Page 81 →Four “The Shadows of the Past”
Black Women’s Commemorative Stewardship and the Demise of the “Black Mammy” Monument
More than a century ago, on February 28, 1923, the US Senate authorized a proposal from the Jefferson Davis Chapter #1650 of the Washington, DC, division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to build in Washington, DC, a monument to “the faithful mammies of the South.” This effort was two decades in the making, according to historian Micki McElya.1 The UDC had long cherished a desire to memorialize the enslaved women who had raised them, their mothers, and their grandmothers. Those who proposed the memorial sought not merely to preserve a particular version of the past but to shape action in the future. McElya noted, “As the UDC sought to build a memorial to the faithful mammies of the past, they hoped that the public representation of white benevolence and mutual affection might shape the behavior of contemporary black people. It would make clear their place, and keep them there.”2 The Jefferson Davis Chapter of the UDC raised funds and selected a sculptor but ultimately met defeat when their proposal died in the House of Representatives. Black opposition, especially from organized women, appears to have hastened the project’s demise. In this chapter, I show how Black women publicly opposed this “Black Mammy” monument by challenging how White Southern women had performed as “commemorative stewards” for memories of enslaved Black women. The critical memory work of these Black women Page 82 →critics made it much more rhetorically and politically difficult for White women to construct the memorial, ultimately resulting in its defeat.
In early 1923, Black women leaders and clubs issued several written protests that outlined the perils of the proposed monument. These include Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s telegram to North Carolina Representative Charles Stedman, which was reported in the New York Age on February 3; a formal protest presented to Congress on February 6 by the women of the Phyllis Wheatley Young Women’s Christian Association (PWYWCA), which was reported in the Washington Evening Star on February 7; an editorial written by Mary Church Terrell and published in the Washington Evening Star on February 10; a fictional short story penned by Maude Nooks Howard and republished in the Baltimore Afro-American on February 23; and an essay written by Hallie Quinn Brown in the April 1923 issue of National Notes, the organ of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).3 Mary Church Terrell and Hallie Quinn Brown occupied key roles in the NACW at the time, with Brown as president and Terrell as one of the honorary presidents. Through their roles and their rhetoric, they fashioned themselves as representatives of Black women across the country, who they claimed were opposed to the building of the monument. Charlotte Hawkins Brown was a prominent educator and founder of North Carolina’s Palmer Memorial Institute. The PWYWCA is a prominent Black women’s club founded in 1905 in Washington, DC.4 Howard was a writer and composer from Circleville, Ohio.5 The core texts of this chapter’s analysis were produced primarily by Black women of relatively high social status, educational attainment, and institutional power. Although Black clubwomen and educators may have driven rhetorical advocacy against the monument, there were likely other women who participated in this resistance behind the scenes through letters to the editor, private correspondence, and word of mouth.
Examining these public texts shows how Black women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century engaged in critical memory work that sought to correct harmful stories about the past and to propose more productive forms of commemoration. Although Black enclave publics engaged in their own lively debates about memories of “Mammy,” and of enslavement more generally, an examination of the public responses of Black women to the UDC proposal illustrates the rhetorical power of a coherent, consistent critique, even if that critique issued from different individuals.6 This case reveals when harmful hegemonic memories must be publicly and repeatedly countered and which rhetorical strategies have Page 83 →been used to advance such a critique. Significantly, the case of the “Black Mammy” memorial provides insight into a rare failed commemorative campaign by White Southern women and a successful oppositional campaign by Black women.7 Black women’s critical memory work proved rhetorically effective, because it helped to create a public environment in which it could no longer be assumed that the UDC had either noble intentions toward or accurate memories of “Mammy.” It demonstrated that the very people who were assumed to be most “honored” by this memorialization were, in fact, insulted. According to Black women, the true stewards of “Mammy’s” memory would honor her actual experiences, acknowledge her exploitation as a form of property, and seek justice for her descendants—in short, they would memorialize her humanity rather than that of her oppressors.
“Mammy’s” Memorial Moment
Renewed sectional divisions and racial tensions during the 1920s created a fraught atmosphere for the birth and death of the “Mammy” monument. Micki McElya has argued that the Senate’s 1923 approval of the UDC monument ought to be understood against the backdrop of several key events in the previous decade.8 In 1912, Woodrow Wilson was elected as the first Southern president since the Civil War; in 1913, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns organized the Woman Suffrage Parade; in 1919, attacks on Black communities tore across the United States in what James Weldon Johnson dubbed the “Red Summer”; and in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. These events simultaneously elevated the status of some women and revealed persistent racist undercurrents in the United States, as White suffragists excluded Black clubwomen from public activism and White supremacists attacked Black male veterans returning from the First World War.9
As a son of the South, Woodrow Wilson brought a Southern sensibility and sympathy to the presidency that created a more welcoming environment for the UDC’s memorial aspirations. Wilson was born in 1858 in Virginia and lived with his clergyman father and mother in a series of Southern cities and towns, including Augusta, Georgia; Columbia, South Carolina; and Wilmington, North Carolina. Wilson lived through the Civil War, yet, as biographer Charles E. Neu notes, “the Civil War seemed to have made little impact on him” as a privileged White child protected from the privations of war.10 Although he had initially studied the law, he eventually earned a bachelor’s degree at the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton University) and a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. He rose Page 84 →quickly through various faculty appointments until he was appointed president of his alma mater, Princeton University, in 1902, at the relatively young age of forty-five. Wilson honed his already strong oratorical skills (although not his diplomacy) in this role, and he became one of the most famous university presidents of the era. His notoriety as Princeton president helped him get elected governor of New Jersey in 1910 and, only two years later, president of the United States.11 Wilson was the first Democrat elected president in twenty years and the first Southern-born person since the Civil War.12 During the 1912 presidential campaign, Black leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter endorsed Wilson as a suitable alternative to Teddy Roosevelt, whose Bull Moose party had rejected their civil rights proposals out of hand.13 However, after Wilson entered office in March 1913, he set out to resegregate not only the White House staff but also the federal government, and “the hopes of Du Bois and the talented tenth crashed.”14 Once in the White House, Wilson hosted a 1914 screening of The Birth of a Nation and was widely known to tell “darky stories” in dialect. Kenneth O’Reilly has argued that Wilson’s public comments during this time “helped create the climate for the first major wartime riot by accusing the Republicans of ‘colonizing’ black voters in East St. Louis, Illinois, and other cities.”15 Although Wilson met with Black leaders such as Trotter and James Weldon Johnson during his eight years in office, the president never backed away from his commitment to segregation as the best policy solution to the race “problem.”
As the specter of segregation again haunted the White House, it also plagued the woman suffrage movement during the decade before the UDC’s “Mammy” monument proposal was passed in 1923. White supremacy had numerous opportunities to divide women of different racial backgrounds. In the late 1860s, White woman suffrage leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony reacted to the proposed Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by initiating a split in their movement to prioritize securing the vote for White women over Black men.16 Black women’s clubs founded in the 1890s increased their opportunities to organize and give voice to their collective priorities, which did not always emphasize the franchise to the same extent as many White women. Many Black clubwomen strategically advocated for Black male suffrage while not sacrificing their commitment to universal suffrage and thereby found themselves subjected to misrepresentation by White female activists.17 The exclusion of Black women from the women’s rights movement became increasingly visible during what Roslyn Terborg-Penn has called the “woman suffrage blitz” Page 85 →of 1910–1920.18 During that time, the movement engaged in what Belinda Stillion Southard described as “a militant campaign against Democratic members of Congress between 1913 and 1916 in a national effort to pressure Democrats to support a federal woman suffrage amendment.”19 For instance, in the Suffrage Parade of 1913, Black women were separated from White women to placate Southern suffragists.20 The exclusion of Black women was further evident in the 1919 Prison Special, “a cross-country train tour of 26 white women who had been jailed as a result of their protest activity for woman suffrage” sponsored by the National Woman’s Party.21 Both of these events, and other actions, put great pressure on President Wilson and Congress to act on the federal level. The Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1918, ratified in 1920, and protected by two critical Supreme Court decisions in 1922.22 The goal of a Constitutional amendment was finally achieved, but it came to some degree at the expense of the cross-racial coalitions that Black women (and some White women) had cultivated. Moreover, as Terborg-Penn has rightly noted, many Black women lost the vote just as soon as they won it through “state constitutional loopholes” designed to exclude African Americans.23 Nonetheless, this decades-long struggle on multiple fronts had helped African-American women build the organizational and political skills to undertake other battles, “battles where they refused to separate their identification by both race and gender,” such as the proposed “Mammy” monument.24
By the time Congress approved the UDC proposal in early 1923, the United States had been through an intense period of racial strife. A confluence of several factors contributed to this situation, including the rise of xenophobia and revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the increased migration of African Americans to northern cities, the exploitation of Black workers as strikebreakers amid labor disputes, and animosity toward Black veterans returning from World War I. Racial terror lynchings continued during this period. As the Equal Justice Initiative has painstakingly documented, between 1915 and 1940, lynchings increasingly focused on Black community leaders who resisted mistreatment and even targeted whole communities.25 The height of this racial strife was the “Red Summer” of 1919, during which at least twenty-five US cities erupted in violence, as White residents terrorized Black communities from Baltimore, Maryland, to Bisbee, Arizona. Even after this summer had ended, the violence continued into the early 1920s, with events such as the 1921 massacre of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, resulting in anywhere from thirty-six to three hundred deaths and $1.8 million in property losses.26
FIGURE 7. Sculptor Ulric Stonewall Jackson Dunbar with his model for a possible monument to the “Black Mammies of the South,” June 27, 1923. A different model, which was created by sculptor Julian George Zolnay, was identified as the design for the proposed statue in a photograph in the Washington Post on June 24, 1923. Dunbar claimed that Zolnay had copied his earlier design. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-F81-25106.
Amid these changes of the early twentieth century, various groups vied for control over public memories of slavery. The formerly enslaved stood at the center of this struggle, although their voices were often silenced. Historian Thavolia Glymph has observed that “former slaves stepped forward to articulate and remember the violence at the heart of slavery” and thereby became the “foremost narrators” of interpretations that viewed emancipation as the key outcome of the Civil War.27 White Southerners sought to discredit these individuals and suppress their accounts of slavery. By the early twentieth century, memorials centering Lost Cause tropes—such as the proposed monument’s “faithful mammy”—proliferated “as an explicit rejoinder to the memory-work of black southerners,” who had been commemorating emancipation for decades.28 It is no coincidence that this same period witnessed the highest rate of Confederate memorialization in US history; both the symbolic violence and the material violence of this era served to reinforce racial hierarchies.29 The pervasive nature of these whitewashed accounts of slavery and the powerful positions of their proponents severely limited the persuasive potential of Black Americans’ memories outside of their own communities.
Page 87 →Within their communities, however, Black women had already been developing stories that could resist and offer reprieve from White representations of Black women, advancing a critique of hegemonic White history, and preserving memories for the Black women of the future. As we saw in chapter 2, Black women named their ancestors and foremothers on public platforms. They took leadership roles in celebrating Emancipation Day and educating African-American children. They sustained Phillis Wheatley’s memory by creating dozens of clubs in her honor to house and support young Black working women.30 They worked individually, as well: 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. As Joan Marie Johnson explained, by engaging in these forms of community memory work, “African Americans did not simply react against the actions of whites; they had already established a tradition of creating their own history and monuments without which they would not have been able to fight the Mammy monument effectively.”31 Black women drew sustenance from their stores of community memories to advance critical memories of the enslavement period. The case of the “Mammy” monument highlights the important role of Black American women in shaping memories of slavery and, in particular, enslaved women, during this critical period.
