The Black women's health book : speaking for ourselves by White Evelyn C. 1954-

Author:White, Evelyn C., 1954-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: African American women, African American women, African American women
Publisher: Seattle, Wash. : Seal Press
Published: 1990-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

144 The Black Women's Health Book

the Reagan-Bush era, are a blip, like the singular precedent of Reconstruction in a long American history of affirmative action against blacks of indescribably greater magnitude. Increasingly we hear political "leaders" and read columnists who state or imply that the black community is asking government in the 1990s to assume responsibility for problems the black community brought upon itself and could and should solve itself, or that blacks are asking government for help different from or greater than that historically and currently provided other groups in the society.

Such politicians and journalists need to be reminded that we seek no more or less than what government has been willing, often eager, to do for others. They need to be reminded that the black community has always and will always do its utmost to solve its problems.

• Harriet Tubman did not wait for government to free the slaves. She made repeated journeys on her underground railroad into the Deep South to spirit out hundreds of slaves to freedom in the North. 11

• Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey revolted against slavery and paid with their lives.

• Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass used their eloquence to speak out against and resist slavery, despite beatings and threats.

• Prince Hall founded one of the oldest social organizations among Negroes in American when, on March 6, 1775, he and fourteen other Negroes chartered a Lodge of Freemasons at Boston Harbor, which mushroomed into the hundreds of Masonic lodges throughout the United States today. As early as 1776 he urged the Massachusetts legislature to support emancipation and in 1797 prodded the city of Boston to provide schools for free Negro children. Before they eventually agreed to do so, he ran a school for black children in his own house, as did many other blacks. 12

• The unwelcoming attitudes of white churches led Thomas Peel to organize independent Baptist churches, including congregations of Free Negroes in Boston and Philadelphia, and Richard Allen to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church. 13

• Black journalists excluded from white newspapers started their own, for example, Monroe Trotter's Boston Guardian. 14

• Ida Wells was one of many blacks who led the crusade against lynching. 15

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