Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

by Duchess Harris

  When Dunnigan completed the ten years of education available to Blacks in the segregated Russelville Schools as valedictorian, she wanted to continue her schooling and pursue a career as a teacher, but her parents did not concur. As Dunnigan recalled:My mother had to do the laundry work throughout the year to keep the family going, but she didn’t make more than five dollars a week. She’d have to do about three families of washing before she could make that, because families paid one or two dollars or something like that for a week’s laundry. So with the small amount of money she earned, she knew she couldn’t keep me in school. That bothered her some, I think, but she took it like a lamb. Well my father just outright protested. He kept saying, ‘Why does Alice want to be a teacher? None of my folks were ever teachers. Why would she ever want to be a teacher?’ He never did anything to try to help or encourage me.16

  The intervention of her Sunday school superintendent, William Russell , the only Black dentist in town, made it possible for Dunnigan to attend Kentucky State College, where she earned her two-year elementary teachers’ certificate after only one year. She wanted to complete her program a year early because she needed to save money. Shortly after graduation, Dunnigan began her teaching career in a one-room rural school.

  That same year, when she was 19 years old, Dunnigan married Walter Dickinson of Mt. Pisgah, Kentucky. Their union was not an easy one, as Dunnigan’s level of education created a gulf between herself and her husband. As she recalled,I tried to make a go of it, because I guess he was a nice person, but he was a rural farmer, and of course we had different views and different values. He wanted me to give up teaching, but I was not willing to do that at the time.17

  Dunnigan’s experience in marriage was similar to the fictional character of Janie, in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Similar to Janie’s first husband, Mr. Killicks, Dunnigan’s husband insisted that she must help him with the farm work as the other farmers’ wives did. She had to help pick cotton, cultivate tobacco, and gather corn. Dunnigan recounted:He told me that I ought to stay at home, as a farmer’s wife should, and help with the crops. If I needed extra money I could always earn it by washing clothes for some of these good White folks.18

  When she explained to her husband that she needed to return to West Kentucky College to get recertified, he told her to stay there, and she did. They were divorced in 1930.

  In 1931, Dunnigan married Charles Dunnigan, who had been a childhood friend. She says of this marriage, “Here again was a matter of incompatibility. I was interested in intellectual things. He was not. Our friends were different. Our outlooks different. Our interests different.”19 They eventually separated in 1953, without ever divorcing. She and Charles had one child, Robert William, who eventually went on to Kentucky State and had four children of his own.

  World War II had a tremendous impact on Dunnigan’s life. By the time a call for government workers went out in 1942, Dunnigan was tired of teaching and of the menial jobs it was necessary for a Black teacher to take in order to eke out a living during the five months when schools were not in session. One of her summer jobs, provided by the Works Progress Administration , involved washing the tombstones at a white cemetery. At the same time, she was working four hours a day in a dairy, cleaning houses for a family, and doing washing at night for another family, earning in all only seven dollars a week.

  In pursuit of a government job, Dunnigan discovered a notice on a post office wall calling for clerk-typists in Washington. She had taken typing in college and went to the postmaster to inquire about taking the examination for civil service grade two, the highest available to her in Kentucky. He said that she had to furnish her own typewriter if she wanted to take the test. She stated in the Black Women’s Oral History Project that even though she was a poor woman of the South, she had a portable typewriter that she had ordered from a magazine but wasn’t accustomed to using. The typewriter was inadequate and she didn’t pass the typing examination. However, she did so well on the oral exam that she was permitted to retest. She passed and subsequently entered the federal civil service as a clerk typist for the Labor Department in Washington, DC. After a year of night courses at Howard University, she reached the level of economist in the Office of Price Administration.

  In 1947, Dunnigan was appointed chief of the Washington Bureau of the Associated Negro Press . She set out to get press credentials, starting with access to the press galleries of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Her request was initially denied on the grounds that she did not represent a daily paper (all papers using the services of the Associated Negro Press were weeklies). After a six-month pursuit, she succeeded and gained her accreditation about a week after the first Black man, Louis Lautier , received his. Dunnigan was the first Black woman admitted to the Capitol and the White House Press Corps. As such, she was the first Black correspondent to travel with a President of the USA, accompanying President Truman during his 1948 campaign. In 1960, she worked for Senator Lyndon Johnson , who was then campaigning for president, along with Senators Kennedy, Humphrey , and Symington . She attended the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles as a guest of Senator Johnson. Shortly after the 1960 national elections, President Kennedy issued the executive order that established the President’s Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity and Vice President Johnson was made chairman. The Vice President appointed Dunnigan as education consultant for the commission. In this position, she conferred with labor and industry representatives regarding strategies for assuring equal opportunities for minorities.

