Category: CARE

19: This Month in Black History – The U.S. Surgeon

Posted on by Katrina Frank
Dr. Joycelyn Elders, US Surgeon General (19913-1994)
Photo Credit: HHS.gov – Office of the Surgeon General

by Dr. Fari Nzinga (editorial support from Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss)

“The U.S. Surgeon General is the Nation’s Doctor, providing Americans with the best scientific information available on how to improve their health and reduce the risk of illness and injury. The Surgeon General oversees the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Commissioned Corps, an elite group of over 6,000 uniformed officers who are public health professionals. The USPHS mission is to protect, promote, and advance the health of our nation.”

Today, the public looks to this office for information regarding the state of COVID-19. But did you know that the first Black U.S. Surgeon General was sworn in on September 8th, 1993 and was a woman (only the second woman to head that office since its inception in 1871)?  It’s a fact!  Dr. Minnie Joycelyn Elders was sworn in by President Bill Clinton as the fifteenth Surgeon General of the United States. (See a list and history of the previous Surgeons General)

Minnie Joycelyn Elders was born August 13, 1933 to sharecropping parents (one of eight children) in Arkansas. While she would grow up to be a renowned physician and public advocate, it wasn’t until she was 16 years old that she met her first doctor! Elders and her siblings worked as field laborers and domestic servants and pooled their money together in order to pay for her to attend the Historically-Black liberal arts college, Philander Smith College, in Little Rock. Finding her options severely limited in Jim Crow Arkansas, Elders joined the Army and trained in physical therapy at the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. After discharge in 1956, she took advantage of the G.I. Bill and enrolled at the University of Arkansas Medical School.

Elders began her studies for a career in medicine one year before the Little Rock Nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957 following the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional. Their enrollment precipitated the tumultuous events that would come to be known as the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. Elders was forced to endure segregated accommodations during her time in medical school as one of very few Black and/or female students on campus.

Elders did an internship in pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, and in 1961 returned to the University of Arkansas for her residency. In no time, Elders became chief resident in charge of the all-white, all-male residents and interns. She must have endured countless instances of racial abuse, sexual harassment, and elitist entitlement. But she didn’t let that deter her! Dr. Elders went on to earn her masters degree in biochemistry in 1967; became an assistant professor of pediatrics at the university’s Medical School in 1971; and ranked as a full professor by 1976. A mere 2 years later, in 1978, Dr. Joycelyn Elders was the first person in the state of Arkansas to become board certified in pediatric endocrinology. Her research and clinical practice focused on mitigating the effects of pregnancy on diabetic girls and young women. As such, Dr. Elders worked with her patients to educate them on their sexual and reproductive health, and offered potentially life-saving family planning resources and information. Dubbed the “condom queen,” she was known for her positions on ensuring sex workers’ access to reproductive health care and making condom available to all public high schoolers.

Using her platform as Surgeon General during a period of “tough on crime” policies that would facilitate the mass incarceration of poor, Black, and other racialized people largely for low-level, non-violent drug offenses, Dr. Elders was ahead of her time in saying: “I do feel that we would markedly reduce our crime rate if drugs were legalized.” President Clinton, however, did not support her position and foreclosed the possibility of a national conversation around drug legalization. One year after her controversial comments, Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign from her Surgeon General post by the Clinton administration. Not long thereafter, in 1996, Elders (with David Chanoff) published her autobiography, Joycelyn Elders, M.D.: From Sharecropper’s Daughter to Surgeon General of the United States of America.

In 2014, former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders teamed up with the Program in Human Sexuality and the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School to advance comprehensive science-based sexual health education by creating the Joycelyn Elders Chair in Sexual Health Education. The position supports research, scholarship and pedagogy that aims to create comprehensive life-long sexual education curricula, to increase the number of health care providers trained in sexual health care, and to expand scientific research in sexuality education.

In 2020 she was honored by TIME Magazine as one of the historical 100 Women Of The Year.

