A Black Woman’s History of the United States .was everything I could have hoped for and somehow more. I dreamed of a book that would give me the history erased in so many classrooms. What I received is a book that managed to be insightful every step of the way, even when recounting oft-repeated stories of the middle passage and the civil rights movement. I was grateful and surprised to find that the book prominently features lesbian and trans Black women, as far back as the times of slavery. What follows is my messy attempt to share some of the coolest women I learned about and some of my musings regarding choices in the text. Learning about these figures is an ongoing process and this blog post in itself is an attempt to further cement this history into my brain.
1) Here are two fascinating pieces of nuance about the civil war: a) many Black women also hated Union soldiers because they would steal food and at times violate Black woman. While the racism of the north is obvious, the violence it would cause Black women when they were being “liberated” by Union soldiers is not talked about. b) Rebel soldiers sometimes used Blackface to trick Union soldiers. I find this shocking and disgusting on so many levels, and didn’t know about that piece of history before.
2) Black women were part and parcel of civil war efforts. They made up 36% of the nurses during the war. They also literally would use the movement of clothes on clotheslines as a secret code to giveaway the position of rebel military leaders and armies.
3) The scholars narrate the extraordinary stories of Millie and Christine McKoy, conjoined twins and performers, who were repeatedly violated by medical professionals, kidnapped, and regarded as “freaks of nature.” I first learned of the McKoy sisters from Tyehimba Jess’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection Olio where he magnificently captures their stories in a series of interlocking contrapuntals. Jess’s retelling of their story manages to turn tragedy to triumph, so I appreciated the scholars for their sobering account of the difficulties the women faced.
4) Black women’s hair was literally policed by the Tignon laws in 1784. Black women incredibly responded by creatively expressing themselves through beautiful headscarves.
5) Sara Jane Woodson Early was the first Black person to serve on the faculty of a university. She later moved down South to dedicate her life to educating Black girls.
Sculpture by Mary Edmonia Lewis
6) Mary Edmonia Lewis was a Black and Chippewa lesbian, abolitionist, and sculptor of note who moved to Italy to escape the American racial politics. She had international acclaim as a sculptor during slavery times!
7) The radical history of Lucy Parsons was included, an American labor organizer, radical socialist, and anarcho-communist! Too often the story of Black intellectuals begins with WEB Du Bois and Booker T Washington, when there were in fact many, many figures, including those taking radical leftist positions.
8) Gladys Bently is an American blues singer, lesbian, who cross-dressed and sometimes was back up by a chorus of drag queens. This was during the Harlem Renaissance!
9) Rosa Parks used to work as a detective as a young woman and was especially important in building cases against white rapists of Black women. Read more here: https://www.history.com/news/before-the-bus-rosa-parks-was-a-sexual-assault-investigator
10) Alice Sampson Presto was a Black suffragist, who again is barely ever talked about.
11) The trickiest part of this history for me is the way it navigated indigeneity. Earlier on, the authors make a key distinction between slaveholders (Blacks) and enslavers (non-Blacks): “The term slaveholders is deliberately used to represent African-Americans who held other African Americans in bondage. The term enslavers refers to someone who forces people into the system of slavery. The term slaveholder refers to someone who holds another person in slavery without the full power of a system to support the practice.” This seems fair enough, except that Native Americans get pinged as enslavers, as if they had “the full power of a system to support the practice [of slavery.].” I am willing to believe the authors are correct in setting Native Americans on the same level as white people, but as someone unfamiliar with the complicated histories of Native Americans and Black folks when it came to slavery, I just wish they would have bothered to make their argument. Elsewhere, another quiet alarm went off in my head when they began narrating the history of Black women who joined European expeditions to the Americas. The scholars referred to them as “explorers” rather than “conquistadores,” even though the missions were clearly colonial in their aims. This is complicated territory no doubt. I just wish the authors would have tumbled in the weeds a bit more here.
12) Pauli Murray was a bad-ass genderqueer lawyer, women’s rights activist, and poet, whose perhaps best known for talking about Jane Crow, or the way Jim Crow laws affected women.
13) Ann Petry, author of The Street, became the first African-American female novelist to sell more than a million copies of her book.
14) Shirley Anita Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the US Congress and she became the first Black candidate for a major party’s nomination for the President of the United States.
15) Frances Beal wrote Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female, a foundational text I’m frustrated I only now am learning about it.
This blog post is little more than a treasure trove of trails for me to further study and learn about. I’m grateful these scholars undertook this major book that made this learning possible for me.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in Black history, women’s history, or the history of the US.