Aly once again led an all-star team to gold in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. She and her teammate Gabby Douglas are the only Americans who have won consecutive team gold medals in gymnastics. It was thrilling to watch them compete and create history. I’ll also never forget watching Aly and her teammate Simone Biles perform their floor routines; I was mesmerized. When Aly finished her routine, she immediately began to cry, in a mix of exhaustion, relief, and pride. Simone won the gold, and Aly, the silver.
“I have both power and voice, and I am only beginning to just use them.”
—ALY RAISMAN
Some athletes fade from public consciousness after their Olympic careers end, but Aly made history once more, in January 2018. Two months after telling a reporter at Time that former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar had sexually abused her throughout her childhood and career, Aly was one of more than 150 women to testify against him at his trial. Aly courageously used her recent fame as a multiple medal-winning Olympian as a platform from which to decry her abuser and the system that had enabled him for decades. She also launched a campaign, Flip the Switch, to train adults to notice signs of sexual abuse and the ways in which trauma manifests in child victims. Thanks to the brave testimony from so many gymnasts, including Aly, Nassar was sentenced to over forty years in prison after he pled guilty to charges involving more than three hundred athletes. Also in 2018, Aly filed a lawsuit against U.S.A. Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee over their failure to protect her and other athletes from Nassar. U.S.A. Gymnastics has filed for bankruptcy and is facing decertification efforts as the sport’s national governing body. Its past practices are also being scrutinized by the U.S. Senate.
Aly continues to speak out about all that went wrong for so many years in the training of elite American gymnasts, and about what needs to be done to ensure that all gymnasts are treated with care and respect and given the protection they deserve. “There are so many people out there that are survivors, but there are few that have a voice,” she told ESPN’s Mina Kimes. “I know that I’m one of the few that are being heard, so I just want to do right by people.”
Advocates and Activists
Dorothy Height and Sojourner Truth
DOROTHY HEIGHT
SOJOURNER TRUTH
Hillary
In her memoir, Open Wide the Freedom Gates, Dr. Dorothy Irene Height, a legend of the civil rights movement, declared: “I am the product of many whose lives have touched mine, from the famous, distinguished, and powerful to the little known and the poor.”
If you live in America and vote, whether you know it or not, Dorothy Height has touched your life. I first met Miss Height—that’s what we always called her—back when I was just out of law school and working for another fiercely courageous woman, Marian Wright Edelman, at the Children’s Defense Fund. Miss Height was elegant but with no airs; brilliant without a trace of arrogance; passionate, but never overheated. And though she spent much of her later years sitting down, she was never sitting still. Because when Dorothy Height set her mind to something, there was no stopping her.
Miss Height grew up outside Pittsburgh and attended integrated schools. She won a national oratory contest in high school that provided a college scholarship, but when she arrived at Barnard College in 1929, she was turned away and informed that the college had already admitted two black students—apparently its yearly quota. So she headed downtown and enrolled at New York University, where she received her bachelor’s degree and a master’s in educational psychology.
After college, she went to work for the YWCA and joined the National Council of Negro Women, beginning a career of fighting for civil rights and equality for black Americans and women. She served as the Council’s president for forty years, from 1957 to 1997. Alongside the “Big Six” of the civil rights movement, which included legends like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, Miss Height was called “the unheralded seventh.” She was the only woman given that distinction. Her activism attracted the notice of Eleanor Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and many others who sought her out for advice. She was a nonpartisan adviser to presidents of both parties. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from my husband in 1994, and the Congressional Gold Medal from President George W. Bush in 2004.
When I was in the Senate, Miss Height and a group of other civil rights leaders—including Dr. C. Delores Tucker and E. Faye Williams of the National Congress of Black Women—came to me and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas. They argued that it was past time for the U.S. Capitol Building to have a statue of the pioneering black suffragist Sojourner Truth, right alongside other national heroes.
Sojourner Truth, then named Isabella Baumfree, was born into slavery in New York around 1797. She escaped with her infant daughter, Sophia, in 1827—a year before New York’s emancipation law went into effect. She later used the new law to sue for the return of her five-year-old son, Peter, who had been illegally sold to a slaveholder in Alabama. She is considered the first black woman to win such a case.
