Black Is Beautiful I
By
Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J.
Week of February 5, 2017
Black History Month for 2017 begins on a thrilling high note. It sings the praises of the
astronaut Jeanette Epps who will make history in May 2018 by becoming the first AfricanAmerican to live and work aboard the International Space Station for six months. She will serve
as a flight engineer on Expedition 56.
A Stellar Resume
Born in 1970 in Syracuse, NY, Jeanette Epps attended Le Moyne College. After four
years of Jesuit education, she graduated with a B.S. degree with a major in physics. She went on
to earn an M.S. and a Ph.D. at the University of Maryland. Next, she took a position at the Ford
Motor Company as a technical specialist in the Scientific Laboratory. In 2002, Dr. Epps joined
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and worked there until she was selected out of 3,500
applicants to be one of fourteen members of NASA’s 2009 astronaut class.
Dr. Epps takes her place among those great African American women who preceded her
with their own distinctive contributions to American culture despite racial prejudice. Five of
these women—all pioneers—are named below with a thumbnail sketch of their lives. They are
less obvious choices among the more obvious or more contemporary women like Maya Angelou,
the poet, Lena Horne, the torch singer, Marion Wright Edelman, activist for the rights of
children, Oprah Winfrey, our former First Lady, Michelle Obama, Sister Thea Bowman, the first
African American to join the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Wisconsin, and hundreds of
other African American women.
History’s Recognition of Black Women
HARRIET TUBMAN. The greatest African American woman of the nineteenth century
became something of a modern Moses as an American abolitionist, humanitarian, an army scout,
and spy for the United States Army during the American Civil War.
Harriet Ross (christened Araminta; c.1822), was born a slave in Dorchester, Maryland.
As a child, she could not escape the brutality of various slave masters who beat and whipped her,
and even inflicted head traumas, leaving her with lifelong dizziness, headaches, and insomnia.
Sadly, children of color were deprived of a normal childhood, and in Harriet’s case, she was
hired out as a nursemaid at the age of five or six. When a baby would wake up, and whenever it
cried, Harriet was blamed and whipped, sometimes more than once a day. As she grew older and
stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
Instead of succumbing to self-pity, Harriet put her suffering to work with a determination
that defies description.
In 1849, Harriet escaped to Philadelphia, and throughout her long life, extricated scores
of slaves from squalor and danger and brought them to freedom. As an antislavery abolitionist,
she helped John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harper’s Ferry, and in the post-war era was an
active participant in the struggle for women’s suffrage. A devout Christian, Harriet, it is said,
experienced visions and vivid dreams which she ascribed to direct communications from God.
Curiously, or perhaps miraculously, but slaveholders never captured her.
On crossing into Philadelphia, she recalled the experience years later: “When I found I
had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a
glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like
I was in heaven.” Had her story not been verified by the historical facts, one might be tempted to
disbelief. She earned the nickname “Moses” owing to her daring missions of delivering slaves in
Maryland to the North.
During the Civil War, Harriet worked for the Union Army, initially as a cook and nurse,
and then as an army scout and spy. After a life of dedication to a precarious cause, she had to be
admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier.
Harriet, a free woman, married John Tubman, an enslaved man, a difficult arrangement; she later
married Nelson Davis. At the end of her life, Harriet worked alongside women such as Susan B.
Anthony and Emily Howland in suffragette issues. Harriet Tubman was buried with semimilitary honors in Auburn, NY where her immediate family lived when she freed them from
slavery.
After her death in 1913, Harriet was lauded as an icon of American courage and freedom.
On April 20, 2016, the U.S. Treasury Department announced a plan for Tubman to replace the
slaveholding Andrew Jackson when newly minted $20 bills are issued. Andrew Jackson will be
relegated to the back of the $20 bill. Tubman will be the first woman so honored on paper
currency since Martha Washington’s portrait briefly graced the $1 silver certificate in the late
19th century.
ROSA PARKS (born McCauley in 1913) became famous in 1955 for her refusal to give her
‘Negro’ seat to a white woman who had no seat. She was ordered to the back of the bus. For this
act of defiance, she was arrested, though the officer did not know the reason. He only knew that
it was the law. She became an icon of resistance to racial segregation. The United States
Congress named her “the first lady of civil rights” and the mother of the freedom movement.
“I have learned over the years,” she reflected, “that when one’s mind is made up, this
diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”
After her boycott in Montgomery County, Alabama, Rosa Parks moved to Detroit where,
from 1965 to 1988, she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African
American U.S. Representative. In her autobiography, Rosa Parks wrote:
People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that wasn’t true. I was
not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not
old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only
tired I was, was tired of giving in.
It was the very last time she would ever ride in humiliation of this kind. Between 1976
and the year of her death in 2005, she received one award after the other for her courage to defy
a legal but immoral Alabama law. Like Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks died at the age of 92.
HATTIE MCDANIEL (1895-1952). Whenever the epic drama, “Gone with the Wind,”
starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh is shown on TCM, it’s impossible not to think of Hattie
McDaniel among the pantheon of the film’s great actors. Ms. McDaniel was no stranger to racial
bias having appeared in over 300 films but receiving screen credits for only 80 of them. She was
the first African American performer to win an Academy Award for her compelling role as a
loyal slave governess in the movie. In 2006, Ms. McDaniel became the first Black recipient of an
Oscar to be honored as well with a U.S. postage stamp.
MARIAN ANDERSON (1897-1993), the American contralto, and one of the most celebrated
singers of the twentieth century, lived with racial prejudice in the field of music virtually all her
life. Ms. Anderson’s voice was “a rich, vibrant contralto of intrinsic beauty,” music critic Alam
Blyth wrote. She sang in concerts and recital all over the world but the stages in America were
closed to her. “Denied the stage, she sang for a nation,” wrote Susan Stamberg. When First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and President Roosevelt intervened, Ms. Anderson made world-wide
news when, on Easter Sunday 1939, her regal figure “stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
in Washington, D.C. to sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and some spirituals before a crowd of
75,000 people and a radio audience in the millions.” This public act initiated by the Roosevelts
evoked tears of joy throughout the nation. “She became the first black person, American or
otherwise, to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in 1955.” Ms. Anderson
sang for wounded veterans in hospitals and bases, to their great delight.
Maestro Arturo
Toscanini, rarely given to praise, commented that a voice like Anderson’s comes around once in
a hundred years.
SHIRLEY CHISOLM (1924-2005) was the first African American woman elected to the
House of Representatives. Breaking the color barrier in 1972, she became the first African
American candidate and the first female candidate for President of the United States. Following a
career in politics, Ms. Chisolm became an educator and administrator: “If you don’t accept
others who are different, it means nothing that you’ve learned calculus;” this conviction became
a cogent reason for living with conviction. A recipient of many awards, she was posthumously
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
Finally . . .
These short sketches of six African American trailblazers, Jeanette Epps, Harriet
Tubman, Rosa Parks, Hattie McDaniel, Marian Anderson, and Shirley Chisolm inspire the rest of
us to aim high, and always higher—semper excelsior. Heeding the words of Scripture, they let
their light shine so that we might see their light and fruitfulness.’
“It isn’t where you come from,” observes Ella Fitzgerald; “it’s where you’re going that
counts.”