LITR 5731: Seminar in
American Minority Literature
University of Houston-Clear Lake,
fall 2001
Student Research Project
Michelle Stephenson
LITR 5731
Journal Project
Dr. Craig White
December 4, 2001
Literature
of the Civil Rights Movement: A Black Woman’s Perspective
Table
of Content
The Civil Rights Movement- Overview
Black Women in the
Civil Rights Movement
Rosa Parks, Mother of the Civil Rights
Movement
Ella Baker, Civil Rights Activist
Fannie Lou Hamer- "Sick and
Tired"
Women Writers of the
Black Arts Movement (1960s-1970s)
Gwendolyn Brooks
Nikki Giovanni
Ntozake Shange
Sonia Sanchez
The Black Matriarch:
Her Family, the Community and the Church
My Thoughts…
Literature
of the Civil Rights Movement-An Overview
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was a
political and social struggle for African-Americans to gain full citizenship
rights and to achieve racial equality in America. Although no longer slaves,
Blacks were still not allowed to vote, suffered from job discrimination, were
not allowed in all-white facilities and were limited to attending only black
schools.
I have always been interested in the Civil
Rights Movement and how it has personally paved the way for young
African-Americans, like myself, to have access to a good education, entry into
corporate America, and basic civil liberties that the dominant white culture has
taken for granted for quite some time. I was born in 1968, the same year that
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and wondered what it really felt like
to risk your life for what you believe in. I can only admire these brave souls
who knew that their efforts would not show immediate results but would be for
their children and their children’s children-the dream deferred.
African-American women, often referred to as
a "double minority," deal with the issues of race, class and gender.
We have often been stereotyped as promiscuous sex objects, welfare recipients or
masculine "mammies" who are only good for cleaning up after white
folk. The sexist emphasis of this period was criticized by Sonia Pressman, in The
Crisis: "When most people talk about civil rights, they mean the rights
of Black people, and when they talk about the rights of black people, they
generally mean the rights of Black males" (Pressman, 1970: 103).
Cynthia Washington, a Black project director, remarks that Black women
saw the race issue as so pressing that they could not focus on the issues of
sexism. She states, "I am certain that our single-minded focus on the
issues of racial discrimination and the Black struggle for equality blinded us
to other issues" (Carson, 1981: 148).
Because the Civil Rights Movement is often
associated with men-a militant or masculine image- women’s contributions to
the movement were often overlooked. I am interested in learning specifically how
Black women felt and what was on their minds during this era. My journal will
focus on the role of women in the movement, women writers of the movement, and
how the next generation of women writers view the movement. From the time of the
civil rights movement’s birth through the black power movement of the
mid-1960s, African-American women writers explored experiences of struggle in a
literary movement that was matched only by the political gains of the era (McKoy,
1995: 191).
Works
Cited
Carson, Clayborn
(1981) In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960’s.
Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press.
McKoy, Sheila Smith
(1995) ‘The Civil Rights Movement,’ in Cathy N. Davidson and Linda
Martin-Wagner (eds.) The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the U.S.,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Pressman, Sonia
(1970) ‘Job Discrimination and the Black Woman’, The Crisis, March
1970: 103.
Black
Women in the Civil Rights Movement
Although slavery was abolished in the 1860s,
segregation- the system of laws that separated Blacks from white society’s
civil rights-was still used to control Black people and to keep them at an
inferior status. Segregation was known as the Jim Crow system, named after a
minstrel show character from the 1830s who was an old, crippled, slave who
embodied negative stereotypes of Blacks. The Civil Rights Movement challenged
segregation with protest marches, boycotts and sit-ins and has also been called
the Black Freedom Movement, the Negro Revolution, and the Second Reconstruction.
Women were often working behind the scenes receiving little recognition, if any
at all, as they helped bring social change through the movement.
Rosa
Parks, Mother of the Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement was actually
started by a woman, Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man
on a Montgomery, AL bus in 1955. Parks’s brave act sparked the Montgomery Bus
Boycott. She states, "I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on
the Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to the segregation
laws in the South. I only knew that I was tired of being pushed around"
(Lyman, 1999: 180). After her arrest, Parks calmly stated, "I did not get
on the bus to get arrested, I got on the bus to go home"(Harmon, 2000: 42).
Unfortunately, because of her bold action, Parks lost her job as a seamstress
and was shunned by the whites of Montgomery, which led her to move her family to
Detroit in 1957.
