The Epiphany Light of Southern Black Washerwomen

On this last day of Black History month, as we make our way into Women's History month, I want to honor the women known as The Pioneers of American Labor, credited with being the impulse for the Labor Movement in America: Southern Black Washerwomen.

It is significant, I think, that today, the 28th day of February, 2025, there is an international movement to boycott all major corporations (and not use credit cards) as a way to protest corporate greed and corruption, and demonstrate to ourselves and the world, the power we have. In the United States, the emphasis is also on boycotting companies who have reversed their DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) policies, like Walmart, Amazon, Target, Google, and fast food places.

Bank of America has decided to end tracking its DEI goals while Morgan Stanley, and CitiGroup as well as many universities and colleges are simply rewording their DEI language or removing it from public-facing content but to quietly continue DEI policies.

There is also a movement to make a special effort, especially today, to support companies who have reaffirmed their DEI policies - like Costco, Apple, Ben& Jerry's, Delta Airlines, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft and Patagonia.

It should be noted that Americans are encouraged to support small businesses - especially entrepreneurs - and to use cash, not credit cards.

Those companies and the people who support them may not know it, but the inspiration for the strengthening of their backbone in the face of enormous pressure from the forces of The White House, MAGA and Project 2025 come from Southern Black Washerwomen in the last quarter of the 19th Century who stood up for themselves and their families for economic fairness.

They are mostly anonymous. Of course. They are women and they are Black. I do have the names of some who went to jail for defying orders and, even before I begin to briefly tell their story, I want to call the names of those whose names were published in the newspaper: Matilda Crawford, Sallie Bell, Carrie Jones, Dora Jones, Orphelia Turner and Sarah A. Collier

They were delicately described in the press as “ebony-hued damsels,” but found themselves slapped with charges of disorderly conduct and “quarreling”. Five of the women were fined $5 apiece, but Collier was ordered to pay a $20 fine. She refused to pay, and as punishment, the 49-year-old asthmatic mother of two was sentenced to work on a chain gang for 40 days.

My apologies. As usual, I'm getting out ahead of my skis. Let me briefly tell you their story. You can find more in the recently published book, “Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor,” by Kim Kelly (Normally, I'd add a link to Amazon, but not today, Mr. Bezos. Not today.)

According to Ms. Kelly, there is no one location or event that can lay a definitive claim to the founding of the American labor movement but one thing is clear, women provided the spark and the impulse.  Since the beginning and for hundreds of years, the social fabric of this country was stitched and held together with strong threads of prejudice against and exploitation of women, people of color, and class status.

Upper and middle class women’s choices were limited to marriage and motherhood, or spinsterhood. Waged labor was seen as the exclusive realm of men, and for most middle- and upper-class women, the thought of earning money for their work was wholly foreign.

Of course, this applied to "native-born women". As immigration ramped up during the middle of the 19th century, female workers from other ethnic groups — including Irish immigrants fleeing a colonial famine and Russian Jews seeking to escape brutal repression — were also targeted by the ruling class’s white-supremacist paternalism.

By the 1830s, the American genocide against Indigenous people had been well underway for decades, and the few Indigenous women allowed into the workforce were treated abominably. So, too, were the lives of women of African descent. Following Emancipation, their lives were still often defined by exploitation, abuse and wage theft.

Whether held in bondage or living freely, Black women were considered no differently than work horses, possessing neither intellect nor soul, but whose primary value was in their cheap labor and their ability to produce children who would continue to support the wealthy elite, from generation to generation.

However, the Industrial Revolution not only changed the way people worked, it caused them to reconsider every aspect of their lives. Ms. Kelly reports that "the restrictive social fabric" - especially for women. It was on a balmy spring 1824 day in Pawtucket, R.I., 102 young women launched the country’s very first factory strike, and brought the city’s humming textile industry to a standstill.

In the North, the textile industry was almost entirely white. It wasn’t until 1866, a year after Emancipation, that formerly enslaved Black female workers were able to launch a widespread work stoppage of their own — and by doing so, jump-start a wave of Black-led labor organizing that would spread through multiple industries and set the stage for decades of labor struggles to come.

Ms. Kelly reports,

"On June 16, 1866, laundry workers in Jackson, Miss., called for a citywide meeting. The women — for they were all women, and all were Black — were tired of being paid next to nothing to spend their days hunched over steaming tubs of other (White) people’s laundry, scrubbing out stains, smoothing the wrinkles with red-hot irons, and hauling the baskets of heavy cloth through the streets. At the time, nearly all Black female workers were employed as domestics by White families, to handle the cooking, cleaning and child care, hauling water, emptying chamber pots, and performing various and sundry other tasks that the lady of the house preferred to avoid."

The washerwomen of Jackson presented Mayor D.N. Barrows with a petition decrying the low wages that plagued their industry and announcing their intention to “join in charging a uniform rate” for their labor. As their petition read:

“Any washerwoman who charges less will be fined by our group. We do not want to charge high prices, we just want to be able to live comfortably from our work.”

The prices they’d agreed upon were far from exorbitant: $1.50 per day for washing, $15 a month for “family washing,” and $10 a month for single people. They signed their letter “The Washerwomen of Jackson,” and in doing so, gave a name to Mississippi’s first trade union.

There is no record of the 1866 strike’s outcome, but the action itself had an immediate ripple effect in Jackson and farther afield. Throughout the Reconstruction era of 1865 to 1877, Black workers rose up and struck in Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Washington, D.C.

There was a successful organization of Black Washerwomen in Galveston, TX but it wasn't until a hot day in July, 1881, in Atlanta, GA, that the trade organization, "The Washing Society" was founded by Black Washerwomen in their Black neighborhood church in Summerhill, GA that these women, working through their Black clergymen, began to have a major impact on higher wages and improved working conditions. 

