nancy weston

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with friends like these….

Nancy Weston

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She lived in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1850s as a free woman. However, in order to satisfy the laws of the state, she was a ‘nominal slave’ legally owned by a white friend. She was also the grandmother of writer Angelina Weld Grimke.

‘The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present’ edited by Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22067139@N05/3397121950/

I would love to write a book or a screenplay based on this one sentence: she was a ‘nominal slave’ legally owned by a white friend.   That has really got my imagination going.  I’ve actually never heard of nominal slaves before.  I read a bit about them today.  Interesting stuff.  Most of what I read was connected to writings pertaining to black slave owners, and the Weston name in S. Carolina came up frequently.  But Nancy was ‘owned’ by a white friend.  I am fascinated.

From http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2821/before-the-civil-war-were-some-slave-owners-black

Between 1800 and 1830 slave states began restricting manumission, seeing free blacks as potential fomenters of slave rebellion. Now you could buy your friends, but you couldn’t free them unless they left the state — which for the freed slave could mean leaving behind family still in bondage. So more free blacks took to owning slaves benevolently. Being a nominal slave was risky — among other things, you could be seized as payment for your nominal owner’s debts. But at least one state, South Carolina, granted nominal slaves certain rights, including the right to buy slaves of their own….

We do, however, need to acknowledge a less common form of black slaveholding. Whites in Louisiana and South Carolina fostered a class of rich people of mixed race — typically they were known as “mulattoes,” although gradations such as “quadroon” and “octoroon” were sometimes used — as a buffer between themselves and slaves. Often the descendants and heirs of well-off whites, these citizens were encouraged to own slaves, tended to side with whites in racial disputes, and generally identified more with their white forebears than black. Nationwide maybe 10 percent of the mixed-race population (about 1 percent of all those identified as African-American) fell into this category.

golden arches

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I have already admitted on here that I love McDonald’s.  I understand just how much is wrong with McDonald’s.  I fancy myself a pretty health conscious person, so this McD’s thing gets filed in my ‘contradictory feelings’ folder.  It’s like my kid self just loves that place so much, but my adult self knows better, but that childlike spark ignites everytime I see the golden arches.  It will not be extinguished.  I can trace this love back to my third birthday party.  Held at the McDonald’s in the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit.  I remember it well.  This picture was taken there.

img008You can see an old school McD’s cup on the table behind me.  My cake had a sugar Ronald McDonald on it and I saved him for as long as I could.  Like he was a doll.  Or my friend.  I have a vivid memory of looking at that thing in the car ride on the way home from the party.  Anyway, I think the love started in November of 1979.  I also think that in the years to come McDonald’s was something that crossed the cultural lines that I couldn’t really understand, but couldn’t help perceiving.  Black people and White people enjoyed McDonald’s.  I would go there with my mom and with my dad long after they stopped going anywhere together.  I have fond memories of both grandmothers taking me there.  McDonald’s was dependable.  Happy Meals made me happy.  McDonald’s provided common ground is what I think I’m trying to say.

While preparing for this blog post I came across this great article on retrojunk.com http://www.retrojunk.com/details_articles/4432/.  So many memories invoked by the pictures.  They just don’t make playlands like they used to.  I’d forgotten how elaborate they could be.  Here are a few of my fav pics from retrojunk.

happymealgang

mcdhappybdaymat

mcdonaldscharacters

You’ll also find the history of Grimace in there.  I love Grimace.

grimace

dr. charlotte hawkins brown

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Here’s another great story.  This woman was amazing.  I can imagine no nobler task than “establishing for Negro youth something superior to Jim Crowism.”  Her influence must have been so great on those she encountered.  I would love to talk with her about today’s “negro youth.”  What she would have imagined and hoped things would be like in 2009 and how that differs from the current reality.  

Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown

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Above is a photo from her wedding in 1912.
**********************
[b. 1870 – d. 1961]

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was born in Henderson, North Carolina, but grew up in Massachusetts after her family moved from the South. She was educated in Boston and had planned to finish her college education when two events changed her life.

First, she met Alice Freeman Palmer, a prominent New England woman, who was so impressed by Hawkins’ determination to get an education that she became Brown’s benefactor. Then, in 1901, Brown returned to the South to teach in a country school that was supported by a Northern missionary society in the town of Sedalia, North Carolina.

Quote: “I have devoted my life to establishing for Negro youth something superior to Jim Crowism”

She arrived during the worst years of the Jim Crow era. Blacks had been disfranchised as well as segregated and there was little money available for black schools. When the school’s funding ended after two years, Brown decided to remain in Sedalia to start her own school. She went north to raise money and returned with $100, which she used to open the Palmer Memorial Institute, an academic and industrial school for African Americans, in 1902.

Brown’s life was a balancing act. She passionately hated segregation and continually sought ways around it. When she went to town to visit her doctor or lawyer, she would arrange to enter into their office immediately upon her arrival. Thus, she avoided sitting in the Jim Crow section of the waiting room. When her students went to the movies or other cultural events, she would rent the theater for the day so that they did not have to sit in the “colored” section.

