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Marcus Mosiah Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887, created the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Committees League (UNIA-ACL) in 1914. Garvey and his supporters adopted Pan-Africanism, which advocated conscious identification with Africa, political and economic resistance to European domination and racism, and solidarity across the African diaspora with the African continent. Slavery, colonialism, racism, and discrimination in the Americas and across the diaspora shaped this philosophy.
The largest Pan-African organization of the 20th century, the UNIA connected the needs and interests of afrodescendant people in the diaspora to Africans on the continent because of their shared identity. Garvey’s philosophy also stressed the need for global economic interdependence to liberate Africans from European colonists. Women helped start and grow the UNIA. Women including Garvey’s wives, Amy Ashwood and Amy Jacques, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, and Henrietta Vinton Davis set the blueprint for Garveyite women as leaders in the UNIA.
The organizational structure of the UNIA, I suspect, contributes to its historical omission from discussions of Black feminism. Garvey established New York as the major seat of the organization in 1918, after arriving in the United States in 1916. The UNIA would eventually found local branches that spanned continents. Garvey was designated “Provisional President of Africa” at the UNIA’s First International Convention in August 1920, while the UNIA Constitution bestowed additional high official posts on a number of male signatories, including Gabriel Johnson, G. O. Marke, J. W. H. Eason, and R.H. Tobitt.
Local branches would reflect this structure by electing prominent men of their communities to the presidency. Similarly, men would dominate in the hierarchies for the UNIA’s other endeavors including the newspaper The Negro World, edited by people such as T. Thomas Fortune, and the Black Star Line, which was overseen by Garvey as its first president and Jeremiah Certain as its first vice president.
>>> Click Here to Listen to “Marcus Garvey: 20th Century Pan-Africanist” <<<
Nonetheless, despite the predominance of men in the organization’s senior echelons, Black women had a leadership role in the UNIA from the outset. For example, Amy Ashwood, Garvey’s first wife, is credited for the organization’s dual-gender structure of separate but parallel women’s and men’s auxiliaries such as the Ladies Division, which later became the Black Cross Nurses, and the Universal African Legions. Ashwood also was an editor for the Negro World.
Garvey’s second wife, Amy Jacques, transformed from his personal secretary into a vital leader within the organization. In her role as associate editor the Negro World, she introduced a page, “Our Women and What They Think,” through which she encouraged UNIA women to work both as political agents and helpmates to their men. When her husband was imprisoned, Jacques-Garvey edited and published two volumes of Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey to raise funds and salvage his reputation. However, Garvey’s wives were not the only women leaders in the UNIA and Garvey movement. Other influential women include Henrietta Vinton Davis and Maymie Lena Turpeau De Mena. Their leadership at the international level attests to the breadth of influence women had in early Pan-Africanism.
Women also made up the rank and file of some local chapters, however histories give more detail about their leadership responsibilities as chapter presidents or secretaries. Due to the UNIA’s gender-segregated structure, women influenced one another and their broader communities in the promotion of black pride, economic empowerment, and self-determination for afrodescendant individuals from within these organizations. One such group was the Women’s Universal African Motor Corps:
The Universal African Motor Corps was a female auxiliary whose units were affiliated with local divisions and associated with the paramilitary African Legion, the membership of which was exclusively male. While the head of the Motor Corps, who was given the title Brigadier General, was a woman, the officers and commanders of the units were men. Members of the Corps were trained in military discipline and automobile driving and repair.
The Black Cross Nurses were another women-led group that left a profound impact on the Black Atlantic. Similar to the Black club women of the U.S., this group of mostly middle-class women carried out social welfare programs centered on the uplift of the poor and working class.
While popular opinion regards Pan Africanism and feminism as incompatible, Garveyite women practiced community feminism, which focused on the collective needs and ambitions of women within their unique community. They highlighted women’s responsibilities as nurturers and caregivers as well as activists and leaders, adopting a vision of the self as communal, interdependent, and relational. Contrary to western feminist notions of women in patriarchal societies, community feminism contends the helpmate role benefits society and provides women the ability to exercise influence over men.