When their demands were not met, the Black washerwomen of Atlanta, Georgia went on strike, which hit the city, on the employers side, like a wrecking ball. Ms. Kelly reports:

“The Washerwomen’s strike is assuming vast proportions and despite the apparent independence of the white people, is causing quite an inconvenience among our citizens,” the Atlanta Constitution reported on July 26, a week into the strike. “There are some families in Atlanta who have been unable to have any washing done for more than two weeks. Not only the washerwomen, but the cooks, house servants and nurses are asking increases.”

Imagine! Why, I'll bet even the horses were scared about whatever was about to happen next!

A pathetic counter offer was made by the Atlanta City Council of a $25 annual business license fee on any member of a washerwomen association (more than $670 in 2021 dollars) — a proposition intended to economically hobble the workers at war for a mere $1 per dozen pounds of laundry.

But instead, the washerwomen wrote a letter to Atlanta Mayor Jim English expressing their willingness to pay the fees — so long as the city agreed to formally grant them control over the local hand-laundering industry. The strikers’ letter ended with a warning:

“Don’t forget this. We hope to hear from your council on Tuesday morning. We mean business this week or no washing.”

Atlanta’s City Council backed down, and while history is murky on the resolution, it appears that the workers had successfully shifted the balance of power not only for themselves as Washerwomen but all Black women and men. Atlanta’s Black female workers had prevailed in making their collective power felt. The city’s white-supremacist employer class had come face-to-face with the reality of Emancipation: Black workers would tolerate injustice no more.

I love this story - these stories - of the Southern Black Washerwomen which illustrate, over and over again, that Black History is American History and we can learn so much about ourselves from reading these stories.

These stories of the Southern Black Washerwomen and all of the stories I have been privileged to read and reflect on and write and post on this blog also offer is a blueprint - a plan and a playbook - of what we need to do in the next four years.

That is already happening today with the worldwide economic boycott. Whether or not we want to admit it, we have learned a great deal from our Black sisters. If we open our eyes and our ears and our hearts, we may just find the courage and the intelligence and the moral strength to elect one of them President of the United States one day.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

From cotton to clouds: The Epiphany of Ms. Bessie Coleman

She went from the drudgery of working in fields filled with white fluffy clouds of cotton to the thrilling, exhilarating work of an airshow pilot in the white, fluffy clouds of the sky.

Known as "Queen Bessie," she was born Elizabeth Coleman in 1892  in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth of 13 children of George Coleman, an African American who may have had Cherokee or Choctaw grandparents, and Susan Coleman, who was African American. The Coleman family were sharecroppers. Ms. Bessie worked as a child in the cotton fields, vowing to one day to "amount to something."

At the age of six, Ms. Bessie began attending school in Waxahachie, Texas in a one-room, segregated schoolhouse where she completed all eight grades. At age 12, Ms. Bessie was accepted into the Missionary Baptist Church School on a scholarship. Yearning to further her education she worked and saved her money and enrolled at Langston University in Oklahoma where she completed one term before running out of funds and returning home to Texas.

Climbing the ladder of success always begins with stepping on the first rung. Often, it means keeping one hand on the rung in front of you while raising the other to take the hand of one who has gone before you.

In 1915 at age 23, Ms. Bessie moved to Chicago to live with her older brother where she became a beautician and a manicurist in a south side barbershop. One of her customers was a man named Robert Abbott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender who told her stories of the pilots returning home to America at the end of World War I.

Something in the stories captured her imagination and the young woman who had spent her life as a girl in the cotton fields of Texas decided that she would like to fly.

She took a second job in order to save money quickly so that she could pursue her dream to be a pilot, but at that time American flight schools did not admit either blacks or women. Robert Abbott encouraged Ms. Bessie to study flying abroad and later she received financial backing from a banker, Jesse Binga, and the Chicago Defender.

One day Ms. Bessie’s brother John, who had served in France during the war said, “I know something that French women do that you’ll never do…fly!” That remark prompted her to travel to France, after teaching herself to speak French.

On June 15, 1921, at the age of 29 and fifty-eight years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Ms. Elizabeth Coleman graduated the Federation Aeronautique Internationale becoming the first African American woman to achieve a pilot’s license.

Still, Ms. Bessie continued to dream. She remembered her first step on the ladder of success and that her brother's hand had been there to help her up. Her dream was to establish a flying school for African Americans in the United States. She knew it was a risky dream, filled with challenges and obstacles, but she was willing to work hard to achieve her goal.

She began her career as a "barnstorming" pilot, performing riveting demonstrations of aerobatics including loops, figure eights, and near-ground dips. This earned her the affectionate nickname of 'Queen Bess" and "Brave Bessie".

She didn't mind. Whatever brought in the crowds, and with them, the money she needed to make the freedom of the skies available to everyone.

"The air is the only place free from prejudice, " she said, and throughout her career, she would only perform at air exhibitions if the crowd was desegregated and permitted to enter through the same gates.

Tragically, although she saved her money and came close to her goal of opening a flight school for Blacks in the United States, Bessie Coleman was tragically killed on April 30, 1926. 

During a rehearsal for an aerial show, the airplane she was in unexpectedly went into a dive and then a spin, subsequently throwing her from the airplane at 2,000 feet. She was not wearing her seat belt because she was of small stature and needed to lift herself up so she could see over the side of the plane.

She died instantly. Upon examination of the aircraft, it was later discovered that a wrench used to maintain the engine had jammed the controls of the airplane.

Ms. Bessie was 34 years old.

Funeral services were held in Florida, before her body was sent back to Chicago. While there was little mention in most media, news of her death was widely carried in the African-American press. Ten thousand mourners attended her ceremonies in Chicago, which were led by activist Ida B. Wells.