African Americans protested the monument even before the Senate voted to approve the UDC proposal in February of 1923. The proposal quickly rocketed into public consciousness after Representative Stedman’s impassioned January 9 “plea” to Congress on behalf of the authorizing bill.32 A lively debate subsequently unfolded across Black and White communities about the monument—its purposes and pitfalls, the motivations of its proponents. Several national newspapers reported on Stedman’s speech, including Black outlets such as the Richmond Planet and the Omaha Monitor.33 Both Stedman’s speech and the “Mammy” monument were frequent topics in the Black press during those months. Although some individual writers and (male) community groups approved of the monument, most Black voices vehemently opposed it.34 In a January 19 editorial in the Monitor, for instance, B. B. Cowan declared, “I believe that I speak for our entire group when I say that we are astounded and bewildered . . . that such a sedate old house of representatives, republicans and democrats alike, should cast aside their masks and openly cheer such a proposition and its sponsor.”35 By February, numerous Black papers had reprinted or responded to criticisms written by Neval H. Thomas and Mary Church Terrell in the Page 88 →White Washington Evening Star on February 6 and 10, respectively.36 Writers argued that it was the wrong time to commemorate “Mammy,” that such a monument would fix Black Americans in a subservient role, and that it was a publicity stunt by the UDC.37 But the most prominent argument advanced on the pages of Black newspapers focused on the monument’s troubling irony. Numerous writers opined about the hypocrisy of White people who would move mountains to memorialize “Mammy” but refused to educate Black children, employ Black workers, or protect Black bodies from lynching. A cartoonist for the Baltimore Afro-American represented it in a clear image: A “Mammy” statue against a backdrop of well-known Washington landmarks holding out her left hand in a plea and displaying in her right hand a standard that reads, “Use that monument fund to pass a law that will STOP lynching of my children!!”38 These words imply that the intentions of the monument’s sponsors are misguided and nostalgic: The sponsors invest time and energy in commemorating the “Mammy” of a bygone era but pay no mind to her suffering descendants in the present. A reading of the Black newspapers during this time period suggests that many other African Americans felt the same.
Black Women and the Rhetoric of Commemorative Stewardship
Although the debate over the proposed “Mammy” monument ranged across many topics, the question of who was doing the commemorating and how they were doing it remained central. This theme aligns with scholarship on public memory that emphasizes the significance of the sponsor of a particular account of the past.39 Who is behind the memory, and what do they hope to achieve by it? The White Southern women of the UDC who promoted the commemoration had numerous goals. Whereas some members of the UDC, like Mary Solari, represented their project as a means of convincing “southern children” of the capacity of Black people for love and self-sacrifice, others, like Rassie Hoskins White, recognized it as way of making visible the women’s behind-the-scenes work on behalf of the Confederate (lost) cause.40 African Americans then and scholars today have argued that the purpose of the monument was, in fact, to reinforce racial hierarchies through the “Black Mammy,” the symbol of subservient and self-sacrificing Blackness. Johnson has explained: “Recognizing the power of public image to shape race relations, many African Americans found it crucial to take control over their public representations, a charge particularly enhanced by the surging popularity of the Lost Cause, a movement to honor the Confederacy. The UDC, an organization dedicated to the Page 89 →Lost Cause, dotted the Southern landscape, and even the nation’s capital, with monuments to the Confederacy. Imbedded in the meaning of these monuments was a particular telling of Southern history in which African Americans had been content as slaves and reverted to savagery without the mitigating influence of their master.”41
Such arguments about who has the authority to shape public memories are arguments about what I call “commemorative stewardship.” This concept applies the idea of stewardship—common in discourses about material matters such as finances, historic preservation, and the environment—to the more symbolic realm of public memory. Commemorative stewardship, as I have argued elsewhere, enables individuals and groups to “secure the credibility to speak on, make decisions about, and ultimately control interpretations of public memories.”42 Rhetors who are involved in controversies over public memory often rely on appeals to ethos, drawing attention to the good character, good sense, and goodwill that they have exhibited in previous efforts to interpret memory.43 Such efforts are made in an attempt to “cultivate trust among members of the public by representing themselves as committed stewards” of the past.44 The rhetoric of commemorative stewardship exhibits four central themes: It acknowledges a sense of public responsibility for specific things or people, such as enslaved Black women; it reinforces the sacredness and value of that for which the steward is responsible; it signals a commitment to shared responsibility and accountability to other stakeholders, such as White Southerners or Black women; and it asserts the steward’s significance by emphasizing their work on behalf of future generations. These themes—public responsibility, sacred value, accountability, and futurity—are present both in the UDC’s discourse in defense of the monument and in Black women’s criticism of it.45
Black women who entered the debate over the proposed monument used the rhetoric of commemorative stewardship to perform critical memory work. That is, they challenged the memory of the “faithful mammy” in part by calling into question the UDC’s credibility and intentions. Black women’s critical memory work has often confronted “disremembering,” which Glymph has described as “a conscious act of community betrayal, a deliberate act of false consciousness.”46 Beyond simply naming the content of the memory as inaccurate, identifying disremembering requires attention to the rememberer’s motives. Are they acting in good faith on behalf of the whole community? Or are they preserving false memories that only serve one group or even reinforce hierarchy and division? Although not often posed explicitly, such questions appeared to animate Black women’s Page 90 →rhetoric as they crafted public statements in opposition to the “Mammy” monument. Given their own vulnerable position when addressing a White public, Black women could not just assert that the “faithful mammy” image was false; they had to develop a more comprehensive argument that undermined the commemorative discourses on which the UDC proposed to build their monument. The rhetoric of commemorative stewardship offered a powerful rhetorical resource for doing so. My analysis of Black women’s engagement in the debate over the proposed monument traces how they criticized the UDC and reconstructed their own ethos as commemorative stewards.
As McElya, Johnson, and others have pointed out, the UDC had spent decades behind the scenes cultivating their commemorative ethos. Black women had likewise been acting as commemorative stewards, although White supremacy limited their influence primarily to Black publics and domestic and educational spaces. In this case, the proposed “commemoration” of enslaved Black women brought these two groups of stewards into direct rhetorical conflict in a way that was not often visible in public discourse at the time. Whereas the White Southern women of the UDC sought to commemorate the “faithful slaves” of Lost Cause mythology, Black clubwomen demanded an honest accounting of the exploitation of so-called “mammies.” Black women rightly pointed out that the proposed monument commemorated not what UDC member Solari called the “self-sacrifice and devotion” of individual enslaved women but the institution of slavery itself.47 These arguments relied on a critique of Southern White women’s motives: Their disremembering was a symptom of corrupt commemorative stewardship.
