black history Archives

Unceasing Militant: Mary Church Terrell

October 21, 2020

By Alison Parker

Expressing an early version of the theory of intersectionality at the turn-of-the-twentieth century, Mary Church Terrell identified herself as “a colored woman in a white world” who experienced both racism and sexism. Throughout her life, Terrell also publicly advocated on behalf of black girls and women who were unfairly convicted for defending themselves against assaults by whites. Today, black women activists have similar priorities. Kimberle Crenshaw’s African American Policy Forum, for instance, coined the hashtag movement #SayHerName, urging the Black Lives Matter movement to bring specific attention to police violence against black women such as Sandra Bland, Tanisha Anderson, and Breonna Taylor. They are also drawing attention to the fact that black women are being incarcerated at increasing and disproportionate rates. Unceasing Militant, my forthcoming biography of Mary Church Terrell, shares the life and priorities of a black feminist foremother whose voice was insistent, clear, and powerful.

An exclusive excerpt from Unceasing Militant.

As she pursued voting rights, Terrell simultaneously engaged in a related effort to achieve equality by dismantling racist and sexist stereotypes about black women as sexually impure. The National Association of Colored Women had formed in 1896 in part to provide black women with a national platform from which to defend themselves against scurrilous slander by hostile whites. Such slander had become an excuse for dismissing concerns about sexual violence against black women.³⁷

Determined to protect her own and all African American daughters from these racially prejudiced and gendered stereotypes as they grew into young womanhood, Terrell wrote and spoke explicitly about sexual purity. Her public speeches offered cogent critiques of racist caricatures that demonized black girls and women as impure, a stereotype that put them at increased risk of harm. White and black audiences and the newspapers reacted strongly to Terrell’s piercing analyses of how sexism and racism affected the lives of all African American girls and women who had to live and survive in a culture that assumed their racial and sexual impurity.³⁸

When the white National Purity Association first invited Terrell to give a talk on “Purity and the Negro” in 1905, she noted in her diary that it “is not a subject one can treat easily, altho’ there is a great deal to be said.”³⁹ Her first purity talk comprehensively laid out her fundamental black feminist ideas about the intersections of gender, race, and purity—ideas that shaped and were shaped by her experience of raising two African American daughters in a hostile, racist society. Terrell used her time at the lectern to dispute whites’ assumption that African Americans were innately more immoral and impure.⁴⁰ Completely rejecting that premise, she began by criticizing whites for their racial bias: “Those who insist that colored people are brutes with respect to their sexual natures, as is often asserted by the enemies and traducers of the race, either ignore or maliciously misrepresent the facts.” Adroitly shifting the blame to white men, Terrell defended the honor of black women, reminding her audience that “during slavery it was impossible for bond-women to protect themselves from the lust of their masters, the sons of their masters or their masters’ friends.”⁴¹ Highlighting the vulnerability of black women to rape by white men, she insisted . . . that crimes against African American women must be taken as seriously as those against white women.

White male violence undermined the sanctified categories of home and womanhood: “In the South, the negro’s home is not considered sacred by the superior race. White men are neither punished for invading it, nor lynched for violating colored women and girls.” Condemning a double standard of sexual purity, she contended that until the day when rape was a crime no matter the race of the victim, black women would not be recognized as legitimate victims or full human beings. White men would continue to claim superiority while acting with impunity, whereas black men would be unfairly accused and even murdered for rapes they did not commit.⁴³

Daring to shift the terms of the debate, Terrell moved from accusing white men to publicly charging white women with responsibility for perpetuating the problem of assaults against black girls and women. White women must openly protest the rape of black women by white men, she said, for only their voices could “arouse the conscience of the public toward the open and shameless debauchery of colored women by [white women’s] husbands, fathers and sons.” Instead of forming a sisterhood based on women’s collective resistance to sexual violence, Terrell pointed out that “the white women of the South who discuss the subject in the public print . . . seem to delight in exposing the weakness of colored women. . . . In several articles . . . in one of the best magazines . . . southern white women have declared . . . that there is no such thing as a virtuous colored woman in the United States.” White female authors used their access to national media to denigrate and further endanger black women by increasing race hatred, whereas most black writers did not have access to mainstream media.⁴⁴

It was white women who had inherited immorality, Terrell countered, because of their callous indifference toward the rape of African American women: “Descended from generations of [white] mothers who were accustomed to look upon the wholesale debauchery of colored women without a protest and without the shock to their moral natures which they would be expected to receive, their daughters have inherited this indifference to the degradation of colored women by the men of the present day.” She bluntly told her white audience, “Morally speaking, slavery was a weapon which shot both ways, wounding those who fired as well as those who were hit. . . . Surely [white women] must know that so long as men may despoil the women of any race with impunity, this prevailing standard of morality must necessarily be very low.”⁴⁵ …

A comprehensive and powerful defense of African American womanhood was at the core of all of Terrell’s speeches at white purity conventions. Every time she spoke honestly to white audiences, she took a significant risk. . . . When she spoke in 1907 “On the Condition of the Colored Woman” at the National Purity Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan, the press was ready to pounce. The Battle Creek Enquirer reported, “Negro Speaker Assails White Women of South.” The Associated Press, in a widely reprinted story, denounced Terrell’s “furious invective” and charged her with claiming that no black woman was safe working as a servant in a white household. This particularly alarmed the white press and its readers, who feared losing their cheap labor supply if African American women declined to do this work. . . .

Invited to speak at the 1911 World’s Purity Congress, in Columbus, Ohio, Terrell had not forgotten the backlash but decided to take the same hard-hitting approach. Afterward, she reported to Berto: “My darling Husband: . . . You should have heard that vociferous prolonged applause when I finished my address! . . . I tell you white people like to hear the disagreeable truth, if one has tact and good taste enough to present it forcibly but politely. I am amazed myself at the quantity of hard pummeling they are willing to stand from me.” She had again “poured it on to white women good and hard and strong.”⁴⁸

Continuing her 1911 lecture tour, Terrell inspired African American audiences, too, with her blunt message about how racism had created distorted notions of purity. Her refusal to accept the fiction of black women’s innate impurity resonated with African Americans.

Photo Above: Mary Church Terrell and others protesting lunch counter segregation, 1952. Courtesy Moorland-Springarn Research Center at Howard University.

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Alison Parker — Alison M. Parker. Photo by Kay Hinton.