  Inabel Burns Lindsay , the youngest of six children, was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on February 13, 1900, to Joseph Smith Burns and Margaret Hartshorn Burns. Margaret Hartshorn’s parents were former slaves who had purchased their freedom. The Hartshorn family migrated from Virginia to Missouri during Reconstruction. Lindsay was not born into a family of educational privilege. Her mother had only an eighth grade education, but she stressed the importance of education and wanted her children to have better opportunities than she herself had enjoyed. Inabel Burns Lindsay was determined to achieve success, despite instabilities in her early life. Her parents separated when she was three, and she missed the first three years of elementary school because of vision problems. She was taught at home by her siblings with a regular school schedule. After her eye problems stabilized, she entered the fourth grade at the age of eight and was able to finish high school at the age of 15. She was encouraged to attend Howard University by her brother Ocie, who was a father figure for her.

  Burns enrolled at Howard University when she was only 16 years old. Although there were institutions closer to home, the family was looking for a place that had the protected environment of a dormitory experience. Despite her youth, Lindsay led a month-long strike against the dormitory when the price of board was raised with notification to parents but not to students. The university then moved against female students living in a dormitory with a ruling that they could not eat outside the dormitory. Her campus activism aside, she graduated with honors in 1920 at the age of 19.

  Geraldyn Hodges Major was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 29, 1894. Her mother died when she was born and her mother’s sister, Maude Powell Lawrence , raised her. Hodges grew up in a life of privilege, receiving many advantages to which few Black or white children were exposed. Her aunt and uncle, Maude and David Lawrence, were both professionals who provided her with dancing lessons and made accessible a social circle that included parties at the exclusive Appomattox Club. After graduating from high school at the age of 18, she entered the University of Chicago. Major had been accepted to Howard University, Fisk University, and Spelman College, but chose the University of Chicago because she received a work-study scholarship. While she was at the university, she became a charter member of the Beta Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha , the second chapter in the first sorority for Black college women. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1915, Major went to teach at Lincoln Instit
ute, a Black college in Jefferson City, Missouri. She was unhappy in this position and returned to school to pursue a teacher’s certificate from Chicago Normal College, where she completed her studies in 1917.

  Later that year, she married Binga Dismond, a man from Houston, Texas, whom she had met while attending the university. When he went to fight in World War I, Major attended Hampton Institute during the summer. Major was no less familiar with marital difficulties than was Dunnigan . She divorced Binga Dismond in 1933, and eventually married Gilbert Holland during the Depression, but that marriage lasted only a short time. Her third and final marriage was to a mortician, John Major, who preceded her in death. Major’s class background is reflected in her journalism. From 1928 to 1931, she was managing editor of the Interstate Tattler, and her articles covered society news. In 1928, she began to write the “New York Social Whirl” column for the Baltimore Afro-American. In March 1953, Major began working for Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago and wrote articles for Ebony and Jet magazines.

  Lillian Holland Harvey was born in Holland, Virginia. She was a graduate of Lincoln Hospital’s Nursing School (1939) and received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1944, a master’s degree in 1948, and a doctorate in 1966. Dr. Harvey arrived in Tuskegee, Alabama as a young woman in 1944, and soon became the first dean of the School of Nursing at Tuskegee Institute . During her tenure as dean (1948–1973), Harvey successfully managed the transition from a diploma program to the first baccalaureate nursing program in the state of Alabama. Harvey was instrumental in advancing opportunities for Black nurses to enter the Army Nurse Corps during World War II by maintaining a program at Tuskegee that prepared Black nurses for military service. While it was necessary to work within the segregated system that was mandated by law in the Deep South, Harvey worked endlessly toward breaking these barriers and promoting an open social system. During the early years of her career, she single-handedly undertook the task of desegregating the Alabama Nurses’ Association by attending its meetings. This required an 80-mile round trip drive from Tuskegee to Montgomery. Although she had to sit in a separate section of the room, she spoke up without hesitation about the needs of nurses and nursing students.

  The selection of Lorraine Hansberry for the PCSW was, perhaps, surprising because of her outspoken radical politics, which included disputes with Robert Kennedy . She was born on the South Side of Chicago on May 19, 1930, into a family of means. The Hansberrys were prominent not only in the Black community of Chicago, but also in national Black cultural and political circles. Her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a successful real estate broker who had moved to Chicago from Mississippi after completing technical courses at Alcorn College. Like thousands of Southern rural Blacks, he migrated north in the early years of the twentieth century seeking better economic opportunities. Despite the economic hardships of the Great Depression, he built a real estate company that he ran as a family business, hiring other relatives who needed employment or who wanted to leave the South. A promising businessman, he made an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1940 on the Republican ticket and contributed large sums of money to causes supported by the NAACP and the Urban League. Hansberry’s mother, Nannie Perry, was a schoolteacher who later became a ward committeewoman.

  The Hansberrys were at the center of Black social life in Chicago and often entertained important political figures that were visiting the city. Despite the Hansberry’s comfortable middle-class economic status, they were still subject to the racial segregation and discrimination characteristic of the period, and they were active in opposing it. Carl Hansberry challenged discriminatory housing patterns in 1938 by purchasing a home in a white area. When a court order forced the family to move, Mr. Hansberry fought the case (Hansberry v. Lee ) in the Supreme Court and won a favorable judgment. The political activism affected Lorraine to the extent that years later, in a 1964 letter to The New York Times she articulated her advocacy of her father’s style of civil disobedience for ghetto-locked Blacks in Chicago.

