From Abolitionist Struggles to Black Lives Matter: The Women Have Always Been Doers
By Cassandra Veney
It is very important for everyone who is a member of a particular nation, province, region, state, and community to be aware of current events where they live and throughout the globe. The recent COVID- 19 pandemic has brought this reality into the homes and lives of most everyone throughout the world. Along with the spread of the pandemic and the economic, political, social, and educational effects that few can escape, the United States and the rest of the world are waking up and grappling with entrenched racism from Cairo to Cape Town, London to Los Angeles, and Beijing to Birmingham. The United States, in particular, has not experienced this level of participation in demonstrations and protests in its history. Certainly, it was just not the longevity and numbers of people who participated in protests and demonstrations that surprised politicians, the media, and ordinary Americans, but the very participants themselves took people by surprise. It was clear that this was not going to be the same kind of protests that the country witnessed after so many murders committed by the police that have left hundreds of Men of Color, in particular, dead.
The participants were not just African-Americans, but they were young white males and females, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans in large, medium-sized, and small rural towns. While the media expressed its surprise at this outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter (BLM), it made me think of a very powerful book that is still my go-to book whenever I give a lecture for Black History Month or when I teach American Politics under the theme liberal democracy. I do not teach it from the male Eurocentric perspective because it is not accurate—for a long time, and still to this day, there is a lot that is not liberal or democratic in the United States. Why are protests continuing to take place on a daily basis in 2020? And moreover, when we examine the role of young African-American women in the organization of BLM and other social and protests movements, what anchors them; whose backs and shoulders are they standing on; what wheels have they not had to create?
This essay is an exploration of the role of African-American women in the struggles against slavery, lynching, and segregation (read systemic, structural, and institutional racism). It also discusses the role of African American women in the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements. The essay will provide a historical background of what undergirds African-American women’s activities in BLM and other organizations that engage in activism. In order to achieve this goal, the author pays homage to some of the pioneering women who showed them the way. This is by using my go-to book: When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America by Paula Giddings.
Paula J. Giddings
Giddings’ (1984) book is an excellent choice because it is about African-American women in the United States and their activism that cannot be achieved by excluding African-American men. Moreover, her book, when it occurred, conveys the internationalization of their efforts. In other words, when Americans were turning a blind eye and deaf ear to the horrors of slavery, women went abroad to garner support in their antislavery efforts. The internationalization of BLM is manifested from Bristol to Baltimore, Sydney to Seattle, and Tehran to Tegucigalpa without its members having to step foot outside of the United States. This is due to social media and twenty-four-hour news coverage from global news outlets such as Cable News Network (CNN), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Al Jazeera, and China Global Television Network (CGTN).
Using Giddings’ book, the rest of the essay will take the reader on a journey from slavery to “freedom” as it elucidates the struggles fought by African American women for citizenship rights for all in the United States. Giddings analyzes African-American women’s agency both individually and collectively and she begins with slavery. African-American women’s agency is evident in the founding of BLM by three women: Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors from New York, Oakland, and Los Angeles, respectively. This is a manifestation of individual agency and then later transformed into group and mass agency. The women who started Black Lives Matter were sick and tired, as Fannie Lou Hamer chanted, of African-American men and women murdered, and some even on video, by police officers who were more than likely to be white, but some were Black as well.