Public Responsibility as Goodwill
Good commemorative stewards attempt to build goodwill with their audiences by acknowledging a sense of public responsibility for a specific memory. As David Lowenthal has explained, “the traditional steward is not an owner but an agent, a keeper for another” who “cares intensely about what is in his [sic] custody.”48 Working as a “keeper for another” or a custodian requires good intentions, so that the public can trust that a memory is being stewarded for the benefit of the community. Many White Americans assumed that members of the UDC were operating from virtuous motives and thus acting as good stewards. Representative Stedman’s January 9 speech on the floor of the US House expresses this sentiment memorably. After noting that humans had long been building monuments out of “exalted sentiment Page 91 →and high ideals,” Stedman reasoned that the UDC’s proposal was even rarer and nobler: “[Y]ou will search the history of all ages in vain for the record of any people who have erected a monument to another race or to any class of that race dwelling among them to perpetuate the memory of qualities which entitle them to remembrance and gratitude.” This monument “in memory of the faithful colored mammies of the South,” Stedman argued, would become a singular and unprecedented example of memorialization that transcended racial lines. His argument worked enthymematically so listeners might conclude that any group that would seek to commemorate someone of another race or class is more virtuous than any commemorative steward in human history. In this case, the UDC was represented as such a group. According to Stedman, the righteous women of the UDC proposed to erect the monument as “a gift to the people of the United States,” deliberately siting it on “public grounds” in Washington, DC.49 Should any listener doubt the intentions of the UDC, Stedman gushed about the organization’s history, which was “resplendent with great deeds,” including caring for Confederate soldiers in life and in death.50 Stedman’s speech drew on common White views to argue that the women of the UDC were committed commemorative stewards with unimpeachable motives.
Many Black women, on the other hand, found the UDC’s motives misguided, at best, or malicious, at worst. Their arguments questioned the sense of public responsibility exhibited by the UDC by interrogating their intentions. Although some Black women gave Southern White women the benefit of the doubt when interpreting their motives, others implied that White women’s professed “care” for enslaved Black women was patronizing and possessive. In her telegram to Representative Stedman in response to his House speech, Charlotte Hawkins Brown acknowledged the presumably good motives of the UDC while condemning the memory that they promoted. She stated, “The intelligent Negro women of the South appreciate your motive in advocating some kind of a memorial to the faithful services of Negro women during slavery, but deplore the fact that it should take the form of a ‘mammy monument.’”51 The intention was good; the memory was not. Mary Church Terrell likewise carefully reframed the UDC proposal in the more flattering light of forgetting rather than blatant racism. She opined, “Surely in their zeal to pay tribute to the faithful services rendered by the [“Black Mammy”] the descendants of slaveholding ancestors have forgotten the atrocities and cruelties incident to the institution of slavery itself.” She generously reframed their negligence as a result of their “zeal” for the memory of “Black Mammies,” thereby attributing a Page 92 →more positive commemorative motive. In their eagerness to become good stewards, Terrell supposed, White Southern women ignored the reality of the memories they were supposedly stewarding. Yet the fact that Terrell chose to begin that sentence with the word “surely” suggests more than a hint of sarcasm.
The women of the PWYWCA likewise raised questions about the memorial motives of White people. They began their petition by clearly stating their opposition to the monument, testifying to the great progress of African Americans, and noting how little White Americans knew about middle-class Black people. Then, they observed that White people were selective in their memorialization: “The white Americans do not speak of their earlier decent [sic] except with sympathy and sadness. They do not raise monuments to accenturate [sic] their humble origin.”52 This petition implies that attempts to commemorate enslaved Black women are, at least, misguided, if not outright malevolent. If the desire to commemorate a group at their most afflicted moment stems from such pure motives, why hadn’t White people yet built a monument to their own less distinguished past?
Other rhetors engaged a slight variation on this theme, using a conditional argument to identify what commemorative stewards with virtuous motives should do. Conditional arguments follow from an “if” statement—the antecedent—to a “then” conclusion—the consequent. Black women reasoned, “If the members of the UDC indeed have admirable motives and a decent sense of public responsibility, then they will do these things.” This logical structure implies that a right remembrance depends not on the intention of the rememberer but on its material manifestation. Mere goodwill is not enough. By using this argument form, Black women could question the UDC’s motives without explicitly accusing White women of malicious intent.
Hallie Quinn Brown repeatedly deployed conditional argument in her statement in the NACW’s National Notes. She contended that “if the Daughters of the Confederacy are actuated by any deep reverence and gratitude for the former slave,” then they would build a monument to enslaved men who defended White homes during the Civil War against their own interests. Read in the context of Brown’s whole statement, her argument functions to expose Southern White women’s hypocrisy rather than to generously interpret their motives. The rhetorical question immediately preceding the conditional antecedent makes Brown’s message clear: “Why erect a dumb statue to the [“Black Mammy”], while thousands of living Page 93 →monuments attest the strength, the virility, they drew from the mammy’s milk—the milk of human kindness?” She used this argument structure in other parts of the statement, prompting “if they wish to salve their conscience and make amends” and “if the Daughters of the Confederacy wish to make restitution.” She followed both of these conditional antecedents with consequents recommending action. Addressing her audience of Black clubwomen, Hallie Quinn Brown could more directly interrogate the UDC’s professed public responsibility, although she still avoided explicit accusation.53
Charlotte Hawkins Brown used a similar, if less biting, strategy in her telegram to Representative Stedman. She argued, “If the fine spirited women, Daughters of the Confederacy, are desirous of perpetuating their gratitude, we implore them to make their memorial in the form of a foundation for the education and advancement of the Negro Children descendants of those faithful souls they seem anxious to honor.”54 Unlike Hallie Quinn Brown’s manifesto, Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s telegram begins with the generous assumption that Southern women are “fine spirited.” Hawkins Brown’s comment identifies a positive motive—wanting to express “gratitude”—and recommends a better means of accomplishing that goal than building a monument.
