The history of Black women in the United States began with the forced migration of millions of African women from the interior to the west coast of Africa, where waiting ships transported human cargo across the Atlantic Ocean to plantations in the West Indies. The horrors of the tortuous and often deadly "middle passage," as scholars refer to that leg of the journey, were mediated only by the strong bonds formed among shipmates. This bonding became one of the most durable and significant dimensions of African women's lives and enabled captive women to endure brutalization on slave ships and the Caribbean "seasoning"—the process designed to subdue and transform captive Africans into obedient slaves. Because women historically are culture bearers, their captors employed special efforts aimed at undermining, if not destroying completely, all vestiges of traditional African culture. The enslaved Africans then were sold to European immigrant colonies on the North American mainland. Regional location determined where Africans worked, either as agricultural laborers on plantations and farms in the South or in the homes and shops of northern colonialists.
In 1619 the first three African women to be taken to an English-speaking colony arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. Their initial status was like that of indentured servants, who received freedom after laboring for a number of years. Within a generation, however, the status of enslaved Africans worsened as Maryland and Virginia's colonial authorities enacted measures to ensure lifelong enslavement. As "African" and "slave" became conflated, new legislation dictated that, contrary to British law and custom, an African child would inherit the status of the mother. This measure underscored a distinct difference in the treatment of African women as compared with that accorded European immigrant women.
African women never acquiesced passively to their enslavement. Even on the ships, they participated in mutinies and rebellions. Second and third generations of women slaves developed more complex forms of resistance. Historian Deborah Gray White argues that survival was a form of resistance and that enslaved women resisted by bearing and nurturing future generations of African Americans. At the other end of the adaptation/resistance continuum, some slave women challenged slave masters' efforts to control their reproductive capacities by abortion, sexual abstinence, or infanticide. The majority, however, occupied a middle ground of passive resistance, including feigning illness, ignorance, or ineptness. Others occasionally engaged in more active tactics such as arson, poisoning, mutilation of farm animals, destruction of property, and even running away. Less obvious, but perhaps even more effective resistance focused on creating a sense of community, preserving and transmitting to their children African-based cultural practices and beliefs as revealed in music making, quilting, storytelling, naming of children, and sustaining traditional marriage practices.
Even as slaves, African women attempted to shape the "peculiar institution" in ways that allowed them to preserve their dignity and affirm their humanity. During the era of the American Revolution, many northern states abolished slavery or made arrangements for gradual emancipation. As a result of increased rates of manumission, rising rates of reproduction, and larger numbers of runaways, the free African women's population grew and many free Black women engaged actively in the abolition movement. From the 1830s to the onset of the Civil War they formed societies, supported abolitionist newspapers, lectured, wrote books, served on vigilante committees, and worked within the Underground Railroad system. For over three decades women such as Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Francis Ellen Watkins Harper raised their voices and wrote against the tyranny of slavery.
Harriet Tubman delivered a frontal assault against the institution of slavery. General Tubman, as she was sometimes called, made over a dozen forays into the South after her own escape from slavery in 1849. Fearless and bold in her determination to destroy slavery, she freed over three hundred slaves, secretly leading them along various routes and using different disguises. She carried doses of paregoric to silence crying babies and a pistol to discourage any fugitive from thoughts of disembarking the freedom train. Only illness prevented her from joining John Brown's aborted raid on Harper's Ferry. After the Civil War began, Tubman served as a spy for the Union army in South Carolina as well as a nurse, along with Susie King Taylor, for wounded Black soldiers.
Oppressed people historically find ways to express and preserve their humanity. To ensure survival, slave women, like their free sisters in the North, also developed supportive and empowering female networks, nurtured extended families, and embraced Christian teachings. Simultaneously, slave women worked hard in the fields alongside the men or in the plantation household under the mistress's watchful scrutiny. Indeed, they often worked double shifts, for they would return to the cabin at dusk to do the housework.
After the Civil War, Black women began the daunting challenge of infusing meaning into their recently acquired freedom. Although the 1868 Fourteenth and the 1870 Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution conferred citizenship and suffrage to men only, Black women nevertheless played a significant behind-the-scenes political role. They encouraged Black men to support the politicians and the legislation that would protect them and ensure a measure of economic autonomy. When possible they reconstituted families, legalized marriages, and fought against long-term apprenticeships of their children.
The collapse of Reconstruction in 1877 signaled the return to power of ex-Confederate elites, now determined to nullify the Reconstruction amendments. Accompanying the loss of political rights was the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, widespread white terrorism, lynching, rapes, and murders. The indifference of Northern whites and the entrenchment of Jim Crow racial segregation forced Black men and women to develop strategies that ranged from accommodation to protest, as represented by Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee, Alabama, and the Harvard University-educated W.E.B. Du Bois.
