Woman of color

“ The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When, now, two of these movements—woman and color—combine in one, the combination has deep meaning. ”

“ The solution of the racial problem by ultimate blending of color is not one which seems likely to succeed here in the course of nature. Black and White are far more separate and distinct in freedom than they were in slavery. Even the black mammy is dying out. There are not so many of that type of colored women. The white mother, moreover, has more scruple against giving her child away from her own breast. The Southern woman is as much against promiscuous relationships with Negro women as her manfolk is against the Negro’s roving eyes. ”

“ The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man. ”

“ The truth is, that in those days of witchcraft and apparitions of all kinds, and even in the present, among the ignorant and uneducated of the lower classes, any female seen at night in a lonely place, and supposed to be a spirit, was termed a white woman, no matter what the color of her dress may have been, provided it was not black. ”

“ No women in the country so beautiful. No women in the world wear color as they do. Their colors are never primitive, never gaudy, but gorgeous and vivid and alive, seldom do you see a woman dressed in black, and black hats almost never. ”

“ They believe that good character and decent manners should count, not color; but an aggressive, combative minority is quite sure that no matter how well educated or virtuous she may be, no black woman is as good as a white one. ”

“ Did you never wonder whether he ever had loved at all?"
"You have made me wonder, to-night, whether, at some period of your life, you have not loved some woman of your own race and color. You must have had some opportunities of knowing white women."
"Very few. An' my pride was agin seekin' what I knew was not for me; for the woman I fancied to myself was no common white woman. White Rose, I carried a young man's heart in my bosom until I was near sixty, an' then I lost it." ”

“ Women of Achievement. By Benjamin Brawley. Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society, Chicago, 1919. Pp. 92.
Glancing at the title of this volume one would expect to find therein the sketches of a number of women of color known to be useful in the uplift of the Negro race. Instead of this, however, there is the disappointment in tho restriction of these sketches to Harriet Tubman, Nora Gordon, Meta Warrick Fuller, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Mary Church Terrell. ”

“ Such strong, primitive types of Negro womanhood in America seem to some to exhaust its capabilities. They know less of a not more worthy, but a finer type of black woman wherein trembles all of that delicate sense of beauty and striving for self-realization, which is as characteristic of the Negro soul as is its quaint strength and sweet laughter. ”

“ When clothes are the work of woman they are generally beautiful in color; when they are beautiful in line they are generally by Poiret. For line tends to be pure and cold, and I hope I will shock nobody when I suggest that purity and coldness are masculine rather than feminine. Color is the expression of passion, line is the expression of intellect, or rather of that curious combination of intellect and passion, of intellect directing passion, and of passion inflaming intellect, which is art as understood by man. ”

“ There are those who think they pay me a compliment in saying that I am just like a white woman. My aim, my joy, my pride is to sing the glories of my own people. Ours was the race that gave the world its measure of heroism, its standard of physical prowess. ”

“ The very attempt to do this in the case of Negro Americans has strangely over-reached itself. By so much as the defective eyesight of the white world rejects black women as beauties, by so much the more it needs them as human beings,—an enviable alternative, as many a white woman knows. ”

“ Much was said of the superiority of man’s intellect, the general helplessness of women and their need for courtesy, the sin of Eve, etc. Most of the white women, being “perfect ladies,” according to the ideals of the time, were not used to speaking in public and finally to their dismay the black woman arose from the corner. ”

“ She is a woman of the largest and most self-sacrificing purposes, who has been and still is giving her best years, all her powers, talents, learning, refinement, wealth, and personal toil, to the education and elevation of the Colored race. ”

“ Tell her that each colored girl may be an Esther, [31] especially in all matters of cleanliness, manners, and self sacrifice, to advance and change the prevalent opinion of the Negro. Each colored woman, not only bears her own burden, but she bears the burden of posterity and the burden of the race. Each one must fit herself for the triple burden. Not even a talent should be used wholly for personal gain nor solely for present uses. Her education must be a process of development of powers not only to fit her for citizenship and life, but it must fit her for her race's burdens. ”

“ That old colored woman was so earnest, so fearless and untiring a laborer for her race during the long contest between freedom and slavery that she is known and loved by thousands in every State in the Union. Very black and without much education, she has remarkable faith in God, wonderfully clear perception of moral right and wrong, the most devoted love for the poor and needy, and the most untiring determination to carry forward plans for the amelioration of the condition of her race. ”

“ To-day, the immigrants pouring in through the open gates of our seaport towns, the Indian when settled in severalty, the negro hardly emancipated from the degradation of two hundred years of slavery,—may all share in the sovereignty of the State. The white woman,—the woman in whose veins runs the blood of those heroic colonists who founded our country, of those women who helped to sustain the courage of their husbands in the Revolutionary War; the woman who may have given the flower of her youth and health in the service of our Civil War—that woman is excluded. ”

“ That is why a man may walk down the avenue with a Negro cook or factory girl without anyone’s being able to guess that she has to work for a living. And, finally, in the matter of that indefinable something which, for want of a better word, we call simply “charm”—the Negro women are far ahead of all others in America. They have more native grace, more winsomeness, greater beauty and more fire and passion. These facts have already begun to attract attention, here and elsewhere, and, eventually, the Negro woman will come into her own. ”

