The Civil Rights Movement in American fiction: A feminist reading

Alice Walker has written, of Black and white writers in the South, "Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writer's story." Walker's statement is used to read four literary texts which focus on the Civil Rights Movement: James Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964), Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), Ernest J. Gaines's In My Father's House (1978) and Rosellen Brown's Civil Wars (1984). These authors write the missing parts to each other's stories, as Blacks and whites, as women and men. The approach to the texts is anti-racist and feminist.; For all the writers, racism is inextricably connected to sex. For Baldwin racism is a battle for sexual dominance between Black and white men. Baldwin sees women only in relation to their men in Blues or as they are used by Black and white men to dominate or unman the other. Thus Baldwin diminishes the importance of Black women's contributions to the Movement.; In Meridian Walker looks back at the Movement from the 1970's, when it was considered "dead," but she affirms its vision of freedom and nonviolence and its commitment to the Black and poor. Meridian is a "womanist" novel, a novel of Black consciousness and feminist consciousness. Walker is concerned with women's commitment to the Movement, and she explores the complexities of sex and race and racism for Black and white women, as well as men.; Gaines's novel, set during the Movement, is about problematic relationships of Black men with their sons and with Black women, created by a history of slavery and white racism. The Movement is measured by the changes it has created or failed to create in these relationships.; Brown's novel is concerned with differences in commitment to the Movement of white Northerners and Southerners, of women and men, with problems between Blacks and whites in the Movement in the 1960's and with whites' difficulties living their commitment to integration in the racially divided 1970's.; The Movement changed American literature, as it changed American society. Its effects on American literature are discussed in detail in the conclusion.