"The 'Fruits of Mixing': Homosexuality and the Politics of Racial Empowerment, 1945-1975."

Abstract

This dissertation, titled " The `Fruits of Mixing': Homosexuality and the Politics of Racial Empowerment, 1945-1975," chronicles how characterizations of gay men and lesbians appeared in various campaigns for and conflicts over black racial equality in the southern United States during the thirty-year period after World War II. During this period, advocates and opponents of racial segregation began to mobilize various understandings of homosexuality to further their political aims alongside and in response to long-standing narratives of black heterosexual deviance. Beginning in the early 1960s, white supremacists increasingly characterized African Americans and racial liberals as homosexuals to parry assaults on white supremacy. Such rhetoric steadily increased during the 1960s and early 1970s, reflecting segregationists' anxieties over their own political marginalization, the declining efficacy of black heterosexual deviance narratives to mobilize support for segregation, and the increasing visibility of gay life. During various campaigns against white supremacy, African American civil rights organizations, institutions, and communities engaged with social, cultural, and political concepts of homosexuality as well as same-gender loving persons. In doing so, their engagements were largely predicated upon achieving racial empowerment and equality. This dissertation incorporates a wide array of rich primary source material including manuscript collections, printed ephemera, newspapers and government documents. The study makes contributions to several fields including American political history, African American history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality.