Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  PART III

  When any group must be controlled and used, their gods, their religion, their land, and their tools of survival must be taken away from them. These are all reflections of themselves and their inner being as well as practical means to living. This must be done by force at first.

  In the days when all the forest was evergreen, before the parakeet painted the autumn leaves red with the color from his breast, before the giants wandered through the woods with their heads above the treetops; in the days when the sun and moon walked the earth as man and wife, and many of the great sleeping mountains were human beings; in those far-off days witchcraft was known only to the women on Onaland (Tierra del Fuego, South America). They kept their own particular lodge, which no man dared approach. The girls, as they neared womanhood, were instructed in the magic arts, learning how to bring sickness and even death to all those who displeased them.

  The men lived in abject fear and subjugation. Certainly they had bows and arrows with which to supply the camp with meat, yet they asked, what use were such weapons against the witchcraft and sickness? This tyranny of the women grew from bad to worse until it occurred to the men that a dead witch was less dangerous than a live one. They conspired together to kill off all the women; and there ensued a great massacre, from which not one woman in human form escaped.

  The legend goes on to describe how the men waited for the little girls to grow up so they could have wives. Meanwhile, they plotted how they would have their own lodge or secret society from which all women would forever be excluded. The lowly servant tasks would be performed only by women. They would be frightened into submission by means of demons drawn from men’s minds.

  This is only one of thousands of such legends taken from all parts of the world that indicate some great crisis did occur where leadership of society was taken away from the women by force. We blacks have a splendid oral tradition and respect for the history that comes to us through our older women. Much of their practical advice on how to doctor our children, make delicious dinners out of scraps the white world throws away, how to get meaning from our dreams, how they felt about the time of slavery, and how they overcame the master, have kept our spirits up. For those of us who want to break out of the subtle oppression of all black women, stories from the past have been used extensively in our research. We have begun to feel sure that before written history there was a great fear of women on the part of males and a sense of being oppressed by their inner and reproductive powers. “The Great Earth Mother” could bring forth life and inexplicably take it away. This was one kind of power—internal power. In all the folktales it could be overcome only through external power—force. It is possible that long ago there was a time when women were murdered in some massive genocide and their ancient God-like reflection destroyed along with their temples. Archaeologists have found such temples in Asia and northern Africa, along with statues of some female goddess. But it is better for women to make the historical connections about these remains, since black and white males still need to rule over us and cannot be depended upon to be free of male prejudice against women. It is enough for now that we note that men were determined at one time in the past to have external power over women, and her symbolic representative nature....

  Historical and political understanding of ourselves and our actual place in the American Dream is more important at this time than the gun. We black women look at our backwardness, our colossal ignorance and political confusion, and want to give up. We do not like ourselves or each other. Our contradictory feelings about our black brothers, who seem simultaneously to move forward and backward, are increased by their continual cautioning that we must not move on our own or we will divide the movement. About all that we will mess up will be their black study, black power, cultural nationalism hustle. Forget black capitalism, because when the master offers you his thing, you know it’s over! There have been other movements in history when revolutionary males have appeared conservative, opportunistic, or just “stopped at the pass,” and revolutionary women have always forged ahead of the males at this time to take the revolution to a deeper stage.

  Black revolutionary women are going to be able to smash the last myths and illusions on which all the jive-male oppressive power depends. We are not alone anymore. This country no longer holds one well-armed united majority against an unarmed minority.... There is a whole bunch of brown and yellow poor folks out there in the world that the ruling middle-class of this country have used and abused, stolen from, and sold their shoddy goods to at way-out prices. They are fighting back now, taking over those United States companies that sucked their people and their land. They are putting out the United States Army and capitalist investors as they did in China and Cuba.

  But a new stage of history really began when the poor Vietnamese men, women, and children beat up and killed a whole lot of white and black cats who had decided it was easier to fight little, brown, poverty-stricken people than fight the MAN. One-half of these courageous South Vietnamese NLF [National Liberation Front] fighters are women and children, and they have proved that no United States male, black or white, got what it takes to destroy a people who have decided in their guts to own themselves and their land. That is power United States males have forgotten, but not black women, especially those of us who are poor.

  White males are only in the image of God and supernaturally powerful with unbeatable instruments of death, in our own “messed-over” minds—not in the revolutionary world beyond the borders of the United States. All that “Big Daddy” and “head of family” shit is possible because we play the game—ego-tripping black men and ourselves. If our minds are together, we can work, think, and decide everything for ourselves. It is only a cruel, capitalist system that digs money, property, and white broads more than it digs people, that forces us to be the dependents of men and wards of the state. We recognize that black males are frail human beings, born of women who love them, not for their “dick power” or their bread, but for their gentle, enduring, and powerful humanity.

