During Black History Month we often hear of the same few well-known people. Today we’ll look at some lesser known women of color who made a difference. Why are they unheard and forgotten? We’ll also hold in our hearts the victims of the school shooting in Florida. All are welcome – please join us.
Nevertheless, She Persisted ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
February 18, 2018
The first master spy named Bond was not a white Englishman. The first spy named Bond was a freed slave who worked in Jefferson Davis’s residence during the Civil War. Bond’s real name was Mary Elizabeth Bowser. She was freed as a child by her owner, Elizabeth Van Lew, an abolitionist in antebellum Richmond. When Mrs. Van Lew observed Mary Elizabeth’s obvious intelligence, she sent her away to a school run by Quakers. After she graduated, Mary Elizabeth returned to Richmond and married. When the Civil War began, Mrs. Van Lew began spying for the Union, and recruited Mrs. Bowser to join her. The two women devised a persona for Mrs. Bowser – and invented a woman of limited intelligence named Ellen Bond. And as Ellen Bond, Mary Elizabeth Bowser took up residence in the Davis household. Since she was regarded basically as furniture, important information such as troop movements were discussed openly in front of her, and vital documents were left out in the open because of course it never occurred to anyone that Ellen Bond could read. In fact not only could she read but apparently she had a photographic memory. And so every day Ellen Bond would greet the bakery delivery wagon when it arrived with the day’s bread, and reported all she had learned to the baker, Thomas McNiven, who was also the Richmond spymaster.
As the war progressed it became increasingly clear that there was a spy in the house, but it wasn’t until almost the end of the war that suspicion fell on Ellen Bond. She managed to escape, and on her way out, attempted to burn down the Confederate White House. (http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/bowser-mary-elizabeth-1839-union-spy-during-civil-war)
The U.S. government destroyed all its records, supposedly in order to protect all the spies involved. But McNiven told his story to family, and through that means, the story of Ellen Bond – Mary Elizabeth Bowser – lives on. We have nothing in her own words, though, in the words of this highly intelligent and literate woman.
This is so often the case. When it comes to the words and deeds of people of color, and especially women of color, there is often so little known, so little recorded about their lives and their thoughts and their accomplishments. We hear so little about these people, and it is easy to assume that they didn’t exist.
“Now is the time to call on the memories of the ancestors…”
February is Black History Month, which is often a time in which we review what we already know about the Civil Rights Movement, or slavery, or review the words and deeds of the few African American men who managed to have their voices heard, people such as Frederick Douglass, or WEB DuBois, and of course, Martin Luther King. But this year, perhaps because in recent months there has more attention paid to the words of women – finally! – that I found myself seeking out stories of women of color, too often unheard, too often erased from our memory and our history.
“…time to call on the memories of the ancestors – who thought they could not walk another step toward freedom, and yet they did.”
Recently I heard the story of Bessie Coleman. She was the daughter of sharecroppers, and in 1922, she set her sights on becoming a pilot. But she wasn’t allowed to attend any flying schools in the United States, so she learned to speak French and went to France to learn to fly. Do you ever notice how for some people there are several additional steps to achieving a goal – that they can’t just go from Step 1 to Step 2? But nevertheless, Bessie persisted, returned to the United States as the first African American woman pilot, and participated in airshows until she died in an accident in 1926. Her goal had been to open her own aviation school for African Americans. (https://www.biography.com/people/bessie-coleman-36928) We hear of other aviation pioneers from that era, but not of Bessie.
Women of color have impacted our history in some surprising ways. The stories of two enslaved women who affected Massachusetts case law caught my attention. Belinda Royall was kidnapped in Ghana as a child and sold into slavery, working for 50 years as a slave in the Isaac Royall household in Medford. In the Revolutionary War, Isaac Royall Jr. fled to England and left his estate behind, thus freeing his slaves. In 1783 Belinda sued for reparations. That’s right – she petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to have money restored to her that she had rightfully earned and was never paid. Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings in reparations for her labor. (“The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, in The Atlantic, June 2014.) While the idea of paying reparations to African Americans for the theft of their labor and agency over hundreds of years has not yet come to fruition, we see that there is a legal case supporting the precedent. But who ever heard of Belinda Royall?
