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THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2023

DAY 5 — The Fisk Jubilee Singers

Today’s hot goss is all about Beyoncé’s history-making 32nd GRAMMY win, 88th nomination, and how they still won’t give her Album of the Year.

With only two GRAMMY wins, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers are on the complete opposite end of that spectrum. Still, they can relate.

After all, who cares what the Recording Academy’s awarding when you’ve got over 150 years of musical history as a force against racism, multiple world tours and concerts to monarchs, presidents, and other global leaders, and ALL the credit for bringing slave spirituals to mainstream music?

In 1866, Nashville’s Fisk University became America’s first institution of higher learning “to offer a liberal arts education to ‘young men and women irrespective of color.’”

“Originally known as the Fisk Free Colored School, Fisk University was established in 1866 in Nashville (Tenn.) at the site of former Union Army hospital barracks. The school was named after General Clinton Bowen Fisk who arrived with Union occupying forces in Nashville in 1862. Enrollment topped 900 students in the first year and, in 1867, the school was incorporated as Fisk University.” Courtesy of the Tennessee Virtual Archive.

Five years later, the school was nearly bankrupt.

Brief as it had been, Fisk had a legacy to maintain, and they weren’t letting it die without a fight. One man at Fisk held the title of both treasurer and music professor, and he devised a clever plan. A choral ensemble could hold concerts benefitting the university. Besides, there truly was nothing left to lose.

Nine men and women shaped the unnamed ensemble, who’d begin their tour in the small towns near Nashville. Soon, their director had another clever idea: a national tour along the route of the Underground Railroad. Most of Fisk’s student body was comprised of Black students who’d been recently freed from enslavement with the 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, so a public tour in the locations their ancestors and even parents had secretly sought freedom was a poignant—and marketable—move.

An original program commemorating the Jubilee Singers, courtesy of the African American Registry.
A minstrel show poster depicts a white man’s transformation into Blackface Minstrel. Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History & Culture.

It was also entirely unheard of. Before this, Black people didn’t perform in public spaces—but white people in minstrel makeup did. Many reviews of the time even noted this phenomenon, with one writing “Those who have only heard the burnt cork caricatures of negro minstrelsy have not the slightest conception of what it really is.” So when the Fisk Singers began touring in earnest in October 1871, many people attended their shows out of the sheer novelty. Nearly all left as fans.

Ella Sheppard, one of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ original sopranos, went on to form a career of her own in music. Read more at PBS.

Even the singers themselves had to be won over initially. Just because these songs had come from within their culture didn’t mean that every Black person in America knew them. Spirituals were sung in the fields, secretly formed churches, and as code songs, so those who’d been freed from slavery before the Proclamation, or lived in affluent, free-standing communities like Seneca Village had no reason to know them. And when they did, they were reluctant to share them with a racist society.

Ella Sheppard, one of the original members wrote, “Sitting upon the floor (there were but few chairs) [we sang] softly, learning from each other the songs of our fathers. We did not dream of ever using them in public… they were sacred to our parents, who used them in their religious worship and shouted over them… It was only after many months that gradually our hearts were opened… and we began to appreciate the wonderful beauty and power of our songs.”

During one of their first stops, they were forced to use that power against an angry white mob that cornered them at a train station. The Fisk Singers’ worshipful songs, angelic voices, and non-violent response shamed the mob into dispersing. “One by one, the riotous crowd left off their jeering and swearing and slunk back until only the leader stood near Mr. White and finally took off his hat,” Ms. Sheppard wrote. “The leader begged us, with tears falling, to sing the hymn again.”

But those beautiful voices couldn’t save them from racism every time. When they donated the proceeds of one of their first concerts in Cincinnati to victims of the Great Fire of Chicago, they were thanked on their next stop in Columbus with terrible hotel accommodations, name-calling from the newspapers, and all manners of abuse from the locals. It was only their first month on tour, and many of the singers—and their parents who didn’t want to allow their children on the tour for this very reason—were so disheartened, they were ready to throw in the towel.

After a night of prayer, the singers regrouped and to build their spirits, were finally given a name that referenced both their heritage and their musical repertoire: The Jubilee Singers. It’s written in the book of Leviticus that every fifty-first year would be a “year of jubilee” in which all slaves would be set free, and the Fisk singers almost exclusively sang spirituals. It fit, spirits were lifted, and the show went on.

18 months later, the Jubilee Singers sent $40,000 back to Fisk, more than they could ever have earned through organized fundraising efforts alone.

Their fame had also grown too big to turn back. By 1872, invitations to the Fisk Jubilee Singers were pouring in. The World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival in Boston, President Ulysses S. Grant’s White House, and Steinway Hall in Manhattan were among a few of the venues they performed.

One of many posters preserved from the Jubilee Singers’ early shows, courtesy of the Tennessee State Museum.

But in 1873 came their crown jewel: a surprise performance and audience with Queen Victoria of England. The Queen requested a handful of songs by name: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Did the Lord Deliver Daniel,” and “Go Down Moses.” She made her share of unsavory requests too. “Tell the dark-skinned one to step forward,” Ella Sheppard wrote in her diary, quoting the Queen’s request to have a better look at Jennie Jackson, another of the singers. Still, their appearance, performance and the combination of both left such an impression on the Queen that she commissioned a portrait of the Jubilee Singers that still hangs today in the university’s Jubilee Hall, built with $150,000 the singers earned from their European tour.

The Jubilee Singers’ portrait by the official painter of the Court of St. James after a performance for Queen Victoria in 1873. Ella Sheppard is depicted seated at the piano with Jennie Jackson to the right.

Their reception in Europe mirrored the attitudes in the States. Some places were progressive enough to recognize the Jubilee Singers’ humanity, others were brutally racist.

These conflicts and controversy around them left their toll on the singers. But they also began reshaping attitudes around racism and segregation. George Pullman personally integrated his entire fleet of trains after learning the Jubilee Singers had been automatically denied accommodations because of their race. When Jersey City voted to integrate schools after the Jubilee Singers had been turned away from a local hotel, the New Jersey Journal wrote, “By their sweet songs and simple ways, the Jubilee Singers are moulding and manufacturing public sentiment.”

Those sweet songs also molded American music as we know it today. “If they had not begun to sing the songs of their ancestors in concert halls, this oral tradition, which existed only in the memories of former slaves, would most likely have been lost to history forever.” The New York Times writes. “And if it had disappeared, it would have taken with it the DNA of much of the American music that followed: blues, gospel, jazz, country, rock, and more.”

And not just American music. Before the Jubilee Singers toured Europe again in 2015, Richard Hawley, a Head of Artistic Programming in Birmingham, England said, “They are without doubt responsible for introducing the Black Oral Tradition to the U.K., and are therefore responsible, certainly in part, for the enormous diversity of music we now have in this country.”

Though they briefly disbanded for a year, the Fisk Jubilee Singers still exist and you can witness an enduring American legacy, live and in person. Until then, stream their catalog—past and present—on Spotify or Apple Music, and listen to how through song and struggle, they saved their school, transformed attitudes across two continents, and left a lasting mark on music as the Gospel Group of the Ages.

Listen to the historic sounds of the Fisk Jubilee Singers on Spotify or Apple Music.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Visit the digital home of today’s Jubilee Singers for more on their past, present and future.

Learn more about The Fisk Jubilee Singers and some of its original members at the Smithsonian Archives Blog.

Discover the depths of the Jubilee Singers’ “Sacrifice and Glory” at PBS.

“In Walk Together Children: The 150th Anniversary of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Dr. Paul T. Kwami and the current singers explore the stories of the world-renowned ensemble’s original nine members and reflect on their roles as students and preservers of the group’s legacy.”

Watch the trailer & full-length special now on PBS.

