Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties - Reviews - Book Review

African American Review, Fall, 2002 by Alice A. Deck

Margo V. Perkins. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 179 pp. $18.00.

Recipient of Mississippi University for Women's Eudora Welty Prize in 1999, Margo Perkins's Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties is a succinct, timely, and, for me, very interesting read. In a mere 150 pages (plus another 11 pages of bibliography and index), Perkins analyzes the autobiographies of three black women who were involved in the Black Power Movement in the United States during the 1960s: Elaine Brown's A Taste Of Power (1992), Angela Davis's Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), and Assata Shakur's Assata: An Autobiography (1987). As Perkins explains in her introduction, her book investigates "the different ways these activists use autobiography to connect their own circumstances with those of other activists across historical periods, their emphatic linking of the personal and political in agitating for transformative action, and their constructing an alternative history that challenges hegemonic ways of knowing." This is a very timely study for two reasons: First, it inter sects with the numerous studies of the Black Power era that have appeared in the last ten years, and, second, it intervenes in the now burgeoning field of American autobiography studies, especially black American autobiography studies.

Following the introduction, Autobiography as Activism subdivides into six chapters that are followed by an epilogue. In Chapter 1, "I Am We: Black Women Activists Writing Autobiography," Perkins discusses the criteria for what she (and Angela Davis before her) names political autobiography. Political autobiography includes the following elements: The autobiographer emphasizes the "story of the struggle over her own personal ordeals"; she will use her own story both to document the history of the political struggle as well as to further its political agenda; she will provide a voice for the voiceless; she will "honor strategic silences in order to protect the integrity of the struggle as well as the welfare of other activists"; she will expose oppressive conditions and the repressive tactics of the state; and she will use autobiography as a form of political intervention, to educate as broad an audience as possible to the situation and issues at stake. Some of these elements were first identified by Barbara Ha rlow in her seminal study Resistance Literature (1987), a source that Perkins cites throughout her discussion. A major difference between the Harlow and Perkins studies is the latter's emphasis solely on the political autobiographies of three black American women as texts.

The one shortfall, as I see it, to Perkins's Autobiography as Activism occurs in Chapter 2, titled "Literary Antecedents in the Struggle for Freedom," where she traces the history of African American resistance narratives. I agree with her naming of the slave narratives as literary antecedents to the three twentieth-century black women's political autobiographies; however, she does not mention Ida B. Wells's Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, which was written between 1927 and 1928, then edited and published posthumously by Wells's youngest daughter, Alfreda Duster, in 1970. Crusade for Justice fits Perkins's criteria for political autobiography and serves as a bridge between the nineteenth-century slave narratives and the late-twentieth-century black women's autobiographies that Perkins discusses. Wells, herself a radical, at times gun-toting activist at the turn-of the century, was not part of an organized political movement, which is why she and her autobiography are often overlooked i n critical studies of African American resistance movements. Part of the problem with Perkins's discussion is that she uses Vincent Harding's There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America, which identifies the "diverse ideologies informing African American resistance struggle from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century." She argues for extending the scope of Harding's study by naming mid-twentieth-century figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and "other activists of the Civil Rights Movement," along with Black Power activists of the 1960s and 1970s who would fit into at least one of his three major currents of black political ideology. Hence, the work of individual activists such as Ida B. Wells, who struggled at the turn-of-the-twentieth century, fall into the textual void between Harding's There Is a River, a history, and Perkins's Autobiography as Activism, a literary study.

In Chapter 3, "On Becoming Activists: Reflections on Their Formative Years," Perkins engages in an interesting comparative discussion regarding why the three women became political activists. She is careful to balance her discussion among all three women. Then in Chapter 4, "Autobiography as Political/Personal Intervention," Perkins engages in a textual analysis of the three women's autobiographies in terms of Lejeune's ideas about the autobiographical pact, the dialectic between truth and "fiction" in autobiography, and the limitations of memory. Perkins uses the three women's individual assessments of Jonathan Jackson's siege of a Marin County courtroom on August 7, 1970, to show how these texts counter the hegemonic historical record of late 1960s and early 1970s black activism. Each of the three women uses her autobiography to reclaim her own public image from distortions emanating from the media at that time. In Chapter 5, "Gender and Power Dynamics in the 1960s' Black Nationalist Struggle," Perkins, via the three women's discussions of this topic in their autobiographies, seems to be swept up in a political analysis of the sexism in the Black Power Movement rather than offering a critical assessment of the way Elaine Brown, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur each discusses this topic. This is typical of any theoretical discussion of any autobiography, in that a critic can easily become so involved in the story of the life (the specific incidents and events, the cultural context, etc.) that this becomes the focus of the discussion instead of the autobiographer's personal responses. Somewhat of the same thing happens in Chapter 6, "Reading Intertextually: Black Power Narratives Then and Now," in which Perkins states her interest in the ways all of the activist autobiographies by men and women involved in the Black Power Movement during the 1960s and 1970s "appear collectively to converse with each other as well as with their readership .... the critical gaze of the writers is focused not only externally, but als o internally, on the dynamics inside the movement." Granted, few, if any, of these activist autobiographies could be categorized as literary; hence one would be hard-pressed to find self-conscious metaphors of subjectivity, or lyrical writing. The events that unfold in the stories told are riveting in and of themselves. But Perkins seems at times to give us a "she-said-he-said" rendition of the gender battles in the Black Power Movement as we move from Chapter 5 to Chapter 6, where she pairs the narratives of Angela Davis and George Jackson. The Epilogue to Autobiography as Activism puts the entire study back on the analytical track introduced at the beginning of the book. it is a nice summation of her central arguments about how the three autobiographies by black women activists of the 1960s and 1970s function as extensions of their political work--how the texts "insist upon the value and importance of linking theory and practice."