Among the landmark events in American history, many black women literally and figuratively have refused to take seats as second-class citizens. Rosa Parks’ historic arrest for failing to give her seat on the bus to a white man is just one example of the battles that such women have waged.
In honor of Black History Month, we highlight four women who have made significant contributions to contemporary history: entertainer Anne Wiggins Brown, former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Du Sable Museum co-founder Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs. The women are among some 800 saluted in a new two-volume collection, “Black Women In America: An Historical Encyclopedia” (Carlson, $195).
“The overall tone is celebratory,” said Darlene Clark Hine, encyclopedia editor and professor of history at Michigan State University. “There have been tremendous strides (recently) for black women. Before, black women may have been behind the scenes, but this visibility we have now is extraordinary.”
To bring attention to the roles black women played throughout history, Hine and an advisory committee developed a list of themes and women they deemed essential.
The 1,500-page result, three years in the making, is a guide to the well-known-Harriet Tubman, Anita Hill, Whoopi Goldberg-and the lesser-known-educator Mamie Elizabeth Fields, anti-slavery poet Charlotte Grimke-proceeding chronologically from 17th Century slaves through Carol Moseley-Braun’s U.S. Senate win in November 1992.
Among famous “firsts”: Janet Bragg, the first black woman enrolled at Chicago’s Curtiss Wright School of Aeronautics in 1928 and one of the first to earn a commercial pilot’s license; and track star Wilma Rudolph, first American woman to win three Olympic gold medals, at the 1960 event in Rome.
Anne Wiggins Brown
George Gershwin’s musical was called “Porgy” before he met Anne Wiggins Brown. After working with the 23-year-old singer, Gershwin retitled and revised “Porgy and Bess” to be her star vehicle in 1935.
“It was called `Porgy’ until we started rehearsal,” Anne Wiggins Brown said. “I wouldn’t be so bold as to say Gershwin renamed it for me; but, yes, he changed the title and rewrote it” to expand her role.
Brown, who spoke by phone recently from her home in Oslo, Norway, where she moved in the late ’40s after touring there, broke several racial barriers in the mid-1930s. To that point, traditional roles for blacks on stage primarily had been supporting ones, as servants or as characters in self-parodying comedies; Brown was one of the first black women to receive co-star billing in a major Broadway production, Hine noted.
Brown also began a personal protest in 1935 against discrimination at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C.
“The National Theatre did not allow blacks to come in (as audience members),” she recalled, “and I said I wouldn’t sing if my family and my sister and my friends couldn’t come in. I simply wouldn’t sing. The cast said I was crazy, I had a contract, and I said, `I’ll just faint in the first act, and they’ll have to use the understudy or close the curtain.’ “
Brown said that she could be “undiplomatic” at that age, but “Gershwin got wind of it-he was more diplomatic-and he got together with the theater guild and the cast, and we all asked for a change in policy. The policy was changed for that one week we played the theater, but after that was back to their old policy. It was 20 years before they changed.”
Still, Brown said she thinks she did the right thing.
“Every protest that doesn’t bring forth violence,” she said, “is a step in the right direction.”
Respiratory problems ended Brown’s active singing career in 1953, but she still teaches privately, and also spends time with four grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She has two daughters: One lives in Norway; the other, in Zambia, where she works in the Peace Corps.
“I’m in very good form for an 80-year-old,” she said. “I still teach three days a week and travel. I visit Todd Duncan (who portrayed Porgy) every once in a while when I visit America.”
Has she found racial equality in Norway?
“There’s not racial equality anywhere in the world,” Brown said.
While Brown feels “very much at peace with myself,” she said there is still more work to be done toward racial equality. If another battle came up “and I had the strength and energy, I’d certainly take part,” she said.
Barbara Jordan
Barbara Jordan started a career in government when she became administrative assistant to a county judge in 1965.
She went to win a Texas state senate seat in 1966 and eventually became a three-term U.S. Congresswoman.
“To hold public office gives one the opportunity to do good things for hundreds and thousands of people,” said Jordan. “I know of no other activity that allows people to impact the lives of so many.”
Elected to the House of Representatives in November 1972, Jordan was thrust into the national spotlight during televised Watergate hearings. She voted in favor of impeachment proceedings for Richard Nixon, saying, “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total.”
