Top Quotes: “A Black Women’s History of the United States” — Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross

Colonial Times

“The first Black women who stepped foot on what we now consider American soil were not enslaved. In fact, some, like Olvera, were free, and they traveled as part of expeditions to explore land that had been inhabited by native populations for generations. These women did not arrive emaciated and distraught from being packed like sardines in the belly of slave ships. Instead, women of African descent arrived before the first ships disembarked their loads of human cargo in the American colonies. They came with Spanish and Portuguese explorers, and many could be classified as indentured servants, missionaries, interpreters, or simply leaders.

Black women arrived during a period of European conquest, colonization, and chaos — marked by warfare, trade, travel, and cultural clash. Much of this chaos began when Spanish and Portuguese explorers, authorized by Castilian law and the Treaty of Tordesillas (by papal law), came in search of new lands and trade routes to other parts of the world.”

“In the summer of 1730, a shipload of ninety-one African captives leaving Guinea for Rhode Island on the sloop Little George revolted and took control of the ship for nearly ten days. There were approximately sixty-one women and children among this group of captives and they participated in the rebellion that started one morning, a few hours before daybreak, at 4 a.m., when the ship was a hundred miles away from shore. The men were able to get out of their irons (perhaps with help from the women and children) and killed three watchmen: a doctor, a sailor, and the cooper. The other crew members grabbed their guns and stayed in their cabins trying to shoot at the rebels from their rooms. “At a loss at what to do,” they used gunpowder to set ablaze a makeshift bomb made out of a bottle and attempted to throw it at the African captives. However, before they could do so, an African man hit the bottle with an ax and it exploded, killing the sailor who held it. Four to five more days of fighting ensued, and the African captives fully took over the Little George. As the ship neared land, a group of adults went ashore while the young children were placed on small boats and towed to safety.”

“What happened to these women when they left the Little George in the middle of the night near Frenchman’s Bay, Maine? We know they negotiated with the native people who discovered them, but we do not know if they all made it to freedom. Their incredible escape story of taking over a sloop for nearly ten days, making it to land, and disembarking safely in Maine, however, illustrates the resilience of African captives seeking freedom in a foreign land.”

“As colonial society took shape, African Americans began challenging their role and pushing for greater freedoms. For example, as early as 1635, enslaved “black workers petitioned for wages,” representing one of the first organized labor actions in American history. They also recognized inconsistencies in their legal status and immediately began filing petitions for freedom. In addition, they approached the Dutch Reformed Church, the major church of the region, to perform baptism and marriage ceremonies to solidify their unions and potentially provide another avenue to freedom. At that time Christians could not enslave other Christians, though this legislation soon changed. But by 1655, the church stopped baptizing enslaved people.

A decade later, however, approximately 75 out of some 375 Black people in New Amsterdam were free. Some gained their freedom because Dutch leaders used Black people as a cushion between white settlers and Native Americans, granting African Americans land ownership in a “buffer zone.””

“Elizabeth Freeman, also known as “Mum Bett” or “Mumbet,” was born in New York in 1744 and sold to the Ashley family in Sheffield, Massachusetts. She, like so many others, had a difficult life in slavery that included physical and psychological abuse. She was “married” in the kind of union enslaved people were able to have and became the mother of a daughter named Betsy. The American Revolution fueled Freeman’s quest for freedom as she heard parts of the Massachusetts Constitution read aloud in the Ashley home. Of this she remarked, “I heard that paper read yesterday that says, ‘all men are born equal, and that every man had a right to freedom.’ I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me my freedom?” She asked this question of attorney Theodore Sedgwick when she sought assistance with the case. Sedgwick represented Freeman in court, where he filed a freedom suit citing the new state constitution (1780) as evidence. Even though Freeman was illiterate, her desire and understanding of the law was remarkable. She had Sedgwick file the suit on behalf of herself and a co-plaintiff, an enslaved man named Brom (Brom and Bett v. Ashley). The case represented an attack on the legality of slavery, and it garnered financial support from other enslaved people in the area. Even though African Americans had few possessions and little money, they pooled their resources to fund litigation in freedom suits. Freeman and Brom won their case, making it the first successful freedom suit in Massachusetts history.”

“On November 7, 1775, when British General Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation offering freedom to enslaved and indentured servants who agreed to fight for the British, Black women responded. They ran away from their enslavers and fled to the British Army.”

“Industrial labor included work in sugar refineries, tobacco factories, textile mills, lumber mills, salt works, brickyards, and turpentine distilleries. These are not locations that people imagine when thinking about slavery and the labor of enslaved and free Black women.”