In an even less direct form of argument, Maude Nooks Howard of Columbus, Ohio explored the motives for the monument by imagining an answer to the question, “Just what would the Black Mammy say?” Howard began her fictional narrative by saying that she had been hearing about a monument to the enslaved caretaker which was to serve as “a ‘reward’ (they are calling it) for her faithfulness.” Her story paints a picture of a young girl traveling to heaven to find her departed nanny: “Angel Gabriel, swing wide dem pearly gates and page Mammy Lou for Missy Nellie Lee of Georgia.” The entire purpose of this visit is to tell the Black woman Mammy Lou about the “beautiful and costly monument” being built by Missy Nellie Lee and other White women because their enslaved caretakers were “good and faithful and true.” Like many White women before and after her, Missy Nellie Lee exhibits concern not primarily for the Black woman to whom she is indebted but for how she is perceived by that woman. Nellie draws attention to her supposedly noble intentions by traveling all the way to the afterlife to make sure Mammy Lou knows about this grand tribute. After confirming that the monument will be made of marble, Mammy Lou replies, in exaggerated “slave” dialect, “Chile, doan you’ll go’n spen’ all dat money ’cause we wuz good ‘n faithful ‘n true. Dat wa’nt nuthin’. Jesus jes’ Page 94 →teached us to lak dat, da’s all, honey. But Missy, ef yo’all wunt de ‘pinion of yo’ Mammy ’bout yo’all shownin’ ‘preciation, tell all dem Missys back dah to je’ treat dem we lef’ behin’ fa’r; quit bu’nin’ ’em quit hu’tin’ dah feelin’s; gin ’em a suar’ deal, honey, dey’s folks lak you alls; spell ma race’s name lak yo’ do eberbody’s.”55 First of all, Mammy Lou’s response subtly reminds her former charge that none of Mammy’s behavior was actually about her; being “good ‘n faithful ‘n true” was a natural expression of enslaved Black women’s faith. Mammy Lou’s conditional argument begins by acknowledging that what Missy Nellie Lee is actually after is her Mammy’s approval of her motives—her “shownin’ ‘preciation.” In effect, the argument is: “If you want me to acknowledge that you are showing appreciation to me, then you will tell other White women to treat Black people with care and respect.” Howard here uses Mammy Lou as a mouthpiece for the same logic presented by Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Hallie Quinn Brown. All three use the “if–then” or conditional argument to obliquely question the motives of the UDC. They acknowledge a potentially virtuous intent while also pointing out more meaningful possibilities for enacting a sense of responsibility to remember their “Black Mammies.”56
Memories as Sacred and Valuable
Commemorative stewards also claim to care deeply for and thereby reinforce the sacredness and value of that for which they are responsible. Whereas the first aspect of commemorative stewardship pertains to the commemorative intention, the second aspect pertains to the content of the memory itself. The women of the UDC claimed to care for the enslaved Black women of yesteryear. They advocated for an image of the “mammy” that would enshrine Lost Cause mythology and reinforce hierarchical relationships by emphasizing the sacrifice of Black women on behalf of their charges. As McElya has pointed out, the UDC campaign reinforced the sacredness and value not of Black women but of the paternalistic relationships between enslaver and enslaved that kept each “in their place.” The UDC wanted to literally place enslaved Black women on a pedestal to preserve racial hierarchies. Black women responding to the proposed commemoration criticized this version of Black “mammies,” sometimes by identifying aspects of their experience that had been omitted and other times by rejecting the image as shameful or unrepresentative of middle-class Black women. Both groups of critics pointed out that the “Mammy” monument would not tell the whole story.
Page 95 →According to Black women critics such as Terrell, Howard, and Hallie Quinn Brown, valuing the memories and lives of Black “mammies” would require an honest and holistic representation of their experience. A nostalgic image of the happy slave certainly did not meet this requirement. Terrell reminded readers of the true plight of enslaved women throughout her letter in the Evening Star. She noted the “pitiably, hopelessly helpless” position of the “Black Mammy,” and she described how enslaved Black women were often deprived of home and marriage and, instead, subjected to the sexual whims of “any . . . white man on the place who might desire her.” Terrell saved the most vivid description, however, for one of the enslaved Black woman’s greatest sorrows: The loss of her own Black children while being forced to care for the White children of her enslavers. The passage is worth quoting in full: “No colored woman could look upon a statue of a [‘Black Mammy’] with a dry eye when she remembered how often the slave woman’s heart was torn with anguish, because the children, either of her master or their slave father, were ruthlessly torn from her in infancy or in youth to be sold ‘down the country,’ where, in all human probability, she would never see them again.” By invoking imagined Black women visitors to the hypothetical monument, Terrell subtly reminded White readers that Black women’s perspectives on this supposed tribute were very different from their own. Furthermore, in this passage, Terrell emphasized the role of Black women as mothers, thereby reminding her White audience of their virtuous commitment to their own children and activating sympathy among readers who would also have valued the mother’s role. After describing in detail the common suffering of enslaved women, Terrell wondered “how any women, whether white or black, could take any pleasure in a marble statue to perpetuate her [the ‘Black Mammy’s’] memory.” She continued with this emotional appeal to female readers, saying, “One cannot help but marvel at the desire to perpetuate in bronze or marble a figure which represents so much that really is and should be abhorrent to the womanhood of the whole civilized world.”57 Although declining to specify which particular features of the figure she found abhorrent, Terrell suggested that they were numerous and should be obvious to women of different races and nations. She drew on a shared experience of womanhood to urge female readers to recognize their misunderstanding of the meaning of the monument. Rather than serving as a paean to Black women’s mothering of White children, the monument would have become a constant reminder that Black women were forced to forfeit their mothering Page 96 →responsibilities to their own children. Terrell argued that White Southern women’s deeply misguided attempt to commemorate Black “mammies” in their state of enslavement transgressed the sacredness of their memory by ignoring reality and by valorizing a relationship that was based on exploitation and cruelty.58
Maude Nooks Howard’s fictional narrative likewise suggests that the proposed monument’s account of the “Black Mammy” is inaccurate. The Mammy Lou character testifies about her own difficult experiences to correct Nelle’s incomplete memory. Although Mammy Lou does not deny that she loved and cared for her charges, she also reminds Nellie that her life included hardship and pain similar to that described by Terrell. She says, “Dey tuk ma ol’ man ‘n sol’ ‘im f’um me: I cried in de lonely hou’s of de night, honey, but I wuz good to yo’ wa’nt I? Ma purty li’l Jane, yo’all ‘members huh? Purty as a picher, wa’nt she? Ma ol’ hea’t broke w’en Mas’ sol’ huh honey, da’s why I’se heah; hom, safe ‘n happy, wid ma sweet Jesus.”59 In the fictional story reflecting many women’s real experiences, Mammy Lou’s testimony about her daughter being sold away from her convinces Nelle that Black women’s sacrifices were for their own descendants, not for their White charges or as a ploy to be memorialized in marble. By centering Mammy Lou’s own painful memory, Howard reminded readers what ought to be valued and held sacred.