Despite this tragic fate, Ms. Elizabeth Coleman's legacy of flight endures and she is credited with inspiring generations of African-American aviators, male and female, including the Tuskegee Airmen and NASA astronaut, Dr. Mae Jemison, who carried Bessie Coleman’s picture with her on her first mission in the Space Shuttle when she became the first African American woman in space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor in September 1992.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

The Light of Deep Wisdom: Maya Angelou

 

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

I think of all the wonderful and wise quotes attributed to Maya Angelou, this one has impacted me most. I first read it written on the wall of a college classroom where I was doing a presentation on Reproductive Justice and Abortion.

I realized, in that moment, that while the information I was about to give them was important, my attitude, the way in which I presented the information so that it would have an impact and be retained, was even more important.

Indeed, I think I understood more clearly than I had ever before that this was one of the key components of leadership. This one sentence has changed the way I see myself, the way I present myself to others and the way I have taught and mentored future leaders in my care.

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a nurse and card dealer.

For the first three years of her life, her family lived in her maternal grandparents home. Angelou's older brother, Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite "Maya", derived from "My" or "Mya Sister".

Ms. Maya's life story has been documented in a series of seven autobiographies, primarily focusing on her childhood and early adult experiences, The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage" ended, and their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas, alone by train, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. In "an astonishing exception" to the harsh economics of African Americans of the time, Angelou's grandmother prospered financially during the Great Depression and World War II, because the general store she owned sold basic and needed commodities and because "she made wise and honest investments".

Four years later, when Angelou was seven and her brother eight, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning" and returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis. At the age of eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, a man named Freeman. She told her brother, who told the rest of their family.

Freeman was found guilty but was jailed for only one day. Four days after his release, he was murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles.Angelou became mute for almost five years, believing she was to blame for his death; as she stated: "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone."

It was during this period of silence when Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her. Her wisdom, she maintains, was born of suffering.

Ms. Maya was an accomplished person in a variety of ways. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years.

She became a poet and writer after a string of odd jobs during her young adulthood. These included fry cook, sex worker, nightclub performer, Porgy and Bess cast member, Southern Christian Leadership Conference coordinator, and correspondent in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa.

Ms. Maya  was also an actress, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In 1982, she was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Beginning in the 1990s, she made approximately 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her ninth decade of life. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" (1993) at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.

Here are some of the things she has said which have personally guided me:

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

"The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise."

"Hate, it has caused a lot a problems in the world, but has not solved one yet."

“In all my work, what I try to say is that as human beings, we are more alike than we are unalike.”

“Life offers us tickets to places which we have not knowingly asked for.”

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”

Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014, at age 86.

Although Angelou had been in poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders.

During her memorial service at Wake Forest University, her son Guy Johnson stated that despite being in constant pain due to her dancing career and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the last ten years of her life. He said, "She left this mortal plane with no loss of acuity and no loss in comprehension."

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia!

The Sound of Light: Bernice Johnson Reagon

 

They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
The strongest leaves of my tree

 

If light could make a sound, I am convinced that one of the sounds it would make would be like the music of Sweet Honey in The Rock, the all Black women a cappella singing group founded by Bernice Johnson Reagon.

That's because while light is an electromagnetic wave, sound is created by vibrations in the air. When there is as strong a force of Spiritual Light as Bernice Johnson Reagon, you know there ain't nothin' going to happen but that Light wave will vibrate. And, make the incredible sounds of harmony and justice and freedom that become Light for all the senses.

Bernice Johnson Reagon was born on October 4, 1942 in Dougherty County, southwest Georgia, the daughter of Beatrice and J.J. Johnson, a Baptist minister. Church and school were an integrated part of her life, with music heavily intertwined in both of those settings.

Dr. Reagon grew up in a church without a piano, so her early music was a cappella, and her first instruments were her hands and feet. When she spoke about her upbringing in this musical culture, she explained that even her early schooling was heavily involved with music, not just the church. She said that her teacher would lead the students outside to play games that entailed singing with their hands and feet, as well as their voices.

She once said, "Singing with my hands and feet and my whole body is the only way I can deal comfortably with creating music." No wonder she causes light waves to vibrate.

A precocious child, she started attending school at age 4 and by the time she was in 4th grade, she started tutoring the children in the 1st grade. At the age of 16, she was accepted at Albany College to study music. While there, she was very active in the NAACP and SNCC. She was expelled from Albany for her involvement in a protest and then briefly attended Spelman College.

Later, she returned to Spelman to complete her undergraduate degree in 1970. She received a Ford Foundation fellowship to do graduate study at Howard University, where she was awarded a PhD in 1975. In in 1989, she won a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.

Albany, Ga., would become an important center of the civil rights movement when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there in 1962, causing the media to descend on the town. Dr. Reagon, however, wasn't there to see it. "I was already in jail, so I missed most of that," she recalled, "But what they began to write about ... no matter what the article said, they talked about singing."

The singing that so fascinated the media were freedom songs — often revamped versions of spirituals familiar to anyone who'd grown up in African American churches. Dr. Reagon would later say that, in many cases, she simply replaced the word "Jesus" with "freedom," as in the rousing "Woke Up This Morning."

After Albany State kicked her out due to her arrest, the rising civil rights organizer co-founded The Freedom Singers, an a cappella group that was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Through music, the Freedom Singers chronicled SNCC's activities, including a movement leader's funeral ("They Laid Medgar Evers In His Grave") and a visit from a Kenyan dignitary brought in by the State Department to demonstrate America's strides toward racial integration ("Oginga Odinga").

When they were being arrested and loaded into the paddy wagons, when they were in jail, when they were having mass meetings in African American churches to organize the next protest, civil rights activists sang all of the songs of their faith in all of those settings.

Dr. Reagon said, "When you're in the civil rights movement, that's the first time you establish yourself in a relationship that's pretty close to the same relationship that used to get the Christians thrown in the lion's den. And so, for the first time, those old songs you understand in a way that nobody could ever teach you."

Gospel music, the music of the Freedom Singers, the music of the Civil Rights Movement, became the sound of The Light of Christ.

