Black Women’s Activism

Welcome Address by Sarah Roth, Ph.D.
Dean of Arts & Humanities, Meredith College

The United States – including the state of North Carolina – has a long track record of suppressing the political voice of African Americans and people of color. 

The history of North Carolina specifically has been marked by violence, intimidation, disfranchisement, vastly unequal distribution of resources, and attempts to deny African Americans, in particular, control of their own families, communities, and reproductive lives. 

That history in North Carolina has featured

• More than 2 centuries of slavery. One of the busiest slave markets in the South was found just up the road in Rolesville; Fayetteville had a Market House where enslaved people were bought and sold between 1831 and 1865. By the time of the Civil War, 1 in 3 North Carolinians was enslaved.
• The white supremacy campaign of 1898 – which resulted in the killing of untold numbers of Black people in the city of Wilmington (60-350), and the destruction of the prosperous Black community there. After white supremacists gained control of the state, they took away voting rights from African Americans for the next 65 years. The state laws they created put into place a system designed to exclude Black men from the political arena while allowing white men of all classes and education levels to participate;
• The brutal and extralegal killing, also known as terror lynching, of at least 123 Black people between 1877 and 1950 (just the documented ones); 
• A segregated system of public education that relegated children of color to schools that were underfunded, leading to fewer months of instruction time and vastly inferior facilities compared to schools for white children. 
• Exclusion of people of color from receiving government benefits, 
• Forced sterilization of poor women and women of color, which went on in NC until 1974;
• The theft of Black farmers’ lands through unprincipled laws and underhanded legal maneuvering;
• Redlining and restrictive covenants, which served to confine African Americans to neighborhoods with inferior public services and conditions that damaged people’s health; those discriminatory practices also kept home values low in predominantly African American neighborhoods, significantly impacting Black families’ ability to amass generational wealth;
• Tearing apart communities of color to build highways;
• Persistent police brutality and highly disproportionate rates of incarceration and capital punishment for people of color, especially African Americans;
• And we’ll talk this morning about gerrymandering, voter ID laws, the disfranchisement of felons, and other ways legislators continue now in the 21st century to try to take away the political power of people of color.

In this country, and in North Carolina, schools today teach little of this history. In fact, right now legislatures in all parts of the country, but especially in the South, are making forceful efforts to try to erase this history, to pretend it doesn’t exist. As a result, the responsibility for the demonstrably inequitable conditions in the present appears to lie not with the oppressive systems that have been in place in one form or another for centuries. When the true history is denied or minimized or just not told, the responsibility appears instead to lie with people of color themselves. It is a “blame the victim” system that has worked unfortunately very well for a very long time in this country.

This false narrative is strengthened because Americans also get a very limited view of the activism of individuals and communities of color against discrimination and oppression. When it comes to Black women’s role in the struggle against these systems, the story is even sparser.

The standard curriculum teaches young people today the bare minimum about those who fought against slavery and segregation – it touches on Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman, then Dr. King, Rosa Parks, maybe Malcolm X, and that’s about it.

Black women rarely appear as central characters in traditional narratives of political activism in American history. Yet even though their actions are often overlooked by history, Black women and women of color have a long tradition of standing up against powerful forces to fight for what is right—on behalf of themselves, their families, and their communities.

One of the few Black women who does consistently make it into the official national story is Rosa Parks. But what do we really hear about Mrs. Parks? We learn that she refused to stand up on a bus in an attempt to end segregation. But she did much more than that, starting well before 1955. As my students read this week, historian Danielle McGuire has called Rosa Parks “a militant race woman, a sharp detective, and an antirape activist long before she became the patron saint of the bus boycott.” (xvii) 

For more than a decade before the boycott, Mrs. Parks worked as an investigator for the NAACP to gain justice for Black women who had been raped by white men. Even the bus boycott itself grew out of the frustration she and other women of color in Montgomery felt as a result of the indignities they had suffered at the hands of white bus drivers who on a daily basis called them derogatory names, exposed themselves to them, and assaulted them. 

We never hear that story told in that way. Why? 

• Because women trying to protect themselves and other women from sexual assault and other forms of abuse are not often heralded as heroes in our patriarchal culture. 
• Because activists who are women of color in particular are not lifted up as ideals within a society that denies their agency and seeks to deny them a political voice. 
• Rosa Parks has been held up as a model of Black female activism because she seemed on the surface to be quiet. Modest. Deferential. When in reality, beyond her public persona, Mrs. Parks worked for years to elevate the voices of Black women as they sought to call to account those who claimed the right to abuse and humiliate them with impunity.

If we look at the history of Black women in North Carolina, there are many examples of those who similarly fought back against oppression on behalf of themselves, their families, and their communities. 

• There is, for example, Molly Horniblow, an enslaved woman who lived in the town of Edenton in the early 19th century. Mrs. Horniblow was the grandmother of Harriet Jacobs, who herself resisted her enslavement and her lecherous oppressor in remarkable ways. (Jacobs hid in her grandmother’s attic for 7 years before she had an opportunity to escape to the North and then to get her children out of slavery.)
• Molly Horniblow fought just as hard as her granddaughter to protect her family and build for them a life of dignity and independence, despite the unjust circumstances under which they lived. Although living under the shadow of enslavement, Mrs. Horniblow was respected as the head of her family, as a successful business woman, and as a leader in her community. Like Rosa Parks, Mrs. Horniblow also fought against the victimization of Black women through bold action.
• Harriet Jacobs described her grandmother in this way: “She was a woman of a high spirit. She was usually very quiet in her demeanor; but if her indignation was once roused, it was not very easily quelled. I had been told that she once chased a white gentleman with a loaded pistol, because he insulted one of her daughters.” (p. 47) 

• There was Anna Julia Cooper, an educator and author who was born enslaved in Raleigh in 1858. Cooper worked in the late nineteenth century to promote access to higher education for Black women and political rights for all African Americans. She also spoke out against the sexual abuse of Black women by white men at a time of extreme violence against.
• The Black women who collectively fought to gain the right to vote in the early twentieth century. After woman suffrage became federal law in 1920, these women persisted in trying to register and vote in North Carolina. A few succeeded, despite the state Jim Crow laws that were in place and the intimidation they faced.
• Pauli Murray, who grew up in Durham, has only very recently been given the credit she deserves for creating the legal strategy the NAACP used to defeat school segregation in Brown v. Board.
• In the twentieth century, Shaw University graduate Ella Baker embodied the spirit of collective, non-hierarchical, community-focused leadership Black women frequently brought to their activism during the civil rights period. In 1960, she served as advisor to the young people who in local areas across the South were organizing the lunch counter sit-in movement. Baker guided the young activists to found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and to create a leadership structure within the organization that allowed for collective decision making without traditional positions of authority. As a result of her behind-the-scenes method of leadership, Ella Baker’s name is not well known in the way that some of the male leaders’ names are today.

It is a natural response to these stories to feel gratitude for these women. In addition, their actions in the face of unimaginable resistance can certainly humble us. But in this space, as this conference provides an opportunity to reflect on the present and plan for the future, these women can also provide inspiration. They can provide concrete, real-life examples that what seems impossible can be made possible, through faith, hard work, and determination to help create a better world the next generation can thrive in. 

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