In keeping with her reputation as a speaker, Hallie Quinn Brown’s rhetoric proves most dramatic and direct. Like Terrell and Howard, Brown centered the distressing experiences of enslaved Black women. Brown’s middle-class Black female audience would likely have afforded her more space for candor, and she used her signature theatrical style to fill that space. She began with biblical allusion and antithesis to highlight the hypocrisy of the would-be memorializers: “One generation stones the prophets and the next builds monuments to their memory. One generation held the [‘Black Mammy’] in abject slavery; the next would erect a monument to her fidelity.” Throughout the statement, Brown confronted the violence of slavery by declaring that it left Black women “brutalized,” “tortured in mind and body,” and ultimately “polluted through two hundred and fifty years of slavery by scions of a supposed superior people.” The system did not only affect those who were enslaved but produced “generations of oppression and suppression.”60 Brown’s statement on the monument left no doubt about what she believed would have been a more accurate account of the “Black Mammy’s” experience. Although she did not say it outright, Page 97 →the whole statement argues that what ought to be treated as sacred is the humanity of Black people both past and present.
Not all of the Black women critics of the monument believed that the enslaved woman’s experience should be remembered and honored in the way Brown advocated. Women such as the signatories of the PWYWCA petition, rather, argued that a commemoration of the “mammy” should be avoided, because it would simply represent Black women at their worst and thereby overshadow contemporary Black women who were aspiring to be their best. As middle-class Black Americans had been doing for decades before the 1920s, the PWYWCA petition emphasizes the “rapid advance” of this group and notes the relative ignorance of White Americans to this progress. Echoing the claims of Fannie Barrier Williams in her 1893 speech at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, the petition reads, “Many of the refined and the intelligent whites of America are utter strangers to the better class of our people.” Animated by the politics of respectability, this familiar argument divides both White and Black Americans along class lines, relegating racism and its effects to the uncouth and unintelligent of each racial group. The petition concludes by stating that “the Old Mammy as a slave, however well she may have performed her part as a foster mother to many of the progeny of the South, represents the Shadows of the Past.” The women of the PWYWCA objected to the representation of the “Old Mammy as a slave” because it would besmirch the reputation of those like them who had worked to separate themselves from what they perceived as a shameful history.61 Such images, the petition argues, are unpleasant reminders of the “unfortunate condition” of oppressed ancestors that can become festering “irritants” in Black women’s attempts to join in the “harmony of citizenship.” The women of the PWYWCA specifically objected to the memory of Black women as enslaved. Calling such memory an “irritant” seems dismissive, as if the recollection of the “Old Mammy” were a buzzing fly to be swatted away. This attitude aligns with early twentieth-century Black ambivalence toward memories of slavery and reveals the effects of class prejudice. Yet the petition’s argument does more than dismiss “Mammy”: It also notes the hypocrisy of White Americans who were eager to memorialize a servile role for Black women while failing to commemorate their own “humble origins” likewise as “serfs” or other unfree social positions. The women of the PWYWCA may have been ashamed of “Mammy,” yet their argument also suggests that they sought to protect her and her vulnerable offspring from unnecessary exposure by Page 98 →White Americans. They believed that doing so would help Black women of the present access the rights of citizenship.
Although more sympathetic toward the “mammy’s” experience, Charlotte Hawkins Brown relied on similar views about how certain memories of enslaved women might influence perceptions of her middle-class contemporaries. Claiming to represent “the intelligent Negro women of the South,” Brown declared that they “deplore the fact that it [a memorial] should take the form of a ‘mammy monument.’”62 By using the descriptor “intelligent,” Brown subtly invoked the same class associations as the PWYWCA while also drawing attention to her role as an educator and a representative of educated Black women. Despite their ambivalence about class dynamics, these arguments nonetheless foreground their care for Black women, albeit more of the present than the past. Both types of arguments dispute the content of the proposed monument’s memory by questioning why the UDC’s nostalgic version of the “Black Mammy,” specifically, must be its focus. By identifying parts of enslaved women’s experience that had been omitted from the memorial representation or rejecting the “mammy” entirely, these Black women implied that the UDC valued not Black “mammies” themselves but the exploitative relationships they signified.
Loyalty to Stakeholders
The third feature of rhetorics of commemorative stewardship is expressing a commitment to shared responsibility and accountability to other stakeholders. Although we might assume that the UDC saw themselves as accountable to those whom they were commemorating (i.e., Black women), UDC commentary on the project demonstrates that they were more committed to serving the supposed interests of White children and future White Southerners. Black women critics of the monument highlighted this reality and gave voice to the stakeholders to whom would-be stewards of Black women’s memory instead ought to be accountable. These speakers did not directly claim that Black women had not been consulted, nor did they advocate a specific means by which Black women should be consulted regarding such a monument. Rather, they repeatedly asserted what they represented as the views of contemporary Black American women throughout the country. The critics argued that memorializers should be accountable to Black women contemporaries because the monument purported to represent their historical experiences.
