Sara
Black woman, early 20s. Tenacious, spunky, tough and resilient. A slave woman with a fitting spirit, unwilling to be broken by her circumstances. Crafty and a sharp tongue. Slowly becoming a union spy.
Sara
S1/P3
"Don't wanna be safe. Wanna be useful."
Black Women, Agency, and the Civil War
"Enslaved women faced “formidable obstacles to freedom: limited mobility, little knowledge of geography, and concern for loved ones, further complicated by the encumbrances of escaping with young children.”3 Despite these obstacles women such as Margaret Garner and Harriet Tubman (who served as a scout and spy during the Civil War) fled slavery while managing family attachments in complex and innovative ways. Beyond plantations, women escaped to cities and towns, North and South; they fled poverty, wealth, benevolence and malevolence alike. As historian Cheryl LaRoche has argued, “although the constraints that kept women mired in captivity are well documented, their strategies for overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles to freedom are not.”
-Bell
"Long as there's a plantation, ain't none of us free."
Sara
S10/P89
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN SPIES
Black Women Intelligence Agents In The Civil War
Other than a very few famous African American women spies, little is known about the black women who gathered intelligence for the Union during the Civil War. We do know that some were former slaves and others were free women who volunteered to spy on the Confederacy, often at great risk to their own personal safety.
Sara
S1/P7
"Lease let me hold it [Abner's gun]. Show me how . So I know what it feels like to have the power of freedom in my hands."
James Baldwin's Speech on the American Dream
As part of African American History Month, Gawain Films salutes James Baldwin speech on the American Dream at Cambridge University in 1965. Some footage and music is from the National Educational Television (NET), a United States educational broadcast television network that operated from May 16, 1954 to October 4, 1970.
Scholar Karen Cook Bell
Black women faced formidable obstacles during the Civil War. Yet, they fashioned a distinct world view grounded in liberation politics that aided them as they negotiated their new lives during and after the Civil War. They confronted the power structures with the tools available to them and resisted policies that proscribed their freedom.
The Erasure Of Black Women’s Contributions: From Past To Present
Senior Contributor@Forbes Magazine
"A disturbing trend that does not get enough attention is the continued practice of taking work, ideas, and creative genius from Black women without properly crediting or citing them as the source. This is not a new practice, but with the advent of the internet, these pernicious acts are even easier to spot. This article will unpack the appropriation in more detail, highlight some lesser-known instances, examine more popular examples of this erasure, and explore what Black women can do to protect themselves."
-Asare
"I want to die like a man too."
Sara
S1/P5
The Civil War:
African-American Women
and the Civil War
Hari Jones, curator and assistant director of the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum in Washington, D.C., talked about the contributions of African-American women during the Civil War.
The Brave Black Women Who Were Civil War Spies
"From the field and slave cabin to the Confederate White House, Black women took an active role in assisting the Union military in winning the Civil War. Contemporaries recognized their service, and on the occasion of the upcoming 150th anniversary of the start of the war (April 12) and the close of Black History Month today, it’s a good time for us to recall and recognize it as well."
-McDevitt
Sara
S8/P89
ABNER looks at SARA. SARA pulls out the musket from hiding.
An unapologetic leader now.
SARA Whatever’s necessary….
Malcolm X
Excerpt from his "By Any Means Necessary" Speech
HERBERT APTHEKER
"The greatest source of military and intelligence, particularly on the tactical level, for the Federal government during the war was the Negro."
Painter Elizabeth Colomba Is Giving Art’s Hidden Figures Their Close-Up
Colomba’s painting could have been done in the 1860s. She’s a new kind of history painter, an attractive, shy, yet highly ambitious artist in her 40s, telling stories about black women—usually real but sometimes imagined—who lived in earlier eras. Her career to date has been largely under the radar, but, like Manet’s Laure, she’s on the verge of being discovered. With our increasing interest in racial identity, her current focus on redefining the role of black figures in Western painting history is catching the art world’s attention.
-Kazanjia
Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom
by Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson
Image by Bisa Butler
"We suggest that reimagining Tubman, and enslaved black women and free women of color more broadly, as historio- graphically erotic subjects opens narratives of slavery to a radical black sexual interiority."
-Lindsey and Johnson
Sara
S10/P105
SARA I stand here before you to tell you that I am no more chattel and bond. I’m barren as a forest with no trees, and thought it made a curse of me as a woman. But now I think, it made me free.
(SARA bares her breast to the audience)
SARA Not to be nursin’ your chir’ren or layin’ in your bed. Notto be governed or fondled or suckled from or auctionedoff. Only to be serving my own ideas and interests.
African American women and espionage in the Civil War
by HERBERT APTHEKER
African American women played highly visible roles in the leadership and fighting of the recent war with Iraq, but this is only the latest American military engagement to which they have contributed. During the American Civil War, African American women played active roles in securing their own freedom; they resisted and escaped from slavery, assisted Union soldiers in Southern territory, and acquired militarily sensitive information while laboring as servants in Confederate households. Some of the most fascinating contributions of African American women to the war effort involved their work as spies and scouts. Discussion of such activities in today's social studies classrooms will not only interest students but will also bring to light the significant part played by black women, in this important historic drama.
