Vengeance Feminism: An Interview with Kali Nicole Gross

In today’s post, Dr. Keisha N. Blain, Professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University, interviews renowned historian Dr. Kali Nicole Gross about her latest book. Dr. Gross is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians (OAH). An interdisciplinary scholar, her primary research explores Black women’s historical experiences in the U.S. criminal justice system, and her expertise and opinion pieces have been featured in press outlets such as TIME, The Washington Post,  The Root, and BBC News. She has appeared on venues such as C-Span, MSNBC, and NPR.

She is the author of three award-winning books, and her latest monograph, Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times, was published by Seal Press on September 24, 2024. Her grants and fellowships include the Carnegie Fellowship, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture: Scholar-in-Residence Award, the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and she was a Public Voices Fellow for The Op-Ed Project. Her newest work examines the historical experiences of Black women and capital punishment in the United States.

Keisha N. Blain: Your groundbreaking scholarship centers on Black women’s experiences in the criminal justice system. Your award-winning books—Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 and Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America—offer new insights into how working-class and impoverished Black women skillfully navigated the violence of the criminal justice system amid the social and political upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tell us more about how your new book, Vengeance Feminism, builds on these themes.

Kali Nicole Gross: Thanks for this question and for the opportunity to talk about Vengeance Feminism (hereafter VF). As a geek hobby I collect late nineteenth-century trial transcripts, and the Philadelphia City Archives is my favorite place to do this. On one of those collecting missions I stumbled across the 1901 trial of Mary Wright, a twenty-four-year-old African American, fighting for her life because she was charged with the murder of an elderly white woman in whose home she worked. At the outset it looked as if it’d be an open and shut case, but then she leaned into a variety of tactics that Black women have used when their backs were against the wall. She weaponized her housekeeper knowledge and exposed the family’s secrets—she cast the cold light of day on the victim’s son, substance abuse in the household came to the fore, and it became a media scandal. Meanwhile, members of her church rallied to get her an attorney who took it to the prosecution. But Mary also was a young woman with secrets—she liked to entertain gentlemen callers, and she liked to party and stay out late; even so, she had a community and when she was on trial, she knew how to turn it up. She wept bitter tears in court, she knew when to talk and when to be quiet—her freedom balanced on a knife’s edge. As I read about her exploits in the legal system, I marveled at the various ways she and other women in the system fought back—Mary used her intellect, her community, and her voice.  So, in some respects the work clearly is in line with key themes I look at in Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, when Tabbs also played the justice system and she did not hesitate to resort to physical violence—as in some other cases in VF. But whereas Tabbs was a villain of sorts, most of the women in VF were everyday Black women making a living in Philadelphia at a time when they were citizens in name only. The legal system didn’t protect them, so they had to learn to take care of themselves, and at the same time defend against the system in the aftermath. In this book, I’m also interested in the ways that Black women in the streets enacted their own kind of feminist politics to protect their bodily sanctity, their honor, and their reproductive systems.

KNB: A significant aspect of your scholarship is how you grapple with the politics of respectability. You bring into bold relief the lives and ideas of a cadre of Black women who simply refused to accept certain social norms and expectations. And perhaps more importantly, you make a case for how these women asserted their power and authority through refusal. Can you say a bit more about how Vengeance Feminism tackles this subject?

KNG: One of my favorite examples that speaks to this is from 1893, and revolves around a sister named Ida Payton. Ida was sweet on a gentleman, Samuel, and hanging out in a shady parlor in the rough part of town. He came through with his bros and some kind of argument broke out between the two. It became quite violent—he grabbed her and beat her head against the floor. His friends intervened and Samuel left.  She told him, “you better get out of here and don’t come back.” Regardless, he returned, feeling that he didn’t get proper satisfaction. Whatever had initially transpired was an affront to his manhood. But this time around, Ida had a gun. Ida and Samuel exchanged more heated words and again friends separated them, but just when it seemed to be settling down, Samuel issued a parting dig, calling Ida a vile, unreprintable name. She told him, “I’ll mark you for that,” raised her weapon, and shot him several times. I think about this case a lot.  She didn’t go and get this gun and shoot this man after he gave her this beating; she doesn’t shoot him when he comes back after her warning; and he didn’t make a move to physically hit her again; the redline was the dishonor. This is problematic in many ways, but I want readers to understand the context: in 1893, while the act of dueling was largely frowned upon and phased out, it was not unheard of for white men to still engage in the act. In neighboring states like Delaware, it was still legal in the late nineteenth century—digest that, the law provided for white men to violently avenge dishonor, for themselves and on behalf of white women. Against this backdrop, Ida, whom I count among vengeance feminists, defends her own honor and, in that respect, is making a real statement about her own personhood as she challenges the normative allotted station for her in the social hierarchy and the law.

