Exhibit Profiles Historian’s Black ‘Women of Courage’

To historian Linda M. Perkins, “Women of Courage” is more than a snappy title for the photographic exhibition of black women opening Sunday at the California Afro-American Museum. These women are, she points out, the last of their kind, women who made their mark as blacks and as females “in a society that valued neither”--and who placed “racial uplift” before self-interest.

Perkins, a visiting scholar at UCLA researching a book on black women and education, is at 35 young enough to be the granddaughter of most of the women, the vast majority of whom were born between 1870 and 1920. For her generation, Perkins said, “It’s a completely different ballgame” and the attitude of many middle-class blacks is, “I don’t owe anything to anybody.”

“I’m just overwhelmed,” she said, “by the frequency with which I hear young black college kids say, ‘I just see myself as a person.’ Race is not relevant to them. But the reality is that it’s relevant in this world. It’s naive of them.”

The “Women of Courage,” who overcame overt racism and legal segregation to become physicians and educators and catalysts for social change, shared a basic belief, Perkins said, that “education, religion and organizations were essential to the survival and growth of the black communities” of America.

Writing in her introduction to the catalogue for “Women of Courage,” which is based on the Black Women Oral History Project of the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, Perkins emphasizes the shared “sense of self-pride and self-respect” and the obligation these women felt to courageous black women who had gone before them.

One of the “Women of Courage,” Minnie Fisher, a community activist and civic worker born in 1896 in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Miss., expressed it this way: “I was taught that my parents wanted me to be able to serve my people.”

The oral histories upon which the photographic exhibit is based were taped between 1976 and 1981 with subjects selected by committee from several hundred suggested names. Few are famous. Their fields are diverse--the arts, law, volunteer service, social work. Many of the women, who were photographed by Judith Sedwick of Massachusetts, were born during what Perkins calls “the best of times and the worst of times,” when opportunities for white women were escalating and those for black Americans declining.

And what they have to say about their lives, about being black and being female, could provide some answers, Perkins said, to the question concerned blacks today are asking: “Will we cease to be our own people? Will there be anything distinctively black about us?”

With a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation, Perkins is writing “Each One, Pull One: Race ‘Uplift,’ Education and Black Women.” It is a task to which she brings impeccable credentials--a Ph.D in the history of education and higher education from the University of Illinois, two years as a fellow and two as assistant director of the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College of Harvard University--together with a conviction that “the history of black women and education is virtually an unexplored topic.”

In her seven years of research, which span the period from the mid-19th Century through the 1960s, Perkins has combed library archives, studied anti-slavery reports and century-old black newspapers and has read and re-read transcripts of taped conversations with the “Women of Courage.” (The original tapes will be housed permanently in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Copies will go to 13 institutions, among them Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.)

The women are somewhat atypical, she said, in that many had college-educated parents; they also had inherited from two previous generations of black women a fierce will to pull other blacks up with them. For the most part, Perkins contends, that is a flame that has been snuffed--”It seems that every generation we become more assimilated and more mainstreamed.

“I know black kids who’ve never been to a black church, never had a black date,” she said. If they think that eliminates racism, she added, they’re living in “Fantasyland.”

The reality, Perkins said, is that the black community at large and its elite need one another--”Given where blacks are educationally, economically, socially and politically, we don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘I’m an individual and race doesn’t matter.’ ”

These are some of the “Women of Courage”: Rosa Parks, the Montgomery, Ala., department store tailor whose refusal to give her bus seat to a white man was an early chapter in the civil rights movement in 1955; Clementine Hunter, a primitive painter from the Cane River area of Louisiana whose canvases are a unique record of black plantation life; Charleszetta (Mother) Waddles, an ordained minister and founder of the Perpetual Mission for Savings Souls of All Nations in Detroit.

There are Miriam Matthews, a librarian in the L.A. Public Library system for more than 30 years who has researched the history of California’s early black settlers; Eunice Rivers Laurie, for 50 years a nurse among the rural poor in Alabama; Muriel S. Snowden, with her husband co-founder of Freedom House, a human relations and advocacy institution in Roxbury, Mass.; the late Esther Mae (Mother) Scott, a Mississippi blues singers who recorded her first album at the age of 78, and the late Dr. May Chinn, a doctor in Harlem for half a century.

