ABWW Heroine of the Day: Aida Overton Walker

While most think of leggy white dancers when they recall the Ziegfeld Follies but some of the original women performers were black women. Ada Overton Walker (14 February 1880 – 11 October 1914), also billed as Aïda Overton Walker and as “The Queen of the Cakewalk”, was an African-American vaudeville performer and wife of George Walker. She appeared with her husband and his performing partner Bert Williams, and appeared in groups such as Black Patti’s Troubadours. She was also a solo dancer and choreographer for vaudeville shows such as Bob Cole, Joe Jordan, and J. Rosamond Johnson’s The Red Moon (1908) and S. H. Dudley’s His Honor the Barber (1911). She was born in the Richmond, Virginia in the month of February — — on 14 February 1880 — — Aida Overton’s family moved to New York City when she was young, and that is where she gained an education and considerable musical training.

Aida Overton Walker dazzled early-twentieth-century theater audiences with her original dance routines, her enchanting singing voice, and her penchant for elegant costumes. At 15 years old, she joined John Isham’s Octoroons, one of the most influential black touring groups of the 1890s, and the following year she became a member of the Black Patti Troubadours. Although the show consisted of dozens of performers, Overton emerged as one of the most promising soubrettes of her day.
In 1898, she joined the company of the famous comedy team Bert Williams and George Walker, and appeared in all of their shows — — The Policy Players (1899), The Sons of Ham (1900), In Dahomey (1902), Abyssinia (1905), and Bandanna Land (1907).Within about a year of their meeting, George Walker and Aida Overton wed on 22 June 1899. After the marriage, Aida Walker worked as a choreographer for Williams and Walker, her husband’s vaudevillian comedy duo.Since

While George Walker supplied most of the ideas for the musical comedies and Bert Williams enjoyed fame as the “funniest man in America,” Aida quickly became an indispensable member of the Williams and Walker Company. In The Sons of Ham, for example, her rendition of Hannah from Savannah won praise for combining superb vocal control with acting skill that together presented a positive, strong image of black womanhood. Indeed, onstage Aida refused to comply with the plantation image of black women as plump mammies, happy to serve; like her husband, she viewed the representation of refined African American types on the stage as important political work. A talented dancer, Aida improvised original routines that her husband eagerly introduced in the shows; when In Dahomey was moved to England, Aida proved to be one of the strongest attractions.

After a decade of nearly continuous success with the Williams and Walker Company, Aida’s career took an unexpected turn when her husband collapsed on tour with Bandanna Land. Eventually, Aida began touring the vaudeville circuit as a solo act. Less than two weeks after George Walker’s death in January 1911, Aida signed a two-year contract to appear as a co-star with S. H. Dudley in another all-black traveling show. She was celebrated for her part in the spectacular “Salome” at Oscar Hammerstein’s Victoria Theater in New York City.

After a 16-week tour of the Midwest, vaudevillian Aida Overton Walker returned to her homebase in The Big Apple in July of 1912. Impresario Oscar Hammerstein invited her to reprise her role as Salome at his roof garden theatre on Broadway and West 42nd Street in the first week of August. Houdini and Mae West were also on the stagebill along with Edgar Berger, Fields and Carroll, Dan the talking dog, and the usual “nut” acts.Critic Robert Speare reported that Aida “is the only colored artist who has ever been known to give this dance in public.” He praised her performance as “a graceful and interesting version of the dance.”

Although still a relatively young woman in the early 1910s, Aida began to develop medical problems that limited her capacity for constant touring and stage performance. The talented thespian died suddenly of kidney failure on 11 October 1914 when she was only 34 years old. The New York Age featured a lengthy obituary on its front page. She was, in the words of the New York Age’s Lester Walton, the exponent of “clean, refined artistic entertainment.”

ABWW Heroine of the Day: Shirley Chisholm

One of first memories of seeing a black person on TV outside of a situation comedy was a dignified, straightforward African American woman campaigning for President. I remember thinking if she could so that, I could do anything. In 1968, she became the first black woman elected to Congress. On January 25, 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Shirley Anita St. Hill was born in Brooklyn, New York, of immigrant parents. Her father, Charles Christopher St. Hill, was born in British Guiana and her mother, Ruby Seale, was born in Christ Church, Barbados. Born in Brooklyn, New York and at the age three, Chisholm was sent to Barbados to live with her maternal grandmother and did not return to New York City until roughly seven years later. In her 1970 autobiography Unbought and Unbossed, she wrote: “Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict, traditional, British-style schools of Barbados. If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason.”