Because many African-Americans relied on
public transportation to get to and from work, the boycott hurt the public
transportation business and eventually stopped busses from running. Blacks
organizations such as the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), arranged car
pools, bought station wagons to help Black get to work and Black cab drivers
dropped their usual forty-five-cent fares to ten cents, the same price as bus
far (Harmon, 2000: 42). Those who did not find a means of transportation walked.
The Black community realized that they did contribute to the American economy
and were an important part of society.
Parks continued to be active in the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), attended the March on
Washington in 1963, and worked as an office assistant for Congressman John
Conyers until she retired in 1988. Parks, who is now 88, will always be
considered the mother of the civil rights right movement and has received
numerous honors, including a street named after her.
Ella
Baker, Civil Rights Activist
During the early years of the movement Black
men and women worked together on issues of discrimination, but as the movement
progressed, Black women became more aware of the increased chauvinistic attitude
of Black men.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, headed by
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.
paved the way for future demonstrations and protests against racial inequality
and injustice. Although King was the head of SCLC, it was Ella Baker who did the
groundwork of developing and running the organization. Prior to her role at
SCLC, Baker was the field secretary for the NAACP, where she organized voter
registrations drives and participated in fund-raising events. She resigned
because she felt that women were excluded from decision-making. After working
for SCLC, Baker realized that she had not escaped this inferior treatment from
men and talks about her observation of the treatment of women in SCLC:
There would never
be any role for me in a leadership capacity with SCLC. Why? First, I’m a
woman. Also, I’m not a minister. And second…I knew that my penchant for
speaking honestly…would not be well tolerated. The combination of the basic
attitude of men, and especially ministers, as to what the role of women in their
church setups is—that of taking orders, not providing leadership—and
the…ego problems involved in having to feel that here is someone who…had
more information about a lot of things than they possessed at that time…This
would never have lent itself to my being a leader in the movement (Giddings,
1984: 312).
It is clear from Baker’s statement that
Black women had to struggle to gain respect from their Black male counterparts
as well as from white society. Baker has worked with more than fifty
organizations in her lifetime but is most known for forming the first
student-activist civil rights movement in American history-the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in October of 1960 (Harmon, 2000: 25).
Many college students staged nonviolent "sit-ins" at white-only
lunch counters to protest white businesses’ refusal to serve Blacks. They were
spat on, called names, and even beaten and arrested (Harmon, 2000: 25). Also,
many whites refused to patronize some of these segregated businesses because
they were afraid, causing the businesses to lose lots of money. By the end of
1960, many lunch counters in America were integrated. Once again, the Black
community pulled together and was victorious. This gave them the motivation to
go on. Their dream of becoming a full citizen with equal rights was coming
closer and closer to a reality.
Although she was very involved in the movement, Baker avoided being in
the spotlight and stayed in the background. In the 1970s, Baker traveled across
the country to raise the awareness of women’s rights and prison reform. She
died in 1986 on her eighty-third birthday. In 1994, she was inducted into the
National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, NY. Shortly before her death,
Baker talked about the importance of becoming involved in something if you want
to make a change,"(During the 1960s) you had to break through things to get
what you wanted. You didn’t just sit up there and think about it; it had to
happen" (Harmon, 2000: 28).
Fannie
Lou Hamer-"Sick and Tired"
Fannie Lou Hamer, another Black activist, who
is famous for her recurring statement, "I’m sick and tired of being sick
and tired" created many programs such as Head Start and Freedom Farm
Cooperative, and raised funds for a low-income housing project to start a
low-income day care center in her town of Ruleville, MS. Hamer was the twentieth
child born on a plantation to a sharecropping family in Mississippi.
Hamer was also a field secretary for the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was severely beaten in a
Winona, MS jail for refusing to acknowledge the white-only rule in a restaurant.
This beating left her permanently scarred and injured. The following passage is
an excerpt from one of her speeches:
We have a problem,
folks, and we want to try to deal with the problem in the only way that we can
deal with the problem as far as black women. And you know, I’m not hung up on
this about liberating myself from the black man, I’m not going to try that
thing. I got a black husband, six feet three, two hundred and forty pounds, with
a 14 shoe, that I don’t want to be liberated from. But we are here to work
side by side with this black man in trying to bring liberation to all people
(Lerner, 1973: 611).
Hamer’s speech clarifies how Black women,
although aware of their poor treatment by Black men as well as white society,
chose to support their men because they felt the cause for racial equality more
of a priority than their rights as women. Hamer had a very down-to-earth
attitude and was very straightforward about what she stood for and believed in.
