BHM: Chokwe Lumumba

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"There are some people historically who have always tried to separate the populations and to have a certain portion of the population oppress the rest of the population."

Lumumba was born Edwin Finley Taliaferro on Aug. 2, 1947. He attended Catholic schools, followed by Kalamazoo College and law school at Wayne State University. His political consciousness awakened early. An early memory, he said, was his mother showing him a photo of the mangled body of Emmett Till, the black boy who was murdered in Mississippi at age 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. But he became radicalized in the wake of the death of Martin Luther King Jr., while he was in college. Discarding his “slave name,” he took the name Chokwe Lumumba, honoring a Central African ethnic group and the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.

A longtime black nationalist organizer and attorney, Lumumba had been described as "America’s most revolutionary mayor." Working with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Lumumba advocated for participatory democracy and the creation of new worker-run cooperatives in Jackson. Over the past four decades, Lumumba was deeply involved in numerous political and legal campaigns. As an attorney, his clients have included former Black Panther Assata Shakur and the late hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur. As a political organizer, Lumumba served for years as vice president of the Republic of New Afrika, an organization which advocated for "an independent predominantly black government" in the southeastern United States and reparations for slavery. He also helped found the National Black Human Rights Coalition and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

Lumumba believed that dealing with infrastructure was a radical act that would secure the city’s autonomy and protect it from the kind of takeover that befell Detroit, his birth city. But his vision extended further. It encompassed cooperatives, recycling, alternative energy and other tools to create a “people’s economy” with local investment and employment.

Lumumba was the most prominent leader of a major city to come from the black revolutionary movement. Tragically less then a year after being voted in as mayor of Jackson, MI he passed away on February 25, 2014.

Sources:
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/26/chokwe_lumumba_remembering_americas_most_revolutionary
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/2/26/chokwe-lumumba-radicalmayorofjacksonmsdiesat66.html

BHM: #TuneTuesday - Black Gold

This song, "Black Gold," was the first single from the Esperanza Spalding album, Radio Music Society. Released March 20, 2012.

The Afro-centric implication of the title is no coincidence. The song was released Feb. 1, 2012 — the first day of Black History Month. The video was premiered on BET. And to these ears, the music itself connects jazz aesthetics to sounds of black popular music today.

In case that message wasn't clear, Spalding wrote some commentary on the track for members of the press:

This song is singing to our African American heritage before slavery. Over the decades, so much of the strength in the African American community has seeded from resistance and endurance. I wanted to address the part of our heritage spanning back to pre-colonial Africa and the elements of Black pride that draw from our connection to our ancestors in their own land. I particularly wanted to create something that spoke to young boys.

Esperanza Spalding (born October 18, 1984) is an American jazz bassist, cellist and singer, who draws upon many genres in her own compositions. She has won four Grammy Awards, including the Grammy Award for Best New Artist at the 53rd Grammy Awards, making her the first jazz artist to win the award.

Sources:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2012/02/02/146287135/new-esperanza-spalding-song-in-time-for-black-history-month
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanza_Spalding

BHM: Daisy Bates

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"We will kneel-in, we will sit-in, until we can eat in any corner in the United States. We will walk until we are free, until we can walk to any school and take our children to any school in the United States. And we will sit-in, and we will kneel-in, and we will lie-in, if necessary, until every Negro in America can vote. This we pledge you, the women of America."

Daisy Lee Gatson Bates was born on November 11, 1914. She grew up in southern Arkansas in the small sawmill town of Huttig. Bates was raised by her foster parents, Orle and Susie Smith, who she believed were her birth parents for many years. In "The Death of my Mother," Bates recounted learning as a child that her birth mother had been raped and murdered by three local white men. Learning of her mothers death and knowing that nothing ever was done about it fueled her anger.

Bates was the former president of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP and also a longtime board member of the national NAACP. In 1957, she helped to enforce the Supreme Court’s school desegregation rulings by working with a group of teenagers later known as the Little Rock Nine. She helped recruit the nine black teenagers and escorted them through irate mobs of white adults and into their first classes at Little Rock Central High School, a previously all-white institution.

