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A Black Women's History of the United States, written by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, conveys Black women's countless testimonials within the United States dating back to pre-slavery. Although the various roles and experiences of Black women are known and have been recorded in particular parts of U.S. history, many historians and educators neglect to provide a holistic recollection of Black women's stories. Thus, Berry and Gross take readers on an exploratory journey of numerous unknown Black women throughout history, successfully readdressing and reapproaching the false narrative too often circulated about Black women within the United States. Moreover, they capture the emotional and mental turmoil Black women in the United States have experienced and continue to encounter, while also retelling moments in American history through each author's perspective. The authors tell this story skillfully, with vignettes of Black women trailblazers and lengthy footnotes documenting extensive historical research that reveals stories of self-reliance, agency, fortitude, bravery, and beauty. Berry and Gross uncover hidden and otherwise unacknowledged aspects of U.S. history from the voices and lives of Black women who marched forward, against all odds, to lead sustained change in their communities, the nation, and across the globe. A Black Women's History of the United States showcases the many themes in Black women's history that emerge across time and space. These thematic experiences entail stories of Black women's mobility, violence, activism and resistance, labor and entrepreneurship, criminalization and incarceration, cultural production, and sexuality and reproduction. These stories underscore Black women's own desires to seek out new opportunities and new worlds, domestically, nationally, and internationally. As Black women traversed new spaces, their travails profoundly influenced social, cultural, political, and legal practices. A distinguishing feature of Berry and Gross's writing is the inclusive narrative of the lived experiences of Black women from many walks of life (travelers, politicians, activists, enslaved, suffragettes, domestic workers, civil rights organizers, mothers, and sports champions), including transgender, bisexual, and cisgender voices. The stories are viscerally painful, psychologically difficult, heart wrenching, selfless, heroic, and triumphant. As Berry and Gross conclude, "We owe a debt to the Black women who came before us, those who persevered and those who did not, because the totality of their history is what informs our present and readies us to continue to demand justice, for ourselves and, by extension, for all" (p. 217). For Berry and Gross, the overall purpose of their ten-chapter book, including the introduction and conclusion, is to ". .. paint a richly textured portrait of Black womanhood in a manner that celebrates Black women's diversity and inspires readers to seek out more" (p. xi). To accomplish that task, every chapter within the book is named after a historically known or
Editorial: Investigating Black Activism in the Civil War Era
2021
Spring 2021 This special thematic issue of the Civil War Book Review is dedicated to recent works that uncover, reveal, and recast the history of Black Americans' emancipation activism in the Civil War Era. The concept of emancipation carried myriad meanings among nineteenth-century Black Americans, which the scholarship reviewed below reflects. These authors have catalogued nineteenth-century Black Americans' vibrant and dynamic efforts to emancipate themselves from slavery, to achieve citizenship and its attendant rights, to secure personal safety, to gain social standing, and to attain economic stability. These books emphasize nineteenth-century African Americans possessed a complex political consciousness that was finely tuned to local, state, and national political developments and white efforts to limit their rights. Their political consciousness inspired their long-standing determination to gain what they knew was deservedly theirs-as Americans, as humans-without waiting for a white savior. The authors examine Black Americans' diversity of goals and the various means they used to achieve them. However, as most people of African descent in the United States before the Civil War were enslaved, the most fundamental and common form of Black freedom fighting in the antebellum era was emancipation from enslavement. In her review of Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad, Kate Clifford Larson praises editor Timothy Walker and the chapters' authors for challenging the "20 th century fakelore featuring the use of quilt codes, lawn jockeys and other physical devices as signs and signals." What their collection shows is "that escape by water, through a vast network of maritime links, was far more common," as escapees often hid in plain sight, posing as dockworkers, and seamen, on their way to freedom. Larson is confident there is more to be learned: "This volume just whets the appetite for more," she concludes. Black Americans who escaped bondage as well as those born to freedom knew the attainment and preservation of their own rights were inextricably bound to the eradication of the institution of slavery. As Jennifer Harbour demonstrates in Organizing Freedom: Black
2020
With today’s twenty-four hour news, augmented by social media, we are constantly aware of threats to our comfort zone and to our sense of justice: democratic institutions under assault, hate crimes on the increase, a growing gap between rich and poor, climate change threatening our planet, health care differentials, xenophobia, and the voices of sexual assault survivors. With such a myriad of problems, we often become impervious to the troubles all around us and we rarely take time to reflect on our past. Yet there are lessons to be learned from history—lessons for today and lessons that fortify our resolve to right wrongs and to continue to fight for causes in which we believe. This paper is about a few women who from their location in Progressive Era settlement houses took up the fight for just causes and made a difference—in their time and for posterity. These women left their mark: in theoretical explanations of social problems; in new and interdisciplinary methodologies that yi...
Black Women, Mothering, and Protest in 19th Century American Society
The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 2007
, working in race and ethnicity, urban development, and family in relation to religious institutions. She writes on the Black church and economic development in the United States, and is presently working on a book titled Religious Institutions
Making a Way Out of No Way a Phenomenological Study of Black Maternal Activism in Chicago
2019
meetings in church basements, lodges, and living rooms, are moments that planted seeds in my heart and mind that could never be erased, no matter the time, distance, or places I have traveled from my neighborhood since. To the women who took the time to meet with me and share my study with other Black maternal activists, thank you for your support and endorsement of the study with their networks and others not well known to them, but eligible to participate. I look forward to continuing my engagement with you and your respective organizations. To my dissertation chair, Tiffeny Jimenez, thank you for your support, guidance, and for challenging me to develop, write, and complete a study that I can be proud of. And thank you for joining me on this journey and supporting my scholarly growth in ways that I always wanted but now are attainable. To my husband, Michael Somerville, and our children, Paul, Miles, Michael Jr. and Madison, thank you for your support in all ways big and small. There were many nights and weekends that required my focus and attention to this work, and you all made sure that our home was a supportive place for me to complete this study, particularly my little warrior girl, Madison.