As the organization grew stronger, the truly committed cadres were being separated from the staff members who wanted the credit but not the responsibility for building SNCC. On the original central staff there had been six men and three women. The three women on the staff—Bobbie, Rene and myself—always had a disproportionate share of the duties of keeping the office and the organization running.…
Some of the brothers came around only for staff meetings (sometimes), and whenever we women were involved in something important, they began to talk about “women taking over the organization”—calling it a matriarchal coup d’etat…. By playing such a leading role in the organization, some of them insisted, we were aiding and abetting the enemy, who wanted to see Black men weak and unable to hold their own.…
Later, when Margaret came, and saw me all huddled up in the blanket, freezing above a water-logged floor, her mouth fell open. “They must be kidding!” she said. “I’ve been inside a lot of jails, but this beats them all.”
Her outrage made me feel a little better. For a while, I had been wondering whether I was overreacting. And then I thought of the descriptions George [Jackson] had given of the many dungeons they had thrown him into over the last decade. This place couldn’t be as bad as O Wing in Soledad or the Adjustment Center in San Quentin or solitary in Folsom or any of the other cells where they had tried to squeeze the will and determination out of George. (Angela Davis, An Autobiography, New York: Random House, 1974.)
In the spring of 1969 black students took over the south campus of the City College of New York for nearly two weeks. Although I was still in high school, I spent a lot of time there. My mother originally sent me with food for the students. I ended up attending a good many of their meetings. I remember one meeting especially well. The president of the black student organization, a tall, handsome Haitian, was begging the black female students to stop picking fights with white male students on North campus. It seemed the black female students were so amazed and delighted by the new notion that black male students would come to their defense that they kept starting fights with white males on North campus in order to witness this miracle again and again.
The previous year I had attended the National Black Theatre, an organization founded by Barbara Ann Teer, a black actress with unusual magnetism and organizational ability. The membership spent much of its time talking about what a shame it was that a man could not be found to take her place.
Misogyny was an integral part of Black Macho. Its philosophy, which maintained that black men had been more oppressed than black women, that black women had, in fact, contributed to that oppression, that black men were sexually and morally superior and also exempt from most of the responsibilities human beings had to other human beings, could only be detrimental to black women. But black women were determined to believe—even as their own guts were telling them it was not so—that they were finally on the verge of liberation from the spectre of the omnipotent blonde with the rosebud lips and the cheesecake legs. They would no longer have to admire another woman on the pedestal. The pedestal would be theirs. They would no longer have to do their own fighting.They would be fought for. The knight in white armor would ride for them. The beautiful fairy princess would be black.
The women of the Black Movement had little sense of the contradictions in their desire to be models of fragile Victorian womanhood in the midst of a revolution. They wanted a house, a picket fence around it, a chicken in the pot, and a man. As they saw it, their only officially designated revolutionary responsibility was to have babies.
Precious few black women were allowed to do anything important in the Black Movement. Those few who did manage to exercise some kind of influence did not concern themselves with the predicament of black women. In that sense, they were ahistorical, compared to the club-society women, activists and career women, black abolitionists, and feminists who were their predecessors.
Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party and a professor at the University of California, was probably the best-known female activist. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father owned a service station and her mother was a teacher. She attended the segregated schools of Birmingham until she was fifteen, when she gained admission to a program that enabled her to live with a white family in New York and attend the private, progressive Elisabeth Irwin High School. She claims that her interest in the Communist Party, in socialism, and in liberation struggles began at this time and continued through her undergraduate years at Brandeis and her graduate study in Frankfurt. In 1967 she went to California to teach and participate in the ongoing Black Revolution. Three years later, not long after being removed from her post as professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California because of her affiliation with the Communist Party, Davis was arrested and charged with conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping.
Early in 1969 she had become involved in the case of the Soledad Brothers. Their story, Davis tells us, began in Soledad Prison during an integrated exercise period. Unaccompanied by guards, black and white prisoners had filed into the yard. A general melee ensued during a fight between a black inmate and a white inmate. O.G. Miller, an expert marksman stationed in the gun tower, shot down three men, all of whom were black. The court ruled that it was “justifiable homicide.” Black prisoners protested, and a white guard was pushed over a railing and killed. George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo, who reportedly had reputations in the prison as “militants,” were charged with the guard’s murder.
Deeply impressed by George Jackson’s political theories, Angela Davis became a prime mover in the committee to free the Soledad Brothers. She subsequently became friendly with George Jackson’s brother Jonathan, who was seventeen, and began to correspond with George Jackson. Although she had only seen him briefly in his courtroom appearance, she fell in love with him. Such things were not uncommon in the sixties.
On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson attended the trial of James McGlain, a prisoner at San Quentin who was a friend of George’s. At an early point during the proceedings young Jackson stood up. He had a carbine in his hand and, as in all the good movies, he ordered everyone in the courtroom to freeze. McClain, as well as Ruchell Magee and William Christmas, also prisoners at San Quentin who were present in order to testify, joined Jonathan. They left the courtroom with Judge Harold Haley, Assistant DA Gary Thomas, and several jurors, and got into a waiting van. A San Quentin guard fired on them, and a general shoot out followed, leaving three of the prisoners and Judge Haley dead, Thomas, Magee and one of the jurors wounded. It was called a revolt.
Davis, who immediately went into hiding, was captured by police and FBI in a motel in New York. She was charged with conspiracy with Jonathan Jackson and giving him the gun. Therefore, under California law, she was also guilty of murder and kidnapping.
Davis’s passionate love for George Jackson was cited by the prosecution as a motive for her involvement with the events of August seventh. Davis said she had known nothing about what Jonathan Jackson intended to do. The gun that Jonathan had used had come from a collection of weapons that the Che-Lumumba Club, the branch of the Communist Party to which Angela Davis belonged, had used for target practice and were available to any member.
Perhaps the largest campaign of its kind was launched to set Angela free. On June 4, 1972, she was cleared of all the charges against her. During the two years that she was confined without bail she became one of the most important figures in the Black Movement and certainly the key figure in the movement to free black political prisoners. As she wrote in her autobiography, it was to this movement that she planned to dedicate the rest of her life.
Angela Davis had grown up surrounded by the bigotry and poverty of the South, yet her family had been comfortably middle class. Just at the height of the Civil Rights Movement (during which a childhood friend of her sister’s died in a church bombing), she went off to a private school in New York. As the Black Movement and the urban riots were getting under way she was in Frankfurt studying Hegel and Marx. Throughout her life she had always been unmistakably removed from the struggles of her people, by education, money, and opportunities. When she finally plunged herself into Movement activity, she reached right over all of the possible issues that might have been considered relevant to her own experience to the issue of the plight of the black male “political prisoner.” She even fell in love with a man who had made it eminently clear that he considered black women enslaving.
It always starts with mama, mine loved me. As testimony of her love, and her fear for the fate of the manchild all slave mothers hold, she attempted to press, hide, push, capture me in the womb. The conflicts and contradictions that will follow me to the tomb started right there in the womb. The feeling of being captured … this slave can never adjust to it. (George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, New York: Bantam Books, 1970.)
But I understand Angela Davis’s choice much better than I often care to admit. When I read George Jackson’s Soledad Brother and Gregory Armstrong’s book about him, The Dragon Has Come (New York: Harper and Row, 1974.) everything I was doing with my own life seemed meaningless measured against the sufferings that had been inflicted upon him. I think of Angela Davis as a person driven by a sense of mission—totally committed to alleviating some of the pain inflicted upon people in this world.
I met her once waiting for an elevator at Random House, where I worked as a typist. Immediately she wanted to know who I was, what I was doing there. I was struck by her directness, her openness, her innocence, her rawness. Although I was only twenty-one and painfully insecure, I felt strangely protective of this handsome, statuesque, very famous young woman.
