What Does It Mean to Be a Black Feminist?

According to the academic administrator, minister, theology professor, and founder of the Center for Black Women in Church and Society, Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant (1948-), black women began to call themselves black feminists in the early to mid-1970s and spent a great deal of time differentiating between that of black feminism and ‘regular’ feminism. However, Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant noted that they did not easily identify with this term:

“...But it was not a term that was comfortable. We were not comfortable there, black feminist, you know…Okay, you take the best of the black movement and the best of the feminist movement, what does it mean to be a black feminist, well it does speak…[to] that which we draw upon to find meaning…the black world, race analysis, the woman's world gender analysis, when you're a black woman, you're impacted by both, you know. But we were never comfortable” [1].

I found Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant’s mentioning of comfortability with the term, “black feminism,” extremely intriguing, as I was perplexed by what she meant until she stated that it was Alice Walker’s In Search of My Mother’s Garden (1984) that allowed for black women to become reacquainted with a universalized, gendered experience. It was from Walker’s book that womanist tradition arose. However, according to Dr. Jacquelyn Grant, to be a womanist was still not an ‘easy’ position to regard:

“It’s not a position that you would hold high simply because one was always warned by one’s mother that that’s not acceptable behavior” [2].

The “acceptable” behavior that Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant referred to was simply being a woman, as it was not admirable to be accused of being a woman, yet Alice Walker was able to portray that sentiment and then invert it and convert it into something that strong black women courageously experience. From there on out, womanism became a more comfortable and liberating term for black women. Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant also proclaimed that the women’s movement did not solve the woman question for all kinds of women. Specifically, if it did, there wouldn’t have been the need for a more specialized fight for the rights of African American Women:

“...If that were the case there would never have been a need for folks like Septima Clark or Fannie Lou Hamer or Dorothy Cotton or any of those African American women who were involved in voter registration movement or the freedom school movement in South Carolina or any of the other board of registration movements that were established throughout the south. Woman suffrage in the 1920s meant white women's suffrage. It did not mean black women's suffrage, and so you still had in the decades to follow the very basic struggle for the right to vote for not only African American men but also African American women” [3]. What I found most remarkable about Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant’s interview was her emphasis on how minority women, specifically black women, were never allowed to participate in the women’s movement at the ground level, and this, therefore, never gave black women a fair chance at defining the movement in terms of their best interest as well [4]. This is one of the reasons why it became important to address the “distinction between what African American women were concerned about and what white women were addressing in their "white middle-class movement” [5].

HistoryMaker Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant

Black feminism, when considered “a lens [or] framework for understanding the world, including the African American experience” [6], as stated by black women’s studies professor and scholar who founded the Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center and co-founded SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1946), becomes a tool that everyone, beyond women, can use. In discussions about feminism, I always find the emphasis on how it should be used as a tool the most generative consideration of it because it allows for it to beyond theory and towards something that can measure and pinpoint gendered relations and gendered oppressions across time. 

HistoryMaker Beverly Guy-Sheftall

I found professor, art critic, and winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for criticism and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Negroland (2015), Margo Jefferson’s (1947-) explanation for the need for black feminism and what it means to be a black feminist extremely revelatory: 

“ …These kinds of expansions and broadenings… were absolutely critical. Plus… the analysis of…gender and racism…do not cancel each other out…So, you know, our particular history and position needed its own analysis. And, yes, I absolutely consider myself a feminist” [7].

HistoryMaker Margo Jefferson

Student Ambassador Update: 

This week, the student ambassadors each revisited our outreach plans for the 2022-2023 school year and spent more time fine-tuning our plans for our Black History Month Contest across various campuses. After our weekly meeting, I was able to get a better understanding of how I might go about launching my contest idea on Howard’s campus as well as a potential exhibition or celebratory event for it as well. I began to draft a proposal for this event and will turn it into the appropriate contact by the end of the upcoming week. 

Notes

[1] Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant (The HistoryMakers A2003.183), interviewed by Larry Crowe, August 12, 2003, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 4, story 9, Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant explains womanism, pt. 1.

[2] Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant. 

[3]  Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant. 

[4] Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant (The HistoryMakers A2003.183), interviewed by Larry Crowe, August 12, 2003, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 5, story 3, Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant explains the need to articulate a specifically black feminism.

[5] Reverend Dr. Jacquelyn Grant. 

[6] Beverly Guy-Sheftall (The HistoryMakers A2007.255), interviewed by Denise Gines, September 11, 2007, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 12, Beverly Guy-Sheftall talks about the importance of feminism.

[7]  Margo Jefferson (The HistoryMakers A2017.007), interviewed by Harriette Cole, January 20, 2017, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 5, story 12, Margo Jefferson talks about the women's movement.