She felt that no matter where you come from or what your background is, all
women should stick together to support justice: "Whether you have a Ph.D.,
or no D, we’re in this bag together. And whether you’re from Morehouse or
Nohouse, we’re still in this bag together"(Lyman, 1999: 101). Hamer’s
faith in God and her involvement in the church was her motivation to keep going.
She felt that God favored the poor and oppressed.
So, contrary to popular belief, Black women like Parks, Baker and Hamer,
were very active in the Civil Rights Movement, as were many others. Professor
Belinda Robnett, author of the book, How Long? How Long?: African-American
Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights, "rewrites" the history of
the movement by using interviews and oral histories of women leaders of the
movement. She argues that because women were excluded from the top layers of
leadership in the civil rights organizations, their contributions were
overlooked and therefore led to an inadequate view of the progression of the
movement. Excluding individuals by gender and class from formal leadership roles
was a practice rooted in black culture, "Ministerial authority was rooted
in church structure but emanated from black cultural tradition (Robnett, 1997:
30).
Primary
Works Cited
Harmon, Rod L.
(2000) American Civil Rights Leaders, New Jersey: Enslow Publisher, Inc.
Lyman, Darryl L.
(1999) Great African-American Women, New York: Gramercy Books.
Robnett, Belinda
(1997) How Long? How Long?: African American Women in the Struggle for
Civil Rights, New York: Oxford University Press.
Secondary
Works Cited
Giddings, Paula
(1984) When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and
Sex in America, New York: Bantam Books.
Lerner, Gerda
(1973) Black Women in White America, New York: Vintage Books.
The
Black Arts Movement
Like the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the Black Arts Movement of the
late 1960s and early 1970s, resulted in an outpouring of music, art and
literature and inspired many educated and middle class African-Americans to
reevaluate and to identify with the vernacular culture associated with the black
proletariat (Mullen, 2001: 58). Emphasizing the oral and performance traditions
of African-Americans, particularly such vernacular practices as
"rapping," "signifying," "sounding," and
"running it down," the Black Arts Movement created a public culture
space for later emergence of "hip-hop" and "spoken word"
poetry (Mullen, 2001: 54). Writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni,
Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez, focused on topics of gender, race and
sexuality. They wrote about the "double-jeopardy" of being female and
black that only a Black woman could explain.
Black women writers were often categorized as
feminists because of this focus on sexism as well as racism, which did not
appeal to the dominant white society or to Black males. These writers, in my
opinion, were a little more militant-a masculine trait- than the writers of the
Harlem Renaissance because of their radical, street-wise language, resistance to
the dominant culture and to the Standard English language. Through their
writings, these women drew attention to the limitless possibilities of
African-American female subjectivity in their texts and provided a context from
which the writings of the late 1960s could grow (McKoy, 1995:192).
In the article, Deferred Dreams: The Voice of African American Women’s
Poetry since the 1970s, Dr. Manohar Samuel of St. Augustine’s University, asks
the question, "Can poetry be political, didactic and art?" The answer,
of course, is that it is possible and is more effectively proved in poetry of
Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Rita Dove and others (Samuel, 2001:
1).
The 1960s poetry
marks the change in attitude and takes a militant posture with the emergence of
the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement and the Black Arts Movement
that brought in cultural nationalism. For many it seemed that poetry written
during this period was purely political and social. The poetry written by
African American women that followed in the 1970s and thereafter (influenced by
the Feminist Movement) proved that Black poetry could be both didactic and
political, and art as well (Samuel, 2001: 3).
In this article, Dr. Samuel proves that
African-American women do have a voice and can write about issues such as
sexism, racism, rape, war, black beauty and the black family, and creatively
turn these issues into works of art.
Gwendolyn
Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African-American male or female, to win a
Pulitzer Prize of any kind for her literary work, Annie Allen, which
included the well-known piece "The Anniad."
She was born in Topeka, KS, on June 7, 1917, as the first child of David
Anderson Brooks and Keziah Corinne (Wims) Brooks. She graduated from Wilson
Junior College in 1956 and published her first book of poetry, A Street in
Bronzeville, in 1945. Her mother, a former schoolteacher, was the one who
strongly encouraged Brooks to write. Brooks states, "I have notebooks
dating from the time I was eleven. When I started to keep my poem in composition
books, my mother decided that I was to better female Paul Laurence Dunbar"
(Lyman, 1999: 27). This comment shows how much respect Black male writers
received during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and how Black women writers
did not receive the credit they deserved. Brooks is also well-known for her
novel, Maud Martha (1953) which she draws on her own experiences and
turns on the conflict of being an artist in a society that defines black
womanhood in terms of domesticity (McKoy, 1995: 191).
