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Community and Critique: The Rhetorical Activism of Black American Women’s Memory Work: Notes

Community and Critique: The Rhetorical Activism of Black American Women’s Memory Work
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table of contents
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Illustrations
  7. Series Editor’s Preface
  8. One: “To Embalm Her Memory in Song and Story”: Charting Black Women’s Community and Critical Memory Work
    1. Public Memory and Black Women’s Memory Work
    2. Situating Black Memory Work
    3. Agency, Collaboration, and Memory in Black Feminist Frameworks
    4. Contextualizing Black American Women’s Community and Critical Memory Work
    5. Black Women’s Memory Work between Reconstruction and the New Negro Movement
    6. Contributions
  9. Two: “To Strive by Their Example”: Invoking Exemplary Women in Public Speech
    1. Exemplars as a Black Feminist Rhetorical Strategy
    2. Exemplars in Black Women’s Public Speech
      1. Biblical Women
      2. Historical Women
      3. White Contemporaries
      4. Black Women
    3. Rhetorical Strategy and Memory Storehouse
  10. Three: “Self-Emancipating Women”: Commemorative Critique by Black Women Speakers at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women
    1. African-American Women at the WCRW
    2. Commemorating Emancipation as the “Zero Point” for Black Women’s Progress
    3. Remembering Enslavement
    4. Enacting and Projecting Black Women’s Agency
    5. Commemorative Critique Past and Present
  11. Four: “The Shadows of the Past”: Black Women’s Commemorative Stewardship and the Demise of the “Black Mammy” Monument
    1. “Mammy’s” Memorial Moment
    2. Black Women and the Rhetoric of Commemorative Stewardship
      1. Public Responsibility as Goodwill
      2. Memories as Sacred and Valuable
      3. Loyalty to Stakeholders
      4. Commemoration for Future Generations
    3. Viewing Black Women’s Anti-“Mammy” Discourse as Critical Memory Work
  12. Five: “Planting Good and Joy Instead”: Cultivating Community Feelings in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction
    1. Homespun Heroines and Black Biography at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
    2. Black Women’s Multibiography as Memory in Reserve
    3. Cultivating Community Feelings of Gratitude and Joy
    4. Facing Memories of Struggle
    5. Remembering the Ordinary and the Extraordinary through Inclusive Gratitude
    6. Remembering and Rejoicing in Black Female Excellence
    7. Collected Memories, Collective Feelings
  13. Epilogue: Abundance, Memory, Risk
    1. Rhetoric’s Abundance
    2. Memory’s Meanings
    3. A Critic’s Risks
  14. Acknowledgments
  15. Notes
  16. Works Cited
  17. Index

Page 147 →Notes

Chapter 1: “To Embalm Her Memory in Song and Story”