“According to the first census, collected in 1790, free Black people consisted of 7.9 percent of the total population. The majority of this small percentage resided in the North (40.2 percent), and a small minority lived in the South (4.7 percent).”

The 19th Century

“Ironically, one unique way African Americans tried to save and protect their families was through slaveholding. Due to the increasing number of free Black people in the population, blended families with enslaved and free members were common. As discussed earlier, in the Revolutionary Era, African women like Anna Kingsley married white men and became enslavers. In the nineteenth century, as more African American women received their freedom, many became property owners.”

““Many of the slave purchases made by black women were their offspring who were owned by white masters,” thus these slaveholding women were working to free their families. If one partner was free, the second partner often tried to purchase him or her so the family could live together in ‘freedom’ or pseudo-slavery until all members were freed. However, as in earlier periods, not all Black women freed the enslaved people in their possession.

Marie Thérése Coincoin Metoyer of Louisiana, who gave birth to ten children by Frenchman Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, helped her family become one of the largest Black slaveholding families in the United States. In addition to the enslaved people she held in bondage, many of her sons were also slaveholders, and over time, the extended family accumulated wealth in land and enslaved people. She was first hired to work for Metoyer, who then purchased and freed her and several of their children so they could create an empire. The family owned about fifteen thousand acres and more than four hundred enslaved men and women in Louisiana. Likewise, Margaret Mitchell Harris of South Carolina inherited “twenty-one [enslaved] males and females from her father, a free mulatto. . . . She [also] received sixteen more from her mother’s estate.” By 1860, Harris had $25,300 in human property. Another free Black woman, Betsy Sompayrac of Louisiana, made sure in her last will and testament that her children would have support from enslaved laborers. Although it is difficult to determine the mind set and attitude of these women, it appears that they were trying to find ways to secure economic stability for their children through slaveholding because some of their offspring were already free. Thus, these women served as slaveholders seeking to make profits from their enslaved people.”

“Lear Green escaped slavery in Maryland in a crafty way: she shipped herself in a box to the Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia, part of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Accompanied by her soon-to-be mother-in-law, a free Black woman, Lear packaged herself and was put on a steamer to make the trip from the Baltimore to the Philadelphia harbor. The journey took eighteen hours, and she brought with her “a quilt, a pillow, and a few articles of raiment, with a small quantity of food and a bottle of water.” Lear was fortunate that her future mother-in-law accompanied her on the life-threatening trip. James Noble, her enslaver from Baltimore, Maryland, advertised a $150 reward for her capture. In the ad he speculated, “I have reason to be confident that she was persuaded off by a negro man named Wim. Adams.” Black abolitionist William Still admired her hunger and thirst for liberty and shared her story in his book. She made it to freedom and married William Adams, and the two settled in Elmira, New York, with extended family. Unfortunately they only enjoyed three years of freedom after her successful escape, as Lear died of unknown causes at the age of twenty-one. She had spent eighteen years enslaved and three years free.”

“Ellen Craft also chose self-liberation to escape the bonds of slavery. Rather than ship herself in a box, she passed as a white male enslaver traveling with her Black male body servant. The person pretending to be her servant was actually her husband, William, and the two of them traveled a thousand miles to freedom. Ellen’s disguise was almost detected at various points in their journey, especially on trains when she traveled in the car reserved for whites. The bandage over her face and the sling over her shoulder protected her from having to talk, but she did not want to part from William, who was asked to take a separate car reserved for the enslaved and free Black people. However, they made it to freedom and moved to England, where Ellen gave birth to five children outside the bounds of slavery.”

“Slavery as an institution came to an official end in the United States but not in Indian Territory (parts of present-day Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas). In Confederate-occupied parts of these regions, Choctaw elders offered some comfort to laboring Black women, despite the fact that abolition was not in force. The Choctaw created a “Mammy’s quarters,” or women’s room, used for enslaved women to prepare meals; in this case, the enslaved cook made “delicious venison and made some genuine Indian corn-bread.” Black women’s labor extended beyond the official confines of the United States into regions not considered sovereign because of the indigenous populations that were forcibly removed there at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Choctaw chief noted that they had a “number of slaves,” but more important, he boasted that the enslaved people “know nothing whatever of the prospects of early freedom.””

“In 1876 Frances Thompson, a formerly enslaved Black woman, was arrested in Memphis, Tennessee, and fined $50. She had migrated to the area about a decade earlier — at the time, maybe full of hope and excitement as she began her new life as a free woman in the city. She made friends and lived in a booming Black community. She liked nice dresses, especially those in bright colors.