There’s even more about how the Fisk Jubilee Singers changed American music at the New York Times.

“Jubilee: An Inspirational A Capella Tribute” ran in 2019. Revisit scenes from the show & reenactments from Ella Sheppard’s diary here.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2023

DAY 4 — Dr. Mandë Holford

Behind Dr. Mandë Holford’s glowing smile and multiple STEM degrees lies a deep secret.

Efficient killers are her life’s work.

And those killers have the potential to change yours.

Well, they aren’t ALL killers…

The smallest cone snails carry a venom that’s no worse than a bee sting. But the largest of them—still only around 9 inches—pack enough power to kill humans in minutes.

Instead, Dr. Mandë is harnessing that power to kill pain and even cancer.

Like so many creatures of the deep, cone snails are beautiful but deadly. Every single one of the 3,200+ known species is carnivorous and venomous. Their decorative shells blend into the ocean floor, while a proboscis much like an elephant’s, but smaller, searches the water for prey. Once they’ve found a meal, cone snails deploy a small barb that envenomates with precision, incapacitating victims almost immediately.

Watch a cone snail strike moment-by-moment and learn how all of its different parts work to reel in an assortment of prey.

Cone snail venom works so efficiently because each species’ venom has thousands of individual components that each target different life functions. One may paralyze, while another targets respiration, and another blinds, rendering prey completely helpless. The only time a cone snail misses a meal is if it misses altogether.

So what does ANY of that have to do with medicine?

Imagine morphine—and every pain-killing opioid—becoming obsolete. Because cone snail toxins can directly target the nervous system, they can inhibit pain receptors with a medicine created by Mother Nature, instead of pharmaceutical companies.

Imagine stopping cancer’s growth in its tracks with simple, naturally derived injections instead of poisonous radiation treatments.

And imagine all of that from the hands of a little girl who loved the museum. At New York’s American Museum of Natural History, whole worlds unfolded before young Mandë Holford.

The Blue Whale display at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Ocean Life.

But growing up always forces us to choose one.

Still, a BS in mathematics and chemistry and PhD. in Synthetic Protein Chemistry didn’t satisfy Dr. Mandë’s curiosity. But one day, the opportunity to study with a scientist who combined physics, chemistry and biology in his work came along, and reintroduced Dr. Mandë to science through the lens of a kaleidoscope instead of a microscope.

“This is what I would like to do,” she thought. “I’d like to bridge the medical training that I received at Rockefeller with the natural history and the wonder and excitement of studying what’s here in biodiversity. And figure out how to make science—how to do the kind of work that is both beneficial to society, but also exploring the wonder that’s here on our planet.”

And today, that is precisely what she does. Dr. Mandë’s work with cone snails and other venomous mollusks could revolutionize medicine.

See just how approachable & delightful Dr. Mande makes science in her TED Talk.

And that’s not just theoretically speaking. Prialt is an FDA-approved drug 1,000 times as potent as morphine with NONE of its chemical dependency. It’s also a direct derivative of cone snail venom. Dr. Mandë didn’t invent it, but she is working to perfect it. Right now, Prialt can only be administered through painful spinal taps. Dr. Mandë hopes to make it as simple as a booster shot.

But Prialt only utilizes one cone snail venom component, and there are thousands, if not millions, more to unlock for use in medicine. Each venom’s individual components—peptides—are tested to explore their effect on a variety of human cells. One such test revealed a peptide that specifically targeted liver cancer cells and inhibited their growth, a groundbreaking find. “What’s amazing about the peptides that we’re finding in the snail venom is not only are they giving us new drugs, but they’re also giving us new pathways for treating old problems,” says Holford.

All of these experiments and discoveries occur in their own little world bearing Dr. Mandë’s name: the Holford Lab at Hunter College at CUNY. But even outside of her lab, people take notice of Dr. Mandë. On a snail collecting trip to Papua New Guinea, she realized that all of the locals stared at her, a feeling familiar to many Black woman traveling abroad. “And you know, in your subconscious, you’re like, ‘What is it? Is it my hair? Do I have something in my teeth? What’s going on?’” But this time was different. This time, the locals stared because the chief scientist of a research team looked like them.

Discover more about what mollusks have to offer medicine at the Holford Lab.

“And it was something I wasn’t prepared for, because I didn’t view myself as a role model,” Holford says. “And I wasn’t trying to be anybody’s role model. You’re just trying to do your thing… but it was also empowering.”

With all that empowerment, Dr. Mandë hopes to bring other people who look like her into the fold. “I like to say that science is one of the cheapest careers. It’s like soccer—all you need is a ball,” she jokes. “In science, all you need is a brain, and all of us are born that way.”

And if you still aren’t convinced, consider the cone snail. It may be small. It may blend into its surroundings. But even without a backbone, this little creature wields the power of life and death… a power that only a few humans like Dr. Mandë Holford ever have the privilege to behold.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Explore the American Museum of Natural History interactively with Dr. Mandë as she works there today, thanks to the magic of Google Arts & Culture.

Learn more about Dr. Mandë’s background and research at Science Friday.

See the snails in action, while Dr. Mandë explains how their venom targets pain receptors and cancer cells on “Breakthrough: The Killer Snail Chemist,” a collaboration between national radio program Science Friday and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Hear a panel of comedians try to get to the bottom of Dr. Mandë’s killer work on live show, podcast, and public radio program “You’re the Expert.”

If you like card games, you’ll love one based on Dr. Mandë’s research! “Killer Snails: Assassins of the Sea,” is supported by the National Science Foundation and 2016 Bit Award Winner for Best Tabletop Game.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2023

DAY 3 — Dr. Mamie Phipps-Clark

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With all the obvious arguments against discrimination and segregation, the smoking gun presented to the high court was little two baby dolls wielded by a Black woman.

Dr. Mamie Phipps-Clark photographed at Columbia University.

Dr. Mamie Phipps-Clark would have been a force against racism even without her groundbreaking research. Born in Hot Springs, AR in 1917, Dr. Mamie was one of the rare Black students with the privilege, persistence, and promise to graduate the city’s first high school for Black students with flying colors.

Attending Howard University at the peak of the Great Depression, she graduated with a Master’s in Psychology, a field where women, and especially Black women, were almost unheard of.

Certainly, this was more than anyone could have hoped from a small town girl in a segregated world. But Dr. Mamie’s barrier breaking was only just beginning.

In 1943, she became the first Black woman to graduate Columbia University with a Doctorate in Psychology. And she did so with a thesis that ultimately changed the shape of the nation.

Read the full study as published in the Journal of Social Psychology here.

Dr. Mamie originally presented “The Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Racial Identification in Negro Preschool Children” as her Master’s thesis at Howard. The topic occurred to her when she simply couldn’t remember a time that she didn’t know that she was Black.

“I became acutely aware of that in childhood, because you had to have a certain kind of protective armor about you, all the time … You learned the things not to do…so as to protect yourself,” she said, describing a phenomenon known to millions of Black children before and since. Dr. Mamie’s initial study included 150 Black children from a DC nursery school, and the results were summed up by her husband and fellow psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark as “disturbing.” They wanted to dive deeper.

At Columbia, Dr. Mamie leveraged the university’s Ivy League status to further fund, explore and legitimize her work. The 1920s and 30s were widely known as “the era of scientific racism,” the belief that there is empirical and/or biological evidence to support white supremacy. By the late 1930s, Black and progressive white psychologists were working to debunk these theories, but a Black woman fearlessly asserting that “Black people were not limited by innate biological difference but by social and economic barriers to success” was entirely revolutionary.

And so was the evidence to prove it.

