I Too Serve America: African American Women War Workers in Chicago, 1940-1945

This essay examines the manner in which African American women realized the Second World War would present opportunities for developing new strategies to obtain civil rights. Black women drew upon the idea of basic protection of civil rights outlined in the constitution and reiterated in the Four Freedoms by the federal government as a way of defining their citizenship. By examining the intersection between race and gender in the shadow of the changing economic and social conditions that blacks faced on Chicago's South Side during the war, one can discern the ways in which African American women reshaped the existing ideas of civil right. Nowhere was this strategy more revealing than in the fight for employment and housing that occurred in Bronzeville during the Second World War. [Author]