Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 126 of 174 · 20 per page

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  When Lou told her that he was afraid sobriety would make him a square, she suggested he add a new vice to his life, one irrelevant to drink, but totally unacceptable. Lou had turned to prostitution. Although he was now earning over a hundred thousand dollars a year in advertising and was in his late thirties, he could still look like a dumb teenage drifter. After a full day of pitching a campaign, he’d change into a T-shirt and jeans right out of the dryer and a corny cowboy hat of the sort never seen west of Jersey. Then he’d stand, skinny and forlorn on Third Avenue and Fifty-first, and be picked up by married men in cars. I met him at the hotel just off Times Square. Our customers were already drunk and playing a tape of Beethoven’s Fifth they’d doctored with trippy insertions of Joni Mitchell’s talkative ballads. Lou and I knew who Joni Mitchell was, but we pretended we’d never heard of Beethoven. Our clients winked at each other over our heads. I had to put on a leather harness, stick a swan feather up my john’s ass, and call him “Pretty Peacock” as he strutted proudly about, cocking his head from side to side like a bird while wanking off in an all-too-human way. Fifty bucks for me and seventy for Lou who, after all, had organized the party. Afterward Lou and I drifted down toward the Village. We didn’t despise our johns. In fact, I was flattered that I’d been able to sell it at my advanced age (I was twenty-nine). I felt for now at last as though I were one of those tough guys I’d admired at Riis Park and here at the Stonewall. The night was hot. We gay guys had taken over all of Christopher Street; even the shops were gay. Although the bars were owned by the Mafia, we somehow thought of them as ours. Just as this street, this one street in a city of ten thousand streets, felt like ours. Of course, stories of police violence still circulated . In the Stonewall the dance floor had been taken over by Latins. I had a friend, Hector Ramirez, a kindergarten teacher who, because he lived with his parents in the Bronx, borrowed my apartment every afternoon after school to rehearse new dance steps with another Latin twenty-two-year-old, similarly mustached and dressed in carefully ironed beige cotton shirts over guinea T-shirts and highwaisted pleated pants held up by a thin black crocodile belt. They were here tonight, twirling out of a tight clench, hips on small pistons, faces illegibly cool. Another friend, the death machine, came up to me and rested his size-twelve black hands on my shoulders and stared into my eyes with a mad gleam: “… is dead.” “Who?” I shouted over the music. “Judy.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  24 “Then the hand was sent from the presence [of the Most High God], and this inscription was written: 25 “This is the i inscription that was written, ‘MENE , MENE , TEKEL , UPHARSIN [numbered, numbered, weighed, and divided].’ 26 “This is the interpretation of the message: ‘MENE ’—God has numbered the days of your kingdom and put an end to it; 27 ‘TEKEL ’—you have been weighed on the scales [of righteousness] and found deficient; 28 ‘j PERES ’—k your kingdom has been divided and given over to the Medes and l Persians.” 29 Then Belshazzar gave the command, and Daniel was clothed with purple and a chain of gold was put around his neck, and a proclamation concerning him was issued [declaring] that he now had authority as the third ruler in the kingdom. 30 During that same m night Belshazzar the [last] Chaldean king was slain [by troops of the n invading army]. 31 So o Darius the Mede received the kingdom; he was about the age of sixty-two. Daniel 6 Daniel Serves Darius 1 I T SEEMED good to Darius [who became king after Belshazzar] to appoint over the kingdom 120 a satraps who would be in charge throughout the kingdom, 2 and over them three chief commissioners (of whom Daniel was one), that these satraps might be accountable to them, so that the king would have no loss [from disloyalty or mismanagement]. 3 Then this Daniel, because of the extraordinary spirit within him, began distinguishing himself among the commissioners and the satraps, and the king planned to appoint him over the entire realm. 4 Then the [other two] commissioners and the satraps began trying to find a reason to bring a complaint against Daniel concerning the [administration of the] kingdom; but they could find no reason for an accusation or evidence of corruption, because he was faithful [a man of high moral character and personal integrity], and no negligence or corruption [of any kind] was found in him. 5 Then these men said, “We will not find any basis for an accusation against this Daniel unless we find something against him in connection with the law of his God.” [Acts 24:13–21 ; 1 Pet 4:12–16 ] 6 Then these commissioners and satraps agreed to approach the king and said to him, “King Darius, live forever! 7 “All the commissioners of the kingdom, the prefects and the satraps, the counselors and the governors have consulted and agreed together that the king should establish a royal statute and enforce an injunction that anyone who petitions (prays to) any god or man besides you, O king, during the next thirty days, shall be thrown into the den of lions.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  addresses, novels, poems, books of travel, miscellaneous essays and the contributions to magazines and newspapers.” 30 She addressed critics who might find a notion of distinct “race literature” separate from American literature objectionable. The “conditions, which govern the people of African Descent in the United States” created a “marked difference in the limitations, characteristics, aspirations and ambitions of this class of people.” 31 In other words, Matthews believed “all this impious wrong has made a Race Literature a possibility, even a necessity.” 32 Thus, in her view there existed both the potential and the necessity for a distinctive African American literary tradition. 33 Race women by and large agreed with this claim. Mary Church Terrell wrote that she regretted her inability to become a formidable fiction writer because she had “thought for years that the Race Problem could be solved more swiftly and more surely through the instrumentality of the short story or novel than in any other way.” 34 For race women, race literature instantiated both a literary tradition and constituted the creation of an “intellectual history” for the race, by which the intellectual possibilities of African Americans would be judged. As Gertrude Bustill Mossell had been so keen to note just one year earlier in her book, Work of the Afro-American Woman, “the intellectual history of a race is always of value in determining the past and future of it.” 35 Race women made “African American literary culture fundamental to the racial uplift agenda of social reform.” 