What I am getting to is that there are two ways to look at Angela Davis. I admire her immensely as an individual for turning her feelings of guilt toward a constructive purpose—something privileged black women have rarely done. It is the use of her image by the Black Movement that I rebel against. Angela Davis, a brilliant, middle-class black woman, with a European education, a Ph.D. in philosophy, and a university appointment, was willing to die for a poor, uneducated black male inmate. It was straight out of Hollywood—Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart.
For all her achievements, she was seen as the epitome of the selfless, sacrificing “good woman”—the only kind of black woman the Movement would accept. She did it for her man, they said. A woman in a woman’s place. The so-called political issues were irrelevant.
Nikki Giovanni, a kind of nationalistic Rod McKuen, was the reigning poetess of the Black Movement during the sixties. Most of us remember her best for poems like this one written in 1968:
Nigger
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a nigger kill
Can a nigger kill a honkie
Can a nigger kill the Man
Can you kill nigger
Huh? nigger can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-jew
Can you kill huh? Nigger
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your ’68 El Dorado
(that’s all they’re good for anyway)
Can you kill
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it off
Can you kill.…
(Nikki Giovanni, “The True Import of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro,” Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement, New York: William Morrow, 1970.)
She attached herself to a black poets’ movement in New York that had been started by LeRoi Jones. The poems generally exhorted blacks to return to their roots and to partake in revolutionary action like killing honkies. There were a great many men and very few women involved; Giovanni was one of the few that lasted.
She had a remarkable facility for riding the tide of public opinion. When it became obvious that (1) the black male poets were going to shut her out and that (2) she could not depend upon a black female audience as long as her poems advocated outright violence, she began to speak positively of the church and to focus more on having babies and loving the black man. Her albums sold quite well. She herself had a baby and refused to disclose the name of the father. Early in the seventies she told young black women to become mothers because they needed something to love. She also told young black people that school was useless and a waste of time—despite her own years of education at Fisk University. Soon after, she backed away from these positions, amending her original statement about having babies to you-should-only-have-one-if-you-could-afford-to-take-care-of-it-like-she-could, and actually encouraging blacks to go back to school. Concomitantly, she began to make a lot of money on the college lecture circuit. She received an award for her work with youth from the Ladies’ Home Journal. It was presented by Lynda Bird Johnson on national television.
Both Davis and Giovanni represented the very best black women had to offer, or were allowed to offer, during the Black Movement. They carved out two paths for women who wished to be active. Davis’s was Do-it-for-your-man. Giovanni’s was Have-a-baby. Neither seemed to have any trouble confining herself to her narrow universe.
Unfortunately, and I believe unintentionally, Davis set a precedent for black female revolutionary action as action that could never be self-generated. When I visited Riker’s Island several years ago, I met a few female revolutionaries suffering the consequences of that example. The run-of-the-mill female prisoner was there because of her man—her pimp, her dope supplier, or the man she had accompanied on a stickup. The political women were there for the same reason.
But only the most adventurous were ready to follow Angela Davis’s lead. The majority took Nikki Giovanni much more seriously. She was the guiding light for those who had been left behind in the flurry and chaos of the revolution. No doubt she prompted many by word and deed to have babies so that they could have “something to love.” By the time she advised them later to first make sure they had enough income to support the child, a lot of women were already on welfare. Giovanni did her bit to encourage the view of black men as sex symbols.
Beautiful Black Men
(With compliments and
apologies to all not
mentioned by name)
i wanta say just gotta say something
bout those beautiful beautiful beautiful outasight
black men
with they afros
walking down the street
is the same ol danger
but a brand new pleasure
sitting on stoops, in bars, going to offices
running numbers, watching for their whores
preaching in churches, driving their hogs
walking their dogs, winking at me
in their fire red, lime green, burnt orange
royal blue tight tight pants that hug
what i like to hug …
(Giovanni, Black Feeling.) (1968)
Yet she could also write, in “Woman Poem”:
you see, my whole life is tied up to unhappiness …
it’s having a job
they won’t let you work
or no work at all
castrating me
(yes it happens to women too)
it’s a sex object if you’re pretty
and no love
or love and no sex if you’re fat
get back fat black woman be a mother
grandmother strong thing but not woman
gameswoman romantic woman love needer
man seeker dick eater sweat getter
fuck needing love seeking woman.…
(Giovanni, Black Feeling.)