In 1964, Chisholm ran for and was elected to the New York State Legislature. In 1968, she ran as the Democratic candidate for New York’s 12th District congressional seat and was elected to the House of Representatives. Defeating Republican candidate James Farmer, Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress. Chisholm joined the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969 as one of its founding members. From 1977 to 1981, during the 95th Congress and 96th Congress, Chisholm was elected to a position in the House Democratic leadership, as Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus. By the time she retired from Congress she was the third highest-ranking member of the prestigious Education and Labor Committee. Throughout her tenure in Congress, Chisholm worked to improve opportunities for inner-city residents. She was a vocal opponent of the draft and supported spending increases for education, health care and other social services, and reductions in military spending.

All those Chisholm hired for her office were women, half of them black. Chisholm said that during her New York legislative career, she had faced much more discrimination because she was a woman than because she was black. In the 1972 U.S. presidential election, she made a bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. George McGovern won the nomination in a hotly contested set of primary elections, with Chisholm campaigning in 12 states and winning 28 delegates during the primary process.At the 1972 Democratic National Convention, as a symbolic gesture, McGovern opponent Hubert H. Humphrey released his black delegates to Chisholm] giving her a total of 152 first-ballot votes for the nomination. Chisholm’s base of support was ethnically diverse and included the National Organization for Women. Chisholm said she ran for the office “in spite of hopeless odds… to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.” Among the volunteers who were inspired by her campaign was Barbara Lee, who continued to be politically active and was elected as a congresswoman 25 years later.

She announced her retirement from Congress in 1982. Her seat was won by a fellow Democrat, Major Owens, in 1983. After leaving Congress, Chisholm was named to the Purington Chair at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She taught there for four years. She also lectured frequently as a public speaker. Chisholm was married to Conrad Chisholm, a Jamaican private investigator from 1949 to 1977. Upon their divorce, she married Arthur Hardwick Jr., a Buffalo businessman who died in 1986. Check out the wonderful documentary of her extraordinary life at veoh.com

ABWW Heroine of the Day: Josephine Baker

La Baker was rose from the chitlin circuit in America to a one of France’s most honored national heroes. She transcended the gross stereotypes of African American women and became an icon of black femininity around the world.

Born Freda Josephine McDonald (June 3, 1906 – April 12, 1975) in St. Louis, Missouri, she later took the name Baker from her second husband, Willie Baker, whom she married at age 15.

Surviving the 1917 riots in East St. Louis, Illinois, where the family was living, Josephine Baker ran away a few years later at age thirteen and began dancing in vaudeville and on Broadway. In 1925, Josephine Baker went to Paris where, after the jazz revue La Revue Nègre failed, her comic ability and jazz dancing drew attention of the director of the Folies Bergère.

Virtually an instant hit, Josephine Baker became one of the best-known entertainers in both France and much of Europe. Her exotic, sensual act reinforced the creative images coming out of the Harlem Renaissance in America.

During World War II Josephine Baker worked with the Red Cross, gathered intelligence for the French Resistance and entertained troops in Africa and the Middle East.

After the war, Josephine Baker adopted, with her second husband, twelve children from around the world, making her home a World Village, a “showplace for brotherhood.” She returned to the stage in the 1950s to finance this project.

In 1951 in the United States, Josephine Baker was refused service at the famous Stork Club in New York City. Yelling at columnist Walter Winchell, another patron of the club, for not coming to her assistance, she was accused by Winchell of communist and fascist sympathies. Never as popular in the US as in Europe, she found herself fighting the rumors begun by Winchell as well.

Josephine Baker responded by crusading for racial equality, refusing to entertain in any club or theater that was not integrated, and thereby breaking the color bar at many establishments. In 1963, she spoke at the March on Washington at the side of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Josephine Baker’s World Village fell apart in the 1950s and in 1969 she was evicted from her chateau which was then auctioned off to pay debts. Princess Grace of Monaco gave her a villa. In 1973 Baker married an American, Robert Brady, and began her stage comeback.

In 1975, Josephine Baker’s Carnegie Hall comeback performance was a success, as was her subsequent Paris performance. But two days after her last Paris performance, she died of a stroke.
Check out some of her performances on youtube, get more information on this amazing woman at her official website and check out the TV autobiographical movie , The Josephine Baker Story staring Lynn Whitfield at Net Flicks or Blockbuster.

