Tag Archives: black history

Black Women Whose Names Should Be Household Words: An Ongoing Series

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Debbie says:

Redoshi (also known as Sally Smith) should be universally known and  venerated for what she endured — and how she endured it. Michael Harriott, writing at The Root, identifies Redoshi as the last survivor of American slave trading. Until recently, this “honor” was generally given to Oluale Kossola (aka Cudjo Lewis), who died in 1935 and is memorialized in Zora Neale Hurston‘s Barracoon, published in 2018, many years after Hurston’s death.

Redoshi lived until 1937. Her story has been uncovered by Dr. Hannah Durkin. LIke Kossola, Redoshi was brought here on the illegal slave ship Clotilda in 1860, 52 years after importation of human chattel from Africa had been outlawed. After emancipation, she stayed with her daughter on the plantation where they had been property. In her later years, she became active in the early the civil rights movement

Durkin’s research should not be groundbreaking. All of this has been known before.

Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Redoshi during Hurston’s initial work on Barracoon. Durkin found film of Redoshi, which is the only known footage of a survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. Civil rights pioneer Amelia Boynton even mentioned Redoshi in her memoir, a fact that underscores the erasure of black history—especially the history of black women.

Although most of the information was publicly available, Durkin’s work, published in the Journal of Slavery and Abolition, tells Redoshi’s story in a narrative that was previously inaccessible. Durkin paints the picture of a complex woman and the brutality of chattel slavery by telling the story of one of the few people on earth to endure African abduction, chattel slavery and emancipation.

In the context of remembeing and honoring Redoshi, Harriott also calls out Amelia Boynton (Robinson), another black woman whose name should be a household word.

Here’s Harriott again:

Redoshi’s name is as forgotten to some as the work of Boynton, who was quite literally one of the founders of the modern civil rights movement. She became one of the first black registered voters in Alabama in 1934 and began teaching other black voters how to pass the then-legal literacy tests for voter registration. She became the first black woman from Alabama to run for Congress. And when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. showed up for the “Bloody Sunday” Selma to Montgomery march, it was Boynton who made the call.

Say their names.

Black Women Whose Names Should Be Household Words: An Ongoing Series

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Debbie says:

When I wrote about Lucy Parsons, I mentioned Pauli Murray in passing. Her name came up again in conversation recently, making me want to write more about her here. It is really hard to do justice to Murray’s legacy. Murray was a lawyer, a women’s rights activist, an author, and the first African-American woman to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church.

According to Wikipedia:

In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers’ Defense League, led her to pursue her career goal of working as a civil rights lawyer. … Murray graduated first in her class, but she was denied the chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University because of her gender. She earned a master’s degree in law at University of California, Berkeley, and in 1965 she became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School.

Thurgood Marshall called Murray’s 1950 book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, the “bible” of the civil rights movement. In 1966 she was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Murray held faculty or administrative positions at the Ghana School of Law, Benedict College, and Brandeis University.

An important mentor of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she is featured in On the Basis of Sex, the (fictionalized) story of GInsburg’s first gender equality case, but is not mentioned in The Notorious RBG.

Again from WIkipedia:

Murray struggled in her adult life with issues related to her sexual and gender identity, describing herself as having an “inverted sex instinct”. She had a brief, annulled marriage to a man and several deep relationships with women. In her younger years, she occasionally had passed as a teenage boy.

Murray coined the term “Jane Crow” for gender equivalents to the restrictive “Jim Crow” policies of post Civil War “reconstruction.” A relatively new biography, Jane Crow: The LIfe of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg, identifies Murray as, among many other things, transgender.

I find it impossible to think about Murray without wishing I had known her.

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