36 “When the literature of our race is developed, it will of necessity be different in all essential points of greatness, true heroism and real Christianity from what we may at the present time, for convenience, call American Literature,” Matthews made clear. 37 This Race Literature, Matthews further argued, would also serve as “a counter-irritant against all such writing” that deliberately misrepresented Black women and Black people. It would have “as an aim the supplying of influential and accurate information, on all subjects relating to the Negro and his environments, to inform the American mind at least, for literary purposes.” 38 Race literature did not merely have a political function, but rather an intellectual one to transform and reshape “the American mind,” and what Williams called “public opinion” regarding the Negro. Matthews’s speech was given at the first national gathering of African American women in 1895, and many of the themes it delineated further refined and clarified the intellectual concerns that drove the NACW’s intellectual agenda. In fact, she made sure to specifically address the role women would play in the creation of race literature. “Woman’s part in Race literature, as in Race building,” she proclaimed, “is to ... receive impressions and transmit them.” 39 Matthews invoked the sentimental discourse of impressibility to connect women’s role in race building to the production of race literature. Feminist theorist Kyla Schuller has recently excavated the significance of the discourse and theory of impressibility to nineteenth-century formulations of evolution.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Terrell challenged those in her audience during her “Dignified Agitation” speech “to learn to express their thoughts as forcibly and clearly as possible.” But lest they misunderstand her admonition, she told them: [D]o not understand me to advise you to learn to do pretty writing. In this day and time, when everybody is too busy to read even the books and articles bearing directly upon their business, pretty writing will do no good. It is as much out of fashion as knee-breeches and hoop skirts. But there is an imperative of strong, clear-headed writers who know how to present facts in a forceful, tactful, attractive manner, so that sentiment may be created in behalf of the race.” 33 Deeply influenced by the calls of their clubwomen comrades and colleagues back in the 1890s for women’s participation in the production of a robust race literature, Terrell would return repeatedly to the importance of writing as a political act. And it is this belief that inspired her to begin writing her own autobiography sometime during the late 1920s. The Double Handicap of Race and Sex: Toward Intersectionality Terrell began her narrative with a declaration: “This is the story of a colored woman living in a white world. It cannot possibly be like a story written by a white woman. A white woman has only one handicap to overcome—that of sex. I have two—both sex and race. I belong to the only group in this country, which has two such huge obstacles to surmount. Colored men have only one—that of race.” 34 The clear framing of her life in terms of dual and interlocking operations of racism and sexism is very important to mapping the genealogical development of intersectional thought within Black feminism. Although a range of both academic and political thinkers would emerge in the latter quarter of the twentieth century to articulate the political implications of Black women’s interlocking and simultaneous oppressions, Terrell very clearly articulates what is at stake by 1940. What Frances Beale will call “double jeopardy” in 1970, Terrell called a “doublehandicap” thirty years earlier. Though a cursory nod is always granted to Terrell in conversations on Black feminism, her assertion of the ways that race and gender politics work to make the stories and experiences of Black women invisible is one of the earliest articulations of the political stakes of intersectionality. Not only did she want to distinguish her narrative from that of white women, but she also wanted “to show what a colored woman can achieve in spite of the difficulties by which race prejudice blocks her path.” 35 Race women experienced sexism differently from white women, and racism differently from Black men. By framing her life narrative in intersectional identity terms, she made the case that womanhood in particular is a significant category of experience in shaping Black female race leaders.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  dictates of traditional knowledge production. Moreover, Williams maintained, the lack of information on black women underscored that the thrust of American knowledge production was not a race- or gender-neutral endeavor. In the case of white women, “nearly every fact and item illustrative of their progress and status is classified and easily accessible.” By contrast, Black women “had no advantage of interests peculiar and distinct and separable from those of men that have yet excited public attention and kindly recognition.” 18 Williams used an intersectional analysis to demonstrate the ways in which movements to emancipate both women and Black people often worked to obscure Black women as both unique producers of knowledge and subjects worthy of knowledge production. Williams did not merely advocate for black women to have access to the “same opportunity for the acquisition of all kinds of knowledge that may be accorded to other women.” Rather, she suggested more specifically that Black women were eager to produce knowledge, and that if given the chance to educate themselves, in one generation Black women “will be found successfully occupying every field where the highest intelligence alone is admissible. ... [T]he exceptional career of our women will yet stamp itself indelibly upon the thought of this country.” 19 “In short,” she told them, “our women are ambitious to be contributors to all the great moral and intellectual forces that make for the greater weal of our common country.” 20 Like Cooper had done in the publication of Voice from the South, Williams informed audiences that Black women wanted a stake in the intellectual leadership, not only of their race but also their country. The second call for the systematic study of the race came from Victoria Earle Matthews in 1895. After a Missouri journalist issued a vicious assault on the character of African American women, precipitated by the rising prominence of Ida B. Wells, a bevy of “about one hundred” “public spirited Afro- American women” convened in Boston for the First Congress of Colored Women. 