During slavery, African-American women engaged in individual agency as an organized and collective agency was impossible and too dangerous. Individual agency was demonstrated by running away (this was very dangerous), refusing the sexual advancements of white masters and male slaves for the purposes of “breeding,” destroying household equipment, suing for their freedom, and playing dumb. Other African-American women, who had gained their freedom through various means, also engaged in individual agency when they purchased their husbands’ or other family members’ freedom. There is also scholarship that is not included in Giddings’ book that interprets and analyzes relationships between slave women and their masters within the context of were these relationships willing, unwilling, solely sexual, or romantic/love relationships that often resulted in the birth of children. The women may have viewed these relationships as the lesser of two evils. In other words, they knew they were at the mercy of the slave owner if they resisted his sexual advances (Stevenson 2013). Therefore, they “agreed” to the relationship and accepted what “benefits,” if any, came with it. At the same time, this placed them in the direct path of the wrath from the white mistress, who tried as she might, could not help but see the children of her husband. Mittie Maude Lena Gordon was correct when she stated, “that in the days gone by your male ancestors used to raise their white children in the front yard and their black children in the backyard” (Blain 2020). There is also a much-needed scholarship on the sexual violence that slave men endured at the hands of white owners (Foster 2011).
The role of African descended women in the fight against slavery was both at home and abroad. The internationalization of the abolitionist movement was to expose the horrors of slavery and to obtain financial and material support that was not forthcoming in the United States. In a time when most Americans did not and could not travel abroad, women of African descent found a way to get others to champion their cause. Most Americans know the names of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. No one should question or downplay their contributions to the antislavery movement in the United States. To support the internationalization of the antislavery movement, the following women are included: Sarah Parker Remond, Ellen Craft, Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Harper, Sarah Mapp Douglas, Charlotte, Sarah, and Margaretta Forten (Yee, 1992). Many more names could be included.
What is important to this essay is make the argument that they made efforts to internationalize the antislavery movement. They did this by traveling to the United Kingdom and to other European countries for reasons stated above. In addition, some antislavery organizations in the United States were both racist and sexist. Women in African-American only antislavery organizations were not silenced because their race, but there were times when they were silenced because of their gender. By traveling abroad, these women were in command and demand. They were able to make their arguments for the abolition of slavery without the constraints of black and white men and white women. Furthermore, Pan-African and Diaspora sentiments or ideology did not motivate their travels abroad.
African-American women had no time to celebrate following the abolition of slavery in 1865 because the battle for citizenship and civil rights did not end there. The battle took on new dimensions under Jim Crow, Black Codes, domestic terrorism thanks to the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist organizations, and a Supreme Court that was hell bent on narrowly interpreting the 14th and 15th amendments to ensure states maintained power and control over their African descended “citizens.” Giddings points out how the hopes of many African Americans were dashed when it failed to deliver their basic citizenship rights. Instead, it unleashed a torrent of racist and hate-filled anger and actions by whites in the South.
What we are witnessing now after the election of Trump is something that does not shock most African Americans because it is history playing out once again. African-American women realized that if they were going to survive Reconstruction and into the future, they would need to organize and internationalize their activism efforts. This can interpreted by highlighting their participation in emigration clubs. When the writing was on the wall that the Reconstruction amendments and various legislative acts on the part of Congress were not going to bear fruit, some African American women, joined emigration clubs. The return to Africa through emigration has ebbed and flowed over time depending on the racial tensions in the United States. Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction was a time when the sentiment to return to Africa flowed in some circles. Hundreds of African American women and men joined emigration clubs and left the United States or they financially helped those who went (Barnes, 2002). In sum, the exodus from the United States is a powerful instrument of individual agency and activism.
For those African-American women who remained in the United States, and most did, they had to face their reality head on and this meant organizing around issues of race and gender. This is exactly what the Black Women’s Club Movement was able to do. There is invaluable research and scholarship on the Black Women’s Club Movement (Mathews-Gardner, 2010; Hendricks, 1998; Knuper, 1996). It is clear from their writings and speeches that the intersection of race and gender was clear in their agendas and activities, especially as the two interconnected in the lynching of African-American men.
The work of Ida Bell Wells-Barnett is crucial then and now. Just as lynching disproportionately affected Black men then, police murders and brutality disproportionately affect Black men now. Her activism is well research in the literature from her work as a journalist to expose the brutalities of lynching, her call for Blacks to leave the South and move west, her work as a suffragist, her role in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and her stance against World War I.
