Marita Golden’s And Do Remember Me as Womanist Homage to Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

The best-known work of American fiction about the 1960s civil rights movement is arguably Alice Walker’s 1976 novel Meridian. During the course of that novel, the titular character Meridian Hill participates in the struggle for racial justice in the American South, and in the process, she also develops an awareness of gender oppression in the larger society and within the movement itself. Accordingly, literary critics such as Barbara Christian, Norman Harris, Roberta Hendrickson, and Melissa Walker have analyzed the role of the movement in Meridian, while Susan Danielson and Karen Stein have focused specifically on ideological parallels between the civil rights movement and the nascent women’s movement in the novel. Since Meridian’s publication, however, very few novels have attempted to depict the African American female experience in the civil rights movement, even as historians have increasingly documented the significant roles that Black women played during the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This essay analyzes Marita Golden’s 1992 novel And Do Remember Me not only as a major yet overlooked fictional treatment of the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States, but also as an important celebration of Black women’s contributions to the movement. Born in 1950, six years after Alice Walker, Golden confesses that she “regret[s]” that she was “too young to have been an activist in the early days of the civil rights movement.” Whereas Walker, a native of Georgia, started college in 1961, participated in directaction protests during the early days of the movement, and even attended the March on Washington in 1963, Golden, a native of Washington, DC, started college much later, in 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. As such, Golden reflects, “In a sense I wrote And Do Remember Me as a way of living an experience I had not had but that had changed so many and so much” (“Message”).