Black women perfected their own culture of dissemblance that enabled them to appear open but actually to preserve their interior lives from whites, and even from Black men and children. Behind a cult of secrecy and within a politics of respectability, this culture of dissemblance was revealed most powerfully in the national women's club movement that flourished at the turn of the century. Black clubwomen organized clinics and nurses' training schools, collected and distributed food and clothing to the needy, founded orphanages and homes for the elderly, launched mutual aid societies to provide funeral benefits, and sustained churches through fund-raising activities. Dissemblance, secrecy, and silence appealed to some Black women and proved powerful instruments of resisting dehumanization and multilayered exploitation and oppression.
Newspaper editor Ida B. Wells spoke out against the lynching of Black men; she shattered white male rationalizations of such brutality under the guise of protecting the sanctity of white womanhood. In 1892 Wells launched the first phase of the antilynching movement with articles and editorials in the Memphis Free Speech and the New York Age, and in the publication of her pamphlet, Southern Horrors. Following her exile from Memphis, Wells settled in Chicago, married Ferdinand Barnett, launched a Black women's political club, established a settlement house, and fought for woman suffrage. Wells-Barnett joined forces in 1909 with W.E.B. Du Bois and other white and Black radicals to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The closing decade of the nineteenth century had witnessed a flowering of Black women's activism and organizational development. One of the most portentous events in Black women's history occurred in 1896 with the merger of the League of Colored Women, a coalition of 113 organizations, and the National Federation of Afro-American Women, a combination of 85 organizations, to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), with Oberlin College graduate Mary Church Terrell as its first president. Under the leadership of Terrell, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Margaret Murray Washington, the NACW grew at a phenomenal rate. By 1914 it had a membership of fifty thousand and had become the strong voice championing Black women. Terrell declared, "We proclaim to the world that the women of our race have become partners in the great firm of progress and reform.... We refer to the fact that this is an association of colored women, because our peculiar status in this country . . . seems to demand that we stand by ourselves."
Although political engagement and club activism consumed the lives of Wells-Barnett, Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Talbert, and other middle-class Black women, the vast majority were more concerned with the day-to-day struggle of earning a living and securing a measure of economic independence while simultaneously existing in the grips of an exploitive capitalist patriarchy. For most Black women agricultural work and domestic servitude were their only economic options.
Out of this bleak economic landscape appeared the astounding accomplishments of Madam C.J. Walker, a washerwoman from Delta, Louisiana, who, by the time of her death in 1919, had parlayed a hair-and-scalp-treatment formula into a million-dollar enterprise. Born Sarah Breedlove in 1867, Walker created a network of beauty schools and a manufacturing and marketing system that allowed thousands of Black women to become independent operators of beauty shops and thus escape the drudgery of exhausting, low-status, underpaid household labor.
Migration was another way to define or give meaning to freedom. To escape racial discrimination, sexual exploitation, and poverty, hundreds of thousands of African American women migrated to northern urban areas. What began as a trickle escalated with the advent of World War I and the cessation of European immigration into a full-scale flood of human movement. Between 1914 and 1925 the Great Migration witnessed the resettlement of 1.5 million African American men, women, and children. Harlem, New York, became the Black mecca and Chicago, Illinois, the Black metropolis. Black women followed a different migratory pattern than did Black men. Most Black women moved directly from the South to the North, foregoing the strategy of working one's way up to the "promised land" in a series of stops. Black women also usually had a family member at the final destination who would provide food, shelter, and protection as well as leads to jobs that would facilitate her adaptation to the new environment.
Although Black women eagerly sought employment in industries, shops, department stores, and the array of newly sex-stereotyped jobs, such as secretaries or sales clerks, they quickly crashed into the wall of Jim Crow. Most of these jobs were reserved for white women. There were never as many industrial job opportunities for Black women in the urban centers as there were for Black men. Few employers would hire Black women in the food-processing or automobile industries except for the most undesirable positions. Even those Black women who were lucky enough to secure positions outside of domestic service during World War I lost out when employers fired them to make way for the returning male veterans.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Black women writers and poets such as Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Zora Neale Hurston participated in the artistic flowering known as the Harlem Renaissance. Amy Jacques Garvey assisted her husband Marcus Garvey in the creation and growth of the nationalist organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and urged Black women to envision new definitions of Black beauty and purposefulness. Black women singers, especially blues women Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, sang of the frustrations many of their sisters felt during the disillusioning decades between world wars. The advent of the Great Depression during the 1930s gave them even more reason to sing the blues.