Regina Stevens-Truss, Director of the HHMI Inclusive Excellence grant & Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry

ARRK – September 2021 Discussion

Posted on by Katrina Frank

ARRK September 2021 Discussion with Sarah Lindley

Participants restricted to Kalamazoo College Faculty, Staff, Students, and Administration

A discussion on sections of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

4-5 p.m. on Tuesday, September 21st
ARRK Meeting space (MS Teams)
Discussion Leader: Sarah Lindley

For September’s ARRK Sarah Lindley leading a discussion of Resma Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. She will be focusing on the preface through Chapter 1. A PDF of Menakem’s preface and first chapter can be found on the ARRK Teams Meeting Space. Another way to become acquainted with the book is through the On Being podcast episode, Resma Menakem, ‘Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence.’

The AntiRacism Reading Knook (ARRK) is a collaboration between the K College library staff and our Inclusive Excellence (KCIE) leadership team. This initiative is NOT a book club, but seeks to facilitate campus-wide engagement with the books in the KCIE Reading for Change book collection. This collection was created to encourage learning about and facilitate greater access to antiracism information to all members of the campus community.

ARRK aims to:

  1. reduce barrier to entry into reading antiracism books,
  2. identify and highlight campus facilitators with experience teaching and/or disciplinary expertise who can provide context and guide discussions of specific texts,
  3. foster broader relationships among faculty and staff, and thus
  4. build greater capacity for an inclusive campus through sustained and focused engagement with shared texts.
  5. help catalyze members of the campus to engage in small group discussions of entire books in the collection (self-organized book clubs, if you will).

For further information on #ARRK see the KCIE AntiRacism Reading Knook page. To volunteer to lead one of these sessions complete the ARRK Discussion Leader application.

19: This Month in Black History – Black Wallstreet and The Tulsa Massacre

Posted on by Katrina Frank

by Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss

Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss

Dear Colleagues, happy summer. I hope this message finds you enjoying your time away/off and that that you are resting and healthy. So much continues to occur in our Nation and the world, that we cannot drop the ball at this point. So, although I promised no story during the summer months, for those of us for whom the work does not stop or take a break, this message is offering an opportunity to continue to educate ourselves on the issues of racism, racist policies, and the destruction of communities.

Documentaries

If you have not seen any of the documentaries about the Tulsa Massacre, they are available at:

Tulsa Race Massacre Reading

This is another sad episode in the growth of this nation, and there are many others like it that need to be told (if you cannot access either film, you can read the History.com Tulsa Race Massacre article. As they say, “history is bound to repeat itself” if we do not know it, study it, and confront its effects head on wherever we see it. Best said by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Stay tuned for a new HHMI IE supported series that will be introduced in August. Stay well,

Regina Stevens-Truss, Director of the HHMI Inclusive Excellence grant & Professor of Chemistry

ARRK (AntiRacism Reading KnooK) – June Discussion

Posted on by Katrina Frank

ARRK June 2021 Discussion with Elizabeth Manwell

Participants restricted to Kalamazoo College Faculty, Staff, Students, and Administration

A discussion where participants can share and discuss books, movies, podcasts, and music centering Black Joy.

4-5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 15th
ARRK Meeting space (MS Teams)
Discussion Leader: Elizabeth Manwell

For June’s ARRK we will be sharing and discussing books, movies, podcasts, music, and more centering Black Joy. The discussion will start with a chapter from Samantha Irby’s We are Never Meeting in Real Life, “The Real Housewives of Kalamazoo” and the first episode of Issa Rae’s web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. A PDF of Irby’s chapter as well as a collaborative spreadsheet for participants to share their recommendations can be found on the ARRK Teams Meeting Space.

The AntiRacism Reading Knook (ARRK) is a collaboration between the K College library staff and our Inclusive Excellence (KCIE) leadership team. This initiative is NOT a book club, but seeks to facilitate campus-wide engagement with the books in the KCIE Reading for Change book collection. This collection was created to encourage learning about and facilitate greater access to antiracism information to all members of the campus community.

ARRK aims to:

  1. reduce barrier to entry into reading antiracism books,
  2. identify and highlight campus facilitators with experience teaching and/or disciplinary expertise who can provide context and guide discussions of specific texts,
  3. foster broader relationships among faculty and staff, and thus
  4. build greater capacity for an inclusive campus through sustained and focused engagement with shared texts.
  5. help catalyze members of the campus to engage in small group discussions of entire books in the collection (self-organized book clubs, if you will).