Nevertheless, the pandemonium at Central High School caused superintendent Virgil Blossom to dismiss school that first day of desegregation, and the crowds dispersed. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened by federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and dispatching the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to ensure that the court orders were enforced. The troops maintained order, and desegregation proceeded. In the 1958-1959 school year, however, public schools in Little Rock were closed in another attempt to roll back desegregation. That period is known as "The Lost Year" in Arkansas.

As a result, Bates and her husband Lucious lost their business. She was jailed, threatened, and the Klu Klux Klan burned an eight-foot cross on her lawn. After Bates moved to Washington, D.C., and worked for the Democratic National Committee. She also served in the administration of U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson working on anti-poverty programs.

Following a stroke she moved back to Arkansas. Little Rock paid perhaps the ultimate tribute, not only to Bates but to the new era she helped initiate, by opening the Daisy Bates Elementary School. Bates passed away in Little Rock on November 4, 1999.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Bates_%28civil_rights_activist%29

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/27/civil_rights_pioneer_gloria_richardson_91

BHM: Miles Davis

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"Do not fear mistakes. There are none."

What is cool? At its very essence, cool is all about what’s happening next. In popular culture, what’s happening next is a kaleidoscope encompassing past, present and future: that which is about to happen may be cool, and that which happened in the distant past may also be cool. This timeless quality, when it applies to music, allows minimalist debate – with few exceptions, that which has been cool will always be cool.

Davis was a man of few words. When he did speak, his words often had a similar effect to a hand grenade being lobbed into the room. In 1987, he was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he'd done with his life to merit an invitation.

Straight-faced, Davis replied: "Well, I've changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fxck the president?"

The son of a prosperous dental surgeon and a music teacher, Miles Davis was born Miles Dewey Davis III on May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois. For nearly six decades, Miles Davis embodied all that is cool – in his music (and most especially jazz), in his art, fashion, romance, and in his international, if not intergalactic, presence that looms strong as ever today.

Honoring his body of work, in 1990, Miles Davis received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award. In 1991, he played with Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The two performed a retrospective of Davis's early work, some of which he had not played in public for more than 20 years.

Later that same year, on September 28, 1991, Davis succumbed to pneumonia and respiratory failure, dying at the age of 65. Fittingly, his recording with Quincy Jones would bring Miles Davis his final Grammy, awarded posthumously in 1993. The honor was just another testament to the musician's profound and lasting influence on jazz.

2006 – The year in which Miles Davis was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame on March 13th – is a land­mark year, commemorating the 80th anniversary of his birth on May 26, 1926, and the 15th anniversary of his death on September 28, 1991. In between those two markers is more than a half-century of brilliance – often exasperating, brutally honest with himself and to others, uncompromising in a way that transcended mere intuition.

Sources:
http://www.milesdavis.com/us/biography
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/sep/28/miles-davis-20-years

BHM: #TuneTuesday - Black Rage

Last year Lauryn Hill released a self-described "sketch" of her song "Black Rage," which she dedicated to the people fighting for racial equality in Ferguson, Missouri. "An old sketch of 'Black Rage,' done in my living room," the singer wrote on her website of the tune that dates back to at least 2012. "Strange, the course of things. Peace for MO."

Hill sings the melody to "My Favorite Things," from Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, but she has changed the lyrics – posted on her website – to ones describing the many factors that inspire "black rage." Hill had previously recited the song's lyrics as a poem in 2012 on her Life Is Good/Black Rage tour with Nas.

"I use the performance platform as an opportunity to express the energy of that moment, and the intention behind it," she said of the song at the time. "I've been a long-standing rebel against the stale, over-commoditization. As artists, we have an opportunity to help the public evolve, raise consciousness and awareness, teach, heal, enlighten and inspire in ways the democratic process may not be able to touch. So we keep it moving."

The lyrics are below:

Black rage is founded on two-thirds a person

Rapings and beatings and suffering that worsens,

Black human packages tied up with strings,

Black rage can come from all these kinds of things.

Black rage is founded on blatant denial

Squeezed economics, subsistence survival,

Deafening silence and social control.

Black rage is founded on wounds in the soul!

When the dogs bite, when the beatings,

When I’m feeling sad

I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don’t fear so bad!

Black rage is founded: who fed us self hatred

Lies and abuse while we waited and waited?