The “Doll Test,” as it’s come to be known, had a simple premise. 253 school-aged Black children—134 who attended segregated schools in Arkansas and 119 from integrated schools in Massachusetts—would be presented with four dolls—two Black, two white. But even that simplicity came with challenges: Black dolls weren’t manufactured in 1947, so Dr. Mamie had to paint white dolls Black instead.

Two of the dolls used in Mamie Clark’s studies, courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

With her dolls at the ready, the experiment was on:
“Give me the doll that you would like to play with or like best.”
“Give me the doll that is the nice doll.”
“Give me the doll that looks bad.”
“Give me the doll that is a nice color.”
“Give me the doll that looks like a White child.”
“Give me the doll that looks like a colored child.”
“Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child.”
“Give me the doll that looks like you.”

The majority associated positive traits to the white doll and negative traits to the Black doll. But these Black childrens’ responses to the last question shook the Clarks so deeply, they didn’t even want to publish the results. When asked to identify the doll that looked most like them, some of the children burst into tears.

Results showed that by age three, Black children were aware of their race and attached negative traits to their own identity, which were then perpetuated by a racist and segregated society. Dr. Kenneth’s summary of the Doll Test was especially clear and truly devastating: “These children saw themselves as inferior and they accepted the inferiority as part of reality.”

Dr. Mamie Phipps-Clark and the children she worked to give self-worth, shot for Vogue Magazine, 1968.

When a young upstart lawyer named Thurgood Marshall discovered the Clarks’ Doll Test, he presented its damning evidence to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. And in a historically unanimous decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren agreed with Dr. Kenneth that “To separate [Black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

With the 1954 decision, segregation was ruled unconstitutional in the United States. And that’s not all. The Doll Test was the first time social science research was submitted as hard evidence in Supreme Court history.

Nettie Hunt and her daughter Nickie sit on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. Nettie explains to her daughter the meaning of the high court’s ruling in the Brown Vs. Board of Education case that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

In 2010, nearly 60 years after Brown v. Board, child psychologist and University of Chicago professor Margaret Beale Spencer revised the Doll Test for a pilot study testing both white and Black children. The results were not as progressive as one might hope.

Though all the children demonstrated a positive bias towards whiteness, white children much more frequently identified their own skin with positive attributes and darker skin with negative attributes. For instance, when asked to point to the dumb child, about 76% of the white children pointed to illustrations of the two darkest children. 66% identified the two darkest as “the mean child.” Dr. Spencer’s conclusion differed little from Dr. Kenneth’s all those decades before: “we are still living in a society where dark things are devalued and white things are valued.”

Devastated by the results of the Doll Test and the constant feeling of being an ”unwanted anomaly” in her field, Dr. Mamie Phipps-Clark left experimental psychology. Instead she focused her efforts on undoing the emotional, mental and educational damage inflicted upon Black children by a society that viewed them so negatively.

Read Dr. Mamie’s obituary detailing her many accomplishments at the New York Times.

As a psychologist at the Riverdale Home for Children, she counseled unhomed Black girls until 1946, when she and her husband opened the Northside Center for Child Development to provide psychological services to minority children in Harlem and study racial biases in education. 16 years later, the Clarks opened Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited to provide resources for Harlem schools and reduce unemployment among Black high school dropouts.

Though she died in 1983 without seeing her work complete, Dr. Mamie set about treating a wound the United States didn’t even know it had, setting us on a course to finally heal the toxic infection of racism.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Smithsonian Magazine details Dr. Mamie’s life, the Doll Test and the impact both had on the world.

Go in-depth into the “Case that Changed America” at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

See CNN’s coverage of the 2010 version of the Doll Test, and some responses from the parents of participating children.

If you think these results are unique to the United States, have a look at an amateur recreation of the Doll Test in Italy.
THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2023

DAY 2 — Mary Jones

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(Ed. Note: this Blackstory includes sex work. Discretion advised.)

Over a hundred years before Cardi B ever dreamed of hustling her clients, Mary Jones perfected the art. Like Cardi, Mary was a New York City sex worker and absolutely unashamed.

Unlike Cardi, Mary Jones was born anatomically male.

And the dignity with which Mary carried herself contrast against the notoriety of her crimes made Mary Jones one of the earliest documented transgender people in New York history.

Court records from 1848 misspell Peter’s given name as “Savori,” but include his known alias Julia Johnson and derogatory nickname “Beefsteak Pete.”

Born in 1803 as Peter Sewally, Mary Jones used a whole host of aliases in her exploits: Julia Johnson, Miss Ophelia, and Eliza Smith among a few. But according to The Sun, and many subsequent newspaper reports, the hustle was always consistent.

“During the day, he generally promenades the street, dressed in a dashing suit of male apparel, and at night prowls about the five points and other similar [poor, disreputable] parts of the city, in the disguise of a female, for the purpose of enticing men into the dens of prostitution, where he picks their pockets if practicable, an art in which he is a great adept.”

The papers didn’t expect their readers to ask the obvious question: who needs to dress as a woman JUST to pick pockets?

The papers most certainly didn’t expect that the first time Mary had to answer for her crimes, she’d appear before the court in full female attire so impeccable, officials would ask her to confirm her legal name and born sex, even though she wore the exact same dress she’d been arrested in the first place.

Lithograph depicting Mary Jones/Peter Sewally as “The Man-Monster”. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Though the Sun was very tight with details, the New York Herald gladly served the tea: “Sewally has for a long time past been doing a fair business [in] practical amalgamation.” To put it plainly in modern-day language: having interracial sex for money. And it was highly uncommon. Even sex work was segregated, so from opening statements to the reading of the verdict, Mary Jones’ trial was so scandalous that nearly every detail is still recorded in the New York City archives.

As a man, Peter did not simply “promenade the street in a dashing suit of male attire,” he lived and worked as the doorman and butler at a brothel.

“I have been in the practice of waiting upon Girls of ill fame and made up their Beds and received the Company at the door and received the money for Rooms and they induced me to dress in Women’s Clothes,” she testified. “Saying I looked so much better in them and I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in this way — and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way —”

Testimony records reading “City and County of New York, Mary Jones being Examined.” Courtesy of NYDA Case Files, NYC Municipal Archives

Peter’s familiarity with sex work gave him a certain insight: dirty men would do anything to keep their dirty deeds quiet. So if he were to commit a dirty deed in return, what were the chances his crimes would actually be reported? And they would have stayed unreported, had Mary not looked SO much like a woman. One man wanted that woman to give him his money back.

A receipt issued by NYPD reads, “Recd. New York, July 16, 1836 rom the Police Office, Eighteen dollars by the order of the court, the same being part o the money stolen rom me by Mary Jones, alias Peter Sewally. Robert Haslem.”

On a Tuesday night in June 1836, Robert Haslem strolled past Bleecker Street where he met a Black woman, “dressed elegantly and in perfect style with white earrings and a gilt comb in her hair.”

“Where are you going, my pretty maid?” he asked, before gladly accompanying her to a nearby alleyway for some business, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t until departing her company that he noticed his own wallet was missing, and in its place was another man’s.

Haslem tried to return the wallet to its rightful owner, who vehemently denied it, before finally admitting he’d lost his wallet under the very same circumstances that his Good Samaritan had. With his wallet returned, there was even less reason to report. But Robert Haslem was still out of $100, and fully invested. The very next night, Mary was arrested for prostitution. Before being taken into custody, she made a last-ditch effort to dispose of a bit of evidence, but instead, the officer recovered two wallets, one of which belonged to Robert Haslem.

Up until the day of the trial, Robert Haslem insisted and even testified that he had relations with a WOMAN who robbed him. The night Mary was apprehended, even the constable had no reason to believe otherwise until his search uncovered a prosthetic. Realizing the full scope of the con, the cunning of its perpetrator, and the continued naivete of her victim, “his Honor the Recorder, the sedate grave Recorder, laughed till he cried.”

