Page 1 →One “To Embalm Her Memory in Song and Story”

Although my assumptions about memory in this book are shaped by conversations within the richly interdisciplinary field of memory studies, I ground my analysis in the concept of “public memory” as it has been articulated in my own field of rhetorical studies. Memory studies is a well-established line of interdisciplinary humanistic inquiry.¹² The field boasts dedicated journals such as Memory Studies, national and international conferences, and numerous monographs and anthologies. According to sociologist and memory scholar Jeffery Olick and his colleagues, memory studies as an academic field stretches back at least a century.¹³ Scholars of rhetoric entered modern conversations about public memory in the 1980s and 1990s to understand how persuasive symbol use by members of the public enables them to generate shared meaning about the past.¹⁴ However, interests in memory as a rhetorical technique date back millennia, at least to the ancient Greeks, as Frances Yates and others have documented.¹⁵ The field of rhetoric thus has a historic tie to questions of memory and offers a generative contemporary vantage point from which to consider how the process of memory is formed through the public use of strategic language. The conclusions drawn from such a vantage point, I argue, are useful for scholars of memory from many different fields, especially those who consider memory as a human-driven process rather than an object or series of products.

A rhetorical approach to public memory provides a fruitful framework for exploring the case studies in this book: representative historical case studies of Black American women’s memory work. Choosing “public memory” rather than another animating term such as “historical memory,” “collective memory,” or “cultural memory” shapes my interpretation of the texts I examine. I have argued elsewhere that, deployed in this way, public Page 6 →memory functions as a hermeneutic rather than a descriptor for some objective category of phenomena.¹⁶ Public memory highlights how people use rhetoric in public spaces to advance collective visions of the past that seek to accomplish something in the present and future. To put it slightly differently, public memory is “an actively reinterpreted resource for action in the present and future, negotiated by public discourse.”¹⁷ Using the lens of public memory illuminates how groups of people use language deliberately to construct, revise, and deploy accounts of the past to accomplish certain shared goals. Because public memory is a “highly rhetorical process” in which “memories are open to contest, revision, and rejection,” deploying the critical tools of rhetoric enables us to better understand how this process occurs in specific texts and discourses.¹⁸

By viewing these case studies as instances of public memory, I can show not only how Black women’s memory work functions rhetorically but also how it is publicly salient, how it fosters identification, and how it provides resources for people to act together. Houdek and Phillips explained that public memory, as defined by scholars in communication and rhetoric, “entails the acts and processes, through which memories move beyond the remembering individual and become shared, passed on, and in this way, form a broader network through which people gather a sense of collectivity.”¹⁹ This definition highlights that both rhetorical “acts” such as giving speeches, forwarding petitions, and writing biographies and rhetorical “processes” such as the transmission of Black hero stories from generation to generation should be considered part of the broader formation of public memory. It also draws attention to the movement of memories from individuals to the broader public. This emphasis on publicity is also central to rhetoric scholars. As Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott explained, the descriptor “‘public’ situates shared memory where it is often the most salient to collectives, in constituted audiences, positioned in some kind of relationship of mutuality that implicates their common interests, investments, or destinies, with profound political implications.”²⁰ Part of my argument in this book is that Black American women’s memory work, whether manifested in more straightforward rhetorical acts such as speeches or less obvious efforts such as editing biographical sketches, is publicly significant. Approaching these case studies as examples of public memory further advances that argument. Focusing on public memory also invites us to consider how people deploy rhetorical strategies to transform individual recollections into shared memories that foster identification. Personal recollections and firsthand memories are especially important for understanding Page 7 →the history of Black Americans, whose accounts have been intentionally suppressed and undermined by White hegemonic memories. Finally, public memory reveals how shared understandings of the past can, in Houdek and Phillips’s words, “form a broader network through which people gather a sense of collectivity” and thereby establish a basis for people to act together. Although the memory work itself does not always constitute activism, it often lays the groundwork for future activism based on a common narrative.

In Community and Critique, I consider public memory as a rhetorical process, and I introduce the term “memory work” to pinpoint the rhetorical labor undertaken within that process. Rhetoric itself supplies many of the crucial tools for memory work. The Black women gathered in this book—many of them educated members of the Black middle class—knew these tools. Whether unable to read like Sojourner Truth, self-educated like Maria W. Stewart, or having earned a doctorate like Anna Julia Cooper, Black American women deliberately deployed rhetorical tools to accomplish their persuasive goals. By considering Black women’s practices as memory work, I emphasize the sustained effort, rhetorical skill, and collective knowledge that they invested in influencing shared understandings of the past. I also use the term “memory work” to encompass rhetorical activities that both lay the groundwork for activism and constitute the activism itself. A speech to fellow African Americans at a religious gathering may not have directly advocated for specific social changes, but it may have marshaled the names of women leaders to encourage female listeners to view themselves as agents capable of working for change. A petition to Congress opposing a harmful monument, on the other hand, more directly agitated for changes in how we remember. As memory work, however, both rhetorical acts cultivate an orientation toward public activism. Typically, studies of memory foregrounding an activist function have focused on memories as resistance. Although I am certainly interested in forms of resistive memory, a central argument of this book is that memory work is more than just resistance. Memory work is more capacious than existing concepts such as “counter-memory” or critical memory, which articulate themselves directionally toward dominant memories. Memory work can be used to create space for survival, to build community, and to cultivate joy. As a chorus of contemporary activists have affirmed, the work of social change is and must be about all of these things simultaneously.²¹

