The best books about formidable Black women, whose lives mattered

I have a PhD in American history but I’m still learning about Black history that was not taught in my schools. This groundbreaking work is a prime resource and an introduction, especially for white readers like me, to Black women in American history. They include Ida B. Wells, who risked her life to launch an anti-lynching campaign in the 1890s; Mary Church Terrell, who marched in the 1913 suffrage parade and picketed the White House in 1917 and segregated restaurants in the 1950s; Mary McLeod Bethune, the highest ranking African American in the New Deal and Eleanor Roosevelt’s ally, who led her husband’s “Black Brain Trust;” and unheralded leaders, like Ella Baker, Daisy Bates, Septima Clark, and Diane Nash, who were the backbone and conscience of the civil rights movement. The common characteristic of Giddings’ subjects is unfailing courage.

Almost every book I’m highlighting was written by a Black woman, which reminds us how much experience and perspective resonate among historians, in the topics we choose and the questions we ask. Greenidge re-examines the lives of the Grimke family, best known for its daughters, Angelina and Sarah, who left their wealthy, slave-owning, Charleston, SC, family in the 1830s, to become celebrity abolitionists and suffragists. Digging deeper, Greenidge challenges their moral credibility  The sisters benefitted from the privileges of plantation profits. Their father was a notably cruel master and their brother had three sons with his enslaved concubine. The author follows their white aunts’ relationship with their nephews, whose educations they underwrote after Emancipation. The story continues into the Wilson administration and the Harlem Renaissance, tracking the harsh legacy of white supremacy on both white and Black family members and all Americans. Even reformers and allies could be more complicated and flawed than their reputations allowed.

This pathbreaking work is the first in-depth biography of Terrell (1863-1954). It challenges common stereotypes about Black women and identifies common ground among women who struggle to balance work and family. Mary Church, born during the Civil War, had two white grandfathers, who impregnated enslaved women and then allowed their offspring to marry. After Emancipation, Molly’s father became a wealthy Memphis land developer, which allowed her to attend Oberlin, earn a master’s degree, and travel in Europe. She married a graduate of Harvard and Howard Law, whom Theodore Roosevelt named the first Black justice of the peace in Washington, DC. She did not allow her distrust of Susan B. Anthony to derail her fight for Black voting rights, before and after the Nineteenth Amendment passed. A founder and the first president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, Terrell used her lace and pearls and Republican connections to fight for her whole community.  

This is the biography of the author’s grandmother, Adella Hunt Logan (1863-1915), a teacher at Tuskegee.  W.E.B. DuBois, who challenged Booker T. Washington’s vocational vision for Black Americans, gave her the title princess. Like Terrell, Logan could “pass” for white, but rarely did: to travel safely north and to have kidney surgery in a white hospital. Unlike Terrell, she was the product of her mother’s and grandmother’s longstanding, consensual relationships with slaveholders. Logan’s life was confined by racism, sexism, marriage, and motherhood, yet she urged reluctant Black women to pursue suffrage, lobbied for equal pay, and espoused reproductive rights, before her tragic death. She was the only Black lifetime member of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and the only member enrolled from Alabama. The author incorporates public records, family archives, stories handed down, and African myths to choreograph this compelling tour de force.    

This work of historical fiction appealed to me on many levels. Read the Author’s Note first, written by its white and Black co-authors. Their book explores the double life of Belle de Costa Greene (1879-1950), whom J.P. Morgan hired in 1905 as his archivist and agent, assuming she’s white. In segregated America, the engaging Belle cannot risk exposure.

“Passing,” the dangerous attempt by Black Americans to hide their identities to survive, remains controversial. Lighter complexions were usually the result of rape by white owners of enslaved women. It allowed offspring greater access to education and employment. In 1929, Nella Larsen published Passing, recently made into a movie. It ends with its “passing” protagonist leaping to her death. Larsen had worked at Tuskegee with Adella Logan, who died in a similar manner. This page-turner confronts the legacy of racism and the “one drop” rule in defining identity.