Alison M. Parker is Chair & Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. She has research and teaching interests in U.S. women’s and gender history, African American history, and legal history. She majored in art history and history at the University of California, Berkeley and earned a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2017-2018, Parker was an Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. Parker is author of Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (2010) and Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933 (1997). Parker also serves as co-editor of the Gender and Race in American History book series for the University of Rochester Press. As Chair of the History Department at the University of Delaware, Parker is committed to helping to build a coalition of students, faculty, and staff promoting a wide-ranging anti-racism agenda.

Notes:

37. Rudolph, “Victoria Earle Matthews,” 106; Guy-Sheftall, Daughters of Sorrow, 26–27; Salem, To Better Our World, 20–22; Hine and Thompson, Shining Thread, 180.

38. Even after her father’s death, Mollie [her nickname] remained sensitive about his background as a saloon owner and developer of Beale Street. Berto reassured Mollie: “By all means attend the Social Purity Congress. Nobody is giving your father’s life a thought. He atoned for all of his sins by accumulating and leaving a fortune. You are entirely too sensitive about his career.” Preston Lauterbach argues that Church’s houses of prostitution were protected by white police officers and Memphis officials because he supplied white prostitutes to white men in a protected vice zone. There is no evidence that Mollie knew about this aspect of his business. Lauterbach, Beale Street Dynasty, 87, 113; RHT to MCT, November 6, 1913, MCT Additions; MCT, “What the Colored Woman’s League Will Do,” 155–56; MCT, “Lynching from a Negro’s Point of View,” North American Review, June 1904, 853–68; MCT, “Purity and the Negro,” 1905, MCT Papers, reel 2 (published in the Light, June 1905, 19–25).

39. In the Light (1905), Terrell was described as “one of the principal speakers at the Conference, her message is always in behalf of the colored people. Herself a colored woman, she can plead the cause of this struggling race with deep earnestness and feeling and we prophesy that there will not be a dry eye nor a cold heart in the audience.” In advance of the 1927 International Purity Conference, it described her as “probably the most eloquent Negro Woman on the American platform. . . . She is a former member of the school board in Washington and is a high official of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races.” That year, Terrell served on a Joint Committee on Delinquency and Crime in Washington, D.C., which noted that “colored girls are arrested and placed in jail more quickly than white girls and an investigation along this line was suggested.” “Notes on Meeting, Joint Committee on Delinquency and Crime,” 1927 and undated, MCT Papers, reel 15. “National Purity Conference,” La Crosse, Wis., October 17–19, 1905; the Light gives detailed information about the speakers on the Purity Conference programs as well as National and International Purity Congresses, 1905, 1907, 1913, 1927, and undated, MCT Papers, reel 16; MCT Diary, September 17, 22, 1905, MCT Papers, reel 1.

40. For more on white purity organizations, see Foster, Moral Reconstruction, 140–43. For its investigations of prostitution, see Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, 14; Satter, Each Mind, 208–9.

41. In a 1905 Voice of the Negro article, Fannie Barrier Williams similarly pointed out that “the women of other races bask in the clear sunlight of man’s chivalry, admiration, and even worship, while the colored woman abides in the shadow of his contempt, mistrust or indifference.” Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Colored Girl,” Voice of the Negro, June 1905, 400–401, quoted in Guy-Sheftall, Daughters of Sorrow, 90, n. 167, 195; James, “Shadowboxing,” 349; MCT, “Purity and the Negro.”

43. See Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 217; Perkins and Stephens, “Introduction,” 5; Hall, Revolt against Chivalry; Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors, 49–72; Feimster, Southern Horrors, 97–92; Freedman, Redefining Rape, 73–88; Rosen, Terror, 9–11; White, Dark Continent, 33; Kuhl, “Countable Bodies,” 133–60; and Terrell, “Lynching from a Negro’s Point of View,” North American Review, June 1904, 853–65.

44. Similarly, in the YWCA, Addie Hunton “and her colleagues sought to persuade white women that they (white women) had a Christian duty to improve race relations.” Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, 26; Dunlap, “Reform of Rape Laws,” 352–72; Shaw, What a Woman, 197, 210; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, chap. 6; MCT, “Purity and the Negro.”

45. Educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown made a similar point in 1920: “We have begun to feel that you are not, after all, interested in us. . . . The Negro women of the South lay everything that happens to members of her race at the door of the Southern white woman.” Brown quoted in Laville, Organized White Women, 43; MCT, “Purity and the Negro.”

48. When she spoke to white women in Wilmington, Del., for instance, Terrell challenged them: “Did you ever feel, sisters of Wilmington, that you are to a certain extent responsible for the downfall . . . of these girls[?] . . . .Did it ever occur to you, good people, how many and how great are the temptations to which colored girls are subjected in various sections of the country? They are marked as the legitimate prey for the evil minded of all races and complexions.” MCT to RHT, October 27, 1911, MCT Papers, reel 2; MCT, “Address to Raise Funds for a Home for Delinquent Girls” (undated), MCT Papers, reel 23.

How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect

March 18, 2020

Hallie Quinn Brown and Other “Homespun Heroines”

By Martha S. Jones

Hallie Quinn Brown knew the power of black women and urged anyone who heard her to let it flourish.

Read her remarks from 1889 and you might believe she saw the future or at least had the capacity to call it into being: “I believe there are as great possibilities in women as there are in men. . . . We are marching onward grandly. . . . We love to think of the great women of our race—the mothers who have struggled through poverty to educate their children. . . . There are many wives who are now helping to educate their husbands at school, by taking in sewing and washin. . . I believe in equalizing the matter. Instead of going to school a whole year, he ought to stay at home one half, and send his wife the other six months. . . . I repeat, we want a grand and noble womanhood, scattered all over the land. There is a great vanguard of scholars and teachers of our sex who are at the head of institutions of learning all over the country. We need teachers, lecturers of force and character to help to teach this great nation of women.”

These remarks, delivered before a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, marked a debut for Brown as an advocate of women’s rights, including the right to vote. If finding the start of a suffragist’s career in a church sanctuary surprises, it is only because the route to women’s suffrage taken by black women is still too often relegated to the margins or obscured by misunderstanding. Consider how black women did not take part in the mythical 1848 women’s meeting in Seneca Falls, New York. When we look for them in that year, we find that, instead, some of them were already at work demanding women’s rights, but they were doing so in black churches rather than in women’s conventions. And what about 1920 and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? Study of that hallmark moment reveals that, while some black women in the North and West had reason to celebrate, it was but a brief pause in their ongoing struggle for voting rights. Especially for black women in southern states, the struggle for the vote extended for decades more, to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act would finally topple barriers constructed by Jim Crow.