  It is important for black women to remind themselves occasionally that no black man gets born unless we permit it—even after we open our legs. That is the first, simple step to understanding the power that we have. The second is that all children belong to the women because only we know who the mother is. As to who the father is—well, we can decide that, too—any man we choose to say it is, and that neither the child nor MAN was made by God.

  Third, we are going to have to put ourselves back to school, do our own research and analysis. We are going to have to argue with and teach one another, grow to respect and love one another. There are a lot of black chicks, field niggers wanting to be house niggers, who will fight very hard to keep this decaying system because of the few, petty privileges it gives them over poor black women. We will be disappointed to lose some house women who will have to revert to their class and who will go with the master, like they did during slavery. Finally, we are going to have to give the brothers a helping hand here and there because they will be uptight, not only with the enemy but with us. But at the same time we’ve got to do our own thing and get our own minds together.

  All revolutionaries, regardless of sex, are the smashers of myths and the destroyers of illusion. They have always died and lived again to build new myths. They dare to dream of a utopia, a new kind of synthesis and equilibrium.

  Pauli Murray (1910—1985)

  Pauli Murray, lawyer, professor, ordained priest, civil rights activist, feminist, and writer, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and a significant figure in the emergence of the modern women’s movement. She was the only woman in her law school class at Howard University, the first African American to earn a doctorate in jurisprudence from Yale University Law School (1965), and the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopalian priest (1977). She was a member of President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, where she joined a small but growing informal network of feminists. She was also involved in
the struggle to pass Title VII of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which mandated equal employment opportunities for women. A founding member of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she remained a crusader for women’s rights throughout her life. “Jane Crow and the Law,” which appeared in the December 1965 issue of the George Washington Law Review and was coauthored with lawyer Mary O. Eastwood, was an early response to Title VII by feminist lawyers. Her essay “The Liberation of Black Women,” which appeared in Voices of the New Feminism (1970), analyzed the double burden of racism and sexism that Black women suffer. She also coined the term “Jane Crow” to refer to institutional barriers and stereotypes that prevented black women from realizing their full potential. She also critiqued the black movement in the 1960s for not resisting patriarchal frameworks and for being essentially a “bid of black males to share power with white males in a continuing patriarchal society in which both black and white females are relegated to secondary status.”

  For additional information about Murray and her family see Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (1956) and her autobiography Song in a Weary Throat (1987).

  THE LIBERATION OF BLACK WOMEN

  Black women, historically, have been doubly victimized by the twin immoralities of Jim Crow and Jane Crow. Jane Crow refers to the entire range of assumptions, attitudes, stereotypes, customs, and arrangements that have robbed women of a positive self-concept and prevented them from participating fully in society as equals with men. Traditionally, racism and sexism in the United States have shared some common origins, displayed similar manifestations, reinforced one another, and are so deeply intertwined in the country’s institutions that the successful outcome of the struggle against racism will depend in large part upon the simultaneous elimination of all discrimination based upon sex. Black women, faced with these dual barriers, have often found that sex bias is more formidable than racial bias. If anyone should ask a Negro woman in America what has been her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be, “I survived!”

  Negro women have endured their double burden with remarkable strength and fortitude. With dignity they have shared with black men a partnership as members of an embattled group excluded from the normal protections of the society and engaged in a struggle for survival during nearly four centuries of a barbarous slave trade, two centuries of chattel slavery, and a century or more of illusive citizenship. Throughout this struggle, into which has been poured most of the resources and much of the genius of successive generations of American Negroes, these women have often carried a disproportionate share of responsibility for the black family as they strove to keep its integrity intact against a host of indignities to which it has been subjected. Black women have not only stood shoulder to shoulder with black men in every phase of the struggle, but they have often continued to stand firmly when their men were destroyed by it. Few blacks are unfamiliar with that heroic, if formidable, figure exhorting her children and grandchildren to overcome every obstacle and humiliation and to “Be somebody!”

  In the battle for survival, Negro women developed a tradition of independence and self-reliance, characteristics that, according to the late Dr. E. Franklin Frazier, Negro sociologist, have “provided generally a pattern of equalitarian relationship between men and women in America.” The historical factors that have fostered the black women’s feeling of independence have been the economic necessity to earn a living to help support their families—if indeed they were not the sole breadwinners—and the need for the black community to draw heavily upon the resources of all of its members in order to survive.