Sweet Honey in the Rock

In 1963, Bernice Johnson and Cordell Reagon, a co-founder of The Freedom Singers, married. A year later, Reagon left the Freedom Singers to give birth to their first child, Toshi Reagon. The couple had one more child together in 1965, Kwan Tauna Reagon. Bernice Johnson Reagon and Cordell Reagon then split in 1967. Toshi has continued her mother's legacy. Kwan is a successful chef.

I first heard Sweet Honey in The Rock in the early 80s when they performed at a UCC Church in Portland, ME where we were living at the time. I knew nothing about them but the excitement of some of our friends convinced us that we really needed to cough up the $10 per ticket and go.

That experience changed something in me. Yes, it was the music but it was more how the music changed the feeling in the room. I know it's overused and will sound trite, but it really was electric. I knew that the sound and the harmonies that came from their voices arose from another place - an ancient place - a place which Audre Lorde described as " our deepest and nonrational knowledge."

Lorde named that place "the erotic," which, she said, "is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves."

Later, after I read Dr. Lorde's work, I came to know that Lord's understanding of the erotic is exactly the place from which the sounds of Sweet Honey in The Rock arose, and transported us all in the time and place to be back with the ancestors as well as in the midst of the chaos of our strongest feelings about gender and race, age and class. 

I was transformed by the Light of their Sound. I don't think I've ever been the same.

In 2003, upon receiving the prestigious Heinz Award, Dr. Reagon spoke in her acceptance speech of the decision she and her long-time partner, Adisa Douglas, made that their "different and related work and struggle would move better were we joined in life partnership--and so it has been--joined and better." The two women remained together as life partners up until Dr. Reagon's death.

Bernice Johnson Reagon died in Washington, D.C. on July 16, 2024, at the age of 81.

In her song, "They Are Falling All Around Me," Dr. Reagon sings

Death it comes and rests so heavy
Death it comes and rests so heavy
Death comes and rests so heavy
Your face I’ll never see no more

But you’re not really going to leave me
You’re not really going to leave me
You’re not really going to leave me

It is your path I walk
It is your song I sing
It is your load I take on
It is your air that I breathe
It’s the record you set
That makes me go on
It’s your strength that helps me stand
You’re not really
You’re not really going to leave me

And I have tried to sing my song right
I have tried to sing my song right
I will try to sing my song right
Be sure to let me hear from you.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

An Epiphany Light under a bushel of racism: Ms. Ann Lowe

Anybody who is anybody in America (or, whom others think is somebody wealthy) is listed in a little something called "The Blue Book." Interestingly enough, that is not the color of the book - it is actually black with pumpkin lettering - but the "blue" stands for the elite color of the blood that was understood to belong to those registered therein.

Also known as The Social Register, it is a semi-annual publication (present annual subscription rate: $75) in the United States that indexes the members of American high society, mostly elite New Yorkers but also California Forty-Niners (who became rich in the Gold Rush of 1848/9) and Texas Wildcatters (descendants of the people who settled Texas) as well as a White House crony or two.

If you were in The Blue Book, you probably had your own private list of people who could get you things or make you things that were rare or costly or at least supported the allure of status. Wine stewards and other Alcohol products, Art Dealers, Interior Decorators, Hair Designers, Millners, Chefs, Pastry makers, Seamstresses and Fashion Designers all worked primarily for the then tight circle of the Social elite. 

And because they were privileged and elite, they kept that list to themselves, so if you were good enough to work for the elite, you were perhaps ... maybe... paid well but relative anonymity in your trade was the trade off. Wasn't it enough simply to work for people who lived at this high level of the social stratosphere?

And so it was with the women of the Lowe Family in Clayton, Alabama who were skilled dressmakers who had sewed for wealthy white families in that state for generations.

Ms. Ann Lowe in Manhattan

Ann Lowe was born in Clayton, Alabama, around 1898 and grew up in Montgomery, the youngest daughter of Jane and Jack Lowe. Her older sister was Sallie. She was the great-granddaughter of an enslaved woman and an Alabama plantation owner.

Her mother, Janie Cole Lowe, and her grandmother, Georgia Thompkins, were skilled dressmakers who taught Ms. Ann to sew as early as age five.

By the time Ms. Ann was six, she had developed a fondness for using scraps of fabric to make small decorative flowers patterned after the flowers she saw in the family’s garden. This childhood pastime would later become the signature feature on many of her dresses and gowns. By age 10, she made her own dress patterns. After her mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly when Ms. Ann was 16 or 17, she took over the family business.

That much is known, but the particulars of her life contain conflicting information, including the actual date of her birth, perhaps not unusual for a "Negro" girl born in the Deep South. For example, Ms. Ann indicated that she dropped out of school at 14 to marry; however U. S. Census records indicate that Lowe was “living in Dothan, Alabama, with her first husband, Lee Cone, in 1910.”

Based on the 1898 date of birth, she would have been 12 years old at the time of her marriage. In a 1964 Saturday Evening Post article, the reporter noted that Ms. Ann married a man 10 years her senior shortly after her mother died in 1914, when she would have been 16 or 17 years old. Her son and later business partner, Arthur Lee Cone, was born a year after she married. Unfortunately, he died in a car accident in New York in 1958.

Ann Lowe is probably best known for designing the wedding dress of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy but never given credit for it until years after the wedding. Jackie's mother, Janet Lee Acuhincloss, commissioned Ms. Ann to design the wedding gown as well as all of the gowns of the bridal attendants, having used her to design her daughter's debutante gowns.

Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress

Ms Ann was known as "the best kept secret" in fashion design. That status, perhaps repeated as a compliment, was a thin, gauze applique to distract from the racism that kept her from being at least as as well known as The Houses of Dior or or Chanel admitted that her design and the quality of her workmanship often exceeded their own.