BLM Co-Founders: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi
What is important in this essay is excavate Wells-Barnett’s efforts to internationalize the lynching of Black men and the failure of the U.S. Constitution to protect them. She followed in the footsteps of the women in the antislavery movement. The abolition of slavery occurred, but people of African descent were a long way from being free. Wells-Barnett crusaded for their rights of African descended people, but she faced an uphill battle that put her very own life on the line. Again, there was a need to raise awareness and funds. She too traveled to the United Kingdom to achieve these goals. She received the same reception that the women in the antislavery movement received: lecture halls were packed and donations followed. The irony and hypocrisy of the British are too obvious to ignore. The tearing down and dumping of the statue of John Colston by supporters of the BLM Movement is a testament to this level of hypocrisy. Nevertheless, Wells-Barnett’s trips to the United Kingdom is a clear demonstration of the internationalization of the anti-lynching campaign.
The women who founded BLM are a testament to the struggles and battles fought decades ago by African-American women to secure citizenship rights for African-Americans and others in the United States. There are differences for certain, but there are also similarities. The differences are that the leaders and participants in BLM are a cross-section of the population both at home and abroad. The founders of BLM do not have the constraints of gender placed on them by a Christian moral ideology. In other words, they are not appealing to whites to do the right thing and exercise Christian values, ethics, and morality. They have been able to galvanize millions of people and demand that the very core of the United States is deconstructed and it begins with acknowledging racism and the inequality that accompanies it.
The other difference is that women such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Anna Julia Cooper, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and even Margaret Murray Washington were defending the name of Black women against the deeply rooted narrative that Black women are jezebels, sexually loose, and lazy. The women of BLM do not have this goal. Moreover, they know that these are merely caricatures that now focus on the welfare queen, single mother, drug addict, or incarcerated. One of the main differences that we hope the women of BLM have been able to do is to get white women to realize that it is not a Black struggle, but rather, it is a human struggle and BLM women are in the forefront; they are the leaders; they don’t have to travel abroad. On the contrary, people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds both at home and abroad are flocking to them for direction, guidance, and for a cause to join and to feel good about.
The significant similarity in BLM and other movements that African-American women founded or were members of is its Diaspora and Pan-African appeal. There were African-American women in the Civil Rights Movement and Black Nationalist Movement who had a Pan-African identity and interest in Africa and its Diaspora. One needs to look no farther than the interest shown by Fannie Lou Hamer, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Prathia Hall, and Dona Richards Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who visited Guinea at the invitation of its president, Sekou Toure in September 1964 (Blain 2020; Fanon 2007). These women are part of the historic African Diaspora while one of the founders of BLM is of Nigerian descent—a member of the contemporary African Diaspora. From all over the United States, the interests and involvement of the contemporary African Diaspora in BLM is evident. They are viewed as Black regardless of their origins and their parents’ origins. Therefore, they too are subjected to the same racial profiling, surveillance, and police brutality as the historic African Diaspora.
The similarities between the activism engaged in by African-American women for the abolition of slavery and lynching, the right to vote, and civil rights are easy to identify. Regardless of the membership, class positions, strategies, and tactics of the women and organizations, they all had the same goal in common: to fight for and achieve the recognition of the citizenship of Black people in the United States.
In the end, BLM may be able to do the above not just for Black people, but also for women and men from various classes, genders, and races. The achievement of BLM may be what the previous struggles for white women’s rights were unable to do because “they failed to transcend their racism and classism to be able to grasp the significance of the Black women’s perspective, even as it related to their own cause” (Giddings, p. 89).
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You can use this link for the entire list of references.
Cassandra Rachel Veney is based in Nairobi, Kenya. She is a political scientist by training and is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of International Relations at the United States International University-Africa. She has published non-fiction scholarship on forced migration in Eastern Africa, human rights in Africa, gender in Africa, and US refugee and immigration policies on African and African descended refugees and immigrants.