Although she rarely chose to reflect it in her work, Giovanni did realize the black woman’s dilemma to some extent. A line from one of her later poems is unfortunately more typical: “what i need to do/is sit and wait/cause i’m a woman …” (Nikki Giovanni, “All I Gotta Do,” The Women and the Men, New York: William Morrow, 1975.)
As we can see in Giovanni’s “Woman Poem” there was some low-key directionless complaining and grumbling among black women in the sixties. But they put more energy into their fight against Women’s Liberation than into anything else. Hardly a week passed during the late sixties and early seventies when there wasn’t an article on how black women felt that Women’s Liberation was irrelevant to them because they were already liberated.
The black woman had been rendered invisible. She was not allowed to participate in political planning. She was also not allowed to go to the hairdresser or church, to attend most clubs, or to participate in sororities, all of which had been declared counterrevolutionary. It could only be said with certainty that she hated white women, hated Women’s Liberation, that she was having babies for the revolution, and that she wanted a man who would provide for her and keep her in a manner to which she had never been accustomed. She became a distinctly reactionary creature. She sat silently by as Eartha Kitt, who had spoken out in the White House against the Vietnam War, and two other politically minded singers, Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba, were virtually banned from performing in this country. It was Aretha Franklin who read her mind: “I don’t want nobody always sitting right there looking at me and that man.” (Aretha Franklin and Ted White, “Dr. Feelgood [Love Is a Serious Business],” Aretha Franklin in Paris, Atlantic Records, 1968.) And that included all women, black or white.
She seemed to think this suicidal course would win her black man back. It drove him further away. In the past the black woman had always provided the black man with an atmosphere in which he was treated as the equal of any man. That included resisting him when he was wrong. Now the black woman was making excuses for him, treating him like a very bad child and herself like a doormat. What use had he for her now? She seemed to make his inferiority a certainty by her very existence.
They were always there…. Those classifying signs that told you who you were, what to do. More than those abrupt and discourteous signs one gets used to in this country—the door that says “Push,” the towel dispenser that says “Press,” the traffic light that says “No”—these signs were not just arrogant, they were malevolent: “White Only,” “Colored Only,” or perhaps just “Colored,” permanently carved into the granite over a drinking fountain. But there was one set of signs that was not malevolent; it was, in fact, rather reassuring in its accuracy and fine distinctions: the pair that said “White Ladies” and “Colored Women.”
The difference between white and black females seemed to me an eminently satisfactory one. White females were ladies, said the sign maker, worthy of respect. And the quality that made ladyhood worthy? Softness, helplessness and modesty—which I interpreted as a willingness to let others do their labor and their thinking. Colored females, on the other hand, were women—unworthy of respect, independent and immodest. (Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” The New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1971.)
dark phrases of womanhood/ of never havin been a girl half-notes scattered/ without rhythm no tune distraught laughter fallin/ over a black girl’s shoulder it’s funny it’s hysterical/ the melody-less-ness of her dance don’t tell nobody don’t tell a soul she’s dancin on beer cans & shingles this must be the spook house/ another song with no singers lyrics, no voices & interrupted solos/ unseen performances are we ghouls?/ children of horror? the joke?/ don’t tell nobody don’t tell a soul are we animals? have we gone crazy? i can’t hear anything/ but maddening screams & the soft strains of death/ & you promised me you promised me …/… you promised me somebody/ anybody/ sing a black girl’s song bring her out/ to know herself/ to know you but sing her rhythms/carin/ struggle/ hard times sing her song of life/ she’s been dead so long closed in silence so long/ she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice/ her infinite beauty she’s half-notes scattered/ without rhythm no tune sing her sighs/ sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel/ let her be born let her be born…. (Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf: A Choreopoem, New York: Macmillan, 1977.)
