Who Will Speak Our Legacy But Us?

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise

-Maya Angelou

The epic story of African American women rising from the ash of slavery is still and untold and undervalued narrative in history. Consider that it was illegal to teach enslaved black women how to read and consider that for centuries their humanity was degraded. And yet, less than a decade after emancipation, “unprecedented numbers of African American women,” as Paula Giddings writes, “were attending predominantly white and predominantly black colleges, and aspiring to professional positions deemed out of reach just a generation before. “By the 1880s,” she goes on to state, “the first black women were passing state bar exams to become attorneys, and were the first were the first women of any race to practice medicine in the South.”

Moreover, by the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington’s National Business League reported that here were “160 black female physicians, seven dentists, ten lawyers, 164 ministers, assorted journalist, writers, artists, 1,185 musicians and teachers of music and 13,525 school instructors.” The period saw a virtual renaissance among black women artist and writers. Again Giddings points out France Ellen-Harper and Pauline Hopkins published tow of the earlier novels by black women; Oberlin-educated Anna Julia Cooper published A Voice from the South (1892) a treatise oh race and feminism that anticipated much of the later work of W.E.B. DuBois; and journalist Ida B. Wells, in 1889, was elected the first women secretary o the Afro-American Press Association

Yet, tragically, such achievement within a generation did not inspire an ideology of equality of race and gender, but one of racial difference, the latter being required to maintain white supremacy. What then should we take from this

Out of relative obscurity, a generation of black women, just up from enslavement, and battling a dominant ideology which render them invisible and irrelevant, demonstrated achieved excellence in a variety of professional fields, and in the course of all of this, forged a model of feminism complementary of male/female relationships and supportive of nation building effort of African Americans; thus, making a fundamental contribution to understanding and improving the human condition. Refusing to be muted, by males or females, African American women gave voice to the most important issues their day.

Guiding Principles of Male/Female Relationships: “All I claim is that there is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth; that these are related not as inferior and superior, not as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as complements-complements in one necessary and symmetric whole“ (Anna Julia Cooper).

Unity of Black Women: “It is to the Afro-American women that the world looks for the solution of the race problem. The first step has been banding of ourselves together, putting our head together, and taking counsel of one another” (Gertrude Culvert).

Black Women as the Motive Force of Nation Building: “The [black] woman has been the motive power in whatever has been accomplished by the race” (Addie Hunton).

Equality of Black Women and Men: “In our development as a race, the colored woman and the colored man started even” (Fannie Williams).

The Centrality of Women to Progress of Blacks: “The status of womanhood is the measure of the progress of the race” (Anna Jones).

On Self-Defense, Self-Determination and Self-Respect: “In the creation of a healthier sentiment, the Afro-American can do for himself what no one else can do for him. The world looks on with wonder that we have conceded so much and remained law-abiding under such outrage and provocation. Nothing, absolutely nothing is to be gained by a further sacrifice of manhood and self-respect. When the white man, who is always the aggressor, knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life” (Ida Wells-Barnett).

Black Women as the Vanguard of the Struggle: “We have our own lives to lead. We are daughters, sisters, mothers, and wives. We must care for ourselves and rear our families, like all women. We have to do more than other women. Those of us fortunate to have education must share it with the less fortunate of our race. We must go into our communities and improve them; we must go into the nation and change it. Above all, we must organize ourselves as Negro women and work together” (Mary Church Terrell).

We sample four voices:

Anna Julia Cooper correctly points out that black women are a corrective force in history.

All I claim is that there is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth; [that] Only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me. Is it not evident then that as individual workers for this race we must address ourselves with no half-hearted zeal to this feature of our mission? The need is felt and must be recognized by all. There is a call for workers, for missionaries, for men and women with the double consecration of a fundamental love of humanity and a desire for its melioration through the Gospel; but superadded to this we demand an intelligent and sympathetic comprehension of the interests and special needs of the Negro.

Alice Walker reminds us that black women have been the central to transmitting both will, hope, and spirit to generations of black people and teachers of a better tomorrow.

How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And so our mothers and grandmothers have more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

Toni Morrison speaks to the multidimensionality of black womanhood.

Our history as black women is the history of women who could build a house and have some children, and there was no problem. What we have known is how to be complete human beings. To lose this is to diminish ourselves unnecessarily.

Add your own voice and statement.

