Freedom Courts: An Analysis of Black Women’s Divorce in Attala County During Mississippi’s Anti-Divorce Campaign, 1890–1940

Evan Howard Ashford

doi:10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11575

Authors

Evan Howard Ashford SUNY Oneonta

Ashford completed his PhD in Afro-American Studies from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His dissertation examined how African Americans utilized education, land, interracial interactions, and voting to shape Mississippi’s complex social, economic, and political landscape during the fifty years following their emancipation. His areas of current and prospective teaching include the Slavery and Resistance, Race, Class, Gender, and Culture, Afro-American Political Science, Reconstruction through Black Power, History of The Civil Rights Movement, History of Crimes and Prisons, LGBTQ Communities of Color, Afro-American Film, and Afro-American Literature and Culture.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11575

Keywords:

Divorce, Race, Women's History, African-American History, Mississippi

Abstract

The essay argues that divorce, as a legal maneuver, provided Black women with the opportunity to challenge oppression within the household while simultaneously pushing back against broader efforts to curtail access to divorce. Framed within the New Negro Era, the article analyzes the competing realities of divorce as both a racialized political issue and an internal struggle for independence. Utilizing newspapers and divorce petitions, the article captures how divorce gave Black women a voice and a platform in which they could declare independence in a society that was historically known for its suppression of African Americans.

Freedom Courts: An Analysis of Black Women’s Divorce in Attala County During Mississippi’s Anti-Divorce Campaign, 1890–1940

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