Every aspect of the case presented a truly outrageous scene for a 19th century courtroom. But Mary carried herself with such grace and dignity, despite onlookers who insisted on making her gender identity part of the spectacle.

The image of her reflects her appearance in court: soft, demure, feminine. But it’s titled “Man-Monster.” The trial appeared on the docket as “The People vs. Peter Sewally, alias Mary Jones,” so upon arriving, she was immediately outed and heckled mercilessly. One gallery member even snatched her wig off, eliciting “a tremendous roar of laughter throughout the room.”

Despite her poise and her plea, Mary Jones was found “Guilty” and sentenced to 5 years in Sing Sing for grand larceny.

Court documents show Peter Sewally, alias Mary Jones being sentenced to a term of five years imprisonment.

But she didn’t stop the hustle. Mary Jones and all her aliases appear again and again in newspaper archives and New York District Attorney’s case files as late as 1848, 12 years after her first trial.

Though mocked, maligned and misidentified, Mary Jones never backed down from who she was. Every time she was taken into custody, it was under a woman’s name. And with her courage, she created a precedent, as the first person in New York—home of the Stonewall Riots 133 years later—to go on the record as out, proud and unashamed.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Discover all of the spicy details behind Mary’s trial and continued arrests from historians, Jonathan Ned Katz and Tavia Nyong’o at OutHistory.

Image: “The Con Art of Peter Sewally” by Lezley Saar

Read more records preserved from the many trials of Peter Sewally in “The People vs Mary Jones: Rethinking Race, Sex and Gender through 19th-Century Court Records” via the NYC Archives.

Sort through a few clippings of Mary’s subsequent exploits at the Digital Transgender Archive.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2023

DAY 1 — John Berry Meachum & the Floating Freedom School

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A lithograph portrait of John Berry Meachum, courtesy of the Missouri Encyclopedia.

John Berry Meachum specialized in freedom.

Born enslaved in 1789, it took 21 years and an agreeable owner to purchase his own independence, and the first thing he did with it? Walked 700 miles from Kentucky to Virginia to free his father too.

Together, the pair walked BACK to Kentucky to liberate John’s mother and siblings. Inspired by John’s tenacity and limited in his own old age, John’s former owner, 100-year-old Paul Meachum, made a once-in-a-lifetime offer: he’d free ALL of his 75+ slaves if John would lead them out of Kentucky and into the free state of Indiana. So John did.

John Berry Meachum purchased & freed his own father for 100 pounds when Virginia was still a British colony.

Little did he know there was MUCH further to go. John returned to Kentucky only to find that his wife’s owners had moved to St. Louis, MO in his absence.

Two guesses what he did next.

By 1815, John and Mary Meachum were reunited in St. Louis where he eventually purchased her liberty, that of their children, and 20 more enslaved strangers as well.

The Meachums’ story could have ended there, happily ever after with everyone they loved free.

But in 1825, he set his sights on a new brand of freedom, founding the first Black church west of the Mississippi. It still exists today as the First Baptist Church of St. Louis. Until 1847, the church’s original basement secretly housed the Tallow Candle School, Missouri’s first school for free and enslaved Black children.

Just the year before, Dred Scott threw the entire state of Missouri into turmoil when he and his wife sued for their freedom in a case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Missouri was a slave state, but its laws read that “once free, always free,” and before they were brought to Missouri, the Scotts had lived in two free states. They were also were church-going people, and Black churches provided a wealth of resources rarely accessible to enslaved people in particular: literature, privacy, and abolitionists.

Woodcarvings depicting Dred and Harriet Scott and their daughters Eliza and Lizzie.

In short, Black churches were a safe haven where slaves might learn to read, and subsequently learn to escape—circumstances that Missouri had to put a stop to. With their 1847 Literacy Act, Missouri forbade Black citizens from being educated, gathering for church services without the presence of law enforcement, and more.

The 1847 Missouri Literacy Law prohibiting Black Missourians from being educated, holding private church services, and moving freely into or out of the state. Read more in the Secretary of State’s Timeline of Missouri African-American History

But the state of Missouri didn’t know Reverend John Berry Meachum’s reputation for subverting the system. Where they made laws, he’d find ways… namely, the United States’ second-largest waterway: the Mississippi River. At its banks, Missouri’s state laws ended and federal regulation began.

So John bought a steamboat, anchored it square in the middle of the Mighty Mississip’ where neither the state nor any nefarious mischief could touch it, and named it the “Floating Freedom School.”

The steamboat Ben Campbell commonly attributed as John Berry Meachum’s Floating Freedom School. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Equipped with its own library, classrooms, and all the standard trappings of a school, the Floating Freedom School was an act of defiance in broad daylight. And because Reverend John planned so carefully, there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it. Until at least 1860, 13 years after its commission, the Floating Freedom School remained moored in the Mississippi River.

Unfortunately though, the school outlasted its founder. The good Reverend died the same way he lived: while shepherding his flock. On a Sunday morning in 1854, he suffered a heart attack in the midst of delivering his sermon.

Mary Meachum

But his work lived on. John’s wife Mary, who herself had been bonded out of slavery decades before, went on to free hundreds more as a major conductor of the Underground Railroad. One of the National Park Service’s 700 National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom “depots” across 39 states even bears her name: “The Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing.”

John Meachum’s Floating Freedom School also became the foundation and inspiration for more recently subversive “Freedom Schools,” created during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to combat the “sharecropper education” Black students received in so-called “separate, but equal” schools. While their external reason for existing was to fill educational gaps, internally, the Freedom School curriculums included Black history, literature, theater and more, honoring and preserving Black culture in one of the few places they could outside the home.

All of this, set in motion by the footsteps of a man whose own freedom wasn’t enough if he couldn’t bring his people too.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Listen to the Atlas Obscura podcast about the Floating Freedom School as one of the “world’s most wondrous, unexpected, even strange places.”

Dive into more Missouri Civil Rights stories here.

Hear the St. Louis Public Radio‘s take on how “John Berry Meachum defied the law to educate” Black Americans.

Hear first-hand accounts from Freedom School students of the 1960s at the Library of Congress blog.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2022

DAY 28 — The German Coast Uprising

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Henrietta Wood’s fight for freedom is documented in federal dockets and case file archives.

Burned ruins bear witness to the Virgin Island Crucians’ final straw .

But the biggest slave revolt in United States history remains one of this country’s best kept secrets.

One of many plaques at the monument to the German Coast Uprising at the Whitney Plantation, just across the Mississippi from the former Andry Plantation.

The French, Spanish, and British armed forces couldn’t defeat the Haitians, and when news of enslaved people taking back their freedom spread through the Caribbean, it became literal wildfire on islands like the Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada and many more.

In 1811, just 7 years after the Haitian Revolution, that wildfire spread north to the States. Much like those in the Caribbean, climate conditions in Louisiana favored sugar cane, a crop so brutal to harvest, that when slavery ended, laws essentially legally enslaving convicted criminals (many of whom weren’t real convicts, but victims of the Black Codes) were enacted to fill the gap, because even for pay, Black people wouldn’t do it.

“Slave Uprising” by Haitian artist Ulrick Jean-Pierre who frequently paints scenes from the Haitian Revolution.

It was far from the first or last time enslaved people would take their freedom into their own hands. American historian Herbert Aptheker defines a slave revolt “as an action involving 10 or more slaves, with ‘freedom as the apparent aim [and] contemporary references labeling the event as an uprising, plot, insurrection, or the equivalent of these’,” according to PBS. By those standards, there are at least 250 recorded “revolts and conspiracies in the history of American Negro slavery.” 

The largest of them was formed by the 500 participants of the German Coast Uprising that marched on New Orleans on January 8, 1811.