The black woman never really dealt with the primary issues of the Black Movement. She stopped straightening her hair. She stopped using lighteners and brighteners. She forced herself to be submissive and passive. She preached to her children about the glories of the black man. But then, suddenly, the Black Movement was over. Now she has begun to straighten her hair again, to follow the latest fashions in Vogue and Mademoiselle, to rouge her cheeks furiously, and to speak, not infrequently, of what a disappointment the black man has been. She has little contact with other black women, and if she does, it is not of a deep sort. The discussion is generally of clothes, makeup, furniture, and men. Privately she does whatever she can to stay out of that surplus of black women (one million) who will never find mates. And if she doesn’t find a man, she might just decide to have a baby anyway.
Although black women have been having babies outside of marriage since slavery, there are several unusual things about the current trend among black women. Whereas unmarried black women with babies have usually lived with extended families, these women tend to brave it alone. Whereas the black women of previous generations have generally married soon after the baby was born, these women may not and often say they do not wish to. Whereas the practice of having babies out of wedlock was generally confined to the poorer classes of black women, it is now not uncommon among middle-class, moderately successful black women. A woman may pick a man she barely knows, she may not even tell him he is going to be a father or permit him to ever see the child. While I don’t believe that anything like a majority of black women are going in for this, it is worth finding out why so many black women have, why so many are saying, “Well, if I don’t marry by the time I am thirty, I’ll have a baby anyway.”
It certainly can’t be for love of children. I am inclined to believe it is because the black woman has no legitimate way of coming together with other black women, no means of self-affirmation—in other words, no women’s movement, and therefore no collective ideology. Career and success are still the social and emotional disadvantages to her that they were to white women in the fifties. There is little in the black community to reinforce a young black woman who does not have a man or a child and who wishes to pursue a career. She is still considered against nature. It is extremely difficult to assert oneself when there remains some question of one’s basic identity.
The Women’s Movement redefined womanhood for white women in a manner that allowed them to work, to be manless, but still women. White women replaced some of their traditional activities with new ones—consciousness raising, feminist meetings and demonstrations, the Women’s Political Caucus, campaigns for Bella Abzug and other feminist politicians, antidiscrimination suits against employers, and the pursuit of an entirely new range of careers. And some white women dragged their men right along with them, not to mention a good many black men.
But the black woman, who had pooh-poohed the Women’s Movement, was left with only one activity that was not considered suspect: motherhood. A baby could counteract the damaging effect a career might have upon her feminine image. A baby could even be a substitute for a man. A baby clarified a woman’s course for at least the next five years. No need for her to bother with difficult decisions about whether or not she ought to pursue promotion or return to school for an advanced degree, both of which might attract even more hostility from black men. Her life had been simplified. Instead of confronting the problems that are presently repressing the black family, instead of battling with her fear of success, she could pursue her individual course which would allow her to make a provisional peace with herself. Never mind the bad odds under which her baby entered the world. In her less than serious moments she could even imagine that there was something liberated about what she had done.
I have a friend whose cousin is at Howard University now. She says that Howard men still insist that their women be light and have long hair. Whereas white women begin to complain about all the decent men being married when they reach their thirties, black women begin this complaint upon graduation from college.
Some young black women are beginning to be honest about seeing themselves as victims rather than superwomen. The pain and isolation set forth in Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide was recognized by many as the bitter truth about their condition. Having decided not to play the role society has alloted them, an alarming number of black women go one disastrous step further. They become angry with black men, black people, blackness; it is simply a new way of blaming someone else for their underdevelopment. It rarely occurs to them that if things are not going well, they ought to take a leadership role in correcting them. The first impulse of upwardly mobile black women to pursue an advanced education, a higher salary, to become a professional, is not motivated by a desire to improve the lot of their race, but by a desire to break away from all its accessories of humiliation and guilt.
