Video: "I am Your Sister": Audre Lorde in the Context of Black Feminist Activism and Ethics
Audre Lorde is one of the most significant and influential Black feminist writer/activists of the twentieth century. In this talk at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College, examined Lorde’s prolific writings in the context of contemporary Black feminist ethics, discourse, and activism. As the nation faces increasing political resistance to social justice reform in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Dr. Guy-Sheftall reflected upon the importance of returning to Lorde’s work as a resource for imagining and building social transformations in society, electoral politics, the criminal justice system, and the academy.
This event took place on April 25, 2023.
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: "I Am Your Sister"-- Audre Lorde in the Context of Black Feminist Activism and Ethics. April 25, 2023.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Just want to, again, thank you all for making time in your busy schedule to come here. A colleague, and a friend, and a mentor, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall.
But before we begin, I just wanted to acknowledge all the sort of behind the scene work that took place to make this happen. Special thanks to Marissa Compton for your help in organizing this, to Mafaz Al-Suwaidan, to Phil Scholer. And I think Bob has left, but to Bob [? Dubow ?] who is our cameraman. I think we have a new cameraman, so thank you, sir, for coming.
And also want to give a special thanks to Doctors Connie and Preston Williams for coming out. It's always great to see you and have your presence because, again, we would not be here, my colleague Tracy and I, without the groundwork that you guys have played in helping make this a stronger institution. So thank you so much.
And so I'll read a formal introduction, but you know, what I can say is that Beverly has just been a light at HBCUs and a light in so many lives of undergraduates. And I know for a fact that without taking her course, I would not be here. I mean, she believed in me at an early stage when I was naive, when I was really trying to make sense of what do you mean by Black feminist thought? Why do we need to study this?
And just has a capacious heart and the mind is so liminal and that she's constantly rethinking traditional norms, constantly trying to understand how does my work then speak to otherness in a way that doesn't cloud or diminish the other but tries to bring light to it as she engages it in a very thoughtful way.
And so I'll read the more formal introduction now, but just wanted to lay the groundwork that not only are we speaking to someone who's been part of making history and with a number of history makers but someone who has just a genuine human spirit in mentoring young people.
So Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall is the founding director of the Women's Research and Resource Center and the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies at Spelman College. For many years prior to that, she was a visiting professor while at Spelman at Emory University's Institute for Women's Studies where she taught graduate courses in women's studies.
At the age of 16, Dr. Guy-Sheftall entered Spelman College where she majored in English and minored in secondary education. After graduating with honors, she attended Wellesley College for a fifth year of study in English. In 1968, she entered Atlanta University to pursue a master's degree in English, and her thesis was entitled Faulkner's Treatment of Women in his Major Novels.
A year later, she began her first teaching job in the Department of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama. And in 1971, she returned to Spelman College and joined the English department. She has published a number of critical texts that are foundational within African-American studies and within women's studies department throughout the nation and the world.
Her work has really in some ways embodied her collaborative spirit. So even as a young untenured professor, she says, look, I want my work to reflect my politics. And so a number of her works are produced in collaboration with other scholars, including the first anthology on Black women's literature, Sturdy Bridges, Visions of Black Women in Literature, which she co-edited with Roseann Bell and Bettye Parker Smith. Daughters Of Sorrow, Attitudes Toward Black Women, which was a single authored manuscript in 1991.
And her groundbreaking collection Words Of Fire, An Anthology Of African-American Feminist Thought. An anthology she also co-edited with Rudolph Byrd entitled Traps, African-American Men on Gender and Sexuality.
She co-authored with Johnnetta B. Cole, former President of Spelman College, Gender Talk, The Struggle for Women's Equality in African-American Communities. And what we use in my course, an anthology entitled I Am Your Sister, Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde co-authored also with Rudolph P. Byrd and Johnnetta B. Cole.
And the list goes on and on. But I also want to note two major accomplishments in terms of rethinking institutions. So in 1983, she became a founding coeditor of SAGE-- a Scholarly Journal of Black Women, which was devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African descent. She is a past president of the National Women's Association and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
And again, Dr. Guy-Sheftall is an extraordinary scholar, extraordinary humanist, and we invited here today in part to help us think through how do we bring to life Audre Lorde's vision along with Dr. Guy-Sheftall's vision of what does sort of a radical ethical imaginary look like? So I'd like to welcome my friend and mentor to Harvard Divinity School. Let's welcome her.
[APPLAUSE]
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Thanks, Terrence. That was a sweet introduction. Terrence is one of my favorite students. I talk about him all the time, and I'm not just saying this because we are together. Since people have to leave at 12:30, I cut out a portion of my talk.
[MUTTERING]
We'll see. OK. Like many undergraduates who finish college and graduate school in the 1960s before the establishment of African-American studies and women's studies, I was not aware of the lives and legacies of too many important figures in US history. The pervasiveness of Eurocentric and masculinist curricula throughout higher education resulted in silences, erasures, and distortions surrounding histories of Black and other women of color here and around the globe.
