BLACK WOMEN IN  HISTORY

By Joe C. Hopkins

Black History Month is over and it is followed by Women’s History Month . There’s a certain overlap, since there would be no Black history without the heroics and survival skills of Black women. From the liberation skills of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and a million mothers and leaders who fought, sacrificed and suffered to save her people, from the ills of slavery, to the ills of today’s evil traps for our youth.

Those heroines were followed by the likes of the great educator Mary McLeod Bethune and Marva Collins the great educator from Chicago to Rosa Parks the mother of the Civil Rights movement.

In order to truly understand the suffering that Black Women have endured there are a few stories that are missing pages of Black history. I will mention a few here that can be found in James Allen’s book, "Without Sanctuary" (2000).

In the early 1900’s Mary Turner was upset about the lynching of her husband. Mary was eight months pregnant and made a comment that she would get even with those who hung her husband and would sign arrest warrants against the killers. The white residents of Valdosta, Georgia decided to teach her a lesson for being uppity enough to be vocal about her pain. A mob found her tied her upside down to a tree, doused her with gasoline and burned her alive. One of the crowd members took a knife and split her belly open letting the baby fall out. Another member of the crowd smashed the baby’s head with his foot. Then the crowd took out their guns and filled the burning body of Mary Turner with bullets. The Associated Press wrote that Mary Turner had made unwise remarks about the execution of her husband.

In Colombus, Mississippi a mob looking for the son of Cordelia Stevenson for allegedly burning a white man’s barn couldn’t find the boy so they satisfied their evil thirst by stripping and hanging Cordelia naked for public viewing. The (all-white) jury verdict was not guilty of murder.

In Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1911, Laura Nelson was accused of killing the local sheriff. A mob entered the jail where she was being held to go to court for the allegations. They took her from her cell , raped her, then took her teenage son and hung her and her son from a bridge. They then used the bodies for target practice. It was later determined that neither Nelson nor her son had anything to do with the death of the sheriff.

Between 1882 and 1968, 4,742 Blacks were lynched by mobs, mostly for being "uppity."

When we read these stories it should be easy to understand why those of us who understand our history get angry at young Black Rappers making money demeaning our women. It should also be easy to understand why we believe that it is not time to end Affirmative Action or abandon the fight for Reparations until some justice has been given for the pain our women have suffered for one sin: being born Black. I wonder if those white elitist and uninformed women ever even heard of such a history , or is it all about them?

With the Rappers demeaning us in their music and while the Conservatives elitists work the legal angle, creating laws and propositions against us, and ignoring the compelling Governmental interest of making up for the ills and discrimination of the past, I feel that we are once again faced with the problem cited by WEB Dubois and Lyndon Johnson who wondered how in the world are we to race against the world with shackles still attached.

Today our women operate at the every level of American life from attorneys, accountants and Bishops, to educators and business women.

Let us never forget the sacrifices of the Laura Nelsons, Mary Turner’s and Cordelia Stevenson’s who died trying to protect their men and their children, and let us not forget those women today still fighting and struggling to salvage and snatch our children from the fire.