As “race women,” the UNIA’s helpmate-leaders occupied the traditional role of wives and caregivers while also participating as leaders in Pan African political and social movements. Nevertheless, despite their major contributions to the UNIA, women members often experienced marginalization or sexism from the Garvey movement’s male adherents. This sexism and misogyny resulted in part from the historical construction of women’s role within nationalist movements as one in which they must reinforce patriarchal power dynamics. Ultimately, this created atmosphere in which women had limited leadership opportunities in the UNIA due to the deprioritization of initiatives centered on them and their issues.
However, UNIA women did not accept sexist standards without push back, choosing to advocate for greater representation and equality within the larger organization, particularly through women’s divisions. For example, Amy Jacques Garvey emphasized equality between men and women. In addition, Jacques-Garvey confronted masculinist notions of the intellectual inferiority of women through her “Our Women and What They Think” column in the Negro World. Further, she took on a leadership role and maintained UNIA affairs during Garvey’s incarceration, including compiling and publishing volumes of his writing and speeches in Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.
The emphasis on militant masculinity propogated by Garvey indicates the tensions between centering Black nationalism and pursuing women’s rights. UNIA women navigated these challenges through open critique of the patriarchal aspects of Pan Africanism. For example, during the Fifth Pan-African International Congress in 1945, Amy Ashwood Garvey, along with fellow Jamaican Alma La Badie, were the only two women presenters. Garvey used the opportunity to call out the absence of women’s issues and voices. Additionally, the resolutions proposed by the West Indies delegation were the sole clauses propositioned about women’s issues including equal pay for equal work, employment opportunities for married women, and raising the age of consent.
Despite the patriarchal structure of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, women played a crucial role as leaders in the organization and as advocates for women’s issues. Women like Amy Ashwood, Amy Jacques, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, Henrietta Vinton Davis, and Maymie Lena Turpeau De Mena set the blueprint for Garveyite women as leaders in the UNIA.
While sexism and misogyny persisted within the organization, UNIA women pushed back against these attitudes through open critique and advocacy for greater representation and equality. The community feminism practiced by Garveyite women emphasized the collective needs and ambitions of women within their unique community. Ultimately, the contributions of UNIA women to the organization and to the broader Pan-African movement demonstrate the importance of recognizing the diversity of leadership roles and perspectives within social and political movements.
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Black women worldwide value their hair. From afros to wigs, braids, and blowouts, Black women have used hair to symbolize their gendered racial identity. Indeed, Madam C.J. Walker, the first Black woman millionaire in the U.S., highlights the significance of hair to Black women as a form of labor and enterprise. In this blog post, I present five crucial insights anchored in Black feminist thought regarding Black hair.
“Black beauty: Shade, hair, and anti-racist aesthetics,” by Shirley Anne Tate, Professor and Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Feminist and Intersectionality at the Sociology Department, University of Alberta, Canada, is a commonly cited paper in Black hair studies. In the essay, Tate investigates the performance and instability of black beauty through an examination of conservations amongst mixed race Black women. Historically, natural Black beauty has been associated with textured hair and darker skin, which is then further associated with antiracism, whereas hair straightening is viewed as an artificial attempt to resemble white or Eurocentric beauty standards.
Since they are often perceived as having more European physical traits, mixed race Black women have historically been put in a complicated position in the hierarchy of feminine and racialized beauty ideals. This leads in a persistent experience of othering and difference, as Rachael Malonson experienced though in backlash for her election to Miss Black University of Texas in 2017.
Tate explains that the way mixed race Black women grapple with the normalized racialized aesthetics of Black beauty exposes how physical signifiers have political meaning that reinforce the boundaries of what constitutes Black beauty. Rather than attempting to comply to specific aesthetics, some reinterpret what defines Black beauty in diverse ways, illustrating how the performance of racialized beauty aesthetics is fluid yet indeterminable.