I didn't know influential African-American foremothers, including Maria Stewart, Frances E. W. Harper, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and even Ida Wells, Zora Neale Hurston, and Audre Lorde. I had not read Anna Julia Cooper's groundbreaking text, A Voice from the South By a Black Woman of the South-- that's 1892-- or William E. B. Du Bois's moving account of the tragedy of Black womanhood and the legacy of slavery in his 1920 publication Dark Water.
I was unaware, as many academics still are, of the robust Black feminist intellectual tradition and literary history of African-Americans. The dearth of exposure to such important history was not only disappointing to me then but it is a reality that persists today.
Education is largely still based on perspectives that do not reflect the fact that more than half the world's population are people of color and women or girls. While some progress toward a more inclusive approach has been made, the empowerment strategies for women in general do not address the particular experiences and needs of women of color. Special efforts, therefore, are needed to level the playing field.
The most important development with respect to Black women's pioneering role in the women's liberation movement was an establishment in 1968, and I didn't know anything about this history until fairly recently, of the SNCC Black Women's Liberation Committee whose antiwar, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist feminist political activities and issues included consciousness raising, liberation schools, sterilization abuse, political prisoners, safe abortions, draft counseling for Black men.
However, what emerged over the next decade was even more significant with respect to the evolution of Black women's feminist activism. In 1970, the Black Women's Liberation Committee of SNCC split from SNCC and became an autonomous organization and changed its name to Black Women's Alliance and, within a year, to Third World Women's Alliance, becoming the model, I would argue, for an intersectional global women's movement mobilization.
Their vision was predicted-- was predicated upon the assumption, and I'm quoting from one of their manifestos, that third world women such as Asians, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans, Chicanas, and Native Americans experience similar exploitation from a common oppressor. One of their documents, Black Women's Liberation, co-authored by Maxine Williams and Pamela Newman, makes this argument, and I'm quoting.
"Women's liberation must not isolate itself from the masses of women or the third world community. At the same time, white women cannot speak for Black women. Black women must speak for themselves. We felt there was a need for a revolutionary women's movement to speak to the oppression of Black women as Blacks, as workers, as women."
"We are involved in reading, discussion, consciousness raising, and taking action. When the third world woman begins to recognize the depth of her oppression, she will move to form alliances with all revolutionary forces available and settle for nothing less than complete destruction of this racist, capitalist, male-dominated system."
Here, the impact of anti-colonial struggles around the globe is apparent as is their commitment to forging solidarity with oppressed peoples fighting European colonization and US military occupation, especially in Africa, Vietnam, and Latin America. As Frances Beal argued, Third World Women's Alliance rejected a feminism that posits sexism as the primary source of women's subordination and developed an analysis predicated on the interaction of race, class, and sex oppression and on an international perspective.
When asked in an interview with Maureen Hartmann about her involvement with the women's movement, Frances Beal is clear in her rather surprising answer now. "I was working with an entity of SNCC called the National Black Antiwar Antidraft Union. The purpose was to discourage young Blacks from going off to war. Most of the staff was female. What really angered us was that James Forman, a SNCC leader, was pushing for a political alliance with the Black Panthers. We were concerned about how women were treated and how they were oppressed within that organization."
"He came back with a book by Eldridge Cleaver called Soul On Ice. We came to the conclusion that Eldridge Cleaver was a thug who raped Black women to work himself up to raping white women. We wrote a response to that book called Soul On Fire." And I have still not been able to find Soul On Fire. And Frances Beal who still lives in California can't find it either.
"Other female issues began to concern us. We found many Black women had been sterilized without their knowledge. That convinced us of the need for good, safe birth control methods. The abortion issue was one that the right wing made the focus," like now. "It was not just an assault on women's abortion rights. It was an assault on women's rights to birth control. That is how I became an active voice for Black Women's Liberation.
You know, when I explained to my students that people had no idea of the deep connection that Black women had to something that we now call second wave feminism or the women's liberation movement. It's really important to remember this.
Located initially in New York City, eventually chapters were founded in San Francisco and Seattle. Truly multiracial and multi-ethnic, the chapter in New York was comprised mainly of Black and Puerto Rican women while the California chapters included Chicana, Asian, and Indigenous women.
In a cogent presentation on third world women's liberation by the Bay Area chapter, their objectives are both broad and focused. What follows, from my perspective, is one of the most capacious, cogent articulations of feminist ethics, and I want to read this. What we want as third world women, number one, the right to decide if and when we want children. There is no such thing as an illegitimate child. There should be free and safe family planning methods available to us, including abortion on demand.
