Showing posts with label women of color. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women of color. Show all posts

March 10 - Happy Birthday, Hallie Quinn Brown

Posted on March 10, 2019

She was the daughter of enslaved people.

She worked hard to become educated (including becoming the first woman to earn a degree of Master of Science at Wilberforce University) - and she also gave back by working hard to help others get good educations.

I have written those sorts of sentences several times before. I keep finding stories about strong black women who achieved on their own merits but also worked to benefit others. Today's education hero is Hallie Quinn Brown.

Born in Pennsylvania on this date in 1849, Brown spent some of her childhood in Canada and studied at Wilberforce University in Ohio. 

Even though it was tougher to go South, far from her family and friends, Brown chose to do that because she felt she was more needed there. She taught children at "plantation schools" and also started a class for older folks so that they could learn to read. She worked in schools in South Carolina and in Mississippi before the organized suppression of black people in 1874 and 1875 made a rough place even rougher.

Brown returned to Ohio, where she got a teaching position and, later, a traveling-and-speaking position on behalf of her alma mater, Wilberforce. Brown is actually known for her mastery of elocution, which is the study of formal speaking - pronunciation, grammar, style, and tone. She apparently coaxed waves of laughter from her audiences when she wished to, or genuine tears, when she wanted that. She was considered to have a "magnetic" voice, and she could vary that voice in a bajillion ways.

When Brown returned to working in schools, she became a dean of one university, principal of Tuskegee Institute, and eventually professor at Wilberforce. She continued to speak at conferences and to help found organizations such as the Colored Women's League of Washington, D.C. 

I read that Brown was born (as I stated above) in 1849 and that she died in '49, as well - and I was thinking that it was a huge mistake, but then I realized that she'd died in 1949. She lived to be 100 years old!



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January 26 - Celebrating Angela Davis

Posted on January 26, 2019

Angela Davis has worked on feminist and civil rights and prison reform. And she has studied and worked as a scholar and professor in areas including social consciousness, popular music, and Marxism.

This professor / activist / author was controversial when I was growing up because she was briefly part of the Black Panther Party and for a long time was part of the Communist Party. She also faced conspiracy to murder charges - BUT she was acquitted (found innocent) of all charges.


Davis's fascinating life helped shape her ideas:

Davis was born on this date in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, and white bigots who bombed the houses of middle class black families in an attempt to frighten them and drive them out of the city (or state?) made some of them into fervent activists. 

Davis's involvement with the Girls Scouts helped channel her anger at discrimination into peaceful protests. 



A Quaker ("Friends") program that placed black students from the South into integrated schools in the North helped shape her life as she started to attend high school in New York City.

During her college career in Massachusetts, Davis attended a rally and met a German-American philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, and became one of his students. 



She traveled to Europe - France, Switzerland, Finland - and attended a World Festival of Youth and Students; later, she declared a major in French and did her junior year in France, which involved living with a French family. When she decided that she wanted to do graduate work in philosophy, in Germany, she ended up living with a German family. Later she lived with an international group of students. She visited East Berlin and ended up comparing post-war Germany from both the East and West. I think it is a rare and wonderful thing to have lived and studied in so many different places!

Because Professor Marcuse moved to a position at UC San Diego, Davis ended up moving to California and getting her masters from UCSD before completing a doctorate in East Berlin. She became an assistant professor at UCLA at age 25. 



A lot of Angela Davis's life was consumed with anti-Communist fears as well as the racism and sexism that affects every black woman in the U.S. Of course, Davis made mistakes - don't we all? - but making her out to be a dangerous terrorist, and putting her on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List, was part of the racist / sexist / anti-Communist reality of the time (and, sadly, of this time as well!). 





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January 10 - Happy Birthday, Amy Ashwood Garvey

Posted on January 10, 2019

A director of the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation.

Co-founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Co-founder of the Negro World newspaper.



Amy Ashwood Garvey, who was born in Jamaica on this date in 1897, married and worked with Marcus Garvey on all of the above. The two created a movement called Garveyism:


  • The idea that all African-American people (including black people in South and Central America, as well as black people in the U.S. and Canada), should unite together for their collective rights and in collective pride.
  • The idea that African slave descendants should go back to Africa, taking with them their intelligence and creativity and skills, and should re-connect with their roots as well as help African nations shake off colonialism and its ill effects.
  • The idea that African-American people who stay in the U.S. should build their own institutions and create their own local economies - rather than trying to infiltrate the institutions and economies of the racist and then-segregationist white societies.
Garveyism led to the Black Power movement of the 1960s, to black identity and black pride.

As you might imagine, there was push-back again the Garveys and their movement. I imagine many white people saw blunt (even bombastic) Marcus Garvey as threatening to the power structure of the status quo, but many black people, too, disliked some of the ideas of Garveyism. For example, many black people had no memory of or personal connection to Africa, and they did not want to leave the only homes they knew to go there. And some black people found the fact that Garvey seemed to be on the same side as super racist segregationists like the KKK (that is, the "go 'back' to Africa side, or the keep-races-separate side) to be appalling.

In 1922 Marcus and Amy divorced (and Marcus married one of Amy's former roommates and friends, also named Amy!), and Amy Ashwood Garvey moved on with her life:

She became a politician...

...a cultural feminist...

...and a speaker and lecturer.

She toured Western Africa, especially Dwaben, Ashanti (in Ghana), which is the part where her great grandmother said her own ancestors used to live. 

She lived and spoke in London, in the U.S., and in the Caribbean. 

She helped organize Pan-African Congress sessions.











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