Her talent for public speaking, and the positive, intelligent image she presented made Jordan a sought-after speaker; she delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Conventions in 1976 and 1992.
Jordan, born in Houston in 1936, opened a private law practice there in 1960. She was elected to the Texas Senate in 1966, the first black elected to that body since 1883.
Jordan said that her major political accomplishment was having sponsored legislation to eliminate barriers to minority voters in Texas in 1978. Furthermore, Jordan said, “I hope what I did is to instruct women to keep pushing the limits.
“I hope I brought to white and black women an expanded horizon; that is, we do not need to be confined and contained in little boxes. As long as this country is founded on equal opportunity, women can keep pushing the limits.”
Retired from politics since 1978, Jordan spoke by phone from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is a professor teaching seminars in political values and ethics.
Jordan said she is pleased by the changes she has seen: “America has dramatically moved in the direction of fulfilling its historical promise. Much still remains to be done, but I think the public policy makers are in place to make the last push for bringing equality of opportunity to everybody.”
Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs
When Chicagoan Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs speaks to school children, she carries a mirror.
“I say, `Look at yourself! You are the most beautiful thing there is!”‘ Burroughs said.
Burroughs’ career has been devoted to the visual arts; she taught art and humanities in Chicago public schools for 27 years and in junior colleges for another 10 years. In 1961, she and her husband, Charles Burroughs, founded the Du Sable Museum of African American History, now in a 75,000-square-foot building at 5700 S. Cottage Grove Ave.
“To start something like that in your living room, then see it grow into what it did gives a great feeling of satisfaction,” says Burroughs, emeritus director and a lifetime board member.
The encyclopedia calls her “an inspiration for and a major participant in the black cultural movement” in the late ’60s, largely because of her poem, “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black?,” from her first poetry volume of that name.
Its message, which stresses the need for a positive image, is one she still advocates.
“Every group of people has their own beauty,” she said, “We should recognize that individuals have their own beauty and accept them as they are.”
Now in her 70s and retired, Burroughs still travels around the nation speaking in schools about preserving African culture. Her plans for the museum include developing a repertory theater, dance troupe, a ceramics studio and a research center.
“You always have to have a vision of the next step,” Burroughs said. “I’m just as busy now as when I was working, but I think you live longer if you’re doing something you want to be doing.”
Charlayne Hunter-Gault
When Charlayne Hunter was admitted to the University of Georgia in Athens in 1961, it was a major step toward equal educational opportunities.
Supported by civil rights activists fighting to integrate the university, Hunter and Hamilton Holmes had fought legal battles for more than a year to gain admission. The case was one of the first major tests of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional.
“We never thought we wouldn’t get in,” said Hunter-Gault, now 50. “We just didn’t know how long it would take. We knew that sooner or later the (segregation) system would crumble, but we didn’t know if it would be sooner or later.”
Hunter-Gault attended Wayne State University in Detroit, while awaiting admission in Georgia, journeying to her home state for testimonies and court appearances. In January 1961 she and Holmes became the school’s first two black students.
Hunter-Gault credits being raised with a healthy sense of self-worth for her ability to withstand the pressures following her entrance.
“I don’t know that we ever used the word self-esteem,” she said, “but in looking back, I see that’s what my grandmothers instilled; and my parents always raised the most money for PTA drives, and I would be named queen of the drives. So when I walked the campus, and they were yelling, `Nigger, nigger,’ I thought they couldn’t be talking about me because I was the queen.”
Hunter-Gault, who received a journalism degree from the University of Georgia in 1963, said her self-assurance wasn’t merely youthful optimism.
“There was a youthful idealism in that I didn’t focus on the potential for danger,” she said, “but I was never truly afraid. I had a lot of faith in human beings, and faith that I could overcome any obstacles I might encounter.”
After graduation she worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times. In 1978 she joined the “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour,” where she is national correspondent. Most recently she has written a book, “In My Place” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $19) about her experiences.
“There’s a long tradition and history of black women activists that have been inspirational to us,” Hunter-Gault said. “Black women have long been engaged in a dual struggle of both gender and race. The struggle in which I was engaged was one in which race was the first and foremost challenge we had.
“The civil rights movement was first an effort to change laws that kept a whole race enslaved; then I think many black women felt they could attend to the problems unique to them.”