More people have heard of Elizabeth Freeman. Known as Bet or Mum Bet, she was the first African American to sue for her freedom in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which changed the course of history. Elizabeth, or Bet, was owned by the Ashleys of Sheffield, Massachusetts. John Ashley was a lawyer and very involved in politics, and it is likely during gatherings at his house that Bet would have overheard the language of the brand new Massachusetts Constitution, written in 1780, which stated that: “all men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights…”
Bet sought out a young lawyer from Western Massachusetts named Theodore Sedgwick, who later became a United States Senator, asking him, “wouldn’t the law give me my freedom?” He agreed to take her case, along with that of another slave in the household named Brom. The case, Brom and Bett vs. Ashley, was heard in Great Barrington in August of 1781, with Sedgwick asserting that the constitutional provision declaring that all men are born free and equal in effect abolished slavery in Massachusetts. The court agreed, and effectively ended slavery.
Bet, who took the name Elizabeth Freeman, left the Ashley household and went to work for the Sedgwicks, and considered herself part of their family until her death in 1829. She is buried in the renowned Sedgwick Family burial plot, known as the Sedgwick Pie, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the only non-Sedgwick buried there. The author Catherine Sedgwick quoted Elizabeth as saying, “Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it – just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman – I would.” (Catherine Sedgwick, Slavery in America, quoted in Wikipedia.)
“It is that time and place to remember those who came through the long night to witness another sunrise.”
In the past year I have been more and more aware of the ways that we humans try to silence one another. We seem to be so perpetually uncomfortable with opinions different than our own, experiences different than our own. We try repeatedly to minimize the accomplishments of other people, especially people who are different than we are. We can erase people’s accomplishments and even their very existence by deciding that their stories don’t deserve our attention, that they don’t deserve a page in our history.
This effort to minimize, to erase, to silence, was not just a phenomenon of our past. We see it take place over and over, even in this past week. I was struck, in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, by the efforts of some people on social media to shut down the comments of the young students who had survived the massacre in their school. They were chastised, and criticized for sharing their rage and fear and grief, as though there is a proper way to respond to a school shooting.
Nevertheless, they are persisting, and more power to them.
And then there was the response to basketball star LeBron James, who was quoted commenting about the current presidency. A conservative political commentator, a woman named Laura Ingraham, remarked that he should “shut up and dribble.” As though he is not a citizen of this country. As though the First Amendment doesn’t apply to him.
This effort to silence, to erase, to keep people in their place, as we used to call it, is truly one of the biggest and yet most taken for granted forms of privilege. The dominant class or race takes for granted that they have the power to minimize others, to silence them. To decide whether they can attend a school or learn a skill, to deny their experiences and their voices. And this has had the greatest impact on women of color. What we have heard here this morning, in a wide variety of stories and experiences, are pieces of a puzzle; part of the reclaiming of the voices of women of color, and the recognition that they have lived important lives and made valuable contributions that we so seldom know anything about.
In working to create an anti-racist society, one of the actions we can always take is to learn and listen, to discover the hidden stories and people who have made contributions to our history. It changes how we see our history, how we see other people. We see how, not only have those who are marginalized been diminished by the efforts to hide their accomplishments, but how we are all diminished. We do not learn the full story of our country and of its people. As Unitarian Universalists we are called to this effort – called by our seven Principles. From our first Principle, upholding the inherent worth and dignity of all people, to the second, promoting justice, equity and compassion, to the fourth – a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, we are required to listen, to try to understand, and to recognize and to amplify the voices that have been repressed for so long.
May we work to bring more stories to light, and to honor and value both the stories and the people, by putting them before any discomfort they may cause us. May we bring more and more people into the circle, and may we make the circle whole.
May it be so,
Amen.