The concept of “memory work” has not been widely theorized or applied in the field of rhetorical studies. It has been used sporadically by scholars in fields as varied as geography, history, and education.²² In an Page 8 →early articulation of the concept, cultural historian Annette Kuhn described memory work as “an active practice of remembering which takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re )construction through memory.”²³ Kuhn’s interests in memory and her development of the method she called “memory work” stemmed from her commitments as a feminist historian prioritizing what Joan Wallach Scott has called “the evidence of experience.”²⁴ My use of the term “memory work” resonates with Kuhn’s usage insofar as both articulate a feminist approach to inquiry, and both view memory as an active process of reconstruction. However, whereas Kuhn and others in this vein characterize memory work as an individual research method or practice, I use it to describe a form of intentional rhetorical practice undertaken by a collective. As such, the term “memory work” strikes a useful balance of scale between the perilously broad “public memory” and narrower concepts such as “counter-memory.” It functions thus as a generative conceptual guide rather than a specific method.

The concept of “memory work” also trains our attention on the rhetorical agency of those doing the work—in this case, Black American women. Centering Black women as active agents performing memory work and thereby shaping public memory addresses the gap in scholarship on US memory, which has previously focused more on Black women as objects of memory than agents of memory.²⁵ Even scholarship that intentionally foregrounds the intersections of race and memory dramatically underplays the role of Black women. For instance, David Blight’s influential Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory acknowledged the existence of Black women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but virtually ignored their vigorous public efforts to shape memories of slavery, especially in the 1890s when they were actively speaking on the subject.²⁶ Historical studies of race and memory during other time periods, such as Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford’s edited collection The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, do feature essays focused on memories of African-American women but not primarily as producers of memory.²⁷ Other scholarship in this area focuses on commemorations of Black men from Crispus Attucks to Booker T. Washington to Malcolm X.²⁸ Historical studies dedicated to remembrances of Black women, such as Milton Sernett’s Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History, are rare and do not necessarily pay sustained attention to Black women as agents of memory.²⁹ Edited collections and monographs in the field of rhetorical studies have also noted the intersections among rhetoric, memory, and race but do not center Black women in a deliberate and sustained fashion, whether as Page 9 →subjects worthy of remembrance or as agents advancing certain memories.³⁰ Using the term “memory work” builds agency into the book’s conceptual framework and enables me to affirm Black women as rhetorical agents engaged in skilled and savvy efforts to influence public memory.

Community and Critique represents an effort to understand Black American women’s historical memory work on its own terms as much as possible. As Kent Ono has argued, this effort requires that I locate the discourse within a “contextual field,” which refers to the “situating elements used to make sense of the rhetorical text, texts, intertexts, transtexts, paratexts, or even ‘discourse formations’ under study.” A contextual field is “actively put into relation to a given rhetoric or rhetorical texts as a heuristic, specifically to generate analytic and hermeneutic possibilities and further imagine rhetoric’s effectivity.”³¹ Two key contextual fields that guide my analysis are conceptualizations of Black American memory and the Black feminist tradition. Taken together, these bodies of thought illuminate the ways in which memory work in Black communities and by Black Americans serves distinctive rhetorical functions. Considering these contextual fields also reveals how Black women’s memory work grows out of, and yet is a unique expression of, African-American memory more generally.

Before I proceed to discuss three key influences on my understanding of Black memory work, I will provide a note on terminology. Throughout Community and Critique, I generally use the terms “Black” and “Black American” to refer to African-descended people living in the United States. The more inclusive term “Black” typically denotes a racial group including people of any nationality or ethnicity who live in all but the northernmost regions of the continent of Africa or are descended from the people of that region. The term “Black” most strongly invokes the people or cultures of the African diaspora. Because my analysis focuses on African-descended women in the United States, I will use both “Black” and “Black American” to describe these speakers and writers. For variety and readability, I will also occasionally use the term “African American” to denote the same identity. I recognize that some people use “Black” to denote a racial category and “African American” to refer to an ethnicity and cultural group. I use the terms “Black” and “African American” interchangeably, because recent polling and personal experience indicate that people of African descent in the United States are evenly split on their preferences for these labels. A 2019 Gallup Poll of African-descended Americans found that seventeen percent Page 10 →of survey respondents preferred the term “Black,” eighteen percent preferred “African American,” and sixty-four percent claimed to have no preference.³² As an adjective, such as in this section on “Black memory work,” I prefer to use the term “Black” because of its simplicity and inclusiveness. Although I use the terms “Black” and “African-American” to denote a racial and social group, I do so recognizing that this group is both socially constructed and richly diverse.³³

Although conceptualizations of memory and related terms have been intermittent and implicit in Black studies, as Christel N. Temple has observed, they have nonetheless produced important insights for scholars aiming to study memory practices that emerged from the African diaspora.³⁴ The most prominent treatments of Black memory have been developed by literary scholars in the Black studies tradition, such as Houston A. Baker, Temple, and Badia Ahad-Legardy. Because they also stem from a humanistic tradition focused on reading texts, their theorizations and analyses resonate with a rhetorical perspective.

