Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  Gradually overcoming the habitual limits imposed upon her by slave masters, she increasingly seeks legal sanction for the consummation and dissolution of sex contracts. Contrary to popular belief, illegitimacy among Negroes is cause for shame and grief. When economic, social, and biological forces combined bring about unwed motherhood, the reaction is much the same as in families of other racial groups. Secrecy is maintained if possible. Generally the married aunt, or even the mother, claims that the illegitimate child is her own. The foundling asylum is seldom sought. Schooled in this kind of suffering in the days of slavery, Negro women often temper scorn with sympathy for weakness. Stigma does fall upon the unmarried mother, but perhaps in this matter the Negroes’ attitude is nearer the modern enlightened ideal for the social treatment of the unfortunate. May this not be considered another contribution to America?

  With all these forces at work, true sex equality has not been approximated. The ratio of opportunity in the sex, social, economic, and political spheres is about that which exists between white men and women. In the large, I would say that the Negro woman is the cultural equal of her man because she is generally kept in school longer. Negro boys, like white boys, are usually put to work to subsidize the family income. The growing economic independence of Negro working women is causing her to rebel against the domineering family attitude of the cruder working-class Negro man. The masses of Negro men are engaged in menial occupations throughout the working day. Their baffled and suppressed desires to determine their economic life are manifested in over-bearing domination at home. Working mothers are unable to instill different ideals in their sons. Conditions change slowly. Nevertheless, education and opportunity are modifying the spirit of the younger Negro men. Trained in modern schools of thought, they begin to show a wholesome attitude of fellowship and freedom for their women. The challenge to young Negro womanhood is to see clearly this trend and grasp the preferred comradeship with sincerity. In this matter of sex equality, Negro women have contributed few outstanding militants. Their feminist efforts are directed chiefly toward the realization of the equality of the races, the sex struggle assuming a subordinate place.

  Obsessed with difficulties that might well compel individualism, the Negro woman has engaged in a considerable amount of organized action to meet group needs. She has evolved a federation of her clubs, embracing between eight and ten thousand women throughout the state of New York. Its chief function is to crystallize programs, prevent duplication of effort, and to sustain a member organization whose cause might otherwise fail. It is now firmly established, and is about to strive for conspicuous goals. In New York City, one association makes child welfare its name and special concern. Others, like the Utility Club, Utopia Neighborhood, Debutante’s League, Sempre Fidelius, etc., raise money for old folks’ homes, a shelter for delinquent girls, and fresh air camps for children. The Colored Branch of the Y.W.C.A. and the womens’ organizations in the many churches, as well as in the beneficial lodges and associations, care for the needs of their members.

  On the other hand, the educational welfare of the coming generation has become the chief concern of the national sororities of Negro college women. The first to be organized in the country, Alpha Kappa Alpha, has a systematized and continuous program of educational and vocational guidance for students of the high schools and colleges. The work of Lambda Chapter, which covers New York City and its suburbs, is outstanding. Its recent campaign gathered together nearly one hundred and fifty such students at a meeting to gain inspiration from the life-stories of successful Negro women in eight fields of endeavor. From the trained nurse, who began in the same schools as they, these girls drank in the tale of her rise to the executive position in the Harlem Health Information Bureau. A commercial artist showed how real talent had overcome the color line. The graduate physician was a living example of the modern opportunities in the newer fields of medicine open to women. The vocations as outlets for the creative instinct became attractive under the persuasion of the musician, the dressmaker, and the decorator. Similarly, Alpha Beta Chapter of the national Delta Sigma Theta Sorority recently devoted a week to work along similar lines. In such ways as these are the progressive and privileged groups of Negro women expressing their community and race consciousness.

  We find the Negro woman, figuratively, struck in the face daily by contempt from the world about her. Within her soul, she knows little of peace and happiness. Through it all, she is courageously standing erect, developing within herself the moral strength to rise above and conquer false attitudes. She is maintaining her natural beauty and charm and improving her mind and opportunity. She is measuring up to the needs and demands of her family, community, and race, and radiating from Harlem a hope that is cherished by her sisters in less propitious circumstances throughout the land. The wind of the race’s destiny stirs more briskly because of her striving.

  Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

  Alice Dunbar-Nelson, born in New Orleans, was a teacher, club woman, journalist, and writer, publishing her first book, Violets and Other Tales, in 1895. She is perhaps best known as a Harlem Renaissance poet and the wife (briefly) of poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, with whom she had a stormy relationship. See Andrew Alexander’s “The Dunbar Letters: The Tragic Love Affair of One of America’s Greatest Poets,” Washington Post Magazine, 28 June 1981. Dunbar’s diary Give Us Each Day (1984), edited by literary critic Gloria T. Hull, is one of only two extant diaries by a nineteenth-century black woman and reveals an active black lesbian network, of which she was a part during the 1920s. Active in the black women’s club movement and the national political arena, she was, in 1915, secretary of the National Association of Colored Women and field organizer for the Middle Atlantic states in the battle for woman suffrage. In 1920, she was also chair of the League of Colored Republican Women and, in 1922, was head of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders in Delaware, which fought for the passage of the Dyer federal Anti-Lynching Bill.

