I remember the first time I had to read a book called Dumba Nengue: Run For Your Life, Peasant Tales of Tragedy in Mozambique. I was glad that the book was so very short compared to my other readings. Originally written in Portuguese by Lina Magaia–who held nothing back–and published in Mozambique, it was an instant best seller. Lina Magaia told the brutal truth. Published in English by 1988, the title comes from a Mozambican proverb that means, “You have to trust your feet.” At only 108 pages, I assumed that reading the book would be a breeze. It was not. Midway through it I was sick to my stomach at how easily revolutionaries could descend into absolute depravity and madness. Reading about the actions of South African-backed Mozambican revolutionaries in the mid-to-late 1970s was hard to swallow.
One of my classmates admitted to our professor that she simply could not finish the book. I understood. The one thing that struck me in the book was how easy it seemed to be for revolutionaries to take hostage, abuse, torture, and sexually violate females of all ages. Indeed, one of my classmates, a young White woman studying on a historically Black campus, researched and wrote about rape as an act of war. Her conclusions were as terrifying as they were valid. I thought about this book when I learned of the kidnapping of over 200 (or over 300 girls) in Nigeria by some group of thugs known as Boko Haram, whose name translates to “Western education is a sin.”
Now, some folk will argue that this tragic episode in Nigerian history is an example of some of the damage done to the nation’s native population by European imperialism and racism. Others will argue that Boko Haram’s activity is the result of their adaptation of a radical form of Islam. This group, they will say, are merely proceeding according to what they believe is an accurate interpretation of Sharia law. Yet, the very notion of “females as property” has been overwhelmingly universal in most places, give or take a few exceptions; and this notion has created more abuse and oppression of girls and women throughout human history than perhaps any other kind of ideology. Even further, this kind of oppression and abuse has never been fully addressed by the entire human family. Sexism is alive and well in every corner of the globe. It cuts across racial, ethnic, religious and geographic boundaries with a frightening swiftness and regularity. WE do not get to blame any particular thing or anybody or any particular group for this one. So I will leave you with this:
I remember once hearing my late Mama promise to rip the lungs out of someone who had physically threatened me. When I asked her would she do it, she replied, “Yes, only if I did not have a loaded gun that I could empty into them.” I am also grateful that my Dad was never a hypocrite when it came to females. I once overheard my late Dad say to a young man, “If you wouldn’t want it done to your daughter or sister or mother, then don’t do it to any other woman.” Enough said.
I am praying for the safe return of all of the abducted girls in Nigeria to their families. Yet, as an old African proverb says, “When you pray, move your feet.”
After listening to nearly 100 robocalls over the past three weeks emanating from an assortment of imbeciles who have no better sense than to believe that they are fit to run for public office in my hometown of Atlanta, I had my own “Have-A-Laugh-Friday” on one of my social media pages. Just one of the things I do occasionally to break the tension. Now, this does not mean that I will be posting or blogging something funny every Friday, or that I or anyone else needs to wait for Friday to laugh. And this is also not done to harm the good reputations of the many wonderful members of the City Council who love Atlanta and do really great work—people like Ceasar Mitchell and Keisha Lance Bottoms who are accessible the whole year, have a great staff that responds to you (and not just at election time.)
Now, this is not a political endorsement. I do not publicly endorse political candidates. My mention of those two people is my personal observation of them over several years. Vote for the candidate that best represents your interests, but I am rambling. Back to the matter at hand—these insufferable robocalls.
For the past three weeks every time I got ready to raise my fork to my mouth, the phone rang. Typically, I did not recognize the number on the Caller ID, so I let it go to voicemail. Then before I could swallow my food, I would see the light blinking on my telephone that indicated that I had a message. I would ignore these blinking lights save for the fact that it might be important. I also had little choice but to turn off the ringers on all of my telephones, that is if I planned to eat or get any work done. Now, when I listened to these messages, they all tended to sound something like this:
“Hello, I am ______________________, and I am a father with two children. I am running for the school board because our children are our future.”
Or
“Hello, I am ________________________, and I am supporting _____________________ , for Atlanta City Council. Atlanta can do better than the current….”
You are damn right Atlanta can do better which is why I have to seriously consider whether or not I am voting for you or for any candidate that believes that a barrage of phone calls is going to earn any potential voter’s trust, to say nothing of their vote. Exactly who told these candidates that a torrent of pre-recorded robocalls that always occur around meals or when I am writing or doing research would send me or anyone else to the polls?
I do not think these political candidates are that out of touch—I do think some of them are dumb, dumb as cat s**t, dumb as a stump, dumb as a box of rocks, and as vacant as a white wall. Some of them probably qualify as doofus—Go look up “doofus.” It is now in the dictionary, and I am sure at least a few of these candidates have helped the authorities at Merriam-Webster refine its definition.
Now I could not ever imagine not voting. Too many of my people fought and died for me to have that privilege. I have to say that when I do go to vote on November 5, I really wish the voting machine had an option to write-in candidates whose names ARE NOT on the ballot. If that option was available, I might just write in the name “Daffy Duck,” or “Porky Pig,” for at least one of the offices. Hey, I might as well vote for someone that I could actually have for dinner—literally!
Now I know this blog will be obsolete very soon because November 5, 2013 is almost upon us. Very soon, a few of these candidates will hold public office in Atlanta. They will create laws about zoning and be responsible for formulating policies that determine the education of your children, our children. God help us all!
So here is my suggestion. I know a few people who make it a habit to call their elected officials on a regular basis, but too many of us do not make that effort. We complain in every day conversations about something that needs fixing in city government, but soon we move on to another topic. Yet, this is an opportunity to give them tit-for-tat. Call these representatives when there is a street sign pointing the wrong way. Call them to complain about a pothole in the street. Hell, call them if you have got a hangnail and you just want to complain about how it stings every time you put your hand in dishwater. They have no qualms about calling you with pre-recorded asinine messages that repeat the same horse manure; and worse, they do not seem to know or care how annoying it is. Return the favor and maybe some of them will do the jobs our tax money pays them to do!
When Erich McMillan-McCall, founder of Project1Voice said, “We need a bibliography,” I knew I was about to be called upon to begin pulling together books that focused on the lives and accomplishments of Black women. I almost declined because there really is no shortage of books written by or about or which target Black women and girls as a reading audience. The real task was not finding books, but rather which ones should be on the list. Erich (pronounced “Eh-rish”) asked me to do this as part of his overall focus on Black women, but also in some ways as a response to the reading of the Christina Ham play “Four Little Girls” that streamed live online at the Kennedy-Center’s website at 6:00 PM EST on Sunday, September 15, 2013.
Although Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Carry Me Home gives a detailed account of that fateful Sunday morning when Cynthia, Addie Mae, Carole, and Denise were killed, there is no book written exclusively about these four little girls who died in that church bombing on September 15, 1963. Indeed, it can be debated that the White racist terrorists that bombed Birmingham, Alabama’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that ended the lives of these girls did not specifically set out to kill young Black females. Often the targets of racial violence were and tend to be Black males, or at least many folks think the targets are always Black males. After all, two Black boys, 16-year-old Johnny Robinson and 13-year-old Virgil Ware were shot and killed the same day in the immediate aftermath of the church bombing. Yet, Black women and girls were not only routine victims of sexual violence, but were often beaten or killed with impunity during slavery, the era of Jim Crow, and well into and beyond the Civil Rights era. Black female martyrdom and valor in the struggle for human and civil rights is often muted in favor of other types of narratives. A perfect example of this is how most people view Rosa Parks.