Hallie Quinn Brown’s call for a vanguard that would empower a “great nation” of black women expressed a vision that would guide her to yet another pivotal moment in the history of black women and the vote. In 1923, in the wake of the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification, Brown took pen to paper and denounced a proposal by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to dedicate a monument to the mythical black mammy of the South—a figure in servant’s garb cradling a white infant. Her words cut: Rather than loyal supplicants, “slave women were brutalized, the victims of white man’s caprice and lust. Often the babe torn from her arms was the child of her oppressor.” As president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), Brown spoke the thoughts of many thousands, descendants of enslaved women who derided the hypocrisy of white southerners who in “one generation held the black mammy in abject slavery [and in] the next would erect a monument to her fidelity.” She doubted the “deep reverence and gratitude” professed to undergird the monument. White southern women would better “make restitution,” Brown advised, by interceding with their husbands and fathers to “with one hand upraised . . . stop mob rule and lynching.”

The “mammy” figure, rather than new, was part of a long-standing Lost Cause myth that relied on the fiction that enslaved people had been docile, content, and loyal to slaveholders. But by 1922, the notion of a “Monument to the Faithful Colored Mammies of the South” won the interest of Congress, where a bill had proposed to authorize the Washington, D.C., chapter of the UDC to install such a figure on public grounds “as a gift to the people of the United States.” Black Americans saw through to the irony of such a framing and cried foul. The monument was mere propaganda aimed to distract the nation from real, twentieth century needs: adequate homes, schools, and heath care. Brown joined others in opposition—from grassroots activists to leaders like W.E.B. DuBois—and the bill died of inaction.

*The enslaved woman Louisa with a child. Missouri Historical Society.*

The “mammy” monument controversy erupted at a historic crossroads. It was one part a story about how the UDC promoted the Lost Cause. It was also a story about the emerging power of the NAACP. Hallie Quinn Brown’s role points to yet one more story about how black women organized to win political power, including the vote, and then used it. As leader of the era’s largest organization of black women, the NACW, Brown condemned the monument for its degrading caricature of an African-American woman. Her insight derived from the spirit expressed in Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 black feminist manifesto: “Only the black woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enter[s] with me.”

I recently revisited the life of Hallie Quinn Brown after having long known her as part of a generation of black women activists who battled Jim Crow in its early decades. Students of African-American women’s history know Brown best by way of her 1926 edited collection of biographical essays, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, which remains a useful reference. But finding Brown leading a challenge to the “mammy” monument made me rethink what I knew. I am at work on a history of black women and the vote, and one thing has already become clear: I must always look for early twentieth-century black suffragists in unexpected places. The racism they encountered in better remembered suffrage organizations, such as the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) or the National Women’s Party (NWP) meant that too few women like Brown worked through those organizations. To tell their stories, I must follow their lead.

Brown and women like her came to the cause of women’s suffrage by paths that ran through African-American-led institutions: Antislavery societies, churches, and women’s clubs. Committed to winning political rights in the early twentieth century, most black women remained just where they had begun, in black-led institutions, testing ideas and building political savvy. Those that could—mostly women in northern and western states, where Jim Crow did not exclude them from politics—signed on as supporters of the Republican party. Their purpose was often distinct. Black women sought the vote to further what they termed human rights, meaning the rights of women and men alike. They were rarely single-issue in their concerns; they battled for political rights while also advocating for temperance, education, prison reform, and the rights of working people. They especially attended to troubles that arose at the crossroads of race and gender. When Brown railed against the prospect of a “mammy” monument in the nation’s capital, she did so knowing that the promotion of such a false and degrading image undercut black women’s political aspirations. She was part of a “great vanguard” prepared to fight back and further empower a “great nation of women.”

Posed photo of five Black women in formal 19th century dresses. — *Adopting the motto “Lifting all We Climb,” several black women’s clubs joined forces in 1896 to form the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. National Women’s History Museum.*

For Brown, women’s education was foundational. Though she was free born in 1849 in Pittsburgh, Brown’s parents had been enslaved. To better educate their children, the household migrated to Chatham in Canada during Brown’s teen years, where the family lived alongside fugitive slaves and dissident black emigrants who had abandoned the United States. By 1870, in the wake of the Civil War and during early Reconstruction, Brown returned to the U.S., where she enrolled at Wilberforce University in Ohio. After graduation, Brown’s career as an educator took her to public schools, north and south, and to Allen University in South Carolina and Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. Along the way, she studied elocution, and in 1893 Brown settled in as a professor at her alma mater, Wilberforce. It would be her institutional home for the next decade.

“Give her your votes,” insisted Gertrude Bustill Mossell, referring to Brown in 1892. Mossell admonished those men who saw Brown’s womanhood as a bar to her holding the office of the secretary of education in the AME Church: “Let the sex have its representation for we all know they willingly accept more than their share of the taxation.” With that—a run for office—Brown was baptized into women’s politics, part of a maelstrom in which, alongside her, other churchwomen were claiming the right to hold office by way of ordination into the ministry. The resulting debates consumed and nearly tore apart the AME Church community. Brown learned valuable lessons: In her aim to assume power she had allies, women like Mossell, and, at the same time, she could expect opposition.

Brown’s early political education was earned in battles over the public representation of black women. At stake was whether black women would exercise rights as full citizens. As with many of her generation, Brown was drawn out from familiar settings such as the classroom and church, as their benevolent work took a sharply political turn and their leadership consolidated at a national level. First, there was a controversy during the planning of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, when the sponsors failed to include African-American planners or themed exhibits. Brown managed to be appointed a clerk in the fair’s department of publicity and promotion and then used her position to expose the degree to which those in charge intended to leave black Americans invisible and unaccounted for. In the same years, Brown led the women of the Colored League of Washington, D.C., to the first meeting of what would become the National Association of Colored Women. The women had been galvanized when James Jacks, then president of the Missouri Press Association, publicly ridiculed Ida B. Wells and her antilynching campaign and then impugned all black women, branding them prostitutes, thieves, and liars. Jacks’s letter ignited a “pressing . . . need of our banding together if only for our protection.”

