Black Women, Into the Light of History FINAL Edition

• Published in: The Washington post
• Main Author: Emma Coleman Jordan
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, D.C WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post 26.03.1998
• Subjects: Black history; Darlene Clark Hine; Hine, Darlene Clark (1947- ); Kathleen Thompson; Morrison, Toni (1931-2019); Nonfiction; Shange, Ntozake; Thompson, Kathleen; Women; Womens history
• ISSN: 0190-8286

The volume is organized chronologically, with few overarching theoretical or conceptual arguments. In some instances it supplies unfamiliar details of the lives of such famous black women as Madame C.J. Walker, the hair-straightening tycoon who hosted anti-lynching fund-raisers at her "estate near the Rockefellers'," and Mary McLeod Bethune, who managed to become "the most powerful black woman in American government to date." Bethune organized the Federal Council on Negro Affairs -- a k a the Black Cabinet -- to advise Franklin Roosevelt. This book brings to our attention the contributions of others not as well known, such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, the first black female playwright, and Maggie Lena Walker, the first American woman of any color to serve as a bank president. "A Shining Thread of Hope" is a welcome, easily accessible, encyclopedic antidote to the prevailing stereotypes about black women. The pernicious effect of these stereotypes upon the psyche of individual black women is vividly captured by playwright Ntozake Shange in the concluding lines of her 1975 choreopoem, "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf": "I found god in myself &/ I loved her/ I loved her fiercely/ . . . this is for colored girls who have considered/ suicide/ but are movin to the end of their own rainbows." Shange's goal was to establish a counteroffensive against the reigning negative stereotypes of black women by pursuing a positive connection between her creative writing and the preservation of the sanity of individual black women. Hine and Thompson recognize this relationship as well when they quote Toni Morrison in an epigraph to the final chapter: "Our lives preserved. How it was; and how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives."