Mae Mallory with her daughter, Patricia, in the late 1950s, when she helped lead one of ’s fi rst school desegregation battles.

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Ashley Farmer was exasperated. She was tired of reading historical accounts of the postwar black freedom struggle in America that cast black female activists only as helpmates to male leaders. Just as men had overshadowed women at the time, so had the popular narrative of the era ignored the contributions untold numbers of women made as strategists and theorists, thinkers and doers. Steeping herself in the work of scholars who were reexamining the postwar black freedom struggle and beginning to bring women out of the shadows, Farmer was intrigued to fi nd a couple of sentences about a Harlem activist named Mae Mallory in a biography of the black nationalist leader Robert F. Williams. Mallory and Williams were part of a nonviolent civil rights protest in Monroe, N.C., in August 1961 that culminated with an attack by an angry white mob. “I was primed as a scholar of black women’s history to take those two sentences and pull them out,” says Farmer, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of history

/REDUX Ashley Farmer brings to light stories of unsung African American THE NEW YORK TIMES YORK THE NEW heroines By Sara Rimer ROBERT WALKER/ ROBERT 47 \ Summer 2017 | Bostonia /

28-51 Bostonia_Su17.indd 47 6/8/17 11:46 AM and of African American studies. “I thought, there’s probably a whole book there. Someone just has to look.” So Farmer looked. She has spent the past six years piecing together Mallory’s story and the stories of other largely unsung black radical and progressive women who helped shape the post–World War II battle against racial inequality. In her forth- coming fi rst book, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, which will be published by University of North Carolina Press in spring 2018, Farmer reexamines the Black Power era through the intellectual history of those wom- en, describing the things they achieved and the many things they put at risk: their jobs, their husband’s jobs, their families’ apartments, their reputations, and even their lives. In the 1950s and ’60s, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover oversaw a massive pro- gram of illegal secret surveillance of civil rights activists across the United States, and Farmer says that Mallory and other female activists were closely watched. Because Mallory, like other black female activists, has been all but overlooked by most histo- rians, Farmer had to fi gure out where and how to look for clues. “We assume that black women don’t have ideas,” she says. For her forthcom- them. She searched archives of University, Howard University, “That’s one of the reasons we ing book, Remak- local black newspapers and dug and Morehouse College. ing Black Power: don’t know more about them.” How Black Women through grassroots organizing Farmer’s father is a psy- She scoured media archives Transformed an pamphlets and FBI records. chologist. Her mother, who died and historical accounts of the Era, Ashley Farmer Farmer is a model of scholarly when Farmer was 16, earned an spent years piec- era for what she calls “the ing together the determination. She grew up in undergraduate degree in history chance encounter” with these stories of some of Nashville in the 1980s, in a fam- from Fisk. At age 36, she enrolled women—their names men- the remarkable ily that prized education and in Meharry Medical College, but largely unsung tioned in passing, a reference black radical and medicine—and “women with graduated four years later—the to a speech they gave on a street progressive fe- strong minds and strong per- year her younger daughter was corner that someone may have male activists who sonalities,” says Farmer’s older born—and became a psychia- helped shape the written down, a meeting among post–World War sister, Sylvia Wright, an Atlanta trist. When she was growing up, activists that someone may II battle against dermatologist. The family counts Farmer says, some of her friends racial inequality. remember. She asked around four generations of physicians, also had mothers who were doc- among other scholars about going back to Farmer’s great- tors. “Some of them would tell me available oral histories and about grandfather. The men and to call them by their fi rst names,” people who might have known women graduated from histori- she recalls, “but my mother Mallory and where she could fi nd cally black colleges—from Fisk would say, ‘Don’t ever let me