21 “The convention afforded a fine exhibition of capable women,” Williams wrote. “There was nothing amateurish, uncertain or timid in the proceedings. Every subject of peculiar interest to colored women was discussed and acted upon as if by women disciplined in thinking out large and serious problems.” 22 Though the women roundly condemned John Jacks, the Missouri journalist, for his vitriolic attacks on Black womanhood, the women “soon felt that a National Convention of responsible women would be a misplacement of moral force, if it merely exhausted itself in replying to a slanderous publication.” 23 Thus, they began to set an agenda to confront, study, and address the myriad problems facing Black local communities.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  15 But, she rejected this initial idea and reaffirmed her pride in her racial origins. Murray’s question about the ways her racial identity related to her gender and sexual identity is an important one. Her body, which she frantically and actively sought to define within some acceptable scientific language, including early inchoate iterations of intersexuality, had already been marked as a particular kind of racial subject. As Marlon Ross observes, if it is true that “by the eighteenth century, race is already marked ‘on the body’ as a totalizing sign of invisible anatomical species difference, then what happens in the nineteenth century when, as Foucault argues, homosexuality is marked on ‘the body’” in precisely the same way? 16 Foucault fails to answer this question by assuming that the homosexual bodies of which he speaks “are not already marked as Negroid or Oriental; that is, in other words, because they are silently, invisibly already marked as unspecified Anglo-Saxons.” 17 Murray’s body and her struggles to characterize and, indeed, authorize its various modes of being, marked “the uneven discursive development of race, gender, and sexuality” and invited the question, “What does it mean for a racialized body to be named before a gendered or homosexualized one?” 18 Becoming Jane Crow Just two weeks after being committed to Bellevue in March 1940 by her friend Adelene (Mac) McBean, the two were arrested in Petersburg, Virginia, for defying a bus segregation statute. Forced to spend three days in a squalid jail cell with five other women, Murray reflected in her notebook on the mixed emotions that she felt as a “Negro woman,” of educated and respectable origins being forced to endure filthy conditions on account of her fierce commitment to racial freedom. 19 Murray recounted this experience in Song in a Weary Throat, as a pivotal one, marking her as a race activist; but there is no mention of the harrowing hospital confinement that had plagued her just weeks before. During that confinement, Murray had written in her notes that her desire to embrace her maleness was so strong, that she simply could not reconcile herself to any notion of womanhood. 20 Yet by March 25, 1940, Murray was waxing eloquent about the peculiar plight of the Negro woman-turned-activist. 21 Song also does not mention that Murray was passing as male when she and Mac were arrested. 22 When asked by the police at the scene for her name and address, she told them, “Oliver Fleming.” Glenda Gilmore recounts that one of the passengers on the bus that day was a white sociology graduate student from UNC named Harold Garfinkel. The incident made such an impression on Garfinkel that he wrote an essay recounting it called “Color Trouble,” which was published two months later in Opportunity magazine. 23 The fact of Pauli Murray’s femaleness was so undetectable as to entirely escape Garfinkel’s notice.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  I could produce certain words discovered by hazard while riffling the pages of a book, show how they set me off—but who on earth could ever guess how, in what manner, they were to set me off? All that the critics write about a work of art, even at the best, even when most sound, convincing, plausible, even when done with love, which is seldom, is as nothing compared to the actual mechanics, the real genetics of a work of art. I remember my work, not word for word, to be sure, but in some more accurate, trustworthy way; my whole work has come to resemble a terrain of which I have made a thorough, geodetic survey, not from a desk, with pen and ruler, but by touch, by getting down on all fours, on my stomach, and crawling over the ground inch by inch, and this over an endless period of time in all conditions of weather. In short, I am as close to the work now as when I was in the act of executing it—closer perhaps. The conclusion of a book was never anything more than a shift of bodily position. It might have ended in a thousand different ways. No single part of it is finished off: I could resume the narrative at any point, carry on, lay canals, tunnels, bridges, houses, factories, stud it with other inhabitants, other fauna and flora, all equally true to fact. I have no beginning and no ending, actually. Just as life begins at any moment, through an act of realization, so the work. But each beginning, whether of book, page, paragraph, sentence or phrase, marks a vital connection, and it is in the vitality, the durability, the timelessness and changelessness of the thoughts and events that I plunge anew each time. Every line and word is vitally connected with my life, my life only, be it in the form of deed, event, fact, thought, emotion, desire, evasion, frustration, dream, revery, vagary, even the unfinished nothings which float listlessly in the brain like the snapped filaments of a spider’s web. There is nothing really vague or tenuous—even the nothingnesses are sharp, tough, definite, durable. Like the spider I return again and again to the task, conscious that the web I am spinning is made of my own substance, that it will never fail me, never run dry. In the beginning I had dreams of rivaling Dostoievski. I hoped to give to the world huge, labyrinthian soul struggles which would devastate the world. But before very far along I realized that we had evolved to a point far beyond that of Dostoievski—beyond in the sense of degeneration. With us the soul problem has disappeared, or rather presents itself in some strangely distorted chemical guise. We are dealing with crystalline elements of the dispersed and shattered soul. The modern painters express this state or condition perhaps even more forcibly than the writer: Picasso is the perfect example of what I mean.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Mae Henderson argues that reading the text according to these simultaneous, competing discourses allows us to address not only the “subject en-gendered in the experience of race” but also “a subject ‘racialized’ in the experience of gender.” 