Spiritual treason, this grid and its cages

Black rage was founded on these kinds of things.

Black rage is founded on draining and draining,

Threatening your freedom to stop your complaining.

Poisoning your water while they say it’s raining,

Then call you mad for complaining, complaining

Old time bureaucracy drugging the youth,

Black rage is founded on blocking the truth!

Murder and crime, compromise and distortion,

Sacrifice, sacrifice, who makes this fortune?

Greed, falsely called progress,

Such human contortion,

Black rage is founded on these kinds of things

So when the dog bites, when the beatings,

And I’m feeling mad,

I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don’t fear so bad!

Free enterprise, is it myth or illusion?

Forcing you back into purposed confusion.

Black human trafficking or blood transfusion?

Black rage is founded on these kinds of things.

Victims of violence both psyche and body

Life out of context is living ungodly.

Politics, politics

Greed falsely called wealth

Black rage is founded on denying of self!

So when the dog bites

And the beatings

And I’m feeling so sad

I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don’t feel so bad!

It has been 6 months since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.

Source:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lauryn-hill-black-rage-new-song-ferguson-20140821

BHM: The Mirabal Sisters

"Si me matan...Yo sacaré mis brazos de la tumba y seré mas fuerte"

"If they kill me... I'll reach my arms out through my tomb and I'll be even stronger."

-Minerva Miabal

The Mirabal Sisters are the four Dominican sisters (Patria, Dedé, Minerva, María Teresa) who opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. One of the most infamous episodes of his dictatorship (which first influenced Minerva) was the massacre of thousands of Haitian citizens in 1937. Trujillo's soldiers murdered Haitians working as sugar cane cutters or living in Dominican territory. Estimates of the men, women and children killed range from 13,000 to 20,000

Further influenced by her uncle, Minerva became involved in the political movement against Trujillo, who served as the country's official president from 1930 to 1938 and from 1942 to 1952, but ruled from behind the scenes as a dictator from 1930 to his assassination in 1961. Minerva studied law and became a lawyer, but because she declined Trujillo's romantic advances in 1949, she was only allowed to earn a degree, but not have a license to practice law. Her sisters followed suit, first Maria Teresa, who joined after staying with Minerva and learning about their activities, and then Patria, who joined after witnessing a massacre by some of Trujillo's men while on a religious retreat. Dedé joined later, due to having been held back by her husband Jaimito.

They eventually formed a group called the Movement of the Fourteenth of June (named after the date of the massacre Patria witnessed), to oppose the Trujillo regime. They distributed pamphlets about the many people whom Trujillo had killed, and obtained materials for guns and bombs to use when they finally openly revolted. Within the group, the Mirabals called themselves Las Mariposas ("The Butterflies"), after Minerva's underground name.

Minerva and María Teresa were incarcerated but were never tortured due to mounting international opposition to Trujillo's regime. Three of the sisters' husbands (who were also involved in the underground activities) were incarcerated at La Victoria Penitentiary in Santo Domingo. Despite these setbacks, they persisted in fighting to end Trujillo's leadership

On 25 November 1960, Patria, Minerva and María Teresa, and their driver, Rufino de la Cruz, were visiting Patria and Minerva's incarcerated husbands. On the way home, they were stopped by Trujillo's henchmen. The sisters and the driver were separated and were clubbed to death. The bodies were then gathered and put in their Jeep where it was run off the mountain road to look like an accident.

In 1994, Dominican-American author Julia Álvarez published her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, a fictionalized account of the lives of the Mirabal sisters. Alvarez called the sisters "feminist icons" and "a reminder that we have our revolutionary heroines, our Che Guevaras, too". The novel was adapted into the 2001 movie of the same name. The movie starred Salma Hayek as Minerva, Edward James Olmos as Trujillo, and singer Marc Anthony in a supporting role.

On December 17, 1999, the United Nations General Assembly designated November 25 as the annual date of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in commemoration of the sisters. The day also marked the beginning of a 16-day period of Activism against Gender Violence. The end of the 16 days, on December 10th, is noted as International Human Rights Day.

Sources:

http://awayshegoes.net/2012/05/21/in-the-time-of-the-butterflies-review/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirabal_sisters

BHM: Lewis Latimer

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"There must be vistas flying out beyond, that promise more than present conditions yield."

Lewis Latimer was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1848. He was the son of George and Rebecca Latimer, escaped slaves from Virginia. After enlitsting in the military at 15, Latimer returned to Boston, Massachusetts where he was employed by the patent solicitors.

Latimer's talent for drafting and his creative genius led him to invent a method of making carbon filaments for the Maxim electric incandescent lamp. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell, a teacher of deaf students, asked Latimer and his known drafting skills to help him apply for a patent. Bell knew others were also working on devices to transmit human voices over electrical wires, and he was in a race to secure a patent. Eventually their patent was approved. In 1881, he supervised the installation of the electric lights in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London.

Lewis Latimer was the original draftsman for Thomas Edison (who he started working for in 1884) and as such was the star witness in Edison's infringement suits. Lewis Latimer was the only African American member of the twenty-four " Edison Principles ", Thomas Edison's engineering division of the Edison Company.

On December 11, 1928, Lewis Howard Latimer died, leaving a remarkable legacy. His name will be forever associated with two of the most revolutionary inventions of all time: the incandescent electric light bulb and the telephone.

Sources:
invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/ilives/latimer/latimer.html
http://inventors.about.com/od/lstartinventors/a/Lewis_Latimer.htm  

BHM: #TuneTuesday - Soul Food

Cadillactica is the second studio album by American rapper Big K.R.I.T.. The album was released on November 10, 2014, by Def Jam Recordings and Cinematic Music Group.The album was supported by the singles "Pay Attention" featuring Rico Love, "Cadillactica" and "Soul Food" featuring Raphael Saadiq.

In a September 2014, interview with Respect., he spoke about the vibe of the album, saying: "I wouldn't say that. Cadillactica is a free-floating album in a way where I felt like I was able to talk about whatever I wanted because I created a planet to do so. Cadillactica is a planet that I created, which in reality is my conscious mind. It’s where all my creative thoughts come from. It’s where all my ideas come from. All of my pain. All my passions. All of my struggles. All of my pain. It all comes from Cadillactica. Everything is a little obscure and a little different because in your mind, it IS like that. Your mind is abstract, your ideas are abstract and I wanted to make my music seem a little abstract. I wanted the skits to be a little abstract. I wanted some of the instrumentation and singing to be abstract. I wanted the content and the topics to be abstract. I think I was able to accomplish that on this planet called Cadillactica."

In a later interview Big K.R.I.T. goes into the his Late Night show performance of Soul Food.

The Boombox: On ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,’ you wore a shirt that read, “Across cultures, darker people suffer most. Why?” Explain the importance of that statement and why you felt viewers should see it?

Big K.R.I.T.: In today’s society and with what’s going on in the world, you have to be conscious and aware of what’s going on. That shirt I wore has a quote from Andre 3000 and it’s actually part of his line — you know one of the jumpsuits. It was one of the quotes that really spoke to me because it’s one of those questions you have to ask yourself: “Why throughout cultures do darker-skinned people have to go through so much?”
People are always judged… So posing that question surrounding a record like ‘Soul Food,’ I just felt like it was perfect. It was something that was good for your mind, body, soul and spirituality. I felt like it was a powerful quote and it would make people talk amongst themselves as well.

Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillactica

BHM: Nina Simone

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'To me we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world.
Black people.
And I mean that in every sense.
Outside and inside.
And to me we have a culture that is surpassed by no other civilization but we don’t know anything about it. 

My job is to somehow make them curious enough to get more aware of themselves and where they came from.

This is what compels me to compel them and I will do it by whatever means necessary'

Nina Simone sang a mix of jazz, blues and folk music in the 1950s and '60s. In her illustrious career she composed over 500 songs, recorded almost 60 albums. She was the first woman to win the Jazz Cultural Award, won "Woman of the Year" 1966, Jazz at Home Club, and was named Female Jazz Singer of the Year, 1967, by the National Association of Television.

 Born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone received a scholarship to study classical piano at the Juilliard School in New York City, but left early when she ran out of money. She turned her interest to jazz, blues and folk music and released her first album in 1958.

