Black Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement--Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter, Part I

 

PORTRAIT OF HARRIET JACOBS, AUTHOR OF INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL, WRITTEN BY HERSELF

This week I had my first opportunities to meet the students in my two Black Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement courses, the first offered in the English Department at the City College of New York on Monday, and the latter on Thursday via the English Department, Women's Studies and American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center on 34th Street and Fifth Avenue. I had wrestled with the question of how to begin the course for as long as possible and then finally settled upon beginning by reading Paula Gidding's crucial study of black feminist history, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984).  

I chose to begin with this book in order to provide us with a history of issues of gender and sexuality in the lives of African American women. I believe that Gidding's book is particularly instructive in acquainting its reader with the story of how black women rose from the degradation of enslavement to occupy a leadership role in the pursuit of feminist issues and concerns in American public life, long before women had won the vote, and before most white women began to challenge their own enslavement to the pedestal and the cult of true womanhood.  

Giddings begins her book (which has subsequently been reissued with a new introduction) by focusing on the responses of two leading early 20th century race women, Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, to the same lynching in Memphis Tennessee of Thomas Moss and two friends on March 9, 1892. 

Moss and his friends had started The People's Grocery Store, which took business away from a white store owner who had once had a monopoly on black customers.  Given the tenor of the times, in which violent unilateral responses by whites were socially acceptable in reaction to any manner of self-assertion or self-protection by blacks, a white mob attacked the store.  Moss and his friends rallied their neighbors to protect their property. In the process, three whites were shot. Moss and over 100 blacks were arrested. Blacks stood vigil outside the jail to prevent a lynching until word was received that all of the white victims would survive their wounds. Mistakenly, it was assumed that a lynching was no longer imminent. In the early morning hours, Moss and his friends were taken from the jail and brutally slaughtered. 

Terrell, who had been raised in Memphis and was a friend of Moss, went with Frederick Douglass to directly appeal to President Harrison to condemn racial lynching in his annual address before Congress, which he failed to do. Ida B. Wells, who was then living in Memphis, and a journalist, would find Moss's lynching particularly instructive in terms of reaching the conclusion that there was no substance afterall to the popular claim of the time that black men were sexual barbarians (owing to the unusual lustfulness of their women) particularly prone to rape. As a pillar of the black community, Moss was above such suspicions.  Moreover, Wells had undertaken an in depth study of lynchings which brought her to the conclusion that most lynchings had nothing whatever to do with sex or rape, and that successful blacks were particularly targeted.

Giddings goes on to trace the roots of the stereotypes about black mens as sexual savages to their origin in the sexual stereotypes about the black woman as a justification for their brutal treatment as slaves. She introduces into her narrative the writings and stories of the early black feminists Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Harper as she documents the debates over the 15th amendment, which ultimately gave the right to vote to black men, as well as the failure and withdrawal of Reconstruction's enforcement.  

We will take up discussion of these materials in our next class meeting. I will endeavor as well to incorporate discussions of the cultural achievements and efforts of black women, particularly in religion, music and art, to address and articulate their resistance to their oppression. Included herein: a list of potentially relevant works.

Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. 1982.

Part 1--Slavery and 19^th Century: Related Topics:

ANTHOLOGIES:

Toni Cade Bambara, editor. The Black Woman: An Anthology, Signet Classics 1970.

Gerda Lerner, ed. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. Vintage 1972.

Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought edited by Beverly Guy Sheftall, The New Press 1995,

including essays by Maria  Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells

NARRATIVES AND BIOGRAPHIES

Marilyn Richardson et al, Maria Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches. Indiana UP 1987.

Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. Norton 1997.

Margaret Washington, Sojourner's America, University of Illinois Press 2009

Jean M. Humez, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories. University of Wisconsin Press 2003.

Kate Clifford Larsen, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. Ballentine Books 2004.

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, Written by Herself: With Related Documents. Bedford St. Martin's 2009.

Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Basic Books 2005.

Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. University of North Carolina Press 2008.

Eizabeth Keckly, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, 1868.

Jennifer Fleischner, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckley: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave. Broadway Books 2003.

Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader.

Deborah Gray White, Editor. Telling Histories: Black Women Historians In The Ivory Tower. The UNC Press 2008.

Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Norton 2008 (concerning Sally Hemmings and her relationship to Thomas Jefferson)

HISTORIES

Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class Random House 1981.

Rosalyn Terborg Penn, African American Women In The Struggle for The Vote, 1850-1920. Indiana University Press 1998.

Deborah Gray White, Aren’t I A Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (Revised Edition) 1999.

Nell Painter, The History of White People. Norton 2010.

Kate Clifford Larsen, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C. UNC Press 2010.

THE ARTS—RELEVANT

Kirsten Pai Buick, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject, Duke UP 2010.

Henderson and Henderson, The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis: A Narrative Biography: A Narrative Biography by Harry Henderson and Albert Henderson. Esquiline Hill Press, Milford Ct. 2012.

Charmaine A. Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Minnesota 2013.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent) at the time of the publication of her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Written by Herself.
http://www.harrietjacobs.org

Among the readings this semester (Sp 2011), was included excerpts from "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself" by Harriet Jacobs.  I suggested that students follow the materials as presented in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2nd Edition 2005 edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie McKay), which includes an explanatory essay about how and why Jacobs wrote her narrative under the pseudonym Linda Brent.  Nonetheless, it was apparent to me in reading the midterms that students had gotten their texts helter skelter from a variety of online or used sources, some of which were probably written when some scholars still thought that the Jacobs narrative was a work of fiction and not written by a former black female slave. 

Such work would not have recognized the important intervention literary historian Jean Fagin Yellin had made into our knowledge of Harriet Jacobs in 1987 in her admirable edition of the "Incidents" in which she draws upon the correspondence between Jacobs and Lydia Maria Child, who acted as her editor, and accompanies us through every detail of her escape.  Since having altered the general understanding of the Jacob's narrative, the only slave narrative of a black woman actually written by herself, Yellin has further added to our knowledge publishing "Harriet Jacobs: A Life"(Basic Books 2004), and also completing the Harriet Jacobs Papers.  

Despite her subsequent anonymity, Jacobs was not an obscure or isolated figure during the period in which "Incidents" was published.  History had forgotten her but at the time she lived she was an active participant in the Abolitionist Movement, although she would have obviously been restricted to the female sphere.  In the period in which she wrote her narrative (1861), the public lives of women were severely restricted by custom and by their lack of the franchise.  Despite the dangers of a runaway slave being returned to her owner, Jacobs participated in the Abolitionist Movement in Rochester, New York where she worked in an antislavery reading room and bookstore just above the offices of Frederick Douglass's "North Star" newspaper. Yellin's scholarship substantiates that through her work as an ex-slave, she had an opportunity to meet and work with some of the most progressive women in Northern urban America. 

Because of the nature of Jacob's narrative and the necessity for her including a confession of how she came to engage in pre-marital sex with a white man who was not her husband (the father of her children) but not her owner, her account poses a challenge to our comprehension of the sexual conventions and values of the 19th century South.  We might reasonably wonder, as I did when writing about Jacobs in my first book "Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman," how could a slave be so concerned about preserving her sexual innocence?  How did she ever come to be innocent in the first place in the context of slavery, which I was taught to regard as an ongoing brothel? But as Yellin helps us to better understand, the life of the slave was not monolithic and unvarying.  As we learn from Douglass's narrative as well, slave children, depending upon whether they were born on a large or small plantation, owned by a large or small family and a variety of other factors, were sometimes gradually eased into the full comprehension of their plight as slaves. Until she successfully fled slavery, Jacobs had a family including a free grandmother, even though the families of the slaves were not recognized by law.

The importance of Jacob's story, which is obviously exceptional rather than typical of the conditions of the black female slave, is that we understand that enslavement was defined by the people who lived under it, not solely by the institution itself, which is part of what makes Yellin's narrative a work of literature worthy of our study and reflection.    