ABWW Heroine of the Day: Mary Eliza Mahoney

Mahoney was the first black professional nurse in the United States, one of the first black members of the American Nursing Association, and a supporter of the establishment of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. Mary Eliza Mahoney was a staunch supporter and advocate for women’s rights, equality, and the right to vote.
She was born in Roxbury, Mass., where her parents had relocated from North Carolina.

Little is known of Mahoney’s earlier years. At 33, she was the first black woman to enroll at the New EnglandHospital for Women and Children in Boston in 1878. The rigorous 16-month training program included lectures on surgical and childbed nursing and assignment in the hospital’s surgical, maternity and medical wards. Student nurses also cleaned and ironed. Mahoney’s last four months in training involved private duty at community homes.

She graduated as a trained nurse and received her diploma in 1879. Her excellent record at New England Hospital helped other black nurses gain admission, and by 1899, five of them graduated. Hospitals, however, refused to employ black nurses. Mahoney worked as a nurse in private homes in a successful career that spanned 40 years.

In 1908 Mahoney gave much support to the formation of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) to combat bias in the nursing industry. She gave the organization’s welcoming and inspirational address and was elected their chaplain. In retirement, Mahoney was still concerned with women’s equality and a strong supporter of women’s suffrage (the movement to gain women the right to vote.) In 1920, she was among the first women in Boston to register to vote. She died in 1926, aged 80.

ABWW Heroine of the Day: Dorothy Height, The Godmother of Civil Rights

The Civil Rights Movement owes a big hand to the women who quietly, patiently stood by and behind the great men we honor today. This year, Dorothy Height, one of the fiercest activists for civil rights and black feminism left this world for her just rewards.
Height, who had been chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority worked in the 1960s alongside civil rights pioneers, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., future U.S. Rep. John Lewis and A. Philip Randolph. She was on the platform when King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

President Obama called her a hero and the “godmother” of the movement, noting she “served as the only woman at the highest level of the civil rights movement — witnessing every march and milestone along the way.”

“And even in the final weeks of her life — a time when anyone else would have enjoyed their well-earned rest, Dr. Height continued her fight to make our nation a more open and inclusive place for people of every race, gender, background and faith.”

Friend and former U.S. Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman said she was “deeply saddened” by Height’s death.
“She was a dynamic woman with a resilient spirit, who was a role model for women and men of all faiths, races and perspectives,” Herman said. “For her, it wasn’t about the many years of her life, but what she did with them.”

Height’s years of service span from Roosevelt to the Obama administration, the council said in a statement announcing her death and listing the highlights of her career.

Height was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994 by President Clinton and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. She was among a handful of key African-American leaders to meet with Obama at the White House recently for a summit on race and the economy.

Her name is synonymous with the National Council of Negro Women, a group she led from 1957 to 1988, when she became the group’s chair and president emerita. She was also a key figure in the YWCA beginning in the 1930s.

Height was born in Richmond, Virginia, and grew up in Rankin, Pennsylvania. Her civil rights work began in 1933 when she became a leader of the United Christian Youth Movement of North America. Among the issues she tackled were fighting to stop lynchings and working to desegregate the armed forces.

She experienced discrimination and wrote in her memoir about being turned down for admittance to Barnard College in New York.”Although I had been accepted, they could not admit me,” she wrote in “Open Wide the Freedom Gates.”

“It took me a while to realize that their decision was a racial matter: Barnard had a quota of two Negro students per year, and two others had already taken the spots.”

At its 1980 commencement ceremonies, Barnard awarded Height its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.
Under Height’s leadership, the National Council of Negro Women dealt with the “unmet needs of women and their families by combating hunger and establishing decent housing and home ownership programs through the federal government for low-income families.”

The organization spearheaded voter registration drives and started “Wednesdays in Mississippi” in which female interracial groups helped at Freedom Schools, institutions meant to empower African-Americans and address inequalities in how the races were educated.

John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and fellow civil rights leader, said Height was fighting for social justice “long before Dr. King and some of us appeared on the scene.”

“She was truly a pioneer, and she must be remembered as one of those brave and courageous souls that never gave up, never gave in,” Lewis said. “She was a feminist and a major spokesperson for the rights of women long before there was a women’s movement.”

U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Height’s efforts “undergirds the work” of the caucus.

She called Height “a bold and brilliant African-American woman who blazed many trails and opened many doors for a countless number of Americans, particularly the empowerment of women and girls, during her lifelong quest for justice.”

ABBW Question of the Day: Why is the media so obsessed with single, educated black women?