Their problems arise from the fact that they are living in the transformed world of the liberated woman at the same time they continue to scorn liberation. But liberation is nothing more than responsibility, responsibility for setting the tone of one’s own life and standing by it.
When I was a newborn infant, my mother used to wonder why I was always scratching. It wasn’t long before the cause became evident: I had eczema, a then incurable skin condition which causes peeling, flaking, and scabs. As I got older, it got worse. I was uglier than anyone or anything; I was positive of that. Other children were afraid to touch me. I greeted new schoolmates with “Don’t worry, it isn’t contagious.” Boys treated me like a leper. It was probably the reason, I now realize, I always preferred to stay inside and read, to be near my mother.
As I approached puberty, it spread to my face. I was the only kid in the seventh grade who didn’t have eyebrows. Because I was always chip dry, I had to put a lot of creams on my skin, couldn’t go swimming or tumble around in the dirt. There wasn’t a single moment of my life that I wasn’t acutely aware of my skin, not only because of its effect on my social life but also because it was constantly itching, burning; I always felt dirty and uncomfortable. It was my excuse for everything—even for why I didn’t do my homework.
When I was thirteen, I was sent to a famous dermatologist, who cured me completely in three weeks. My skin was not only clear, it seemed perfect. I remember people used to stop me on the street to ask me what I used on my skin. Suddenly I was beautiful, but my perception of myself had not adjusted to the change in my appearance.
I had grown up feeling wounded, marked, victimized, scarred, and the mere removal of my eczema had not altered that sensibility. The sense of being handicapped, of having a right to special considerations, never left me. When people complained about my lateness or my seeming lack of a sense of responsibility, I was always baffled and hurt. Didn’t they understand that I couldn’t be expected to perform as if I were healthy?
I think that the black woman thinks of her history and her condition as a wound which makes her different and therefore special and therefore exempt from human responsibility. The impartial observer may look at her and see a beautiful, healthy, glowing, vigorous woman but none of that matters. What matters is what she feels inside. And what she feels inside is powerless; she feels powerless to do anything about her condition or anyone else’s. Her solution is to simply not participate, or to participate on her own very limited basis.
Yes, it is very important that we never forget the tragedy of our history or how racist white people have been or how the black man has let us down. But all of that must he set in its proper perspective. It belongs to the past and we must belong to the future. The future is something we can control. When I began this book, I thought it would be about what the black woman is, but this book has turned out to be about what has happened to her. She has yet to become what she is.
Lately I’ve noticed the appearance of a number of black women’s organizations and conferences. The middle-class black woman in particular is beginning to address herself to feminist issues. But everything I’ve seen so far has been an imitation of what white feminists have done before. I now hear students refer casually to a Black Women’s Movement. But I haven’t seen black women make any meaningful attempt to differentiate between their problems and the problems of white women and, most important, there seems to be no awareness of how black women have been duped by the Myth of the Superwoman. Some black women have come together because they can’t find husbands. Some are angry with their boyfriends. The lesbians are looking for a public forum for their sexual preference. Others notice that if one follows in the footsteps of the white feminists, a lucrative position or promotion may come up before long.
These women have trouble agreeing on things. Their organizations break up quickly and yet more keep forming. Every now and then someone still mentions that white women are going to rip them off if they join the Women’s Movement—that is, white women will use their support to make gains and then not share with the black women. Unfortunately, this is probably true. It would be true of any movement the black woman joined in her present condition, that is, without some clear understanding of her priorities. The black woman needs an analysis. She belongs to the only group in this country which has not asserted its identity.
Early in 1978 there was a series of articles in The New York Times on the changes in the black community since 1968. It covered the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Movement, the economic and social situation for blacks today. Never once did it mention the contribution black women made to the Civil Rights Movement. The article spoke of three Americas: one white, one middle-class black, one poor black. No particular notice was given to the fact that that poor black America consists largely of black women and children. It was as if these women and children did not exist.
The history of the period has been written and will continue to be written without us. The imperative is clear: Either we will make history or remain the victims of it.