The Troubled History of Medical Harm to Black Women

In 1805, a Black woman known in the historical record as Pleasant, took a deep breath and pushed her son into the world. She was surrounded by Indigenous and white Moravian women who lived in the Appalachian mountains of northern Georgia. Pleasant pulled her son to her chest. The women helped her deliver the afterbirth and cleaned her tired body. Having survived the dangerous trials of childbirth, Pleasant held and fed her son.

In the archives, Pleasant’s story is told from the perspective of others. Researchers can only glean details about her pregnancy and her child’s delivery from the writings of white Moravian missionaries. The Moravians, originally from North Carolina, had purchased Pleasant from a farmer they met on the way to their Georgian mission community, Springplace. To their pleasure, Pleasant was with child, providing them another person to enslave and some assurance that she would offer them more human capital. Pleasant’s reproductive capabilities were an economic asset for her enslavers. In fact, historians like Sasha Turner have identified reproductive bodies as a “zone of conflict,” in which enslavers, abolitionists, doctors, and Black women fought for control both over function and meaning.

Today, Black women continue to seek control over their bodies and pregnancies. They face incredible risks during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. In 2016, a Black mother, Kira Johnson, of Los Angeles, knew something was wrong when she gave birth to her second son. She repeatedly implored doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to examine her. Instead, the medical staff ignored her—for 10 hours. Despite her husband’s advocacy, doctors dismissed Johnson’s concerns as mere complaints. Kira died from internal bleeding, neglected by medical professionals.

Separated by two centuries, Pleasant and Kira Johnson were both victimized by racist understandings of Black women’s reproductive functions. In both cases, white Americans in positions of power ignored Pleasant and Johnson as mothers, interpreting their grievances through pervasive, demeaning stereotypes of Black women.

They disregarded their distinct experiences of motherhood. Stories such as Johnson’s regularly appear in Black news outlets discussing cases of Black women losing their lives due to indifference or willful neglect from white doctors. A recent story from CNN, Making Pregnancy Safer for Black Women, highlights that medical myths and racist stereotypes undermine Black women’s humanity and autonomy. Racial bias results in the precarity of Black women during and after childbirth. Vice President Kamala Harris and the Center for Disease Control recognize that Black women are three times more likely to die due to complications caused by pregnancy than white women.

The harmful, racialized beliefs which result in today’s medical harm to Black women stem from Pleasant’s world, in which white enslavers ignored her humanity and commodified her Black body. Medical professionals and scholars need to recenter Black women’s stories beyond the white gaze that influences the medical and historical narratives about Black women. Black feminist historians are producing groundbreaking scholarship to transform perspectives. Saidiya Hartman’s innovative methodology offers scholars an effective means to extract Black women’s experiences from sources which obscure them. Critical fabulation allows us to reconsider inequitable historical records and imagine Pleasant’s experience with motherhood. While scholars cannot undo the violence and pain of her life, we can use fresh techniques to recover her humanity from a world that subjected her. We can identify racist structures that continue to ignore Black women’s autonomy and control their experience of motherhood.

The Moravians established small mission communities in the South following the First Great Awakening. As a Protestant denomination transplanted from 17th century Germany, the Moravians viewed communal living as ideal for Christians. Despite believing all people could acquire spiritual salvation, the Moravians did not believe in liberation from chattel slavery. They engaged in African bondage.