  She wrote numerous short essays for her columns “From a Woman’s Point of View” for the Pittsburgh Courier in 1926 and “As In a Looking Glass” for the Washington Eagle (1926—30). “The Negro Woman and the Ballot” appeared in The Messenger in 1927. See Gloria Hull’s Color, Sex and Poetry for extensive discussions of three Harlem Renaissance writers—Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Weld Grimke (1880—1956), and Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966).

  THE NEGRO WOMAN AND THE BALLOT

  It has been six years since the franchise as a national measure has been granted women. The Negro woman has had the ballot in conjunction with her white sister, and friend and foe alike are asking the question, What has she done with it?

  Six years is a very short time in which to ask for results from any measure or condition, no matter how simple. In six years a human being is barely able to make itself intelligible to listeners; is a feeble, puny thing at best, with undeveloped understanding, no power of reasoning, with a slight contributory value to the human race, except in a sentimental fashion. Nations in six years are but the beginnings of an idea. It is barely possible to erect a structure of any permanent value in six years, and only the most ephemeral trees have reached any size in six years.

  So perhaps it is hardly fair to ask with a cynic’s sneer, What has the Negro woman done with the ballot since she has had it? But, since the question continues to be hurled at the woman, she must needs be nettled into reply.

  To those colored women who worked, fought, spoke, sacrificed, traveled, pleaded, wept, cajoled, all but died for the right of suffrage for themselves and their peers, it seemed as if the ballot would be the great objective of life. That with its granting, all the economic, political, and social problems to which the race had been subject would be solved. They did not hesitate to say—those militantly gentle workers for the vote—that with the granting of the ballot the women would step into the dominant place, politically, of the race. That all the mistakes which the men had made would be rectified. The men have sold their birthright for a mess
of pottage, said the women. Cheap political office and little political preferment had dazzled their eyes so that they could not see the great issues affecting the race. They had been fooled by specious lies, fair promises and large-sounding works. Pre-election promises had inflated their chests, so that they could not see the post-election failures at their feet.

  And thus on and on during all the bitter campaign of votes for women.

  One of the strange phases of the situation was the rather violent objection of the Negro man to the Negro woman’s having the vote. Just what his objection racially was, he did not say, preferring to hide behind the grandiloquent platitude of his white political boss. He had probably not thought the matter through; if he had, remembering how precious the ballot was to the race, he would have hesitated at withholding its privilege from another one of his own people.

  But all that is neither here nor there. The Negro woman got the vote along with some tens of million other women in the country. And has it made any appreciable difference in the status of the race? ... The Negro woman was going to be independent, she had averred. She came into the political game with a clean slate. No Civil War memories for her, and no deadening sense of gratitude to influence her vote. She would vote men and measures, not parties. She could scan each candidate’s record and give him her support according to how he had stood in the past on the question of race. She owed no party allegiance. The name of Abraham Lincoln was not synonymous with her for blind G.O.P. allegiance. She would show the Negro man how to make his vote a power, and not a joke. She would break up the tradition that one could tell a black man’s politics by the color of his skin.

  And when she got the ballot she slipped quietly, safely, easily, and conservatively into the political party of her male relatives.

  Which is to say, that with the exception of New York City, and a sporadic break here and there, she became a Republican. Not a conservative one, however. She was virulent and zealous. Prone to stop speaking to her friends who might disagree with her findings on the political issue, and vituperative in campaigns.

  In other words the Negro woman has by and large been a disappointment in her handling of the ballot. She has added to the overhead charges of the political machinery, without solving racial problems.

  One of two bright lights in the story hearten the reader. In the congressional campaign of 1922 the Negro woman cut adrift from party allegiance and took up the cudgel (if one may mix metaphors) for the cause of the Dyer Bill. The Anti-Lynching Crusaders, led by Mrs. Mary B. Talbot, found in several states—New Jersey, Delaware, and Michigan particularly —that its cause was involved in the congressional election. Sundry gentlemen had voted against the Dyer Bill in the House and had come up for reelection. They were properly castigated by being kept at home. The women’s votes unquestionably had the deciding influence in the three states mentioned, and the campaign conducted by them was of a most commendable kind.

  School bond issues here and there have been decided by the colored woman’s votes—but so slight is the ripple on the smooth surface of conservatism that it has attracted no attention from the deadly monotony of the blind faith in the “Party of Massa Linkun.”

