Kofi-Charu Nat Turner - Caffie Greene and Black Women Activists

This book uses the life and work of Caffie Greene, one of the most influential grassroots community activists and public health educators in twentieth-century Los Angeles as a platform to examine the wider story of Black women activists in recent United States history.

Caffie Greene worked to foster the development of unions, Black elected officials, and Black youth leaders within the Black Panthers and worked with a legion of women leaders to further progress in the fields of health care, education, youth employment, welfare rights, public transportation, police reform, and electoral politics. The book traces Greenes journey from her childhood plantation life in Arkansas to her emergence as one of the most distinguished civil rights activists in Los Angeles history. It provides in-depth, meticulously researched archival material to amplify the voice of a pivotal woman and analyzes how her contributions impacted the movements of the postwar era. Examining the pedagogical aspects of social protest as the main resource for consciousness raising among historically marginalized youth and adults, Caffie Greene and Black Women Activists asks the essential question: What can we learn about grassroots community organizing that we do not yet know by centering a Black woman like Caffie Greenes life? What are the continuities in Greenes political work between Cold War radicalism, Black Power, and Black feminism and that strict binaries like integrationist and Black separatist, nationalism and socialism, feminism and Black Power obscure?

This book will be of key interest to students and scholars studying Black activist history, Black feminism, and twentieth-century United States history.

Kofi-Charu Nat Turner, grandson of Caffie Greene, is an associate professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Brought up by activist parents in the San Francisco Bay Area and then by his grandma in South Central L.A., Dr. Turner first found a spiritual foundation to his activism as a student of Africana Studies studying abroad in Ghana. Today, all his work seeks to engage and support historically underserved youth, K-12 teachers, and administrators utilizing mindfulness and other embodied practices to heal the intergenerational trauma associated with white body supremacy. A community-engaged scholar and ceaseless seeker of knowledge, Dr. Turners research and courses span the areas of language and literacy practices of culturally and linguistically diverse urban adolescents (particularly African Americans) in school and nonschool settings, racial justice/reparations in education, hip-hop culture, and emergent technologies. He received degrees from Harvard and Brown Universities and was trained in dynamic mindfulness (DMind) at the Niroga Institute (Oakland, CA), an organization he continues to collaborate with, facilitating DMind with youth in Jersey City public schools.

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Kofi-Charu Nat Turner

First published 2022

by Routledge

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2022 Kofi-Charu Nat Turner

The right of Kofi-Charu Nat Turner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Turner, Kofi-Charu Nat, author.

Title: Caffie Greene and Black women activists : unsung women of

the Black liberation movement / Kofi Charu Nat Turner.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |

Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2021013621 (print) | LCCN 2021013622 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781032069067 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003204527 (paperback) |

ISBN 9781003204527 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Green, Caffie, 1919-2010. | African American women

civil rights workersCaliforniaLos AngelesBiography. | African American

women political activistsCaliforniaLos Angeles--Biography. | Civil rights

movementsCaliforniaLos AngelesHistory. | Medical policyCalifornia

Los Angeles. | Watts (Los Angeles, Calif.)History. | Los Angeles (Calif.)

Biography. | Los Angeles (Calif.) Race relations.

Classification: LCC F869.L853 G747 2022 (print) |

LCC F869.L853 (ebook) | DDC 323.092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013621

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013622

ISBN: 978-1-032-06906-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-06919-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-20452-7 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003204527

Typeset in Sabon

by Newgen Publishing UK