Houston A. Baker Jr.’s “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere” offers an important reflection on memory’s political and rhetorical functions. Baker outlined the “twin rhetorics” through which Black modernity engages with the past: nostalgia and critical memory.³⁵ Baker argued that these forms of memory, which both emerge from the Black public sphere, express different relationships to revolution. Nostalgia safely imprisons revolution in the past, whereas critical memory continues to fuel revolution in the present. Baker claimed that “the essence of critical memory’s work is the cumulative, collective maintenance of a record that draws into relationship significant instants of time past and the always uprooted homelessness of now.”³⁶ To illustrate the power of critical memory for the Black public sphere, Baker showed how Martin Luther King Jr. had been captured by nostalgia when he should instead be seen as “a black political radical of the first order.”³⁷ The tool of critical memory enables us to see King more fully by situating him in a relationship of continuity rather than a rupture with other Black political figures and movements. Baker’s analysis highlights the fact that public memory as a rhetorical process is shaped by the ideological and political structures of the time in which it is produced and responsive to the people by whom it is produced. For instance, representing King as a champion of colorblind unity serves White politicians seeking to appease fearful White voters while appearing to appeal to Black voters. Baker’s essay cautions readers to remain cognizant of how different forms of memory can create varied—and sometimes deeply dangerous—political results. I draw Page 11 →on Baker’s work to conceptualize the idea of critical memory work that resists dominant White memories and to show how memory work connects to Black publics.

Although not as explicitly focused on memory as Baker’s essay, Christel N. Temple’s work applies to my project because of its Afrocentric approach to Black diasporic engagement with the past. I have drawn particularly from Temple’s essay about the concept of “sankofa” and her book Black Cultural Mythology.³⁸ Both of these works plumb the deep cultural foundations excavated by Afrocentric thinkers. Long present in Black communities, Afrocentric philosophies began to play a more prominent role in the late twentieth century. The reclamation and celebration of African traditions in the US diaspora included not only words and language—especially from West African cultural groups—but ideas. A key African idea pertaining to memory is sankofa, which is both a word and an image that Temple describes as an “Adinkra communicator.”³⁹ Adinkra is a visual system of communication used by the Akan people of West Africa to convey the central ideas and values of their culture. A “communicator” such as sankofa is not a mere symbol or word but a visual representation of a complex philosophy. The word sankofa is often translated as “go back and fetch it” or “it is not taboo to go back and retrieve what you have forgotten or lost.”⁴⁰ The visual representation of this idea is a bird turning its head backward and opening its beak toward a round object on its back, perhaps an egg or a seed. Together, this word and image have given birth to a diasporic practice by Black Americans that builds collective bonds through acknowledgment of and education about the past. Temple argued that Black communities have deployed this communicator with “fascinating and creative agency” to “define [their] experience through the naming of schools, bakeries, beauty products, businesses, rites of passage programs, and more.”⁴¹ Although the Black women whose rhetoric is examined in this book did not explicitly invoke sankofa to describe their activities, their memory work resonates strongly with the tradition.

Christel N. Temple’s theorization of Black cultural mythology also begins from an Africana foundation to develop a framework for understanding how Black diasporic communities have constructed mythologies that ensured their survival and flourishing. Although Temple’s operative term is mythology, memory figures prominently in her framework. Her opening chapter defines Black cultural mythology as “a renewed approach to stabilizing cultural memory that collectively ensures the preservation and recollection of African American and broader diasporan legacy using conceptual Page 12 →tools to actively engage the culturally relevant past.”⁴² Temple argues that this approach is especially essential for Black diasporic communities in societies in which they are the minority and in which their place in the society is overdetermined by the history of chattel slavery, such as the United States.⁴³ The framework seeks to rehabilitate the concept of mythology within an Africana worldview so that it can help us understand the distinctive practices that Black communities have used to survive in a society that has persistently sought to alienate them from their history and their agency. Temple’s ambitious project—especially her excavation and reframing of key thinkers in mythology—illustrates the importance of considering Black engagement with the past on its own terms as much as possible rather than subjecting it to misreading through a hegemonic White worldview. Temple’s framework is furthermore valuable for my project, because it demonstrates that Black women such as Maria W. Stewart have served crucial roles in theorizing and contributing to Black cultural mythology. Although the broad contours and commitments of Temple’s framework parallel the analysis in this book, her framework does not substantively engage with Black feminism. Therefore, instead of applying Temple’s framework holistically, I use specific attributes of the framework, such as “hero dynamics” and “ancestor acknowledgment,” to illuminate how Black women’s memory work often aligns with Afrocentric memory practices.⁴⁴

Finally, Badia Ahad-Legardy’s conceptualization of “Afro-nostalgia” supplies a rationale for reading the positive, productive functions of Black memory work without ignoring its painful exigencies. Ahad-Legardy recuperates the idea of nostalgia on behalf of fellow African Americans, for whom such “‘pretty’ modes of memory” had been previously thought unavailable.⁴⁵ Afro-nostalgia serves as “a lens through which we can conceptualize the desires of the African-descended to discern and devise romantic recollections of the past in the service of complicating the traumatic as a singular black historical through line.”⁴⁶ Ahad-Legardy’s analysis challenges the idea that nostalgia is a luxury of the privileged—whether White people or the Black elite—to show that it is, in fact, an important aspect of Black American culture writ large. Like Christel N. Temple’s formulation of Black cultural mythology, Ahad-Legardy’s concept of Afro-nostalgia expands the understanding of how Black people relate to the past beyond the bounds of trauma. Afro-nostalgia thus becomes a positive cultural practice that “lace[s] the gaps of historical memory with pleasure-inducing affect—not by rewriting the past but by embracing nostalgia’s imaginative capacity to rehabilitate the black historical past and refashion the present.”⁴⁷ Although Page 13 →Ahad-Legardy’s analysis of Afro-nostalgia focuses on contemporary examples, the concept is generative for the study of historical examples as well. In fact, because it aims to show how nostalgia functions as “a means of historical pleasure” in Black life, it is especially relevant for thinking about how African Americans performed memory work when memories of enslavement were fresh and the manifestations of White supremacy more brazen.

