Full Description
This book uses the life and work of Caffie Greene, one of the most influential grassroots community activists and public health educators in twentieth-century Los Angeles as a platform to examine the wider story of Black women activists in recent United States history.
Caffie Greene worked to foster the development of unions, Black elected officials, and Black youth leaders within the Black Panthers and worked with a legion of women leaders to further progress in the fields of health care, education, youth employment, welfare rights, public transportation, police reform, and electoral politics. The book traces Greene's journey from her childhood plantation life in Arkansas to her emergence as one of the most distinguished civil rights activists in Los Angeles' history. It provides in-depth, meticulously researched archival material to amplify the voice of a pivotal woman and analyzes how her contributions impacted the movements of the postwar era. Examining the pedagogical aspects of social protest as the main resource for consciousness raising among historically marginalized youth and adults, Caffie Greene and Black Women Activists asks the essential question: What can we learn about grassroots community organizing that we do not yet know by centering a Black woman like Caffie Greene's life? What are the continuities in Greene's political work between Cold War radicalism, Black Power, and Black feminism and that strict binaries like integrationist and Black separatist, nationalism and socialism, and feminism and Black Power obscure?
This book will be of key interest to students and scholars studying Black activist history, Black feminism, and twentieth-century United States history.
Contents
Introduction; PART I. ARKANSAS to post-WWII Los Angeles (1919-1959) 1 Arkansas and pre-WWII Los Angeles (1919-1939); 2 San Pedro Years (1939-1949); 3 The Family Years (1949-1959); PART II. TEEN POST & WAR ON POVERTY (1959-1967) 4 Y-Teen, Political Organizing & ANC Mothers (1959-1964); 5 War on Poverty, Watts Uprising & the Teen Post (1964-1967); PART III. HEALTH CARE & HIGHER EDUCATION (1967-1976) 6 Founding MLK Hospital and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (1966-1969) 7 National Health Organizing, Black Grassroots Caucus, & Youth Health Careers (1970-1974) 8 Struggle for Community Control of King-Drew (1974-1975) PART IV. CONCERNED BLACK WOMEN & DNC (1975-1989) 9 Year of the Concerned Black Woman, L.A. County Commissioner, & DNC (1975-1980) 10 No Intention of Resting: Biological and Educational Warfare (1980-1989) PART V. LEGACY, BLACK YOUTH & #BLM (1990s-Beyond) 11 Chemical and Economic Warfare, South African Apartheid (Late 1980s-1991); 12 I Won't Complain: Arrest, Alzheimer's, 90th Birthday, Funeral, and Legacy (1991 and Beyond); Epilogue; Appendix: Caffie Greene's Organizational Affiliations, 1940-2010; Awards Granted to Caffie Greene; Interviews; Note on Primary Sources
