Perseverance is a Black woman’s middle name

4th April 2022 · 0 Comments

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s U.S. Supreme Court senatorial nomination hearings – particularly the three days she got pilloried, castigated, character assassinated and demeaned by Republican Senators – was a disgraceful spectacle of verbal abuse.

Although the senators’ attack on this highly qualified Black woman was anticipated, the depth of the meanness and disrespect was not.

Jackson held her own, her bona fides go beyond most sitting Supreme Court justices, and she survived the clownish attacks upon her by Republicans with grace and patience.

They read her for filth, criticized her sentencing of people caught with child pornography and one senator even asked her the definition of a woman. Still, she persevered as she was advised to do, by a Black woman she didn’t know on Harvard University’s campus.

Jackson did what she was advised to do by a Black woman, a stranger, who approached her while Jackson was on Harvard University’s campus and told her to persevere. When asked, the jurist says she would tell young women coming behind her to “persevere.”

The sage advice to Black women to persevere is centuries old. In fact, the late singer Aaliyah put the wise guidance in “Try Again”: “If at first you don’t succeed, you can dust yourself off and try again.”

Black women have a long history of perseverance. They have had to endure being overlooked, abused, shortchanged and ignored by society as a whole, which, even to this day, still views Black women as the other and less than.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has received many death threats, is a shining example of perseverance. The first Black woman to run as vice president on a major political party ticket and the second to run for president – Shirley Chisom was the first – Harris endured being called a “hoe” on a billboard erected by a white car dealer in Massachusetts.

Ironically, Black women have taught societies, worldwide, how to persevere.

Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people. Tubman helped John Brown plan his 1859 raid of a Harpers Ferry arsenal, one of the major events that led to the Civil War. During the Civil War, Tubman helped to coordinate a military assault during the Civil War that freed more than 700 people from slavery.

However, the greatest act of perseverance Tubman left to history, was her choice not to receive anesthesia during brain surgery. She chose to bite on a bullet – something she had seen soldiers do during the Civil War when they suffered pain on the battlefield.

When Tubman was a child, an overseer hit her in the head with a heavy weight. She suffered severe head trauma and experienced headaches and seizures for the rest of her life.

Ida B. Wells, the famed journalist and newspaper publisher, was also a suffragette, she founded an organization of Black women to rally for the vote. Even though her newspaper’s office was set on fire, she persevered.

College Professor Ella Baker organized the Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee which went to the deep south during Freedom Summer to register people to vote. Interestingly, Baker and other Black women civil rights leaders did the heavy lifting, but the men got all the glory. In other cases, Black women worked for equal rights and women’s rights but while others got the recognition, Black women were unheard and unseen.

Shirley Chisom was “unbossed and unbowed.” She ran unsuccessfully for president but became the first Black woman in Congress.

Nikole Hannah Jones, a Howard University professor, was attacked by white Republicans for producing and editing the 2021 book: “The 1619 Project.”

The list of Black women who have preserved is endless and ongoing.

The irony of all of this perseverance through adversity is that Black women continue to be abused by society, even in their own communities. Black men are guilty of abusing, overlooking and ignoring Black women, too.

“The Color Purple,” Alice Walker’s novel, told the dirty little secret of Black men physically and sexually abusing Black women.

That type of abuse continues today. According to recent statistics, Black and African-American women experience violence at a rate 2.5 times more than white women. The violence Black women experience is often emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. Again, though, Black women persevere. And they persevere by taking action.

Tarana Burke is an American activist from the Bronx, New York, who started the Me Too movement. In 2006, Burke began using “Me Too” to help other women and to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault in society.

The beauty and uniqueness of Black women’s struggle to survive, thrive and actualize their highest selves is exhibited in the actions they take, the will to persevere and the examples they set.

The contributions of Black women to American society are slowly coming into focus, not because others are recognizing them but because Black women themselves are speaking up and showing out. We all are better for their struggle and perseverance.

In his famous poem, “Mother to Son,” renowned poet Langston Hughes depicted the struggle of a mother to persevere, while also encouraging her son to persevere against all odds, assuring him that while she had faced her share of challenges in life and that it had not been a “crystal stair,” that she still continues on nonetheless.

“Mother to Son”
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”