In the decades leading to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Brown grew to be a sophisticated activist who moved along intertwined paths, the sort of journey shared by many black suffragists. She appears to have avoided any sustained association with NAWSA or the NWP. The antiblack racism that ran through such organizations likely kept her at a distance. Brown did not, however, operate in deference to a divide between black and white women, nor did she avoid suffrage politics. Temperance brought her to London, where she spoke at the 1895 convention of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, one of only three black American women to do so. In the summer of 1900, Brown was in London to attend the International Congress of Women, where she heard women’s suffrage debated and reported favorably on an exchange in which antiwomen’s suffrage ideas were “torn to shreds.”

Black women’s clubs became the heart of Brown’s public work. There, by 1899, leaders were heralding the movement for women’s suffrage as “the pioneer force for woman’s emancipation and progress.” By 1901, NACW president Mary Church Terrell won an “ovation” for her remarks on “The Justice of Women Suffrage”: “Woman’s rights were not protected as they should be. Not until woman . . . had the ballot to be used for her protection and self-defence [sic] can she hope to secure the rights and privileges to which she is entitled.” Brown, in 1904, helped write a resolution which provided “that the women of our Association prepare themselves by the study of civic government and kindred subjects for the problems of city, State, and National life that they may be able to perform, intelligently, the duties that have come to some and will come to others in the natural progress of the Woman Suffrage movement.” In 1911 and 1912, she headed the NACW’s “Suffrage” department and, in 1920, Brown assumed the association’s presidency.

Looking ahead from 1920, Brown charged the women of the NACW with picking up where the movement for the Nineteenth Amendment had left off. The enfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of black women, the majority in the American South, was not yet complete. Brown led thousands of clubwomen with the same vision that had initially drawn her to the podium in 1889. Historian Nikki Brown explains that Brown’s aim was to harness black women’s votes and thus win them influence in the Republican party and in Washington, D.C. Brown urged black women to regard the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment as an opening for an acquisition of power: “Let us remember that we are making our own history. That we are character builders; building for all eternity. Woman’s horizon has widened. Her sphere of usefulness is greatly enlarged. Her capabilities are acknowledged. . . . Let us not ask: what shall we do with our newly acquired power? Rather, what manner of women are we going to be?” She framed women’s votes as a next chapter in the long struggle for black political rights: “We stand at the open door of a new era. For the first time in the history of this country, women have exercised the right of franchise. The right for which the pioneers of our race fought, but died without the sight.”

Brown’s opposition to the UDC’s “mammy” monument fit precisely at the confluence of a victory for women’s suffrage and the ongoing work of civil rights. And a new moment demanded a new strategy. Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, published in 1926, leveled one of Brown’s most robust and enduring shots at those who doubted black women’s suitability as voters. The book was styled as what historian Brittney Cooper has termed a “listing.” It was a disruptive volley that countered limited visions of the body politic as one consisting of white women and also of men, black and white. Brown collaborated with more than 25 other women to produce—across 250 pages and more than 60 biographical sketches, essays, and poems—an argument about the past, present, and future of black women. The book demolished myths and brought to light the lives of real women—their ideas and their activism. As Brown put it in her introduction, Homespun Heroines aimed to inspire young people to “cleave more tenaciously to the truth and to battle more heroically for the right.” On the horizon, Brown suggested, was a time when universal womanhood suffrage would be realized.

Mammy—as a subservient, content and enduringly loyal slave—was exposed as pure fiction. The biographies in Homespun Heroines introduced enslaved women who recognized their exploitation, resisted at great personal risk, and were committed to their own families rather than to those of slaveholders, even when subjected to forced, prolonged separation. Dinah Cox battled in court for over 14 years when her late owner’s family refused to free her as his will provided. Upon her manumission, Charlotta Gordon MacHenry Pyles and her family risked a treacherous journey from Kentucky, through Missouri, finally arriving in the free state of Iowa. Once settled, Pyles set out to purchase family members who remained enslaved and reunited loved ones separated by sale. Harriet Tubman freed herself, returned at great risk to liberate her family and neighbors on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and then aided Union army officials, working as a “scout,” and “outwitting the Confederates.” Lucretia Harper Simpson had been separated from her entire family while enslaved in Kentucky and, when the war came, she and three other young women took their chance and crossed the river into Ohio. These women were neither docile nor content. Nor were they loyal, at least not to those who had held them in bondage.

Citizenship was a birthright for which black women were prepared. The women of Homespun Heroines were paradigmatic voters, women of independence and integrity. For many, formal education had bestowed the insight, reason and discernment that suited them for citizenship. Others, especially those born enslaved, still managed to make manifest qualities—piousness, fidelity, benevolence, selflessness, and compassion—that evidenced their suitability as citizens and voters. Elizabeth Smith had won her education despite violent opposition to the presence of young black women at Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury, Connecticut. Caroline Sherman Andrews-Hill, though enslaved, stole learning as the household’s white children were being taught, only to be banned from working nearby during lesson time. Anne E. Baltimore, Mary Burnett Talbert, and Mary J. Patterson attended Oberlin College. So did Fannie Jackson Coppin, who took the “gentleman’s course,” despite advice that she do otherwise.

Black women had earned the vote, Homespun Heroines argued. They had as suffragists aided all American women to secure a constitutional amendment. Sojourner Truth had been a “zealous advocate for the enfranchisement of women” who “saved the day and won the victory for women,” at an 1851 suffrage convention. Harriet Tubman had taken up the cause of women’s suffrage, allied with the Empire State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs to whom she sent a last message before her death: “Tell the women to stick together. God is fighting for them and all will be well!” Journalist Mary Ann Shadd Cary toured with white antislavery lecturers who also spoke on women’s rights, including Abby Kelley, Lucretia Mott, and Lucy Stone. Cary’s commitment sustained itself through the 1880s, when she joined the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. Sarah J. S. Garnet was the woman behind Brooklyn’s Equal Suffrage Club and Superintendent of the NACW’s suffrage department. Eliza Ann Gardner helped found Boston’s Woman’s Era Club and championed women’s rights in the AME Zion Church. Amanda Berry Smith preached in pulpits across the globe and “wherever she went there always sprang up an eager discussion on the subject of women’s right to preach.” Laura A. Brown was, during the administration of President Warren Harding, appointed a member of the executive board of the Republican Women’s Committee of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, and in 1922 she ran for the state legislature, perhaps, Brown suggested, the first black woman in the United States to do so.