Throughout her career, Lowe was a celebrated designer of one-of-a-kind dresses for her powerful and wealthy clients, although some of them did not pay her for the costs of the labor and materials, or they asked her for prices that they knew were substantially below what they would have paid a white designer. Those circumstances left Lowe with a minimum amount of funds after paying her staff.

Some of her clientele remained loyal to her, helping her through difficult times. For example, in 1962, the U.S. Department of Revenue closed Lowe’s New York shop due to $12,800 owed in back taxes. She also owed $10, 000 to suppliers. The debt was later quietly and generously paid by Jacqueline Kennedy.

After the foreclosure of her salon, Lowe began working for Madeleine Couture. The small, custom salon, located on Madison Ave., belonged to Benjamin and Ione Stoddard. The Stoddards were instrumental in helping Ms. Ann obtain the risky operation to remove cataracts in her left eye, even as she was experiencing glaucoma in her right eye.

In addition, they organized a major fashion show, which included runway models who were former clients wearing the designs Lowe created for them. The Stoddards also arranged two television interviews of Lowe on The Mike Douglas Show in 1964.

Ms. Ann continuously invented and reinvented herself, even though she encountered many devastating obstacles—discrimination, financial challenges, loss of close family members, health problems, and people who took advantage of her kindness and lack of business acumen.

Through it all, she maintained her ambitions to manifest her choices—to work for families on America’s Social Registry and to establish salons that bore her name as the creative director of Ann Lowe fashions.

A collection of five of Ann Lowe's designs are held at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Three are on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

A personal note about prestigious Blue Books

General Convention "Blue Books"

At one time, there was an actual book which contained the reports of and the names of all of the deputies to General Convention. It was called "The Green Book". That was until the early 2000 when it became "The Blue Book". It was referred to in the same reverential tones as The Social Register.

One year, when it was announced that the color of the book would change - perhaps (Gasp!) to salmon or crimson - it became front page news on all of The Episcopal Publications at the time. Bloggers (who were all the rage at the time and a real threat to 'legacy media' like ENS) blogged about it and wrung their hands in distress. People were outraged - OUTRAGED, I tell you - as it was seen as a harbinger of the final decline of The Episcopal Church.

The similarly printed, bound book which contained all the names of The Episcopal Clergy was known as "The Red Book." It was also known as "The Stud Book," even a decade after the ordination of women.

To my knowledge, the color controversy died a quiet, dignified death with the coming of the Age of Technology and is now available online. It was buried alongside the very large three-ring binders which deputies used to lug around from hearing to hearing to legislative session. Deputies of a certain age will remember reams of paper being distributed with the latest updated version of changes to resolutions and the loud "click, click, click" of deputies adding pages to their three-ring binders.

It will also be remembered that Pam Chinnis, the first woman to be President of the House of Deputies and a force with which to be reckoned, would occasionally raise her voice from the podium, rap her gavel, and scold, "Silence. Stop. That. Clicking."

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

 

A Eulogy for Perren

A Eulogy for Fr. E. Perren Hayes

Gospel John 14:1-6

The Rev Dr. Elizabeth Kaeton

 

“How can we know the way?” 'Doubting' Thomas asked Jesus.

You know, as I think of it, Perren could have subbed in for Thomas as one of the disciples. That’s not because Thomas is “doubting”. No, Thomas wasn’t doubting. Thomas was curious. And E. Perren Hays was nothing if not curious. Indeed, he was one of the most intellectually curious Episcopal priests I’ve known. And, he would never deny you the opportunity – God forbid it! – to learn all about the things his curiosity had just discovered or uncovered.

Perren was curious about curious things. Things that have captured the curiosity of artists from the time cave-dwellers tried to capture a moment in time and draw that in pictures on the inside of caves or trace them on pieces of stretched, dried animal hide.

He was curious about the light. I remember spending an extra 30 minutes with him one afternoon, because he wanted me to see how the sun shifted on the lawn and the trees from his window in his room at Atlantic Shores.

Now, Perren was also highly skilled at convincing people that they had more time to spend with him than they thought they had – indeed, he could be maddening in that way – but that’s another story for another time. The fact of the matter is that he was right: It was, indeed, fascinating to watch the shadow move slowly across the lawn, and to watch the leaves of the trees take on a variety of the shade of green. And we ought to “make time” to watch it.

Perren was very, very curious about time. He understood that linear time was the invention and preoccupation of the human mind but he often quoted to me the line from the psalmist which has been captured in one of our hymns: "A thousand ages in thy sight are like and evening gone".

Perren’s mind was intensely curious about the mind of God – how God might conceive of time and light and how, in the human mind, at least, one informed the other. There would be no understanding of evening without the absence of light and no morning without its presence.

When speaking of Steven Hawking, Perren once pondered aloud that as the human mind of Hawking was so incredibly brilliant, and if humans are made in the likeness and image of God, how glorious must be the mind of God! “In some ways,” he said, “I can’t wait to find out.”

Hubble Star Nursery

Holocaust survivor and author, Ellie Wiesel, once said, “There are many paths but one way to God.” Being curious, Perrin explored many of those paths. He has now found his way to God, the same way taken by Thomas and James and John, Peter and Andrew and all the other disciples, and the millions and billions and trillions of people over millennia of time who now dwell in Light Eternal.

If we are right when we say, “dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” and the mind of the scientist is one path on the way to God, and if they are right when they tell us that dust and ash from earth rejoin the cosmos and find their way, eventually, to the “Star Nurseries” where we have seen pictures of moments, centuries old, when stars were being formed from dust and ash, then it is true that just as Jesus is “Light from Light,” so, we, too – over the centuries but, to God, an evening gone – become light from that Light.

Perren, rest in peace, my friend. The time for your curiosity has reached its fulfillment. You now stand before The One who is Time itself – who is, all at once and at the same time – The One who is and The One who was and The One who will be.

You stand before The One who is Light from Light, who does not cast a shadow on others but draws everyone into The Light to become light from Light.