The rural night was even darker than usual 30 miles west of the Crescent City in LaPlace, Louisiana, where thunderheads poured in from the Gulf. Lulled by the rain and a misplaced sense of security, Manuel and Gilbert, father and son masters of the Andry Plantation, slept soundly in the big house, utterly unaware of the forces descending upon them. Led by Charles Deslondes, around a dozen enslaved men stormed the mansion, cornering and killing young Gilbert. His father slipped their grasp, fleeing into the Louisiana swampland with nothing but his jammies and slim chances of survival. And anyway, the rebels’ strategy was sounder than they’d been given credit for. It wasn’t simply an assault on a single plantation – enslaved allies in New Orleans had conspired with Deslondes & Co. to wage their own assault in the city when their reinforcements arrived. From either direction, the Mississippi River Plantations and the New Orleans slave trade were to meet their doom.

From the Andry Plantation, Charles Deslondes and his rebels marched downriver, gaining numbers at each plantation they passed, and leaving fire in their wake. By the time the rebellion reached the outskirts of New Orleans, 5 plantations were in flames and nearly 500 enslaved men and women had joined the cause. Those numbers may well have changed the entire face of the American South if not for one fatal mistake: Master Andry had indeed survived swamp, only to alert his fellow plantation owners. The early warning was still too late for 3 of the 5 plantations that ultimately burned to the ground, but was ultimately sufficient for local militias, 30 Army soldiers, and 40 Navy sailors to respond en force. Armed with very few guns and mostly field tools, the rebels were no match for military strength. On January 11, 4 days after it had begun, the German Coast Uprising was finally suppressed.

A day later, Charles Deslondes was captured, identified as the rebel leader and sentenced to a brutal death, without any trial at all. According to a Navy officer, his slow execution began as he was “shot in one thigh & then the other, until they were both broken – then shot in the body and before he had expired was put into a bundle of straw and roasted!”

But his was only the first of many gruesome executions, designed to terrorize any enslaved person who might ever again consider violence against their captors. A jury of 5 slave owners sentenced almost all of the rebels to death by beheading, with each head mounted on a pike in a 60-mile long stretch between LaPlace and New Orleans, and beyond. Their bodies were hung from the New Orleans levees, rotting in full display. At individual plantations, the same sentences were carried out, with every enslaved member of each house forced to watch.

A recreation of the sentence carried out on the German Coast rebels, erected at the Whitney Plantation.

It was a psychological torture that effectively erased any trace of the uprising. While the legal proceedings were recorded, nothing else about the events of January 8-11 ever saw the light of day, and enslaved people wouldn’t even dare speak of it lest they be accused of conspiracy as well. But they didn’t forget. 50 years later, the children and grandchildren of the German Coast rebels joined forces with the Union Army, numbering among the 28,000 men (only around 5,000 of them white) who left Louisiana to fight against the Confederacy in the Civil War, once again – and this time, more successfully – shedding their ancestors’ blood for freedom.

February 2022’s American Blackstory began with Henrietta Wood’s case for freedom. It ends with a fight for it that while suppressed, couldn’t be extinguished.

Unquenchable fire is our past, present and future, so let this American Blackstory, among the many others that those who’d rewrite history have attempted bury, be a constant inspiration to keep burning bright.

The leaders of the German Coast Uprising. Not slaves. Real men with real names and real lives demonstrating real courage.
The Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate documented the rebellion in their Tricentennial spread. Read the text-only version here.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

The Smithsonian Magazine delves into “How a Nearly Successful Slave Revolt Was Intentionally Lost to History”

Trying to imagine what hundreds of enslaved people marching to New Orleans for their freedom might look like? See it in“Scenes From a Reenactment of a Slave Uprising”

Hear what the re-enactment means to the participants themselves in a short courtesy of PBS News Hour.

The Whitney Plantation, just across the river from the Andry Plantation (now known as the Kid Ory House), has a series of resources available for those who’d like to learn more about the geographic & historic context of the revolt.

Louisiana’s river parishes are now doing their part to preserve the American history of the 1811 Revolt. Visit their official website documented the events here.

Daniel Rasmussen is an academic with the most extensive knowledge of the 1811 German Coast Uprisings, and you can read everything he’s compiled on the subject in “American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt”

Browse NPR’s exclusive excerpt here.

Buy it from our friends at Black-owned Marcus Books.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2022, Uncategorized

DAY 27 — Ellen E. Armstrong

In 1939, Ellen E. Armstrong pulled off one of the slickest tricks the performing world had ever seen.

Born in 1914, the 25-year-old daughter of J. Hartford and Lillie Belle Armstrong took over her father’s business – a feat in itself for any woman of the time – and transformed herself into the world’s first headlining African-American female magician.

J. Hartford and Lillie Belle: “the wizard & the witch” as they’re labeled in the photo

As the only heir to the couple dubbed “the most royal colored entertainers of the century,” Ellen took up her birthright early on, joining her parents in performing at the age of 6. Their tagline “Going Fine Since 1889” During set changes, Ellen would wander through the audience, touch her little index finger to a person’s forehead, and divine what they were thinking about the person sitting next to them. Whether it actually worked, or simply served as adorable comic relief, Ellen’s confidence was boosted, and her act grew to include sleight of hand and card tricks too. Never one to shy away from showmanship, she even created her own signature act, “Chalk Talk,” where she told stories through squiggles and doodles. Each time she’d add a new chalk mark, the doodle would transform into a new character or scene in her story.

The family business. Ellen, J. Hartford, and Lillie Belle appear in an beautifully printed tour poster.
Just Lillie Belle & Ellen. “Daddy’s Babies” is inscribed below them.

Taking audiences on a journey was Ellen’s talent, regardless of the medium, and “The Celebrated Armstrongs” enjoyed incredible success and critical acclaim as “America’s Greatest Colored Magicians” touring the East Coast, Cuba, and even Europe. But all of that came to a screeching halt in 1939 when J. Hartford Armstrong, “King of the Colored Conjurers,” died suddenly.

Ellen was only 25, and fresh out of college. She could have chosen many paths. Instead, she would rightfully inherit the throne of the King of the Colored Conjurers and his substantial $8,500 in props, taking up her mantle as the unrivaled “Mistress of Modern Magic.”

And she was absolutely terrified. 

American culture has long held taboos against women practicing magic, and even the Salem Witch Trials held a Black women in particular contempt. Even if Ellen’s magic was simply for entertainment’s sake, it was still risky to practice alone, travel alone, and own property alone in the early 20th Century.

But for the next 3 decades, Ellen’s risktaking paid off.

Ellen’s newspaper ads were hilarious, boisterous and entirely unexpected from the lady pictured at the top.

She married in 1940, but Ellen’s headlining act was her only baby and her sole bread and butter. Many of the tricks she performed like the Miser’s Dream, the Mutilated Parasol and the Sand Frame, where a photograph of famous African-American boxer Joe Louis appeared from thin air, are still classics today.

When her “Modern, Marvelous, Matchless Merrymaking March Through Mysteryland” finally came to a close, Ellen retired in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and in 1979, died unceremoniously. Aside from the tricks she practiced, and a handful of her tour posters, little of Ellen or her groundbreaking performance remains. And though that means there’s often very little for me to tell, I am so grateful to feature women like Ellen (and men like Black Herman) here at The American Blackstory, ensuring that if I have anything to do with it, they’ll never disappear.

A letterpress poster touting Ellen’s act printed by historic small press Bower Show Print.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Browse the Armstrong Family Papers including photographs, news articles, and letters documenting their lives at the University of South Carolina Libraries.

Listen to podcast “Stuff Mom Never Told You” and their episode on Ellen’s Magical Marvels.

“Quiet Masters: The History and Relevance of the Black Magical Artist” is a documentary featuring many more untold magical stories, and available for rent at Amazon.