The "Black Pride" theme of the
1960s left Black women resistant and refusing to assimilate to the standards of
beauty that white society tried to force upon them- blue eyes, straight hair and
waif-like figures. Black women were proud of their heritage, proud of their
kinky hair, proud of their dark complexions and proud of their full figures.
In her article, Double Consciousness,
Modernism, and Womanist Themes in Gwendolyn Brooks’s "The Anniad,"
A. Yemisi Jimoh, states:
Brooks also probes
gender relations, which often are reinforced in the dominant media as well as in
social discourse; and she critiques the prescriptive nature of those relations.
One of the major gendered themes in "The Anniad" is black women-
represented by Annie Allen- who are trapped in the beauty and gender role
fictions of the dominant society in the United States. Mary Helen Washington
defines this motif, as the "intimidation of color" which she finds is
a consistent issue in many African-American women writers’ works. Through
Brooks’s themes in "The Anniad," she demonstrates that a black
woman’s belief in the dominant beauty and gender role fictions will cause her
to suffer immensely—more than the physical beauty that is projected by the
dominant culture is unreal and almost unattainable (without tremendous physical
alterations) for most black women (Jimoh, 1998: 2).
After attending the Second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University
in Nashville, TN, Brooks decided to change her writing style and made a
conscious effort to write for black readers about the black experience and black
subject matter. She did not care if her poetry appealed to mainstream American
because she was writing for her people. This change of thought also led her to
publish exclusively through black companies.
This new style of writing produced her book of poems, In the Mecca
(1968), a narrative work detailing the search for a missing girl named Pepita,
and thereby realistically revealing black life and thought in the Mecca, a
building crowded with poverty-stricken people (Lyman, 1999: 28).
One of her most famous works is entitled, We Real Cool, subtitled The
Pool Players. Seven at the Green Shovel.
"We real cool.
We left school.
We lurk late.
We strike straight.
We sing sin.
We thin gin.
We jazz june.
We die soon."
I remember reading this poem in one of my
undergraduate courses and although her words appear to be very short and simple,
they are also very empowering. The "we" in her poem, are
"cool" because they skip school, stay out late and get to drink gin.
After reading each line, the reader wants to know what "we" are going
to do next. Of course, at the end, the reader finds out that all of this fun
lead to destruction because, "we die soon!" Barbara B. Sims in her
article, "Brooks’s We Real Cool"(1976), says something
similar:
Until the last
line, the element of bravado, in the diction and rhythm has made the activities
of the street people seem somehow defensible, if not downright desirable. A
certain in being outside the conventions, institutions, and legal structures of
the predominant society is conveyed. Escaping the drudgery and dullness of
school and work has left the lives of the drop-outs open to many romantic
possibilities (Sims, 1976: 58).
Brooks explains her use of "we" in
her poem:
First of all, let
me tell you how that’s ("We Real Cool") supposed to be said, because
there’s a reason why I set it out as I did. These are people who are
essentially saying, "Kilroy is here. We are." But they’re a little
uncertain of the strength of their identity. The "We" – you’re
supposed to stop after the "we" and think about validity; of course,
there’s no way for you to tell whether it should be said softly or not, I
suppose, but I say it rather softly because I want to represent their basic
uncertainty (q. Lindbergh, 1976: 283).
So, themes of beauty, poverty, resistance to the dominant cultures and
the black experience were some of Brooks’s main topics of discussion in her
poems and novels. I personally like Brooks’s simplistic style and how she also
is able to help her audience to hear the minority voice and vicariously share
the minority experience. Brooks is still alive and well and is still receiving
awards and recognition for her literary works.
Nikki
Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, TN on June 7, 1917, to Jones
"Gus" Giovanni, a probation officer, and Yolande Cornelia (Watson)
Giovanni, a social worker. After graduating from Fisk University in Nashville,
TN, in 1967, Giovanni attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Social
Work and the Columbia University School of Fine Arts for her graduate studies.
It was while attending Fisk that she got involved in the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and became a militant civil rights activist.
She wrote a collection of poems that included Black Feeling, Black Talk
(1968), and Black Judgement (1968), which was famous for the line
"Black love is Black wealth" and became known as the Princess of Black
Poetry.