  1. 1. Genesis 1:2, New International Version.
  2. 2. Matthews, “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” in Lift Every Voice, 836.
  3. 3. Matthews, “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” in Lift Every Voice, 838.
  4. 4. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters; McElya, Clinging to Mammy; Wallace-Sanders, Mammy.
  5. 5. See Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 10; O. I. Davis, “A Black Woman as Rhetorical Critic,” 77–89; O. I. Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” in Centering Ourselves, 35–51; S. Davis, “Taking Back the Power,” 303; Gittens, “‘What If I Am a Woman?’” 311; Houston and Davis, “Introduction,” in Centering Ourselves, 3–4; Stanback, “Feminist Theory and Black Women’s Talk,” 188.
  6. 6. Campbell, “Style and Content in the Rhetoric of Early Afro-American Feminists,” 434.
  7. 7. Davis, “A Black Woman as Rhetorical Critic,” 77–89; Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” 35–51.
  8. 8. Walker, The Rhetoric of Struggle; Logan, We Are Coming.
  9. 9. Although these books have had the most impact in rhetorical studies, monographs and collections about individual Black women rhetors have also advanced understanding in this area. Prominent examples include Marilynn Richardson’s work on Maria W. Stewart, Maegan Parker Brooks’s work on Fannie Lou Hamer, and Susan Pullon Fitch and Roseann Mandziuk’s work on Sojourner Truth. See Richardson, ed. Maria W. Stewart; Brooks and Houck, eds. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer; Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army; Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer; Fitch and Mandziuk, eds., Sojourner Truth as Orator. Scholars continue to add to these monographs; in no way should this list be considered exhaustive.
  10. 10. Browdy, “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s),” n.p.
  11. 11. Eves, “A Recipe for Remembrance,” 280–97; P. G. Davis, “The Other Southern Belles,” 308–31.
  12. 12. Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 4.
  13. 13. Olick, Sierp, and Wűsterberg, “Introduction: Taking Stock of Memory Studies,” 1399.
  14. 14. Houdek and Phillips, “Public Memory,” 3. For instance, representative recent books in the field on this subject include Aden, Upon the Ruins of Liberty; P. G. Davis, Laying Claim; Dunn, Queerly Remembered; Haskins, Popular Memories; and Tell, Remembering Emmett Till.
  15. 15. Page 148 →Yates, The Art of Memory.
  16. 16. VanderHaagen, Children’s Biographies of African American Women, 23–34.
  17. 17. VanderHaagen, Children’s Biographies of African American Women, 11.
  18. 18. Phillips, “Introduction,” Framing Public Memory, 2.
  19. 19. Houdek and Phillips, “Public Memory,” 3.
  20. 20. Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” Places of Public Memory, 6.
  21. 21. See, for instance, Toi Derricotte’s 2018 poem “Joy is an act of resistance,” 23; artist Kleaver Cruz’s ongoing Black Joy Project (https://kleavercruz.com/the-black-joy-project); and 2021 videos by The Root editorial staff (https://www.theroot.com/you-get-some-black-joy-and-you-get-some-black-joy-eve-1846347 970; and https://www.theroot.com/black-and-jubilant-unpacking-black-joy-from-the-revolu-1846288040).
  22. 22. Glymph, “‘Liberty Dearly Bought,’” Time Longer Than Rope, 111–39; Brand, Inwood, and Alderman, “Truth-Telling and Memory-Work in Montgomery’s Co-Constituted Landscapes,” 468–83; Ohito, “Remembering My Memories,” 1856–75. Mary E. Triece’s Memory Work: White Ignorance and Black Resistance in Popular Magazines, 1900–1910, the only book in rhetorical studies that I am aware of that uses this concept, was published in late 2024, after this book was in press.
  23. 23. Kuhn, “A Journey Through Memory,” Memory and Methodology, 186.
  24. 24. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 773–97.
  25. 25. Notable exceptions to this pattern are the few PhD dissertations focused on Black women’s commemorative practices, including Russell, “Sites Seen and Unseen.”
  26. 26. Blight, Race and Reunion. This omission is especially evident in chapter 9, “Black Memory and the Progress of the Race,” in which Blight focused overwhelmingly on the efforts of prominent Black men like Frederick Douglass and Alexander Crummel to shape memories of slavery during the end of the nineteenth century. Although Frances E. W. Harper and Ida B. Wells both make brief appearances, their rhetoric was not substantively analyzed; nor did Blight cite any of the numerous speeches that Black women gave on “progress” during this period, many of which directly addressed the question of how Americans remember slavery.
  27. 27. Romano and Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory.
  28. 28. Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty; Hamilton, Booker T. Washington in American Memory; Dyson, Making Malcolm.
  29. 29. Sernett, Harriet Tubman.
  30. 30. Dickinson, Blair, and Ott, Places of Public Memory; P. G. Davis, Laying Claim; Tell, Remembering Emmett Till.
  31. 31. Ono, “Contextual Fields of Rhetoric,” 266.
  32. 32. Saad, “Gallup Vault: Black Americans’ Preferred Racial Label.”
  33. 33. I capitalize “Black” or “African American” as well as “White” throughout this book. I do so to highlight “White” as a socially constructed racial identifier and “Whiteness” as a system of racialized hierarchy. My reasons for this choice echo those articulated in this statement from the MacArthur Foundation: Mack and Palfrey, “Capitalizing Black and White.”
  34. 34. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 14.
  35. 35. Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” 3.
  36. 36. Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” 3.
  37. 37. Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” 31. Emphasis in original.
  38. 38. Page 149 →Temple, “The Emergence of Sankofa Practice in the United States,” 127–50; Temple, Black Cultural Mythology.
  39. 39. Temple, “The Emergence of Sankofa Practice in the United States,” 130.
  40. 40. Temple, “The Emergence of Sankofa Practice in the United States,” 127.
  41. 41. Temple, “The Emergence of Sankofa Practice in the United States,” 129.
  42. 42. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 23.
  43. 43. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 1.
  44. 44. Temple identifies fifteen attributes of Black cultural mythology: hero dynamics, ancestor acknowledgment, historical re-enactment of worldview, resistance-based cognitive survival, hyperheroic actions, epic intuitive conduct, immortalization sensibility, sacred observation, ritual remembrance, commemoration philosophy, mythological structure, sacrificial inheritance, aesthetic memorialization, reconciliation and renewal, and antiheroics (23, 84).
  45. 45. Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia, 3.
  46. 46. Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia, 3.
  47. 47. Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia, 8.
  48. 48. VanderHaagen, Children’s Biographies of African American Women, 25–34.
  49. 49. See, for example, Ahad-Legardy’s claim that nostalgia is not just passive or unconscious but an active form of “memory work that can be called on and self-induced for the purpose of feeling good in the now,” Afro-Nostalgia, 10; Baker’s discussion of the need for “agential, black imaginative work” in “Critical Memory,” 12; and Temple’s formulation of heroics or “past models of Black agency” as a centerpiece of Black cultural mythology, Black Cultural Mythology, 60.
  50. 50. Ronisha Browdy, among others, has described “the contentious relationship that Black women for decades have had with the word ‘feminism,’ opting out of such labeling of their writings, stories, music, and other modes of expression and communication as ‘feminist’ because of its connection to white feminism.” Browdy, “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s),” n.p.
  51. 51. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 298.
  52. 52. This is also closely aligned with Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s articulation of agency in her 2005 essay “Agency,” 1–19.
  53. 53. In Feminism is for Everybody, bell hooks characterized women’s agency as “the power to be self-defining” (95). Philosopher Alisa Bierria developed a particularly compelling explication of the roles that self-definition and self-determination play in Black feminist conceptions of agency. She explained that “racist authoring of black agentic action evacuates black agents’ self-generated explanation from their actions, replacing it with intentions and explanations constructed through the living archive and sanctioned by institutional racism.” Black agents, Bierria concluded, thus become “missing in action,” and the only remedy is self-definition (134). See also O. I. Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” 38–9; S. Davis, “Taking Back the Power,” 302.