Uncover the stories of more Black magic in Conjure Times: Black Magicians in America.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2022

DAY 26 — Georgia Gilmore

From the local newspaper to the locals themselves, Montgomery’s white folks liked to turn Georgia Gilmore into a fat joke.

They had no idea they were mocking the heart and soul of a movement.

The delightful and effervescent Georgia Gilmore

The Black folks close to her knew Georgia Gilmore had presence. And it had nothing to do with her size.

She was quick-witted, clever, motherly, industrious, and every morsel from her kitchen tasted absolutely divine.

Georgia’s skill was in high demand in Montgomery’s households and lunch facilities, but the hypocrisy everywhere else in town was real. Even though Montgomery’s bus system was almost entirely reliant on domestic workers like maids, nannies, seamstresses (like Rosa Parks) and cooks like Georgia, those women took the brunt of racial abuse from drivers and passengers. By the time Rosa’s turn came around, Georgia’s personal bus boycott had already begun. 

She’d gone through the mortifying motions so often it was automatic: fare at the front, walk of shame to the back. So when Georgia dropped her fare into the box in October 1955, and the driver barked at her to get off and get on again through the back door, she was more than rattled. Georgia was furious. Powerless to do any different, Georgia begrudgingly backed out. When her feet touched the pavement, the driver shut the door and drove away. She vowed to never be humiliated that way again.

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too, for it Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. This woman's case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don't ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off all buses Monday.

So when flyers went out alerting Black Montgomerians that an upstanding woman had been jailed for protesting the Montgomery Bus System, Georgia hightailed it to Holt St. Baptist Church where those in support of taking action gathered. She was one of nearly 5,000 there on December 5, 1956 who launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the first mass public demonstration of the Civil Rights Movement, and she was proud to be counted among its most crucial participants.  “After the maids and the cooks stopped riding the bus, well the bus didn’t have any need to run,” she said. “It was just the idea that we could make the white man suffer. And let the white man realize that we could get along in the world without him.”

Georgia praying in the Holt St. pews.
Holt St. Baptist Church as it stands today.
“After the maids and the cooks stopped riding the bus, well the bus didn’t have any need to run,” Georgia said. From the LIFE Picture Collection: “Two white women sit in an otherwise empty bus during the African-American boycott of bus companies throughout Montgomery, Alabama. Grey Villet/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

By simply existing in her Blackness, Georgia had taken some of her power back from her oppressors. And hungry for more, she put her skills to work.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott drew supporters from outside communities too, because even Black people that didn’t live in Montgomery still had to sit in the back of its buses. Georgia had worked as a cook and a midwife, but mass fundraising against racism was brand new to almost everybody participating. But not all were in the position to participate publicly. They cooked, cleaned and cared for the children of white racists, and were suddenly forced into a choice between supporting their people and maintaining a livelihood. Carpools were formed to transport workers and named based on their geographical locations around town. But all of those car clubs needed money for gas, insurance, upkeep, all the costs one takes public transportation to avoid. Georgia rallied all of those domestic workers who wanted to help quietly into the “Club from Nowhere,” a group of women who turned plates, pies, pastries, and whatever their culinary speciality into cash money for the movement.

Georgia serving up just desserts in her kitchen.

The Club from Nowhere provided all sorts of strategic cover. A Black maid or cook carrying food was about the least suspicious person in the Jim Crow South. Should any member be questioned about the money they carried after selling their goods, they could answer in two totally truthful ways: say that it was from selling food, OR that it came from/was being taken to “Nowhere.” Finally, white allies who couldn’t realistically attend a planning meeting to donate could write a check to “The Club from Nowhere” without revealing the true recipient of that support. Eventually, the Club from Nowhere was bringing in $200+ dollars a week (about $2K today), more than any other fundraising effort in Montgomery.

A boycott carpool loads up while a bus across the street sits empty. Montgomery, Alabama, February 1956. Don Cravens/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images

Nowhere was brilliant, and through it, Georgia came into her own, cooking and hustling for the movement. For the 382 days that the Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted, Georgia Gilmore found one way or another to support it.

The most obvious, and you’d think innocuous, was by walking. “Sometime, I walked by myself and sometime, I walked with different people, and I began to enjoy walking, because for so long I guess I had this convenient ride until I had forgot about how well it would be to walk,” she said. “A lot of times, some of the young whites would come along and they would say, ‘N*gger, don’t you know it’s better to ride the bus than it is to walk?’ And we would say, ‘No, cracker, no. We rather walk.’ I was the kind of person who would be fiery. I didn’t mind fighting with you.”

Three months into the 381-day boycott, African Americans are photographed walking to work instead of riding the bus. Montgomery, Alabama, February 1956. Don Cravens/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images

All that fire and fight made Georgia an excellent witness on the stand when Montgomery County Grand Jury indicted Martin Luther King Jr. (and over 100 others) for violating Alabama’s anti-boycott laws. Nobody had a better story to tell than Ms. Georgia who’d been left on the side of the road out of spite. She made an indefensible case for why Montgomery’s buses needed to be desegregated: “When I paid my fare and they got the money, they don’t know Negro money from white money,” Georgia testified.

But that visibility also made Georgia an easy target.

She appeared in the pages of the Montgomery Advertiser repeatedly after that, always as the aggressor, always as a laughingstock.

The Alabama Journal, November 3, 1961: “Huge Negro Woman Draws Cursing Fine.”

The Montgomery Advertiser, on the same story: “A hefty Negro woman who weighed in excess of 230 pounds was fined $25 today in city court on charges of cursing a diminutive white garbage truck driver.”

Hattie McDaniel as America’s cinematic “Mammy” in a press image from “Gone with the Wind.”

As the Safiya Charles of today’s Montgomery Advertiser writes, “he worked a twist on the sassy Black mammy archetype. And he rendered the white male truck driver her victim.”

But Georgia would not be deterred by outside opinions. Because her home was full of love. Though the papers called her the most derogatory names, the people who came from far and wide to buy Georgia’s plates of fried chicken and macaroni and cheese, or sit at her table sipping sweet tea called her “Georgie,” “Tiny,” “Big Mama,” and “Madear.” 

(Those near and dear guests of her kitchen included Martin Luther King, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, and even Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy.)

On December 20, 1956 the boycotts ended after the Supreme Court ruled the buses’ segregation unconstitutional, but Georgia’s reputation had been so utterly tattered that she was certain her days of working in Montgomery were through. Between her activism, her testimony, her attitude, and the press, she couldn’t even get home insurance.

Georgia & Dr. King were featured in the Alabama Journal, but click through for a closer look at how even with a positive spin, the language used to describe Georgia isn’t exactly complimentary.

Georgia deserved to be rewarded for her courage and dedication to the movement, not left in shambles because of it. “She was not really recognized for who she was, but had it not been for people like Georgia Gilmore, Martin Luther King Jr. would not have been who he was,” Rev. Thomas Lilly who participated in the boycott, said. Dr. King himself repaid at least some of that debt with the most valuable piece of advice Georgia ever received. “All these years you’ve worked for somebody else, now it’s time you worked for yourself.” She did, and she never worked for anyone else again.

Still at it decades later, on March 3, 1990, in preparation for the 25th anniversary of the March from Selma to Montgomery, Georgia cooked up her famous macaroni and cheese and fried chicken to feed the revelers. Hours later, she passed and had the honor of watching her table from above as hundreds gathered to grieve her and commemorate so many walks for freedom with one last meal from from nowhere.

The historic marker at the former home of Georgia Gilmore in Montgomery, AL. Mickey Welsh / Montgomery Advertiser

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Georgia in the New York Times’ Overlooked series.