69 Becoming a free woman, able to move unencumbered in the public sphere, was critical to doing the work of the race; similarly, freeing herself from the stigma of racist ideology had direct ramifications for Terrell’s experience of womanhood. By presenting a notion of freedom embodied in the confident performance of womanhood, Terrell subverts the very terms that attempt to circumscribe her experience; “race” is not allowed to operate with its characteristic opacity vis-à-vis other forms of difference, nor is womanhood an identity left restricted to white women. And the visual imagery of her freedom is that of a woman with her head held high, which points us toward, rather than away from, Terrell’s experience as an embodied, Black female subject. Terrell not only offered a glimpse into her narrative of personal reckoning with destructive effects of racism. She also offered an account of her public battle with white women to occupy the space of “free womanhood.” In 1904, she was invited to deliver an address at the International Congress of Women in Berlin. Because of her very light skin, many of the German conference attendees mistook her for a white woman. When two German women discovered that she spoke German but was American, they began to ask Terrell about “‘die Negerin’ (the Negress) from the United States whom they were expecting.” 70 Initially, Terrell did not understand that they thought she was white, but she discovered “that they had no idea they were talking to this very unusually anthropological specimen whom they were seeking.” 71 The ever-mischievous Terrell had a laugh at their expense and kept up the comedy of errors for several days as people inquired of her repeatedly about “die Negerin.” Terrell’s choice not to identify herself as Black effectively, if not intentionally, rendered her a white woman. Because Terrell was fluent in both German and French (not to mention Latin and Greek), she decided to give her address in German. Even when she finally stood to give her speech, no one realized she was Black.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Mary Church Terrell did live to see the desegregation of the nation’s capital. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor against Thompson’s Restaurant in 1953. Terrell also lived to see the passage of the Brown v. Board decision, just two months before she died. Eleanor Holmes (Norton), a student activist in the 1960s, who sought to understand the context of that decade’s activism, argued that out of the “early forties” “came the search for a new, dignified, and more direct way to protest.”98 Holmes’s comments make clear that the “dignified agitation” in which Terrell and others engaged participated in laying the groundwork for the next decade of nonviolent direct action. Terrell’s Supreme Court victory, the culmination of more than sixty years of dignified agitation, also created the context for the Brown decision. Her shifting ideas about what constituted proper agitation paralleled a broader racial shift from uplift politics to direct action and institutional agitation. Moreover, Terrell, along with the young colleagues she mentored, challenged the charismatic male leadership model that continues to frame not only Black politics but also Black scholarship. From her earliest leadership days as a protégé of Frederick Douglass, to her latter days as a civil rights activist, Terrell created a new genealogical branch for Black politics and Black leadership, one that proceeds through a range of Black women directly into the Civil Rights struggle. Her life demonstrates very concretely the ways that notions of racial respectability came to inform not only uplift politics in the nineteenth century but also civil rights politics in the twentieth. And she did all that while also offering a clearly liberal Black feminist vision rooted in intersectional politics, a commitment to democracy, and a belief in institutional transformation that would “make democracy” real for Black women. One of the Black women inspired concretely by Terrell’s long history of Civil Rights was Pauli Murray. In her own autobiography, Murray remembered Terrell as “a militant civil rights activist and longtime feminist who had fought for woman suffrage,” and as “the Essence of Victorian respectability.”99 It was Terrell who had “completed the struggle” begun by those precocious Howard students in the 1940s. In doing so, she concretely connected past battles for racial freedom to contemporary ones, making space for the dignified forms of protest that would be undertaken by a new generation of feminists fighting for civil rights and women’s rights. In the next chapter, I turn specifically to Pauli Murray’s story; for her path creates a unique thread of Black female leadership directly from this moment of the 1950s into the tumultuous 1970s. CHAPTER 3 Queering Jane CrowPauli Murray’s Quest for an Unhyphenated Identity

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  11 “For when an ear heard [my name mentioned], it called me happy and fortunate; And when an eye saw [me], it testified for me [approvingly], 12 Because I rescued the poor who cried for help, And the orphan who had no helper. 13 “The blessing of him who was about to perish came upon me, And I made the widow’s heart sing for joy. 14 “I put on b righteousness, and it clothed me; My justice was like a robe and a turban! 15 “I was eyes to the blind And I was feet to the lame. 16 “I was a father to the needy; I investigated the case I did not know [and assured justice]. 17 “And I smashed the jaws of the wicked And snatched the prey from his teeth. 18 “Then I said, ‘I shall die in my nest, And I shall multiply my days as the sand. 19 ‘My root is spread out and open to the waters, And the dew lies all night upon my branch. 20 ‘My glory and honor are fresh in me [being constantly renewed], And my bow gains [ever] new strength in my hand.’ 21 “They listened to me and waited And kept silent for my counsel. 22 “After I spoke, they did not speak again, And my speech dropped upon them [like a refreshing shower]. 23 “They waited for me [and for my words] as for the rain, And they opened their mouths as for the spring rain. 24 “I smiled at them when they did not believe, And they did not diminish the light of my face. 25 “I chose a way for them and sat as chief, And dwelt as a king among his soldiers, As one who comforts mourners. Job 30 Job’s Present State Is Humiliating 1 “B UT NOW those younger than I mock and laugh at me, Whose fathers I refused to put with the sheepdogs of my flock. 2 “Indeed, how could the strength of their hands profit me? Vigor had perished from them. 3 “They are gaunt with want and famine; They gnaw the dry and barren ground by night in [the gloom of] waste and desolation. 