In 1843, she became a Methodist and took the name Sojourner Truth, explaining to her friends: “The Spirit calls me, and I must go.” She never learned to read or write, but she traveled the country, preaching in favor of the abolition of slavery. Her memoir, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, was published in 1850, the same year she spoke at the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1851, she attended the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron. In a crowded church, she delivered her famous extemporaneous speech on women’s rights, “Ain’t I a Woman.” From her towering height (she was nearly six feet tall), she responded to the male speakers who had argued that women were inferior to men and too weak to be entrusted with the vote. “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again!” she declared in her deep, booming voice. “And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.”
Her speech became an immediate sensation, prompting competing stories about how she presented herself and even what she had said. When a heckler at a speech in 1858 questioned whether she was, in fact, a woman, she answered by opening her blouse to reveal her breasts.
During the Civil War, she helped recruit black soldiers for the Union Army and worked with the National Freedman’s Relief Association in Washington, D.C. In 1864, she met with President Lincoln at the White House. While in Washington, she helped force desegregation of local streetcars by riding them. When a conductor tried to stop her from boarding, she had him arrested, took him to court, and won her case, nearly a century before Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks refused to give up their seats on the bus.
After the war, she met with President Ulysses S. Grant. She gathered thousands of signatures on a petition to provide land grants to help former slaves escape poverty and build new lives. She campaigned for Grant’s reelection, and in 1872, she even tried to vote, though she was turned away. Sojourner kept speaking out about abolition, women’s rights, prison reform, and capital punishment until her death in 1883.
With a record like this, you might not think it would be controversial to add Sojourner Truth to the U.S. Capitol’s Emancipation Hall. But, as it turns out, it’s hard to get Congress to do just about anything. We faced one delay after another. Lesser women would have gotten discouraged, settled for less, or just given up. That wasn’t Miss Height’s way. She just kept pushing, calling, and writing.
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I hav
e borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
—SOJOURNER TRUTH
It took us years, but we finally got Sojourner’s statue put up. And on April 28, 2009, we gathered in the Capitol Visitor Center for the unveiling. The celebrated actress Cicely Tyson recited “Ain’t I a Woman.”
With her very presence, Cicely, like Sojourner, embodied the indivisibility of women’s rights and civil rights. You couldn’t be for one and not the other. You couldn’t give the vote to just some women. Or just some black Americans. Our democracy belongs to all of us, and it needs to protect and serve every citizen. We all are freer when every one of us is free. We all have more opportunity when everyone has opportunity. That was Sojourner Truth’s mission. It was Dorothy Height’s mission. And today it must remain our mission.
Ida B. Wells
Hillary and Chelsea
Over a century before the 2017 Women’s March, there was the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade. The day before the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson, more than five thousand women converged on Washington, D.C., to march for the right to vote. At the front of the procession was white suffragist and lawyer Inez Milholland, dressed in white, astride a white horse. At the back of the parade was a group of black women, including the twenty-two founders of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. But Ida B. Wells, a sorority member who had brought several members of the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago to march that day, was not with them.
Over the weeks prior, the parade’s organizers, including twenty-eight-year-old Alice Paul from New Jersey, had been quietly discouraging black women from marching in the parade at all, worrying that their inclusion would alienate Southern politicians who might otherwise support the cause of suffrage. Understandably, that did not sit well with Ida. When she was told that the members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority should march at the back of the parade, she made it very clear: She would not take part unless her group could march with the rest of the Illinois delegation near the front. On the day of the parade, defying the white suffragist leaders, that’s exactly what Ida did. “When white suffragists told her to march at the back of the line, she went straight to the front,” recounted historian Alexis Coe on the podcast No Man’s Land. “And she organized one of the first black women’s clubs to fight for enfranchisement.”
Ida B. Wells did not bear injustice quietly; instead, she fought against it with all her might. At barely five feet tall, she is among the most courageous women the United States has ever seen. She was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, three years before the end of the Civil War. At sixteen, she lost both parents and her brother to a yellow fever epidemic. To support the rest of her siblings, she dropped out of high school, moved to Memphis, and became a teacher by lying about her age. She finished school herself at night and on weekends.
When she was twenty-one years old, Ida bought a first-class train ticket to get from Memphis to her teaching job in nearby Woodstock, Tennessee. When the train conductor came to punch tickets, he told her she was in the wrong car. She knew exactly which car she was in; it was not the wrong one. He insisted that she move to the blacks-only carriage. And when he “tried to drag me out of the seat,” Wells wrote in her autobiography, “I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand.”