Too often the public (and a few historians) mistakes Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat to a White person in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 as just an example of what happens when a Black woman simply gets tired of racial injustice. But it was much, much more than that. Historian Danielle L. McGuire aptly noted that Parks had a long career of dangerous work as an NAACP investigator in the decades before her fateful act in 1955. McGuire also reported that the very first question Rosa Parks’ mother asked her after Parks was released from jail for her now-famous refusal to give up her seat to a white bus passenger was: “Did they beat you?” That kind of question was, at one time, almost as typical for Black women as the sun coming up.
One way to dispel myths and increase our understanding of our lives and the world we live in is to read and do our own research. One way to honor those four little girls tragically killed on that fateful Sunday in 1963 (and all of our Black heroines) is to examine and celebrate our resilient and diverse and often brilliant Black womanhood, a womanhood denied to them. So here goes…
The books contained in the .pdf attachment at the end of this blog were my favorites and the first books that came to mind, along with a few marvelous book suggestions about Black female musicians courtesy of my good friend and alumna sister from Agnes Scott College, ethnomusicologist Dr. Birgitta Johnson.
Some books are old and some relatively new. There are no separate sections where fiction is separated from nonfiction. The only separate section in this bibliography is a section of books devoted exclusively to and for Black girls from preschool to middle school. A few parents might find this useful. I am also happy to report that books for and about Black girls is a growing industry.
My book list is not comprehensive. For some of you who read all the time, you might find some glaring omissions. I make no apologies. I never choose a book simply because it was or is popular, and neither should you. I also have not been fond of everything on the bestseller list now or in the past. This list is MY LIST and it is hardly an exhaustive list of all the books I have read about Black women and/or any other subject. Yet it is a beginning. For those of you who read occasionally, you might find this list particularly useful so that you can begin that journey where you read and discover new things, new ideas, and new writers.
Now, for those of you who might be tempted to send me some remark about how I left out what you consider to be the “best book ever,” do not despair and save your energy. The attached bibliography has an important page with a header that reads: “Add Your Favorite Books Here.” THIS IS YOUR PAGE. This is where I hope you will begin to write down the authors and titles of those books that have mattered the most to you. I hope you will create your own bibliography, because if you do, we can begin to shape a real dialogue that is truly about ALL OF US. I invite you to start one part of your/our journey by clicking here: **By, About, and For Black Women, a Personal Bibliography by Leslye Joy Allen.pdf**
Portable Document Files (.pdf ) have to be opened with an Adobe Reader. If you have a problem opening the file above, please visit http://www.adobe.com, click on the section near the top of the page that is marked “Download,” then highlight and click “Adobe Reader” and download the Adobe Reader free of charge.
Also be sure to visit the Gist of Freedom, free podcasts devoted to preserving our rich African American History at: http://www.blackhistoryuniversity.com
There were four little Black girls whose lives were snuffed out on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963 when a bomb planted by racist White terrorists exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. They were, Denise McNair who was the youngest at age 11, Carol Robertson aged 14, Cynthia Wesley** aged 14 (**Real and Birth name is “CYNTHIA MORRIS”), and Addie Mae Collins was aged 14. When that bomb went off, most Black Birmingham citizens and most Black Americans forgot about the “March on Washington,” held a mere eighteen days earlier on August 28. Not long after the blast, all hell broke loose. The New York Times headline on the following day read (click here for article): “Birmingham Bomb Kills 4 Negro Girls in Church; Riots Flare; 2 Boys Slain.“
Birmingham, then nicknamed “Bombingham,” had an ugly history it would take decades to live down. A middle class neighborhood in the city had suffered so many bombings that it was nicknamed “Dynamite Hill,” because angry Whites bombed homes to stop Black people from moving into the area. Dynamite Hill was the neighborhood that honed and developed future Phi Beta Kappa scholar, radical activist, and author Angela Davis. Yet, that is a story for another essay. There are those of us, however, who think the story of what and who we lost on that fateful Sunday morning deserves its place in all the national narratives of American history. I am one of those people; so is actor and activist Erich McMillan-McCall.