Several key themes emerge from this Black studies scholarship that resonate with my goals. First, these thinkers seek to reorient Black American memory beyond the trauma lens to account for more robust and even joyful forms of engagement with the past. As Ahad-Legardy’s work makes especially clear, such a reorientation seeks not to ignore trauma but to consider it within a larger affective landscape. Second, they consider the past as a resource to be shaped and used rather than an inert mass of objectively existing information. Considerations of memory from within Black studies largely reject the sharp distinction that some scholars—most prominently Pierre Nora—have made between history and memory to argue that the two exist in an interdependent relationship. This approach resonates with ideas that I have articulated here and elsewhere.⁴⁸ Third, these scholars affirm the existence of distinctive—though by no means monolithic—Black American memory practices. Christel N. Temple, in particular, seeks to accomplish this in a comprehensive fashion through her theorization of Black cultural mythology. Although my aims are not as sweeping as Temple’s, her work provides an important underlying justification for my project’s specific focus on Black American women’s memory work. Fourth, these scholars insist that Black Americans have consistently acted as central agents of memory, despite being ignored or misunderstood as such. The very idea of agency as the capacity for creative, effectual action proves crucial in all of the aforementioned treatments of Black memory.⁴⁹ Fifth, their work emphasizes the significant role of “heroic” individuals in Black public memory, from Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. These individuals demonstrate the possibilities of Black agency past, present, and future. Such figures are not without flaws, but their lives are deliberately presented as examples of survival, resistance, and radical imagination. The analysis in the subsequent chapters likewise recognizes the centrality of exemplary lives not as mere hagiography but as robust resources for memory work and future action. Finally, this scholarship points to an approach to time that emphasizes deep continuity among past, present, and future rather than rupture or the rejection of tradition. Moments of transformation exist, yet they are contextualized within a Page 14 →broader approach to time that seeks to connect those who have gone before with those yet to be.

Any exploration of Black women’s memory work must rely on the maps and signposts of Black feminist thought. Emerging from a long tradition of Black women thinkers, Black feminism draws our attention to Black women’s unique intersectional identities and experiences and the actions that emerge from them. Using Black feminism as a guide keeps us on the right path while leading us beyond the boundaries of Whiteness. Some of the women who have contributed to the Black feminist tradition lived before the appearance of the term “feminist” or may not have applied it to themselves because “feminism” connoted White women.⁵⁰ Although most did not self-identify as feminists, Black women of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century anticipated and built the groundwork for contemporary Black feminist thought. Many of these women engaged in memory work—both in its community and critical modes—because of their commitments to uplifting and liberating Black women. Therefore, in this book, I approach Black women’s memory work and the Black feminist tradition as symbiotic projects. Three central Black feminist ideas emerge as especially relevant to Black women’s memory work: an emphasis on agency, collaborative activism, and reframing memory beyond critique. Attention to these themes guides my analysis in the case study chapters.

Agency is a grounding concept in Black feminist thought. Patricia Hill Collins described agency as “an individual or social group’s will to be self-defining and self-determining.”⁵¹ Agency entails Black women defining their own identities and actions, resisting oppression regardless of whether such efforts were widely recognized by White oppressors, and producing valuable knowledge from their experience.⁵² Black feminist scholars such as bell hooks, Alisa Bierria, Olga Idriss Davis, and Shardé Davis have echoed Collins’s emphasis on self-determination and self-definition.⁵³ Philosopher Jennifer C. Nash has argued that these ideas are foundational to the “second-wave” Black feminism of the 1970s, including thinkers such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde. Nash said that such Black feminism is rooted in “a shared commitment to ‘self-love, self-respect, and self-determination.’”⁵⁴ Furthermore, the Black feminist emphasis on agency seeks to provide what D. Soyini Madison called “tools of resistance,” which facilitate critical engagement with hegemonic discourses.⁵⁵ Finally, Black feminist thought frames agency as Black women’s ability to interpret and Page 15 →make sense of their own actions. For instance, Collins noted that her path-breaking work in Black Feminist Thought sought to challenge the “treatment of black women as objects of knowledge by valorizing African American women as agents of knowledge.”⁵⁶ Likewise, Black feminist communication scholars Marsha Houston and Olga Idriss Davis advocated for research that treats Black women “as active agents who create and interpret their own and others’ discourse” and values “experiential data [. . .] more than experimental data.”⁵⁷ Although many of these scholars have pinpointed the importance of agency in contemporary configurations of Black feminism, an analysis of rhetorical texts from Black women of the past suggests that they also viewed testifying to and creating space for agency as a key rhetorical goal. Moreover, these women recognized that crafting memories for present and future Black women could provide resources for self-definition and action.