  54. 54. Nash, “Practicing Love,” 14, 19.
  55. 55. Madison, “‘That Was My Occupation,’” 230. See also Allen, “Black Womanhood and Feminist Standpoints,” 577; S. Davis, “Taking Back the Power,” 302–4; Gittens, “‘What If I Am a Woman?’” 310.
  56. 56. Collins, “No Guarantees,” 2350.
  57. 57. Houston and Davis, “Introduction,” in Centering Ourselves, 13; Stanback, “Feminist Theory and Black Women’s Talk,” 188. Having described the emphasis on self-definition in Black feminist thought, I also acknowledge the tension Page 150 →produced when a scholar who identifies as a “White woman, such as myself, advances an interpretation of Black women’s words and actions. Lacking what Bierria described as “self-generated explanation” (134) from the historical Black women featured in this analysis, I look to implicit theorizing in their discourses and rely on the explanation of contemporary Black feminist thinkers to guide this analysis. This analysis attempts to treat Black women as “active agents who interpret their own and others’ discourse.”
  58. 58. Allen, “Goals for Emancipatory Research on Black Women,” in Centering Ourselves, 24.
  59. 59. The few existing works include Schwalm, “Emancipation Day Celebrations,” 291–332; Eves, “A Recipe for Remembrance”; Johnson, “‘Ye Gave Them a Stone,’” 62–86; Griffiths, Traumatic Possessions; Davis, “The Other Southern Belles”; and Russell, “Sites Seen and Unseen.”
  60. 60. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, 5.
  61. 61. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, 57.
  62. 62. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.
  63. 63. Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” 3.
  64. 64. Hine, “African American Women and Their Communities in the Twentieth Century,” 2.
  65. 65. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere,” 446.
  66. 66. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere,” 446. Drawing on the work of Margaret S. Boone, Carla Peterson formulated a similar taxonomy of African-American social spheres. She identified the following spheres as locations for Black women’s activism: domestic, ethnic community, ethnic public, and national public spheres. See “Doers of the Word,” 8.
  67. 67. Wherever possible, I use the adjective “enslaved” to denote a potentially temporary, externally imposed condition rather than the word “slave,” which defines the person so named primarily by their enslavement rather than their humanity. This choice follows that of many journalists and historians who write about this time period, and it is guided by the ideal of “people-first” language promoted by contemporary advocates for people with disabilities.
  68. 68. Wheatley, “On Recollection,” in The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, 62–64.
  69. 69. Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 49–82.
  70. 70. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 237.
  71. 71. Woodson, “Address to the Youth,” in Lift Every Voice, 386.
  72. 72. Remond, Letter to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, 2.
  73. 73. The concept of a “usable past” appears to stem from a 1918 article by US literary critic Van Wyck Brooks. In this essay, Brooks advocated for a “usable past” through applicable literary criticism. His commentary begins with literature, but he extended it to history as well. He said of creating a usable past: “The past is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals; it opens of itself at the touch of desire; it yields up, now this treasure, now that, to anyone who comes to it armed with a capacity for personal choices. If, then, we cannot use the past our professors offer us, is there any reason why we should not create others of our own?” Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” 339.
  74. 74. Glymph, “‘Liberty Dearly Bought,’” 115.
  75. 75. “NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom. The New Negro Movement,” Library of Congress.
  76. 76. Watts, Hearing the Hurt, 3.
  77. 77. Page 151 →Notably, Glymph argued that “the Lost Cause movement stands as an explicit rejoinder to the memory-work of black southerners, not the other way around.” Glymph, “‘Liberty Dearly Bought,’” 116.
  78. 78. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, 63–83.
  79. 79. “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy.”
  80. 80. Several excellent historical treatments of African-American women’s diverse forms of public activism during this time period have been published, including Brown, Private Politics and Public Voices; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent; Logan, We Are Coming; and Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920.
  81. 81. Fauset, “Looking Backward,” 126. Fauset also theorized memory in an August 1921 essay in The Crisis titled “Nostalgia.” Although not widely known, Fauset was a significant figure in the New Negro Movement, or the Harlem Renaissance. She was a writer, editor, and teacher—most notably, the literary editor of The Crisis from 1919 until 1926. She supported and advocated for many young writers, including poet Langston Hughes.
  82. 82. Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope, 39.
  83. 83. Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope, 27.
  84. 84. Peterson, “Doers of the Word,”223.
  85. 85. For more detail about this contentious period in American memory, see Blight, Race and Reunion, 98–139.
  86. 86. Glymph, “‘Liberty Dearly Bought,’” 124.
  87. 87. Bailey, “Days of Jubilee,” 353–73; Kachun, Festivals of Freedom; Kerr-Ritchie, Rites of August First; Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora.
  88. 88. Historian Rayford Logan first characterized this period as the “nadir” in his 1954 book The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901.
  89. 89. Gilmore, “Somewhere in the Nadir of African American History.”
  90. 90. Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope, 181; Russell, “Sites Seen and Unseen,” 17–47.
  91. 91. Luckerson, “The Women Who Preserved the Story of the Tulsa Race Massacre”; Tolson, “Making Books Available,” 9–16.
  92. 92. Dagbovie, “Black Women Historians from the Late 19th Century to the Dawning of the Civil Rights Movement,” 241–44; Massenburg, “Documenting the Contributions Made by Black Women to Carter G. Woodson’s Early Black History Movement,” 28–34.
  93. 93. In fact, this special collection named for writer and activist James Weldon Johnson accomplished two goals of memory work: It corrected racist memories of Black people, and it commemorated the life of Johnson. Although this collection was primarily for Black children, Baker also noted its significance for White children. The fact that she prioritized Black children in her Harlem neighborhood leads me to describe this act as “community memory”; Baker, Books About the Negro for Children, n.p.
  94. 94. Baker, Books About the Negro for Children, n.p.
  95. 95. Although the critique of the “Great Man” approach has gained traction since the late twentieth century, scholars disagree about exactly how to avoid the “Great Speaker” approach in practice, as an exchange between Barbara Biesecker and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell illustrates. Biesecker and Campbell both identified female tokenism as a particularly tricky problem for scholars working to expand the rhetorical canon, especially because, as Biesecker argued, recovery projects Page 152 →often reinscribe the very (White male) individualism that excluded people in the first place. See Biesecker, “Coming to Terms,” 140–61; Campbell, “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either,” 153–59; Biesecker, “Negotiating with our Tradition,” 136–41.
  96. 96. O. I. Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” 38.
  97. 97. O. I. Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” 38; Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, 5.
  98. 98. Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas”; Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, 5.
  99. 99. On the term “race women,” see Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 11–31.
  100. 100. Hall, “Slippin’ In and Out of Frame,” 344.
  101. 101. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 5, 17.
  102. 102. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 414.
  103. 103. Parts of chapter 1 were adapted from “Memory Work and Rhetorical Activism,” in Oxford Handbook on African American Women’s Writing, edited by Simone C. Drake. Published online February 2, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197647424.013.0001. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. This content is excluded from all forms of open access license, including Creative Commons, and the content may not be reused without the permission of Oxford University Press. Details of how to obtain permission can be found at https://global.oup.com/academic/rights/permissions/.