Despite Focus on Men

Despite the accomplishments of such women, Perkins found that when she began researching her general subject in the late ‘70s, there was “all this focus on great men” in black studies programs but “no mention of minority women” save for Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

As she pursued her theme of “race uplift” and focused on the history of black women and education, Perkins became intrigued with the story of Fanny Jackson Coppin, who was one of the first black women to get a college degree (from Oberlin College, in the 1860s) and was later principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, founded by the Quakers in the 1830s as the first high school for blacks in America.

It was significant to Perkins that, during an age of conservatism in terms of black societal attitudes toward women, at the turn of the century, black educator Booker T. Washington was “influential in unseating black women” who held high positions--among them Coppin. This climate was to persist from after Reconstruction until the 1960s.

Tracing the history and philosophy of education for black women, as viewed by blacks, Perkins found that, from the early to mid-19th Century, as a result of “disenfranchisement and enslavement of the entire race,” blacks thought education equally important for all blacks, equating it with freedom. While whites established men’s colleges and women’s colleges, excluding all but white males from the best of the former, black institutions were from the beginning coeducational.

But, Perkins said, “After the turn of the century black women did not hold high positions for half a century.” Black churches, traditionally the cornerstones of the community, were raising money to send black males to college.

Loss of Expectations

Gone was the expectation that black women, as well as black men, were to make a contribution. “Once blacks moved out of their slave communities,” Perkins said, and began being educated by white missionaries, they accepted the missionaries’ view of working women as “an aberration.”

From the 1920s to the 1950s, Perkins found, there was a resurgence of debate about the purpose of higher education for black women. Another crisis for educated black women took place in the late ‘50s: White scholars began to cite black women as intellectually better equipped than black men, causing them both to feel guilty and to have difficulty breaking into non-traditional female professions within the black community.

The latter dilemma remains unresolved, Perkins said. To put it in context, she points out that the strategy of the black community in the ‘30s and ‘40s was to send women to college to prepare to be teachers and to place men in the trades, where they could make good money. The lesson that had been learned, she said, was that “racism was so pervasive that a man with a college degree would not get a job commensurate with his education.”

Because the strategy was accepted by the black community, Perkins said, “A black woman could be an educator and be married to someone who was not college-educated and this would not in any way be considered marrying down.”

A New Dilemma

Since then, continued discrimination against black men in employment, combined with significant accomplishments for educated black women, have created what Perkins terms a “psychological dilemma” within a patriarchal society. Black men, angered at being seen as irresponsible, have reacted defensively to the rise of women just as doors to leadership positions were opening to blacks.

Today, the tensions between black men and women are “most definitely a problem,” Perkins said. “Black men have never been allowed to fully live out society’s definition of a man.”

But the biggest problem she sees for blacks is “the tremendous class gap. Now, poor people only know poor people and middle-class people only know middle-class people. One result has been the growth of the ‘black underclass’ and a disintegration of the church-based social system.”

There has been, she said, an “abandonment of black institutions, the decay and decline of black communities as we once knew them with their real cross-fertilization of people.” Perkins emphasized she is not advocating that all blacks move back to one community but she thinks it is urgent that middle-class blacks develop “a feeling of connectedness with poor blacks. The first challenge for educated blacks is to come to grips with the fact that, yes, you’re an American but you’re a black American.”

Perhaps, she suggested, the place to start is the black church, “still the most viable black institutions,” whose ministers have historically been reformers and crusaders. Someone, she said, must make society at large accountable so that young black men will be able to see that a college education pays off with a good job.

Perkins writes about Fanny Jackson Coppin, who spoke of blacks being bound together in 1877 by a “common sorrow” that gave them energy and optimism. That was a period, Perkins writes, when “black men and women worked cooperatively with a brilliant sense of purpose of self-reliance and self-respect by educating and inspiring their own people.”

Perkins holds out hope that this spirit did not die with the “Women of Courage.”

The “Women of Courage” exhibit, completing a two-year national tour, is sponsored locally by the California Afro-American Museum, the Coalition of 100 Black Women and the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Southern California. It will be at the museum in Exposition Park, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily,through Nov. 30.