  Yet these survival values have often been distorted, and the qualities of strength and independence observable in many Negro women have been stereotyped as “female dominance” attributed to the “matriarchal” character of the Negro family developed during slavery and its aftermath. The popular conception is that because society has emasculated the black male, he has been unable to assume his economic role as head of the household, and the black woman’s earning power has placed her in a dominant position. The black militant’s cry for the retrieval of black manhood suggests an acceptance of this stereotype, an association of masculinity with male dominance, and a tendency to treat the values of self-reliance and independence as purely masculine traits. Thus, while blacks generally have recognized the fusion of white supremacy and male dominance (note the popular expressions “The Man” and “Mr. Charlie”), male spokesmen for Negro rights have sometimes pandered to sexism in their fight against racism. When nationally known civil rights leader James Farmer ran for Congress against Mrs. Shirley Chisholm in 1968, his campaign literature stressed the need for a “strong male image” and a “man’s voice” in Washington.

  If idealized values of masculinity and feminity are used as criteria, it would be hard to say whether the experience of slavery subjected the black male to any greater loss of his manhood than the black female of her womanhood. The chasm between the slave woman and her white counterpart (whose own enslavement was masked by her position as a symbol of high virtue and an object of chivalry) was as impassable as the gulf between the male slave and his arrogant white master. If black males suffered from real and psychological castration, black females bore the burden of real or psychological rape. Both situations involved the negation of the individual’s personal integrity and attacked the foundations of one’s sense of personal worth.

  The history of slavery suggests that black men and women shared a rough equality of hardship and degradation. While the black woman’s position as sex object and breeder may have given her temporarily greater leverage in dealing with her white master than the black male enjoyed, in the long run it denied her a positive image of herself. On the other hand, the very nature of slavery foreclosed certain conditions experienced by white women. The black woman had few expectations of economic dependence upon the male or of derivative status through marriage. She emerged from slavery without the illusions of a specially protected position as a woman or the possibilities of a parasitic existence as a woman. As Dr. Frazier observed, “Neither economic necessity nor tradition has instilled in her the spirit of subordination to masculine authority. Emancipation only tended to confirm in many cases the spirit of self-sufficiency, which slavery had taught.”

  Throughout the history of black America, its women have been in the forefront of the struggle for human rights. A century ago Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were titans of the abolitionist movement. In the 1890s Ida B. Wells-Barnett carried on a one woman crusade against lynching. Mary McLeod Bethune and Mary Church Terrell symbolize the stalwart woman leaders of the first half of the twentieth century. At the age of ninety, Mrs. Terrell successfully challenged segregation in public places in the nation’s capital through a Supreme Court decision in 1953.

  In contemporary times we have Rosa Parks setting off the mass struggle for civil rights in the South by refusing to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery in 1955; Daisy Bates guiding the Little Rock Nine through a series of school desegregation crises in 1957—59; Gloria Richardson facing down the National Guard in Cambridge, Maryland, in the early sixties; or Coretta Scott King picking up the fallen standard of her slain husband to continue the fight. Not only these and many other women whose names are well known have given this great human effort its peculiar vitality, but also women in many communities whose names will never be known have revealed the courage and strength of the black woman in America. They are the mothers who stood in school yards of the South with their children, many times alone. One cannot help asking: “Would the black struggle have come this far without the indomitable determination of its women?”

  Now that some attention is finally being given to the place of the Negro in American history, how much do we hear of the role of the Negro woman? Of the many books published on the Negro experience and the black revolution in recent times, to date not one has concerned itself with the struggles of black women and their contributions to history. Of approximate
ly 800 full-length articles published in the Journal of Negro History since its inception in 1916, only six have dealt directly with the Negro woman. Only two have considered Negro women as a group: Carter G. Woodson’s “The Negro Washerwoman: A Vanishing Figure” (14 JNH, 1930) and Jessie W. Pankhurst’s “The Role of the Black Mammy in the Plantation Household” (28 JNH, 1938).

  This historical neglect continues into the present. A significant feature of the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s was its inclusiveness born of the broad participation of men, women, and children without regard to age and sex. As indicated, school children often led by their mothers in the 1950s won worldwide acclaim for their courage in desegregating the schools. A black child can have no finer heritage to give a sense of “somebodiness” than the knowledge of having personally been part of the great sweep of history. (An older generation, for example, takes pride in the use of the term “Negro,” having been part of a seventy-five-year effort to dignify the term by capitalizing it. Now some black militants with a woeful lack of historical perspective have allied themselves symbolically with white racists by downgrading the term to lowercase again.) Yet, despite the crucial role which Negro women have played in the struggle, in the great mass of magazine and newspaper print expended on the racial crisis, the aspirations of the black community have been articulated almost exclusively by black males. There has been very little public discussion of the problems, objectives, or concerns of black women.