To raise funds for the school, she wrote letters to potential supporters. Her students learned French, Latin, and other academic subjects. Brown prepared her students to be leaders of their race.

In addition to building her school, Charlotte Hawkins Brown was active in the women’s club and suffragist movements. She later became president of the North Carolina Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and she helped organize voter registration drives for black women and tried to get white club women to back suffrage for black women.

She saw herself as part of the freedom struggle that was taking place in the black community. The Palmer Institute became an educational success and remained open until a decade after her death, in 1961.

Charles W. Wadelington and Richard F. Knapp, ‘Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute; What One Young African American Woman Could Do.’

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22067139@N05/2642553943/

viola desmond

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Here’s one of those Black Women stories.  Maybe Canada’s not as not-racist as they say.

 

Viola Desmond didn’t set out to make history, but she did (1946)

2562673380_a23de368ca2[b. 1914 – d. 1965]

Viola Desmond was a successful 32-year-old Halifax entrepreneur when her car broke down in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. She decided to go to a movie at the Roseland Theatre while the car was being serviced.

It was November 8, 1946, and she was about to make history.

Desmond requested a ticket for the main floor of the theatre, paid for it, went in and sat down. Although it was not posted anywhere to see, the theatre’s policy was that persons of colour had to sit in the balcony.

When ordered to move, Desmond replied that she couldn’t see from the balcony, that she had paid to sit on the main floor, and that she would stay there. The manager ran out of the theatre and got a policeman. Together, the two men carried Viola Desmond into the street, injuring her knee and hip in the process.

She spent that night in the town jail. No one informed her of her rights, she was not allowed parole, and she was incarcerated in the same jail block as male prisoners. Determined to maintain her dignity, she sat bolt upright, wearing her white gloves, for the entire night.

In the morning – without representation, without understanding that she could question the witnesses against her, without even having been told that she could have a lawyer – she was tried and found guilty: tax evasion.

She had not paid the extra one cent tax on a ticket for a seat on the main floor of the theatre. She had paid for a less expensive seat in the balcony. That she had requested the floor seat, that she had no way to know that Blacks were restricted to the balcony, that she believed she had paid for the ticket on the first floor, that she offered to pay the difference, that she had been assaulted, injured, held then tried in irregular and perhaps illegal ways – it made no difference.

The sentence: 30 days in jail or a fine of $20, plus $6 to the manager of the theatre – one of the two men who had carried her out so roughly. She paid.

The doctor who treated her injuries recommended that Desmond get a lawyer. After discussing her arrest and trial with friends, she decided to challenge the verdict in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia. In its decision, although one of the four judges, Justice Hall, referred in passing to the race issue, he agreed with the other three judges that no error in law had occurred in the original trial. The court unanimously upheld the verdict. The conviction stood.

The unspoken, unacknowledged truth: Viola Desmond was found guilty of being a Black person who had stepped out of her assigned place in society.

This resounding defeat in the courts left her discouraged. Her marriage – already strained by her business success – did not survive the trial. Desmond’s husband thought she was making a fuss over a matter that didn’t warrant it.

She did have significant supporters. And her stand had helped to build something much bigger.

The Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NSAACP) – aided by Viola’s friends, newspaper publisher Carrie Best and activist Pearleen Oliver campaigned to raise money. After the appeal, her lawyer, Frederick Bissett – a white man from Halifax – donated his fees back to the NSAACP.

With these funds, the fight Viola had started could continue. Vigorous further action by Best, Oliver, community members, and the NSAACP led finally to the repeal of segregation policies in Nova Scotia in 1954 – more than a year before Rosa Parks’s action in Montgomery, Alabama, helped bring the civil rights movement in the U.S. into sharp media focus.

Viola Desmond grew up in a prosperous family in Halifax. She decided early to be a hairdresser, one of the few professions open to an ambitious, independent-minded black woman. Unable to gain admission to a hairdressing school in Nova Scotia, she trained in Montreal, New York and Atlantic City.

Back in Halifax, Viola married and opened her first salon, where she specialized in hair styles and treatments tailored for her community. Beauty shops had become a major social gathering place in the 1930s, soon after salons first appeared. After a few years in business, she founded a school to train other beauticians. Her dream was to open a chain of salons across Canada – salons staffed by people she trained, specializing in Black women’s hair.

After the trial, Viola gave up her salon and her ambition of a chain of salons across the country. She went to Montreal to business school, then moved to New York to set up a new business, this time as an agent for performers. Very shortly after she arrived in New York, Viola Desmond died at the age of fifty.

Viola Desmond Unintentional Revolutionary
by Frances Rooney

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/22067139@N05/2562673380/

vintage black women

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black-rose

black-women1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While searching for photos of black women with long, long hair I stumbled upon this great flickr photostream entitled BlackWomen  http://www.flickr.com/photos/22067139@N05/sets/72157603627219253/.  Some of the photos have biographical info.  Maybe I’ll post some from time to time.

vintage-black-women-with-cameranative-and-african-american

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

group-of-vintage-black-women

 

africa-for-christ1sash reads “Africa for Christ”