Good or bad; authentic versus inauthentic; natural versus straightened. In a 2009 Women’s Studies article, Cheryl Thompson, Assistant Professor in Performance at The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, discusses how these opposing hair perspectives affect Black women’s sense of self. Thompson overviews the history of Black hair to illuminate how slavery, emancipation, and Black social movements constitute key political contexts that affect how Black people style their hair.
Beauty standards for Black women are shaped not just by white society, but also by members of their own community. Because of the cultural association of straightened, long hair with feminine beauty, Black women are pressured to alter their naturally kinky hair to conform to these expectations. Further, in their everyday life, they must manage how these standards justify prejudice and discrimination; for example, workplace hairstyle standards may impede their economic mobility in the long run. For these reasons, Thompson explains that we can’t depoliticize Black hair because of how western values affect Black people’s lived experiences.
Black women have a complex and nuanced relationship to beauty, hair, and embodiment. In western society, black hair has become politicized and hyper-scrutinized, with longstanding hegemonic standards of beauty privileging straighter hair and looser curl patterns as “good hair.” In “Rooted: On Black women, beauty, hair, and embodiment,” Kristin Denise Rowe, Assistant Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, examines the ways hair is tied to their embodied experiences for many Black women.
According to Rowe, the natural hair movement, which has gained momentum in recent years, offers a vehicle for Black women to reclaim embodied agency and interiority, in the face of misogynoir. Through this movement, Black women have created a space to rearitculate standards of beauty and to affirm their natural hair textures. However, the beauty industry has also commodified and commercialized Black women’s growing emphasis on their natural hair, with a predicted worth of over $13 billion
Overall, Rowe’s essay provides a comprehensive examination of the history, politics, and dynamic relationships to beauty culture for Black women in relation to their hair. Additionally, it acknowledges the importance of Black women’s experiences and narratives to expand and complicate ideas of beauty that shape the unique relationship of women of color to beauty culture. By understanding the complex constellation of interlocking factors that inform how Black women experience and conceptualize beauty, we can reveal what Rowe calls the intimacies, (re)negotiations, (re)articulations, and radical possibilities of Black women’s embodiment and the potentiality of “beauty” as a construct.
From precolonial Africa to the present, Black women’s hair has had political importance. Throughout the history of the Americas, Europeans used hair to demonstrate political authority over the Other. In her 2022 Sociology Compass essay “Historicizing black hair politics: A framework for contextualizing race politics,” Sylviane Ngandu-Kalenga Greensword, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Texas Christian University’s (TCU) Race and Reconciliation Initiative (RRI), explores these dynamics. Greensword discusses the intersectionality of race and gender in the political oppression of Black hair, as well as resistance to this oppression. The essay also explains that Black hair culture has progressed from enslavement and colonialism to globalization and decolonization, yet Black women still suffer hair discrimination and policies that privilege white hair practices.
Black women have long used West and Central African practices of hairstyling and ornamentation to resist these injustices. For example,in the 1780s, then-Governor Miró issued the “Edict of Good Government,” which forced women of color to either cover their hair with a handkerchief or comb it flat or face incarceration. In response, Black women began to wear “tignons,” elegant turbans that emphasized their textured hair rather than concealed it.
The tignon laws exemplify the weaponization of hair in order to control, hypersexualize, and defeminize Black women, denying them any claim to womanhood, femininity, or piety. As a form of political resistance, Black people praise their hair as beautiful, redefining normative standards of human value. Black people make a political statement about this (de)valuation through the time, money, energy, and care dedicated to their bodies via hairstyling.
Hair is an important part of Black women’s identities. However, for decades, the categorization of Black hair diversity into good and bad hair has been a source of disagreement. Eurocentric societies value long, straight, and silky as good, while they consider tightly coiled and kinky bad. In her 2011 Howard Journal of Communications piece, “Hair as Race: Why ‘‘Good Hair’’ May Be Bad for Black Females,” Cynthia L. Robinson, Black Studies Department Head and Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, unpacks this “hair hierarchy.”