Another popular poem, Ego Tripping, had a broad popular appeal and
combines hyperbole and humor with the populist Afrocentric history, heroic myth,
feminist self-assertion and celebration of black pride (Mullen, 2001: 55). The
concluding lines of the poem reveal why Giovanni’s work has had an empowering
effect on the lives of many young African-American women: "I am so perfect
so divine so ethereal so surreal/ I cannot be comprehended/ except by my
permission/ I mean…I…can fly/ like a bird in the sky" (Fowler, 1997:
317).
These themes tie in well with the theme of
the Civil Rights Movement, which was "Black Pride" or "Say it
loud, I’m Black and I’m proud." African-Americans were no longer
ashamed of their race, ethnicity or culture background and wanted white American
to hear their voices.
Giovanni’s more controversial poem, The
True Importance of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro," contains
the following lines:
Nigger
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a nigger kill
Can a nigger kill a honkie
Can a nigger kill the Man
Can you kill nigger
Huh? Nigger can you
Kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-jew
…
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut if off
…
Can you kill a white man
Can you kill the nigger
in you
Can you make your nigger mind
And free your black hands to
Strangle
Can you kill
Can a nigger kill
Can you shoot straight ahead and
Fire for good measure
Can you splatter their brains in the street
…
Can we learn to kill the WHITE for BLACK
Learn to kill niggers
Learn to kill Black men (q.Mullen, 2001: 55).
Giovanni’s use of variations of Standard
English and empowering words, gives her poem a "rap" sound and
"militant attitude." This style of writing may seem very harsh by
today’s standards, but this honest view of race relations in the 1960s is what
the Black Arts Movement was known for. I do not think that writers of today’s
era are as bold as writers of the Civil Right era. They tend to sort of
sugarcoat the issues by using words that are softer and less confrontational.
Harriet Mullen, author of The Black Arts Movement states:
Such poems record
the trauma and mark the transition from the integrationist goals of the
nonviolent Civil Rights movement, to the militant stance of the Black Power
movement, as African-Americans become enraged by the impunity of racist
murderers, assassins, and terrorists whose aim was to kill the hopes and dreams
of black people. Like similar works of the period, Giovanni’s poem oscillates
between a literal call for retaliatory violence, urging revolutionary blacks to
murder racist whites, and a wish for the metaphorical death of the oppressive
"honkie" and the submissive "nigger (Mullen, 2001: 56).
Another poem of Giovanni’s, Woman Poem
(1969), focuses on how Black
women were traditionally portrayed as either
sex objects or a fat "motherly" or "mammy" type. Her poem
has a sarcastic, "choppy" tone that catches the reader’s attention:
it’s a sex
object if you’re pretty
and no love
or love and no
sex if you’re fat
get back fat
black woman be a mother
grandmother
strong thing but not woman
gameswoman
romantic woman love needer (q.Cade,
1970: 13).
In this poem, Giovanni is saying that a woman
cannot have both love and sex simultaneously. It is either one or the other. A
man is either attracted to a woman sexually or "loves" a woman for
being a good mother or "mammy". If a woman is strong, she is
considered to be masculine, a feminist or a lesbian, therefore taking away her
"beauty" as a woman. In a man’s eyes, a woman cannot be both strong
and beautiful, which is a very inaccurate stereotype.
Like Brooks, Giovanni has received many
awards and honors and is still living. She is often called "A speaker of
the Age." Giovanni states, "I have always thought my job is to call
what I see, to describe my world. When you are a speaker from a people who
don’t have a voice, then you are a spokesperson (Lyman, 1999: 91).
Ntozake
Shange
I had the pleasure of meeting Ntozake
Shange in person, while I was studying English and Women’s Studies at the
University Of Missouri-Columbia. She brings such a strong presence to a room
that I was almost too afraid to approach her. Once I struck up the nerve to talk
to her, I found her to be a very warm, extremely intelligent and deep person.
Even her everyday conversation has a sort of poetic sound. Our class read aloud
her well-known choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide When
the Rainbow is Enuf (1975) and when she visited our campus, she also read
some excerpts from the book.
For Colored Girls
describes what it means to be a Black woman and how we deal with love, loss,
hurt, pain, the black community and white society. I have also read her novel, Sassafrass,
Cypress, and Indigo (1982), a story about three sisters and their mother
from Charleston, SC. The book focuses on themes such as single motherhood,
domestic violence and black relationships. Like Toni Morrison, Shange uses
"double meaning" and magic realism in this novel.