The Bible
Deuteronomy 20:2-4
image: Susie King Taylor
(Civil War Nurse)
"When you are approaching the battle, the priest shall come near and speak to the people. He shall say to them...Hear, O Israel, you are approaching the battle against your enemies today. Do not be afraid, or panic, or tremble before them, for the LORD your God is the one who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies."
Reproduction and Resistance
from the Hidden Voices Series: Enslaved Women in the Lowcountry and U.S. South
image Margaret Garner by Thomas Satterwhite Noble
"In them days the turpentine was strong and ten or twelve drops would miscarry you. But the makers found what it was used for and they changed the way of making turpentine. It ain’t no good no more."
Escaping Slavery
from the Hidden Voices: Enslaved Women in
the Lowcountry and U.S. South
image: Lucy Higgs escaping slavery from Grays Creek, Tennessee to the Union lines, June 1862 (Kathy Grant, artist)
Women more commonly partook in temporary absenteeism from their plantations by absconding, or "truanting" to the dense landscape of local woods and swamps. They fled their plantation for days, weeks, or even a few months at time, evading capture by the slave patrol. Other enslaved people could provide them with food and drink if they had access to these provisions, and Lowcountry slaves, who regularly worked gardens or patches of land to grow food, were particularly well-placed here. Frances Anne Kemble’s enslaved woman, Sarah, spent some time hiding in the woods, eluding discovery, but when tracked and brought home she "was severely flogged." Enslaved in South Carolina, Emanuel Elmore remembered being told that his mother had escaped slavery after being sold away. She supported herself by catching and cooking small animals such as rabbits and squirrels, supplemented by bread brought to her by enslaved people who knew she was hiding out in the woods.
Day-to-Day Resistance
from the Hidden Voices: Enslaved Women in the Lowcountry and U.S. South
Enslaved women’s resistance most often took the form of everyday actions in response to violent and brutal events. Like resistance as a whole, the ways in which women challenged their enslavement on a day-to-day basis existed on a spectrum of severity. Ultimately, resisting women behaved in self-preserving ways that proved detrimental to slaveowners by reducing their ability to make profits. Enslavers’ repercussions for Black people’s violent outbursts against whites were so severe that enslaved women learned to be clever, cunning, and use whatever opportunities presented themselves to resist slavery primarily from within the system itself.
Enslaved Women’s Sexual Health: Reproductive Rights as Resistance
By Crystal Webster
White merchants and enslavers’ dominance in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and in New World slavery depended upon the control and exploitation of Black women’s reproductive abilities. When enslaved women interfered in this process, as they often did at various stages, they contested the terms and logic upon which the white supremacist patriarchy depended.
During the antebellum period, enslaved women wielded their reproductive capital and fought
off white encroachment on their sexual health.
“Good Breeders”
And there were repercussions for barrenness. Young women who had not demonstrated fertility faced the possibility of separation from family as well as additional labor, as the story of Lulu Wilson’s mother illustrates. If a married couple lived together for long without having a baby, North Carolina planter Joe Fevors Cutt would force both husband and wife to choose new partners. Former slave Henry Bobbitt maintained that many marriages did not last longer than five years because if no children were born within that period, husbands and wives were expected to find other spouses.
Watch Full Movie on Amazon Prime
Colson Whitehead's 'Underground Railroad' Is A Literal Train To Freedom
by Fresh Air on NPR
I wrote 100 pages and I thought I had a good thing going, and I decided to see 12 Years a Slave, which I hadn't seen yet, and while I was able to put all the stuff on the page, seeing the movie made me really upset and I could only get through half of it. It was one thing to put my characters through the reality of slavery, and it's something different to see actual humans, they're actors, but go through some of the things I was writing about, and it was too much...
-Whitehead
'Underground Railroad' Traces The Terrible Wounds Of Slavery
In The Underground Railroad, Whitehead has created a portrayal of pre-Civil War America that doesn't shy away from the inhumanity that wounded this country, nearly mortally, wounds that still haven't healed. Whitehead proves once again that he's a master of language — there are no wasted words in the book, and it's apparent that each sentence was crafted with exacting care.
Objects of Kinship
by Mark Auslander
image by Fabrice Monteiro's Marrons Series
Four decades after Roots reconstructed a seven generation arc of descent from the Middle Passage to the Bicentennial, two significant works of art have come to public attention, reconfiguring lineage and the aftershocks of slavery in startling ways.
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Watch Full Series on Amazon Prime
Fountain Pen - History of Fountain Pens
The main flaws of quills and pens with no ink reservoir is that they must be constantly dipped in ink so they could write or draw and, because of that, they can very easily stain the surface on which they write. Fountain pen is the first solution for these problems.
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