This course examines Black motherhood as a shifting cultural formation in U.S. media from 1945 through the 1980s. Through film, plays, periodicals, and television—from Imitation of Life to Good Times to films like Finding Christa—we trace how Black women’s maternal lives have been rendered as sites of discipline, care, labor, and constraint.

Beginning with mid-century representations shaped by postwar liberalism, including A Raisin in the Sun, the course follows the transformation of Black motherhood through the civil rights era, the expansion of the welfare state, and the emergence of Black feminist critique. Drawing on Ruth Feldstein’s Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965, we situate these representations within broader debates about race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.

Across these materials, we ask: How has Black motherhood functioned as a site of cultural projection and political struggle? What role has the state played in shaping expectations of maternal care and responsibility? And what possibilities emerge when Black women’s lives strain against—or refuse—the limits of normative motherhood?