A Historian’s Fresh Take on Black Capitalists and Civil Rights

Brenna Wynn Greer’94 was a reluctant historian.

The Wisconsin native hated 历史 in high school but frequently drove the backroads of the state with her mother, 玛丽Hughes-Greer 97, looking for—as the pair affectionately called them—“hysterical (historical) markers,，尽管她最终主修了 历史 at 贝洛伊特, Greer never thought of herself as a historian.

格里尔学分 安妮塔·安德鲁, a visiting professor of Asian 历史 who taught at 贝洛伊特 from 1987 to 1994, with being the first person to point her toward her future career.

“I remember her expressing that this was something she thought I enjoyed and was impressed by my instinct for it,格里尔说。. “I was interested in 历史 but had never thought of that as a profession. 这对我来说是一种觉醒.”

几十年后，他获得了博士学位.D. 来自威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校, Greer is an associate professor of 历史 at Wellesley College, 专门研究20世纪美国文学.S. 历史. She pays Andrew’s advice forward to her students, dedicating time in each course to talk about the process of becoming a historian.

“It’s really important to me that students walk away with some sense of what it means to be a historian and how you become a historian, 这一切都要追溯到安妮塔,格里尔说。.

Though she says she was introverted during her time at 贝洛伊特, 格里尔还自称是“纵火犯”,” who wasn’t afraid to write letters to the editor of The Round Table or ask difficult questions in class.

She hasn’t shied away from asking difficult or even controversial questions in her scholarship either.

她的书, Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship, published in 2019 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, explores the role that black capitalists and entrepreneurs John H. Johnson and Moss Kendrix had in advancing civil rights. Johnson created a publishing empire through magazines like Jet and Ebony, while Kendrix was the first black public relations officer for Coca-Cola. Together they used a growing consumer culture reliant on images to make money, and their successful business endeavors pushed the civil rights movement forward.

“The book is pushing against this conventional understanding of the civil rights movement as primarily, 不仅如此, 抗议行动:抗议行动的运动,格里尔说。.

直到第二次世界大战, African-Americans had little access to mainstream media and often saw themselves being portrayed as caricatures—depicted as lazy and primitive and thus reaffirming their second-class citizenship status. 但在20世纪40年代末, Johnson and Kendrix redefined the visual representation of African-Americans in an image-saturated society. In an advertising campaign titled “Family Favorite,” which was created by Kendrix for Coca-Cola and published in Ebony and other black publications, black families were shown doing things like cooking, 跳舞, 看电视. 第一次出现在可口可乐的广告里, black people saw themselves represented outside of the stereotypes that had prevailed in popular culture.

This is not, however, the book Greer set out to write. She wanted to explore black women activists and how they visually represented themselves during the civil rights movement. 她的研究让她找到了约翰逊和肯德里克斯, and that attracted pushback from others about her newfound topic.

“I started running into people questioning why I was writing about these black businessmen or how I was writing about them,格里尔说。. “We really have a hard time thinking about marginalized people participating in institutions like capitalism that contribute to inequality and racism.”

比阿特丽斯麦肯齐, 贝洛伊特’s Keefer Professor of Public Humanities, describes Greer’s research as a fresh take on questions that historians are just starting to ask. 麦肯齐说这是最近才有的, historians have turned to look at the 历史 of capitalism from different perspectives, 包括奴隶制作为资本主义的冒险.

A central question in the book asks whether the experience of “freedom” in the United States requires going through and shoring up institutions of oppression, 比如资本主义.

Greer will be the first to tell you that she doesn’t have the answer. But she hopes the book can expand thoughts about what the civil rights movement was.

“The book is meant to shine a light on the specific historical circumstances and systems that made particular people say and produce particular things,格里尔说。.

惠特尼舵 is the news and social media manager for 十大菠菜台子.