The Great Migration and Black Women’s Political Work

This post is part of our online roundtable on Hettie V. Williams’s The Georgia of the North.

There will never be too much written on the role of Black women in American activism. We are far too behind to ever make that the case. It is glaring enough how infrequently “ordinary” Black men are spotlighted when discourse around civil rights takes shape; imagine how many people only recently learned of Bayard Rustin, for example. But when it comes to African American women, well, their stories are sometimes just plain invisible.

There is, of course, scholarship to explain one facet of this paucity. In Manuel Castells’s The City and the Grassroots, the author writes that women have historically “mobilized on behalf of their families’ needs.” Even as women activists, in general, have moved toward a more feminist mission in their work, it remains often relegated to the domestic, or private sphere. Nothing to see here.

My own research confirms the argument that Black women’s work remains in the shadows. My recent book, Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark illustrates how the women narrators respond to questions around their political work in the negative. They often say in no uncertain terms that they are not “political.” Yet when these same women are asked about community work, they list numerous tasks that most of us would deem political–and even radical. Luckily, more and more writing is coming out now on just how important African American women are and have been in the fight for civil rights in this country. And as we stand on yet another precipice, looking out onto a sea of white supremacy and misogyny, Black women are once again being called upon to “do the work.” Recent scholarship shows that they have been doing it all along, and often without the support of their white counterparts.

Hettie Williams’s book offers one such antidote for this impaired historical vision. Williams foregrounds both Black women and New Jersey, a state that deserves more historical attention aside from its American Revolution roots and, as Williams points out, urban rebellion.

Identifying her book as a “historical narrative,” Williams’s “central question” is: “How and why did New Jersey’s Black leaders, community members, and women, in particular, effect major civil rights legislation, legal equality, and integration a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education decision?” In fact, early on Williams notes that before Brown there was Hedgepeth and Williams v. Trenton Board of Education, “the first legal precedent in any state during the twentieth century to explicitly call for an end to the practice of school segregation.” So there. Jersey came for that particular practice of racism first.

Williams calls New Jersey “a northern state with very southern sensibilities” due in large part to the Great Migration. This sentence does a beautiful job in framing the state’s personality, if you will, during this historical period. What Williams is doing here is a service to any student of history who still harbors the belief that all civil rights activity occurred in the South–and ergo, that all racism was in the South as well.

The book is also, Williams adds, “an intellectual history.” And certainly, when reading this extensively researched project, one sees the centrality of African Americans to New Jersey’s civil rights progress; policies that have shaped this country; and the thinking involved in getting these things done. Williams explains that the term intellectual in this case “includes the people who made a living by arguing, as well as the people who made a living and argued.” Yes, activism’s definition is expanded–a necessary task of inclusion to right some deep historiographical omissions. As Williams writes, “African American women have continuously been left out of the major volumes on American intellectual history; this is an act of erasure and a projection of white supremacist thinking that routinely reduces Black women to the category of non-thinkers.”

One does not have to be from New Jersey to enjoy this book, but it certainly is an added pleasure. Having lived in Montclair for twenty-five years–as well as having studied, taught and written extensively in Newark–it was fascinating to learn some of the legal machinations behind the history I thought I knew.

Each woman highlighted in this book is worth their own library of writing, as Williams often notes. I was especially interested in the section on Marion Thompson Wright, someone who I knew of for the most part through the late Dr. Clement Price’s annual Marion Thompson Wright lecture series held each February at Rutgers University-Newark. And while Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Sara Spencer Washington also receive their own chapters, numerous other women and the roles they played–especially in the early Civil Rights Movement–are highlighted as well. Mary Hayes Allen, Florence Spearing Randolph, and Hortense Ridley Tate are just a few examples. These are certainly names I was not familiar with, and I am grateful that these women and their contributions are being added to the proverbial history books.

Personally, I would have been happy to see all of these women even more centered, such that the (albeit important) men were all but left out. Williams, I believe, sees a need to include them, however, in order to contextualize the work of the women, which is certainly a reasonable approach in telling this story. In fact, Williams aims to do many things in this book, perhaps a nod to the continuing paucity of the subject in academic scholarship.

In an online talk that Dr. Williams participated in recently with the William Monroe Trotter Institute–where she acts as director–she shared a few family stories of the women in her ancestral life. Her point was the personal is political–especially when it comes to women and African Americans, I would argue. One can imagine her relatives’ bodies as archives in and of themselves, Williams posited. Indeed. The Georgia of the North introduces many of us to women we did not know and who were effecting changes we did not know they made. There are so many stories like this to tell and, as Williams noted in her talk, many of us know just how crucial it is to record them before they are erased.

Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.