In 1866 she would survive the extraordinary violence that decimated her neighborhood. Just a year after Emancipation, Frances would testify before a congressional committee. One of five Black women to tell their stories that day, Frances, who relied on crutches because of a foot malady, described how she had been robbed and gang-raped by a group of white men, at least two policemen among them. The men burst into the home she shared with another Black woman, Lucy Smith, and savaged them both. As Frances testified, “They drew their pistols and said they would shoot us and fire the house if we did not let them have their way with us.” The Memphis Riot, sparked in part by white rage at Black Union soldiers, claimed over forty African American lives, as well as ninety-one homes, four churches, and twelve schools, the latter all set ablaze. Untold numbers of Black women and girls likely suffered the same fate as had Frances. But Frances and the other women followed in the footsteps of Black women who reported soldiers’ crimes during the Civil War, Specifically, they went on record to state inequivocally that they did not consent.

The published congressional report laid bare whites’ cruelties, and locally, Frances Thompson became persona non grata. For the next decade she would endure police harassment, accused of everything from distributing “hoodoo bags” and telling fortunes to being responsible for “infamous traffic as a procuress and keeper of one of the vilest dens in the city.” And there were more serious allegations. According to the Memphis Public Ledger, Frances had been “arrested several times on suspicion of being a man, and notorious lewdness, but always managed to escape the clutches of the law.” However, in July 1876, she did not get away. Though Frances maintained that she was “of double sex,” a local white doctor, doubtful of her claims, had her arrested and after subjecting her to a series of invasive examinations by four white physicians, told authorities that her true sex was male. What did these examinations mean for Frances? One wonders how she coped with such violations.

Frances had lived at least twenty years as a woman, donning ladies’ hats and gingham overskirts with petticoats — attire fashionable for her day. The finding that her sex was male forced her into men’s clothes and onto a male chain gang. Whereas Frances had maintained a smooth face, in custody authorities denied her the ability to shave as the Days’ Doings noted, “a thick black beard is coming out all over his face, to his great disgust.” As a free woman, Frances had cleaved out a life for herself, weathering seasons that might find her “almost in rags” or draped in “the finest kind of loud-colored toggery.” Behind bars, she suffered but never lost her fight, answering rude questions about her gender by responding, “None of your damn business.” When Frances worked the chain gang, large crowds gathered to ridicule her. So much so that officers had no choice but to remove her from the line. She was eventually forced to work as a “washerman” inside the stationhouse. Further, the news of her “male sex” was used to discredit her earlier testimony as well as that of the other women. Frances survived her months in custody, though she took ill shortly after her release and died later that year, in November 1876.”

“Prior to Emancipation, most lynching victims were white men – enslaved Black bodies possessed a monetary value, so one could not just go and lynch another white man’s or white woman’s property. Freedom, ironically, removed this deterrent.”

The 20th Century

“Among her many accomplishments, Augusta created a free art school, which, by 1934, was the largest in New York City. She organized Black artists and cofounded the Harlem Artists Guild. The guild pressed officials in the WA, the federal agency that gave out-of-work artists jobs, for support for Black artists during the prolonged financial depression of the 1930s. The guild also secured funds for an arts center in Harlem in 1937, and Augusta served as its inaugural director. In 1938 she received a lucrative commission to show a piece in the New York World’s Fair. Her sixteen-foot, awe-inspiring statue The Harp was among the most visited sights. One critic wrote, “Augusta Savage is a Negro sculptress, whose work has been outstanding, and who has in large degree exemplified, or rather interpreted, the emotional pathos and sensuousness of her race.” Yet when she attempted to reclaim her position at the center, she was denied. The WA regarded her acceptance of the commission as employment; under the circumstances, its obligation to her had been fulfilled. The maneuver was likely political payback for her leadership of the Harlem Artists Guild.”

“In 1920, Mrs. W. L. Presto campaigned for a state senate seat in Seattle, Washington. Presto lost her bid but achieved a place in history as the first Black female candidate to run for a state legislature. Her platform was robust and unabashedly feminist, as Presto championed equal pay for labor regardless of gender, called for a cost-of-living increase for widows’ pensions, and held that taxpayer’s children should not have to pay tuition at state educational institutions.”