4 “They pluck [and eat] a saltwort (mallows) among the bushes, And their food is the root of the broom shrub. 5 “They are driven from the community; They shout after them as after a thief. 6 “They must dwell on the slopes of b wadis And in holes in the ground and in rocks. 7 “Among the bushes they cry out [like wild animals]; Beneath the prickly scrub they gather and huddle together. 8 “They are the sons of [worthless and nameless] fools, They have been driven out of the land. 9 “And now I have become [the subject of] their taunting; Yes, I am a c byword and a laughingstock to them. 10 “They hate me, they stand aloof from me, And do not refrain from spitting in my face.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  And they had been “forming work-study groups, discussion clubs, cooperative nurseries, cooperative businesses, … women’s caucuses within existing organizations, [and] Afro-American women’s magazines” with the goal of studying and making legible various kinds of Black female selfhoods. By celebrating the profusion of community spaces in which Black women were conducting self study, Bambara resisted a top-down account of racial knowledge production, demonstrating a range of horizontal spaces in which Black women were coming together to make sense of their own lives. Like the Club era, these community-based spaces, wherein Black women produced knowledge about themselves, constituted a kind of Black female counter-public space that allowed Black women to contest official, dominant narratives that undermined them morally, intellectually, and politically. However, unlike the clubwomen, Bambara did not seek to bring these groups under an organizational umbrella. Instead, she took a more traditional discursive approach, producing an anthology of writings through which Black women could testify to their embodied experiences. Farah Jasmine Griffin notes that the multiplicity of voices in this text, the dialogues between a range of differently situated Black women, is one of the most remarkable features of Black Woman: “[I]ts chorus of voices reminds us of the extra-academic origins of black women’s intellectual work and of its concern with something other than curriculum, canons, fields, careers and academic publication. And while the academy is certainly an important site of struggle, it is not the only place where socially and politically engaged intellectuals ought to find themselves.”48 In short, the text reminds us that within Black women’s intellectual history, “the sites of intellectual work are always shifting.”49 The extra-academic nature of the text and its willingness to offer a range of perspectives—both feminist and nonfeminist, nationalist and antinationalist—within its pages offers a discursive representation of a robust Black women’s public sphere. Moreover, it demonstrates in practice that Black women’s knowledge production is not beholden to the academy. By drawing on the works of a range of women to constitute her anthology, Bambara offered a robust model for what Black women’s public intellectual work looked like. Her text also marked one of the clearest generational shifts in the rhetoric about race womanhood. She noted that “unlike the traditional sororities and business clubs,” her contributors “[seemed] to use the Black Liberation struggle rather than the American Dream as their yardstick, their gauge, their vantage point.”50 This represented a marked shift from the rhetoric of liberal race women like Williams and Murray, whose lives bookend the paradigmatic frame of American peculiarity as a critique of American exceptionalism. Unlike Murray, whose primary quest was for American acceptance, Bambara’s race women used Black freedom as the measuring stick for determining racial progress, noting that, in fact, these two ideals were not congruent. Moreover, the textual debate between Black nationalist women and Black feminist women challenged the distinctive integrationist versus nationalist binary that Cruse had set forth in Crisis.51

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Looking outward, however, the NACW’s work impacted far more than just Black women. “The National Association,” Williams averred, “has also been useful to an important extent in creating what may be called a race public opinion [emphasis added]. When the local clubs of the many States became nationalized, it became possible to reach the whole people with questions and interests that concerned the whole race.”6 Du Bois had attempted to localize the impact of the NACW, arguing that its primary impact would be on its work with children. Meanwhile, he claimed that the Council had a better handle on national racial concerns. Williams argued exactly the opposite. The NACW was the first major national organization to effectively coordinate local Black social and political concerns on a national scale. “For example,” Williams pressed her case, “when the National Association interested itself in studying such problems as the Convict Lease System of the Southern States or the necessity of kindergartens … it was possible to unite and interest the intelligent forces of the entire race.” Moreover, clubwomen railed against the sexual and labor exploitations of the convict lease system from the time of their earliest meetings. They created committees to study the problem, drafted reports, which always made sure to mention the especial difficulty Black women faced in labor camps, and made abolition of the convict lease system a hallmark of their advocacy.7 This spirit of racial cooperation across locales “is new,” Williams argued, “and belongs to the new order of things brought about by nationalized efforts.”8