For further information on #ARRK see the KCIE AntiRacism Reading Knook page. To volunteer to lead one of these sessions complete the ARRK Discussion Leader application.

19: This Month in Black History- May Day

Posted on by Katrina Frank

Lucy Gomez Parsons, Albert Parsons, and May Day

May Day

by Dr. Lisa Brock (editorial support from Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss)

Did you know that May Day, typically celebrated on May 1st, is not just an old European tradition where kids dance around a maypole, nor is it a radical holiday that occurs only in socialist countries, but is the original “Labor Day” in the United States? Did you know that May Day began in Chicago on May 1, 1886 by “Chicago unionists, reformers, socialists, anarchists, and ordinary workers [who] combined to make the city the center of the national movement for an eight-hour [work] day?” If you knew that, kudos to you. Did you also know that one of the leaders of the movement was Lucy Gomez Parsons, a Black woman of indigenous and Mexican lineage?

This month’s 19 Story is her story and the story of May Day.

Lucy Gomez Parsons was born in Texas around 1853; her parents were likely enslaved. Because of her triple heritage, she sometimes claimed to be Mexican or Indian, depending on the circumstances of oppression she found herself in at any given time. Around 1870, she met and married Albert Parsons who was white, and together they were politically active during the time of Reconstruction (1865-1877), working to register Black people to vote in Texas. Their political action, however, made them targets, as their lives were often threatened. Following Albert getting shot in the leg, they decided to escape to Chicago where their marriage, while frowned upon, would at least be legal, and where they felt they could continue their political work.

The 1870s in Chicago were highly charged times, as was true in many of America’s northern cities, where European, African-American, and Latinx immigrants migrated to looking for work and a better life. What they found, however, was horrendous working conditions, such as those of the meat packing industry depicted in Upton Sinclair’s classic 1907 novel, The Jungle and Bill Dukes 1984 film, The Killing Floor.

When Lucy and Albert arrived in Chicago in 1873, an economic depression was underway. Much like the Great Depression of the 1930s, masses of people were being laid off pushing wages down. Albert, though, was fortunate, and managed to get a job as a printer at the Chicago Times newspaper. Lucy, along with a friend, Lizzy Swank, opened a Dress Shop.

Now, understand that the eight-hour day/forty-hour work week became Federal law in the US in 1938 with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. But the struggle for this, was real and slow. For example, on May 1, 1867, the Illinois legislature passed a law mandating an eight-hours workday, and on May 19, 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation that guaranteed a stable wage and an eight-hours workday for government workers. However, private industries refused to comply, and neither the state nor the federal government were making them.

As the workers’ movement brewed for a decade, it’s been said that Lucy and Albert held meetings in the Dress Shop, which is believed to have led to Albert’s firing and his being blacklisted as a printer. At this time, industrial workers were fighting for higher wages and better working conditions. In 1877, the Baltimore-Ohio Railroad, one of the largest companies in the country, cut the wages of their workers, for which a strike ensued with solidarity strikes occurring all over the country. New Unions were created during this time, and Lucy emerged as a leader of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).

Lucy was considered by some to be “dangerous” at this time as she wrote articles in The Alarm, published weekly by the International Worker’s People’s Association (IWPA) with the aim of advocating for direct action by people if needed to defend workers’ rights – a publication Lucy and Albert helped found in 1883.

On May 1, 1886 a day of action was planned – workers demanded an eight-hours work day with no cut in pay, and as you can guess, this was not received well by companies. Thus, on May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers across the nation walked off their jobs to participate in the largest mass general strike in US history; forty thousand workers struck in Chicago, alone, creating a whirlwind of workers’ activity, which inspired workers all over the world. Two days later, on May 3rd, 1886, the McCormick Harvest workers went on strike, joining the movement. With so many workers on strike, industries put pressure on City and State governments to do something. So, police were unleashed, with them firing into crowds of striking workers. A bomb was thrown into a crowd who was meeting at the Haymarket Square in Chicago killing one policeman. Riots broke out and both strikers and police were hurt. In the days that followed, city authorities, in response, raided the homes of leaders, many of whom had not even been at Haymarket Square, and they shut down newspapers. Police were looking for Albert and other strike leaders, many of whom went into hiding; some were found and some turned themselves in. In October, 1887, Albert and four other movement leaders were put on trial. They were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, and on November 11, 1887, Albert and the others were hung.

