The Revolutionary Column is a radical space for liberatory politics.
Of course Black women stood on business with our ballots in November’s presidential election. We are the founding mothers of democracy in America. When the idea of democracy was left up to the Founding Fathers, those white colonizers who President-elect Donald Trump and conservatives idolize so much, only white men who owned property were guaranteed the right to vote in this country. Only those land– and slave– owning, white Protestant, English-speaking men of British descent were considered to be created equal.
Black women’s visionary leadership and persistent demands for more liberal and inclusive interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution created the opportunity for the 153 million people — and counting — to vote in the historic 2024 presidential election. Those millions of voters include ballots from Americans of different races, socio-economic classes, religions and education levels.
White men and women did exactly what we knew they would do. Black men are the only men who favored feminism over fascism by overwhelmingly backing Black women’s call to elect Vice President Kamala Harris as the country’s first woman president. Our community showed the most unity despite the popular narrative that we are the most internally conflicted.
Everyone else who chose to align themselves with Trump’s fascist agenda to make racism in America great again will quickly learn. It is, and has always been, in the best interest of those who believe in freedom and democratic accountability to follow Black women’s political lead.
History has proven this, time and time again. Let’s talk about how the thankless and tenacious work of Black women gave y’all the freedom and enfranchisement that you enjoy today — at least, before y’all’s incoming president slowly takes it all away.
Black women shaped the revolutionary anti-slavery politics adopted by the “Radical Republicans”
Let’s start with the American Revolutionary War. In the 1770s, white colonists decided an armed insurrection against Great Britain was necessary to gain their political independence and right to self determination. And Black women played the long game.
Those same freedom-loving American patriots were our enslavers and rapists who also owned, bought, tortured and sold our children. We wanted liberty or death, too. Black women risked their lives to rescue themselves and their children from bondage while their slave masters were preoccupied with battle.
An estimated 33,000 runaways who fled slavery during the Revolutionary War were women, according to Dr. Karen Cook Bell, a historian and author of Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America. And that was a whole generation before the legendary abolitionist Harriet Tubman was even born in 1822.
Black women issued their own declaration of independence and rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness through collective fugitivity. During the Antebellum Period (1812-1861), free and fugitive Black women in northern states– such as Massachusetts and Vermont, where slavery was already abolished– learned to read and write, and were instrumental in shaping and expanding the abolitionist movement that was born in recognition of the hypocrisy of slave owning in a country founded on the ideals of individual rights and fundamental freedoms.
It was Black women — not Abraham Lincoln — who first used the rhetoric of the American Revolution to denounce the practice of chattel slavery as anti-Christian, anti-democracy and anti-American. Massachusetts became the first state to outlaw slavery in 1783 after Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman, found an attorney to successfully file a lawsuit for and win her freedom by arguing that the state’s 1780 constitution, which said that all men were born free and equal, rendered her enslavement illegal.
A northern, free-born Black woman named Maria W. Stewart, whose radicalization process started with learning to read the Bible, is considered the mother of abolition feminism. In 1832, she was the first known American woman of any race to publicly address an audience of both men and women — something that was considered “promiscuous” at the time. America was only 56 years old, and Stewart was only 28 years old at the forefront of the country’s next great socio-political revolution.
During this time, Stewart spoke to an interracial and co-ed audience of abolitionists about the need for moral and just white men and women. She asked them to join forces with somewhat-free Black men and women in slavery-prohibited states in order to support enslaved Black men and women by creating and sustaining a movement capable of actualizing what she saw as God’s will for all Americans to be fully free, regardless of race or gender.
In the 1830s, slave states started strengthening their anti-literacy laws, prohibiting the education of both enslaved and free Black people, out of fear that learned laborers would demand liberation and lead more revolts like Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Virginia. As critical resistance to the new wave of repressive legislation, Stewart published writings exploring race, gender, theology and democracy in white journalist William Lloyd Garrison’s weekly antislavery newspaper The Liberator, the era’s most radical, influential and consistent abolitionist periodical. Book bans and attacks on public education and critical race theory are today’s anti-literacy legislation.
Black women like Stewart shaped the revolutionary anti-slavery politics that were later adopted by the “Radical Republicans,” including demands for not only immediate emancipation, but also equal civil rights protections for Black Americans and legal immigrants. The Radical Republicans were a small but mighty faction of the Republican Party, which was the most progressive party at the time, and they were responsible for writing the Reconstruction Acts legislation that required southern states adopt new constitutions prohibiting slavery: including universal male suffrage, and granting birthright citizenship to former slaves. Democrats and Republicans gradually started to switch ideological platforms in the 1870s after the Reconstruction Era, then drastically in the 1930s during the Great Depression.
Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, one of the more militant Radical Republicans, went so far as to propose a reparations plan to confiscate plantations from their owners and redistribute the land to freedmen. He argued that President Abraham Lincoln didn’t go nearly far enough to protect Black citizens and punish their former enslavers. Stevens was rumored to have been in a longtime romantic relationship with Lydia Hamilton Smith, a free Black woman and abolitionist who he hired as a housekeeper to manage his homes and businesses. I’m willing to bet that she also played a key role in directing his political agenda.