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Part of the work of cultivating the public platform as a site for Black women to stand was making the space as safe as possible for Black women’s physical bodies, which would be publicly on display. Black female leaders theorized the public platform as a site for community transformation via the dispensation of useful knowledge that they themselves helped to produce. That required them to put their bodies on the line and to confront the very kinds of troubling discourses about their sexual promiscuity that shaped how public audiences would perceive them. Though the term is contemporary, I choose to understand race women intellectuals as public intellectuals because it is my contention that the models of racial leadership and public lecturing, in which these Black women historically engaged, created the paradigm for contemporary modes of Black public intellectual engagement. Black women thinkers have always been public intellectuals, both because they cared about producing accessible forms of knowledge for and with communities involved in the Black freedom struggle, and because the confluence of racism and patriarchy exempted them from access to academic institutions and from the protections of the private sphere. Black women have never had the luxury of being private thinkers. Thus, though the term public intellectual is fairly contemporary, the origins of practices that connote public intellectual work are much longer. In fact, according to historian Lucindy Willis, the appearance of the term intellectual in nineteenth-century discourse “connotes a distinct shift in perspective, making the concept less theoretical and more pragmatic.” Related to, but distinct from, thinker/philosophers like Socrates or Virgil, the term, in the nineteenth century, referred to individuals who “generated, applied and dispensed culture. Like great thinkers, [public intellectuals] were philosophers of sorts, but they seemed to possess a more developed sense of audience. As did their predecessors, they viewed life in its broadest contexts—socially, politically, and economically —yet often took active roles in challenging contemporary social conditions.” 15 In this book, I intentionally and unapologetically foreground the intellectual work of race women because they themselves spent a great deal of time making arguments about their importance as intellectuals. Moreover, I make this move in line with historians and biographers of Black women thinkers who in the last decade have sought to foreground the critical intellectual labor that public Black women did in addition to their work as activists, organizers, educators, and churchwomen. Additionally, I understand Black women’s knowledge production to encompass the range of places and spaces, thoughts, speech, and writings that Black women engaged to both know and understand themselves and the world around them more fully. In this book, I focus on the kinds of knowledge Black women produced about racial identity, gender identity, and gender politics in their books, speeches, and organizational work. Because I focus on women who had access to public platforms, this limits the scope of the Black women knowledge producers under consideration here—for example, poor and working-class Black women who produced knowledge in other forms.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  FIGURE 1. Anna Julia Cooper. Courtesy of Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Manuscripts Division, Howard University, Washington D.C. An iconic moment from Cooper’s Voice from the South is instructive. In her oft-cited critical exchange with Martin Delany, she exposes the problem with masculinist conceptions of Black possibility: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole race enters with me.’” 3 A paragon of the emerging Great Race Man model of leadership that relied on a charismatic male leader as its centerpiece, 4 Delany, whom Cooper admired, represented both the potency and the danger of a masculinist approach to race progress. Delany, a staunch Black nationalist, reveled in being what Cooper called “an unadulterated black man” with no identifiable European ancestry. For him, this “pure” African bloodline meant that when he, an accomplished medical doctor, intellectual, and racial leader, “entered the council of kings the black race entered with him.” 5 Delany was a quintessential race man who, by turns, attempted a race colonization scheme in Africa, and when that failed, served in the Union Army. While he was a champion of the education of women, he also thought their primary role in “the regeneration of the race” was as good mothers. But his race rhetoric was tied to his belief that his bloodline had remained unsullied by whiteness. 6 As the child of an enslaved mother and a white slave master, Cooper could make no such pronouncements about Black racial purity or an unadulterated bloodline. Histories of sexual violence and bodily trauma in Black women’s lives made such accounts of racial identity untenable. Unimpressed by Delany’s definition of power, which metonymically centered formal recognition by the “council of kings,” Cooper also made clear that “whatever the attainments of the individual may be ... he can never be regarded as identical with or representative of the whole.” 7 By challenging Delany’s conception of power, Cooper rejected his implicit romanticization of political elitism and white male standards of power as the goal to which Black people should aspire. 8 Cooper pointed instead to the “horny handed toiling men and women of the South” as the proper measure of race progress. Focusing on the gnarled, calloused hands of working-class Black people demanded that racial accounts of progress remain connected to the material and embodied conditions of everyday Black people. Moreover, Cooper made clear that her primary social goal was not the achievement of racial respectability, but rather the achievement of “undisputed dignity.” The call for dignity and the call for respectability are not the same, though they are frequently conflated. Demands for dignity are demands for a fundamental recognition of one’s inherent humanity. Demands for respectability assume that unassailable social propriety will prove one’s dignity. Dignity, unlike respectability, is not socially contingent. It is intrinsic and, therefore, not up for debate.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you. Perhaps one does it just because nobody believes; perhaps the real secret lies in making people believe. That the book was inadequate, faulty, bad, terrible , as they said, was only natural. I was attempting at the start what a man of genius would have undertaken only at the end. I wanted to say the last word at the beginning. It was absurd and pathetic. It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood. I knew at least what it was to fail. I knew what it was to attempt something big. Today, when I think of the circumstances under which I wrote that book, when I think of the overwhelming material which I tried to put into form, when I think of what I hoped to encompass, I pat myself on the back, I give myself a double A. I am proud of the fact that I made such a miserable failure of it; had I succeeded I would have been a monster. Sometimes, when I look over my notebooks, when I look at the names alone of those whom I thought to write about, I am seized with vertigo. Each man came to me with a world of his own; he came to me and unloaded it on my desk; he expected me to pick it up and put it on my shoulders. I had no time to make a world of my own: I had to stay fixed like Atlas, my feet on the elephant’s back and the elephant on the tortoise’s back. To inquire on what the tortoise stood would be to go mad. I didn’t dare to think of anything then except the “facts.” To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn’t become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being. One can’t make a new heaven and earth with “facts.” There are no “facts”—there is only the fact that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous and patient.