The Black Women Who Formed the Roots of the Anti-Violence Movement
Mar 13, 2022
Written by Becca Williams, SBT Copywriter
Please note that we are talking about sexual violence. Do what you need to do to care for yourself.
What do you think of when you think of the women’s movement to address sexual assault and domestic violence? For a long time, I thought the movement started in the 1960s and 1970s. Wikipedia does a pretty good job summing this up: “The [antirape] movement came about in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when new concepts of rape arose out of second wave feminism…” I know that Wikipedia is not the place for robust research, but this does demonstrate a commonly held belief. This article points out that many White second wave feminists bolstered the claim that the consciousness-raising groups, marches, and changes in the law that supported rape survivors can all be attributed to their work and their work alone, to the neglect of Black activists who have tirelessly sought recognition for their advocacy.
When I learned about the “origins” of my then-chosen career field of survivor advocacy, there wasn’t much mention of the role that Black women played in its formation. There also wasn’t much talk about how the current advocacy approach, which is so closely linked to criminal justice systems, punitive legal processes, and a neoliberal professionalization is significantly altered from its original state of being a grassroots movement led by survivors of color.
(A 1970s anti-rape march. From: https://sites.williams.edu/engl113-f18/flagler/a-brief-history-of-rape-law/)
Today, we’re going to talk about the true origination of this movement and a few of the Black women who were among the first to openly speak about their experience with sexual violence. First though, I’d like to talk about representation and the consequences of written history. Resisting sexual violence has been around for as long as colonization has, however our knowledge of it represents the ingrained racism within our institutions. Indigenous and Black women have long been at the forefront of this struggle. When colonizers first arrived in what we now call the United States, they used sexual violence as tool for oppression, genocide, and slavery.
As we know from the conversation we had about Ida B. Wells, a key figure in this movement, the issue of sexual violence in the Black community was multi-faceted: Black men in the South were often lynched under the guise of raping White women, while Black women were raped by White men, a crime that wasn’t considered a crime because Black women didn’t have legal bodily autonomy. Still, they resisted. Traditional Indigenous laws tended to be very survivor-centric, and in the mid-1800s Black women formed women’s clubs to vocalize their experiences.
History is written by the victors, though, and the dominant narrative around the anti-rape movement continues to be one which erases this legacy. This is something that I participated in for a long time. I’m still sorting out my relationship between knowingly, unknowingly, and complicity and lately I’ve been landing on knowing I’m still complicit in this denial even though I wasn’t taught differently. That assumed passivity (“wasn’t taught” versus “didn’t take the time to learn”) denies my own agency to hold myself and my community to a higher standard, and also shows how strong the grip of White Supremacy is. When we acknowledge that gray areas can exist, we can move forward into the discomfort of the relearning.
The relearning, though, isn’t just inserting Black women into history. It’s understanding what that erasure does in the present tense, and understanding why we still rely so heavily on it. By devaluing the origin stories of the movement, we are saying that Black and Indigenous stories about rape and survival don’t merit a legitimate place in our history or in our current moment (because, remember, #metoo was started by Tarana Burke, a Black woman, in 2006). This erasure ultimately reinforces the White Supremacist sub context that Black and brown women can’t be raped and thus have nothing to advocate for.
We’re going to spend the rest of this piece talking about a few Black women who made significant contributions to the anti-violence movement: Frances Thompson, Lucy Smith, Rebecca Ann Bloom, Lucy Tibbs, Harriet Armor, Celia, and Harriet Jacobs.
From May 1st to May 3rd, 1866, White mobs terrorized the Black community in Memphis. This is 16 years before Ida B. Wells moved there to work as a journalist and co-owner of a local newspaper, and during the era of post-Civil War Reconstruction when racial tensions were ignited and Black communities faced regular violence. Memphis police officers and firefighters openly participated in the atrocities, which ended in the deaths of 46 Black folx, 285 injuries, over 100 buildings burned, and five reported rapes. Congress arrived in Memphis a month after the massacre to investigate and conduct interviews, including interviewing the five rape survivors, all Black women. This is the first time that survivors of sexual violence provided congressional testimony, which can be found in their entirety here. The congressional testimony of these women played a critical role in getting the political motivation to pass legislation to protect the civil rights of newly emancipated Black people through the passage of the 14th Amendment.
(Artist rendering of the Memphis Massacre, in Harper's Weekly May 26th, 1866. From: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/memphis-riot-1866/)
Frances Thompson was the first trans woman to testify in front of Congress. Ten years after Frances gave her congressional testimony, it was discovered that she was assigned male at birth, which made many folx discredit her testimony as well as the early civil rights movement. Frances was sent to prison where she was forced to wear male-presenting clothing and to work as part of the Memphis city chain gang. She died a few months after her release. Frances’ story resonates for us today, where Black trans women face violent transphobia on a regular basis, and comprise two thirds of all victims of fatal transgender violence. The Frances Thompson Education Fund is a scholarship fund that supports Black trans students in reaching their educational goals. I encourage you to check them out.
Lucy Smith and Frances Thompson shared a home at the time of the 1866 Massacre. Seven men broke into that home, forced Lucy and Frances to cook for them, physically and sexually assaulted them, then robbed them. Lucy was around 16 or 17 when this happened, and in addition to testifying to her own story, she identified the perpetrators as police officers and corroborated Frances’ testimony.