“ Again and in more concrete ways the Negro woman has influenced America and that is by her personal contact with the family—its men, women and children. As housekeeper, maid and nurse—as confidante, adviser and friend, she was often an integral part of the white family life of the South, and transmitted her dialect, her mannerisms, her quaint philosophy and her boundless sympathy. ”

“ We have noted then the Negro woman in America as a worker tending to emancipate all women workers; as a mother nursing the white race and uniting the black and white race; as a conspirator urging forward emancipation in various sorts of ways; and we have finally only to remember that to-day the women of America who are doing humble but on the whole the most effective work in the social uplift of the lowly, not so much by money as by personal contact, are the colored women. ”

“ I have spoken of "men and women," and indeed the women must not be forgotten, for to them the men look for much of the inspiration and impulse that drives them forward to success. Mrs. Mary Church Terrell upon the platform speaking for Negro womanhood and Miss Sarah Brown, her direct opposite, a little woman sitting up in her aerie above a noisy New York street, stand for the very best that there is in our mothers, wives and sisters. ”

“ Anne Spencer
Who can fathom to its depths the heart of womanhood? Under the conditions of American life the Negro woman’s heart offers difficulties peculiar to itself. These various writers—talented, cultured, with Mrs. ”

“ When one considers how these women had spent the best part of their lives in working for the freedom of the negro, their humiliation can be imagined at seeing educated colored men laboring with might and main to prevent white women from obtaining the same privileges which they were asking for themselves. It was a bitter dose and one which women have been compelled to take in every State where a campaign for woman suffrage has been made. ”

“ But colored women have also had special reasons of their own for feeling that association is desirable. We were told that the immediate occasion for the formation of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs was a letter written to an English woman, impugning the morality of the negro race, and especially of the negro women. This letter came into the hands of a noble-minded negro woman in Boston. Because this good woman felt that the burden was too heavy for her to bear alone, she called some of her friends—some of the foremost women of her own race—to her assistance. ”

“ Thus even with chiefs who possess wives by hundreds the bonds of blood are the strongest and that the woman, though often heavily burdened, is in herself held in no small esteem among the Negroes is clear from the numerous Negro queens, from the medicine women, from the participation in public meetings permitted to women by many Negro peoples. ”

“ Thus passed away the brightest and most generally beloved Afro-American woman of her day. This Afro-American, coming in a slave-ship, a heathen child of seven years, from the jungles of Africa, and although at once putting on the galling yoke of slavery, nevertheless she grew and developed such traits of character and displayed the genius of such a powerful intellect that in less than twenty years from the time she was purchased at the slave-pen in Boston she became the admiration and wonder of the best minds in Europe and in America. ”

“ It seems a great pity that it should be left to the foreigner to “discover” the Negro-American woman. For her own mankind have been seeing her for centuries. And yet, outside of the vague rhetoric of the brethren in church and lodge when they want her to turn their functions into financial successes, and outside of Paul Dunbar and perhaps two other poets, no proper amount of esthetic appreciation of her has been forthcoming from their side. ”

“ That such a state of society should exist in a Christian nation, claiming to be the most enlightened upon earth, without calling forth any particular attention to its existence, though ever before our eyes and in our families, is a moral phenomenon at once unaccountable and disgraceful.’ Nor does the colored woman suffer alone: the moral purity of the white woman is deeply contaminated. ”

“ The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both. ”

“ The fact that she could and did replace the white man as laborer, artisan and servant, showed the possibility of the white woman doing the same thing, and led to it. Moreover, the usual sentimental arguments against women at work were not brought forward in the case of Negro womanhood. Nothing illustrates this so well as the speech of Sojourner Truth before the second National Woman Suffrage Convention, in 1852. ”

“ English women are strengthened 32and protected by more than twelve centuries of Christian influences, freedom and civilization; English girls are dispirited and crushed down by no such all-levelling prejudice as that supercilious caste spirit in America which cynically assumes “A Negro woman cannot be a lady.” English womanhood is beset by no such snares and traps as betray the unprotected, untrained colored girl of the South, whose only crime and dire destruction often is her unconscious and marvelous beauty. ”

“ In America the work of Negro women has not only pre-figured this development but it has had a direct influence upon it. The Negro woman as laborer, as seamstress, as servant and cook, has come into competition with the white male laborer and with the white woman worker. ”

“ Indeed, the greater portion of the colored women, in the days of slavery, had no greater aspiration than that of becoming the finely-dressed mistress of some white man. Although freedom has brought about a new order of things, and our colored women are making rapid strides to rise above the dark scenes of the past, yet the want of protection to our people since the old-time whites have regained power, places a large number of the colored young women of the cities and towns at the mercy of bad colored men, or worse white men. ”

“ A colored mother is a success as she measures up to her relation and obligation to the race.
Negro children of all children need mothers who are strong spiritually, [183] physically, and intellectually. Enough colored children have been born under bad or careless conditions. The child born under bad conditions can not be expected to hold his own among other children.
No woman has a right to blight the future of her race. Not even her body may be abused—this beautiful casket—the treasure house of future souls. Any crime that she commits against herself or her body she commits against the race. ”