The Great Depression was one of the most catastrophic periods in U.S. history. But the majority of Black women had little time to stay in sorrow's kitchen. They had children to feed, families to nurture, and communities to mobilize for self-help. In southern cities some Black women participated in sharecropping unions and Communist Party-led struggles within the steel industries. In northern areas Black women developed programs of economic nationalism and formed consumer action groups such as the Housewives' League of Detroit. Established in 1930, the Housewives' League had as one of its mottos "Stabilize the economic status of the Negro through directed spending." For the next thirty years, members of the league pledged to patronize all organized Negro businesses; to patronize "stores that employ Negroes in varied capacities and that do not discriminate in types of work offered"; to support and encourage institutions training Negro youth for trades and commercial activities; to teach "Negro youth that no work done well is menial"; and to conduct "education campaigns to teach the Negro the value of his spending." The directed-spending campaigns, or boycotts of neighborhood all-white stores, spread to other cities and secured an estimated seventy-five thousand new jobs for Blacks.
Black urban women employed a variety of strategies to ward off economic devastation and political powerlessness. In 1935 Mary McLeod Bethune, a prominent member of Roosevelt's New Deal, founded the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). The NCNW declared as its purpose the collecting, interpreting, and disseminating of information concerning the activities of Black women. Its leaders, including Mary Church Terrell and Estelle Massey Riddle, wished "to develop competent and courageous leadership among Negro women and effect their integration and that of all Negro people into the political, economic, educational, cultural, and social life of their communities and the nation."
The advent of any war usually results in an improvement in women's status. As men are drafted to foreign locations, women usually are expected to take up the slack and fulfill those jobs that during peacetime are considered "men's work." While some Black women got jobs in nontraditional occupations as welders, workers in defense plants, or instructors of aviation, the majority remained in domestic service and agricultural labor. Even Black women nurses were engaged in struggles against exclusionary practices and quotas that restricted their right to serve in the Armed Forces Nurse Corps. Mabel K. Staupers, executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, won recognition for Black nurses to serve in the Nurse Corps near the end of World War II, to fight against fascism and Nazism. On January 25, 1945, the Navy Nurses' Corps was opened to Black women. A few weeks later Phyllis Dailey became the first Black nurse to be inducted.
Recent investigation into the roles of Black women in the civil rights movement has demonstrated connections between the communal institution-building work of earlier generations of clubwomen and the successful activism of the 1950s and 1960s. Ella Baker was a key player both in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. According to Jo Ann Gibson Robinson's memoirs, women were the ones who initiated the Montgomery bus boycott that led to the overthrow of Jim Crow transportation laws across the South and signaled the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. Following Rosa Parks's arrest in December 1955, Robinson, a professor of English at Alabama State College and president of the Women's Political Council of Montgomery, mimeographed and distributed thirty thousand leaflets advising the Black citizens of Montgomery to stay off the buses. The bus-riding population, consisting as it did mainly of Black women, heeded her call—and Jim Crow's days were numbered.
In more recent decades Black women have amassed outstanding achievements. In politics, Carol Moseley-Braun won election to the U.S. Senate in 1992. Mae Jemison became the first Black woman astronaut, and Toni Morrison won the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, the first African American, male or female, to do so. Julie Dash in 1992 directed and produced a unique Black women's film, Daughters of the Dusk. Today, over half of all Black undergraduate students are women, and employed Black women have steadily reduced the gap between their income and that of white women. These achievements are the outgrowth of the new Black women's consciousness that was forged in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement's passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
This new consciousness dates back to the 1970 publication of Toni Cade's The Black Woman: An Anthology. This anthology was the first of its kind and its influence continues to resonate. In 1974 the Combahee River Collective was launched as the Boston chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization. The collective's first priority was to raise Black women's consciousness and to define issues of concern, such as sexual harassment, class oppression, and homophobia. According to Barbara Smith, the collective, during its six-year existence, also defined itself as anticapitalist, socialist, and revolutionary. The Combahee River Collective Statement inspired Black women's mobilization during the 1980s and 1990s.
Three additional markers heralded the rise of a new Black woman's creative activism. Michele Wallace's controversial Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978), Ntozake Shange's explosive Broadway play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975), and Alice Walker's powerful and provocative novel, The Color Purple (1982), which included a positive portrayal of a lesbian relationship between two Black women, all unveiled the reality of sexism within the Black community. These works allowed Black women across age, class, color, and occupational backgrounds to address those issues relevant to them, which the civil rights and women's liberation movements had overlooked.
By the early 1990s the achievements against the odds by a significant number of Black women, as well as the attention accorded their accomplishments, threatened to obscure the degradation and intransigence of poverty, sexual harassment, domestic violence, the ravages of life-threatening illnesses, the demonization of welfare recipients, the rise of female-headed households, and the lack of support for education and skills training. Negative stereotypes of Black women as welfare queens or oversexed moral wantons resurfaced in new guises. Yet the centuries-long spirit of resistance and culture of struggle remains a vital force, ensuring the ultimate coherence and survival of Black women in the United States.
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Morrow, 1984); Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg Penn, eds., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Carlson Publishers, 1993); Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed, eds., We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women's History (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1995).
Darlene Clark Hine
African American Women
For more on the history of African American women, see the following entries:
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