Black feminist thought also emphasizes the significance of collaborative, collective activism. From the mutual aid societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the Combahee River Collective, to the contemporary Black Women Radicals and the #SayHerName campaign, Black women have advocated collectively for themselves and their communities. For this reason, Community and Critique underscores the simultaneous significance of both individual and collective rhetorical actions. By tacking back and forth between individual and collective rhetorical acts, my analysis aims to reflect the insistence of Black feminist thought on communal resistance and to reveal, as Brenda J. Allen put it, “the complexity and heterogeneity of Black women’s communicative lives, even as we seek commonalities of experience.”⁵⁸ Although my analysis often engages in close readings of individual rhetorical acts, such as speeches, these are considered within the context of shared experience and collective action. Reading Black women’s memory work through Black feminism holds individual and communal agency in tension, which, in turn, enables me to avoid oversimplification and stereotyping on the one hand and simple tokenism on the other. The concept of memory work also contributes to this goal by encompassing both individual and communal rhetorical activity.

Finally, turning to Black feminist thought reframes our understanding of Black women’s memory work beyond the function of critique. As I have noted, little scholarship on public memory has been centered on Black American women’s public memory work.⁵⁹ Contemporary conversations about Confederate memorials and public school history curricula have prominently featured some Black women, such as journalist Nikole Page 16 →Hannah-Jones, but almost exclusively as critics of hegemonic White memory. Black women have undoubtedly had many reasons to criticize White memories. However, to consider only this type of intervention risks misunderstanding Black women’s memory work as only a reaction to Whiteness. Rather, Black women have also undertaken to recover, preserve, and promote memories of Blackness primarily for Black people.

Black women and the ideas they produce have often been restricted to the position of critique. Jennifer Nash explored this problem in an eloquent and compelling fashion in Black Feminism Reimagined. She explained that Black feminism has been reduced to a means of defending the concept of intersectionality as a stand-in for Black feminist thought more generally. Nash observed that the demand that Black women and Black feminist scholars—which, as she states, are not identical categories⁶⁰—constantly protect and correct is itself deeply shaped by White supremacy. The same is true of Black women’s memory work. If Black women’s memory work is purely critical and corrective, then it is again beholden to Whiteness. As Nash noted, “If the tradition [of Black feminism] is designed merely to correct, rather than to exist as its own vibrant field of debate, then it is logical that black feminists find themselves mired in the impasse of the present, one marked by the intersectionality wars that again attempt to tether black feminism to one intellectual product—intersectionality—and to reduce and collapse ‘black woman,’ ‘black feminism,’ and ‘intersectionality.’”⁶¹ By examining both the community and critical memories fashioned by Black women, this project charts the complexity highlighted by Nash and aims to engage Black women’s memory work on its own terms.

African-American women have historically engaged in what I describe as both community memory work and critical memory work. The intersecting but distinct forms of memory work performed by Black women differ primarily in terms of audience and purpose. Community memory work focuses on members of a particular group that self-identifies as a community. Communities, as Benedict Anderson explained, are not simply given but imagined.⁶² Most of Black women’s community memory work is oriented toward recovering, building, and imagining meaningful memories about and for Black Americans—especially for young people and children. This work reminds Black communities of their rich history—contrary to the narrative advanced by White supremacy—and aims to instill a sense Page 17 →of pride in that history. Community memory work is about serving Black people. Critical memory work focuses on correcting hegemonic White memories that have systematically erased or diminished Black people. It is intentionally oppositional and corrective. In some cases, it simply challenges White memories. In other cases, critical memory seeks to supplant White memories. In both cases, its primary audience is White people and often, more broadly, anyone benefitting from the privilege embedded in White memories. Houston Baker has described Black critical memory as “the very faculty of revolution,” which “judges severely, censures righteously, renders hard ethical evaluations of the past that it never defines as well-passed.”⁶³ Because of the unique audiences and goals of these two forms of memory, Black women have engaged distinctive rhetorical strategies suited to each.

The relationships between community memory work and critical memory work parallel the relationships between different spheres of Black life and activism. Like their respective purposes, the spheres in which community memory work and critical memory work occur are distinct yet intertwined. Although Black communities can be self-contained, they can also be linked to the White public sphere. Black spaces have historically provided respite from and served as incubators for activism in White spaces. As Darlene Clark Hine observed, “The primary launching site of every struggle was the community.”⁶⁴ For hundreds of years, the memory work of Black women occurred within what Catherine Squires has called enclave or counterpublic spaces. Both of these alternative contexts arise when groups are excluded from the dominant public sphere, as Black women frequently have been. The inwardly focused community memory often occurs in an enclave that hides “counterhegemonic ideas and strategies in order to survive or avoid sanctions, while internally producing lively debate and planning.”⁶⁵ The community memories gathered and stored within the safe walls of the Black family, church, or neighborhood often subsequently nourish critical memory. In contrast, counterpublic discourse engages in “debate with wider publics to test ideas and perhaps utilize traditional social movement tactics,” much as critical memory addresses dominant publics to uproot problematic memories that have taken hold there.⁶⁶ Acknowledging these varied spheres is especially important when considering the historical, rhetorical activities of women—particularly women of color—which often occurred in spaces hidden from public view.