Robinson argues that the concept of good and bad hair is based in the color complex, which refers to some Black people’s self-hatred and disdain for their Blackness. This complex is the product of years of enslavement and a lack of collective African identity, which causes Black people to discount physical attributes that reveal African heritage, notably skin color and hair texture. Rated on a scale of good to bad, good hair communicates European, Native American, or Asian trace ancestry through wavy or straight texture, and is likely to be long. In contrast, society categorizes tightly coiled, thicker, short hair that plainly reveals African heritage as bad. Thus, Black women have had to develop their own beauty standards that are particular to their hair textures, allowing for more creative range in popular Black hairstyles.
The dichotomy of good and bad hair is still a challenge for Black women. As Robinson explains, hair valuations are harmful to Black women because they elevate white beauty standards while undervaluing Black women’s hair textures. These labels also reflect the color complex and Eurocentric beauty ideals that have devalued Black women’s natural hair textures. Therefore, we must reject these harmful aesthetic standards and embrace the uniqueness of Black hair in order to move forward.
The post Black Hair: Black Feminist Perspectives appeared first on Blackfeminisms.com.
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Social movements are a process of collective action aimed at structural change. I am interested in the social psychology of collective action from the standpoint of Black women activists. My research adopts Black feminist thought as a lens through which to conduct a sociology of antiracist social movements in the contemporary era. However, Black feminist scholars from a wide range of fields have done research on Black women’s activism throughout history. Below is a list of five groups of Black women activists with some insights from Black feminist scholars.
The Black Panther Party was formed in 1966 in Oakland, California. This worldwide network of chapters advocated for Black self-defense and self-determination by publishing a Ten-Point platform based on anticapitalist and antiracist ideals, which included a demand to cease police violence. Their political expressions reimagined femininity, masculinity, and empowerment to challenge hegemony and patriarchy as well as to mobilize women. For example, in Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, Ashley D. Farmer argues the work of Gayle Dickson for Bobby Seale’s mayoral campaign in 1973 portrays Black women as “militant domestics” or “revolutionary women” for the purposes of communicated global solidarity among U.S. Black women.
In “Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California”, Robyn C. Spencer writes that Black Panther Party historiographies tend to portray Black women as victims or opponents of misogyny and sexism in Black nationalist social movements. However, this framing obscures the agency and empowerment of Black Panther Party women:
The Panthers created images that valorized the armed, revolutionary black woman at a time when the dominant sociological and public policy arguments said that strong black women were detrimental to the family and therefore the community, and both liberal integrationist and conservative nationalist rhetoric promoted patriarchy. In stark contrast to the image of women spontaneously and individually engaging in self–defense, which emerged from the civil rights movement, the Panthers posited black women as proactive and organized—acting alongside men as defenders of the black community.
- Spencer (2008:99)
Spencer and Farmer’s work both highlight the significance of Black feminist thought in Black Power throughout the 1970s, challenging long-held assumption about Black women’s marginalization within the Black Power Movement.
Historically, anti-racist social movements in the west have centered men of color as the primary victims of racism. For example, the #BlackLivesMatter social movement addresses police violence as a global issue that all Black people suffer, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Yet, the media and internet advocates of #BlackLivesMatter tend to amplify police violence against Black heterosexual men.
The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) initiated the #SayHerName campaign in December 2014 to respond to the lack of attention to Black women victims of police brutality. In 2015, AAPF Executive Director Kimberlé Williams Crenshawand Andrea J. Ritchie, a researcher in resident at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, released a report that demonstrated the pervasiveness of police brutality against Black women.
>>>CLICK HERE TO READ THE SAY HER NAME REPORT<<<
#SayHerName activists engage in multiple strategies including direct advocacy and policy suggestions to support in Black women and girls slain by police. As suggested by the “#,” advocates also use online social networking tools in their activism. Therefore, #SayHerName shows how Black feminism today uses both conventional strategies and new media to achieve its aims.