Furthermore, Pleasant navigated a world in which white people commodified her body and motherhood. In 1804, thirty-two-year-old Pleasant was trafficked by Casper Stoltz to the Moravians. They enslaved her to assist white Moravian women with household chores. Pleasant may have had other children who were still enslaved by the man who sold her. The Moravians described her son as mixed-race. His father could have been Stoltz. Pleasant appears in the archives through the missionary records of their purchase and the birth of her son. Yet, she had an undocumented life before her Moravian enslavement that shaped her experiences of motherhood.¹

Less than a month after his birth, the Moravians baptized Pleasant’s son in Springplace. Pleasant, along with twenty-five other enslaved Black individuals, looked on as the Moravian missionary poured water onto her son’s head and laid claim to not only his labor, but also his soul. He was soon christened under the name Michael. It is unknown whether Pleasant or the Moravians named her son. However, we do know that Pleasant did not convert to the Christianity of her enslavers. Perhaps she held onto a faith passed down from her mother, or, like Fredrick Douglass, she refused to practice the religion used to deny her humanity. Pleasant likely had no say in her son’s baptism. Instead, her enslavers decided to give him this sacrament.

For the next fourteen years, the Moravians likely undermined Pleasant’s capacity to parent Michael. Mother and child remained together in the mission town. Yet, Pleasant struggled to guide her son in a system that did not recognize her parental authority. Even as a child, Michael had to navigate his mother’s loving authority and their enslavers’ rules. The Moravians attempted to evangelize Michael despite his mother’s disinterest or disbelief in Christianity. The Moravian enslavers reacted to this Black woman’s spiritual autonomy by characterizing Pleasant and Michael’s way of living as “heathen.” They pressured the young boy to convert when his mother was not present. Enduring the relentless dismissal and undermining of her motherly authority by the slaveholding missionaries, Pleasant continued to nurture Michael under her own values, despite the many challenges of raising a child in slavery.

As historian Brenda Stevenson explained, enslavement forced Black women like Pleasant to raise their children without a father who would share the load of parenting. As the sole parent, Pleasant navigated raising her son while the Moravians subverted her right to parent him. Michael entered his teenage years testing his mother’s authority. While managing a teenager was hard enough, their enslavers judged—and held the power to overrule—every decision she made as a mother. Pleasant and Michael experienced heated disagreements, some ending in him running off. Living on the frontier at the intersection of Indigenous and European cultures, she was likely worried about her son’s safety.

In 1819, the Moravians intervened when fourteen-year-old Michael ran away after a heated argument with his mother. They decided that Pleasant no longer had the right to be his mother. Flexing the power of the enslaver, they took away her son. They sold Michael to a man on a nearby farm, breaking up Pleasant’s family.  They stripped away this Black mother’s ability to see and hold her child. Pleasant was inconsolable. She desperately sought after her son. After tracking him down, she resigned herself to the fact that Michael was not coming home. No laws or authorities enabled her to take him back. All she could do was express her pain, cursing the man who trafficked Michael. The Moravian men commodified her boy. These white men deemed that Pleasant had no rights as a Black mother that they were bound to respect.

The Moravians then brought Pleasant back to Springplace. The pain of losing her son was all-encompassing. She lost the will to labor for the unsympathetic people who had trafficked her son. Pleasant mourned the loss of Michael. Perhaps Michael was not the first child she had lost. With no record of her life before the Moravians, we will never know if Michael was the only child enslavers had taken from her.

In the 1830s, the Moravians sent Pleasant to North Carolina. Michael remained with the man who had taken him. The Moravians did not ask or honor Pleasant’s wishes for herself and her child. She never saw her son again. In Springplace, the Moravian enslavers had undermined and erased Pleasant’s right to mother her child. Despite racist beliefs robbing Pleasant of her humanity in their eyes, she was still Michael’s mother. She celebrated his birth. She chastised his behavior. She sought him when he was taken. She mourned the loss of her son.

To honor Black motherhood, past and present, scholars must assert Black women’s humanity. Kira Johnson and other Black women have been dispossessed, died, and cheated out of a lifetime experience of motherhood because of white supremacy’s persistent dismissal of their voices. Upon reflection on Pleasant, Kira, and the newly-established Black Maternal Health Week, we need measures that will prevent doctors from perpetuating deadly racist stereotypes. Black feminist methods empower scholars to recover Black female voices that have historically been silenced. In both scholarship and medicine, we must affirm Black women’s right to fully experience motherhood.

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