My theory is that this trend was incited by the cognitive dissonance of having a woman like Michelle Obama for First Lady. Men as talented as Barak Obama are in the forefront of marrying out and his choice of an elegant, beautiful, educated black woman who is such an exemplar that disturbs the deeply ingrained stereotypes of black women and has most Americans in a psychological tizzy. The fact that the majority of women who are like Michelle are unmarried threatens the idea of a post racial America in way that most are unable to digest. The racial sexism that places white women as the icon of ideal femininity and black women as the “mules of the world” is challenged by educated black women and is puzzling to mainstream America. The majority of Americans have never looked honestly at the diversity and accomplishments of black women and are puzzled at the fact that we have had a different path that non-white women. Thus the questions about marriage are childbearing obsessively investigated without bothering to learn about the history, socioeconomic and racial gendered obstacles we have overcome. So instead of examining the dehumanization and brutality suffered by black women throughout the centuries and how we have overcome it all, it is easier to make us media fodder that can be easily consumed and thrown away.
The comments after most news stories and blogs fall into several categories:
1- “Black women are blah, blah, blah.” These posts usually are extremely insulting and blame black women for all the racially gendered prejudice that is heaped on us.
2- “Why don’t black women out marry like black men? “These answers range from naivete to offensive. They refuse to take into account that black women were sexually exploited for centuries and derided for their differences from ideal white womanhood.
3-” I am a single, black 35 year old with a good job and cannot find a good black woman.” This guy has problems, stay way from him like he had the plague. His complains are nonsensical, there are more black women than men, way too many black men in jail and there are more educated black women than men and black women come in all sizes and colors, yet there is no one out there for him. I’m glad.
4- “I am a white woman married to a black man…..” These women contend that their relationships are all about love and never contemplate the fact that despite the woman’s movement they are still the world’s default category for beauty. I would like them to consider this why is it that since the Loving decision, black women outmarry at much lower rates than white women. Have we suddenly got less loveable?
5- “I don’t care, God will provide a man for me” God helps those who help themselves, nuff said.
None of this at ABWW. This blog will be a vanguard against black women hateration and a shelter against all the he-man-black-woman-hateration and sister self hate.

ABWW Heroine of the Day: Sojourner Truth

Those who know about this remarkable women know her as the one of the first female civil rights activists. But when the suffrage movement expunged black women from their ranks her advocacy for woman’s rights was also erased.
Here is an excerpt of speech that she gave at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851:

I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint, and a man a quart – why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, – for we can’t take more than our pint’ll hold. The poor men seems to be all in confusion, and don’t know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble. I can’t read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part? But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.

Mayber if white suffragates were not so racist women could have won the right to vote decades earlier. What do you think?

ABWW Book of the Day: Jesus, Jobs and Justice: African American Women and Religion

Bettye Collier-Thomas’ Jesus, Jobs and Justice is a massive work that details the story of black women’s roles in building up the black community and its churches. Her research is excellent. Womanist scholars have previously focused on particular women as symbols of the civil rights struggle — Sojourner Truth, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Mcleod Bethune and Dorothy Height. Collier-Thomas weaves into that U.S. history the stories of countless other women. We meet the black women in the predominantly white — Episcopal, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic — church where rarely have the names of any but a few of these women been lifted up for the recognition they justly deserve.

The women’s efforts are seen not in isolation but in conjunction with the efforts of black women nationwide — but especially in the South — in a civil rights struggle that was twofold: At the same time they fought for black women and men to be recognized as human beings, the women had to struggle for religious rights within the black churches. The irony of the black church is that of all Christian churches built with the pennies, nickels and dimes women helped to raise. Women, who provide so much of the financial support, who are the backbone of the ministers and bishops, have historically been denied the rights of full membership: leadership roles, ordination, self-autonomy.

Black men fought against opening church leadership to women, who oftentimes were those same male leaders’ main support. Sadly buying into the patriarchal rhetoric, there were very few black men courageous enough to recognize the equality of women and men. The women persisted and persevered. They became deacons, ordained ministers and finally, in the late 20th century, bishops in various denominations.

Jesus, Jobs and Justice is a comprehensive, almost encyclopedic narration of historical facts ferreted from church newspapers and newsletters, convention minutes, and the minutes of women’s conventions and auxiliaries, the secular black press and other archival sources. It is a groundbreaking depiction of women’s religious faith and spirituality as it seeks to reveal how “black women have woven their faith into their daily experience, and illustrates their centrality to the development of African-American religion, politics and public culture.”