Rest well, Perren.  Eternal Light is now yours.

Amen.

The Epiphany of Unwilling Immortality: Henrietta Lacks

 

Good Sunday morning, good pilgrims on the way of the remains of The Epiphany Season. Today is (was) known as Sexagesima, the second Sunday before Lent, which makes it 58 days (not 60) and the 8th Sunday before Easter.

Back in the day, the focus of the meditation for this week was on the story of Noah and how, after the destruction of the flood, God set a rainbow in the sky to remind all of God's creatures (and, I suspect, God's self) of God's promise of a kind of immortality. God promised never again to destroy the earth, its creatures or creation, that we would live on through each other. 

I don't know that God had to make that promise. I suspect we needed to make that promise to God. We seem to be testing God at God's word every single day.

Today is also the 23rd day of Black History Month and I want to lift up, celebrate, and call out the name of the one who shines as an Epiphany, a manifestation of God. It's a tragic story, as many of the stories in this part of American history often are, but it is one that proves that Dr. King was right: The moral arc of history is long, but it always bends toward justice.

Today I want to talk about Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cells, harvested without her permission, saved countless millions of people with cancer.

Her story begins on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, where she was born to Eliza Pleasant (nee Lacks) and John "Johnny" Randall Pleasant.  Her family is uncertain how her name changed from Loretta to Henrietta, but she was nicknamed Hennie.

Ms. "Hennie"

When Ms. Henrietta was four years old in 1924, her mother died giving birth to her tenth child. Unable to care for the children alone after his wife's death, Ms. Henrietta's father moved the family to Clover, VA, where the children were distributed among relatives.

She ended up with her maternal grandfather, Thomas "Tommy" Henry Lacks, in a two-story log cabin that was once the slave quarters on the plantation that had been owned by Ms. Henrietta's white great-grandfather and great-uncle. She shared a room with her nine-year-old first cousin and future husband, David "Day" Lacks (1915–2002).

Like many people in her family and town, Ms. Henrietta began working as a child on the tobacco farm where she fed the animals, tended the garden and worked the tobacco fields. Due to family necessity, she dropped out of school when she was in the sixth grade. When she was 14 years old, she had her first child, a boy, followed by a daughter who was born seriously disabled.

Ms. Henrietta married David Lacks in 1941. Later that same year, they moved with a cousin to Turner Station, MD, so her husband could get a job at Bethlehem Steel at Sparrow's Point, outside of Baltimore. Eventually, they were able to purchase a house in that same town which became the oldest and largest African American community in Baltimore County at that time.

Ms. Henrietta and David had three more children together. In 1951, at the age of 31 and less than 6 months after having given birth to her 5th and last child, Ms. Henrietta visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. Upon examination, renowned gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix.

Not long before her death, doctors removed some of the cells from the tumor. They later discovered that the cells could thrive in the lab, something no human cells had every before achieved. Indeed, it was discovered that Henrietta's cells were unlike any of the others he had ever seen: where other cells would die, her cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours.

Soon the cells, called HeLa cells, were being shipped from Baltimore around the world. For 62 years — twice as long as Ms. Henrietta's own life — her cells have been the subject of more than 74,000 studies, many of which have yielded profound insights into cell biology, vaccines, in vitro fertilization and cancer.

 

Lacks Family - Congressional Medal of Honor

Perhaps it was because Hopkins Hospital was only one of a few hospitals to treat poor Black people that they felt a sense of "ownership". But Henrietta Lacks, who was poor, Black and uneducated, never consented to her cells being studied. For 62 years, her family had been left out of the decision-making about that research.

Hopkins Hospital also stated that, after reflection on their 50 year relationship with the Lacks family, "we found that Johns Hopkins could have – and should have – done more to inform and work with members of Henrietta Lacks’ family out of respect for them, their privacy and their personal interests."

Finally, in 2013, the National Institutes of Health came to an agreement with the Lacks family to grant them some control over how Henrietta Lacks’s genome is used. In the history of the NIH, that had never before happened .

In fairness, it should be noted that, Johns Hopkins has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line. Rather, as Johns Hopkins itself reports, they "offered HeLa cells (named for the first two letters of her first and last name) freely and widely for scientific research."

Officials at the National Institutes of Health ultimately acknowledge that they should have contacted the Lacks family when researchers first applied for a grant to sequence the HeLa genome. They belatedly addressed the problem after the family raised its objections.

The Lacks family and the N.I.H. settled on an agreement: the data from both studies should be stored in the institutes’ database of genotypes and phenotypes. Researchers who want to use the data can apply for access and will have to submit annual reports about their research. A so-called HeLa Genome Data Access working group at the N.I.H. will review the applications. Two members of the Lacks family will be members.

The agreement does not provide the Lacks family with proceeds from any commercial products that may be developed from research on the HeLa genome.

The Lack Grand & Great Grand Daughters

As one who has benefited from cancer research, I feel a special debt of gratitude to Ms. Henrietta Lacks, unwitting and unwilling as she might have been to be a recipient of my deep thanks.

I am especially grateful that the research on her cells has made it possible to test my DNA as well as the unique DNA of my particular cancer tumor which provides information for me to pass on to my children and grandchildren.

They now know that the DNA that was passed down to them from me does not contain the DNA of either breast nor bowel cancer.

Ms. Henrietta is remembered as having hazel eyes, a small waist, size 6 shoes, and always wearing red nail polish and a neatly pleated skirt. She will also be remembered with her name on a building at Johns Hopkins, a Congressional Medal of Honor, and in various other ways.

Ms. Henrietta Lacks will live on in immortality - without her understanding or permission - with deep gratitude that, despite her tragedy and poverty and oppression, and through the persistent efforts of her children and grandchildren, something good has come.

There are many ways God's promise to Noah is lived out. A rainbow in the sky is but one.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

We Who Believe in Freedom: Ella Baker

 

We who believe in freedom cannot rest

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

 

Until the killing of Black men, 

Black mother's sons

Is as important as the killing of White men 

White mother's sons.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes. 