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  still look like a dumb teenage drifter. After a full day of pitching a campaign, he’d change into a T-shirt and jeans right out of the dryer and a corny cowboy hat of the sort never seen west of Jersey. Then he’d stand, skinny and forlorn on Third Avenue and Fifty-first, and be picked up by married men in cars. I met him at the hotel just off Times Square. Our customers were already drunk and playing a tape of Beethoven’s Fifth they’d doctored with trippy insertions of Joni Mitchell’s talkative ballads. Lou and I knew who Joni Mitchell was, but we pretended we’d never heard of Beethoven. Our clients winked at each other over our heads. I had to put on a leather harness, stick a swan feather up my john’s ass, and call him “Pretty Peacock” as he strutted proudly about, cocking his head from side to side like a bird while wanking off in an all-too-human way. Fifty bucks for me and seventy for Lou who, after all, had organized the party. Afterward Lou and I drifted down toward the Village. We didn’t despise our johns. In fact, I was flattered that I’d been able to sell it at my advanced age (I was twenty-nine). I felt for now at last as though I were one of those tough guys I’d admired at Riis Park and here at the Stonewall. The night was hot. We gay guys had taken over all of Christopher Street; even the shops were gay. Although the bars were owned by the Mafia, we somehow thought of them as ours. Just as this street, this one street in a city of ten thousand streets, felt like ours. Of course, stories of police violence still circulated. In the Stonewall the dance floor had been taken over by Latins. I had a friend, Hector Ramirez, a kindergarten teacher who, because he lived with his parents in the Bronx, borrowed my apartment every afternoon after school to rehearse new dance steps with another Latin twenty-two-year-old, similarly mustached and dressed in carefully ironed beige cotton shirts over guinea T-shirts and highwaisted pleated pants held up by a thin black crocodile belt. They were here tonight, twirling out of a tight clench, hips on small pistons, faces illegibly cool. Another friend, the death machine, came up to me and rested his size-twelve black hands on my shoulders and stared into my eyes with a mad gleam: “... is dead.” “Who?” I shouted over the music. “Judy. Judy Garland.” Then the music went off, and the bar was full of cops, the bright lights came on, and we were all ordered out onto the street, everyone except the police working there. I suppose the police expected us to run away into the night, as we’d always done before, but we stood across the street on the sidewalk of the small triangular park. Inside the metal palisades rose the dignified, smaller-than-lifesize statue of the Civil War officer General Sheridan.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Her formulation of “dignified agitation,” which she worked out over the course of fifty years of public speaking and writing, conceptually bridges the uplift politics that characterized the work of the NACW School and other nineteenth-century Black organizations with the twentieth-century nonviolent, direct- action civil rights strategies that came to characterize Terrell’s activism during the early 1950s at the advent of the Civil Rights Movement. As an architect of uplift politics and the uplift infrastructure for most of her life, Terrell’s life fully inhabits the paradigm of respectable race womanhood. At the same time, she also mischievously and defiantly exceeds the frame of respectability politics. Second, I excavate her importance as a theorist to the intellectual history of Black feminist thought. She offers one of the earliest and most forthright formulations of what we now term intersectionality in the opening pages of her memoir, in addition to offering humorously progressive takes on dating in the midst of retrograde gender politics about women’s roles in the home. 3 Thus, I consider what her discussions of dance and creative maneuvers in the face of racism might have to teach us about Black women’s pleasure politics and about the pleasures of resistance. Third, I undertake key close readings of moments from her autobiography, which offer us a sense of the social forces that shaped her life and the public and private lives of race women. Colored Woman in a White World (1940) is simultaneously theoretical tome, political manifesto, and memoir. As the first book-length public leadership memoir published by a Black woman, it fits within the genre of what Margo V. Perkins calls “political autobiography,” which many prominent African American women such as Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown will turn to in the latter half of the twentieth century. 4 It therefore constitutes a critical site in the intellectual geography of race women being mapped in this book. More importantly, it offers a rare look into the interior life of one of the most prominent race women of the twentieth century. In it, she shares her thoughts on the politics of dating and marriage as a race leader, her struggles with depression, and her love of dancing. The information in the text, coupled with materials from her archives, also offer a complex picture of her social and intellectual relationships with other race leaders like her mentor Frederick Douglass and her sometimes-rival Ida B. Wells. Terrell gives us a picture of some of the humorous, mischievous, and often complicated ways that she resisted both the politics of racism and the politics of racial respectability throughout her life. The ephemeral and affective aspects of outwitting constricting social forces around the operations of race and gender— that is, the joys and pleasures—are frequently harder to capture, particularly if we look at race women solely through frames of dissemblance and respectability. But Terrell emerges in this book as deft negotiator of the competing private and public demands of her life.