Black women are many things. We are business executives, political strategists and elected officials, philanthropists, and activists. We are health and wellness practitioners. We are entertainers and faith leaders. We are wives, mothers, daughters, educators, and students. We set and shift culture. We build power and we are powerful.
Clearly, there are several lessons to be gleaned from the legacy of these freedom warriors and workers for a new society and world. And the first is to rightfully locate them in Black history among their people, our people in the midst of an unfinished and ongoing Black freedom struggle. Indeed, there can be no correct understanding, appropriate appreciation or honest emulation of their lives and the lives of all those who preceded them and made them and us possible and of those who were their co-combatants, unless we place them all in the context of their people, our people, Black people and our struggle.
Violent episodes were the exceptions and not the rule of the massively spreading Sit-in Movement.
The 19th Amendment was adopted Aug. 18, 1920, after the required number of states ratified the constitutional measure. Though many Black women led suffrage campaigns, the 19th Amendment put white women on an empowerment tract to electoral engagement. Interestingly, the suffrage movement, festooned in the symbolic color white, is often portrayed through a narrow window uncomplicated by the strictures of race and power that framed the Amendment then and now.
If we are to know ourselves rightly, honor our history, radically improve our present and forge a future worthy of the names African and human, then we must reaffirm and renew our moral and social vanguard role as a people, wage righteous and relentless resistance to evil and injustice everywhere, and put forth in plan and practice a new history and hope for our people and humankind. In the months of February and March, which we of Us have designated as Black History Month I (General Focus) and Black History Month II (Women Focus), our people have set aside time and space to celebrate ourselves inhistoryand ashistory. For we are producers and products of this sacred narrative, and the subject and center of this awesome record and struggle, the most ancient of human histories.
Inherent in this deceptive and hypocritical call for civility and condemnation of confrontation of the oppressor and oppression everywhere are attempts to tie it to both irresponsible activity and violence. Min. Malcolm taught us that this is a standard tactic of the oppressor to discredit and deter resistance. He observed how the established order seeks to silence and crush resistance by associating it with violence and criminalizing it. Using lynching as an example, he says that they redefine victim and victimizer “If (we) do anything to stop the man from putting that rope around (our) neck.”