The history of African American women is a corrective to racist and sexist history presented in the narrative of American history. Until recently, much of the history of black women was hidden or a footnote in Black and American history. Honesty and history compels us to recognize this fact without engaging in a nonproductive dialogue about who was “most oppressed” or making excuses for subordinating the achievements and struggle of black women. Poet Mari Evans reminds us to:

Speak the truth to the people

Talk sense to the people

Free them with honesty

Free the people with Love and Courage for their Being

Spare them the fantasy

Fantasy enslaves

As Mary McLeod Bethune teaches, “We as [blacks] must recognize that we are the custodians as well as the heirs of a great civilization. We have given something to the world as a race and for this we are proud and fully conscious of our place in the total picture of mankind’s development.” Black women, known and unknown have been an equal partner in our achievement and in the historical struggle to make America “a more perfect union.”

Ella Baker advises us do all we can in the way we can to make life better for those coming behind us: “If there is any philosophy, its that those who have walked a certain path should know some things, should remember some things that they can pass on, that others can use to walk the path a little better

Anita Baker tells us in lyric and song, Giving You The Best That I Got, advises:

The scales are sometimes unbalanced
And you bear the weight of all that has to be
I hope you see that you can lean on me
And together we can calm a stormy sea

Maya Angelou reminds black women that they are indeed Phenomenal:

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies…

I walk into a room/ Just as cool as you please
And to a man/ The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees/ Then they swarm around me
A hive of honey bees/ I say
And the flash of my teeth/ It’s the fire in my eyes
The swing in my waist/And the joy in my feet
I’m a woman/ Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman/ That’s me

Margaret Walker in her epic poem, For My People, encourages us to set afoot a new world and issues a bold challenge to black men:

For my people everywhere…

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

rise and take control.

Join us in celebrating and saluting black women in history. And, oh yeah, celebrate the woman closest to you in your life.

I want [blacks] to maintain their dignity at all cost. We as [blacks] must recognize that we are the custodians as well as the heirs of a great civilization. We have given something to the world as a race and for this we are proud and fully conscious of our place in the total picture of mankind’s development…I would not exchange my color for all the wealth in the world, for had I been born white, I might not have been able to do all I have done or yet hope to do.”

Mary McLeod Bethune was one of the most significant women of the twentieth century. She remains a model for both women and men. She was an institution in black life and the ambassador to the halls of the white power structure. In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt named her director for [black] affairs the National Youth Administration, the most influential position a black women had ever held in the federal government.

As the founder and president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) she advocated the empowerment of females through unity and struggle. In 1926, she called for “a worldwide meeting of women of color’ to chart a strategy for mutual progress.

Bethune, along with other female stalwarts of black female empowerment provided local self-help programs and a vision of black female self-sufficiency for American Americans before the dawn of the New Deal. She championed the cause of women and the voiceless at every crossroad.

Mary McLeod Bethune was a symbol of race leadership and a paragon of integrity and exemplar of achievement.

We salute, Mary McLeod Bethune, thou more than women!

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally

Cooper was truly a phenomenal woman- the representative woman of her era par excellence- a public intellectual and activist of the first order. Her writing and social teachings on black women laid the basis for the modern black feminist movement and served as a corrective for male dominated leadership in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Writing as early as 1892, Cooper asserted, “With all the wrongs and neglects of her past, with all the weakness, the debasement, the moral thralldom of her present, the black woman of to-day stands mute and wondering at the Herculean task devolving upon her. But the cycles wait for her. No other hand can move the lever. She must be loose from her hands and set to work.

Moreover, her writings are central and essential to understanding the importance of having the correct orientation and practice of male and female relationships, and to realizing the full potential inherent in the union of men and women engaged in family life and social struggle. More than ever, her views on American social thought and practice is needed today as a corrective force for the misguided and destructive voices on the right and the timid voices on the left.  Cooper viewed the relationship between men and women as complementary opposites within a greater whole. For her, the duality of male female relationships interacted as a unified whole, giving balance to each opposite gender.

To be sure, Cooper was a race-woman who believed deeply in the unique vocation of black women. At the beginning of the 20^th century she argued that black women were uniquely position to assume the role of the moral vanguard because of the “black woman’s moral superiority to white civilization, whose ‘blasé world-weary look characterized the old washed out and worn out races which have already, so to speak seen their best days.”  Women she believed were part of the rising tide of history. “To be a woman in such an age,” she opined, “carries with it privilege and an opportunity never implied before. But to be a woman of the Negro race in America is to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibility of the crisis, is to have a heritage seems to me, unique in the ages.

