Women's History Month

Women's History Month 2021 ends today. As with Black History Month, I pray that someday soon we won't need a special month to call attention to the contributions made by people other than White males; I hope that we will see them as part of our history, period. And that we will read about them in our history books and celebrate them all year long. 

In the meantime, where even to begin? There are so many great women to recognize. So many who have been profiled this month. Here are a few great women -- some famous, some not so well known -- who have been uppermost in my mind lately. 

American educator, journalist, anti-lynching activist, and suffragist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) was born into enslavement during the Civil War. Orphaned after the war, she became sole parent to her younger brothers and sister. She was one tough woman. She enrolled at Shaw University (now Rust College) as a young teen but was expelled for starting a dispute with the college president (she later attended Fisk University, one of the most prominent historically Black colleges and universities, and alma mater of the late Congressman John Lewis; Fisk remains affiliated with my religious denomination, the United Church of Christ). 

Ida B. Wells was a spiritual grandmother to Rosa Parks. In 1883 she was removed from a train for her refusal to move to another car because of her race. Undaunted by Jim Crow laws, 20-year-old Ida Wells sued the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southern Railroad Company  for unfair treatment. Represented by Memphis' first Black lawyer, Thomas Frank Cassels, she won her case; the railroad paid the damages awarded to her. The decision was overturned on appeal, but Ida Wells had made her point. She would be neither abused nor silenced. I hear her brave voice when I read her testimony.

When her friend was lynched, Wells did not look away from the horror. She turned her considerable talent as a writer and her unwavering courage to the task of making us all see it. She investigated the real reasons for a number of lynchings, publishing her findings in pamphlets and local newspapers. In 1892 a mob of enraged locals burned her printing press and drove her out of Memphis. She relocated to Chicago, where she lived the rest of her life. In 1895 she married, and she and her husband had four children. She found a way to balance motherhood with her career as an activist. 

Activism was never easy for her, but Ida Wells-Barnett persevered. On March 3, 1913, women suffragists from around the country gathered in Washington, D.C. to march down Pennsylvania Avenue on the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration as president.  As the only Black member of the Illinois delegation, Wells-Barnett was asked to march at the back of the procession to avoid a scene. Of course she refused. Instead, she found a way to step out in front and lead her state's delegation. In a great bending of the arc of justice, I am proud that my local high school -- formerly named for Woodrow Wilson -- has just been renamed for this brave woman.

Fisk alumna Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005) was the first Black woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court (she won nine of the ten she eventually argued), and the first to receive a lifetime appointment as a federal judge. President Lyndon Johnson named her to the District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1966. I was unsurprised to see her there when I arrived in Manhattan twelve years later to begin my own legal career. I wish I had known then what I well know now, that I was in the presence of greatness when I appeared before her. 

I was not alone in my ignorance, though. Despite her extraordinary and transformative achievements, Judge Motley remains a largely unsung hero, upstaged by the men around her. While she was a student at Columbia Law school, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall hired her to work at the NAACP's legal office. As a lawyer, she occasionally represented Martin Luther King, Jr., helped write the briefs in Brown v. Board of Education, and helped James Meredith gain admission to the University of Mississippi. Medgar Evers and his family hosted her on her many visits to Mississippi on that case.

In addition to her law clerks, Judge Motley quietly mentored countless Black women lawyers and judges over the course of her long career. They help carry on her legacy today. When she died, an obituary reported that "her hope as a judge was that she would change the world for the better." That she did. Sung or unsung, she was a hero for all Americans.

Wilma Mankiller (1945-2010) was a lifelong community activist. She was a mother, the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, and recipient of the Medal of Freedom. The organizers of the 2017 Women's March on Washington cited her as one of the most important leaders in America's movement for equality, but she described herself as simply "a pretty ordinary person given an opportunity to do extraordinary things in my life." Aren't we all? The question is whether we rise to the occasion. Wilma Mankiller showed us how to do it. And that we can.

Robin Rue Simmons was elected alderman of the City of Evanston, Illinois' Fifth Ward in 2017. Focused upon improving lives and expanding opportunities for Black residents of her ward, she successfully led the passage of the nation's first municipal reparations program. On March 22, the Evanston aldermen approved the first expenditures of the $10 million Restorative Housing Reparations program, which is designed to compensate Black residents for the ongoing effects of codified discrimination. Ald. Simmons called the $400,000 housing grant program a first step in "the road to repair and justice." She is leading us on that road.

The road to justice is a long one, and we cannot see the end of it. While I pray it will be otherwise, I don't expect to see it in my lifetime. But that's all the more reason to learn our history and, like Judge Motley, to do our best to "change the world for the better." 

There's no shortage of heroes to lead us now. Women like Willie Poinsette, who co-founded Respond to Racism to offer a safe space, education, and practical tools to interrupt the racism of her adopted hometown of Lake Oswego, Oregon. Or Portland lawyer Edie Rogoway, a humanitarian force of nature whose latest act of radical kindness is to help seniors navigate the maze of registering for their COVID-19 vaccinations. This article just gives the beginning of the story; since it was published, Edie has relentlessly focused her attention on finding vaccine opportunities around Oregon for BIPOC seniors and enabling them to get to the appointments. Or my law school classmate Peggy Nagae, who represented Minoru Yasui in reopening his WW II Japanese exclusion case, served on the Japanese American Citizens League National Redress Committee, which formulated the federal legislation for Japanese reparations, and was appointed by President Clinton to the board that administered those grants. She continues to work toward dismantling White supremacy and empowering women as a Senior Consultant to White Men as Full Diversity Partners.

I'll close with praise for women of all ages who not only make history but document it. Women like young Mya Gordon, founder of her high school Equity Council and documentary filmmaker. Her 2020 film, "Lake 'No Negro',"  examines Lake Oswego's racist past and present and lifts up the voices of Willie Poinsette and others who want to address it. Or Mikki Kendall, whose bestselling collection of essays, Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot, explains how marginalized women have been excluded from efforts to eliminate race, gender, and class as stereotypes. In carrying on the tradition of Ida Wells-Barnett, Gordon and Kendall help ensure that truth will be told, and that we will be empowered to be the change we want to see.

Today is the last day of Women's History Month, but every day is Women's History Day; "women's history" is simply human history. So let us continue to pay attention to the heroes and historians upon whose shoulders we stand and those in our midst today. And on the 17th anniversary of her death, I pay special tribute today to one of the strongest women I have ever known. Thank you, Mom. I miss you.

Love,

Nancie/Mom/Mimi/Grandma