Several of the Black women critics challenged the commemorative stewardship of the UDC by implying their lack of accountability to Black Page 99 →women. They did so indirectly, by beginning their statements with a declaration that they were speaking on behalf of other Black women, whom they perceived as the true stakeholders in this commemoration. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, for example, began her telegram to Congressman Stedman by situating herself as a representative of “the intelligent Negro women of the South.” She underscored her roles as part of that key group by using first-person plural pronouns. Brown concluded the telegram with a plea on behalf of her fellow Southern Black women, saying “we implore” the UDC to support education for Black children rather than funding the monument.63 A few days later, the Washington, DC, clubwomen who penned the Congressional petition identified the specific community on whose behalf they were writing and detailed the process whereby their representation had been established: “The Board of Directors of the Phyllis Wheatley Y.W.C.A., representing 2000 women in the District of Columbia, met last night and after discussion voted to protest against the granting of a site for the erection of a statue to the ‘Black Mammy of the South’; as also against the erection of such a statue anywhere.”64 The names of the board members were also inscribed on the second page of the petition, boldly declaring to the leaders of the nation their identities and leadership roles in an esteemed African-American women’s club. Although the number of women represented is much smaller than that in Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s large yet nebulous group, an organization of two thousand middle-class Black women in geographical proximity to the proposed monument would have had more focused rhetorical impact. Like Brown, the signatories used firstperson plural pronouns near the end of their statement to remind readers of the key stakeholders in this business. They announced, “We, the colored women of the city of Washington, do not like to be vividly reminded of the unfortunate condition of some of our ancestors. . . .”65 They clearly identified themselves as Black women and residents of the District, and they furthermore tied themselves to those represented by the proposed monument—“our ancestors.” Although they evidently wished to distance themselves from that past, they nonetheless claimed it as their own and thereby positioned themselves as key stakeholders in the debate.
Whereas Charlotte Hawkins Brown and the PWYWCA represented more limited regional groups of Black women, Mary Church Terrell and Hallie Quinn Brown claimed to speak for hundreds of thousands of middle-class Black women across the United States. Both women were national leaders of the NACW, and they opened their statements by establishing a united front for the group of stakeholders whom they believed Page 100 →had been overlooked. They left no question about those for whom they spoke, nor about what those people thought about the proposed monument. Terrell affirmed that “colored women all over the United States stand aghast at the idea of erecting a [‘Black Mammy’] monument in the capital of the United States.”66 Brown more explicitly identified herself as both the spokeswoman for and a member of this group, proclaiming, “In the name of 500,000 intelligent, educated colored women, citizens of this country, we register our strongest protest against the erection of a statue in the Capitol of this Republic, by the Daughters of the Confederacy, which is to be dedicated to the ‘Black Mammy’ of the South.” These opening salvos center Black women as key stakeholders and unequivocally assert their disapproval of the proposed monument. Whether speaking on behalf of regional, local, or national groups of Black women, these rhetors used their position to expose the failure of the UDC to be responsible and accountable to—or even acknowledge—the people whom they were supposedly memorializing. Displaying their loyalty to their community as stakeholders further cemented Black women’s credibility as commemorative stewards.
Commemoration for Future Generations
In the fourth and final rhetorical move of commemorative stewardship, commemorative stewards assert their own significance by emphasizing their work on behalf of future generations. As the previous section illustrates, the UDC’s lack of attention to Black stakeholders reveals that their central concern was not for African Americans at all—past, present, or future. The UDC viewed its main stakeholders as future generations of White Southerners. As UDC leader Mary Solari put it, the story of the devoted “Black Mammy” had to be preserved for “coming generations,” to “hand down to posterity” this narrative of Black sacrifice within a relationship of beneficent bondage.67 In contrast, Black women critics argued that true commemorative stewards should be concerned not only with preserving memories of Black women of the past but with the welfare of Black people of the present and future. Critics affirmed their own care and concern for fellow Black Americans by repeatedly reframing the conversation around the plight of those individuals. Rhetorically, they accomplished this by insisting on temporal continuity from past to present to future through the figure of “Mammy’s descendants.” Critics used the language of “Mammy’s descendants” or “Mammy’s children/sons/daughters” to refer both to the people who were the literal children and grandchildren of enslaved women and to future generations of Black American heirs to these historical experiences. Whether Page 101 →intentional or not, the ambiguity of these references operates rhetorically to blur temporal boundaries and project the implications of this monument controversy into the future. Black female critics used this argument about future generations in ways that sharply contrasted with the rhetorical work of the UDC. Black women strengthened connections among Black people across time in the hopes that they might effect change in the future. This aspect of their critical memory work also served important community functions by claiming space for memories that centered Black experiences and lives. The UDC, on the other hand, aimed to enshrine enslavement as a timeless emblem of the ideal relationships between Black and White Americans. The UDC looked to the past to prevent change in the future.