My friend, Erich is the founder of Project1Voice, an organization devoted to preserving Black theatre companies and our important historical legacies. I should add that not only is he a multitalented performance artist with credits on Broadway, national stages, and television, he is also a visionary. I say he is a visionary, however, with a very important acknowledgement of the type of communities that both of us grew up in as children. Black women, he emphasizes, were at the center of these communities. Yet, in several of our usual marathon-long telephone conversations, he has lamented that he is bothered by how Black women’s voices are not only muted or unacknowledged in the historical narratives, but also on the stage, and in the arts.
Erich and I are products of a time when to be young and Black and living in the American South did not necessarily mean that everywhere you went there was danger; what it tended to mean was the Black community in which you grew up was supportive, filled with a great deal of love and encouragement. There were threats to our wellbeing, to be sure. Yet, those threats largely came from outside the neighborhoods where we lived. As much as some very sympathetic White liberal folks and some younger Black Americans have erroneously assumed otherwise, our Black parents and elders made sure we had normal childhoods with school, church, piano lessons, baseball games, concerts, plays, parties, and family picnics. They did all of this for us in spite of the racism and the perpetual threat of (and often real) racial violence that characterized much of life for us during the 1960s and 1970s. Erich understands this type of upbringing.
His proactive approach, that provides greater visibility to financially struggling Black theatre companies while engaging educational, civic, and political organizations in this collective struggle for artistic, political, educational, economic, and historical viability is not exactly a new way of doing things. The Black community that I grew up in was filled with folks who could sing, dance, act, organize, who taught school, practiced medicine, ran businesses, and helped elect Black people to political office—This is what we were/are. I loved this Black community, and the activism and the theatre it produced. I still live in the neighborhood my family moved to when I was around the age of eleven. It has not entirely lost those same qualities that it had during my childhood. However, I fear that these types of communities become more rare with each passing decade. At the same time, I am gratified and encouraged by Erich’s embrace of the old collaborative efforts of our neighborhoods and organizations that we remember about our childhoods; and his insistence that those qualities can be modified and used to great affect in the information age. I hope this is the beginning of a new trend.
Sunday, September 15, 2013, is the 50th anniversary of one of our worst tragedies. On this date, Project1Voice, in collaboration with Howard University, African Continuum Theatre Company, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will present a reading of the play “Four Little Girls,” written by Christina Ham, directed by Phylicia Rashad. It will stream live online at 6:00 PM EST via the Kennedy Center’s website.
Targeted toward young audiences, this will be one of those wonderful opportunities to sit down in front of your computer screens with your children and your friends to watch this important piece of theatre and history—Free of Charge. You should also check for viewing parties around the country. Additionally, over thirty Black theatre companies around this nation will be presenting “Four Little Girls” simultaneously on the fiftieth anniversary of this national tragedy.
Erich and I both remember neighborhoods where middle class and working class Black families looked out for each other and each other’s children. These facts, however, are precisely why the slaughter of Denise McNair, Carol Robertson, Cynthia Wesley** (**born as “Cynthia Morris,” but cited in the historiography and in most news reports as “Cynthia Wesley“) and Addie Mae Collins was so devastating to Birmingham’s Black community and other Black communities throughout the nation. The reading of this play is not only a way to honor these dead children, but to also recall and remember the kind of stable and warm neighborhoods where all of them and us grew up. Let us honor these little girls by going home again. Peace.
Please visit: Project1Voice and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for more information about this play; how to access the play via the internet on Sept. 15, 2013 at 6 PM EST; and for information about other great performances and programs.
