I Am a Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement. By Steve Estes. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. x, 239. $19.95.)
"The civil rights movement was first and foremost a struggle for racial equality," the author reminds his readers, "but questions of gender lay deeply embedded within this overtly racial conflict" (2). This sentence succinctly sums up the import of this much-welcomed addition to civil rights historiography. Although there has been quite a bit of scholarship as of late that examines the gender politics of the civil rights movement, I Am a Man! is the first historical monograph dedicated to exploring the movement through the use of masculinity as an analytical category. Steve Estes has produced a thoroughly researched and entirely readable piece of scholarship, and it will quickly become mandatory reading for anyone interested in civil rights history and African American gender history.
This is not an exhaustive study of the civil rights era. Rather, Estes employs representative individuals, organizations, and developments of the period to demonstrate the ways that masculinity became an organizing principle of the struggles for, and campaigns against, integration, voting rights, and black empowerment. Thus, African American veterans of World War II evinced a "martial manhood" that laid the groundwork for the early reformist stage of the movement; young civil rights workers in the early 1960s adhered to a "militant, nonviolent manhood" that allowed them to sustain their activism in the face of segregationist violence; hard-line segregationists used the rhetoric of honor and manhood to mobilize white Southerners to resist integration; Malcolm X's "self-styled image of militant manhood" influenced younger men who would turn to Black Power; and the Black Panther Party espoused a "revolutionary masculinity" that placed a premium on violently challenging "The Man." What ties all of these together, for Estes, is the idea that the "masculinist rhetoric used by both sides served to obscure the questions of racial and economic equality that lay at the heart of the original struggle" (8).
As a history of the gender and sexual politics of the movement, I Am a Man! is wholly persuasive. Estes deftly portrays the contested nature of manhood and how it contributed to the marginalization of women and gay men within the movement. As a history of black masculinity in the postwar period, however, the book is less successful. There is little discussion of how the various models of manhood--martial, militant, and revolutionary--related to one another outside of their articulation in movement politics. Moreover, one of the questions that Estes is concerned with is whether "movement activists influence[d] racial and gender identities in American society" (8). This question is largely left unanswered. Estes argues that the movement allowed for the emergence of a "new kind of black manhood," characterized by independence, sexual magnetism, and an irreverent attitude toward the dominant culture, and embodied by the "blaxploitation" film hero, Shaft (180). In ignoring the long history of these kinds of iconic figures in black popular culture--from Stagolee to John Henry to Jack Johnson--Estes grants too much power to the civil rights movement in shaping how African American men constituted their gender identities. Notwithstanding this problematic conclusion, I Am a Man! makes enormously important contributions and is most deserving of a wide readership.
Martin Summers
University of Oregon