She is sent to Bedford Hills New York State Reformatory for Women, where she faces abuse. After two failed relationships with men and becoming a mother, Mattie is condemned for sexual promiscuity. Meanwhile, Mattie Jackson finds work and explores her sexuality. Someone who would have greeted new arrivals would have been Victoria Earle Matthews, the founder of the White Rose Mission for young Black girls. Wells writes about anti-Black and sexist discrimination.Ĭhapter 4 follows teenager Mattie Jackson (née Nelson) upon her arrival from Virginia to New York in 1913. Seeking to publicize racial injustice, Ida B. She later takes the railway company to court. Wells resists the ejection, but she is eventually relocated. Wells is forcibly removed from her seat on a Tennessee train. Chapter 3 opens with the 1883 incident when Ida B. Hartman aims to write about girls like the one in the photograph but with a focus on the beauty of their lives rather than the misfortune. The coerced photograph evokes the tie between female sexuality, race, and the history of slavery. The poor Black people in the area are perceived as criminal and morally degenerate, but they are exercising new ways of being free.Ĭhapter 2 examines a nude photograph of an anonymous Black girl taken by Thomas Eakins in 1882. Reformers take photographs of ordinary things, but there is more to the slum than they can see. Chapter 1 begins in 1900 in Philadelphia, where ethnic minorities live among each other in a slum.
Please note that the contents reference sexual assault.Įach chapter is discrete, zooming in on a different aspect of Black life in northern cities at the turn of the 20th century.
0 kommentar(er)