Hallie Quinn Brown was a suffragist. She was simultaneously an educator, church worker, temperance advocate, and club movement leader. She was a Republican party activist and she was a writer. Homespun Heroines may not have rivaled in page count the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage, begun by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage in the 1880s. But it was no less an effort to chronicle the history of women’s activism and then mobilize that history for political ends. As the celebration in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment faded, Brown and the women of the NACW were left with serious work in front of them. Jim Crow still kept too many of their sisters away from the polls, and untruths wrought of racism and sexism sustained their disenfranchisement. The way forward was fraught—with competition in black politics from an increasingly influential NAACP, and with indifference on the part of women’s suffrage organizations like the National Women’s Party. The NACW would be hampered internally by an elite politics of respectability that kept it distant from black women of the working class. Other black women activists would take an internationalist view of politics, rejecting the vote and parties as too tainted by racism to take them forward. Still, Brown’s book endured, aiding those activists who followed her, and historians like me, to better understand and build upon that “great nation of women” of which she was a part.

About

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. Her forthcoming book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, is available now for pre-order.

Originally published as “Black Suffragists: Hallie Quinn Brown and Other ‘Homespun Heroines'” in the Summer 2019 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Sources

Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction by Hallie Quinn Brown, Adeline Publishing, 1926. A Voice from the South by Anna Julia Cooper, Aldine Printing House, 1892. Women of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character by Lawson Andrew Scruggs, Donnohue & Henneberry, 1893. Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities by Monroe Majors, Donohue & Henneberry, 1893. All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 by Martha S. Jones, University of North Carolina Press, 2007. “Celebrating the Faithful Colored Mammies of the South” by Lopez D. Matthews, National Archives: Rediscovering Black History. Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, University of Michigan Press, 2008. Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America by Micki McElya, Harvard University Press, 2009. “Black Women in the ‘White City,’” by Ann Massa, Journal of American Studies. Introduction, in How Did African-American Women Define Their Citizenship at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893? by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Erin Shaughnessy, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1997. “Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women” by Stephanie J. Shaw, Journal of Women’s History 3, no. 2 (1991). Private Politics and Public Voices: Black Women’s Activism from World War I to the New Deal by Nikki Brown, Indiana University Press, 2006. “Club Women and Electoral Politics in the 1920s,” by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, in eds., Ann Gordon, et al., Black Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. “A Torch in the Valley”: The Life and Work of Miss Hallie Quinn Brown, PhD dissertation, by Daleah B. Goodwin, University of Georgia, 2014. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney Cooper, University of Illinois Press, 2017. Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom by Keisha Blain, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism, eds., Keisha Blain and Tiffany Gill, University

Definitions of Black Agency: The Legacy of Mildred Johnson Edwards

February 18, 2020

Ansley Erickson, a historian at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Karen Taylor, the founder and director of “While We Are Still Here,” a Harlem-based heritage-preservation site, received an Action Grant to host two public events as part of their process in documenting Harlem’s rich tradition of education.

Ansley is Co-Director and Karen is Director of Public History at the Harlem Education History Project, which uses archival materials and oral histories to preserve and share stories of education in Harlem. Humanities New York sat with them to learn about what inspired this initiative―and Mildred Johnson Edwards, whose vision materialized a legacy of its own in the Modern School.

HNY: Who was Mildred Johnson Edwards, and how did she respond to the conditions in which she grew up and began her work?

Ansley: Her father was J. [John] Rosamond Johnson, who was a famous composer and musician, and her uncle was James Weldon Johnson, who was a leading intellectual and African American figure. Together her uncle and father wrote and composed the Negro National Anthem, as it was called, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

Choral program for "Lift Every Voice and Sing." — *J. Rosamond Johnson, co-wrote the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” with his brother, James Weldon Johnson in Jacksonville, Florida in 1900. Courtesy of Yale University Library.*

A song about citizenship, presence and participation in a nation that was denying presence and participation, and citizenship to African American people for a very long time. That’s not a direct answer to your question but I think it’s certainly part of the story…

And she’s in Harlem at a time when, because of the structures of segregation, there was relatively more class diversity than certainly was the case by the ’60s or ’70s or ’80s, when a larger number of African American families with means might have chosen to move to more suburban areas.

Karen: Mildred Johnson Edwards was an educator. She attended the New York Society for Ethical Culture [now the Ethical Culture Fieldston School].

Ansley: At the time a famous, progressive education space that was a predominantly white institution.

Karen: For her to graduate she had to student-teach. But because of racism, she was not allowed to teach white children.

Ansley: None of the predominantly white, segregated, I would say, private schools in New York would hire her. Part of the way she solved that problem: create a school where she could be a teacher.

Karen: So she found eight little children, probably about three, four, five years old. And she founded the Modern School, at St. Philips Church. She sustained that school from approximately 1934 to the late 1990s. Before it became popular in the ‘70s, Mildred Johnson Edwards was very much into progressive education; that is, more child-centered lessons and curriculum. And the level of education was high– thus far all of the people I have met who attended that school have extraordinary intellect, and they’ve achieved extremely high professional positions.

That’s the wonderful side of it.

Ansley: In the context of New York and its racial segregation, Mildred Johnson Edwards wanted to create an institution for Black children that modeled the pedegogical beliefs that she held. And yet, her need to create that school was itself a result of segregation.

*James Weldon Johnson (left) and John Rosamond Johnson at a piano, creating music together. Courtesy of Yale University Library.*

HNY: How would you define segregation?

Ansley: That is a wonderfully complicated question.

Segregation, in this context, is the arrangement that we have in this country, in which most children today go to schools that are composed predominantly of children of one racial background or category. And that’s the result of a very long history of policy choices we’ve made, as well as lots of choices by individuals.

Karen: We live in a segregated society. We have always lived in a segregated society. And the United States is a segregationist, white supremacist society. Harlem was developed out of that reality. Mildred knew that she was functioning in a world that’s completely segregated and that opportunities for African American people were … constricted.

Ansley: But, defining segregation is hard, because it means so many different things in so many different ways. One way to define it is as a policy problem. Another way to define it is as a context in which people variously positioned live their lives, and do all kinds of things in those segregated spaces that gives them different kinds of meaning.

It’s also a construct that rests on these fundamentally problematic and socially contested ideas of racial categories. And so, in that way, it’s inherently problematic. We don’t really have the intellectual tools to pull apart what segregation is without recognizing that it itself rests on categories that are themselves not real. But they become real by virtue of policy and history… it’s a very tangled problem.

