Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists
Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights, written by Mikki Kendall, author of Hood Feminism, and illustrated by A. D’Amico, is the perfect book to bridge the gap between Black History Month and Women’s History Month.
The book starts with a diverse group of young women discussing the question of who won women’s rights. Their discussion, which is edging toward an argument, is interrupted by the dramatic arrival of a slightly androgynous purple-skinned woman in futuristic attire who announces “This will never do. One question…so many answers.” She then takes them on a tour through “the history you clearly never learned.”
The first two chapters introduce the group of young women, and the reader, to the role of women in antiquity and to a panoply of powerful women from the past, drawn from across the globe. The purple-skinned instructor/tour-guide tells stories that illustrate big ideas, one page at a time. The young women ask questions, squabble among themselves, and have aha moments. Much of this was familiar to me because I’ve spent a lot of time in this world over the last decade or so.* It might be familiar to those of you who have been along for the ride. But my guess is that it is new material for many of the books intended readers, especially in 2019 when the book came out.
Things picked up with the third chapter, titled “Slavery, Colonialism, and Imperialism: The Rights of Women Under Siege.” Our purple-skinned instructor begins with the statement that “Although some queens had to power to change lives, they weren’t always making those changes for the better. And the women their decisions harmed had to find a way to fight back.” For the next five chapters and 130 pages, Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists tells stories** of women’s fights first for freedom, then the vote, and finally equal rights across time, beginning with Queen Nanny’s leadership of against slavery in Jamaica in the Maroon Wars and ending with the modern world. While the book never uses the phrase intersectional, the stories illustrate the concept clearly. Kendall and D’Amico chose stories about Black, White , Indigenous, and Latinx activists, whose goals are not always the same. They make it clear that white suffragists often were not in favor of Black equality. They introduce us to women who fight for disability rights, labor rights, LBGT rights and environmental rights. They show that sports and the arts are also political forums.
At the end of the book, the group of young women and their instructor end up at place they began, with the question that started them on their journey: Women’s rights: who won them? They now share an answer. Every one has to work for women’s rights. And everyone will have to keep working for them.
Amazons, Abolitionists, an Activists is a good place to begin thinking about the broader issues of civil rights for all. And it is a powerful call to action.
*Hard though it is to believe, I started work on Women Warriors in 2014. Time flies when you're writing stuff.
**As Kendall and D’Amico make clear, it is never just one story and it is never a single march forward.
In which I read How the Word is Passed
I bought Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America almost as soon as it came out in 2021 after repeatedly hearing what an amazing book it was. But as I mentioned in post earlier this month, I was deep in the world of Nazis and couldn’t face adding America’s history of slavery to the stew in my head. So I put it on the high-priority T0-Be-Read piles that live on my office window sill,* with a promise that I would get to it soon. (Soon is relative in TBR time.)
How the Word is Passed is indeed amazing. Beginning with his home town of New Orleans and ending with discussions with his grandparents, Smith leads the reader on a tour of sites related to the history of slavery and how those sites have been used to tell that story. He does not simply consider the obvious sites.** For instance he looks at historical sites related to the slave trade in New York City—an incisive demonstration of the point that slavery and the slave trade played critical roles in the country as a whole, not just in the south. At each site, he considers not only how the story is told, but who is telling it, who is listening to it, and what stories are being left out. He shares his own reaction to each site, sometimes in physical terms. He makes it clear that slavery, and the long emancipation that followed, have a long tail in this country, emotional as well as economic.
As I read How the Word is Passed, I found myself thinking of Dolly Chugh’s A More Just Future. Chugh discusses how to deal with the discomfort of coming to terms with the disjunction between the history we were taught and the history we we weren’t taught. Smith gives us a personal demonstration of that discomfort. In a discussion of the project as the end of the book, he tells the reader that not only is the book not a definitive account of sites related to slavery, but it is not a definitive account of the sites he chose to visit. Instead, it is “a reflection of my own experience, concerns, and questions at each place at a specific period of time.” Smith’s writing is beautiful, thoughtful and powerful. He kept me turning the pages even when the reading was painful. My heart ached as I read.
If you chose to read one book about Black history this year, How the Word is Passed would be an excellent choice.***
*As opposed to the TBR piles that sit on my office floor waiting for room to open up on the TBR bookshelf, where some books have waited for a long, long time. I will point out that all of the books I am reading for Black History Month are from the high-priority stacks. (I occasionally bemoan the sheer volume of books waiting for me to read them someday, but as I discovered while writing The Dragon From Chicago, books find their time. More than once I discovered I already owned just the book I needed.)
**Monticello, I’m looking at you.
***Personally, I intend to read more over the coming year, though not in such a concentrated way. I will share a list of books from my shelves, read and unread, in my newsletter on February 27. (A good reason to sign up for the newsletter if you don’t get it already. Here’s the link: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b )
History on Display: Martin, a Ballet Film by Gordon Parks
©David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC
One of the later chapters of The Swans of Harlem discussed a ballet film by 20th century Renaissance man Gordon Park. Parks is best known for his photojournalism, in which he documented poverty and the civil rights movement from the 1940s through the 1970s, and his groundbreaking blockbuster film, Shaft (1971). He brings those two talents together in the documentary ballet film Martin (1990), a ballet about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
As a card-carrying ballet fan and history buff, I felt compelled to learn more.
Martin is a ballet with a prologue and five acts corresponding to significant moments in Dr. King’s life: the bus boycott (one of the five Swans of Harlem danced the part of Rosa Parks*), the march on Selma, his time in a Birmingham jail, his assassination, and his funeral. Gordon Parks not only directed and produced the film, but he composed the music.
To my disappointment, I was not able to watch the entire ballet. One full-length copy is available on YouTube, but the copy was so degraded that it was painful to watch. Instead I was able to see three segments: the prologue, Act III and Act V.
In the prologue, Gordon Parks narrates an introduction that deals primarily with the days before and after King’s assassination, played against a powerful montage of Parks’ photographs from the period. Occasionally a very young dancer moves across the screen and then freezes in a pose that resolves into one of the photographs—an enormously powerful technique and one that makes it clear that this ballet was designed for the screen, not the stage. Parks ends with a statement of his intent for the production: “As Martin was committed to a vision, this ballet is committed to the memory of that vision”
I did not find the choreography for Act III, "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which includes a voice over of the text of the letter, and Act V, Mourning Place, which overtly references the resurrection of Christ from the tomb, particularly compelling, though the dancing itself was excellent. Martin is ultimately interesting as a historical statement, and a historical artifact.
I’m glad I took the time to watch it.
*I’m sure I’m not the only person who wondered whether Gordon Parks was related to Rosa Parks. The answer is no.