African-American women have written memory into public discourse for hundreds of years. In 1773, Phillis Wheatley published a poem titled “On Recollection,” which praised Mneme—the Greek muse of memory—and Page 18 →the “ample treasure of her secret stores.” The enslaved⁶⁷ poet Wheatley wrote of how “the heav’nly phantom [Mneme] paints the actions done / By ev’ry tribe beneath the rolling sun.” One can easily imagine that Wheatley sought to include her own lost natal “tribe” in the realm of historical action. She spoke of memory’s ability to bring reckoning—”Has vice condemn’d, and ev’ry virtue blest.” Whereas Mneme blesses those who act uprightly, her appearance is “dreaded by the race, / Who scorn her warnings, and despise her grace.”⁶⁸ Given her own Christian piety, Wheatley could have been speaking of recollections and judgment of individual sins; yet her mention of a “race” that might dread the unpredictable eruptions of memory into the present could also plausibly serve as a veiled critique of Whiteness and chattel slavery. Wheatley’s theorization of memory in this poem evocatively suggests her understanding of its connection to both action and judgment. White intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson dismissed Wheatley’s verse as amateurish and derivative, and Black cultural critics from Edward Wilmot Blydon to Amiri Baraka scoffed at Wheatley’s supposed lack of self-determination and race consciousness.⁶⁹ Yet others—especially Black women—recognized the significance of her contribution. For example, in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Alice Walker honored Wheatley’s memory work, saying, “It is not so much what you sang, as that you kept alive, in so many of our ancestors, the notion of song.”⁷⁰

Many Black women since Wheatley have recognized the power of memory to carve out life-giving spaces for themselves, to create cohesive communities for African Americans, to instill race pride, to advocate for their rights, and to destabilize racist and sexist discourses that sought to diminish their humanity. Memory has served a particularly central role for African Americans, whose shared identity has been forged from a common diasporic experience—whether voluntary or involuntary. Many Black Americans were brought to the Americas by force and systematically deprived of the native languages, tribal affiliations, and religious practices that typically unite and sustain displaced people. When combined with carefully constructed racial hierarchies, that deprivation left many Black Americans with a sense that they had no history as a people, as a “race.”

African Americans’ supposed lack of recorded history seems to have been especially poignantly felt around the period of emancipation. In an 1863 speech to the Ohio Colored Teachers’ Association, Sarah J. Woodson (later Early) invoked the historical erasure of Blackness to exhort young people to pursue education: “We inherit from our fathers nought but subjugation and dishonor. No history records the deeds of our great and good, Page 19 →no tongue ever heralded the praise of our brave and noble. No banner was ever inscribed with the insignia of our national existence; yet our history, humiliating as it may be, is not without precedent.”⁷¹ Woodson then followed other African Americans by comparing her people’s story with that of the Israelites, “God’s chosen people,” enslaved in Egypt. A few years later in 1866, Sarah Parker Remond penned a letter to the National Anti-Slavery Standard that lamented the apparent impossibility of African-American history, saying, “What a record could the victims of this terrible hatred present against the dominant race. It will never be written. It never can be written.”⁷² These women grieved not that Black people had not acted; they grieved that no one would know. They lamented that the Black past had been systematically suppressed in public memory. Remarkably, women such as Woodson and Remond used this suppression as a motive for community activism and public advocacy. Black women understood the persuasive power of public memory, and they recognized the role that rhetoric played in constructing and circulating usable pasts.⁷³

As the examples of Wheatley, Woodson, and Remond make clear, Black women’s memory work adapted to changing historical circumstances. The time period featured in this book is a crucial moment for both the development of US public memory and the growth of Black women’s public activism, and—at the intersection of these two phenomena—the expansion of Black women’s memory work. The beginning of this time period is marked by emancipation, which ushered in dramatic changes for African Americans, from legal freedom to Black male enfranchisement and representation in all levels of government. Emancipation also brought opportunities for commemorating new freedoms and remembering centuries of bondage.⁷⁴ The conclusion of this period is signaled by the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, also called the Harlem Renaissance, which “promoted a renewed sense of racial pride, cultural self-expression, economic independence, and progressive politics.”⁷⁵ Like the sankofa bird, many Black artists, writers, and cultural leaders reached into the shared past for creative inspiration, making memory work a key piece of the movement. Black women were especially active in preserving and promoting memories during this decade. As Eric King Watts put it, the New Negro Movement was “the product of a special kairos.”⁷⁶ In this section, I highlight several important historical changes between emancipation and the New Negro Movement Page 20 →that affected how Black women approached rhetorical activism and public memory work.

Black Americans living between 1865 and 1930 were engaged in both private labor and public movements to advance their rights and resist rampant racial violence. They faced intense racial hostility, from disenfranchisement to restrictive Jim Crow laws to horrific lynchings. Beneath those flagrant forms of violence simmered the symbolic violence of White memory, through which powerful public memories of slavery coalesced. As Black Americans articulated their memories of slavery during Reconstruction, White American groups redoubled their efforts to control public memories of slavery, the Civil War, and even the founding principles of the nation.⁷⁷ The United Daughters of the Confederacy, for instance, proved remarkably successful in funding and building Confederate monuments.⁷⁸ A contemporary report by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows that Confederate memorialization efforts were most intense between 1866 and 1945, peaking in 1911 with the dedication of more than forty named sites.⁷⁹ Memorials centering Lost Cause narratives and their whitewashed accounts of slavery severely constrained the ability of Black Americans to advance their own understandings of those events.

