Black Women Writers and Singers of the Avant-Garde and Civil Rights Movement

When one thinks of America in the 1960s and 1970s, one thinks of the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War protests, Free Speech Movement, Women's Liberation, the Gay Rights Movement, etc. Not to put too fine a point on it, this twenty year span in American history was not only one of the most tumultuous times in American history, but it served as the perfect time for subordinated groups to claim or reclaim their identities and let their voices be heard by the dominant culture. In retrospect, the voices of black women as a subordinated group do not seem to speak to the dominant culture as loud as other groups. Few black women authors and artists emerged from the shadows of the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation Movements as a testament to the struggle for black women's voices to be heard.

Black women were able to assert themselves as political and intellectual figures in dominant culture by way of their contributions to the arts, namely writing, film and music. While black women's voices seem to have melded into the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the 1970s provided more opportunity to be acknowledged by dominant culture. The Black Arts Movement offered black women a chance to speak out against the injustices that blacks continued to face in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, but the predominantly male collective offered few women a chance to speak. Black women struggled with participation in Women's Liberation Movement due to pressure from those in the Black Power Movement feeling as if the torn black woman was neglecting her race. For many black women, the question became "what more can I do to assert myself?" From reflective, illustrative writings to blaxploitation heroines and disco divas in song, being a black woman in 1970s America's dominant culture suddenly meant being cool.

Although black women can be identified as a subordinated group in terms of gender and racial status, this does not stop them from being considered capable to induce their own form of an avant-garde movement. Theorist Matei Calinescu defines avant-garde movement as having: