dirtylibrarianthoughts:

Members of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, including Sylvia Rivera (seated in middle). (photo: Ellen Schumsky)

Queer Prehistory

In August 1966, there was a riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, a 24-hour San Francisco eatery popular with drag queens and other gender-benders, hustlers, runaway teens and cruising gays. The Compton’s management had begun calling police to roust this nonconformist clientele, and one night a drag queen precipitated the riot by throwing a cup of coffee into the face of a cop who was trying to drag her away. 

Get it right, because the Stonewall Riots were not the first acts of queer rebellion against the State.

“Known as the Motorcycle Queen of Miami, Bessie Stringfield started riding when she was 16. She was the first African-American woman to travel cross-country solo, and she did it at age 19 in 1929, riding a 1928 Indian Scout. Bessie traveled through all of the lower 48 states during the ’30s and ’40s at a time when the country was rife with prejudice and hatred. She later rode in Europe, Brazil, and Haiti and during World War II she served as one of the few motorcycle despatch riders for the United States military.”

via A Usable Past

thegang:

A look at African-American Trans Trailblazers by Monica Roberts 

In 1953, while much of America focused on the story of Christine Jorgensen (a White woman who was the first person widely known to have undergone sex reassignment surgery) JET Magazine readers learned about Carlett Brown’s attempt to become the “First Negro Sex Change.” Transgender African Americans actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, incorporating tactics from those efforts into their own work toward liberation. The gender non-conforming African American youth in Philadelphia, PA who kick-started the Dewey’s Lunch Counter Sit In and Protest in April and May of 1965 were a prime example of such involvement. It was the first protest specifically organized around and concerning trans issues, and preceded both the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riots and the better known 1969 Stonewall Riots in which African American transgender advocates such as Miss Major and Marsha P. Johnson (pictured) were involved.

cartermagazine:

Today In History

‘Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, opened her historic campaign for President on this date January 25, 1972.’

(photo: Shirley Chisholm) - CARTER Magazine

Without wanting to trivialize the political boldness of Chisholm in campaigning for President, I’ll just state that, she also had such massive style.

Coney Island, 1947. © Sid Grossman The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951 Exhibition on view: November 4, 2011–March 25, 2012

The Jewish Museum of New York will be exhibiting The Radical Camera, a collection of photographs from the influential Photo League. Based in New York City, The Photo League consisted of young, politically progressive artists (many of whom were first generation Jewish Americans) that were shooting from the mid 1930s to the early 1950s. Interested in capturing their direct surroundings, League members documented the urban landscape of New York City during the turbulent times of the late Depression, World War II, and early Cold War eras.

via Exposures » Blog Archive » New York’s Photo League at The Jewish Museum)

Photo from Dr. Martin Luther King’s memorial service, 1968, displayed at the Muhammad Ali Center, Louisville, KY. The Supremes at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorial service in 1968.

(via Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women | Brain Pickings)

In the 1940s and ’50s, there were few places where muscular women congregated; one of the most important was in the circus. Aerialists, trapeze artists, and acrobats all developed impressive musculature by practicing their arts. There was a cadre of men who pursued these women and captured their flexing biceps on film. The pictures do not show much creativity or talent, but they document female muscularity at a time when such images were very rare. There is a rustic charm to these photographs, taken in off-hours in fort of circus wagons or company busses. Unfortunately, few paying customers wanted to see girls posing like this.

awesome-everyday:

coolchicksfromhistory:

Freedom Rider and student leader Lucretia Collins, 1961.

Lucretia Collins was a senior at Tennessee A&I when she decided to take part in the Freedom Rides.  She was one of the few Freedom Riders who opted to be bailed out, although several other riders were also seniors in college.  She received her degree the day after this photo was taken.  

Lucretia moved to Ghana in the mid-60s and by 1969 had “ceased to believe in non-violence as a tactic or anything else.”

I require this outfit/hairstyle.

fuckyeahapihistory:

Shipyard worker Lonnie Young during WWII (Courtesy of Connie Young Yu)

The demands of wartime production enabled Chinese Americans to move into the American workforce in large numbers. For the first time Chinese American women took on jobs as welders, riveters, burners and flangers. 

dstitch:

investigating Gees Bend quilts .

“Gee’s Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. Founded in antebellum times, it was the site of cotton plantations, primarily the lands of Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850. After the Civil War, the freed slaves took the name Pettway, became tenant farmers for the Pettway family, and founded an all-black community nearly isolated from the surrounding world. During the Great Depression, the federal government stepped in to purchase land and homes for the community, bringing strange renown — as an “Alabama Africa” — to this sleepy hamlet.

The town’s women developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. The women of Gee’s Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present.”

so-treu:

undilutedsoul:thelastgreatpoolparty:

Women firefighters after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

From Life magazine series Women in the Fight.

WOW.

bet you didn’t see them in that Pearl Harbor movie.

fuckyeahapihistory:

Workers on Strike at Jung Sai/Chinese American Sewing Company. San Francisco, 1974. Photographed by Cathy Cade.

“Efforts to organize (Jung Sai, a subsidiary of Esprit de Corp) began fifteen months ago but were recently intensified because a new manager lowered piece rates and laid off workers. A hundred workers, out of 135, signed cards with ILGWU Local 101. The strike was precipitated when Frankie Ma, a union activist, was fired for ‘unsatisfactory work’ (after 2 1/2 years!)…Jung Sai workers, most of them middle-aged women, sat down in front of the shop. Management tried to crash through with bins of cloth and several workers were hospitalized. [Esprit closed the shop claiming bankruptcy]….38 women were arrested for blocking trucks, 15 more were arrested a week later. The Chinese community rallied support and the courtroom was packed when the strikers came up for trial.” (Joyce Maupin, Union WAGE newspaper, 1974.) They finally won a favorable settlement almost ten years later.

Roland Barthes, a Fabric Flower, and a Freedom Rider « threadbared

Originally published in the photo collection Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freed Riders, this archival police photograph of then 19 year-old Freedom Rider Joan Trumpauer Mulholland has been making the rounds. There is much debate about what troubling discourses of race and beauty might be operating in its reception right now, as there should be — the manifold dangers in conflating beauty with truth, or in attributing to whiteness a special heroism, are real and run deep.

But I admit that I keep looking too.

The Child: How come civil rights people are so good looking? Do you have to be good looking, to be a leader?

Me: Well no, anyone can do civil rights. You only have to be good looking to be the one activist newspapers keep picking for cover stories. 

[I used to wonder that too, when I was a kid and magazine lists of women role models usually included Cindy Crawford, Elle Macpherson, a pretty white civil rights lawyer and Mother Theresa. Girls can do anything! So long as you conform to heirarchal beauty norms or live like a saint!]

Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a “Vengeance” dive bomber, Tennessee via The Library of Congress

OMG, hi Rosie!!