Southern Foodways collaborated with the Montgomery Advertiser to celebrate Georgia’s life, and make amends for how she’d been represented in the Advertiser’s pages. It’s a beautiful read, by another Black woman and I encourage you to enjoy it.

PBS series “Eyes on the Prize” has captured interviews with members of the Alabama civil rights movements, and you can find Georgia’s here:
INTERVIEW 1 (1979) | INTERVIEW 2 (1986)

Listen in to the personal accounts of many who had the pleasure of eating in Ms. Georgia’s kitchen, including her son, Montgomery City Councilman Mark Gilmore, in NPR’s “The Kitchen of a Civil Rights Hero. “

Councilman Gilmore was gracious enough to share Georgia’s Legendary Sweet Tea recipe so we can raise a glass to her.

Discover more “Selfless Servant Leadership of the African-American Women of the Civil Rights Movement.”

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2022

DAY 25 — Ruby Doris Smith Robinson

The Freedom Riders exist in American culture as an almost mythical group of heroes, a collective of brave souls, iconic and sympathetic champions of equality.

Don’t worry. You won’t read anything different here.

Indeed, the Freedom Riders were all of those things. But they were also 436 individuals who each woke up one day, unwilling to wake up to another where Black people were second-class citizens. As Diane Nash, a founder of the SNCC told us, most had put their affairs in order, and all had signed waivers releasing the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) from any liability should they be injured or killed. 

Ruby Doris Smith wasn’t just one among the collective, she led by example. 

Born in 1942, she was one of seven born to beautician Alice and pastor/handyman J.T., both gainfully employed and fully involved in their community, raising their brood in all-Black schools, churches, and other social settings. With the luxury of safe and comfortable financial and social circumstances, wanting for little and surrounded by friendly faces, the Smith children grew up with certain expectations of the world, and against that backdrop, the scenes of white supremacy and racial violence outside of the Smiths’ little bubble seemed absolutely horrifying. Even as a child, Ruby Doris knew she’d been put here with purpose, and once told her sister Catherine, “I know what my life and mission is…It’s to set the Black people free. I will never rest until it happens. I will die for that cause.”

Ruby Doris’s journey started with small protests. She’d throw rocks back at white children who would tease her friends and siblings. When a white sundae shop clerk handed her an ice cream cone with his bare hand, she refused, perfectly aware that cones served to white customers came wrapped in tissue. Those were only embers of the fire still yet to come.

Whipsmart, Ruby Doris graduated high school at 16, and just kept leveling up at the historic Black women’s university of Spelman College. In 1960, Ruby had been at school less than a year and already found her calling. That was the year four well-dressed young Black men walked up to the F. W. Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, cemented their place in history and ignited a movement by simply sitting down.

The Greensboro Four: David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan and Joseph McNeil

That kind of defiance was right up Ruby’s alley, and she jumped head first into organizing her own publicity-making protests. “Kneel-ins” at white churches were a particular specialty of hers, but outside of holy places, Ruby Doris wasn’t afraid to be loud about her rights. “Have integration will shop, have segregation will not,” she’d chant outside of shops and grocery stores, even if no one else protested with her. By 1961, Ruby Doris had been arrested more times than she could count for her repeated rabble-rousing, and had no intention of stopping as she signed on to become the executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the group that had just begun organizing what they would call “Freedom Rides.”

The KKK firebombed a Freedom Rider bus in May 1961, just outside of Birmingham.

When Ruby Doris set out on her own bus ride from Nashville to Birmingham on May 17, the KKK’s Anniston, AL firebombing had occurred just days before. Diane Nash said, “It was clear to me that if we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence.” So undeterred, they pressed on, and as expected, they were indeed met with more massive violence. Ruby Doris was badly beaten, but still rode on from Birmingham to Jackson, MS. And since nothing else so far had kept busload after busload of Freedom Riders from riding into the Deep South, the powers that be decided they’d try another tactic: brutal imprisonment. Parchman State Penitentiary was a Mississippi maximum security prison, and everything about the Freedom Riders’ imprisonment there was designed to be torturous to the hundreds whose rides landed them at those facilities.

Freedom Riders arrested in Jackson after departing Alabama Greyhound Stations. Ruby Doris Smith is on the second line, fourth from left.

Michael Booth, a member of the Civil Rights Movement remembers, “With the intention to intimidate and instill fear, the women were packed onto a flatbed, in the middle of the night, similar to that which animals are transported in. They were forced to stand the entire drive from Jackson to Parchman, going through Money, Mississippi, the place where Emmett Till was murdered. In a continued effort to break their spirits, when the women were processed into Parchman they were forced to walk through a very large pool of cockroaches before being photographed and fingerprinted. The women were imprisoned on death row where the ‘most cruel and unbelievable things’ were perpetrated on the Freedom Riders. [One woman’s] cell was only 13 footsteps from the gas chamber. The lights were left on 24 hours a day so that the prisoners didn’t know what time it was or what day it was.”

Ruby Doris didn’t document the horrors perpetrated on her at Parchman, but others remembered being scarred by what they saw done to her. The woman jailed next to the gas chamber, Dr. Pauline Knight-Ofusu, watched as Ruby Doris was “dragged barefooted down a concrete hallway to be thrown into a shower and scrubbed with a wire brush. Post traumatic syndrome is a given for every Freedom Rider,” she said. Traumatized, but still not broken. After 45 days in Parchman, Ruby Doris went right back to disrupting the way only she could.

The Kennedys were legislating the bus situation, the lunch counters had been desegregated thanks to the efforts of the protestors, but there was more work to be done. Even hospitals had “white only” entrances, and after months of organizing elsewhere, that’s where Ruby Doris turned her attention. When a receptionist tried to bar protestors from the white-only door, quipping that they weren’t sick anyway, Ruby Doris marched right up to the desk, looked that woman straight in the eye as she vomited, and replied, “Is that sick enough for you?!”

Truth is, Ruby Doris was sick. Dr. Pauline knew back at Parchman that Ruby had ulcers and diabetes. When Ruby Doris was elected as the first female executive secretary of SNCC under Stokely Carmichael, she was a wife, mother, and had a full time job. Her anxiety kept her so tightly wound that she kept a collection of glass bottles in her office specifically to break and sweep up before getting back to work. By the time she was 25, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson was dead.

Officially, a rare blood disease and terminal cancer claimed her life on October 7, 1967, but everyone involved in the movement knew her real cause of death. Stanley Wise, another leader in SNCC put it plainly: “She died of exhaustion… I don’t think it was necessary to assassinate her. What killed (her) was the constant outpouring of work with being married, having a child, constant struggles that she was subjected to because she was a woman… she was destroyed by the movement.”

Officers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee listen as Stokely Carmichael, right, chairman of the organization, speaks at a news conference in Atlanta, May 23, 1966. Pictured left to right are: James Forman, outgoing executive secretary; Cleveland Sellers, program secretary; and Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, the organization’s first female executive secretary.

Note that Mr. Wise speaks of her death in terms of assassination because Ruby Doris was truly a driving force in the movement, and her sudden loss was deeply felt. What I’ve mentioned to you here is only a fraction of what she accomplished in her 25 years. She led voter registration drives in dangerously racist Mississippi, and single-handedly organized the SNCC’s Sojourner Truth Motor Fleet to keep the organization mobile. The work she did for Civil Rights was incomparable, and so was her mere presence. In eulogy, Stokely Carmichael said Ruby Doris “was convinced that there was nothing that she could not do… she was a tower of strength,” and on her headstone, her own words were engraved: “If you think free, you are free.”

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Spend more time getting to know Ruby Doris in her biography, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson.

Read SNCC’s detailing of the impact Ruby Doris left on their organization.

Browse the archives of the Civil Rights Digital Library and the Atlanta University Center Woodruff Library for more articles, letters and clippings from Ruby Doris’ life.