** Shortly after this blog was published, I, Leslye Joy Allen, was contacted by Fate Morris, the brother of the young girl commonly known in historical and news records as “Cynthia Wesley.” Fate Morris insisted that his sister’s real name is “CYNTHIA DIANE MORRIS,” and that authorities recorded her name incorrectly the day of the explosion. Mr. Morris also informed me that he has decided to accept the Congressional Medal for his sister. Originally he and Sarah Collins Rudolph (sister of Addie Mae Collins) had declined this medal. Please read the following article about the survivors of this tragedy: “Survivor of ’63 Bombing Seeks Funds”**
Please join Project1Voice‘s commemoration of the lives of these four little girls:
I learned late on Monday, 17 June 2013 that one of my Aunt Minnie Belle Veal’s protégées passed this April 2013. She was Ambassador Gayleatha Beatrice Brown(June 20, 1947 to April 19, 2013).
A Howard University alumna, “Gay,” as I called her, was the first person I knew that worked for Randall Robinson’s TransAfrica, the first person who wore braids before they became popular. In her usual “I-will-not-have-any-of-it” style, my “Aunt Beh Beh” (Minnie Belle Veal) drove from Edison, New Jersey, all the way to Gay’s graduate school, the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, after someone there mildly suggested that Gay, a Black girl from a working class family in New Jersey, should not seriously consider a career in Foreign Service. And then—with the hell-and-be-damned-with-you that is the best of Black America—she became a diplomat and later an ambassador.
I remember her as someone who loved my Aunt Minnie Belle more than life. The book she gave Auntie in 1969 was The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. I ended up reading the copy of the book she left for my Aunt. I remember Gay as someone who liked her eggs scrambled hard, like me. I fixed them several times for her and myself on one of the extended visits to Atlanta that she took with my Aunt Beh Beh. The last time I saw her both of my parents were still alive, but my Aunt Minnie Belle had just passed and Gay had arrived for her funeral. Now, all of them are gone.
In the usual routine of graduate students and, I guess, members of the foreign service, Gay and I lost contact with each other due to moving around. She quickly went from being a U. S. Diplomat in France to her later years when she served as Ambassador to two countries on the continent of Africa, Burkina Faso and then later Benin.
I received an email earlier in the day from a former female student of mine. This student was about to embark on studies that are not so traditional for women in general, to say nothing of Black women. Later in the evening I decided to look up Gayleatha on the Internet. I had found her before and quickly forwarded the hyperlinks. This time I found her again, but what came up first was her obituary and the Funeral Service for Gayleatha Brown, which I did not expect. I thought about my Dad, who has been gone now for twenty-six years, who was as proud of Gayleatha as he was of his sister Minnie Belle. As my head raced, my first impulse, in the wee hours of the morning, was to call Mama to tell her that Gayleatha was dead. It dawned on me, as I reached for the phone, that Mama was also gone.
With the exception of a few cousins on my Dad’s side of the family, most of the people that I knew whom Gay’s passing would upset, have already passed on themselves. I would tell you how I am holding my chin up, trusting in God and all of the usual stuff that people say at a time like this. However, I have had about as much death as I care to take in one year.
I lost Mama, a beloved cousin; and while I have two loving families, I had a couple of family members who decided that I made a good emotional punching bag since they could not vent their dissatisfaction with themselves on anyone else. Additionally, someone who I thought was a friend proved to be anything but one.
Now, I know that I have not earned this and that I have no control over any of this. And in spite of how truly bad I feel, late Monday into the wee hours of Tuesday morning were not completely awful. After all, I heard from a former student who is planning to study and do great things; and I made a quick acquaintance of a Vassar College Professor who likes my blog and who does his own bit of social commentary. I just wish that the day had ended on a better note. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that I learned of her passing, I remain grateful to have known Gay.
So, all I ask is that you pray for the family of the late Ambassador Gayleatha Beatrice Brown. Pray for my students and for all young people who desperately need her example to do the kind of work we all need them to do. As for me, I am, right now, not much in the mood for anything. And I make no apologies. That is just the way it is, for now.
This Blog was written by Leslye Joy Allen and is protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to this blog, or any total or partial excerpt of this blog must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: http://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly and visibly stated as the author.
