Boycotts, Buses and Passes: Black Women's Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa

GENDER Pamela E. Brooks. Boycotts, Buses and Passes: Black Women's Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. xviii + 304 pp. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Index. $29.95. Paper.

Boycotts, Buses, and Passes offers an intimate view into black women's resistance to apartheid and Jim Crow segregation laws. Based on oral histories and archival research, Pamela E. Brooks takes readers on a trans-Atlantic journey that sheds new light on familiar stories of black resistance by locating them within the lives of generations of ordinary women who share a diasporic identity. Despite obvious political economic, cultural, and demographic differences in the styles of black women's politicization in South Africa and the American South, Brooks identifies a number of similarities between them as well. From bus boycotts to anti-pass protests, she draws on an impressive collection of personal narratives to explore the gendered nature of racial domination, strategies of resistance, and the importance of family traditions in explaining women's political activism.

In the opening chapters Brooks explores...