Chapter 2: “To Strive by Their Example”

  1. 1. Stewart, “What If I Am a Woman?” in Lift Every Voice, 139.
  2. 2. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, 5. It is important to point out that Nash views Black feminism not as singular but as “a varied project with theoretical, political, activist, intellectual, erotic, ethical, and creative dimensions; black feminism is multiple, myriad, shifting, and unfolding” (5).
  3. 3. Mann, “Theorizing ‘What Could Have Been,’” 581–82.
  4. 4. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, 5.
  5. 5. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, 116.
  6. 6. Collins, “No Guarantees,” 2350.
  7. 7. Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 152.
  8. 8. For more detailed discussions of these ideologies, their time frame, and how Black women negotiated them, see Weir-Soley, Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings, 21–31; and Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 3–7.
  9. 9. Weir-Soley, Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings, 24; Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” 912–20; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent.
  10. 10. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 187.
  11. 11. Isocrates, “To Demonicus,” in Isocrates I, 19–21; Hampton, Writing from History, 1–30; McCormick, “Mirrors for the Queen,” 273–96.
  12. 12. Herdt, “Exemplarity Between Tradition and Critique,” 553.
  13. 13. Hampton, Writing from History, 3.
  14. 14. Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century,” 89–108; Temple, Black Cultural Mythology.
  15. 15. McCormick, “Mirrors for the Queen,” 274. McCormick used the word “example” in this passage, but he is referring to the same rhetorical strategy that I am.
  16. 16. Page 153 →Ceccarelli, “Polysemy,” 404.
  17. 17. McCormick, “Mirrors for the Queen,” 275.
  18. 18. McCormick, “Mirrors for the Queen,” 292.
  19. 19. Ceccarelli, “Polysemy,” 405.
  20. 20. Ambiguity can also have cultural import. In her book on Martin Luther King Jr., Trudier Harris noted an “inherent ambiguity of African American heroic folk traits” that actively resist simplification of King as a hero. Trudier Harris, Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature, 2.
  21. 21. McCormick, “Mirrors for the Queen,” 275.
  22. 22. See, for example, Hauser, “The Example in Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” 78–90; Benoit, “Aristotle’s Example,” 182–92; Hauser, “Aristotle’s Example Revisited,” 171–80; Benoit, “On Aristotle’s Example,” 261–67; Hauser, “Reply to Benoit,” 268–73.
  23. 23. Arthos, “Where There Are No Rules,” 321.
  24. 24. Arthos, “Where There Are No Rules,” 321.
  25. 25. Arthos, “Where There Are No Rules,” 322.
  26. 26. For a discussion of some of the problems inherent in a “mere imitation” approach to moral exemplars in character education, see Kristjánsson, “Emulation and the Use of Role Models in Moral Education,” 40.
  27. 27. McCormick, “Mirrors for the Queen,” 275.
  28. 28. Vos, “Learning from Exemplars,” 21.
  29. 29. Vos, “Learning from Exemplars,” 21–22.
  30. 30. See Herdt, “Exemplarity Between Tradition and Critique,” 560; and Vos, “Learning from Exemplars,” 22–23.
  31. 31. Both Kristjánsson and Vos were keen to distinguish between simplistic, uncritical copying and something more reflective, which they typically refer to as “emulation.” However, neither made a sharp distinction between emulation and imitation—rather, they were advancing understanding of that more engaged form of audience/student uptake. Kristjánsson, “Emulation and the Use of Role Models in Moral Education,” 40; Vos, “Learning from Exemplars,” 22.
  32. 32. Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation,” 90.
  33. 33. Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation,” 97, 99.
  34. 34. Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation,” 102.
  35. 35. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 23. Temple conceptualizes this Afrocentric philosophy of heroes not as defined essentially by certain “African” features or ideology but rather characterized historically as a commitment of diasporic people to center their thinking on stories, people, and beliefs that originated with their ancestors on the African continent.
  36. 36. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 18.
  37. 37. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 31.
  38. 38. An initial survey turned up fourteen speech texts given between 1833 and 1928 that cited female exemplars. My research assistant at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Kacey Ballard, and I looked for published speeches that invoked women as examples, whether in a passing reference or a sustained narrative. This initial search drew mainly from published collections and other publicly accessible sources such as BlackPast.org. Subsequent searches of other databases and digital archives have produced three additional speeches for a total of seventeen. While this set is not exhaustive, it is large enough to be representative of Black middle-class women’s public discourse during the period. I opted to include some rhetors from before the stipulated time period for this book, such as Page 154 →Stewart, because their speeches aligned with and even set the stage for later uses of exemplars.
  39. 39. Maria W. Stewart, “What If I Am a Woman?” (1833) in Lift Every Voice, 138; Mary Ann Shadd, “Break Every Yoke and Let the Oppressed Go Free” (1858) in Lift Every Voice, 321; Sojourner Truth, “Equal Rights for All, Three Speeches” (1867) in Lift Every Voice, 465–66; Mary V. Cook, “Woman’s Place in the Work of the Denomination” (1887) in Lift Every Voice, 668.
  40. 40. Shadd simply invoked sisters Martha and Mary as women with whom Christ associated and thereby demonstrated that he “heald [sic] the sexes indiscriminately thereby implying an Equal inheritance.” See “Break Every Yoke,” 321.
  41. 41. There are several women named Mary identified in the Gospels, which can lead to some confusion in identifying the speakers’ precise references. All four Gospels identify Mary Magdalene by name as one of the first people (if not the first person) to witness the resurrected Christ. Some traditions have conflated Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany, who is the sister of Martha and Lazarus. In this case, it is possible that Shadd’s and Cook’s references to Mary could have been invoking the same person. For more information on the traditions behind the Marys of the Gospels, see Beavis, “Who is Mary Magdalene?”
  42. 42. Truth, “Equal Rights for All,” 465–66.
  43. 43. Truth thus participates as a “forerunner” of what is now characterized as womanist biblical interpretation. See Junior, An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation, 39–53.
  44. 44. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 1.
  45. 45. Stewart, “What If I Am a Woman?” 137.
  46. 46. The elimination of religious “middle men” in this fashion illustrates Stewart’s Black radical (and, anticipatorily, Black feminist) interpretation of central Reformation tenets.
  47. 47. Stewart, “What If I Am a Woman?” 140, 139.
  48. 48. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 666–68.
  49. 49. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 665.
  50. 50. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 665. This focus on a “pure and undefiled Christianity” clearly exhibits the virtues of purity and piety upheld in the cult of True Womanhood. Although such comments reveal Cook’s reliance on certain conservative feminine ideals, they are also in line with the reasoning of Black female contemporaries like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who argued for a more holistic approach to Black women’s rights. Black women who had previously been denied the safety and dignity of domestic life and religious practice in enslavement often expressed a very different perspective on political solutions to sexism than did White middle-class women.
  51. 51. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 665–66.
  52. 52. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 666.
  53. 53. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 666. Sarah, in fact, twice doubted God’s covenant with her husband Abraham: In the book of Genesis, chapter 16 recounts the story of how a barren Sarah forced her slave Hagar to sleep with Abraham to produce an heir, and chapter 18 narrates her laughter at God’s promise of a son.
  54. 54. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 667. Emphasis added.
  55. 55. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 668.
  56. 56. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 675.
  57. 57. Page 155 →Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 666.
  58. 58. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 666.
  59. 59. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 668.
  60. 60. Speeches invoking historical women from a source other than the Bible included the following: Cook, “Woman’s Place”; Victoria Earle Matthews “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” in Lift Every Voice, 834–40; Lucy Wilmot Smith, “The Future Colored Girl,” in Minutes and Addresses of the American National Baptist Convention, 68–74; Stewart, “What If I Am a Woman?”
  61. 61. On the predominance of such texts, see Booth, How to Make It as a Woman, 1–47.
  62. 62. Stewart, “What If I Am a Woman?” 140.
  63. 63. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 671, 672.
  64. 64. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 672.
  65. 65. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 667.
  66. 66. Smith, “The Future Colored Girl.”
  67. 67. Smith, “The Future Colored Girl.”
  68. 68. Matthews, “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” 837.
  69. 69. Examples from Cook, “A Woman’s Place,” 667; Stewart, “What If I Am a Woman?” 140; Matthews, “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” 837.
  70. 70. Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women.”
  71. 71. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 672.
  72. 72. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 673.
  73. 73. Laney, “The Burden of the Educated Colored Woman,” in Lift Every Voice, 886.
  74. 74. Laney, “The Burden of the Educated Colored Woman,” 889.
  75. 75. Papers of the NAACP, Part I, 1909–1950: Meetings of the Board of Directors, Records of Annual Conferences, Speeches, and Special Reports, xi.
  76. 76. Cannady, “Address to the NAACP.”
  77. 77. Although Cannady’s treatment of Ovington here suggests that her praise is sincere, it is possible that she is also flattering Ovington, who would have been present in the audience. Both things could be true, and both purposes would contribute to Cannady’s rhetorical goals. Of course, as with any speech, the motivations remain ambiguous.
  78. 78. Ovington was also a suffrage advocate, but that is not the work for which Cannady recognizes her.
  79. 79. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 31.
  80. 80. Cook, “Woman’s Place,” 672.
  81. 81. These eleven speeches are, in chronological order: Elizabeth Jennings, “On Improvement of the Mind” (1837); Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together” (1866); Olivia A. Davidson, “How Shall We Make the Women of Our Race Stronger?” (1886); Mary V. Cook, “Woman’s Place in the Work of the Denomination” (1887); Hallie Quinn Brown, “Discussion of the Same Subject” (1893); Anna Julia Cooper, “Women’s Cause Is One and Universal” (1893); Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women” (1898); Lucy Craft Laney, “The Burden of the Educated Colored Woman” (1899); Rosetta Douglass Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her” (1900); Mary McLeod Bethune, “President’s Address to the 15th Biennial Convention of the National Association of Colored Women” (1926); and Beatrice Morrow Cannady, “Beatrice Morrow Cannady Speaks to the NAACP” (1928).
  82. 82. Page 156 →As noted in chapter 1, such views are explicitly expressed in speeches by Sarah J. Woodson and Victoria Earle Matthews. See Woodson, “Address to the Youth,” in Lift Every Voice, 386; and Matthews, “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” in Lift Every Voice, 836.
  83. 83. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 85.
  84. 84. Speeches by Cook (1887), Brown (1893), and Laney (1899) identify Harper for recognition. Harper died in 1911, near the end of the period under examination.
  85. 85. Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” 460. For more on the uniquely powerful role that Tubman has played as an African-American hero, see Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 137–53.
  86. 86. Speeches that name Wheatley include Brown (726), Laney (886), and Terrell; those that cite Truth include Brown (727), Laney (886), Cannady.
  87. 87. Elizabeth Jennings, “On Improvement of the Mind,” in Lift Every Voice, 168.
  88. 88. Mikorenda, “Beating Wings in Rebellion.”
  89. 89. Jennings, “On Improvement of the Mind,” 168.
  90. 90. Jennings, “On Improvement of the Mind,” 168. This transcript spells Mathews’s surname with two “t”s, whereas most historical sources indicate that it was spelled with only one. See Porter, “The Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary Societies, 1828–1846,” 555–76.
  91. 91. Davidson, “How Shall We Make the Women of our Race Stronger?” 649.
  92. 92. Davidson, “How Shall We Make the Women of our Race Stronger?” 651.
  93. 93. Davidson, “How Shall We Make the Women of our Race Stronger?” 652.
  94. 94. Davidson, “How Shall We Make the Women of our Race Stronger?” 649.
  95. 95. Bethune, “President’s Address to the 15th Biennial Convention of the National Association of Colored Women, Civic Auditorium, Oakland, California,” 2–3.
  96. 96. Bethune, “President’s Address,” 3.
  97. 97. Emphasis added.
  98. 98. Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her,” 898–99. Sprague’s published, illustrated version of this speech, along with newspaper clippings, is also available through the Library of Congress at https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11879.02007/?st=gallery.
  99. 99. Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her,” 899.
  100. 100. Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her,” 899, 900, 901, 904, 902.
  101. 101. Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her,” 901, 902.
  102. 102. Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her,” 903, 905.
  103. 103. Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her,” 905.
  104. 104. Logan, We Are Coming, 47.
  105. 105. Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” 460.
  106. 106. Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” 460. The “Montgomery” referred to here is Colonel James Montgomery of the Union Army, with whom Tubman conducted the Combahee River Raid that freed several hundred enslaved people.
  107. 107. Temple also uses the language of survival in her analysis of Tubman, saying that she is “one of the most recognized survivors of enslavement.” Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 137.
  108. 108. For more on how Tubman might function in the practice of ancestor acknowledgment, see Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 140.
  109. 109. Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” 460.
  110. 110. Page 157 →Brown, “Discussion of the Same Subject,” 725–27.
  111. 111. Brown, “Discussion of the Same Subject,” 725.
  112. 112. Brown, “Discussion of the Same Subject,” 729.
  113. 113. Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women.”
  114. 114. Burke, Grammar of Motives, xix.
  115. 115. Arthos, “Where There Are No Rules,” 322.
  116. 116. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12; Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 414.
  117. 117. Amponsah, “Towards a Black Cultural Memory,” 33.