(One of the only known portraits of Frances Thompson. From: https://www.tftef.org/about-2)
The White police officers who entered Rebecca Ann Bloom’s and her husband’s home assumed, because she was a Black woman, that she was a sex worker. They attempted to extort money from her and forced Mr. Bloom to go down to the police station to pay a fee. When she denied being a sex worker and pointed to her marriage as evidence, they assaulted her. Rebecca Ann Bloom’s and her husband’s testimonies demonstrate a common theme felt still today: the institution of policing and the individual acts of police officers amount to both systemic and personal harm and violence. Today, sexual misconduct is the second most common form of police misconduct, after police brutality.
Lucy Tibbs was pregnant at the time of the Memphis Massacre, and lost her older brother, a Union soldier during the violence. In her testimony, Lucy named a White man, Pendergast, as murdering Black men in the street, and also acknowledged the death threats that she received from Pendergast’s son in the aftermath. Lucy was assaulted in her home while her children were sleeping. One part of Lucy’s testimony about her sexual assault that stuck out for me was when she was asked by the committee “Did you make any resistance?”. Lucy plainly responded, “No sir. The house was full of men. I thought they would kill me.” This line of questioning (“why didn’t you fight back?”) is still very prevalent for survivors giving testimony today. Lucy spoke truth to power in the face of death threats and to a committee full of victim-blaming White men who looked like the perpetrators.
(A mural of Lucy Tibbs in Memphis, TN. From: https://www.facinghistory.org/memphis-mural/lucy-tibbs)
Harriet Armor’s story reminds us of the pervasiveness of the public shaming and humiliation that survivors of sexual violence often endure, particularly as they make public what they experienced. Harriet named one of her perpetrators, and similarly to Lucy Tibbs, was questioned about whether or not she resisted. Harriet’s husband left her after the assault and the public humiliation that surrounded it and that likely followed all of the women who testified.
Now we’ll move a little back in time to the 1850s and the case of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave. This case, similar to the women who provided Congressional testimony, represents issues that we still know and see all too clearly today: racism, sexual violence, the state, and the inability of the justice system to dole out justice, particularly for Black women. Celia, a 19-year-old slave in Fulton, Missouri, was repeatedly raped by slave owner Robert Newsom over a period of five years. Celia pleaded with Robert’s daughters for help, but they did not intervene. She then took matters into her own hands, murdering Robert when he attempted to rape her in June of 1855. She was discovered, and her case went to trial. At the time, only White women could plead self-defense when they killed a perpetrator, and the judge in this case told the all-male jury that the homicide was not legally justifiable; claiming it was would have meant that Black women were not property and in fact had the right to resist. Celia was found guilty and hanged in December of 1855.
(A recent photo of the Calloway County Courthouse in Fulton, Missouri. From: https://www.courts.mo.gov/hosted/circuit13/geninfo/gi_callawaycourthouse.htm)
This video and the Celia Project link Celia’s story to the ongoing demand for justice for Black women who are victims and survivors of state violence. More broadly, the #sayhername movement, started in 2014 “brings awareness to the often invisible names and stories of Black women and girls who have been victimized by racist police violence, and provides support to their families”.
The final story we’ll talk about today is the story of Harriet Jacobs, the first woman to write an autobiographical slave narrative. Harriet was born in 1813 in North Carolina, and after the death of her first mistress, who taught her to read and write, she was willed to work in the house of James Norcom. Harriet was 13 when she arrived at this house and soon realized that Norcom was a sexual threat. In her book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet documents these advances, and her ultimate decision to avoid being raped by Norcom by forming a sexual liaison with another White man, Sawyer, who held more positional power than Norcom. She bore two of Sawyer’s children, and thought that he would purchase her and the children, however he didn’t, and she caught word that Norcom threatened to move her children to one of his even more brutal plantations. Harriet fled, rightfully thinking that without her there Norcom would lose interest in her children and eventually sell them to Sawyer.
(Norcom's reward notice for Harriet Jacobs after she fled. From: https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/harriet-jacobs-1813-1897/)
Harriet spent seven years in a tiny crawlspace above her grandmother’s, a freedwoman’s, house. Seven years, to protect her children. This article frames this as the “inherent negotiation within slavery”. Harriet eventually escaped North and was reunited with her children, whom she educated. She worked closely with the abolition movement, and vocalized the need for sexual and gender equality, in addition to the racial equality sought by often White northern abolitionists. She spoke openly about the calculations she made in situations unfathomable to White women, in which she was navigating sexual and physical violence, the quest for bodily autonomy, and freedom for herself and her children.
It’s on us to uplift these women today and to understand the ways in which their stories still ring true in our current context so that we may see both the commitment needed to break down these systems, and that the road connecting us to the past isn’t as long as we might think. Sexual violence against Black and Indigenous women, LGBTQ+ folx, and folx with disabilities continues to be a tool for oppression, as does the lack of an adequate institutional response. Our progress can’t be measured by the laws we pass nor the prosecution rates that inevitability disproportionately subject these same communities to more violence while not addressing White Supremacy as a root cause. I encourage you to engage in some of your own reading and research about this. The Black women we’ve talked about today are some of the first recorded women to speak about their experiences with sexual violence, but they certainly aren’t the only ones.