“During a Chicago strategy meeting to confront employment discrimination in the defense industries, a Black woman delegate said, “Mr, Chairman, we ought to throw fifty thousand Negros around the White House — bring them from all over the country, in jalopies, in trains, and any way they can get there until we get some action from the White House.” A. Philip Randolph, who was in full agreement, offered the support of his organization, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and spearheaded the charge. The proposed mass action, a march on Washington, planned for June 2, 1941, aimed to spotlight the nation’s hypocrisy. How could such a country credibly claim to fight for democracy or stand against tyranny and antisemitism, while at home it remained submerged in racism, violent mob justice, and the treatment of Africam Americans as second-class citizens? Fearing the damage such a march would cause the country’s image, the federal government moved to desegregate all industries affiliated with the war effort. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 into law in 1941, and the Fair Employment Practices Committee was established to ensure that the order was upheld. It was a critical win. Still, African American women raised concerns that the order did not expressly include women, though it was taken for granted that the race provision would protect them.””

“She carried herself with dignity and respect, yet she and her family suffered daily indignities and death threats. Those efforts failed to meet their mark because as Mamie explained, “They wrote: I’m glad that it was your n — — - boy that was killed; that’ll show some more smart kids in Chicago that they can’t come down in Mississippi and get away with what they get away with in Chicago. I would like to tell those people tonight, that if it hadn’t been for those letters, I probably wouldn’t be standing here. I want them to know that every one of those letters gave me a new determination to stand up and fight that much harder.””

“On the face of it, Diane might seem an unlikely activist. A former beauty queen from a middle-class family, she was seen by her relatives as having fallen in with the wrong element when they learned about her social justice activism. Yet, her dedication to the movement was principled, unwavering, and lifelong. Not only was Diane among the scores of students who valiantly sought to desegregate lunch counters, but she was among the pioneers when it came to SNCC’s policy of sitting in jail rather than being bailed out. Her first stint, some thirty-eight days in a cell, along with three other SNCC members, was physically and emotionally grueling. It would be the first of many such actions. Another bid took place when she was pregnant with her first child. She was prepared to remain in jail, because she wanted to make a better world for her future offspring, even if that meant his being born in jail to achieve it.”

“Fannie Lou Hamer was among the earliest of local African Americans to work with SNCC and to attempt to register to vote after attending a SNCC-sponsored mass meeting in Ruleville, Mississippi, in 1962. Her decision to try to access one of the basic rights of citizenship that year would alter her life trajectory. Upon her first failed attempt to register to vote, she returned home to learn from her spouse the news that she no longer had a job and that she was advised to leave the community where she had lived and labored. After the owner of the land where she and her family sharecropped issued Hamer an ultimatum — either withdraw your application to vote or leave — she decided that, despite having handled W. D. Marlow’s time books, nursed his family, and cleaned his house, his demand was the final straw. As Hamer put it, “I made up my mind I was grown, and I was tired.” She informed Marlow: “I didn’t go down there to register for you. I went there to register for myself.”

Hamer would dedicate her life to activism; she continued to try to register to vote, finally attaining that goal on June 10, 1963. Any celebratory basking would quickly end, however. Shortly after, Hamer and a number of fellow organizers were arrested and beaten in a jail cell in Winona, Mississippi. She later said, “That man beat me – that man beat me until he give out.” Hamer recalled that the beating had left her extremities swollen and blue, and that, at one point, she tried to fix her clothes to cover herself, as the violence had left them disheveled. She told how a white man who participated in the attack, and who had ordered other Black prisoners to beat Hamer, had “just taken my clothes and snatched them up, and this Negro, when he had just beat me until I know he was just (going to] give out, well, then, this state patrolman told the other Negro to take it.”

Despite that traumatic ordeal, Hamer somehow found the strength to continue to organize, whether working to feed the poor or decrying the state’s racist 1964 sterilization bill, which, as historian Chana Kai Lee explains, was “immediately recognized as the legislature’s pathetic attempt to repress the movement by scaring local folk, especially women.” The bill would have made having a second child out of wedlock a felony, and mothers would have to choose between sterilization or prison. Dubbed the “genocide bill” by SNCC and other local activists, the legislative effort reveals the profound threat to Black women’s bodies. Hamer’s testimony against the proposed legislation helped lay bare the frequency with which rural Black women in Mississippi were being targeted for sterilization; she herself had been the victim of such a procedure. In 1961, thinking she has having a cyst removed from her stomach, Hamer learned afterward that she had been given a hysterectomy without her consent.”