48 BOSTONIA Summer 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY KELLY DAVIDSON

28-51 Bostonia_Su17.indd 48 6/8/17 11:46 AM hear you call them anything but Patricia Mallory,” she said in were inferior, inadequate, and doctor.’ She would say that they a soft voice. She was grateful just “as Jim Crow” as the elemen- worked hard for that and that I to Farmer, she said, for honor- tary school she’d attended back should show them respect.” ing her mother by telling her in Macon. It was a bold truth for a Mae Mallory and the other story. From the stage, Farmer black woman to assert in 1957, in black female activists who have thanked Patricia Mallory. And New York City, given that school long been overshadowed by the she thanked her good fortune. offi cials preferred to believe that male leaders of their era are owed She had been trying for years and segregation were that same respect, Farmer says. to track Patricia down. uniquely Southern affl ictions. “I think that I walk around with Mallory led the way as she IT STARTS an understanding of my place in and eight other Harlem mothers the world—my place in society’s WITH SCHOOLING tried, unsuccessfully, to enroll race, class, and gender construc- their children in white junior tion—in large part because they With Mae Mallory, Farmer high schools on the nearby Upper thought about this and developed uncovered the story of a coura- East Side that had better facili- a set of writings that expressed geous, radical-minded activist ties, more rigorous academics, this and that got absorbed in the who spent decades fi ghting for and more experienced teachers. public sphere and in academia,” black liberation. As a grassroots In 1957, In 1958, after petitions, letters, she says. leader of one of the fi rst school and protest marches had brought Farmer graduated from Spel- desegregation battles in New Mallory little improvement to Harlem man College with a bachelor’s York City, in the late 1950s, public education, Mallory and the degree in French and went on Mallory was one of a group of declared other mothers kept their children to Harvard University to earn Harlem mothers hailed as hero- that home from three junior high a master’s in history and a PhD ines by the black media. They schools for 156 days. They would in African American studies. As were seen as Northern sisters to Harlem’s rather go to jail, the mothers part of her research for a paper in Montgomery, Daisy said, than subject their children on the Third World Women’s Bates in Little Rock, and other public to “educational abuse.” Alliance, she interviewed female Southern black women fi ghting schools Quoting Mallory, Farmer says black activists from the 1960s against the racial caste system. the mothers’ battle for their and ’70s, including Frances Beal Mallory was born in 1927 in were just children to attend white schools and Gwendolyn Patton. “They Macon, Ga., and with her mother, “‘had nothing to do with sitting emphasized their intellectual she joined the Great Migra- “as Jim next to white folks.’” For Mallory infl uences and they said that if I tion north, arriving in Harlem Crow” as the and the other mothers, school was going to tell the story of the in the late 1930s. She worked integration was a vehicle for Third World Women’s Alliance, I in a factory as a teenager, and elementary black self-determination, pride, had to look back further,” Farmer then, like the majority of black and economic empowerment. says. “There was a cauldron of women at the time, she became school In the 1950s, Farmer says, about ideas and black women were add- a domestic worker, cleaning she had half of all black women held the ing their voices to it.” the homes of white families for lowest paid factory jobs or did In December 2016, Farmer minimal wages. As a divorced attended domestic work. In New York City, told the story of Mallory’s fi ght single mother, she raised a son the only aff ordable apartments for school desegregation in and a daughter. She plunged into back in available to black women like 1950s New York City during a grassroots organizing when she Macon, Ga. Mallory were in Harlem or other panel discussion on black women joined the fi ght for equal rights minority neighborhoods. That radicals at the Schomburg Center for blacks working in factories housing, in partnership with the for Research in Black Culture, in in the 1950s. school system’s zoning policies, Harlem. Many of the older people In January 1957—three years kept their children trapped in in- in the audience had known Mal- after the US Supreme Court ruled ferior, segregated neighborhood lory. They nodded in approval as in Brown v. Board of Education schools—schools where guidance Farmer talked about her role in that separate schools for black counselors curtailed the aspira- the early school desegregation children were inherently un- tions of black female students battle. When the panelists took equal—she made national head- by steering them toward futures questions from the audience later lines when she stood up at a New as beauticians or nurse’s aides in the evening, a 60ish woman in York City Board of Education instead of to college. a black coat took the microphone public hearing and declared that Although Mallory and the at the back of the auditorium. Harlem’s overwhelmingly black other mothers—the Harlem “I’m Mae Mallory’s daughter, and Puerto Rican public schools Nine, as they were called by the