Shange was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, NJ to Paul T. Williams, a
surgeon, and Eloise Williams, a psychiatric social worker. She was the oldest of
four children of an upper middle class family. She earned a bachelor’s degree
with honors in American Studies from Barnard College in 1970 and a master’s
degree in American studies in 1973 from the University of Southern California,
Los Angeles.
To redirect her life and to reinforce her inner strength, in 1971 she
decided to change her name to Ntozake, meaning "she who comes with her own
things" and Shange, meaning "who walks like a lion." After having
a one-on-one conversation with her, this is not surprising because she seems to
be in a world of her own (in a good way).
In my opinion, although Shange may not be as
well know by mainstream America as Maya Angelou or Toni Morrison, she has a very
authentic writing style that combines street slang, jazz tones and poetic prose.
Harryette Mullen, author of "The Black Arts Movement" states that
Shange’s choreopoem is a feminist work that broke through many spoken and
unspoken proscriptions on black women’s writing (Mullen, 2001: 56). Her work
deals with the physical and emotional abuse of Black women by their men and also
deals with her ability to survive this abuse and move on.
Shange was among the writers who confessed
discomfort or frustration with written literature and with the English language
itself as vehicles unsuitable for black expression (Mullen, 2001: 59).
Shange’s poem, nappy edges (1972) like Gwendolyn Brooks’s "The
Anniad" celebrated the beauty of Black women and their difference from yet
"uniqueness" to white society’s idea of beauty. Neal A. Lester’s
section on "Hair" in The Oxford Companion to African American
Literature, says that Shange’s epigram to her poetry collection nappy
edges, affirms a richness of African Americans’ hair, a richness that
defines, legitimizes, and celebrates African American experience and identity:
"the roots if your hair/what turns back when we sweat, run, make love,
dance, get afraid, get happy: the tell-tale sign of living" (q. Lester,
1997: 334).
Shange, like Giovanni, cleverly manipulates
the English language and creates her own language. She referred to the English
language as "the language in which I learned to hate myself" (Mullen,
2001: 60). Shange means that the language used by the dominant white society is
full of stereotypes and often portrays African-American as inferior to whites.
This is an example of how Black women writers of the 1960s and 1970s refused to
let white America define them with "white language" or by "white
washing" racist and sexist issues.
The following is an excerpt from For
Colored Girls that describes a woman experiencing an abortion, which was a
very touchy subject in the 70s (and still is today):
tubes tables white washed windows
grime from age wiped over once
legs spread
anxious
eyes crawling up on me
eyes rollin in my thighs
metal horses gnawin my womb
dead mice fall from my mouth
i really didn’t mean to
i really didn’t think i cd
just one day off…
get offa me alla this blood
bones shattered like soft ice-cream cones
i cdnt have people
lookin at me
pregnant
i cdnt have my friends see this
dyin danglin tween my legs
& i didnt say a thing
not a sigh
or a fast scream
to get
those eyes offa me
get them steel rods outta me
this hurts
this hurts me
& nobody came
cuz nobody knew
once i waz pregnant & shamed of myself
(Shange, 1977: 22-23).
The lines "bones shattered like soft
ice-cream cones" and "dyin dangling tween my legs," gives the
reader a visual picture of a baby being destroyed inside her. Also the line,
"& nobody came cuz nobody knew" describes how lonely this woman
was because she was too ashamed to tell anyone, including the father. Being a
single parent or making the decision to have an abortion without any input from
the father of her unborn child, was the Black woman’s reality.
Because Shange was not afraid to discuss
topics such as domestic violence, rape, and abortion, she was often labeled a
feminist or womanist. Even during the 60s and 70s when it was "in" to
talk about racism, a woman could not celebrate her womanhood without society
considering her to be anti-male. If it were not for women writers like Shange,
many of these important issues would not have been addressed. Being Black should
be more important than being a woman, right? Well, as a Black woman, I feel that
I cannot separate my race from my gender. Together, both race and gender define
me.
Shange, who is still living, has also
published: Sassafras: A Novella (1977) and Three Pieces (1981), a book which
contains three theatre pieces. In the early 1990s, she received favorable review
for her direction of For Colored Girls… at the Ensemble Theatre in
Houston, TX.