Between May 1, 1886 and October, 1887, you can imagine that Lucy, who was then under constant surveillance and harassment, tried to save her husband. As she was not to be silenced, she traveled the country to raise awareness of what was happening. She was often jailed and beaten in cities through which she traveled. In fact, she and her two children were jailed to “avoid trouble” after they visited Albert in jail for the last time.

Lucy Gomez Parsons, a Black woman, lived just long enough to see the eight-hours day/forty-hours week become a reality. She remained politically active until she died at the age of 89 in what the authorities said was an accidental fire at her house in Chicago on March 7, 1942. Sadly, her library of 1500 books, on sex, socialism and anarchy, which according to the FBI survived the fire, mysteriously disappeared.

Because of the work of Lucy Gomez Parsons and many others, the US Federal government negotiated with labor unions for Labor Day to be observed in September instead of May – ironically, the US is the only country that celebrates Labor Day on a day other than May 1st.

And if you didn’t know – now you know! Happy Labor Day month.

Regina Stevens-Truss, Director of the HHMI Inclusive Excellence grant & Professor of Chemistry
Lisa Brock, retired, ACSJL Academic Director & Professor of History

ARRK (AntiRacism Reading KnooK) – May Discussion

Posted on by Katrina Frank

ARRK May 2021 Discussion with Brittany Liu

Discussion of a Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

4-5 p.m. on Tuesday, May 18th
ARRK Meeting space (MS Teams)
Discussion Leader: Brittany Liu

For May we will be focusing on “Chapter I: The Rebirth of Caste.” For a PDF of Chapter 1 & the Introduction please visit the ARRK Team Meeting Space or access the reading in the Library’s, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness eBook.

The AntiRacism Reading Knook (ARRK) is a collaboration between the K College library staff and our Inclusive Excellence (KCIE) leadership team. This initiative is NOT a book club, but seeks to facilitate campus-wide engagement with the books in the KCIE Reading for Change book collection. This collection was created to encourage learning about and facilitate greater access to antiracism information to all members of the campus community.

ARRK aims to:

  1. reduce barrier to entry into reading antiracism books,
  2. identify and highlight campus facilitators with experience teaching and/or disciplinary expertise who can provide context and guide discussions of specific texts,
  3. foster broader relationships among faculty and staff, and thus
  4. build greater capacity for an inclusive campus through sustained and focused engagement with shared texts.
  5. help catalyze members of the campus to engage in small group discussions of entire books in the collection (self-organized book clubs, if you will).

For further information on #ARRK see the KCIE AntiRacism Reading Knook page. To volunteer to lead one of these sessions complete the ARRK Discussion Leader application.

19: This Month in Black History – It’s Baseball Season: History, Black Excellence, and Race

Posted on by Katrina Frank

“Play Ball!”

By Lisa Brock and Mark Truss (conceptual and editorial support from Regina Stevens-Truss)

“Play Ball” – at this time of year in the USA, for many, there is the feeling of being outdoors, eating hot dogs, playing catch, and simply that there is something in the air – it’s Baseball season! This year however, the USA, and indeed the world, lost one of the greatest baseball players of all time, Henry Louis Aaron (1934 – 2021) referred to as Hank the Hammer. Why? Because he was recognized for hammering the ball so hard, so high and so far, that he is the only player in history to hit 24 or more home runs every year for 18 years (1955-1973), and is one of only two players to hit 30 or more home runs in a single season for at least fifteen seasons. Aaron’s epilogue, however, is marred by what happened to him during his time in the majors. He is most known for breaking Babe Ruth’s (aka, the great “Bambino”) home run record when he hit 715 home runs on April 8, 1974. While many people followed his chasing of Ruth’s record with hopeful anticipation, the fact that he was Black became an issue for white racists who refused to accept a Black man breaking the Bambino’s record set 39 years earlier.