The Smithsonian has gathered powerful archival footage on the events leading up to the Anniston Freedom Rider firebombing.
Hear the experiences of the Freedom Riders in their own words.
THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2022

DAY 24 — Charmay & Black American Sign Language

Social media personality Nakia Smith coined a saying: “My hands are loud enough.”

So instead of me, a hearing person, introducing you to Black American Sign Language, here’s Nakia speaking for herself.

On her social channels, she goes by Charmay, but as a woman who’s Black, deaf, and Black and deaf, she’s used to having multiple identities, each with its own unique set of circumstances and challenges to navigate.

But why does “Black and deaf” fall into a separate category?

Because Jim Crow didn’t give passes for disabilities.

Accommodations for deaf people have always been drastically behind those for the hearing, and it wasn’t even until 1817 that the first school for deaf children—the first in the entire Western Hemisphere, actually—was opened. Because that same school wouldn’t accommodate African-American students until 135 years later in 1952, racism essentially stripped Black deaf people of any community at all. In some southern states like Louisiana, deaf schools weren’t desegregated until 1978. Physically unable to communicate with people who looked like them, and legally unable to learn with people who communicated like them left Black deaf people in a very small circle. Within it, they built a community, schools, and a rich language of their own.

Austin’s Blind, Deaf & Orphan School is one example of the segregated learning facilities for Black deaf students, and the same institution that Charmay’s grandfather Jake attended.

Americans typically think of the “Black version” of things as lesser, and English is no exception (see: the wholesale invalidation of Ebonics and African-American Vernacular English [AAVE]). Linguist John McWhorter explains, “The educated white person has often internalized a sense that it’s wrong to associate black people and ‘bad grammar’ at all. There’s a dissonance that person permits, which is to read southern white speech depicted in all of its glory and accept that as ‘the way they talk,’ but to bristle at Black people depicted speaking the same way. Human minds tolerate a lot of dissonance of that kind!”

Those concepts translate over to sign language quite fluidly because BASL uses different signs than ASL, but it’s visually different in practice as well. Where ASL largely uses one hand for signs and communicates around the shoulders and midsection, BASL uses two hands to sign in the face and forehead region more frequently. BASL users also employ a lot more of their personal space for communicating than ASL users do, with signs that use big motions around the body. In other words, as our friend Charmay says, “The biggest difference between BASL and ASL is that BASL got seasoning.” Teraca Florence, a former president of the Black Deaf Student Union at Gallaudet University, says “Our signing is louder, more expressive. It’s almost poetic.”

@itscharmay

Cool right? 😎 very old fashioned signs from 1887! My grandfather & his friends, who he went to school with, still use those signs!

♬ original sound – @itscharmay

Charmay’s social channels are filled with videos documenting the history and celebrating users of BASL because she realized that many people in deaf and hearing communities didn’t even know Black American Sign Language existed. Because this is the Internet, for every bit of praise, Charmay received even more criticism. Even white deaf people weren’t fully in support, asking questions like “Why further divide the deaf community?” But questions like that were just more proof that her voice absolutely needed to be heard, because they were evidence of history repeating itself over a lack of shared experience. Felecia Redd, a Black deaf interpreter says, “I’m always told by deaf African Americans, ‘I am Black first; then I’m deaf.’ White deaf people are deaf first and then white.”

BASL didn’t develop out of Black people’s need for specialized communication. It developed out of their need to communicate AT ALL. It’s not a variant of ASL, “Black ASL could be considered the purer of the two forms,” says Ceil Davis of Gallaudet University. Because African-Americans weren’t allowed access to any advancements in hearing technology, they could only refer to the original curriculum used by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet when he opened the first school for the deaf. From that curriculum, Black ASL developed nuance, syntax, slang, idioms and other language fundamentals that simply don’t exist or function differently in ASL, giving the Black deaf community something truly unique. That is, until schools integrated, and Black deaf students had no choice but to conform to ASL. Instead of being welcomed into the broader community, Black deaf students were only further marginalized, mocked and teased for having developed a separate language due to the racism forced upon them.

@coda_plug

My Deaf Dad going to a Deaf/Blind school and his experience with desegregation. #deafawareness #asl #deafculture #codaplug #blackasl

♬ original sound – Coda Plug
@coda_plug

The treasure my parents didn’t know they have. My g-parents didn’t let them know to value your language. Representation Matters! #asl #deafculture

♬ original sound – Coda Plug
Dr. Carolyn McCaskill of Gallaudet University was a Black deaf student who integrated into all-white schools. She discusses her experiences code-switching as a Black deaf person, and shows you what that looks like too.

Even though Black deaf people are now “integrated” in the broader deaf community, many of the challenges they faced are unchanged. “In the United States, less Black people from the age of 25-64 are deaf—a rate of 1.8%, compared to the overall population at 2.3%,” according to the National Deaf Center. Of course, that means fewer translators in comparison as well. So when Black deaf people have to navigate places that already demonstrate unconscious bias against them, like say, doctor’s offices, they also find themselves facing a double language barrier as well. LeeAnne Valentine complained of constant abdominal pain to her hearing white doctor via white interpreter, but was routinely dismissed. When she visited the same doctor with a Black interpreter, her experience was night and day.

“She actually interpreted what I said, with the intent and the tone, plus my emotions,” LeeAnne said. “And she conveyed that to the doctor… and he finally took some action.” As a result, LeeAnne was rushed for emergency gallbladder surgery. Health services employees routinely report BASL users misunderstanding information about COVID and vaccines, if they receive it at all, because televised broadcasts rely on mostly white interpreters as though ASL is the only way for deaf Americans to communicate. Inherently tense social interactions like encounters with the police take on a whole new layer of complexity for Black deaf people. “Black Lives Matter” is even signed differently in BASL than ASL because Black people have an entirely different relationship to the movement than white people do. Even today with more accommodation than ever, the same physical and social barriers exist for Black deaf people, just in more modern spaces.

Dozens of Black deaf people ask the question “Am I Next?” in this short PSA.

That’s where Charmay comes in. There’s no more modern space than TikTok. And with 402K followers, she’s speaking truth to power to an audience bigger than her ancestors could have even imagined. She’s the 5th generation of BASL users in her family, and like so many things precious to the Black diaspora, her language has only been handed down by oral tradition. Without Charmay and other visible BASL users on social media, university collections, and privately funded documentaries, the world might not know BASL existed at all. “Historically, so much has been taken away from us, and we’re finally feeling that ‘this is ours,’” she said. “‘This is mine. I own something.’” And she’s one of many claiming every bit of her history and guaranteeing its future with the power of her two Black hands.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Spend 30 minutes getting to know the intricacies of being a Black person signing in America, and if you like that, watch the rest of the series for more legacies of African-American language at Talking Black in America. If you’re hooked, continue down that rabbit hole with “What Counts as Standard? On Black English and Black American Sign Language,” a compelling conversation between a linguist and a writer.
Gallaudet University has a complete series on Black ASL, and this video links to the full playlist. Fair warning, it’s totally 90s style production, but there’s SO much insight from Black ASL users and so much story to see here.
Good Morning America presented an extensive overview of BASL, its history and how its users are preserving their language today.

Follow Nakia Smith (aka Charmay) on TikTok for more videos on Black American Sign Language and cameos from her family members!

If Instagram is more your speed, follow her here.

“I have to make sure my hands are not ashy before I sign.” Get even more insight on the life & times of Charmay & more Black ASL users past & present at the New York Times.

There’s an incredible repository of creative and accessible content “Celebrating Representation, Identity and Diversity of Black Deaf Families” here.

Find another amazing collection of resources examining “Black Deaf Culture Through the Lens of History” here.