Chapter 3: “Self-Emancipating Women”

  1. 1. Early, “The Organized Efforts of the Colored Women of the South to Improve Their Condition,” in World’s Congress of Representative Women, ed. Sewall, 2:720. Hereinafter in the notes, this compilation is referred to as “WCRW.”
  2. 2. Although Florence Lewis was scheduled to speak on May 18, as the last of three respondents to Williams’s address, Sewall’s proceedings record neither a speech nor any other appearance by Lewis. It is possible that when Frederick Douglass gave his impromptu speech after Coppin, he preempted or at least overshadowed Lewis’s speech. Douglass’s speech, unlike Lewis’s speech (if it was given at all), is recorded in the proceedings. See WCRW, ed. Sewall, 1:76, 2:717. See also Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 86.
  3. 3. Truman, History of the World’s Fair, 23.
  4. 4. “Announcement,” in WRCW, 1:v.
  5. 5. Logan, “Frances E. W. Harper, ‘Woman’s Political Future,’” 46. Hazel Carby saw the invitation somewhat differently from Logan: “The fact that six black women eventually addressed the World’s Congress was not the result of a practice of sisterhood or evidence of a concern to provide a black political presence but part of a discourse of exoticism that pervaded the fair.” Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 5. Although I have not been able to locate evidence documenting exactly how these women were selected or invited, I think it most likely that they were selected by the Board of Lady Managers because they were already prominent figures. Williams was well known and likely deemed acceptable to White Chicago socialites; she was the first Black speaker invited. In inviting the other speakers, it is possible that the Board took inspiration from a widely dispersed circular that Black women crafted to express their disappointment with the lack of representation at the Fair. The circular “earnestly solicited” several “representative colored women” to be present at the Fair, including Early, Harper, Brown, and Coppin. “Of Great Interest to Colored Women,” The Freeman, 8.
  6. 6. For the schedule of the general congresses, see Sewall, WCRW, 1:76–84.
  7. 7. Much as she argued in 1866, Harper here held that suffrage was not a “panacea” but one political tool among many: Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 1:434. See also Logan, “Frances E. W. Harper, ‘Woman’s Political Future,’” 48–49. Suffrage was the primary concern addressed by discussant Margaret Windeyer. Her brief response to Harper’s speech focused almost exclusively on arguing that women should prioritize the franchise. See Windeyer, “Discussion of the Preceding Address by Margaret Windeyer of Australia, Representative of the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 1:437–38.
  8. 8. Page 158 →S. W. Logan, “Frances E. W. Harper, ‘Woman’s Political Future,’” 43; see also Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 175; and R. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought.
  9. 9. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 96.
  10. 10. Previous scholarship examined the speeches in different configurations. Shirley Wilson Logan analyzed Williams’s and Cooper’s speeches, as well as Harper’s (“Woman’s Political Future”). Laura L. Behling examined only Williams, Cooper, and Coppin. I build on the work of both Logan and Behling, but my analysis offers an alternative to Behling’s interpretation, which, in my view, overemphasized the speakers’ objectification as “exhibits” at the expense of considering how they acted as agents. Kristy Maddux framed these speeches as part of the project of “racial uplift” and examined them alongside ten others, including speeches by White women. Maddux’s analysis, although appropriate to her purpose, does not closely examine the Black women’s unique positionalities and rhetorical strategies. See Logan, We Are Coming; Behling, “Reification and Resistance,” 173–96; and Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 86–120.
  11. 11. For an example of research that examines the significance of the collective in interpersonal spaces, see S. Davis, “The ‘Strong Black Woman Collective,’” 20–35. For a more detailed explanation of why it is important to account simultaneously for individual speech and collective rhetorical action, see VanderHaagen, “‘A Grand Sisterhood,’” 15–18.
  12. 12. Allen, “Goals for Emancipatory Research on Black Women,” in Centering Ourselves, 24.
  13. 13. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 298.
  14. 14. See Bierria, “Missing in Action,” 134; O. I. Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” 38–39; S. Davis, “Taking Back the Power,” 302; hooks, Feminism is for Everybody; and Nash, “Practicing Love,” 14. See also Campbell, “Agency,” 1–19.
  15. 15. Massa, “Black Women in the ‘White City,’” 319; Rydell, “World’s Columbian Exposition.”
  16. 16. Speakers variously used the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to mark emancipation.
  17. 17. Reed, “All the World is Here!”xxii; 52–53. Quoting St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton.
  18. 18. See Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 3–6; Harris and Werner, “Forensic Rhetoric and Racial Justice,” 618–33; Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 99–104; Paddon and Turner, “African Americans and the World’s Columbian Exposition,” 19; and Reed, “All the World,” xi–xiv.
  19. 19. Massa, “Black Women,” 331; Weimann, The Fair Women, 103–24; Reed, “All the World,” 26–30.
  20. 20. Reed, “All the World,” 27.
  21. 21. Massa, “Black Women,” 329. Reed claimed that Palmer’s decision was opportunistic and political, and Weimann believed that it was influenced by the need to appease the powerful Southern White women; Reed, “All the World,” 29; Weimann, The Fair Women, 104. See also Paddon and Turner, “African Americans and the World’s Columbian Exposition,” 22.
  22. 22. Quoted in Tsenes-Hills, I Am the Utterance of My Name, 193. For the full text, see Hallie Q. Brown, “A Great Slight to the Race,” The Indianapolis Freeman, April Page 159 →30, 1892, 4. Although the Board viewed Brown’s decision as petty, Brown could have perceived the small position as both inadequate to her aspirations and woefully undercompensated. See Massa, “Black Women,” 333; Weimann, The Fair Women, 117–19.
  23. 23. Reed, “All the World,” 30. At the state level, Joan Imogen Howard nearly single-handedly orchestrated the substantive inclusion of African-American work in the New York state exhibit. Harper served in a nominal role on the WCRW “Home Advisory Council.” See Sewall, WCRW, 2:934.
  24. 24. African-American women were visible elsewhere: Williams also spoke at the Congress on Africa, and Brown performed at “Colored American Day”; Reed, “All the World,” 17, 102, 138. The first “Aunt Jemima,” Nancy Green, also appeared in an advertising campaign at the Fair; see Wallace-Sanders, Mammy, 63–67. Unlike the WCRW speakers, Ida B. Wells wrote her critique from an external position, as she boycotted the Fair’s events. This position rendered her statement quite different—although no less significant—in its rhetorical function.
  25. 25. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Cindy Koenig Richards have noted that women have often had to cloak radical arguments in conventional garb; see Campbell, “Gender and Genre,” 479–95; Richards, “Inventing Sacagawea,” 1–22.
  26. 26. Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 11. The few book-length studies of nineteenth-century African-American women’s rhetoric from the field of rhetorical studies and communication have also attested to the significance of some or all of these six women. See Atwater, African American Women’s Rhetoric, 3; Royster, Traces of a Stream, 289–93; Logan, We Are Coming.
  27. 27. Royster, Traces of a Stream, 178.
  28. 28. Foster, “Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins,” in Black Women in America, ed. Hine, 2:22–25.
  29. 29. Perkins, “Coppin, Fannie Jackson,” in Black Women in America, ed. Hine, 1:312–14. Most sources, including publications authored by Coppin, spell her first name “Fanny.”
  30. 30. Reed, “All the World,” 17.
  31. 31. Lemert, “Cooper, Anna Julia,” in Black Women in America, ed. Hine, 1:308–12.
  32. 32. Fisher, “Brown, Hallie Quinn,” in Black Women in America, ed. Hine 1:168–70.
  33. 33. Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 18.
  34. 34. Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 87.
  35. 35. Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 86.
  36. 36. Blight, Race and Reunion, 332. Blight provides a nuanced overview of the controversies over progress in the Black community, but his account is limited by its near-exclusive focus on Black men. An examination of Black women’s speeches provides an important correction and addition to Blight’s argument.
  37. 37. Blight, Race and Reunion, 319, 321.
  38. 38. Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 111.
  39. 39. “Not Lost Sight Of. The Afro-American is Gradually Being Brought into the Fair,” Plaindealer (Detroit), March 24, 1893, 1.
  40. 40. Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States Since the Emancipation Proclamation,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:696.
  41. 41. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:696.
  42. 42. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:697, 704.
  43. 43. Page 160 →Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:704.
  44. 44. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:704.
  45. 45. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:697.
  46. 46. Here, Williams offered a subtle critique of White women, but in other sections, she praised them as “saintly” (697) and compared Black women with them. Such passages illustrate Williams’s investment in respectability politics. We can also see Williams’s class prejudice in passages lamenting White Americans’ inability to differentiate between the Black elite and what she described as the “nonprogressive peasants of the ‘black belt’ of the South” (705). Behling (2010) interpreted such choices as Williams denying her racial identity in favor of identification with her White female audiences. Although I agree that this is quite problematic, I contend that Williams did this strategically to gain the trust of White women and thus utilized her position to become a more amenable messenger for radical ideas. For further discussion of the issue of the social distinctions among Black Americans in the Gilded Age, see Reed, “All the World,” 37–53.
  47. 47. Cooper’s characterization of the process of progress resonates strongly with Nash’s description of work in Black feminist love-politics (2011).
  48. 48. A. J. Cooper, “Discussion of the Same Subject,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:712.
  49. 49. A. J. Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:712.
  50. 50. A. J. Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:713. Cooper’s language alludes to a parable of Jesus, recounted in the Gospels of Matthew (13:33) and Luke (13:21) (King James Version).
  51. 51. Coppin, “Discussion Continued,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:716.
  52. 52. Coppin, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:715.
  53. 53. Coppin, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:715.
  54. 54. Frederick Douglass, who had been seated on the platform during the session, followed Coppin’s address with a brief impromptu response. He articulated a strong break between past and present and appropriated the apocalyptic biblical language of the books of Ecclesiastes and Revelation to herald the arrival of a new order; see WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:717. Reed noted that Douglass’s statement would have had particular impact, as he was the only man to address the Congress since the opening remarks. Reed, “All the World,” 124.
  55. 55. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:723.
  56. 56. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:723.
  57. 57. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:723.
  58. 58. I counted six references to specific amounts of time (e.g. “thirty years”) and twelve general references (e.g., “centuries,” “the age”). This enumeration is inspired by Allison Prasch’s “rhetorical theory of deixis,” which “is concerned with how a speaker defines his/her rhetorical act within both senses of time (chronos and kairos), place, and space-time while also attending to the ways a discourse might change over time in accordance with historical events, moments that often define, and are defined by, their placement”; Prasch, “Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Deixis,” 174.
  59. 59. Brown, “Discussion of the Same Subject,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:725.
  60. 60. Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:726.
  61. 61. Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:728.
  62. 62. Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:729.
  63. 63. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 1:434.
  64. 64. Page 161 →Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 168.
  65. 65. Blight, Race and Reunion, 313.
  66. 66. Schwalm, “‘Agonizing Groans of Mothers’ and ‘Slave-Scarred Veterans,’” 291.
  67. 67. See Blight, Race and Reunion, 311–19; Johnston, “Freedom and Slavery in the Voice of the Negro,” 30–34; Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 148; Schwalm, “Emancipation Day Celebrations,” 293.
  68. 68. I thank Ashley R. Hall for a conversation that helped me to conceptualize the idea of the negative in these speeches.
  69. 69. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:703.
  70. 70. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:698, 701.
  71. 71. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:701.
  72. 72. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:703.
  73. 73. Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 95.
  74. 74. It is important to note that Williams’s elite position may have hindered her ability to recognize enslaved Black women as survivors rather than mere victims.
  75. 75. Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:712.
  76. 76. Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:712.
  77. 77. Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:712.
  78. 78. Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:711, 713. The language of heroism that Cooper used here also strongly resonates with Christel N. Temple’s claims about the philosophy of heroism in Black cultural mythology: “defined organically from diasporic experiences with survivalist impact, achievement against the odds, and the extension of human capacity beyond the ordinary.” Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 18.
  79. 79. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:719.
  80. 80. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:719.
  81. 81. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:720.
  82. 82. Coppin, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:716; Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 1:435.
  83. 83. Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:724.
  84. 84. Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:724.
  85. 85. Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:724.
  86. 86. Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:724.
  87. 87. Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:725.
  88. 88. Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 144.
  89. 89. S. Davis, “Taking Back the Power,” 302.
  90. 90. Nash, “Practicing Love,” 16.
  91. 91. Williams’s use of the phrase “slight tinge” may also betray her color prejudice and accommodation to White beauty norms.
  92. 92. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:706.
  93. 93. Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:711.
  94. 94. Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:728.
  95. 95. Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:728.
  96. 96. Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:712.
  97. 97. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:700.
  98. 98. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:699.
  99. 99. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:719; Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:700; Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:714. Although the language of self-help can be problematic if it blames Page 162 →the oppressed for their oppression, in these instances, the women use it as a means of focusing on Black women’s action as an engine for progress.
  100. 100. As Kirt Wilson has shown, the “racial politics of imitation” during this time period were complex, with many Whites (and some people of color) viewing Black Americans as “natural” mimics but unable to internalize imitated virtues. Black Americans, on the other hand, saw imitation of good qualities as a means of uplifting their race. This latter enactment of imitation by Black people, Wilson notes, became threatening to Whites, revealing the progressive potential in a seemingly regressive idea. See Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century,” 89–108.
  101. 101. Coppin, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:716.
  102. 102. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:719.
  103. 103. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:719.
  104. 104. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:720.
  105. 105. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:720.
  106. 106. Nash, “Practicing Love,” 18.
  107. 107. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:700.
  108. 108. Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:700–01.
  109. 109. Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 2:723.
  110. 110. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 1:433.
  111. 111. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 1:435.
  112. 112. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 1:437.
  113. 113. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewall, 1: 437; Wells, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” in Lift Every Voice, 759.
  114. 114. Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” 8.
  115. 115. Collins, “No Guarantees,” 2350.
  116. 116. Weimann, Fair Women, 523–32.
  117. 117. Rev. D. A. Graham, “World’s Fair Glances.” Graham’s article is the only substantive Black newspaper account of these speeches that I was able to locate. My reading of White newspapers’ accounts of the speeches confirms Graham’s report.
  118. 118. “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019; Schuster, Teaching Hard History, January 31, 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/20180131/teaching-hard-history.
  119. 119. Silverstein, “Why We Published The 1619 Project,” New York Times, December 20, 2019. It is no accident or coincidence that a Black woman thought leader, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has become the scapegoat of right-wing narratives vilifying what they classify as critical race theory in “The 1619 Project,” in which Hannah-Jones has played a pivotal role. This case clearly demonstrates how Black women who dare to use their rhetorical skills to change public memory continue to face dangerous consequences meted by the powers of White supremacy.
  120. 120. Hall, “Slippin’ In and Out of Frame,” 344.
  121. 121. Nash, “Practicing Love,” 19.