The PWYWCA, Terrell, and Hallie Quinn Brown invoked lineage across time to underscore their arguments about the symbolic impact of the monument. Although at first glance the Black clubwomen of the PWYWCA appeared to be advocating a break in lineage, closer attention reveals that their argument depends on the idea that Black Americans past and present are connected. For instance, they specifically pointed out that representing “our ancestors” in the “unfortunate condition” of slavery would interfere with their efforts to act as citizens.68 Terrell concluded her editorial with an evocative statement about how, if the monument were built, thousands of Black men and women would “fervently pray that on some stormy night the lightning will strike it and the heavenly elements will send it crashing to the ground.” According to Terrell, their prayers would rise up specifically to prevent future generations—the “descendants of Black mammies”—from being forever “reminded of the anguish of heart and the physical suffering which the mothers and grandmothers of the race endured for nearly 300 years.”69 Whereas the PWYWCA and Terrell emphasized the seeming permanence of such a monument, Hallie Quinn Brown noted its insignificance in the grand sweep of history, relative to other, more practical forms of commemoration such as education for Black children. Her statement offers numerous alternatives for commemorating enslaved women, saying that these other “memorials” would endure “not only for time but for eternity when stone statues erected to [‘Black Mammy’] shall have perished from the face of the earth,” reaching well beyond the current generation into the future.70
With the exception of the PWYWCA petition, all of the texts use the language of kinship to question the UDC’s decision to commemorate the “Black Mammy” with a sentimental stone monument rather than practical investment in the welfare of future generations of Black Americans.71 Page 102 →Notably, in many instances, critics used this language in combination with the conditional argument discussed earlier: If you want to make an appropriate commemoration, they argued, then you will address the needs of the descendants of the enslaved. The argument strongly implies, although it rarely explicitly states, that those who commemorate without addressing contemporary material needs are hypocrites. For instance, Charlotte Hawkins Brown argued that if the UDC wanted to express their gratitude toward enslaved women, they should do so “in the form of a foundation for the education and advancement of the Negro children descendants of those faithful souls they seem anxious to honor.”72 Maude Nooks Howard also invited readers to consider the kinship that joins future generations with the “Black Mammy” of the past. Having been to heaven to visit Mammy Lou, Missy Nelle returns convinced of the “indelible truth” that these enslaved women cared for their White charges “in faith that her kith and kin would be rewarded by a ‘square deal’ and a ‘happy life,’ unspoiled by little n’s and prejudices.” This passage implies that any proper commemoration of the “Black Mammy” would prioritize fair treatment of her descendants, and it furthermore suggests that Mammy Lou herself had focused on future generations to endure the hardships of enslavement.
Although Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Maude Nooks Howard gestured toward enslaved women’s descendants only in passing, Hallie Quinn Brown made them the center of her critique. She argued repeatedly that “mammy’s descendants”—or those to whom Brown also refers as “mammy’s children” and her “sons and daughters”—ought to be the proper focus of any “monument” intended to honor enslaved women. A true monument to present and future generations, according to Brown, would denounce and eradicate the lynching, discrimination, poverty, and poor education that afflicted these descendants. After several paragraphs vividly enumerating the many actions that White women could take to “salve their conscience and make amends,” Brown concluded her statement by contrasting the proposed monument to “a class of dead saints” with their “living descendants [who] cry for succor, for a fair chance in life.”73
By drawing attention to the living descendants of enslaved women and future generations of Black children, these Black women again suggested—or outright stated—that the women of the UDC were acting only as stewards of their own interest and the continued supremacy of their White children. Furthermore, the language of lineage deliberately emphasizes continuity through time to connect contemporary and future generations of Black Americans to the experiences of their enslaved ancestors. Some Page 103 →middle-class Black women might have preferred to remember the “Black Mammy” in the privacy of their own thoughts and homes rather than on a public pedestal. However, none of these critics failed to claim the enslaved Black woman as their forebear. None of the critics denied the inheritance of slavery, even if their own ancestors were not enslaved.74
Viewing Black Women’s Anti-“Mammy” Discourse as Critical Memory Work
My analysis illustrates how Black women of the early twentieth century deployed their rhetorical skills to engage in critical memory work that challenged the UDC’s memorial plans. The debate over the so-called monument to the “faithful slave mammies of the South” illustrates their pointed and deliberate protests against White efforts to control memories of slavery—especially memories of enslaved women. The debate over the monument centered around the question of who has the authority and credibility to control commemoration and how. A key component of their rhetorical work in this particular case is the critique of the commemorative stewardship of White Southern women, which emphasizes the question of who has the right to control and circulate the memories that affect Americans for generations to come. This chapter thus demonstrates how appeals to commemorative stewardship can function as critical memory work.
Harvey Young offered a description of critical memory that is especially relevant to the “Mammy” monument case: “Critical memory invites consideration of past practices that have affected the lives and shaped the experiences of black folk. It looks back in time, from a present-day perspective, and not only accounts for the evolution in culture but also enables an imagining of what life would be like had things been different. The appeal of critical memory is that it grants access to past experiences of select individuals. At the same time, it does not blind us to their (or our) present reality.”75 The Black women engaged in public critique were, in a sense, “imagining what would have been,” as they argued for alternative commemorations that would take into account the needs of “Mammy’s descendants.” Looking back from their present to the past of the enslaved woman, Black women of 1923 were “not blind [. . .] to their (or our) present reality.” Their critical memory was clear-eyed about what happened in the past, as well as what that meant for their present. Regardless of whether they wanted to publicly remember “Mammy” (e.g., the PWYWCA), they still insisted on recognizing the enslaved woman’s experience as it was, not how the UDC wished it was or how White supremacy had taught them it was.
Page 104 →This case also offers insight into how critical memory work exhibits rhetorical sensitivity to the audience. To be sure, the Black women critics directed their commentary at White folks, whether it was Representative Stedman, or Congress, or the UDC, or White women in general. However, their strategies differed slightly depending on the context and outlet of their rhetorical activity. For instance, Charlotte Hawkins Brown wrote to Stedman as the proponent of the monument in Congress, the PWYWCA addressed Congress as a whole, Terrell published in a major White daily newspaper, Howard published in Black newspapers, and Hallie Quinn Brown wrote to Black women in the National Notes (perhaps hoping to be picked up by the White press). These women clearly recognized that a campaign to challenge the UDC’s proposal required critique on multiple fronts and in multiple forms. It is possible that this varied approach contributed to the overall rhetorical effect of their critical memory work in this case: the death of the UDC proposal in Congress. Although direct influence cannot be demonstrated, the case nonetheless provides an example of a rare, failed commemorative campaign by White Southern women and a successful rejoinder from Black Americans. Placing themselves on the record in this way again contributed to building the storehouse of memory from which future Black women could draw, whether to combat White supremacy or, as I describe in the next chapter, to cultivate positive community feelings.