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Posted By: gregor197

Tbob wrote:
"...did not vote to elect Buck and instead elected a gangster and a White woman..."

Effa Manley may have had two white parents, but she lived her life as a black woman and was treated by society as a black woman. During the 1920s and 1930s - a very hard time in this country to be black - she chose to live in and be a member of the African-American community.

If anyone had told Mrs. Manley - or anyone else in the 1930s - when she was leading boycotts of Harlem department stores or receiving Jim Crow accomodations at hotels that she was a "white woman," they would have laughed at you. Nobody thought (or knew) that the co-owner of the Newark Eagles, who sponsored promotions at the ballpark for the NAACP's "Stop Lynching Now" campaign was white. Everyone assumed (or knew) that she was black.

She is a fantastic example of the fact that race is a socially constructed phenomenon, and not a biological fact. If she lived her life as a black woman and was accepted and understood by blacks and whites alike to be a black woman, then I think it is inaccurate to call her a "white woman."

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...