Jean Fagin Yellin has painstakingly reconstructed Jacob's life and rounded up her correspondence for posterity.  If she had not, we black women of the 20th century might not have ever realized the compelling authenticity of Jacob's story.  Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that all of the editions which refer to her work as fictional and her narrative as unreliable are automatically barred from our library and bookstore shelves.

Blues People Began Again Thursday, Aug 26th, Assigned Readings

 As of the Fall semester of 2010 at the City College of New York, I will be teaching once again my course Blues People: African American Culture in the 20th Century, as a special section of World Humanities under the course number WH 10302.  The course will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3:30 p.m.  We will begin in a new way with the discussion of our individual visits to the exhibition For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights at The International Center of Photography located at 43rd Street and 6th Avenue.  We will also be reading the book by Maurice Berger, which accompanies the exhibition, in the course of the semester in combination with our other readings in the Norton Anthology and African American Music: An Introduction.  

From there, we will progress to our chronological reading of African American literature in the 20th century, beginning with chapters from WEB Du Bois's 1903 masterpiece TRHE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK.  You are invited to supplement the reading of SOULS with visual materials from Du Bois's "Negro Exhibition" at the Paris Exposition of 1900, about which a great deal has been written and said.  


Du Bois's NEGRO EXHIBITION was compiled by him and others  to document the progress of African Americans since their enslavement had officially ended in the United States in the mid-1860s.  He travelled steerage to Paris to install it at the Paris Exposition of 1900, one of the most celebrated of the world's fairs of the period.    


World's Fairs in general were particularly instructive when considering the status of race and African American in the United States and elsewhere.  Especially when the fair was actually located in the United States (as was the case of the Atlanta Cotton Exposition of 1896 in Atlanta at which Booker T. Washington delivered his celebrated address), African American artists and various kinds of status reports and exhibitions on African Americans were included. 


On this blog, I have made available a variety of related materials, as well, as a very excellent presentation of Du Bois's exhibition at the Paris fair compiled by Eugene Provenzo, who is also the author of THE ANNOTATED SOULS OF BLACK FOLK.  While the book doesn't have high quality photographs, the website is superb and includes superior supporting documentation related to the exhibition.  


REQUIRED READINGS:

http://blackandbluespeople.blogspot.com/2009/02/course-readings-section-i.html

   THE NEGRO EXHIBITION COMPILED BY WEB DU BOIS as introduced by me:

http://blackandbluespeople.blogspot.com/2009/02/negro-exhibition-complied-by-web-du.html

   AS COMPILED BY EUGENE PROVENZO:

http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/Paris/home.htm

  COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION OF 1893 IN CHICAGO:

http://blackandbluespeople.blogspot.com/2009/03/columbian-exposition_16.html

Course Readings--Section I

Basic Readings taken from---(REQUIRED TEXT)

THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, SECOND EDITION with two audio cds of folk culture.
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail-contents.aspx?ID=10626

I. WEB Du Bois, SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (1903)
  Chapters I, III, IV, V, VI, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, and The After-Thought

VISUALS:

Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition (1900):
Archival reconstruction by Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., School of Education, University of Miami

http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/Paris/home.htm  

African American Photographs Assembled for the Paris Exposition of 1900:
Photographs Online Catalog, Library of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/anedub/

SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS:

Thomas Jefferson, DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (1776);

Frederick Douglass, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1836)

 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS (Excerpts) (c1890)

Harriet Jacobs, INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL (1851):

Preface, Chapters I, II, V, X, XIV, XVII, XXI, XXIX, XXXIX, XL, XLI

Harriet Wilson, OUR NIG; OR SKETCHES FROM THE LIFE OF A FREE BLACK IN A TWO STORY WHITE HOUSE, NORTH (c. 1951):

Preface, Chapters I, II, II, VIII, X and XII

Booker T. Washington, UP FROM SLAVERY (1893); Chapters I, II, III, XIV

AUDIO FILES:

Spirituals--
Ezekiel Saw De Wheel, Go Down, Mose, Been in the Storm So Long, Steal Away to Jesus, Soon I Will Be Done

Gospels--This Little Light of Mine, Take My Hand, Precious Lord