  As the younger generation becomes of age it is apt to be independent in thought and in act. But it is soon whipped into line by the elders, and by the promise of plums of preferment or of an amicable position in the community or of easy social relations—for we still persecute socially those who disagree with us politically. What is true of the men is true of the women. The very young is apt to let father, sweetheart, brother, or uncle decide her vote....

  Whether women have been influenced and corrupted by their male relatives and friends is a moot question. Were I to judge by my personal experience I would say unquestionably so. I mean a personal experience with some hundreds of women in the North Atlantic, Middle Atlantic, and Middle Western States. High ideals are laughed at, and women confess with drooping wings how they have been scoffed at for working for nothing, for voting for nothing, for supporting a candidate before having first been “seen.” In the face of this sinister influence it is difficult to see how the Negro woman could have been anything else but “just another vote.”

  All this is rather a gloomy presentment of a well-known situation. But it is not altogether hopeless. The fact that the Negro woman CAN be roused when something near and dear to her is touched and threatened is cheering. Then she throws off the influence of her male companion and strikes out for herself. Whatever the Negro may hope to gain for himself must be won at the ballot box, and quiet “going along” will never gain his end. When the Negro woman finds that the future of her children lies in her own hands—if she can be made to see this—she will strike off the political shackles she has allowed to be hung upon her, and win the economic freedom of her race.

  Perhaps some Joan of Arc will lead the way.

  Amy Jacques Garvey (1896—1973) Ula Taylor

  Amy Jacques Garvey, the second wife of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the charismatic leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), participated directly in the struggle to achieve the organization’s goat—self-determination for black people around the world based on the doctrines of Pan-Africanism.

  As a political activist, Amy Garvey is well-known for assisting and promoting her husband. However, equally important was Amy’s call for black women to participate in the “race first” movement. Amy Garvey’s woman’s page, “Our Women and What They Think,” published in the Negro World, the UNIA’s weekly propaganda newspaper, promoted the notion that it was essential for black women to develop a political consciousness to “uplift” the race and ultimately “redeem” Africa.

  Amy Garvey’s editorials remind readers that she was not divorced from the historical legacy of the 1890s black club women. In fact, Amy helped to renew their feminist philosophies in the 1920s, adding to this body of thought the concept of black nationalism.

  As had her predecessors, Amy Garvey advocated that black women be given every opportunity to develop intellectually. The educated woman was better equipped to raise productive children and negotiate her domestic environment and the public arena. Amy Garvey differed from the Progressive Era activists, however, because she urged black women to cultivate their womanhood not for integration into the mainstream but for a nationalist platform focused on the needs of the race.

  Amy Garvey understood that a nationalist agenda required a general understanding of world affairs, particularly the activities of women whose statuses varied tremendously. Her writings covered a range of issues, reflecting her belief that it was essential for black women to place their activism in a global context. While Amy’s editorials were diverse, her efforts to advance a feminist agenda were relentless. Her editorials challenged patriarchal privilege and the notion that women are intellectually inferior to men. She advocated that black women work in partnership with men in the worldwide liberation struggle. But, when it appeared that black men’s political stance, or lack thereof, stifled the advancement of the race, she urged women to assume leadership roles.

  Ula Taylor is assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and wrote a dissertation entitled “The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey.”

  In all of her editorials, Amy Garvey demonstrated not only her commitment to the Garvey philosophy, but also her belief that there were many ways that one could and should be active within one’s communities. Her editorials are undeniably feminist in their emphasis on empowering women and expanding their roles and options in the world.

  OUR WOMEN GETTING INTO THE LARGER LIFE

  The worldwide movement for the enlargement of woman’s sphere of usefulness is one of the most remarkable of the ages. In all countries and in all ages, men have arrogated to themselves the prerogative of regulating not only the domestic, but also the civic and economic life of women. In many countries, women were subject entirely to the whims and l
egislation of men. It is that way now in most Asiatic countries and among some of the tribes in Africa.

  The recent upheaval in Turkey has carried with it condemnation of harem relations and the sanction of the family life as it has developed in Christian countries. Madam Kemal is the leader of the Turkish women for larger freedom in the ordering of their lives, but the innovation, which is bound to work for the betterment of men as well as women as the harem life is a blight on womanhood which degrades manhood as well, could only have been accomplished by the separation of Church and State, the Sultanate and the Caliphate, which amounts to negating the hitherto predominating influence of the Mohammedan religion in the affairs of State as of Church. However far the innovation will extend to other Moslem countries, and what influence, if any, it will have on the domestic life of the people of Asia and Africa, where the Mohammedan religion is strong, remains to be seen.

  In Europe, average womanhood has been held at a very low valuation until it got into the recently developed currents of modern innovation, and the average still remains low, peasant life for the man and the woman and their children being of the lowest and hardest. Only in Great Britain has the movement for the larger and better life for women, by allowing them reasonable voice in making and enforcing the laws, made any appreciable headway.