*One of two buildings comprising the Modern School in the old Sugar Hill section just uptown of Harlem. Courtesy of Ansley Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University.*

Karen: But that did not stop her from educating the children of Harlem.

And she had Camp Dunroven [she founded and ran Camp Dunroven from 1933 to 1965], which would extend the Modern School experience throughout the summer. They learned horseback riding and various kinds of things that are associated with, you know, middle class white America.

Ansley: The basic desire that Mildred Johnson Edwards was noticing—to create a quality educational space for children—is a basic desire that still remains present certainly in Harlem, and for many children.

In many ways, that’s a good microcosm to think about segregation, right? Which is a set of structures that are imposed upon people, outside of their control. But her story within that segregated context also really matters. In the ways that she adapts to it, and uses the networks that she has amongst African American communities in Harlem, and her own entrepreneurial spirit, to build this institution that operates as a school for roughly sixty-five years.

Karen: And in terms of the educational landscape in Harlem, there were many Black independent schools. When you had these Black communities, many times, the public school experiences were inferior, and so people called upon their agency and developed [private] schools of their own.

HNY: Why document and preserve the history of education in Harlem?

Karen: So that there’s a record. So that a record exists.

We have to retain memory. We cannot negate the importance of the history of Black people in Harlem, nor can we negate the history of the importance of Black people in the United States. Before discussing the Modern School with Ansley, I don’t think many in the Teachers College community were aware that there was this Black independent school in Harlem, that lasted for approximately six decades. It’s important to keep these histories, because history is important… It’s very, very important.

Ansley: I learned of Mildred Johnson Edwards through Karen. I learned of the institution that [Mildred Johnson Edwards] started through a student of mine, Deidre Bennett Flowers, who had actually been a student at the Modern School.

*Modern School invitation. Courtesy of Ansley Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University.*

It’s not surprising that I encountered the story of the Modern School through a student. I have spent a lot of time reading books that other historians write, and some archival material about the history of education in Harlem. But, there are parts of that history that are not captured in the existing scholarship.

The story of Mildred Johnson Edwards and the Modern School is not particularly visible in the scholarship. And it’s not just her school. It’s lots of educational spaces that were created often by African American women, sometimes by African American men, in Harlem for Harlem residents and children, that have not received a lot of scholarly attention.

Or, even more pointedly: Probably have not gotten a lot of scholarly attention from people in elite positions, publishing in a sort of narrow band of a predominantly white academy.

Karen: The wonderful aspect of keeping that history—of gathering that history, of codifying that history—is that it shows Black agency. It shows self determination. And the will that Black people have, who said, “I don’t care what you say about me or my people, we are going to be educated and we are going to be highlyeducated, and there’s nothing you could do about it.”

*A community member speaks at an event about the legacy of the Modern School. Courtesy of Ansley Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University.*

That agency. That drive. That intense desire to be educated. I think that’s exemplified by people like Mildred Johnson Edwards.

Ansley: The Harlem Education History Project—the broad umbrella, and then our focus on the Modern School is a subset of that—that project, is inspired by the recognition that this is important history. That this is not history that’s necessarily documented well in the archives that exist.

Karen and I share the sense that oral history can be a really robust way to make sure those historical absences or disappearances don’t happen entirely, right? To some extent things do disappear, but at least we can try to create traces of time that would let us think about them in the future. Oral history tries to prioritize the voices of the people who have these experiences themselves, and have their stories shape the documentation that’s created.

*Modern School alumna Cherilyn Wright revists historic Modern School documents with a Teacher’s College student Rachel Klepper. Courtesy of Ansley Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University.*

HNY: Can you walk us through the organization of the public recording events?

Ansley: Karen conceptualized a “multigenerational reunion.” Then, we made oral history a part of that day. We started with a panel in which several alumni and one scholar spoke in front of about one hundred alumni. While those were not formal oral histories, they were story-sharing times that set the tone for the day. [This day] became another venue where people were telling their stories, sharing about experiences at the school.

Later in the afternoon, we sat with people who volunteered to be interviewed. They talked about what their experience was at the school, how they had come to be at the school, what their recollections were from their time there, how they reflected on the school later in their life. Several people who participated had become educators, so they often were thinking about the relationship between what had happened at the school and their later choices.

And with the support of Humanities New York, we did two additional events in which we invited alumni to join us for more interviews. One woman who was both a student and then a board member at the school, joined us for two sessions. We knew more about the school having heard from the first set of people, so we were a little bit more informed about what kinds of things to be listening for and asking people to reflect on [And we had met with a group of alumni before hand, to discuss the project and confer about themes for the interviews].

HNY: Who conducts these oral history interviews, and what do you hope they gain from this multigenerational, cross-cultural exchange?

Ansley: The oral history interviews are conducted largely by students here at Teachers College, who have taken a class with me in oral history practice, and also a class focused on preparing for this particular oral history project. If I can teach a class and I can have six or seven students interested in doing interviews, then we can do a good body of interviews.

*A Teacher’s College, Columbia University student Jean Park working with Modern School alumna Jacquemar Fudge-Law at an event session. Courtesy of Teachers College, Columbia University.*

It’s also a really valuable pedagogical space because students here, who are either future historians or future educators, get the chance to sit down and listen to people who can reflect on how important schooling was to them; can describe educational experiences that were really consequential for them.

I think oral history, and especially listening to somebody’s account of their childhood in school, is a really fundamentally humane experience. I would hope that it creates, for future teachers, or anybody working in education, a sense of both aspiration—you’d like to be a part of helping someone feel as connected to and as supported by their schooling, as we were hearing from people about the Modern School.
But also some sense of humility—when you work with children you’re doing work that shapes people’s lives.

HNY: What’s next for the Harlem Education History Project?

Ansley: Since the first event in 2017, and every time we’ve done an oral history recording day, we’ve also created an informal museum, where people who came to be interviewed can listen to and see the other materials that we have gathered.

Actually, [an] important audience for these oral histories is the Modern School community itself. People really enjoy getting to hear their friends and former friends, or people from a different generation, with their own recollections.

I think Karen would say—maybe you’ll ask her—that this should be a documentary video project. And maybe it should be.

Karen: I would love to do a documentary.

Ansley: But I hope that this particular kind of story, about an autonomous educational space created and led by a Black woman for sixty years, becomes part of what scholars and public historians think of when they think about what education in Harlem looked like.

Modern School alumna Daphne Skeeter shares thoughts with Teachers College, Columbia University student Shellina Shidnia at an event session. Photo courtesy of Ansley Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University.