Sonia
Sanchez
Sonia Sanchez, like Shange, often took a
different approach to language. She experimented with nonverbal vocalizations
intended to represent voices of ancestors, or incorporating extralinguistic
cries, yells, whoops, and hollers to express intense emotion-Sanchez frequently
shows how Black speakers have always already altered the European language, so
that English acquires subversive connotations other than those associated with
its usage as a language of oppressors (Mullen, 2001: 61).
Born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham,
Alabama, to Wilson Driver (musician and teacher) and Lena (Jones) Driver, who
died when Sanchez was a baby. She had a sister named Patricia and a brother,
Wilson, who died in 1981. Sanchez began to express herself through poetry after
developing a stutter that lasted throughout her adolescent years. She earned a
BA in political science at Hunter College and studied poetry at New York
University.
In the following excerpt from her poem,
"We a BaddDDD People," Sanchez employs nonstandard grammar, spelling,
punctuation, and slang, transforming "bad English" into witty African
American colloquialism transliterated from speech to text, while demonstrating
how black vernacular, deployed as stylistic opposition to standard English, can
reverse the meaning of words, so that "bad" is understood as
"good, excellent, beautiful, wonderful" (Mullen, 2001: 62).
i mean
we bees real
bad.
we gots bad songs
sung on every station
we gots some bad
NATURALS
on our heads
and brothers gots
some bad loud (fo real)
dashiki threads
on them.
i mean when
we dance
u know we be doooen it
when we talk
we be doooen it
when we wrap
we be doooen it
and
when we love.well.yeh. u be knowen
bout that too. (un-huh!)
we got some BAAADDD
thots and actions
like off those white mothafuckers
and rip if off if it ain’t nailed
down and surround those wite/
knee/grow/pigs &don’t let them
live to come back again into
our neighborhoods (q. Mullen, 2001: 62).
Sanchez’s use of "we" is very
similar to Brooks’s use of "we" in the poem, We Real Cool.
"We" unites and empowers a group of people, in this case African-
Americans, and gives them a sort of "authentic" identity.
"They" are proud to be different and resistant to the dominant white
culture. "We" have bad dashiki threads, bad naturals, bad R & B
songs. These are things that were typically associated only with
African-Americans and gave them a sort of identity that separated them from the
dominant culture. Sanchez, like her fellow poets of the Black Arts Movement,
cleverly manipulates the human language and develops variations of the Standard
English language. Sanchez also seems to be influenced by jazz and blues because
of the way her words smoothly flow together.
Sanchez is still alive and is known as a leader of the feminist/womanist
movement. "For a while it was easy being a woman and a feminist," she
reflected. "Everything was going right. The point is, ‘Do you stay a
womanist and a feminist when things aren’t going well?’ That’s always a
test of what is. If you are truly committed to this whole idea" (q.
Rodriguez, 1999: 2).
Primary
Works Cited
Lyman, Darryl L. (1999) Great
African-American Women, New York: Gramercy Books.
McKoy, Sheila Smith (1995) ‘The Civil
Rights Movement,’ The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the U.S.,
eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Martin-Wagner. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Mullen, Harryette (2001) ‘The Black Arts
Movement’ in African-American Writers/Profiles of Their Lives and Works
from 1700s to the Present, eds. Valerie Smith, Leah Baechler, and Al Walton
Witz. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Secondary
Works Cited
Giovanni, Nikki (1970)‘Woman Poem’ in The
Black Woman, ed. Toni Cade. New York: New American Library.
Jimoh, A. Yemisi (1998), ‘Double
Consciousness Modernism, and Womanism Themes in Gwendolyn Brooks’s The
Anniad’at http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m2278/3_23/54925299/print.jhtml
(accessed: 11 November 2000).
Lindberg, Kathryne V. (1996) "Whose
Canon? Gwendolyn Brooks: Founder at the Center of the ‘Margins.’" in Gendered
Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, eds. Margaret
Dickie and Thomas Travisano. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania.
Rodriguez, Johnette (1999) ‘Sonia Sanchez
Sings Out’, at http://www.providencephoenix.com/archive/theater/99/01/21/SANCHEZ.html
(accessed: 20 November 2001).
Samuel, Dr. Manohar (2001), ‘Deferred
Dreams: The Voice of African American Women’s Poetry Since the 1970s’, American
Studies Today Online at http://www.americansc.org.uk/samuel.htm
(accessed: 20 November 2001).
Sims, Barbara B (1976) "Brooks’s ‘We
Real Cool.’" Explicator 34: 58.