After the National Women’s Clubs barred black women from attending the World Columbian Exposition in 1893, they formed their own clubs. Many club women were former slaves’ children who had to contend with White feminists who held racist and classist views.
Ida B. Wells embarked on a global anti-lynching speaking tour, exposing the bigotry of American liberal organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) whose sole Black executive member was Frances Ellen Harper.
>>>Click here to listen to Making Ida B. Wells from WBEZ Chicago.<<<
Following the President of the Missouri Press Association’s retaliation to Wells’ campaign, 36 Black Women’s Clubs formed the National Federation of Afro-American Women. Margaret Murray Washington, Booker T.’s wife, was president. The organization ultimately became the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), which was led by Mary Church Terrell.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, middle-class Black women spearheaded the Colored Women’s Club Movement. In her 1993 book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920, historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined the term politics of respectabilityto describe their activism. Respectability politics enabled women to combine their spiritual practices with their social and political values, allowing them to use the church as a home base for teaching, organizing, and community outreach.
According to the Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, communism is “a concept or system of society in which the major resources and means of production are owned by the community rather than by individuals.” For the most part, the role of Black women in communist movements has been suppressed. However, scholars such as Erik S. McDuffie and Carole Boyce Davies have started a new wave of literature that illuminates the legacies of Louise Thompson Patterson, Audley Moore, Eula Gray, and Claudia Jones.
Michigan State University Associate Professor of History LaShawn Harris documents this history during the Great Depression in a 2009 article, “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party during the Great Depression,” for the Journal of African American History. The Great Depression exacerbated the existing employment problems faced by Black people including poverty, low wages, and discrimination. The refusal of governments in the South to extend the New Dealto Black Americans pushed many to turn to leftist organizations for assistance.
Communist-based organizations such as the League of Struggles for Negro Rights, the Unemployed Councils, and the International Labor Defense, provided support for issues such as housing evictions, food for the jobless and homeless, and labor marches and strikes. Additionally, the Communist Party gave Black women leadership roles in local, national, and international movements against intersecting oppressions, further propelled community growth and institution building. According to Harris, Black women’s engagement with communism to reconstruct the politics of respectability, forging strategies of liberation through new ways of protest that contrasted to the bourgeois ideals of racial uplift.
For the most part, U.S. society frames support for reproductive rights via the pro-choice framework. However, historically, this movement’s singular emphasis on abortion gas mostly served the interests of white upper middle class white women. Furthermore, its legacy of birth control advocacy and forced sterilization emerges out of models of population control rooted in eugenics. The choice framework also conceals the state’s involvement in propagating reproductive sanctions and differentially rewarding various groups’ reproductive practices.
In “Understanding Reproductive Justice: Transforming the Pro-Choice Movement,” Smith College Associate Professor of Women & Gender Loretta J. Ross explains how Black women and other women of color developed a different strategy against reproductive oppression with the reproductive justice paradigm.
Reproductive Justice says that the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is linked directly to the conditions in her community—and these conditions are not just a matter of individual choice and access.
- Ross (2006:14)
Ross also explains that proponents of reproductive justice fight for:
- The right to have a child
- The right not to have a child
- The right to parent, the children we have, as well as to control our birthing options, such as midwifery.
This engagement in reproductive rights and social justice, built on the human rights framework and intersectionality, extends the heritage of resistance among women of color, particularly Black women, to coercive and incentivized depopulation policies of the state. For example, the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, based in Atlanta, was founded in 1997 via the merger of sixteen groups funded by the Ford Foundation. Human rights principles and intersectionality were included into the group’s educational initiatives, which included national and regional trainings and seminars. SisterSong, according to Kimala Price, creates a strong collective identity in order to attract individual and organizational members, especially women disenfranchised by the pro-choice social movements.
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