Analysis Of Mary Mcleod Bethune's Essay 'Working For Democracy'

This week in class we discussed the topic of the Black Freedom struggle and the theme was “Black Women’s ‘Double V’ Campaign” and we talked about Mary McLeod Bethune and her essays, one being “Closed Doors and author Megan Taylor Shockley and her essay “Working for Democracy: Working-Class African-American Women, Citizenship, and Civil Rights in Detroit, 1940-1954”. Both women talk about the struggles that Black women dealt with at the beginning of World War II and how they fought back against the Jim Crow laws. During 1939, World War II has just started and black people are not only fighting overseas to defend the United States from the likes of Hitler but before African Americans fight Germany, they have to still fight at home to gain the equality that they deserve, with black women still being on the front line. Mary McLeod Bethune shows her white audience the struggle that all black people go through on a daily basis. Bethune uses a quote

Although America has won overseas, black still hasn't won at home. She talks of Louise Thomas, who was turned away from a job at Ford’s Willow Run because of the color of her skin and that other black women would never be able to work there because they aren’t fit for it. Thomas and many other black people chose to fight back against the racial prejudice in many different ways. Shockley talks about one the ways when she says, “Detroit's African-American community had various possible ways to challenge the city's racial hierarchies. For example, African Americans contested strict neighborhood color lines by moving into Detroit's white neighborhoods”. Black people used ways like this to get under white people’s skin and fight against the hierarchies. Shockley engages in the freedom struggle by showing another view of how black people had used different tactics to fight back against racial