You may also be aware of Major League Baseball retiring the number 42, which, by the way, was also the title of a movie whose main character was played by the late Chadwick Boseman (you may know him as The Black Panther). The number 42 is synonymous with Jackie Roosevelt Robinson (1919-1972) who was the first known Black player to break into the Major League – he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.

But this 19 Black History Story is neither about Aaron nor Robinson specifically, but about Negro League Baseball, which got its start after the Civil War. Segregation policies at that time played into the then National Association of Amateur Baseball players “gentlemens’ agreement” to keep Black players out. In the early 1920s, Hall of Famer Andrew (Rube) Bishop Foster launched the Negro National League – the first successful league for African-American players. “When Rube Foster died [Dec. 9, 1930], Negro baseball died with him,” said Joe Green, a fellow Negro Leagues player, manager and owner. However, Negro League Baseball enjoyed periods of success in the early 1920s and again after the Great Depression. The history of Negro Leagues winds through multiple eras and stories, amounting to what is believed today to have been seven leagues: Negro Leagues of 1920-1948 were the Negro National League (I) (1920–1931); the Eastern Colored League (1923–1928); the American Negro League (1929); the East-West League (1932); the Negro Southern League (1932); the Negro National League (II) (1933–1948); and the Negro American League (1937–1948).

Interestingly, Hank Aaron was the last of the Black baseball players to integrate into the Major Leagues from the Negro Leagues, which had some of the best all-time baseball players in history, such as Satchel Paige, Minnie Miñoso, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and of course Jackie Robinson. Ty Cobb (1866-1961) known for playing and then managing the Detroit Tigers was, according to his early biographers, a major force in keeping the Major Leagues segregated. In the early decades of the 20th Century Cobb is noted as saying that he would never play a n-word in his life. What most people don’t know is that he uttered this after losing to Negro League players in exhibition games, which were frequent before the 1920s. Thus, his alleged racism was not based on him feeling he was superior to Black players, but because he actually knew that he was not!

As Jerry Brewer said in his January 23, 2021 Washington Post article, entitled Racism carved away a piece of Hank Aaron’s heart. What remained was still a gift: “It’s not hyperbolic to consider Hank Aaron the perfect baseball player. It’s not some grief-swelled attempt to lionize an irreplaceable giant. The man could do everything: hit for average, hit for power, run, play flawless defense in right field, lead. He could persist, through racist hate and death threats, and break the sport’s hallowed home run record.” Brewer goes on to quote Aaron: “It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about…My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ballparks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day. All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won’t go away. They carved a piece of my heart away.” “Imagine that,” pens Brewer. “Think of your proudest moment, the culmination of your life’s work. And then picture receiving thousands of letters expressing a desire to end your life,” just because of your greatness.

What many people may not know is that the Detroit Tigers, as did other major league teams, often played exhibition series in Cuba during the winter months. In fact, because the US baseball leagues were racially segregated and the Cuban professional leagues were not, most teams and players from Cuba who played in the US did so on Negro League teams and on the Negro League circuit. Another fun fact about the Negro Leagues is that there is only one woman in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Effa Manley, and while very fair, she considered herself Black. She and her husband owned the Newark Eagles, a Negro League team. She was also a leader in the fight for the integration of baseball, with the goal to integrate the Major League and democratize baseball’s economic structures, which would have allowed the Negro League teams to come into the majors with Black owners and teams intact. Instead, once Robinson broke the “the color barrier,” Major League teams began raiding Negro League teams and recruiting Black players, and because they could offer more money, by the 1960s Negro League teams owners were forced to shut down.

On December 16, 2020, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred declared that the seven Negro Leagues would be recognized as official Major Leagues, with their players’ records and statistics counted in baseball’s record books.

Today, there is concern about the lack of US-Black American baseball players coming up into the ranks of the majors, while Black Latin Players continue to thrive. This is largely because of a diminishing of public funds for baseball in lower income communities in the US, while the major league runs a minor league feeder system in the Caribbean. Nonetheless, the importance of the Negro Leagues in baseball history continues to be applauded, and the speed needed as well as the idea of bunting that they introduced to the game is now standard play.