  A famed playwright, Lorraine Hansberry was as politically active as she was artistically creative. When the civil rights movement intensified, she publicly agreed that Blacks should defend themselves against terrorist acts. Hansberry posed a threat to the dominant culture for several reasons, and these threats intensified after her fame gave her national exposure. She was a lesbian, although never publicly; she was a Pan-Africanist; and in 1961, she donated money for the station wagon used by James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who were Freedom Riders in Mississippi at the time of their murder. In 1962, Hansberry helped plan fund-raising events to support the SNCC. She expressed her disgust with the red-baiting of the McCarthy era and called for dissolving the House’s Un-American Activities Committee. She criticized President John F. Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis, arguing that his actions endangered the cause of world peace. For all of these reasons, one might have reasonably expected that Hansberry would not be invited to serve on the commission.20

  Indeed, Hansberry was apparently more radical than the other commission members. She was also more evolved in her feminist beliefs than most Black women of her time, and as early as 1957 she wrote a critical commentary of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex , a book that had changed Hansberry’s life. In May 1963, before the report of the PCSW was even published, Hansberry was asked to join a multiracial assembly that included James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, and Lena Horne at a meeting in New York City with Attorney General Robert Kennedy to discuss the escalating protests and violence in the South. After a passionate query by Jerome Smith, a young Black Freedom Rider , as to the lack of positive leadership on the part of the US government in the South, Hansberry admonished Kennedy that he must listen to the voices of men like Smith to understand the needs of Black Americans.

  Though not heard by many, playwright Lorraine Hansberry expressed racial militancy when she wrote in 1962, “The condition of our people dictates what can only be called revolutionary attitudes.”21 Countering white criticisms of “Black power” and militant opposition to racism, Hansberry declared:Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and nonviolent. They must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps – and shoot from windows when the tactics come cruising through their communities.22

  Hansberry and peers who shared her more radical approach believed that organizing as Black feminists would be the most expedient, if not the only, way to advance their concerns. Accomplishing this goal, however, would take a decade more. In the meantime, Hansberry would articulate her concerns openly on the commission.

  The Fourth Consultation proposed several relevant recommendations for enhancing the role of Black women in American society. However, despite the fact that the 24 suggestions of the PCSW were covered on the front page of The New York Times on October 12, 1963, none of the recommendations of the Negro Women’s Consultation received media coverage, nor were they incorporated into the final summaries. Indeed, the Black women’s contributions were not mentioned at all. The fact that the Black women’s suggestions were not included on the front page of The New York Times demonstrates that although Black women were making their way from the margins of public policy, they still were not part of the mainstream. The best way to illustrate this point is to consider that the following year, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hammer was not allowed a delegate position at the 1964 Democratic National Convention .

  NOW

  Yet the precedents established by the commission and the women who served on it paved the way for future organizations and efforts, both with respect to racial politics and equality and sexual-gendered politics and equality. For instance, after having worked with the commission for two years, Pauli Murray tried to bring Black women’s concerns to the table of another mainstream group: the National Organization for Women (NOW) . Contrary to popular belief, wo
men of color were involved in the formation and development of NOW . In fact, this new organization’s membership overlapped with that of the PCSW and the still-to-come NBFO. Three Black women—Pauli Murray , Aileen Hernandez , and Shirley Chisholm —were involved in the organization of NOW .23 In 1966, NOW emerged out of the third annual conference of Commission on the Status of Women in Washington, DC, white women who had been involved in SNCC and other civil rights organizations were slowly being forced out and they began to focus their energies on the struggle for women’s rights. As they began to look at their role as women in society, many educated, upper-middle-class white women began to recognize the relationship between sexism and racism. Many of the proponents of the NOW said they wanted “an NAACP for Women” because they felt that their issues were being pushed aside by the newly emerging Black Power movement .24

  Pauli Murray was asked to be a founding member of NOW after Betty Friedan heard reports of her statements at the October 1965 conference of the National Council of Women in the USA. Murray had declared that she would not shrink from the fight for equality should such a fight become necessary. In 1965, Murray wrote an important article for the George Washington University Law Review stating that while the brutality that African-Americans endured was far worse than that which women faced, this did not obscure the fact that the rights of both groups needed to be assured and both were human rights issues. It is important to note that Murray did not racialize the category “woman” in her article.

  Along with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem , Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm attended the July 1971 National Political Caucus in Washington, DC, and spoke out in favor of more women running for political office. These women were central in NOW’s development, and in their early conversations about their organization’s agenda, NOW’s statement of purpose incorporated many of the issues that the Black women on the Kennedy Commission had already explored . NOW’s objectives centered on education, employment, legal and political rights, family life, poverty, and mass media images. There was no great focus on CR, but rather on the concrete political and legal changes needed to improve the economic situation of mainly middle- and upper-middle-class women. The NBFO was formed in 1973 partly because NOW did not deal adequately with the issue of race and the particular concern of Black working-class women.25