Chapter 4: “The Shadows of the Past”

  1. 1. McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 120.
  2. 2. McElya, “Monumental Citizenship,” 110.
  3. 3. “Charlotte Hawkins Brown Speaks at Oberlin,” 1; Phyllis Wheatley Young Women’s Christian Association, “Petition to Congress,” 1; Terrell, “The Black Page 163 →Mammy Monument,” 6; Howard, “‘Mammy’ Gets ’Em Told,” 7; H. Q. Brown, “The Black Mammy Statue,” 3.
  4. 4. Most contemporary historians and scholars use the “Phillis” spelling, but historical sources vary, with “Phillis” and “Phyllis” being most prominent. I will use the spelling preferred by the historical source. Elsewhere in this book, I use “Phillis.” Alexandria Russell addresses this usage in a helpful note in her doctoral dissertation: Russell, “Sites Seen and Unseen,” 18; See also Carretta, Phillis Wheatley; Shields, “Wheatley, Phillis,” in Black Women in America, ed. Hine, 3: 344–47.
  5. 5. “Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920.”
  6. 6. Catherine Squires outlined the concept of Black “enclave publics” in her essay “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere,” 446–68.
  7. 7. Black men such as Neval Thomas were also publicly opposed to the monument. However, Black men as a group were much less publicly unified in this view than were Black women. Individual men and groups led by men issued statements in support of the monument, as I detail later.
  8. 8. McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 124–28.
  9. 9. Joan Marie Johnson addressed some of these influences in her essay “‘Ye Gave Them a Stone,’” 62–86.
  10. 10. Neu, The Wilson Circle, 4.
  11. 11. Biographical information summarized from Neu, The Wilson Circle, 3–32.
  12. 12. O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” 117.
  13. 13. Du Bois, “My Impressions of Woodrow Wilson,” 453.
  14. 14. O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” 117.
  15. 15. O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” 119.
  16. 16. Information drawn from Flexnor and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle, 136–48.
  17. 17. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 108.
  18. 18. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote.
  19. 19. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship, 121.
  20. 20. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship, 83–86.
  21. 21. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special,” 107.
  22. 22. Flexnor and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle, 300–17.
  23. 23. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 160.
  24. 24. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 165.
  25. 25. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America.
  26. 26. Messer, The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, 8.
  27. 27. Glymph, “‘Liberty Dearly Bought,’” 127.
  28. 28. Glymph, “‘Liberty Dearly Bought,’” 116.
  29. 29. “Whose Heritage?” 33.
  30. 30. Hine and Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope, 181; Russell, “Sites Seen and Unseen,” 17–47.
  31. 31. Johnson, “‘Ye Gave Them a Stone,’” 64.
  32. 32. “House Applauds Carolinian’s Plea to Honor Mammy,” Washington Evening Star, January 11, 1923, 40.
  33. 33. “That Responsive Racial Feeling,” Richmond Planet, January 13, 1923, 4; “House Gives Ovation to Plea for Statue of Negro Mammy,” The Monitor, January 19, 1923, 1; B.B. Cowan, “Balsam of Gilead,” The Monitor, January 19, 1923, 2.
  34. 34. Notably, the mainstream White newspaper the Washington Evening Star reported on February 6 that a group of “ministers and deacons representing all of Page 164 →the colored churches in Washington” had voted to endorse the monument (9). The Richmond Planet also provided an interesting “Southern” perspective on the monument with a decidedly conservative flavor to several of the opinion pieces published there. See especially articles from January 13 (4) and February 3 (4).
  35. 35. Cowan, “Balsam of Gilead,” 2.
  36. 36. See the Monitor, February 16, 1923, 2; Appeal, February 17, 1923, 1; Colorado Statesman, February 17, 1923, 1; Baltimore Afro-American, February 23, 1923, 1.
  37. 37. See, for instance, Kelly Miller, “Kelly Miller Says,” Baltimore Afro-American, February 23, 1923, 9; “Senate OK’s Bill for Monument to ‘Black Mammy,’” The Northwestern Bulletin (St. Paul, MN), March 17, 1923, 1; Cowan, “Balsam of Gilead.”
  38. 38. Baltimore Afro-American, March 2, 1923, 9.
  39. 39. John Bodnar’s conceptualization of vernacular and official memories has been influential; Bodnar, Remaking America, 13–20. For an example focused on rhetoric, memory, and race, see P. G. Davis, Laying Claim, 17.
  40. 40. Quoted in McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 118, 123.
  41. 41. Johnson, “‘Ye Gave Them a Stone,’” 63.
  42. 42. VanderHaagen, “(Mis)Quoting King,” 91.
  43. 43. Good character, good sense, and goodwill are the three features of appeals to ethos, according to Aristotle’s original formulation of the concept in his Rhetoric. See On Rhetoric, 120–21.
  44. 44. VanderHaagen, “(Mis)Quoting King,” 96.
  45. 45. VanderHaagen, “(Mis)Quoting King,” 98.
  46. 46. Glymph, “‘Liberty Dearly Bought,’” 116.
  47. 47. Quoted in McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 123.
  48. 48. Lowenthal, “Stewardship, Sanctimony and Selfishness,” in History and Heritage, 169.
  49. 49. Stedman, A Monument in Commemoration of the Faithful Colored Mammies of the South, 2.
  50. 50. Stedman, Monument in Commemoration of the Faithful Colored Mammies of the South, 3.
  51. 51. “Charlotte Hawkins Brown,” New York Age, 1.
  52. 52. PWYWCA, “Petition to Congress,” 1.
  53. 53. H. Q. Brown, “The Black Mammy Statue,” 3.
  54. 54. “Charlotte Hawkins Brown,” New York Age, 1.
  55. 55. In 1923, the use of dialect in general, and “Black” dialect in particular, was much more common among writers of all racial backgrounds. However, the reasons for using dialect would have diverged quite dramatically, depending on the identity and position of the author. Whereas White writers and performers infamously used such dialect to portray derogatory images of the “darky” in minstrel shows and the like, Black artists and authors deployed this dialect in much more complex and potentially positive ways. Black writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often used exaggerated “Black” dialect to connect with working-class Black audiences and, significantly, to make fun of White people’s interpretations of Blackness. The complexity of these layers of parody parallels the history of the cakewalk. Although I cannot confirm Howard’s intentions, it appears that her use of dialect in Mammy Lou’s speech in a fictional story published in a prominent Black newspaper is not intended to be derogatory. It is much more likely to have been viewed within the context of her satirical purposes Page 165 →in the essay, as a means of using Mammy’s “improper” English to shame clueless Whites. This “mammy” speaks truths and makes arguments—she is not to be dismissed because she speaks in Southern Black dialect. I thank readers Natasha Barnes, Kim Singletary, and Tracy Vaughn-Manley for suggesting and clarifying this interpretation. On Black dialect poetry, see Harris, “‘The Sole Province of the Public Reader,’” 36–55; Nurhussein, Rhetorics of Literacy. On the history of the cakewalk, see Shrum, “Who Takes the Cake? The History of the Cakewalk.”
  56. 56. Howard, “‘Mammy’ Gets ’Em Told,” 7.
  57. 57. Terrell, “The Black Mammy Monument,” 6.
  58. 58. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders argued that assumptions about motherhood—both biological and surrogate—were central to the image of the “mammy” during the early twentieth century. Although she did not discuss this monument in detail, her analysis poses important questions about the complicated and difficult experience of motherhood for enslaved women. She also emphasized the way in which the image of the “mammy” came to operate as a “coercive force” in public discourse (93); see Wallace-Sanders, Mammy, 93–117.
  59. 59. Howard, “‘Mammy’ Gets ’Em Told,” 7.
  60. 60. Brown, “The Black Mammy Statue,” 3.
  61. 61. PWYWCA, “Petition to Congress,” 1.
  62. 62. “Charlotte Hawkins Brown,” New York Age, 1.
  63. 63. “Charlotte Hawkins Brown,” New York Age, 1.
  64. 64. PWYWCA, “Petition to Congress,” 1.
  65. 65. PWYWCA, “Petition to Congress,” 1.
  66. 66. Terrell, “The Black Mammy Monument.”
  67. 67. Quoted in McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 12.
  68. 68. PWYWCA, “Petition to Congress,” 1.
  69. 69. Terrell, “The Black Mammy Monument.”
  70. 70. H. Q. Brown, “The Black Mammy Statue,” 3.
  71. 71. Megan Fitzmaurice expanded on this point significantly in her National Communication Association conference presentation, “A Strategic Reversal: The National Association of Colored Women’s Narrative Reframing of the Mammy Monument,” 2016.
  72. 72. “Charlotte Hawkins Brown,” New York Age, 1.
  73. 73. H.Q. Brown, “Black Mammy Statue,” 4.
  74. 74. This connection among past, present, and future, combined with an insistence on futures of freedom and liberation, is an example of what Charles Mills described in his essay “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time.” He described an “alternative vision of racial time, aimed not at racial revenge and the aspiration to a new time of reversed nonwhite domination, but of racial equality.” Such visions “demanded alternative futures of independence and freedom quite different from those mapped out for them by their colonial masters.” See Mills, “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time,” 312–13.
  75. 75. Young, Embodying Black Experience, 19–20.