Starting during Reconstruction and continuing through the early decades of the twentieth century, Black women’s public activism flourished.⁸⁰ Intersecting oppressions such as sexism and racism typically barred them from party politics, the polls, and many social movements. However, such discrimination did not stop their public rhetorical work of ascending lecture platforms, teaching students, writing poetry, stocking libraries, and forming associations. Through their collective action, Black women developed rhetorical and political strategies that enabled their communities to confront and survive oppression. As part of these public activities, Black women worked to preserve and promote memories that could destabilize dominant accounts. Embedded in this rhetorical work was a belief in the power of history to inspire pride in and deepen commitment to uplifting one’s community. For instance, speaking about prominent African Americans of the past, author Jessie Redmon Fauset noted in a January 1922 essay in The Crisis that “their memory must be kept green, their tale be retold that we of a later day may take fresh heart.”⁸¹ Fauset argued that remembering past engagement could fuel present activism. Despite the limited contemporary reach of the memories Black women upheld, they shared stories that resisted and offered reprieve from White representations of Black women, advanced a critique Page 21 →of hegemonic White history, and preserved critical memories for the Black women of the future.

Although this book focuses primarily on memory work beginning during Reconstruction, it is important to acknowledge that Black women’s activism preceded emancipation. Before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865, Black women, both enslaved and free, lived under the shadow of bondage. Much of their public discourse—both that oriented toward Black communities and that calling the White public to account—was focused on the horrors of slavery and the urgent need to eradicate it. Free Black women also invested their rhetorical efforts into developing support systems to enable their communities to survive in a society that ignored them or sought to destroy them. For instance, as Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson have documented, women organized more than half of the one hundred nineteen Black mutual aid societies that were active in 1838 Philadelphia, home to a thriving free Black community.⁸² Historians such as Hine and Thompson have noted the challenge of locating firsthand accounts from enslaved people, let alone stories that could be described as having risen to the level of “public discourse.” However, we should not conclude that enslaved Black women were doing nothing to preserve or build a shared past. Rather, as Hine and Thompson explained, these women “often preserved African traditions and values, which reinforced their identity as people of worth and heritage.”⁸³ Their invisible work yielded results that reverberated through subsequent generations.

Life changed for African Americans—enslaved and free—after emancipation, and with it changed Black women’s memory work. Once the urgent demand of antislavery activism no longer dominated the lives of Black Americans, energies were invested in new forms of public activity. Most important, Black Americans faced the welcome challenges of supporting and educating those emancipated from slavery, strengthening their civic institutions, improving their economic status, and—in the case of Black men—becoming informed voters and skilled elected leaders. Carla L. Peterson has noted that Black women played a critical role in this transitional time: “[B]lack women in the Reconstruction period aspired to a comprehensive political vision that would encompass the place of African Americans within the nation as a whole. To construct a place for blacks within the nation, they needed to assess not only the strengths and weaknesses that lay within domestic and community spheres but also such questions as the commonality of interests between black and white women, the Page 22 →ballot as a tool of national Reconstruction, and the function of black labor within the nation.”⁸⁴ Black women focused simultaneously on building Black communities and expanding Black access to the US public sphere. They also negotiated the tumultuous landscape of Reconstruction memory, in which groups of White Americans suppressed Black American remembrances by advancing White interpretations of the Civil War.⁸⁵

For instance, Black women played important roles in the Emancipation Day celebrations that powerfully formed Black community memory during the Reconstruction period. Thavolia Glymph has explained that such celebrations “created spaces for black people to remember individually and collectively and to construct their own history.”⁸⁶ These public celebrations, although attended and viewed by Whites, were largely orchestrated by and for Black communities. They featured a rich tapestry of activities, including original speeches, prayers, public readings, historical pageantry, musical performances, and dances. Although men dominated the speakers’ podium, women actively contributed to emancipation commemorations in ways that were deemed suitable for respectable nineteenth-century women. Research by Amber Bailey, Mitch Kachun, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie, and Leslie Schwalm has shown that women prepared food, performed in historical pageants and tableaux, and read the Emancipation Proclamation or other texts.⁸⁷ Although African-American women’s opportunities to write, speak, and publish remained limited during the nineteenth century, their participation in the diverse activities of Emancipation Day celebrations demonstrates that they played important roles in the creation and maintenance of community memory during this key period. Black women’s memory work on behalf of Emancipation Day kept that commemoration in the public consciousness in ways that eventually enabled Juneteenth to become a federal holiday in 2021.

The end of Reconstruction brought a severe constriction of the rights and opportunities that Black Americans had briefly possessed. Paradoxically, the period after Reconstruction was considered both the nadir of American race relations and a time of great growth and activity for Black women.⁸⁸ Middle-class Black women, in particular, organized numerous associations to uplift their race by providing much needed social services to their communities. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper declared the late nineteenth century the “women’s era” in 1893, and, starting in 1894, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin broadcast that moniker in her newspaper, the Women’s Era, the first produced by and for Black women. Tens of thousands of women participated in the Black women’s club movement, which historian Glenda Page 23 →Elizabeth Gilmore argued “kept civic activities and opportunities alive in the darkest days of Jim Crow.”⁸⁹ Although not widely discussed, the preservation and promotion of Black American memories supplied persuasive fuel for this movement. For instance, Black women kept Phillis Wheatley’s memory alive by creating dozens of clubs in her honor to house and support young Black working women.⁹⁰ In the early twentieth century, Black women’s behind-the-scenes memory work advanced both community and critical goals. Mary E. Jones Parrish preserved Black memories of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, writer Jessie Redmon Fauset promoted Black biographies for children, and librarian Augusta Baker prioritized Black history in children’s library collections.⁹¹ While the names of men such as Carter G. Woodson have become synonymous with the rise of Black history in the 1920s, Black women also actively advocated the teaching of Black history both to uplift Black communities and critique whitewashed versions of American history.⁹² A handful of Black women, such as Ida B. Wells and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, occupied more visible public positions as writers and activists, yet the vast majority performed their memory work in places invisible to White America and relevant primarily to Black communities.