HNY: Why ought funders support oral history preservation projects?

Ansley: That’s a very big question. It’s a very important question.

To the point about listening to people’s stories: We are all individuals trying to make our way in the world. I fundamentally think we can do better when we have a sense of what people’s stories have been before us. And those stories can inspire us, those stories can challenge us, those stories can humble us. I think that’s a really valuable part of learning.

And if we don’t fund history, it doesn’t necessarily get preserved. It doesn’t necessarily get taught, and it doesn’t necessarily become available to people who could benefit from encountering it.

Karen: I cannot underestimate the importance of community. I think having a community—that has the same historical imperatives, the same kind of historical experiences—is important, for every person. For people to have a sense of their own powerful histories, and their contributions to the world. That’s really important.

And I’m talking about all people—not just Black people, not just white people, not just straight people, not just gay people.

Ansley: I think Humanities New York’s interest in not just having historical resources exist but putting them into conversation with audiences and communities that can care about them, is also really important. That emphasis on public programing I think is really important.

Karen: It’s an even more wonderful thing when those various communities can come together towards the liberation of humanity. People have to call upon their self-determination and their agency to make the world a better place.

*Mildred Johnson Edwards in June, 1937. Courtesy of Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Letters, Yale University Library Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.*

HNY: And one last question before we go. How does legacy define this project?

Ansley: When alumni remember the presence of their principal, who is also sometimes their teacher, and they remember viscerally how they felt as children… clearly Mildred Johnson Edwards is present in their lives.

There are a lot of people who went there who really appreciate the experience they had, and that matters a tremendous amount. In a couple instances in interviews, people have commented on the kinds of decisions they’re making for their own children. It seems quite clear that their decisions are shaped in some way by the experience they had as children.

That’s a legacy. That’s Mildred Johnson Edwards, having created something that is shaping the education of people a hundred years beyond her passing.

And my hope is that other people down the road will be able to connect to her story, and so that the legacy—that her legacy, is not just about the particular students [she had] worked with. It’s about the ways in which her story can cause people in education, people working in African American communities, African American community members themselves, to reflect on what this history is and what it means for the future.

You can learn more about the Harlem Education History Project on the web and on Twitter, @EduHarlem.

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Interviewed by Kordell K. Hammond, HNY Graduate Intern

Ansley T. Erickson, Associate Professor of History and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. Co-Director, Center on History and Education. Affiliated Faculty, Institute for Urban and Minority Education. Affiliated Faculty, Columbia University History Department

Ansley T. Erickson is a U.S. historian who focuses on educational inequality, segregation, and the interactions between schooling, urban and metropolitan space, racism, and capitalism. Her first book, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016 and won the History of Education Society’s Outstanding Book Award in 2017. Her work has also been awarded the History of Education Society Prize (2016), the Bancroft Dissertation Prize (2010), and the Claude A. Eggertsen Dissertation Prize (2011).

Erickson co-directs the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP) with Ernest Morrell, Coyle Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Notre Dame. HEHP supports a digital history project and collaborations with local schools. The project has produced an edited volume, Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, that was published by Columbia University Press in November 2019 and available online as a free enhanced digital edition at harlemeducationhistory.library.columbia.edu.

Karen D. Taylor is the founder and executive director of While We Are Still Here, a heritage-preservation organization founded to ensure that the “‘post-gentrification’ community of Harlem and beyond will honor and find a meaningful connection to the legacy of African-American achievement, and its paramount importance to world culture.” Ms. Taylor produced and directed a feature-length documentary film, In the Face of What We Remember: Oral histories of 409 and 555 Edgecombe Avenue, which was a Reel Sisters Film Festival selection, as well as a selection of the Inwood Film Festival.

Additionally, she consults as the director of public history for Teachers College-Columbia University’s Harlem Education History Project. Ms. Taylor is currently completing a memoir, Calypso Blues: A Black Woman’s Song In White America, which recounts her experiences as a woman of African-American and Barbadian heritage.

She is also a multi-genre artist, who has appeared as a vocalist and poet at the Schomburg’s Women In Jazz series; and at Transart’s Jazz In the Valley, she premiered a spoken-word/music tribute to Jayne Cortez, “A Jazz Fan Looks Back.” Her essay, “Still Occupied: My Report on the Safety of My Sons,” published in Transition Magazine was cited in the Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction Category, in 2016 Best American Essays, edited by Jonathan Franzen. She has also had articles published at espnW.com, the Amsterdam News, Downbeat, and Essence.

Ms. Taylor received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction.

Portable History: Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow

October 29, 2018

Museums continually test new ways to produce exhibits that are accessible to people beyond the doors of the institution. Sometimes exhibitions are extended through websites or phone apps, but digital approaches have their limits as well. With this new exhibit, the New-York Historical Society goes a step further, by producing a panel exhibition that presenters with even the smallest venues can download and publish.

Touching on current events, the exhibition “Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow” explores the struggle for full citizenship and racial equality that unfolded in the 50 years after the Civil War. Humanities New York is excited to offer $500 Quick Grants to organizations wishing to print and exhibit the panel exhibition starting in December, 2018.

In October, 2018, Humanities New York spoke with Marci Reaven, Vice President of History Exhibitions at N-YHS, and Lily Wong, Assistant Curator, about the development, design, and impact of the exhibit.

Image: Winslow Homer, A Visit from the Old Mistress, 1876, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.28

HNY: What led to the creation of the exhibit?

Marci: The 150th Anniversary of the 14th Amendment got us thinking about what we could do to celebrate it at the New-York Historical Society. There were other reasons–Professor Henry Louis Gates is a Trustee of N-YHS, and we knew he would be releasing a PBS series on Reconstruction in the Spring of 2019. We thought that we could build around the momentum of that series and the anniversary. In addition, we have traditionally engaged in exhibits related to race relations in the US, in the 2000’s we held two exhibits about slavery in the North, and there have been other exhibits at the Museum like “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” that have addressed important histories that still impact our lives today.

HNY: How did you plan the exhibition?

Unidentified artist, Dred Scott, after 1857. New-York Historical Society

Marci: We learned from many different sources. We were fortunate to get an implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work with a group of eight advisors. In addition, we learned from people who ended up being participants in the story. We talked to people from St. Philip’s Church in Harlem and we went to visit the curators at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture because they have been doing such important collecting over the past years–so they were a great source of assistance and collaboration. We spoke with curators at the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site, and the Chicago History Museum. Some were curators, some were proprietors of historic sites, some were leaders of historic institutions that were involved in the stories and descendants of some of the historic actors featured in the exhibit. We also have a research team in-house, Dominique Jean-Louis [a former Public Humanities Fellow of HNY] and Amanda Bellows, who were instrumental in mining the literature.