“…from sixteen-year-old Melba Patillo helping desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, to six-year-old Ruby Bridges desegregating an all-white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960. In her rousing memoir, Melba detailed her loneliness and isolation, as well as the daily harassments and assaults she and her peers endured that year. Melba also highlighted her betrayal by a teacher on the first day of school. The white woman who led the class did nothing as the boys called Melba a “nigger coon” and threatened to beat her up. Melba explained: “I waited for the teacher to speak up, but she said nothing. Some of the students snickered. The boy took his seat, but he kept shouting ugly words at me throughout the rest of the class. My heart was weeping, but I squeezed back the tears. I squared my shoulders and tried to remember what Grandma has said: ‘God loves you, child; no matter what he sees you as his precious idea.’ The taunts were just the beginning, as Melba was tormented by white girls in the restrooms and in the cafeteria. Three white football players attacked Melba by first knocking her books and papers to the floor, and then, she recalled, “one of them pinned me against the wall. Someone’s forearm pressed hard against my throat, choking me. I couldn’t speak. I could hardly breathe.” The young men delivered an ominous warning: “We’re gonna make your life hell, nigger. You all are gonna go screaming out of here, taking those nigger-loving soldiers with you.” Even with a National Guardsman for protection, a white student managed to throw battery acid in Melba’s face. The guardsman’s swift action, immediately flushing her face with water in a nearby restroom, helped save Melba’s sight. Melba survived her time at Central High School, though she sustained serious emotional trauma from the experience. Although Melba’s story is marked by her adherence to nonviolence, not all Black girls followed those tenets in the strictest sense.

In 1963 Black girls in Baton Rouge strategically armed themselves and found ways to weaponize everyday items such as school bags, safety pins, and even books. Marion Greenup, a Black teen desegregating Baton Rouge High School, let white students believe she had a gun in her bag by warning them, “I don’t think you want to mess with me, you don’t know what I have.” Freya Anderson, at Lee High, carried large, open safety pins in both hands, so that anyone who bumped into her got jabbed.”

“Such was the case for at least thirty preteen and adolescent Black girls who protested segregation in Americus, Georgia, in July 1963. The children were violently arrested and transported twenty miles out of town, without their parents’ knowledge. Authorities locked the girls in the Leesburg stockade. With one broken toilet and a broken shower, the girls languished in the sweltering heat, in filthy conditions, with inadequate food and no toiletries, for nearly six weeks. The girls squatted over the shower drain to relieve themselves, and they used the cardboard from sporadic burger deliveries as toilet paper. They tore strips off their dresses to use when they got their periods.

This resourcefulness could not shield them from the suffocating odors or repel the ticks, roaches, and mosquitoes in the stockade. One old guard was posted to keep watch, and while he was himself a tormentor, he did run off two truckloads of drunken white boys who showed up one night looking for prey. As Laura Ruff, who was fifteen at the time, recalled, “They started yelling to Pops, ‘Let us in there. We wanna have a little fun!’ Battling depression, dehydration, and bouts of diarrhea, the girls kept their spirits up by praying, singing freedom songs, and holding each other. A SNCC photographer, Danny Lyon, managed to obtain photos of the children, taken through the stockade’s barred windows. Once exposed, pressure on the local authorities prompted the girls’ release. It would be the first week of September 1963, just as the school year had begun.”

“Farmer’s campaign assumed that depicting Shirley as “a bossy female, [and] a would-be matriarch,” would resonate negatively with voters, since this critique of Black women undergirded much of Black Nationalism at the time. But in their corner of the world, the Twelfth Congressional District in Brooklyn, there were more than two female voters for every one male. As Shirley explained, “What Farmer thought was his strength was his Achilles’ heel.” Moreover, Shirley knew how to hustle.

Armed with very little money, her own unvarnished slogan (Vote for Chisholm for Congress — Unbought and Unbossed), shopping bags printed with said slogan, and roughly twenty-five volunteers, Shirley and her team canvassed public housing and grocery stores. She also went to house parties hosted in her honor, recalling, “In the black neighborhood I ate chitlins, in the Jewish neighborhood bagels and lox, in the Puerto Rican neighborhood arroz con pollo.” Meanwhile her competition had a national reputation and sound trucks manned by “young dudes with Afros, beating tom-toms: the big, black, male image.” The press followed Farmer everywhere, while Shirley received little attention. When she complained, one television station staffer bluntly replied: “Who are you? A little schoolteacher who happened to go to the Assembly.” That “little schoolteacher” won in November, drawing 34,885 votes to Farmer’s 13,777, while a conservative candidate, Ralph J. Carrane, pulled 3,771.”