ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews two illustrations to articulate historic and contemporary intersections between race and gender: women of color in the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and the Women’s March on Washington of 2017. It considers different approaches of the writing of Public Relations (PR) history, namely the ‘traditional’ versus the ‘reappraisal’ approach, which reframes PR actors’ goals in history in more culturally situated ways. The chapter looks at gendered and raced subjects as PR practitioner-activists operating in complex systems of social oppression through a lens of intersectionality. Jacquie L’Etang’s work on PR history has been instrumental in highlighting the problems with traditional readings and bringing forth approaches and methods for uncovering additional, revisionist readings. According to D. L. McGuire, ‘political respectability required middle-class decorum’ and was deployed strategically by Black men and women since Reconstruction to combat racist, anti-Black stigmas that persisted among middle- and upper-class White Americans.