Shange, Ntozake (1975) For Colored Girls
Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, New
York: Bantam Books.
The
Black Matriarch: Her Family, the Community and the Church
Black women often relied on the church as their spiritual support and
also as a meeting place to make contributions to the struggle for freedom and
equality. Many business meetings of Black organization were held in the church.
In her book, If It Wasn’t for Women…:
Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community,
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes argues that women are vital to the creative cultural
process of social change. After emancipation, churchwomen and teachers organized
schools and churches throughout the South. Both preachers and teachers became
the leaders for the Black community. Since then, the church remains a key part
of any black community and is considered a place of trust and refuge for anyone
in need of economic, physical, legal or spiritual assistance. It is not uncommon
for a Black woman of today to work in corporate America, take care of her family
and also be very involved in church and community activities. Gilkes gives
examples of this:
As these women
talked about the ways in which they became involved in community work and the
different kinds of organizations and activities in which they participated,
learned about the very intricate and diverse ways in which people make social
change. I also learned about the many ways in which women experience racial
oppression. Their family roles make them acutely conscious not only of their own
deprivations but also of the suffering of their children and the men in their
lives. Their insightful and enterprising responses to these many kinds of
suffering led to their prominence in the community…African-American women
usually work, manage their families, and, if they are community workers,
participate in the struggles between the communities and the dominant society (Gilkes,
2001: 2).
Trudier Harris, in the section on
"Churchwoman" in The Oxford Companion to African American
Literature, states that churchwomen are the standardbearers for religion and
religious behavior in African-American fictional communities and by being
solidly grounded in the church (usually fundamentalist), religion, and God, they
determine who else should be, under what circumstances, and when (Harris, 1997:
147).
Many Black women writers of the 60s portrayed
women as a strong, matriarchal role who found their strength in the church and
took it upon themselves to keep others in line (McKoy, 1995: 191). For example,
Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), a domestic drama
about south side Chicago (whose title comes from Langston Hughes’s poem Harlem)
tells how the Younger family copes with the death of Big Walter, the family’s
father. Everyone else in the family wants to selfishly squander Walter’s
insurance money, but Mama Lena, the family matriarch, decides to use some of the
money as a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood, hoping to give her
family a better life. Walter Lee, her son, loses the remainder of the insurance
money on a bad business deal. Out of desperation, Walter considers accepting
money from the white people of the neighborhood to go back to his
"ghetto". Lena tells Walter Lee that he can accept the offer only if
he allows his son to watch the humiliating transaction. Walter Lee then decides
to move the family into the new house to keep his family’s dignity intact. If
it were not for the family matriarch, Lena, and her strong will and
determination, the family would have never progressed.
Clearly, like Hansberry’s character, Mama
Lena, Black women have been and always will be tied to their families, their
community and their local churches, because it has become a part of their
identities.
Works
Cited
Hansberry, Lorraine (1961) A Raisin in the
Sun in the Sun, New York: New American Library.
Harris, Trudier (1997) ‘Churchwoman’ in The
Oxford Companion to African American Literature, eds. William L. Andrews,
Frances Smith Foster & Trudier Harris.
Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend (2001) If It
Wasn’t for the Women…: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in
Church and the Community, excerpt from www.amazon.com (accessed: November 20 2001).
McKoy, Sheila Smith (1995) ‘The Civil
Rights Movement,’ in The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the U.S.,
eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Martin-Wagner. New York: Oxford
University Press.
My
Thoughts…
Cleary, by the examples given, Black women
writers of the Civil Rights Movement were very educated, outspoken and radical.
By reaching back into their African heritage and developing a new language that
became a "code" for their people, writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks,
Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez, helped create black slang, rap
and hip-hop. They also introduced the concept of black being beautiful-black
hair, black skin, black (African) features. Through their power of poetry and
fiction, they have also helped others to hear the minority voice and vicariously
share their "double-minority" experience. Unfortunately, the themes of
the civil rights era- racism, sexism, domestic violence, religion and
relationships-are issues that Black women still deal with today. If these women
would not have brought these issues to the forefront during the civil rights
era, I wonder what my life would be like today. Also, what if Rosa Parks had not
refused to give up her seat on the bus? Would I still have a job in corporate
America? Would I be able to vote? Would I be a graduate student at the
University of Houston-Clear Lake? By reading the stories of these women, other
Black women are given a voice and an identity. By reading their stories, I see
my story, my mother’s story, my grandmother’s story and so on.