The current political and social situation today, resembles much of the climate in the early 20^th century, exactly one hundred year ago. The political retrenchment of civil rights and economic gains by African Americans, the immigrant bashing, the vitriolic and racist rhetoric of the rightwing, the resentment and anxieties of the poor and working class whites, and the mass incarceration of African American males.

The condition of black males in America has reached perhaps their second nadir. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes in her new book, the New Jim Crow, that: “the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or labeled felons for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an astounding percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prison or trapped in a permanent, second-class status-much like their grandparents before them who live under an explicit system of control.” Hence, Anna Julia Cooper’s voice is as relevant today as it was one hundred years ago. In this moment of crisis for African Americans and America, Cooper’s views and writing are instructive, and essential to avoiding the current decent into chaos and barbarism.

The Teaching of Anna Julia Cooper

Interconnectedness and interdependence and Sanctity of Male and Female Relationships

All I claim is that there is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth; that these are related not as inferior and superior, not as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as complements-complements in one necessary and symmetric whole.

Higher Education of Women
A Voice from the South

The necessity of the integration of male and female in making whole men and women

There is a general consensus of mankind that the one trait is masculine and the other is peculiarly feminine. That both are needed to be worked into the training of children, in order that our boys may supplement their virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girls may round out their gentleness by strength and self-reliance. In short, Cooper saw the unity of male and female relationships was a moral force giving a necessary balance to life, stating: That, as both (male  and female relationships) are alike necessary in giving symmetry to the individual, so a nation or a race will degenerate into mere emotionalism on one hand, or bullyism on the other, if dominated by either exclusively; lastly, and most emphatically, that the feminine factor can have its proper effect only through women’s development and education so that she may fitly and intelligently stamped force on the forces of her day, and add her modicum t the riches of the world’s thought.

Higher Education of Women
A Voice from the South

The Importance of Education

Now I claim that it is the prevalence of the higher Education among women, the making it a common everyday affair for women to reason and think and express their thoughts, the training and stimulus which enable and encourage women  administer to the world the bread it needs was well as the sugar it cries for; in short it is the transmitting the potential forces of her soul into dynamic factors that has given symmetry and completeness to the world’s agencies. Our meager and superficial results form past efforts prove their futility; and every attempt to elevate the Negro, whether undertaken by himself or through the philanthropy of others, cannot but prove abortive unless so directed as to utilize the indispensable agency of an elevated and trained womanhood.

Higher Education of Women
A Voice from the South

Honoring what is worthy

We too often mistake individual’s honor for the development and so are ready to substitute pretty accomplishments for sound sense and earnest purpose. The Negro is constitutionally hopeful and proverbially irrepressible; and naturally stands in danger of being dazzled by the shimmer and tinsel of superficial. We often mistake foliage for fruit and overestimate or wrongly estimate brilliant results. We need men who can let their interest and gallantry extend outside the circle of their aesthetic appreciation, men who can be a father, a brother, and a friend to every weak, struggling unshielded girl.  We need women who are so sure of their won social footing that they need not fear learning to lend a hand to a fallen or falling sister. We need men and women who do not exhaust their genius splitting hairs on aristocratic distinctions and thanking god they are not as others, but earnest , unselfish souls, who can to into the highways and byways, lifting up and leading.”

Womanhood
A Voice from the South

Black Women as the rising tide of history

To be a woman in such an age to be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages. In the first place, the race is young and full of the elasticity and hopefulness of youth.  All its achievements are before it. It does not look on the mastery triumphs of nineteenth century civilization with that blasé world-weary look which characterizes the old washed out and worn out races which have already, so to speak, seen their best days.

Status of Women in America
A Voice from the South

The success or ruin of a people begins in the family

A stream cannot rise higher than its source. The atmosphere of homes is no rarer and purer and sweeter than are the mothers in those homes. A race is about a total of families. The nation is the aggregate of its homes. As the whole is sum of all its parts, so the character of the part will determine the characteristics of the whole. Whatever the attainment of the individual may be, unless his home has moved on pari passu, he can never be regarded as identical with or representative of the whole.

Womanhood
A Voice from the South

A race can only achieve progress through its own internal strengths and efforts

A race cannot be purified from without. Preachers and teachers are helps and stimulants and conditions as necessary as the gracious rain and sunshine are to plant growth. But what are the rain and dew and sunshine and clouds if there be no life in the plant germ. We must go to the root and see that that is sound and healthy and vigorous; and not deceive ourselves with waxen flowers and painted leaves of mock chlorophyll. Everything to this race is new and strange and inspiring. There is a quickening of its pulse and a glowing of its self-consciousness. Aha, I can rival that1 I can aspire to that! I can honor my name and vindicate my race! Something like this, it strikes me, is the enthusiasm which sirs, the genius of young Africa in America.