A civil rights activist, she wrote songs promoting the Civil Rights Movement. By the mid-1960s, Simone became known as the voice of the civil rights movement. She wrote "Mississippi Goddam" in response to the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing that killed four young African-American girls. After the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, Simone penned "Why (The King of Love Is Dead)." She also wrote "Young, Gifted and Black," borrowing the title of a play by Hansberry, which became a popular anthem at the time.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Simone tired of the American music scene and the country's deeply divided racial politics. She lived in several different countries, including Liberia, Switzerland, England and Barbados before eventually settling down in the South of France. She died in France on April 21, 2003.

Sources:
http://www.biography.com/people/nina-simone-9484532#civil-rights-singer
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/aframer19511999/a/Nina-Simone.htm

BHM: Walter Rodney

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"It is absolutely necessary to determine whether the standard of living in a given industrialized country is a product of its own internal resources or whether it stems from exploiting other countries.”

Dr. Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on March 23, 1942. His was a working class family-his father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress. After attending primary school, he won an open exhibition scholarship to attend Queens College as one of the early working-class beneficiaries of concessions made in the filed of education by the ruling class in Guyana to the new nationalism that gripped the country in the early 1950s.

His doctoral research on slavery on the Upper Guinea Coast was the result of long meticulous work on the records of Portuguese merchants both in England and in Portugal. In 1970, his Ph.D dissertation was published by Oxford University Press under the title, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800. Walter took up his first teaching appointment in Tanzania before returning to his alma mater, the University of the West Indies, in 1968. This was a period of great political activity in the Caribbean as the countries begun their post colonial journey. But it was the Black Power Movement that caught Walter's imagination.

By the summer of 1968 Rodney's "groundings with the working poor of Jamaica had begun to attract the attention of the government. So, when he attended a Black Writers' Conference in Montreal, Canada, in October 1968, the Hugh Shearer-led Jamaican Labor Party Government banned him from re-entering the country. This action sparked widespread riots and revolts in Kingston in which several people were killed and injured by the police and security forces, and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed.. Rodney's encounters with the Rastafarians were published in a pamphlet entitled "Grounding with My Brothers," that became a bible for the Caribbean Black Power Movement.

Having been expelled from Jamaica, Walter returned to Tanzania after a short stay in Cuba. It was from partly from these activities that his second major work, and his best known --How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - emerged. It was published by Bogle-L'Ouverture, in London, in conjunction with Tanzanian Publishing House in 1972.

In 1974, Walter returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of Guyana, but the government rescinded the appointment. But Rodney remained in Guyana, joined the newly formed political group, the Working People's Alliance.

From that period up to the time of his murder, he was constantly persecuted and harassed and at least on one occasion, an attempt was made to kill him. Finally, on the evening of June 13, 1980, he was assassinated by a bomb in the middle of Georgetown.

Below is a short documentary based off of an interview with Walter Rodney

Source:
http://www.guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com/wpa/rodney_bio.html

BHM: #TuneTuesday - Africa Must Wake Up

Distant Relatives is a collaborative studio album by American rapper Nas and Jamaican reggae artist Damian Marley, released May 18, 2010, on Universal Republic and Def Jam Recordings. Production for the album took place during 2008 to 2010 and was handled primarily by Damian Marley and Stephen Marley. Fusing musical elements of hip hop and reggae, Distant Relatives features lyrical themes concerning ancestry, poverty, and the plight of Africa. Its proceeds were to go to a project in Africa, with the possibility of building a school in Congo

In an interview with Tim Westwood the following year they went into the meaning of the album. 

Tim Westwood: The show sort of crescendos with Africa Must Wake Up, what is that message?

Nas: When you look at what happened in Egypt and what’s going on in Lybia right now, people are waking up and fighting for theirs, for their freedom. The song was made last year but it’s so relevant it’s timeless I feel like. ‘Cause it goes with the times, with what’s going on and people want freedom. People are tired of the way they been living, over there. People are tired of dictatorships they tired of it. So it’s a new day. When we saying Africa must wake up we saying everybody wake up…… It’s distant relatives but we’re talking to everybody.