KNB: Vengeance Feminism does a wonderful job of teasing out the multifaceted aspects of Black feminist thought. In many ways, it captures Joy James’s earlier observation that Black feminism is by no means monolithic, and it also brings to mind Brittney Cooper’s astute analysis of Black women’s “eloquent rage.” What emerges in your remarkable and nuanced book is a view of Black feminist politics from the ground—and indeed, the streets—where Black women are taking matters into their own hands. Tell us more about how Black feminism functions in your book.

KNG: Like traditional Black feminism, VF is also deeply concerned with the sanctity of Black womanhood and bodily autonomy, and it is certainly also about affirming their demands to have their womanhood respected (as they defined it). Where it diverges in a significant way is that traditional Black feminism is often very focused on the community, uplift for everyone, and allyship—vengeance feminism is not about the collective in a direct sense; it’s about Black women on the ground lashing back on behalf of themselves and placing their womanhood, their priorities, their sanctity, their pride, and their honor first by any means necessary. So, it’s also not aligned with these ideas of noble struggle.

KNB: I’d like to turn to the topic of research. Vengeance Feminism draws on a very impressive evidence base. I especially love your use of the Black press, which I think is perhaps one of the more extraordinary primary sources we can use to shed new light on the lives of ordinary (and extraordinary) Black people. But the use of the Black press poses its own challenges—especially when centering a group of women who were viewed as (violent) troublemakers and, indeed, “criminals.” Can you share more about how you navigated these challenges (which I am certain you encountered in a range of other primary sources too)?

KNG: The only real challenge I found with using the Black press was mainly about finding enough examples of it throughout the period of study. In those moments where I do find it, the articles really are like gems, because the Black press usually included these kinds of humanizing details about African American subjects in ways that mainstream presses did not. So, I was less deterred by the kind of judgments in the papers because so much of the other information and details were so rich and generative. I also didn’t mind the tension, because those contradictions—they’re human and that’s who we are.

KNB: As a writer and intellectual, you’re especially skilled at grappling with the more granular aspects of the topics you study to help us see the big picture. You do this in a very compelling way in Vengeance Feminism through your decision to focus squarely on Black women’s lives in the city of Philadelphia to unveil the intricacies of Black women’s experiences in the United States. Can you talk about this approach and, perhaps more specifically, the importance of Philadelphia as both a physical space and as a site of research inquiry. 

KNG: As you know I love the City of Brotherly Love even though I’m a native New Yorker. This admission is probably going to get me banned from New York City, but in a lot of ways when we describe campus or the university as a microcosm of society, I really regard Philadelphia’s history as a microcosm of American history. It is foundational to our national origin story; it grappled with our original sins of enslavement, racial hatred, and misogynoir, but it also exemplifies the hope and inspiration of abolitionism, resistance, and the space for Black people to live a little and invent and reinvent themselves. It’s a great site for me because it’s almost like another character in the book. I wanted the book to read like creative nonfiction, so I really tried to depict the flavor of the avenues and the seedy thoroughfares, to sketch out dice games, juke joints, and the revelry; the dancing and the cavorting and the people adorning themselves for an evening out or for picnics in local parks. I strove to paint that picture because I didn’t just want to tell people about the history; I was really trying to show them.

KNB: To conclude, what was the most rewarding and/or surprising aspect of writing this book? 

KNG: I didn’t really come to the realization until the end of the book, but much of this text is profoundly influenced by my mother’s legacy and my relationship with her. My mom was my hero; she was a survivor in her own way, and she took real pains to share her experiences with me as a young person so that I would know and understand what it is to be a Black woman in this society. She hoped I would learn from her mistakes and not end up pregnant before I was ready or find myself married to a man who was abusive. She fought her way out of those situations, and it occurred to me as I was finishing the book that she found herself in the same kinds of dilemmas in the late twentieth century that so many of the women I studied confronted in the late nineteenth century. They had to make a decision: either let yourself be abused by someone or fight back and risk being abused by the state. Her stance has certainly influenced me as a Black woman but also as a scholar of Black women’s experiences. That’s true for most of my work, but it’s particularly apparent in VF. Thanks for that question, and again for the chance to talk about the book.