Womanhood
A Voice from the South

The focus of uplift of African Americans begins with the masses with a priority on women

Not by pointing to sun-bathed mountain tops do we prove that Phoebus warms” the valleys. We must point to the homes, average homes, homes of the rank and file of horny handed toiling men and women of the South (where the masses are) lighted and cheered by the good, the beautiful, and the true,-them and not till then will the whole plateau be lifted into the sunlight. I am my sister’s keeper! should be the hearty response of every man and woman of the race, and their conviction should purify and exalt the narrow selfish and petty personal aims of life into a noble and sacred purpose.

African American Women resisted the notion that black were slaves, both in the political and existential sense. Inasmuch as a woman’s identity, during the age of slavery in America, was defined by her roles in the family, and; slavery undermined the basic concept and structure of family life. The effort of black women, however, to form families and perform the obligatory duties of mothers was a way of redefining their identity in the face of conditions which were at variance with conditions supportive of family life. Thus, the act of forming families was an act not only against slavery, but an affirmation of the identity of black women.

Family and former slave quarters at The Hermitage plantation, Savannah (Detroit Publishing Co. c1907)

To be sure, the roles which black women played during the period of slavery and segregation- some imposed and others of free will-defined their concept of womanhood and gave them a much greater appreciation of the roles of women outside of the family ,and which challenged the limited roles which women- white women in particular- were expected to perform. Sojourner Truth, in her memorable statement Ain’t I A Woman, affirm the expanded and equal roles of black women: Truth asserted, “I have plough and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man- when I could get it- and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?”

Building on the foundation and legacy of their foremothers, African American Women of the late 19th century and the early 20th century self-consciously defined their mission as cultivating, growing and saving the “race”. In 1916, Mary Church Terrell, one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree, echoed W.E.B. DuBois call for a talented tenth which would guide and save the race. Terrell, recognizing the historical burden placed on the shoulders of black women thundered:

We have our own lives to lead. We are daughters, sisters, mothers, and wives. We must care for ourselves and rear our families, like all women. We have to do more than other women. Those of us fortunate to have education must share it with the less fortunate of our race. We must go into our communities and improve them; we must go into the nation and change it. Above all, we must organize ourselves as Negro women and work together.

Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper and other black women insightfully tied the progress of African Americans to the role of black women in fulfilling their historical role in society as mothers, wives and “change agents”. These combined roles are what gave black women their special place in history as being a “corrective force”. To advance their mission of improving the conditions of the “race” and changing American society, African American women began organizing themselves in associations and clubs. These women in the words of Anna Julia Cooper believed that it was imperative for black women to step forth to “help shape, mold, and direct the thought” of their age. Seeing themselves as part of a larger meaning in the sweep of history, they decided that they would become the instrument of history and nation-building, presuming the role of actors and creators in the coming of age of African Americans as a self-conscious people. To be sure, they saw themselves as the subjects of history, defining themselves and their mission in their own terms.

The nation-building task which Terrell, Cooper, Wells-Barnett, Patterson and others undertook was during the period in African American history known as the “nadir”. During this period, black people were not responding to racial violence and oppression-peonage, lynching, disfranchisement, race riots, white supremacist ideology, and the racist imperialist expansion of Africa and other Third World nations. In the South, for example, blacks, especially black men, were targeted for violence and intimidation. In the North, black suffered from random acts of violence and the force of racism. In this context and with full knowledge and understanding of the situation, black women proclaimed the advent of the “woman’s era” and came forth with a plan to uplift the “race” based on the premise of equality between black men and women. Hence, as scholar and activist Fannie Williams observed, “In our development as a race, the colored woman and the colored man started even.” Put another way, Anna Julia Cooper in her brilliant work, A voice From the South, poetically and astutely wrote: “All I claim is that there is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth; that these are related not as inferior and superior, not as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as complements–complements in one necessary and symmetric whole.”

Challenged by racism, oppressed by gender, rebuffed by white women’s organization, black clubwomen shouldered the awesome task of racial uplift, insisting that the first step in nation-building was the belief that progress in of black women marked the progress of the race. The vision, work and accomplishments of the black clubwomen of the late 19th and early 20th centuries defined African American women as a corrective force in history. For as national organizer Addie Hunton, National Association of Colored Women, proclaimed: “The [black] woman has been the motive power in whatever has been accomplished by the race.”