Damian: We’re human. The most important thing. And even in the album that is one of the parts that we’re trying to get across not because we’re talking about Africa. Africa is the cradle of civilization. So don’t care where you come from you come from Africa too.

Sources:
Wikipedia
Youtube

BHM: Maya Angelou

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"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."

Maya Angelou was born as Marguerite Johnson on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri and raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. Maya Angelou became one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time. With over 50 honorary doctorate degrees Dr. Maya Angelou became a celebrated poet, memoirist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist.

As a teenager, Dr. Angelou’s love for the arts won her a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School. At 14, she dropped out to become San Francisco’s first African-American female cable car conductor. She later finished high school, giving birth to her son, Guy, a few weeks after graduation. As a young single mother, she supported her son by working as a waitress and cook, however her passion for music, dance, performance, and poetry would soon take center stage. Maya Angelou’s life would continue to mirror the American landscape paving the way for a first hand experience with racism, single parenting, over-coming poverty, seeking higher education, creating wealth, living through and participating in the civil rights movement. In later years she would embrace popular culture working with rappers, poets, musicians and filmmakers. Writing about her experience with eloquence and detail, Maya Angelou recorded history through poetry, biographies, journalism, children’s books, cook books and essays painting a picture of the American landscape for generations to come.

During her years abroad, Dr. Angelou read and studied voraciously, mastering French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti. While in Ghana, she met with Malcolm X and, in 1964, returned to America to help him build his new Organization of African American Unity.

Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and the organization dissolved. Soon after X’s assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Dr. Angelou to serve as Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King’s assassination, falling on her birthday in 1968, left her devastated. Maya Angelou continued her work in Civil Rights and has also been widely recognized as a international ambassador for good will crossing lines of race and culture.

President Barack Obama presented her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor in 2010. Dr. Maya Angelou received over 50 honorary degrees and was the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University for more than 25 years. Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014.

Posted by: E. Rey
Follow @DaHaitianProfet

Sources:
http://www.mayaangelou.com/biography/

Black History Month: Harriet Ann Jacobs

Image source: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Harriet_Ann_Jacobs1894.png

Why does the slave ever love? Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away by the hand of violence? When separations come by the hand of death, the pious soul can bow in resignation, and say, "Not my will, but thine be done, O Lord!" But when the ruthless hand of man strikes the blow, regardless of the misery he causes, it is hard to be submissive. I did not reason thus when I was a young girl. Youth will be youth. I loved, and I indulged the hope that the dark clouds around me would turn out a bright lining. I forgot that in the land of my birth the shadows are too dense for light to penetrate.

~ Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born February 11, 1813, in Edenton, North Carolina to parents Elijah Knox and Delilah Horniblow. Jacobs’ father, the putative product of a white father and black mother--though still a slave--worked as a house carpenter, and her mother lived as chattel property of John Horniblow, a tavern owner. Harriet had one brother, John, and owing to the legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem, both Harriet and John were born in bondage.

Jacobs is most known for her work as an abolitionist and the 1861 publication the biographical slave narrative--under the pseudonym Linda Brent--of her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Incidents described, in shocking detail, the travails of being a slave, and more, the intersection of gender and motherhood, which played a significant role in the slave woman’s predicament. Jacobs was the repeated victim of unsolicited sexual advances and abuse, and though she wanted to be free, she could not countenance leaving behind her two children. She was, however, eventually able to escape the stronghold of her cruel master, and finally take up “residence” in “a tiny crawlspace above a porch.”

The space was nine feet long and seven feet wide. Its sloping ceiling, only three feet high at one end, didn't allow her to turn while laying down without hitting her shoulder. Rats and mice crawled over her; there was no light and no ventilation. But her children had been bought by the lawyer (the children’s father) and were now living in the same house. Harriet could even see them while they played outside through a peephole she had drilled. She lived in the crawlspace for seven years, coming out only for brief periods at night for exercise.

Jacobs would eventually go on to secure her freedom, and that of her children, following the abovementioned, and other, harrowing and traumatic events. She would dedicate her freedom to the abolition of the slave system and publish her powerful narrative--one of the very first to chronicle the incredible suffering and oppression that was visited upon women slaves all over the South. Jacobs died, after a long and courageous life, on March 7, 1897 at 84 years old.




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