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28-51 Bostonia_Su17.indd 49 6/8/17 11:46 AM black media—failed to enroll their children in white schools, they scored a major victory when a New York City judge ruled that their children were being pro- vided with “inferior educational opportunities by reason of racial discrimination.” The judge also ruled that while the city’s schools were not segregated by govern- ment action, as in the South, they were, nonetheless, de facto segregated. The Harlem Nine laid the groundwork for future deseg- regation battles in New York and other Northern cities. “Mallory refused to adjust to the status quo of racism and patriarchy,” says Farmer. “She developed a radical political practice that was at odds with the dominant cultural expectations of African American women. She was an organic intellectual and In 1964, a jury “…Most Negroes do not choose amount of time,” says Farmer. “I in Monroe, N.C., activist who shaped the modern convicted Mallory to lead a dog’s life—whether it is a see Mallory as a long-distance black freedom movement.” (pictured here in lap dog, hunting dog, or one from runner. She wasn’t just a fl ash in In August 1961, Mallory trav- an archival photo) the kennel,” Mallory wrote. “They the pan.” of kidnapping. The eled to Monroe, N.C., to help Wil- verdict was over- do not want scraps from the Mae Mallory was one of many. liams, president of the Monroe turned because master’s table, neither crumbs; There were untold numbers of NAACP chapter in the 1950s and of the exclusion of neither do we choose to be mas- like-minded women who helped early ’60s, host a visit from the from the jury. ters—only masters of our fates.” defi ne what Farmer calls the , the nonviolent With her supporters rallying Black Power era in post–World civil rights activists who rode in- around the cry of “Free Mae from War II America. “By Black Power, terstate buses to protest Southern the KKK,” Mallory became for I mean a political outlook that resistance to integration. A white a time an international fi gure asserts that black people have mob attacked the Freedom Riders in the . the right to self-defense, self- there, setting off a wave of racial Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, determination, and control over violence. With the Hon.’59) called for her freedom. their bodies, lives, and commu- threatening Williams’ life, and In 1964, an all-white jury in nities,” she says. “This is some- the FBI posting a warrant for his Monroe convicted Mallory in less times manifested in the right to arrest on false charges of kidnap- than 30 minutes and sentenced bear arms, but this was only one ping a white couple, Williams fl ed her to 16 to 20 years in prison. of many manifestations of Black to Cuba. Facing the same charges, She was exonerated in 1965, Power. A lot of these women were Mallory landed in a jail in Cleve- when a judge overturned her saying, ‘I’m not out to hurt any- land—where she had gone under- verdict because of the exclusion body, but you’re not going to keep ground—and spent several years of African Americans from the doing this to me without any fear fi ghting extradition to Monroe. jury. Shortly afterward, Mallory of repercussion.’” In a series of letters written to her went on a speaking tour with EXPANDING THE supporters from the Cleveland . Through the 1960s jail, Mallory explored her views and ’70s, she fought for the free- BLACK POWER ERA on black liberation, drawing dom of other black activists who on her experience cleaning the had been wrongfully imprisoned. The homes of white families in New She continued her fi ght for racial has traditionally been seen as York City apartment buildings, equality well into her old age. catalyzed by a chain of events— where signs at the front entranc- “There’s a term that historians the June 1964 murders by the Ku es warned, “No Dogs or Negroes use—long-distance runner—for Klux Klan of three civil rights allowed,” she wrote. an activist who shapes a large workers who were attempting to