Sources;

A Voice from the South, Anna Julia Cooper

A Shining Thread of Hope, Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson

Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994, Deborah G

African American women have received little credit and recognition for their role in pioneering black nationalism. And yet, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, Maria W Stewart, cited as one of the first black nationalist, spoke boldly for racial pride and had nothing but contempt for blacks who expected or even allowed white people to solve their problems for them. A central theme of the many speeches she delivered as early as 1832 was self-determination and economic independence. Mary Ann Shadd Cary was another proponent of black self-determination. She too was a forerunner of black nationalism. She issued a powerful call for self-reliance in her publication, Hints to the Colored People of North America.

In the campaign to end slavery, Sojourner Truth and Ellen Craft worked and spoke out against slavery without the emotional and practice support which male abolitionist leaders received and expected. In the struggle against American Slavery, Sojourner Truth embraced and defined African American Womanhood and by extension womanhood for all American women. Prefiguring the feminist movement and arguments of the 1970s, she asserted in her classical statement, Ain’t I A Woman?

And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arms! I have plough and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man- when I could get it- and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen most of them sold off into slavery and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

As chronicled in the excellent work on black women, Shining Thread of Hope, few political actions in history have so captured the imaginations as the Underground Railroad. The entire purpose of the “railroad” was to help enslaved blacks escape from the south. Harriet Tubman, best known conductor on the Underground Railroad, achieved fame of mythic proportions with her daring rescue efforts. Her heroic exploits included many trips into the South, recuing more than three hundred enslaved African Americans and delivering them to freedom.

In addition to this, during the Civil War, under Tubman’s leadership and guidance, a band of 300 black soldiers struck fear in the hearts of the confederacy, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary store and cotton, and recued and nearly 800 enslaved blacks and thousands of dollars worth of property without losing a man. She was the first women general in American military history.

Other black women contributed mightily to the cause of breaking the back of the confederacy and in ending African American enslavement. During the period of enslavement, for instance, free African American women were thoroughly involved in the antislavery movement. Mary Ellen Pleasant, a black businesswoman, helped to finance John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Women were also among the group of armed African Americans who in 1851 went to the defense of four escaped blacks in Christiana, Pennsylvania, in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law.

Black women pioneered the social safety net for blacks, known as the mutual aid society right after the end of slavery. “Lift as We Climb” became one of the mottoes of the black woman’s club movement at the start of the 20th century. Black women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries formed clubs to combat poverty, illiteracy, and discrimination on a massive scale, and to promote the welfare of the community. When black women discovered that white government agencies and other organizations had no intension of providing services to the black community, they stepped in to fill the void.

In 1892, Anna Julia Cooper issued a manifesto on womanhood declaring: “All I claim is that there is a feminine as well as masculine side to truth; that these are related not as inferior and superior, not as better or worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as complements-complements in one necessary and symmetric whole.”

In 1908, Josephine Allensworth, a black woman and her husband founded the town of Allensworth, near Bakersfield, California. They established Allensworth so that African Americans could be “free from the restrictions of race.” In the town, Josephine Allensworth was president of the school board. She established a library for the town and sponsored organizations for self-improvement.

African American women also excelled in creative productions-art music literature and science. As Alice Walker poetically stated; “And so our mothers and grandmothers have more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.” At the start of the decade of the 1920s, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith articulated the pain and promise of being black in America. Zora Neale Hurston wrote insightfully about the black experience during the flowering of black culture known as the Harlem Renaissance. And, Alice H. Parker, in 1919, was issued a patent for a heating furnace. The invention provided a mechanism for regulating heat to be carried to various rooms of a building.

Black women have been in the vanguard and the rearguard of black freedom struggle. Ida B Wells led the fight against the lynching of blacks, in particular black males. Mary M Bethune built and founded Bethune-Cookman College, and was a leader in the black women’s club movement as well as serving as president of the National Association of Colored Women. Ella Baker helped found two of the most significant organizations of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement- Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Fannie Lou Hamer, field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, helped organize the 1964 “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi, a campaign to register blacks to vote and to establish “freedom” schools.

And most recently, Michelle Obama, First Lady, mother, wife, graduated of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, has continued and expanded the model of womanhood, reflecting the sentiments of Toni Morrison: Our history as black women is the history of women who could build a house and have some children, and there was no problem. What we have known is how to be complete human beings. To lose this is to diminish ourselves unnecessarily.

Sources:

Shining Thread of Hope, Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson

Black women In Nineteenth-Century American Life, Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin

Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994, Deborah Gray White