Number two, no forced sterilization or mandatory birth control programs. Number three, guaranteed full, equal, and nonexploited employment controlled collectively by workers who produce the wealth of this society. Number four, an end to racism and sexism, which forces third world women into the lowest paid service jobs in which ensures we'll be the lowest paid of all.
Number five, the establishment of free daycare centers available to all, including facilities for preschool older children. Number six, the elimination of rigid sex roles, which are oppressive for both men and women. The true revolutionary beings are not limiting themselves to people as sex roles or objects. Number seven, self knowledge. The history of third world women and their liberation struggle, their relation to society, and their knowledge of their bodies must be made freely available.
Number eight, all services necessary for human survival, such as health care, housing, food, clothing, transportation, and education, these should be free and controlled and administered by the people themselves. And finally, third world women should be full participants in all levels of struggle against imperialism, administrative, political, and military.
And then finally, this is what I'm saying, avoiding what they perceive as the White women's movement's positioning men as the enemy, these feminist activists were committed to working with men as their comrades in struggle. They were against separatist movements within the movement. However, they encouraged men to rid themselves of, quote, male chauvinism-- that was what it was called then-- and heed this advice.
This was the advice they gave. We criticize our men who continue to treat our sisters as less than equal and we criticize sisters who remain passive and do not join in the struggle against our common oppression. We will make a revolution of brothers and sisters together in love and respect for each other.
During the same time period in 1973, the National Black Feminist Organization would emerge in part as a reminder to the Black liberation struggle that there can't be liberation for half the race. Activist lawyer Flo Kennedy and Margaret Sloan decided to convene a small gathering of Black feminists in May so that they could discuss their experiences with the primarily racist women's movement and what it meant to be Black, female, and feminist.
In their statement of purpose-- this is National Black Feminist Organization-- they objected to the women's movement being seen as white and their involvement in it as disloyal to the race. Underscoring Black women's need for self definition, they identified racism from without and sexism from within as destructive to all Black communities.
National Black Feminist Organization officially began November 30, 1973 at an Eastern regional conference in New York City at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. This was a historic gathering of the first self-defined Black Feminist Organization committed to the eradication of sexism, racism, and heterosexism.
Workshops focused on a variety of issues-- child care, the church, welfare, welfare rights, women's liberation, lesbian identity, prisons, education, drug addiction, equal pay for equal work, female sexualities, and domestic violence. Among those present were Shirley Chisholm, Alice Walker, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Flo Kennedy, Margaret Sloan, NBFO's first and only president, Michelle Wallace, her mother Faith Ringgold, and of course, Audre.
A year after the founding meeting, the Boston chapter of National Black Feminist Organization decided to form a more radical organization, according to lesbian feminist activist Barbara Smith, and named itself in 1973 the Combahee River Collective after Harriet Tubman's military campaign in South Carolina in 1863 which, as you know, freed nearly 800 enslaved persons.
In 1977, after meeting informally for three years and doing intense consciousness raising-- I want to say that consciousness raising did not come out of the women's movement. Consciousness raising was a major strategy of the Civil Rights Movement that the women's movement claimed.
Anyway, after meeting for three years, three members of the collective-- Barbara Smith, her sister Beverly, and Demita Frazier-- wrote a statement documenting the activities of the collective and articulating their philosophy, and Audre Lorde had a lot to do with this. And you can see embedded in this what we would now call feminist ethics.
This Black feminist manifesto is a clear articulation of the simultaneity of oppressions that Black women suffer. It also emphasized the importance of eradicating homophobia and acknowledging the role of lesbians in the development of radical Black feminism in particular. Their manifesto foregrounded sexuality and asserted that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as is the politics of class and race.
Emphasizing the simultaneity of racial, gender, heterosexist, and class oppression in the lives of Black and other women of color, they affirmed their connection to an activist tradition among Black women going back to the 19th century as well as the Black Liberation struggles of the 1960s.
Despite the difficulty of sustaining a socialist Black feminist organization with primarily lesbian leadership for six years, they worked untiringly on a variety of revolutionary issues-- reproductive justice, rape, prison reform, sterilization abuse, violence against women, health care, and racism within the white women's movement. They also understood the importance of coalition building and worked with other women of color, white feminists, and progressive men.
Especially important was their breaking the silence about homophobia within Black communities and providing lesbians and heterosexual women with opportunities to work together. In an extensive interview with Loretta Ross, Barbara Smith, born in 1946-- same year I was born-- explains her own politicization which propelled her toward civil rights and women's movements, and this is what Barbara said.
"It would be really hard to be-- it would be really hard to be a person of African heritage born before the midpoint of the 20th century and not to have some kind of political consciousness about being born in US apartheid. I'm sure that it was enhanced by being around a family of what I like to refer to as race women. As we got more involved in civil rights activities, we gravitated to the Congress of Racial Equality, the Cleveland chapter."
