Note: This is an abridged collection of poems from my National History Day project, Ain’t I a Woman? : Black Women Combating Racism in U.S. Women's Suffrage Movements. Title of the blog post inspired by Beyoncé's Black Parade lyric "I can't forget my history is herstory."
Though a greater understanding of the intersectional nature of human identity has reached the general public nowadays, Black women during the American suffragist and civil rights movements often had to choose between advocating for women’s rights and advocating for the rights of Black people due to racism in the suffragist movement. I, a student who shares the intersecting identities of Black and woman the way so many activists who fought for my rights did, have written this collection of poems to showcase Black women who broke the barriers of systemic racism within their advocacy movements (the very movements that should have benefited them) and represented the unique identity that comes with being both Black and a woman. Because of the trailblazing of people like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Mary McLeod Bethune, there are institutions set up specifically to support Black women, speeches that speak to our shared experiences, the knowledge that I and my Black female contemporaries are not alone nor the first in experiencing misogynoir, and the basis for many discussions of intersecting Blackness and womanhood.
Poem Guide
Sojourner Truth Poem
Mary McLeod Bethune Poem
Turning To Today
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)
Society selects who will be considered portraits of femininity
Who is sugar and spice and everything nice
Who to open doors for and whose tears matter
Society decides who is beautiful and the bride of lace and refined taste
And society calls these people women
Except this narrative is a lie
Sojourner Truth would not comply with this narrative
The narrative that all women were treated with a kiss on the hand
Truth’s Blackness somehow seemed to diminish her womanhood
White men could not see her on the same level as their wives
But Sojourner did not shape herself into a doll
Did not fall to her knees and shroud herself in weakness
To appeal to the sexism of men who viewed Blacks as brutes,
Struggling for them to see her as woman
Instead she challenged the idea that femininity was soft
Women’s Rights Convention audiences of 1851 watched on
As Truth spoke her truth, painted a picture of the fields she had plowed
The days as a slave, the strength that swirled in her chest
Used her body as a monument to Black womanhood
Her sculpted arms taught that women could be feminine and strong
Her skin shone Black and woman
Her biggest enemies were not the Caucasian men
Who whispered that she must’ve been a man in woman’s clothing,
An abolitionist seeking sympathy in a skirt
The same men who demanded a doctor examine her naked body
For proof that it held some sort of woman inside
The biggest threats to her truth where the Caucasian women
Who told her “not yet, not now, we women must achieve the vote somehow,
And we cannot jeopardize it by rising up against two systems at once
White women first, we’ll liberate the rest when the time is right.
Set your Blackness aside.”
And with wide open eyes, Truth asked them “Ain’t I a woman?”
And she continued to fight for Black women
As she was Black
And she was woman
And she refused to compartmentalize.
Mary McLeod Bethune (1875- 1955)
First lady of the struggle
Was working on the double
By day teaching little Black girls
In a world that said education
Was a big White male world
By night staying up
Til the sun came out
Holding a vigil
Just in case the KKK came around
Pushed her way in to women’s rights
Which, in the South, was really “Rights for Whites: Female Edition”
She made the decision to join
The Equal Suffrage League
She lead several organizations
For Black women’s rights
And during World War II
Lobbied for Black women to be able to fight
She got her wish and Black WACs became legal
Blacks in the Women’s Army Corps traveled the world
Dismantling the stereotypes about what Black women were
Not only Black and woman
But Black woman teacher
McLeod Bethune refused to be put on the bleachers
When it came to equality for women.
Turning to Today (2002-?)
And when I speak
Let it not be for a fraction of who I am
Let me raise my arms to look like Truth’s
Tell my story to stir like Tubman
And when I hear intersectional
Let me remember how Truth bared herself
Reminded us that womanhood does not have one look
How Tubman knew her voice could be used in different circles
How McLeod Bethune may not have known the word
As it was not coined until after her time
But how her very life rhymed with it and she would’ve chimed in
To the conversations over gender, race, sexuality, and disability
That we are having today, as all three of these women understood
That Blackness does not diminish womanhood, and that womanhood
Does not diminish Blackness
They turned their status quo upside down
Challenged the very idea of what femininity was
And what spaces it should occupy.
Works Cited:
Secondary sources:
"Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955)." Turning Point Suffragist Memorial, https://suffragistmemorial.org/mary-mcleod-bethune-1875-. 01 October, 1970, Online, accessed 01 February, 2020.
“Female, Black, and Able: Representations of Sojourner Truth and Theories of Embodiment.” Disability Studies Quarterly, https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3030/3057. Online, accesed 24 January, 2020.
“The Root: How Racism Tainted Women's Suffrage.” NPR, https://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134849480/the-root-how-racism-tainted-womens-suffrage. 25 March, 2011, Online, accesed 02 February, 2020.
Neale McGoldrick. “Women’s Suffrage and the Question of Color.” Women’s Suffrage and the Question of Color, http://www.socialstudies.org/sites/default/files/publications/se/5905/590503.html. Online, accesed 03 February, 2020.