Chapter 5: “Planting Good and Joy Instead”

  1. 1. Brown, 1926 introduction to Homespun Heroines, vii.
  2. 2. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 55.
  3. 3. Here again are echoes of Paul Ricoeur’s idea of forgetting “kept in reserve.” In the case of racialized memories in the United States, White supremacy has broadly Page 166 →suppressed or “forgotten” the presence of Blackness. This erasure, although pervasive and devastating, has not been complete, thanks in large part to Black Americans themselves. Although White America has forgotten, Black America has kept in reserve its stories, long advocating for more just memories. See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 414.
  4. 4. Burkett, introduction to Homespun Heroines, xxix.
  5. 5. Booth, How to Make It as a Woman, 23.
  6. 6. Bits and Odds, which was originally published in 1884 and reprinted in 1910, was a reciter text including forty selections for performance, opened by a fourteen-page introduction on theories and practices of elocution written by Brown. Brown there detailed the theory of imitation that undergirded her performance and teaching. These ideas are further enacted in Homespun Heroines.
  7. 7. Bethune, “Oswald Garrison Villard and Hallie Quinn Brown,” 6.
  8. 8. See also Burkett, introduction to Homespun Heroines, xxix.
  9. 9. Burkett, introduction to Homespun Heroines, xxix.
  10. 10. Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 6–9.
  11. 11. VanderHaagen, Children’s Biographies of African American Women, 35–57.
  12. 12. Watts, Hearing the Hurt, 3.
  13. 13. Booth, How to Make It as a Woman, 214–18.
  14. 14. VanderHaagen, “Black Heroes and ‘The Jury,’” in A Centennial Celebration of The Brownies’ Book Magazine, eds. Johnson-Feelings and McNair, 56–77.
  15. 15. Booth, How to Make It as a Woman, 12.
  16. 16. Booth, How to Make It as a Woman, 197.
  17. 17. Booth, How to Make It as a Woman, 10, 9–10. References to selection criteria are often present in the works’ peritextual material, such as prefaces and forewords. For more on the rhetorical analysis of peritextual material in collective biographies for children, see Bloomfield and VanderHaagen, “Where Women Scientists Belong.”
  18. 18. Burkett, introduction to Homespun Heroines, xxxiv.
  19. 19. Brown, Homespun Heroines, vii.
  20. 20. In her chronological catalog of women’s multibiographies, Booth recorded between eight (1921) and forty-two (1900) published per year between 1865 and 1940 (390–92). She noted that 1894, the year after the World’s Fair, was a high point with thirty-seven texts (213–14). Although some of these texts included token women of other racial groups, such as Harriet Tubman and Pocahontas, the vast majority were focused on women of European descent. These numbers highlight just how unusual were the texts devoted to Black women.
  21. 21. Eves, “A Recipe for Remembrance,” 280–97; P. G. Davis, “The Other Southern Belles,” 308–31.
  22. 22. Eves, “Recipe for Remembrance,” 295.
  23. 23. Davis, “The Other Southern Belles,” 309.
  24. 24. Davis, “The Other Southern Belles,” 310.
  25. 25. Houdek and Phillips, “Public Memory,” 11.
  26. 26. Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory, 7.
  27. 27. Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” 459–68.
  28. 28. Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” 461.
  29. 29. Corrigan, Black Feelings, xxiii.
  30. 30. Page 167 →Lisa M. Corrigan explains that “in the case of social movements, expressions of new feelings become political action.” Brown and her coauthors may not be producing new feelings, necessarily, but their volume nonetheless clearly highlights the potential connection among memories, feelings, and political action. See Corrigan, Black Feelings, xv.
  31. 31. “Joy,” Dictionary of Psychology.
  32. 32. Dunn and Love, “Antiracist Language Arts Pedagogy Is Incomplete without Black Joy,” 191.
  33. 33. For a few notable examples, see Toi Derricotte’s 2018 poem “Joy is an act of resistance,” artist Kleaver Cruz’s ongoing Black Joy Project (https://kleavercruz.com/the-black-joy-project), and 2021 videos by The Root editorial staff.
  34. 34. Johnson, “Black Joy in the Time of Ferguson,” 180.
  35. 35. Stewart, The Politics of Black Joy, 9.
  36. 36. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 168–86.
  37. 37. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 172.
  38. 38. See especially Stewart, The Politics of Black Joy, 1–25, 27–44.
  39. 39. Stewart’s argument in The Politics of Black Joy centers around the complex politics of Black joy as manifested in the work and art of Hurston (and Beyoncé), which differs from that of the creators of Homespun Heroines, who appear to have been more invested in feminine virtue, Christian piety, and racial uplift. Stewart argues that Hurston’s insistence on Black joy struck a posture of refusal rather than resistance. Stewart explains: “Instead of directly protesting oppression, Hurston’s emphasis on Black joy was more like a refusal to entertain the white gaze. That is, she strove to maintain an emotional indifference toward whites, relegating them to the periphery of a Black world. Rather than actively fight against whites, she refused to pay them attention” (9). Although the politics of Hurston and the creators of Homespun Heroines differ significantly, I see resonances in their shared effort to celebrate the lives and joys of Black women outside of the White gaze, in their own communities.
  40. 40. For a summary of studies on gratitude in the field of positive psychology, see “Giving Thanks Can Make You Happier,” Harvard Health Publishing.
  41. 41. Emmons and McCullough, introduction to The Psychology of Gratitude, 5, 6.
  42. 42. Emmons and McCullough, introduction to The Psychology of Gratitude, 5.
  43. 43. Emmons and McCullough, introduction to The Psychology of Gratitude, 7.
  44. 44. Komter, “Gratitude and Gift Exchange,” in Psychology of Gratitude, eds. Emmons and McCullough, 204.
  45. 45. Quoted in Edward J. Harpham, “Gratitude in the History of Ideas,” in Psychology of Gratitude, eds. Emmons and McCullough, 20.
  46. 46. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 85.
  47. 47. On the dark side of gratitude in unjust scenarios, see Jackson, “Why Should I Be Grateful?” 277–79; Rodríguez-Silva, “Abolition, Race, and the Politics of Gratitude in Late Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” 622–23.
  48. 48. See Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia; Brock, Distributed Blackness; Lu and Steele, “‘Joy is Resistance,’” 823–37; Stewart, The Politics of Black Joy; and Temple, Black Cultural Mythology.
  49. 49. Brock, Distributed Blackness, 229.
  50. 50. Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia, 3.
  51. 51. Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia, 4.
  52. 52. Page 168 →On “eavesdropping audiences,” see Leff and Utley, “Instrumental and Constitutive Rhetoric in Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’” 47.
  53. 53. Brown, Homespun Heroines, vii.
  54. 54. Brown, Homespun Heroines, vii.
  55. 55. Brown, Homespun Heroines, vii.
  56. 56. Burkett, introduction to Homespun Heroines, xxix. On other biographical collections published during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Booth, How To Make It as a Woman, 213–23.
  57. 57. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 104.
  58. 58. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 105.
  59. 59. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 31. Brown reported that Cox was involved in a case that went to the Supreme Court, which she called the “Famous Randolph Will Case” (31). For additional history on the 1917 Supreme Court decision, see Mathias, “John Randolph’s Freedman,” 263–72.
  60. 60. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 119.
  61. 61. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 55.
  62. 62. As I noted in chapter 3, the Black women speakers at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women used the same argument to enlighten audiences about the remarkable accomplishments of their community.
  63. 63. For instance, the sketches report that both Catherine S. Delany (wife of Martin Delany) and Mary Shadd Cary were said to have fled the United States for Canada after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (90–91; 93).
  64. 64. Mary Catherine Windsor and Sarah J. S. Tompkins Garnet.
  65. 65. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 119.
  66. 66. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 121.
  67. 67. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 63.
  68. 68. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 23.
  69. 69. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 169.
  70. 70. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 170.
  71. 71. Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 18, 86.
  72. 72. Historical significance is, of course, rhetorically constructed. Moreover, “traditional standards” at the time would have been dictated by White patriarchal definitions of history, which inherently exclude all but the most exceptional European women, let alone Black women.
  73. 73. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 6, 13, 14.
  74. 74. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 53, 145, 188.
  75. 75. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 55.
  76. 76. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 55.
  77. 77. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 64.
  78. 78. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 23.
  79. 79. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 24.
  80. 80. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 28.
  81. 81. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 28.
  82. 82. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 169.
  83. 83. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 171.
  84. 84. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 171.
  85. 85. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 169.
  86. 86. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 169.
  87. 87. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 170.
  88. 88. Page 169 →Brown, Homespun Heroines, 204.
  89. 89. Brown, Homespun Heroines, vii. In the individual sketches, the word “gratitude” or “grateful” is used five times to report feelings toward the subjects (53, 145, 182, 184, and 188); the word “appreciation” appears six times (61, 115, 155, 171, 180, and 218). These terms are applied to both prominent and lesser-known figures.
  90. 90. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 22.
  91. 91. Brown, Homespun Heroines, vii.
  92. 92. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 207. While the text references the tune as “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” the more familiar title associated with this tune is “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” whose words were written by Julia Ward Howe during the Civil War. The original tune written by William Steffe gained popularity as a Union marching song called “John Brown’s Body.”
  93. 93. I am not talking about these women’s lives as mere entertainment here but rather showing how the text is oriented toward producing pride and pleasure in certain readers (i.e., Black women) who view the women profiled not as passive objects to be gazed at but as active subjects like themselves.
  94. 94. Burkett, introduction to Homespun Heroines, xxx.
  95. 95. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 231; emphasis added.
  96. 96. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 231.
  97. 97. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 233.
  98. 98. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 236.
  99. 99. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 235.
  100. 100. Burkett counted nineteen out of sixty women profiled. Burkett did not indicate how he arrived at this total. The collection includes profiles of fifty-five individual women and one joint profile of “California Colored Women Trailblazers,” which names seven specific women. Burkett, introduction to Homespun Heroines, xxx.
  101. 101. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 212.
  102. 102. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 213. In both of these examples, Keyser draws attention to her appearance, saying she is “attractive” (212) and “pale” (213). These references to appearance, although not atypical in the collection, raise difficult questions about Black women as objects to be enjoyed and, in particular, favoring light-skinned women as more worthy of admiration.
  103. 103. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 216.
  104. 104. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 183. Notably, in 2002, the name of the school was changed to honor Baldwin rather than Louis Agassiz, whose racial views were judged out of alignment with the community. In 2024, a young Black former student from the school successfully completed a years-long effort to similarly rename the Cambridge neighborhood in which the school is located. See Dorgan, “Committee Renames Local Agassiz School,” Harvard Crimson; and Mitchell, “The Renaming of a Neighborhood,” Harvard Gazette.
  105. 105. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 182–93.
  106. 106. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 186.
  107. 107. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 186.
  108. 108. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 187.
  109. 109. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 186–87.
  110. 110. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 46.
  111. 111. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 47.
  112. 112. Although the sketch does not specify the date, a report from the “BBC World Page 170 →News” notes the date as July 16, 1892. See Dale, “How a Former Slave Gave a Quilt to Queen Victoria,” BBC Africa.
  113. 113. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 48.
  114. 114. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 48.
  115. 115. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 48.
  116. 116. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 48.
  117. 117. Although familial terms such as “Granny” or “Aunt” have been used by White society to diminish Black women, in this Black-woman-focused context the titles have positive valence. Recent discussions of the various views on these terms can be found in Dahleen Glanton, “Is ‘Auntie’ a Term of Endearment for African American Women or Does It Promote an Aunt Jemima Stereotype?” Chicago Tribune; and Perry, “The Crucial Legacy of the Black Aunt,” Jezebel.
  118. 118. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 51.
  119. 119. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 51.
  120. 120. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 51. The sketch notes in passing that Aunt Mac was the sister of “Mrs. D. A. Payne” (52) and, therefore, the sister-in-law of Daniel A. Payne. He was a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the president of Wilberforce, among other roles. Aunt Mac’s connection with the Paynes perhaps enhanced her prominence among Wilberforce residents, but that fact is not emphasized in the sketch.
  121. 121. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 51.
  122. 122. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 51.
  123. 123. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 51–52.
  124. 124. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 52.
  125. 125. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 52.
  126. 126. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 53.
  127. 127. Brown’s reference resonates with the feature of Black cultural mythology that Temple calls “immortalization sensibility.” Temple notes Maria W. Stewart as an exemplar of this practice, which is elaborated as “the Africana iteration of cultural eternal life, of never forgetting, of never being defeated.” Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 23, 28, 86.
  128. 128. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 54.
  129. 129. Stewart, The Politics of Black Joy, 6.
  130. 130. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 187.
  131. 131. Paying ritual homage to one’s ancestors was a key feature of West African spiritual practice that has been adapted and continued in African-American communities, as in the observance of Kwanzaa and the pouring of libations. See Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 54, 71.