HNY: With such a large amount of information to choose from, how did you select what would be in the exhibition?

Marci: The process of coming up with the final scenes and the final text is a really interesting and complicated one. It’s a matter of matching the story and what one decides are the key points to what the available objects are, and what display elements work with the available space. And we need to consider what visitors are likely to know. How much background do we need to give at any one point. One is always going back and forth between these points to make sure that we are addressing all those things. It’s a creative process which makes it really fun. We have an ongoing meeting between Curatorial and Design that includes other members of N-YHS who are responsible for programming involving the exhibition such as the Education department and staff from the Family Programs division. We’re always trying to keep in mind the space, the audience, the story, and the elements that we have to tell that story.

Lily: There’s a section that focuses on Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War, and we wanted to really center the African American experience: What did it mean to be free? What did it mean to be citizens? How are African Americans active participants during this era? There were so many wonderful stories that we couldn’t fit them all. We wanted to do as many as possible so we organized them under “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” and “Democracy and Equality” as the founding ideals of the country that were newly available to African Americans during this period, so things like “Life” included basic freedoms like reuniting with family or getting married legally. “Democracy” included the new right to vote and black office holders. The structure allowed us to tell a wide range of stories.

Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Co., Shampoo tin, ca. 1910–1920. New-York Historical Society, Gift of Lisa Kugelman in memory of Thomas P. Kugelman

Marci: We worked those themes into the design and made them the central organizing feature of a large display. The structure provided a context that reinforced the importance of all the things that freedpeople were doing during Reconstruction. We used the same thematic framework later in the exhibit during the rise of Jim Crow, but there the design helped to communicate that these new rights were being denied and taken away.

HNY: Were there any challenges in the exhibition design?

Marci: We wanted to talk about African American Harlem, even before the Harlem Renaissance, but there was very little three-dimensional material available with which to tell the story in a museum setting. We worked with the designers to create actual models of some of the important institutions in Harlem in the 1910’s, like St. Philip’s Church or the White Rose Mission.

HNY: What’s been the most exciting part of the exhibition for guests?

Marci: The “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” display has been the part of the exhibit that gets the most attention. People really appreciate the range of ways that African Americans breathed real meaning into their new-found freedom. I think what’s appealing is that it’s a combination of detailed human interest stories combined with surprise that so much was being accomplished so quickly, at such risk and with such resourcefulness.

Lily: We try to put in a range of types of objects, types of stories, and types of displays so that everyone who walks through will come out having had a meaningful interaction with some piece of the history.

HNY: How do you evaluate engagement with the exhibits?

Marci: We treat each exhibit differently. For some exhibits we observe visitors, for others we do robust feedback with visitors. For the Vietnam War exhibit we created a sizable space for visitors to sit down and enter their thoughts into visitor comment books and then we suggested five questions that people might address in their comments. The number of responses we got was truly remarkable! Not just in quantity, but in quality. What people shared with us about their own personal and family experiences or about their political beliefs or their concerns for the future or for their children who are serving overseas right now. It was so special that we had twelve large journals transcribed that are all available for researchers to use in our library and we put a large number of them online.

HNY: We’re excited to partner with N-YHS on the panel exhibition that will be available soon! How did you decide what would be included from the larger exhibition?

Lily: We had to really think about our key points—what were the most important things for people to understand while also keeping in the stories that make the exhibit engaging. It’s always a bit of a balancing act, and it’s different in a panel show. The objects aren’t there, so the 2-d visual elements have to tell the story. You really have to think about the visuals in a different way. We rely on documents, paintings, and photographs to bring people through the larger story we are trying to tell.

Marci: Writing for exhibits is never an easy process. A lot of thought has to be put into making complicated stories about the past very succinct and clear for people who don’t have the luxury of sitting down and looking at each exhibit panel. So we go through many many drafts and get as many eyes on it as possible to make it as clear and succinct as possible.

Lily: We wanted to preserve the centering of the African American experience, even in such a condensed form as panels, in order to still give voice to that experience.

HNY: Where will the panels go?

Marci: Because we’ll be able to distribute the panels in digital format at no charge, they will be available to anyone with the ability to print, mount, and display a thirty-by-forty-inch panel. We’d like to see the panel exhibition spurring conversations across the country. We also plan on travelling the full exhibition. One of the things I was struck by was how excited museums and historical sites were to learn about this show. There’s always good collaboration between museums, but this time there was an extra spark of excitement that we felt when we called other institutions. As we are arranging a travel itinerary for the full exhibition, we’re finding almost all of our lenders are willing to extend their loans so the object we borrowed can continue to travel with the exhibit. The period of Reconstruction and Jim Crow are undertold parts of U.S. history and it was time to tell them, and it was time to tell them now.

HNY: Do you think this will inform future exhibitions at N-YHS?

Marci: I think what this means for future steps remains to be seen. What I enjoy about the N-YHS approach is the interest in working creatively to expand the reach of important historical stories. We’ve done other panel shows, and we’ve done other travelling shows, but this would be the first time that we are creating one that is being distributed digitally and free of charge, so this is an experiment for us. The idea for distributing a digital exhibition at no charge came in good part due to the panel exhibition New York State Museum and Humanities New York did together for the NYS Women’s Suffrage Commemoration in 2017. We think it will be very successful, and likely to inform future activities.

HNY: Fantastic, Marci and Lily! Thanks for speaking with us today.

Interview by Nicholas MacDonald, Communications Manager

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Marci Reaven is Vice President of History Exhibitions at New-York Historical Society. Her exhibits include “Nueva York” (2010), “WWII & NYC” (2012), “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” (2014), “The Vietnam War” (2017), and “Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow” (2018). “Hudson Rising,” on the environmental history of the Hudson River, will open in March 2019. Previously, she served as Managing Director of City Lore, and as Senior Associate at American History Workshop. She holds a Ph.D. in US history from NYU.

Lily Wong is an assistant curator at the New-York Historical Society. She has worked on several history exhibitions including “The Vietnam War: 1945-1975” and “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion.” She holds a B.A. in History & Asian Studies from Williams College.