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28-51 Bostonia_Su17.indd 50 6/8/17 11:46 AM register black voters in Missis- men theorized, while the women acquiesce in all sorts of ways. She sippi; the riots in Los Angeles’ organized.” notes that veteran female activ- Watts neighborhood in August The women did plenty of ists Claudia Jones, Vicki Garvin, 1965; and the moment, in June theorizing and strategizing, and Moore mentored Malcolm X 1966, when she says. They wrote articles in the 1950s and ’60s. She writes marched into Greenwood, Miss., for black newspapers and gave about Frances Beal, a member of declaring, “We’ve been saying speeches on street corners in the Student Nonviolent Coor- freedom for six years. What we’re Harlem and at Pan-African dinating Committee and the going to start saying now is black conferences in Tanzania. And, Third World Women’s Alliance, power.” Farmer is one of several she adds, while they didn’t fully and her seminal 1970 essay, historians who have been refram- succeed in overcoming the well- “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black ing the movement as part of the documented misogyny of much and Female.” Beal’s essay, Farmer larger Black Power era, one that of the black male leadership, they writes, “has become critical to began in the mid-1940s and ran For these earned the respect of many men, our understanding of how race, through the late 1970s. women, says who argued for the liberation of gender, and class work together Many female activists of the black women. to oppress people of color.” 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s Farmer Farmer, the In the 1940s and ’50s, black She examines the ways these has studied—the list includes female domestic workers were women defi ed both white and Claudia Jones, Alice Childress, struggle expected to be compliant and black male expectations of what and Audley Moore—worked wasn’t uncomplaining. It was an act of a black woman should be through as domestic help to support resistance, Farmer says, when what she and other scholars term their families. “That they were simply in 1950 Alice Childress began to the “gendered imaginary,” or domestic workers was not their frame domestic workers as radi- how men and women imagine be-all and end-all,” says Farmer. about race. cal political actors by chronicling themselves in the world. During “I’m less interested in that part It was the life of a witty, outspoken, an era when oppression subvert- of their lives. There’s a way in fi ctional Harlem domestic ed and crushed the fantasies of which we only humanize black also about worker named Mildred Johnson generations of black women, she women by proving that they did in a series of columns in the black says, Mallory and others dared the same things other people do gender radical newspaper Freedom. to imagine themselves in what in their daily lives. I’m interested and class Mildred Johnson validated and Farmer describes as a series of in them as theorists and think- emboldened a generation of black archetypal roles: “the militant ers. Many people have started to equality. female Freedom readers who were black domestic worker,” “the recognize that these women were domestic workers, says Farmer. black revolutionary woman,” fearless and brave activists, but In her book, she cites a Chil- “the Pan-African woman,” and few scholars take them seriously dress column from April 1952, the “Third World woman.” For as theorists.” where Mildred tells her friend these women, she says, the Nancy F. Cott, Harvard Univer- and fellow domestic worker, struggle wasn’t simply about sity’s Jonathan Trumbull Profes- Marge, that her white employer, race. It was also about gender sor of American History and one Mrs. C, had informed a recent and class equality. of Farmer’s advisers, says that houseguest that she “just loved” “They were challenging white Farmer has “broadened the scope Mildred and that Mildred was perceptions of womanhood,” of examining Black Power and “just like one of the family.” After Farmer says. “The militant she has found women, starting the houseguest had left, Mildred domestic worker was not the with earlier generations—with tells Marge, she set her employer ‘docile mammy’ that is supposed Audley Moore—who were articu- straight: “Mrs. C, you are a pretty to love serving whites. In the lating ideas that were core Black nice person to work for, but I ’60s, the expectations were that Power ideas combined with a wish you could please stop talk- you should be a good housewife, women-forward approach. ing about me like I was a cocker or you should take a back seat “She’s found lots of very impor- spaniel or a poll parrot or a kit- to men. The idea was that white tant women whose voices she’s ten…you don’t love me, you may womanhood is everybody’s mod- now brought out, whose take on be fond of me, but that is all. I am el, supposedly. But black women Black Power she’s illuminated,” not just like one of the family at were never going to be allowed says Cott. all. Your family eats in the dining access to that model. Like other scholars of black room, I eat in the kitchen.” “This is about black women women’s history, Farmer wants In the following decades, as defi ning, sometimes in idealistic to help revise the convention- Farmer documents in her book, terms, what womanhood means al historical framework: “that a lot of other women refused to for themselves,” Farmer says.

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