In the 1950s and 1960s, as civil rights activists challenged Jim Crow, a system that was as much gendered as it was raced, they wrestled with historic assumptions about race and gender in American society. This course explores this and seeks to answer several major questions: What was the "gendered geography of Jim Crow"? How did race and gender shape the course of the Civil Rights Movement? What was the interplay between race, gender, and sexuality in this struggle? How did the mid-twentieth century Black Freedom Movement reinforce and challenge traditional notions of womanhood and manhood?