Bettye Collier-Thomas begins with the 400-plus years of slavery, discusses the critical roles that African-American women played in establishing the “Invisible Institution” — the various “hush and brush” arbors that enabled those enslaved to develop a Christianity that was a blend of African and American cultures, heritages and experiences. She illustrates how enslaved black women were the “glue that held the family and community together” and the foundation for the formation of the independent black churches.
Check it out at amazon

ABWW Hater of the Day: William G. Hyland Jr

I am a BOOKTV nerd. Not many folks look forward to a weekend full of lecture from largely academic writers, it fills me with glee. Every once and a while I get sucked into watching something so wrong that I can’t stop watching, sorta like a car wreck. One Saturday I caught a lecture by William G. Hyland Jr., the author of ‘In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemmings Sex Scandal.’ A lawyer from the “Confederate History Month and forget about slavery” state disavows DNA, historical research and the official conclusion of the Monticello Association. This good son of Virgina’s basic thesis that Thomas Jefferson was too moral a gentleman to have fathered Sally Hemmings’ children. He poses that one or more of Jefferson male relatives fathered the slave’s children, most likely his near do well brother Randolph who reportedly liked to “socialize” in the slave quarters. His unsaid thesis is that Sally was a quadroon whore who corrupted weak minded white men. Let’s examine Jefferson’s morals. The young Jefferson consorted with Elizabeth Walker, the wife of General John Walker, who had gone off to fight in one of the Indian Wars and he chased another married woman, Maria Cosway while he was an ambassador in France.

Like many paragons of moral rectitude of his time, Jefferson was obsessed with black female sexuality. His Notes on the State of Virginia includes quotes “…….as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species” and ‘They (blacks) are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. ” Why was the second president of the United States of America fantasizing about black women and bestiality? Why was one of the writers of the Constitution spying on black people doing the wild thing? What a perv!

Lastly Thomas Jefferson also spent time devising a mathematical formula for interracial breeding the determined the amount of generations it would take to whitewash mixed children. Is it any wonder that his formula made Sally Hemmings’ children white? William G. Hyland Jr is modern day example of good old fashioned black woman basher who takes his cue from those ignorant 15th century sailors who could not see black women as humans. I wonder how moral Hyland’s male ancestors were under the cover of the plantation moon and how many black relatives he has that look like Jefferson’s progeny in the picture above?

ABWW Heroine of the Day: Mary McLeod Bethune

Mary McLeod Bethune (July 10, 1875 – May 18, 1955) was an American educator and civil rights leader best known for starting a school for black students in Daytona Beach, Florida that eventually became Bethune-Cookman University and for being an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Born in South Carolina to parents who had been slaves, and having to work in fields at age 5, she took an early interest in her own education. With the help of benefactors, Bethune attended college hoping to become a missionary in Africa. When that did not materialize, she started a school for black girls in Daytona Beach From six students it grew and merged with an institute for black boys and eventually became the Bethune-Cookman School. Its quality far surpassed the standards of education for black students, and rivaled those of white schools. Bethune worked tirelessly to ensure funding for the school, and used it as a showcase for tourists and donors, to exhibit what educated black people could do.

Bethune served as the president of the Southeastern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs from 1920 to 1925, an organization that served to amplify black women’s voices for better opportunities. Her presence in the organization earned her the Nationa; Association of Colored Woman national presidency in 1924. Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in New York City in 1935 bringing together 28 different organizations to form a council to facilitate the improvement of quality of life for black women and their communities.

Bethune played a dual role as close and loyal friend of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt respected Bethune to the extent that the segregation rules at the Southern Conference on Human Welfare in 1938, being held in Birmingham, Alabama, were changed on Roosevelt’s request so she could sit next to Bethune. Roosevelt frequently referred to Bethune as “her closest friend in her age group.”[19] Bethune, in her turn took it upon herself to disperse the message of the Democratic Party to black voters, and make the concerns of black people known to the Roosevelts at the same time. She had unprecedented access to the White House through her relationship with the First Lady.

On the turnover of Plessy v Ferguson by the U.S. Supreme Court, Bethune took the opportunity to defend the decision by writing her opinion in the Chicago Defender in 1954:

There can be no divided democracy, no class government, no half-free county, under the constitution. Therefore, there can be no discrimination, no segregation, no separation of some citizens from the rights which belong to all… We are on our way. But these are frontiers which we must conquer… We must gain full equality in education …in the franchise… in economic opportunity, and full equality in the abundance of life.