The Republican Party of today is currently fighting against every amendment to the Constitution that the Radical Republicans of the 1860s fought for. In November, Californians voted on Election Day to continue to allow slave labor as punishment for state prisoners pursuant to a penal exception clause in the 13th amendment and their state constitution. Ongoing attacks against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) erode the equal civil and legal protections granted to Black and immigrant citizens by the 14th amendment. And tough-on-crime policies that exacerbate mass incarceration continue to be a great barrier to Black men actualizing their 15th amendment right to vote.
Slavery depended on the white man’s right to control Black women’s bodies
We can’t forget that also, during the Antebellum Period, America was expanding its territory and terrorism of Indigenous populations westward across the continent while adding new slave states to its empire.
Before President Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, there were 11 free states and 11 slave states in the Union. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States, acquiring approximately 827,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River. By the end of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the U.S. had gained the majority of western land, including Texas, California, Nevada, and Utah.
Pioneer abolition feminists like Stewart and Sojourner Truth were demanding immediate emancipation in the already existing slave states such as South Carolina and Mississippi. Slave states and free states back then would’ve been the equivalent of red states and blue states today. Increasing the number of slave states meant increasing the number of pro-slavery senators who would protect the interests of slaveholders in Congress and dominate national politics. Legislators kept the peace as long as they could by trying to balance the admittance of new slave states and new free states into the Union.
The question of slavery itself was a question of Black women’s reproductive rights. Enslaved women were forced to breed generations of slave laborers with whatever men their masters decided, and they had no say in the child’s rearing or education. Slavery exploited all Black peoples’ productive labor, but chattel slavery was unique in its greedy and opportunistic commodification of Black women’s reproductive labor. For centuries, our childbearing was this country’s cash cow.
Sojourner Truth was a teenager in West Park, New York in 1815 when her slave master forced her to start having children, a.k.a. producing more slaves, with another Black enslaved man he owned. When the New York Anti-Slavery Law was fully enacted in 1827, Truth’s former master spitefully and illegally sold her 5-year-old son into slavery in the South, where it was still legal. Her fight to get him back made Truth the first Black woman to successfully sue a white man in this country.
Truth became one of the most outspoken advocates for abolition and for women’s rights in the years leading up to the American Civil War (1861-1865). You’d think that with the women’s rights movement happening at the same time as the abolitionist movement, there would have been strong solidarity between the two progressive groups struggling against white male supremacy as their common enemy. Wrong. Black women and white women were at bitter odds. They’ve always been our biggest opps.
White women’s progressive politics have never stood much of a chance against their inherent racism. The white feminist movement in America was born out of a desire to preserve white supremacy and strengthen white families through the exclusive empowerment of white Protestant women who had always unequivocally supported their men’s leadership.
Black women held both sides down despite both feminism and racism trying to hold them back. Sojourner Truth openly opposed white suffragist Susan B. Anthony’s position that white women’s suffrage should come before the abolition of slavery, and she also split with abolitionist Frederick Douglass over his argument that formerly enslaved men should vote before women. Truth’s unpopular opinion was that emancipation, white women’s suffrage and voting rights for all formerly enslaved people should happen simultaneously. Black women have always been this country’s most principled and progressive patriots.
Black women are the most pro-life and the most pro-liberty Americans despite everything our fellow countrymen have done to deny our pursuit of happiness. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened the gates to civil rights for Latino Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans and everybody else in this country.
In addition to prohibiting racially motivated discrimination in voting, the Act also eliminated racially motivated national-origin immigration quotas that favored immigrants from northern and western Europe — thereby drastically changing the racial makeup of this country.
And there would have been no Voting Rights Act of 1965 were it not for community organizer Fannie Lou Hamer, who was radicalized in 1961 after a white doctor in Mississippi gave her an unnecessary hysterectomy without her consent.
At the time, the forced sterilization of poor Black women in the South was such common practice that the procedure became known as a “Mississippi Appendectomy.” A 1973 lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of the Relf sisters, 12- and 14-year-old Black girls, exposed that an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 poor people — mostly Black and indigenous poor women and girls — were sterilized annually under federally funded programs. Now all of a sudden the government is so pro-life. Black women aren’t fools.
Hamer was fired from her job, evicted from her home, shot at by the Ku Klux Klan, arrested, brutally beaten by police who left her with permanent injuries, and harassed daily by white terrorists for her work registering Black voters and laying the groundwork for the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Her resilience was resistance to the resurgence of white supremacist intrusion into Black women’s reproductive lives.
Now here we are again in 2024. In an iniquitous twist of fate, it was voters of color who played a significant role in catapulting Trump to victory and helping white nationalists regain control of the country.
Having more citizens and voters of color was supposed to help Black Americans strengthen our defense against racial fascism and push the country forward— not set us back. Playing in our face like this is crazy.
I don’t care how you feel about the Black woman who was at the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket, this election was about the Black women at the bottom of the totem pole, who will inevitably suffer most from Trump’s policies.
The Democratic Party’s leadership failures doesn’t absolve anyone — especially members of the so-called progressive movement or radical left — from their failure to show up for Black women. There has never been a progressive or radical movement in this country without us. And any movement going forward that does not heed Black women’s leadership is just as sure to fail as the Democrats.
We put blood, sweat and tears into trying to salvage America’s experiment with democracy. We did our best. Now it’s time for Black women to focus on saving ourselves. No one is coming to our rescue. And that’s OK. For centuries, we’ve been our own greatest champions. And we’ve always been enough. Onward, sis.