Those of you who know the music of Sweet Honey in the Rock may know the words to this anthem. You may have sung them as you listened along to a recording of it. If you were lucky enough, you may have been inspired as you heard them sing this song in concert. And, if you ever were lucky enough to have heard Sweet Honey in the Rock in concert, you are lucky enough.

This is Ella's Song, named for the brilliant Civil Rights community, grass-roots organizer and strategist, Ms. Ella Josephine ("Ella Jo") Baker. 

 

Ms. Ella Jo Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Georgiana (called Anna) and Blake Baker. In 1910, Norfolk had a race riot in which whites attacked black workers from the shipyard where her father worked. Her mother decided to take the family back to North Carolina while their father continued to work for the steamship company. Ella was seven years old when they returned to her mother's rural hometown near Littleton, North Carolina.

She grew up there, in North Carolina, the middle of three surviving siblings, listening to her grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth "Bet" Ross, and her stories about life under slavery. It was from her grandmother that she learned the full meaning - and the dangers - of resistance and resilience.

As a slave, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave owner. She was punished for her insubordination with hard labor plowing fallow fields. Despite the work, she nevertheless attended every celebration on the plantation, dancing until the early hours of the morning to show that her spirit remained unbowed.

Her grandmother’s pride and resilience in the face of racism and injustice continued to inspire Ms. Ella throughout her life. Her particular talent was assisting people to empower themselves, giving them a context for understanding the injustices Black people continue to face, as her grandmother had provided for her. People in her town knew Ms. Ella Jo as "the whirlwind". Seems she inherited her grandmother's energy level, as well.

Ella's Song contains the words: "That which touches me most is that I had a chance to work with people, passing on to others that which was passed on to me."

Sweet Honey in the Rock

Ms. Ella attended Shaw University in Raleigh, NC. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, she moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations.

During this time, Baker lived with and married her college sweetheart, T. J. (Bob) Roberts. They divorced in 1958. Baker rarely discussed her private life or marital status. According to fellow activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, many women in the Civil Rights Movement followed Baker's example, adopting a practice of dissemblance  about their private lives that allowed them to be accepted as individuals in the movement.

It occurs to me that many of the Black women I've known who are leaders in The Episcopal Church, have also adopted this practice of dissemblance, which often raises questions about their sexual orientation. I'm thinking here, especially, of Bishop Barbara Clementine Harris.

Just a few weeks ago, a woman who had graduated from CDSP (Church Divinity School of the Pacific) remarked, as if it were true, that the resistance to Bishop Barbara's election was that not only was she a woman and an African-American, but that she was a lesbian.

I laughed right out loud. There is, of course, nothing in the world wrong with being a lesbian. That said, Barbara Clementine Harris was not a lesbian. Strong? Feisty? Opinionated? Black Feminist/Womanist Liberation Theologian? Check. Check. Check. And, check. Lesbian? Well, we want the best for our leaders, of course, but that was not true of Bishop Barbara. She made up for it by being one of the strongest advocates for LGBTQ+ people in the House of Bishops.

Ella's Song was written as a tribute to Ms. Ella by her friend Bernice Reagon. It contains the words
"I'm a woman who speaks in a voice and I must be heard.
At times I can be quite difficult, I'll bow to no man's word."

Baker befriended John Henrik Clarke, a future scholar and activist; Pauli Murray, a future writer and civil rights lawyer; and others who became lifelong friends. The Harlem Renaissance influenced her thoughts and teachings. She advocated widespread, local action as a means of social change. Her emphasis on a grassroots approach to the struggle for equal rights influenced the growth and success of the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.

From Ella's Song: "Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot, I’ve come to realize,
that teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survives."

Historical highway marker in NC

In 1930, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop black economic power through collective planning. She also involved herself with several women’s organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.”

Ms. Ella began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946. Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Ms. Ella co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South.

While serving as Executive Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)  she organized the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) held at her alma mater, Shaw University, during the Easter weekend of 1960.

She had immediately recognized the potential of the students involved in the Sit-in Movement and wanted to bring leaders of the Movement together to meet one another and to consider future work. Miss Baker, as the students usually called her, persuaded Dr. Martin Luther King to put up the $800 needed to hold the conference. Rev. King hoped they would become an SCLC student wing. Ms Baker, however, encouraged the students to think about forming their own organization.

Addressing the conference, Rev. King asked the students to commit to nonviolence as a way of life, but for most in attendance, nonviolence was simply an effective tactic. Speaking to the conference Ms. Baker told the students that their struggle was “much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized coke.”

In presenting this bigger picture and encouraging them to form their own organization, Ms. Baker displayed the talents she learned from her grandmother: resistance, resilience and assisting people to empower themselves.  The students decided to form their own organization: SNCC. And with the formation of SNCC, she encouraged the new organization to organize from the bottom up.

From Ella's Song: To me young people come first, they have the courage where we fail.
And if I can but shed some light as they carry us through the gale.

The older I get the better I know that the secret of my going on
Is when the reins are in the hands of the young, who dare to run against the storm

Committed to achieving racial equality

I think, of all the things I've learned about Ms. Ella Jo Baker, this one fact is the most impressive. I mean, imagine standing up to a giant like MLK, Jr. Imagine being so committed to the principles of resistance, resilience and empowerment, that you stand up for them, even in the face of the sexism known to exist in the Movement, and to the very face of the Leadership of the Civil Rights Movement.

Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize the 1961 Freedom Rides.  In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi’s racism and to register black voters.

She became president of the NAACP in 1952. In this role, she supervised the field secretaries and coordinated the national office's work with local groups. Baker's top priority was to lessen the organization's bureaucracy and give women more power in the organization; this included reducing Walther Francis White's dominating role as executive secretary.