Epilogue: Abundance, Memory, Risk

  1. 1. Woodson, “Address to the Youth,” in Lift Every Voice, 386–87.
  2. 2. Angelou, “And Still I Rise,” in And Still I Rise, 41–42.
  3. 3. Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” 3.
  4. 4. Jaschik, “Hannah-Jones Turns Down UNC Offer,” Inside Higher Ed.
  5. 5. Seabrooks, “The People’s Professor,” The Hilltop.
  6. 6. Hall, “Slippin’ In and Out of Frame,” 344. Temple expands this perspective on death by describing how certain Black cultural traditions perceive continuity, even at the end of life, through proper community remembrance: “The life cycles Page 171 →that we remember are retained and recycled in oral and written traditions because the death transitions represent the culmination of sacrifice on behalf of others. At life’s end, one’s deeds should be honorable and worthy of remembrance.” Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 196.
  7. 7. Ono, “Contextual Fields of Rhetoric,” 272.
  8. 8. Wilson, “Theory/Criticism,” 281–82. Angela G. Ray also articulates what is essentially a functionalist definition of rhetorical criticism in a 2016 essay: “Rather than offering a definition of the term rhetorical criticism and assessing an instance of scholarship based on its proximity to that stipulated definition, we will instead assume, for the purposes of assessing the state of the art, that scholarship identified by authors, editors, reviewers, and readers as rhetoric is, in fact, that.” See Ray, “Rhetoric and the Archive,” 45.
  9. 9. Wilson, “Theory/Criticism,” 281.
  10. 10. Ray, “Rhetoric and the Archive,” 45.
  11. 11. Browdy, “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s),” n.p.
  12. 12. Browdy, “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s).” See also O. I. Davis, “A Black Woman as Rhetorical Critic,” 78.
  13. 13. Browdy, “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s).”
  14. 14. Hine, “African American Women and Their Communities in the Twentieth Century,” 2; Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere,” 446.
  15. 15. Woodson, “Address to the Youth,” 386; Brown, introduction to Homespun Heroines, vii.
  16. 16. Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia, 3; Temple, Black Cultural Mythology, 88.
  17. 17. Mills, “Chronopolitics”; Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation,” 443–58.
  18. 18. Mills, “Chronopolitics,” 312.
  19. 19. Ore and Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation,” 456.
  20. 20. Brown, Homespun Heroines, 55.
  21. 21. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 414.
  22. 22. U.S. Census Bureau Quick Facts.
  23. 23. Ono, “Contextual Fields of Rhetoric,” 265. Ono defines contextual fields as “the situating elements used to make sense of the rhetorical text, texts, intertexts, transtexts, paratexts, or even ‘discourse formations’ under study.”
  24. 24. Colpean and Dingo, “Beyond Drive-By Race Scholarship,” 306.
  25. 25. Ono, “Contextual Fields of Rhetoric, 274.
  26. 26. Ono, “Contextual Fields of Rhetoric,” 276.
  27. 27. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 131.

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