Regina Stevens-Truss, Director of the HHMI Inclusive Excellence grant & Professor of Chemistry
Lisa Brock, retired, ACSJL Academic Director & Professor of History

ARRK (AntiRacism Reading KnooK) – April Discussion

Posted on by Katrina Frank

ARRK April 2021 Discussion with Laura Furge

Discussion of moving from theoretical antiracist discussions to strategies to disrupt white supremacy.

4-5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 20th
ARRK Meeting space (MS Teams)
Discussion Leader: Laura Furge

During the discussion we’ll look at the recent case of the Georgetown Professor Fired for Statements About Black Students as well as the article Are You Supporting White Supremacy?

The AntiRacism Reading KnooK (ARRK) is a collaboration between the K College library staff and our Inclusive Excellence (KCIE) leadership team. This initiative is NOT a book club, but seeks to facilitate campus-wide engagement with the books in the KCIE Reading for Change book collection. This collection was created to encourage learning about and facilitate greater access to antiracism information to all members of the campus community.

ARRK aims to:

  1. reduce barrier to entry into reading antiracism books,
  2. identify and highlight campus facilitators with experience teaching and/or disciplinary expertise who can provide context and guide discussions of specific texts,
  3. foster broader relationships among faculty and staff, and thus
  4. build greater capacity for an inclusive campus through sustained and focused engagement with shared texts.
  5. help catalyze members of the campus to engage in small group discussions of entire books in the collection (self-organized book clubs, if you will).

For further information on #ARRK see the KCIE AntiRacism Reading Knook page. To volunteer to lead one of these sessions complete the ARRK Discussion Leader application.

19: This Month in Black History – The Combahee River Collective

Posted on by Katrina Frank

The Combahee River Collective

Written by Dr. Lisa Brock (conceptual and editorial support from Dr. Regina Stevens-Truss)

In honor of Women’s History Month, you would think that we would address the Women’s Liberation Movement, and you’d be right. We are specifically focusing on one of the most important, albeit short-lived, movements in Black Women’s History, the Combahee River Collective. It was created in 1974 by Black feminist lesbians who were fed up with the hyper masculinity of Black Nationalists and Civil Rights organizations, and felt the women’s movement centered white women while the emerging Black feminist movement was too conventional. In fact, the Combahee River Collective emerged as a tear-away from the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), which at its peak had over 2000 members. The NBFO issued a Statement of Purpose at its founding in 1973, calling for an organization that would address both racism and sexism in order: “to address…the particular and specific needs of the larger, but almost cast-aside half of the black race in Amerikkka, the black woman.” Significantly, the NBFO was extremely heterogenous, but unfortunately, this led to tensions over the varied perspectives of what a Black Feminist Politic would entail, and by 1976 its national operations had ended. One of the NBFO’s thrust, though, was carried on by the Combahee River Collective, which not only wanted to address racism and sexism but also sexuality, class and imperialism.

Members of the Combahee River Collective (CRC) began meeting in Boston in 1974 and included twin sisters Barbara and Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, Cheryl Clarke, Akasha Hull, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Chirlane McCray, and American writer feminist Audre Lorde. They held retreats, they studied, they published writings, and began to define a Black Feminist Politic that connected Black women’s liberation to various intersecting oppressions. They began to see themselves as revolutionaries whose objectives went far beyond the binary of women and men; they saw capitalism as inextricably intertwined with patriarchy and anti-colonial struggles in the Global South as central to the work of women.

