Ruthe Winegarten - Brave Black Women. From Slavery to the Space Shuttle

Copyright 1997 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 1997

This book is adapted for young readers from Ruthe Winegartens Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, TX 787137819.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winegarten, Ruthe.

Brave Black women : from slavery to the space shuttle / Ruthe Winegarten and Sharon Kahn. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Adaptation of: Black Texas women. 1995.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-292-79106-2 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-292-79107-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Afro-American womenTexasHistoryJuvenile literature. 2. TexasHistory18461950Juvenile literature. 3. TexasHistory1951 Juvenile literature. [1. Afro-AmericansTexasHistory. 2. WomenTexasHistory. 3. TexasHistory.] I. Kahn, Sharon, 1934 . II. Winegarten, Ruthe. Black Texas Women. III. Title.

E185.93.T4B563 1997

305.48'960730764dc20

9635614
AC

Design by Elizabeth Towler Menon

, clockwise from top right: Mae Jemison (NASA); Ethelyn Taylor Chisum (Texas/Dallas History Archives Division, Dallas Public Library); Anne Lundy (photo by Jeff St. Mary, courtesy Anne Lundy); Barbara Jordan (Houston Chronicle); Bessie Coleman (Smithsonian Institution); Phylicia Rashad (Adept New American Museum, Mount Vernon, N.Y.); chopping cotton (photo by Dorothea Lange, Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations). Center: Carlette Guidry (copyright Susan Allen Camp, Womens Athletics Division, University of Texas at Austin).

ISBN 978-0-292-75735-6 (e-book)

ISBN 978-0-292-78555-7 (individual e-book)

BRAVE BLACK WOMEN

FROM SLAVERY TO THE SPACE SHUTTLE

Ruthe Winegarten and Sharon Kahn

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
AUSTIN

Preface

I wont know what the next step is until I get there. I know that when I went to Boston, and Austin, and Washington, I took with me everything I had learned before. And thats what I will do this time. Thats the point of it, isnt it? To bring everything you have with you wherever you go.

BARBARA JORDAN spoke these words to studentsher favorite audience. Though she was a legislator, an orator, and a great American leader, her role as teacher was the most important one, and she taught us all. Barbara Jordan died as this book was being written, and it is her spirit which breathes life into its chapters.

Barbara Jordan told us in the words above that the point of life is to bring everything you have with you wherever you go. Though she was a child of the twentieth century, she brought with her the rich heritage of all the brave black women who had gone before her and who worked alongside her. As she succeeded in the world, she took with her everything she had learned before. What she brought with her is what this book is all about.

The great poet W. B. Yeats wrote:

O chestnut-tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

(Among School Children, 1928)

Like the chestnut tree, Barbara Jordan sprang from the great roots of African American women who nourished this country for three centuries through slavery to freedom. She is a part of them, and they of her. Brave Black Women tells us their stories and shows us their photographs, emphasizing the black women of Jordans home state of Texas, whose legacy she inherited. Many of them, along with Jordan, achieved national fame.

Barbara Jordan said, I get from the soil and spirit of Texas the feeling that I, as an individual, can accomplish whatever I want to, and that there are no limits, that you can just keep going, keep soaring. I like that spirit.

Dignity marks these lives with a graceful step, uniting Barbara Jordan and those who came before her. Join us as we follow, in pictures and words, the dancer and the dance.

Ruthe Winegarten and Sharon Kahn, 1996

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the excellent editorial assistance of Dr. Dorothea Brown, Dr. Nancy Baker Jones, and Frieda Werden.

We thank our family members for their love and support: David, Suzanne, and Jon Weizenbaum and Nancy Nussbaum; and Debbie Winegarten, Marc Sanders, and Martha Wilson.

Our editor at U.T. Press, Theresa J. May, believed in the value of this book and has lent constant encouragement, for which we are most appreciative.

CHAPTER 1

Slavery: Overcoming Fear

As you listen to these words of Abraham Lincoln, relate them to the concept of a national community in which every last one of us participates:As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of a democracy.

BARBARA JORDAN

Slave women worked without pay. Former slave Mariah Carr of Marshall demonstrates the spinning wheel. During the Civil War, she spun thread for long hours to make clothes for the Confederate soldiers.

WHAT WAS SLAVERY LIKE?

BRAVE black women endured years of slavery until the end of the Civil War. Their own lives, and those of their families, belonged to the slave owners. These masters and mistresses controlled their slaves actions during the workday.

Even at night and on the weekends, slave women often worked, washing, ironing, spinning thread, and sewing. Despite many hardships, slaves remembered and continued their African traditions, where women were honored and respected as they grew older and wiser.

Have you ever picked up a big dog weighing fifty pounds? Was the load so heavy you almost dropped it? Slave children worked in the fields picking cotton. The sacks they filled could hold as much as fifty pounds. Some women picked three hundred or sometimes four hundred pounds of cotton a day, as much as the men. The children worked beside them, filling sacks made in a smaller size. They had to work fast and keep picking, even when they were hot, tired, and sleepy. Sometimes they were hungry and thirsty, too, and frightened of the overseer, the slaves boss. They didnt have much time to play. Children as young as five or six also baby-sat for infants and toddlers, gathered firewood, swept the yard, and tended animals.

Chopping cottonmeans hoeing to get the weeds out. Slave women and sharecroppers worked hard in the cotton fields from sunup to sundown. They planted, chopped, or picked depending on the season.

Clara Anderson was six years old when she and a girl friend were captured by a white man. It was Christmas Day, 1843. They were stolen from their parents in Maryland and brought to Texas as slaves. Clara was badly mistreated. Years later, she remembered her many troubles:

This all happened in Austin, Texas. The folks would give me a little to eat, and half the time I was almost starved to death. There was some little Jewish children who lived nearby, and every day when they would come from school, theyd leave me some food. Theyd hide this food in a tree-stump, where Id go and git it. Those children would bring me buttered bread, cakes, and other things