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Since the Tropic of Cancer first appeared in Paris, in 1934, I have received many hundreds of letters from readers all over the world: they are from men and women of all ages and all walks of life, and in the main they are congratulatory messages. Many of those who denounced the book because of its gutter language professed admiration for it otherwise; very, very few ever remarked that it was a dull book, or badly written. The book continues to sell steadily “under the counter” and is still written about at intervals although it made its appearance eleven years ago and was promptly banned in all the Anglo-Saxon countries. The only effect which censorship has had upon its circulation is to drive it underground, thus limiting the sales but at the same time insuring for it the best of all publicity—word of mouth recommendation. It is to be found in the libraries of nearly all our important colleges, is often recommended to students by their professors, and has gradually come to take its place beside other celebrated literary works which, once similarly banned and suppressed, are now accepted as classics. It is a book which appeals especially to young people and which, from all that I gather directly and indirectly, not only does not ruin their lives, but increases their morale. The book is a living proof that censorship defeats itself. It also proves once again that the only ones who may be said to be protected by censorship are the censors themselves, and this only because of a law of nature known to all who overindulge. In this connection I feel impelled to mention a curious fact often brought to my attention by booksellers, namely, that the two classes of books which enjoy a steady and ever-increasing sale are the so-called “pornographic, or obscene, and the occult. This would seem to corroborate Havelock Ellis’s view which I mentioned earlier. Certainly all attempts to regulate the traffic in obscene books, just as all attempts to regulate the traffic in drugs or prostitution, are doomed to failure wherever civilization rears its head. Whether these things are a definite evil or not, whether or not they are definite and ineradicable elements of our social life, it seems indisputable that they are synonymous with what is called civilization. Despite all that has been said and written for and against, it is evident that with regard to these factors of social life men have never come to that agreement which they have about slavery. It is possible, of course, that one day these things may disappear, but it is also possible, despite the now seemingly universal disapproval of it, that slavery may once again be practiced by human beings. The most insistent question put to the writer of “obscene” literature is: why did you have to use such language? The implication is, of course, that with conventional terms or means the same effect might have been obtained.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  W INTRODUCTION The Duty of the True Race Woman From the time that the first importation of Africans began to add comfort and wealth to the existence of the New World Community, the Negro woman has been constantly proving the intellectual character of her race in unexpected directions; indeed, her success has been significant. From the foregoing we conclude that it is the duty of the true race-woman to study and discuss all phases of the race question. —Pauline Hopkins (1902) hat does it mean and what has it meant to be a Black female intellectual? What does it mean to be a race woman? When and where are the sites of race women’s becoming? In Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, I argue that to arrive at an answer to the first question, we must diligently interrogate and examine the latter questions. Race women were the first Black women intellectuals. As they entered into public racial leadership roles beyond the church in the decades after Reconstruction, they explicitly fashioned for themselves a public duty to serve their people through diligent and careful intellectual work and attention to “proving the intellectual character” of the race. Pauline Hopkins declared two key tasks attached to the work of the “true race-woman.” 1 They were “to study” and “to discuss” “all phases of the race question.” Not only were these women institution builders and activists; they declared themselves public thinkers on race questions. Though Hopkins and her colleagues were part of a critical mass of public Black women thinkers in the 1890s, they joined a longer list of Black women who had been at the forefront of debates over “the woman question” and the role of Black women in public life throughout the 1800s. 2 In this book, I construct both an intellectual genealogy and an intellectual geography of race women, whose work as public thinkers remains undertheorized, despite more than three decades of critical work in Black feminist theory and literary criticism and Black women’s history. Thus, this book seeks to construct both an intellectual genealogy of the ideas that race women produce about racial identity, gender, and leadership between the 1890s and the 1970s, and an intellectual geography that maps the deliberate ways that Black women chose to take up and transform intellectual and physical spaces in service of their racial uplift projects. I begin this genealogy and geography with the short epigraphic quote that Pauline Hopkins, Boston-based journalist, novelist, and clubwoman, penned for the Colored American Magazine in 1902 because it is the first explicit definition of the race woman in print. 3 The fact that she offered up this theorization of race womanhood, Black female leadership, and Black intellectual identity in a piece innocuously titled “Some Literary Workers,” makes clear the idea that Black women did their theorizing in unexpected locations.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  But the fact that race women deployed a combination of strategies of respectability, dissemblance, and embodied discourse suggests that they were less interested in evacuating all modes of sexual expression from the social terrain of the Black female body and more interested in making sure that ideas of sexuality did not overdetermine and limit the scope of Black women’s social possibilities. Thus, they concerned themselves with creating a body of thought and a series of social strategies that would shift the public discourse about Black women’s bodies. Matthews, one of the featured speakers at the Congress, felt that this shift could occur through the creation of what she called “Race Literature.” Thematically, her speech on “The Value of Race Literature” took up where Williams had left off, systematically laying out a call for the intellectual development of the race. She anchored her talk conceptually by framing what she meant by the terms race and literature. “By race literature we mean ordinarily all the writings emanating from a distinct class—not necessarily race matter, but a general collection of what has been written by the men and women of the race.” 29 This collection of literature could include every conceivable genre from “history, biographies, scientific treatises, sermons,