That incident sparked the beginning of Ida’s career as a journalist. She took the railroad company to court and won five hundred dollars in damages, which would be a little over twelve thousand dollars today. Three years later, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision and charged the court costs to Ida. Furious at the court’s verdict, she wrote about the incident in a local newspaper, the Living Way. Her account gained national attention, and in 1887, the National Afro-American Press Convention heralded her as the most prominent reporter of the American black press.
In 1891, she was fired from her teaching job for publishing editorials exposing the poor conditions of segregated black schools. The next year, Ida’s life again changed forever after the lynching of three of her close friends—Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Will Stewart—who owned a grocery store that competed for customers and profits with a white grocery store in the same community. By the late 1880s, after over twenty years of black men voting in elections, winning elections, and joining the police force, some white Memphians were determined to reassert white supremacy and rule.
Her horror and anger following her friends’ murders inspired Ida to write about lynching. Her reporting took her to some of the most dangerous parts of the country for a black woman, where she told the stories of victims of racial violence and published their names so they would not be forgotten. She wrote her stories for the newspaper she co-owned, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight.
When eight black men were lynched in one week across the South in 1892, Ida published—under a pseudonym to protect herself—an editorial challenging the old, offensive canard that whites were justified in lynching black men because white women were attracted to them. The white papers responded by attacking the editorial’s author. One paper ominously warned: “There are some things the Southern white man will not tolerate.”
“If this work can… arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance.”
—IDA B. WELLS, AFTER FLEEING MEMPHIS
Ida’s anti-lynching editorials were met with death threats against her across the South, and a white mob destroyed her newspaper office. Even after that, she published, under her own name, Southern Horrors and The Red Record, pamphlets that called out lynching for what it was: racial violence intended to suppress the economic and political progress of black Americans.
She moved to Chicago in 1894 and married Ferdinand Barnett, Illinois’s first black assistant state’s attorney and the editor of the city’s first black paper, the Chicago Conservator. Throughout their life together, Ferdinand cooked dinner for the family most nights, and cared for the children, though his own job was demanding. It’s clear that he recognized the importance of Ida’s voice in speaking out against racism and other injustices.
While in Chicago, Ida helped create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded the first black women’s suffrage association in the United States, and started the first kindergarten for black children in Chicago. She continued to call out white suffragists and politicians for their racism and exclusionist views about blacks and immigrants. And she fought for equal education for black children and young people, a free press, women’s rights, civil rights, and against lynching.
Ida knew lynching wasn’t only a Southern crime. After years of intense activism by Ida and others, the governor of Illinois signed anti-lynching legislation in 1905. But in 1909, a mob in Cairo, Illinois, lynched William James after he had been charged with the rape and murder of a white woman. The mob then stormed a local jail and lynched Henry Salzner, a white man accused of murdering his wife. Under pressure from Ida as well as the recently formed NAACP and other civil rights leaders—and likely with new urgency in reaction to the white victim—the Illinois governor enforced a provision in the 1905 anti-lynching law that any officers who didn’t protect their prisoners would lose their jobs.
In December 2018, nearly ninety years after Ida died, the United States Senate unanimously—and finally—passed legislation making lynching a federal crime. Before that point, Congress had considered more than two hundred anti-lynching bills and passed none. It is certainly progress—long overdue—and, as of mid-2019, the House of Representatives is expected to pass their own equally strong version of the bill.
Ida probably would have agreed with nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber’s description of politics as “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Despite all she had seen and experienced, however, she refused to bec
ome cynical or give up on the possibility of progress. Near the end of her life, in 1930, she ran for the Illinois state senate—before black women were permitted to vote in most states.
In her lifetime, Ida fought tirelessly against white supremacy and for freedom of the press. She began a legacy carried on by journalists and advocates who are holding the powerful accountable just as she did and proving that, in Ida’s words, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” And after a ten-year crowdfunding effort, Ida’s great-granddaughter Michelle Duster recently announced that she had successfully raised enough money to commission a statue honoring Ida near her former home in Chicago. “You can’t just gloss over history,” Michelle said. “She was called fearless. I don’t believe that she had no fear. I believe she had fear and she decided to keep going forward.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
Hillary
Eleanor Roosevelt is a continuing inspiration to me. Throughout her life, she overcame personal, political, and public challenges that would have flattened most of us. When I think of women I admire, she’s at the top of my list.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 23