Near the end of this time period and beyond, Black American women continued to expand their activist work from their communities to the Capitol. Black women performed memory work in a variety of roles during the 1930s and into the Black Freedom Movement, but perhaps no figures were more influential on community memory than Black teachers and librarians. Women such as Mary McLeod Bethune and Augusta Baker used their positions to advocate for Black narratives for Black children. As president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History from 1936 until 1951, educator Bethune advocated the teaching of Black history to Black children. Significantly, Bethune also served as the Director of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration from 1936 to 1944, a position to which she was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Librarian Augusta Baker pushed for the New York Public Library system to include books for Black children that had more accurate and appropriate representations of Black people. In the 1940s, Baker helped bring a special collection of books to the 135th Street Branch Library in Harlem “in an effort to acquaint Negro boys and girls with their own heritage and racial achievements.”⁹³ Baker deliberately called out the misrepresentation of Black people in public memory, insisting that “the complete picture of the Negro’s part in American life should be represented, and not just the Page 24 →nostalgic old South with its plantations and loyal servants.”⁹⁴ Baker understood the virulence of whitewashed memories and the power of children’s books to inoculate Black children against those memories’ damaging narratives. The work of women such as Bethune and Baker echoes into the twenty-first century, as demonstrated by the resurgence of debates about how racism is represented in books and curriculum for children in public institutions such as schools and libraries. These numerous examples illustrate that, from Reconstruction through the New Negro Movement, Black women have engaged consistently in both community-based and critically oriented memory work.

Informed by deep engagement with this historical context and the theoretical context of Black feminist thought, the subsequent chapters undertake a rhetorical analysis of key instances of both community and critical memory work by Black American women. Chapter 2 examines how Black women speakers strategically invoked exemplary women from the past both to persuade in the present and to build a “storehouse” of memory to inspire future action. Chapter 3 focuses on the speeches of six Black women who addressed the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women and argued for forms of commemoration centering the experiences of Black women. Chapter 4 analyzes Black women’s rhetorical activism and commemorative stewardship in the 1923 debate over a proposed monument to “the faithful mammies of the South.” Chapter 5 reads the 1926 book Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, a collection of biographical sketches by, about, and for Black women. These case studies enable me to examine instances of memory work that primarily address Black communities, those that primarily address White audiences, and those that engage in community and critical memory work simultaneously. These case studies offer worthwhile insights on their own, but they also illustrate the utility of the community and critical memory work framing.

Community and Critique demonstrates the critical power and value of Black feminist thought, through both the theorization of memory work and the analyses provided in the case studies. This is an important intervention in the field of rhetoric, which was historically dominated by “iconic” texts and “Great Men.”⁹⁵ As Olga Idriss Davis explained, “To theorize the rhetoric of African American women from the perspective of our traditional and contemporary theories is what Lorde (1983) called ‘using the Master’s tools to dismantle the Master’s house.’”⁹⁶ Using “the tools of a racist patriarchy” Page 25 →will not suffice when interpreting Black women’s discourse: Critics must consult the body of knowledge that is invested “in black women’s humanity, intellectual labor, and political visionary work.”⁹⁷ This obligation is especially acute for non-Black scholars, like myself, who read Black women’s discourse from outside of that experience. Although Black feminist thought begins with and is unequivocally centered in Black women’s experience, scholars such as Collins and Nash have argued that it is a capacious knowledge project that can build coalitions for future action, both within historical moments and across time.⁹⁸ This rich and complex project can thus embrace both nineteenth-century “race women” and twenty-first-century activists.⁹⁹ My analysis of Black women’s memory work as an expression of and contribution to Black feminist thought “places Black women across time and space in conversation with each other to theorize how Black women’s truthtelling threatens white supremacy”—a critical move advocated by Ashley R. Hall in her essay on “Afrafuturist feminism.”¹⁰⁰ This book also contributes to what Lisa Flores has described as “racial rhetorical criticism” by offering a historically grounded analysis that works to be “reflective about and engages the persistence of racial oppression, logics, voices, and bodies and that theorizes the very production of race as rhetorical.”¹⁰¹

I examine Black American women’s memory work to amplify Black women’s voices and testify to the significant role that they played in shaping our national memory about our racial past and present, which has previously been underappreciated in scholarship on memory. In part, this is a recovery project, but it also shows how, in preserving and shaping memories for their own communities, Black women preserved the possibility for rehabilitating memories in their future, which is today. This goal was not always explicit in their words, but they were working to build a storehouse of memory from which future generations might draw once more Americans recognized the centrality of Black history and Black women’s role within it. This goal is related to what Paul Ricoeur talks about in Memory, History, Forgetting as “forgetting in reserve”: Basically, even though something might recede or be forced from the broader public memory, it can still be held “in reserve” for a time that is ripe for its re-emergence.¹⁰² The story Community and Critique tells is intended to honor Black women today who continue to “go back and fetch” that past held in reserve for them by their ancestors and foremothers.¹⁰³