It should be noted that they were particularly inspired by the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance (1968-1980), which was an outgrowth of the Black Women’s Liberation Committee-a caucus of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); SNCC, of course, was the committee formed by young civil rights activists including the late Congressman John Lewis. What separated the CRC from other such movements, was the far-reaching power of their manifesto entitled the Combahee River Collective Statement; a statement that had an unprecedented impact on the nature of feminism. In her New Yorker article of July 24, 2020, Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote:

“As it was explained to me, feminists saw the world as divided between men and women and not between classes. The Combahee Statement obliterated that premise. Theoretically rich and strategically nimble, it imagined a course of politics that could take Black women from the margins of society to the center of a revolution. Because Black women were among the most marginalized people in this country, their political struggles brought them into direct conflict with the intertwined malignancies of capitalism—racism, sexism, and poverty. Thus, the women of the C.R.C believed that, if Black women were successful in their struggles and movements, they would have an impact far beyond their immediate demands. As they put it, ‘If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression’.”

This CRC statement has so influenced Black and feminist politics, that it is hard to imagine the study of women and gender today without it. Audre Lorde went on to become one of feminisms most influential writers, with her 1984 seminal work entitled, Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches. This work, revised in 2007, is now mandatory reading for many women and gender studies programs worldwide. While attorney Kimberly Crenshaw is credited with coining the term intersectionality in 1989, clearly the theoretical groundwork for this understanding of intersecting oppressions was laid with the work of the CRC.

Just in case you are wondering about the origins of the Combahee River Collective and why this name was chosen, know that the Combahee river is in South Carolina, near Charleston, and was named by the area’s original inhabitants. It is the river where in June 1863, during the Civil War, Harriet Tubman, leader of the underground railroad and union soldier, led a group of union troops against the Confederacy with gun boats. When Tubman and her men disembarked, they successfully torched plantations, fields, mills, warehouses and mansions, causing a humiliating defeat for the Confederacy, including the loss of a pontoon bridge shot to pieces by the union gunboats. Nothing like this had ever happened before in US history, where a Black woman led a group of men in battle. But just as significant, especially for the CRC, was the fact that more than 700 enslaved women and men, anticipating this win, courageously made it onto the gunboats led by Tubman and escaped their bondage. It was in honor of this episode that the women of the collective chose their name. The Combahee river is also known for the Yamasee War of 1715-1717, when the Yamasee and other indigenous peoples rose up in resistance to British Colonial Settlers who were taking territory that was not theirs to take. The Yamasee were so skillful in battle, that they threatened to annihilate the entire colony; thus, this war is considered one of the bloodiest battles in US colonial history.

Black women are the bedrocks of societies, but are not treated as such. In March, and every March, we celebrate women; their courage, their fight, and their ability to forge forward and shape societies even in the face of adversity. Happy Women’s History Month!

Regina Stevens-Truss, Director of the HHMI Inclusive Excellence grant & Professor of Chemistry
Lisa Brock, retired, ACSJL Academic Director & Professor of History

Regina Stevens-Truss, Professor of Chemistry

ARRK (AntiRacism Reading KnooK) – March 2021 Discussion

Posted on by Katrina Frank

ARRK March 2021 Discussion with the Advancement Division

Discussion of “Chapter 3: Power” from Ibram X. Kendi’s
How to be an Antiracist
4-5 p.m. on Tuesday, March 16
ARRK Meeting space (MS Teams)
Discussion Leader: Members of the Advancement Division

Members of the Advancement Division will also share their experience forming a division-wide antiracism book group.

You can read in the library’s How to be an Antiracist eBook or a PDF is available on the ARRK Meeting space.

The AntiRacism Reading KnooK (ARRK) is a collaboration between the K College library staff and our Inclusive Excellence (KCIE) leadership team. This initiative is NOT a book club, but seeks to facilitate campus-wide engagement with the books in the KCIE Reading for Change book collection. This collection was created to encourage learning about and facilitate greater access to antiracism information to all members of the campus community.

ARRK aims to:

  1. reduce barrier to entry into reading antiracism books,
  2. identify and highlight campus facilitators with experience teaching and/or disciplinary expertise who can provide context and guide discussions of specific texts,
  3. foster broader relationships among faculty and staff, and thus
  4. build greater capacity for an inclusive campus through sustained and focused engagement with shared texts.
  5. help catalyze members of the campus to engage in small group discussions of entire books in the collection (self-organized book clubs, if you will).

For further information on #ARRK see the KCIE AntiRacism Reading Knook page. To volunteer to lead one of these sessions complete the ARRK Discussion Leader application.