Baker believed the program should be primarily channeled not through White and the national office, but through the people in the field. She lobbied to reduce the rigid hierarchy, place more power in the hands of capable local leaders, and give local branches greater responsibility and autonomy.

From Ella's Song: Not needing to clutch for power, not needing the light just to shine on me. I need to be one in the number as we stand against tyranny. 

She is often referred to as "the unsung hero of the Civil Right's Movement." Ms. Ella's influence was reflected in the nickname she acquired: “Fundi,” a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next generation. Baker continued to be a respected and influential leader in the fight for human and civil rights until her death on December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.

The very first verse of Ella's Song "Until the killing of Black men, Black mother's sons, is as important as the killing of white men, white mother's sons," calls us to remember the systemic nature of racism. Racism not only hurts the people it oppresses, but it causes serious damage to the souls of the oppressor.

Which is why it is so important to remember that Black History is American History. It is critically important that we take at least these 28 days every year to remember and recall and celebrate the contributions of Black people to our history and heritage and culture.

Every year. Every single year.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes. 

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

A Bright Epiphany Light Phillis Wheatley

Statue of Phillis Wheatley on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail

 

"On being brought from Africa to America":

Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic dye."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

That was one of the first poems written by Phillis Wheatley, the first published African American poet. 

The internalized oppression makes me weep every time I read it.

Born in West Africa - either in present day Gambia or Senegal - in 1753, Ms. Phillis was was sold by a local chief to a visiting trader, who took her to Boston in the then British Colony of Massachusetts on July 11, 1761,^[on a slave ship called The Phillis. She was seven or eight years old.

After she arrived in Boston, Ms. Phillis was bought by the wealthy Boston merchant and tailor, John Wheatley, as a slave for his wife Susanna. She was named after the slave ship that took her from her homeland, and was given their surname. Her birth name is not recorded in history.

It was common in those days for people to know the birth date, place and pedigree of their cattle and horses and even their house pets, but not of the humans they held in bondage. 

The Wheatleys' 18-year-old daughter, Mary, was Ms. Phillis's first tutor in reading and writing. Their son, Nathaniel, also tutored her. John Wheatley was known as a progressive throughout New England; his family afforded Ms. Phillis an unprecedented education for an enslaved person, and one unusual for a woman of any race at the time.

When she was 11, she began corresponding with preachers and friends. By the age of 12, Ms. Phillis was reading Greek and Latin classics in their original languages, as well as difficult passages from the Bible. At the age of 14, she wrote her first poem, "To the University of Cambridge [Harvard], in New England," complete with classical Greek references.

In that poem, she encourages Harvard students to be grateful for their privileges and to live virtuously. The poem wasn't published until 1773. Ms. Phillis would encounter great difficulty in getting her work published, even though the Wheatleys promoted her enthusiastically.

At first, publishers in Boston had declined to publish her poetry, doubting that an African slave was capable of writing such excellent poetry.

Ms. Phillis was forced to defend herself and her integrity in court in 1772. Indeed, she was defended in court by several prominent people, including John Hancock, as well as the Mayor of Boston and the Lt. Governor and Governor of Massachusetts, who all had read her work, examined Ms. Phillis, and verified its authenticity.

They even signed a statement which exonerated her.

In 1773, Susannah Wheatley sent Ms. Phillis to England. Even though Phillis’s fame was growing, Susannah felt she would have a better chance of publishing her poems in England. 

 She sent Ms. Phillis, escorted by Susannah’s son, Nathaniel, to London where she met many important figures of the day.

Influential people in London were very interested in her poetry and many became her patrons. Her collected works, ‘Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral' was published in London in 1773. This publication brought Ms. Phillis fame in both England and in the American colonies. She included the signed statement from her case in court in the preface of that book.

Unfortunately, shortly after her arrival in London Ms. Phillis learned that Susanna Wheatley had become gravely ill. Phillis returned immediately to Boston and in 1774 Susanna died.

Ms. Phillis was freed but stayed on with John Wheatley until he died in 1778. Her freedom meant she had lost her patrons and even though she had written a second volume of poems in 1779, she could not get them published. Fortunately, some of her poems from the second volume were later published in pamphlets and newspapers.

While none other than George Washington praised her work, Thomas Jefferson, in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, was unwilling to acknowledge the value of her work or the work of any black poet. He wrote:

Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.

Jefferson was not the only noted, Enlightenment figure who held racist views. Such luminaries as David Hume and Emmanuel Kant likewise believed Africans were not fully human.

Unfortunately, her poetry has earned her controversy and criticism from Black scholars as well, seeing her work as a prime example of "Uncle Tom Syndrome," and believing that this furthers this syndrome among descendants of Africans in the Americas.

Others have argued on her behalf, citing that her work was used successfully by abolitionists as evidence of the intellectual and creative capacities of African descendants. Henry Louis Gates asked "What would happen if we ceased to stereotype Wheatley but, instead, read her, read her with all the resourcefulness that she herself brought to her craft?"

Shortly after the death of John Wheatley and her emancipation, Ms. Phillis met and married John Peters, an impoverished free black grocer. They lived in poor conditions and two of their babies died.

John was imprisoned for debt in 1784. With a sickly infant son to provide for, Ms. Phillis became a a scullery maid at a boarding house, doing work she had never done before. She developed pneumonia and died on December 5, 1784, at the age of 31, after giving birth to a daughter, who died the same day as her.

It is never easy to be "the first" in any category but it certainly helps when one is to the position born. That would seem to be so for Ms. Phillis Wheatley. In her very short life with its tragic ending - too soon! - she was able to open minds and hearts to her full humanity and so, the possibility of the full humanity of others - including that of her oppressors.

Her life and her work demonstrated that art in all of its forms - poetry, literature, music, sculpture, pottery, fabric - is able to cross boundaries and cultures and languages and weaken the stronghold of prejudice and bigotry, even while bearing its unbearable burdens. 

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.