Modjeska Monteith Simkins and Black Female Leadership: Propriety, Politics, Place, and Periodization in the African American Freedom Struggle

Modjeska Monteith Simkins was one of the most significant voices in the struggle for African American rights in South Carolina during the twentieth century. For a decade, starting in the mid-1960s, that voice was heard most Wednesdays on the black-oriented WOIC-Columbia radio station. Ward’s article uses Simkins’s career as activist and broadcaster to revisit the complexities of black female leadership in the South, particularly during the transition from the nominally ‘civil rights’ to the nominally ‘black power’ phase of the freedom struggle. In so doing it extends debates about ‘periodization’ and ‘nomenclature’, and reveals the challenges of adequately theorizing the protean qualities of much black female leadership. By mapping Simkins’s attempts to navigate the competing demands of intersecting racial, gender, religious and class imperatives while trying to promote a viable participatory politics among, and greater opportunities for, the black masses, it suggests new, more fluid ways of thinking about the dynamic complexities of black leadership.