"I get to Mount Holyoke-- right? Close. "And get involved in the civil actions group. They were organizing around the Vietnam War. I got involved in anti-Vietnam war organizing as well. I was becoming more and more radicalized at Mount Holyoke. These were the years of the Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. I went to one of the first major demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, which was a march to the United Nations in the spring of 1967. That was also the demonstration at which Martin Luther King Junior spoke out against the war."
When asked specifically about her journey to Black feminism, as I frequently get asked, she spoke about her sister Beverly Smith who persuaded her to go to the upcoming National Black Feminist Organization conference in New York City in 1973, about which she was very excited. Beverly had been told about the conference by Margaret Sloan who worked at Ms. Magazine at the time where Beverly also worked, not surprisingly, because it echoes the sentiments of many Black women in the early '70s. Barbara shared her initial feelings.
"I was not involved in the women's movement before I got involved in NBFO because as much as I could understand how women were oppressed because of gender and because of patriarchy, I just couldn't see being and doing political work with predominantly white women or men for that matter."
She also recalled not being politically active at all at the time because "this was the height of Black nationalism, and the role for Black women as defined by unprogressive Black nationalists was a little bit narrow for me." "I'm not going to walk however many steps behind and have babies for the nation," she added. After joining the Boston chapter, she left briefly for DC, joined a consciousness raising group of white women, and began her writing career, which was a published review of Alice Walker's collection of short stories In Love And Trouble in Ms. Magazine.
This historical context, largely absent still from traditional women's liberation movement histories, is necessary, I would argue, for understanding Audre Lorde's feminist writing, feminist activism, and feminist ethics. My relationship with Audre Lorde began when I was a junior untenured professor at Spelman College in the 1970s and culminated in the publication of I Am Your Sister, Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, which was co-edited with Rudolph Byrd and Johnnetta Cole.
It is a highly selective collection of Lorde's speeches and essays as well as personal reflections from sister scholars Alice Walker, Gloria Joseph, Audre's last partner, and bell hooks. The anthology includes, for the first time, reflections on Audre Lorde's connections with Spelman College, the oldest historically Black college for women in the world.
Spelman is also the home of the Audre Lorde papers, which arrived on the campus in 1995 and had been open to scholars since 2009 in the College Archives, which is managed by the Women's Research and Resource Center. A generous grant from the Arcus Foundation in 2005 enabled us to process the papers and host students, faculty, and researchers from around the globe, and that's about 300 every year.
Audre Lorde's journey to Spelman did not happen as one might imagine, and they don't like to hear this when I talk about it out loud. In 1976, Ruby Sales, a temporary professor in the history department, a former SNCC organizer and an aspiring historian, invited Audre to speak at Spelman without fanfare or institutional support.
Let me just mention, if you have not seen the Lowndes County documentary that I think MSNBC crafted and Ruby Sales is one of the principal persons there, you should see it. This was a historic moment from my vantage point as a young member of the English department because Audre was likely the first out Black lesbian to speak to students and faculty at Spelman.
Rather predictably, her visit met with some resistance when word circulated that she had spoken openly about sexuality matters. Audre's return to Spelman in 1988 when Johnnetta Cole, then president, invited her to speak not long after she was inaugurated as the college's first Black woman president, was certainly a major event.
One of the things that people don't know is that Spelman had been around since 1881 and had never had a Black woman president, and this is 1987. When Audrey arrived at Spelman in 1987, Johnnetta was-- when Johnnetta arrived at Spelman in 1987, she was told primarily by me that Audre had visited the campus about a decade earlier but had been coldly received and was a target of homophobia, and she vowed never ever to step foot on Spelman's campus.
Drawing on their Sicily and feminist connection, Johnnetta invited Audre to come to Spelman and participate in a series that she called Speaking at Spelman, Reading at Reynolds. At first, Audre resisted. But finally, perhaps as much to end Johnnetta's persistent asking, agreed to visit the campus in 1988.
This time she was warmly and properly received. In many ways, the work of the Women's Center founded in 1981 had been dealing head on with gender and sexuality issues, so there was less hostility to Audre's radical feminist politics. To be sure, Audre's most cherished gift to the college and future generations of scholars was her decision, despite this earlier episode, to donate when she could have sold them-- to donate her personal papers and other artifacts to the Spelman archives, a component of the center.
Capturing the significance of this connection at our 25th anniversary at the center, which was a symposium on Audre's legacy, Leslie Feinberg, a rather well known trans activist, said this. "It is here at Spelman that the words and works of Audre Lorde have finally found a home. This historically Black college has ensured that her fiery words will never be extinguished."
I am convinced that it was Audrey's cherished friendship with Johnnetta and her last visit to Spelman's campus that precipitated her decision to deposit her papers there. Her will made provisions for this precious gift. And three years after her death in 1992, Audre's archive arrived at Spelman. I am also convinced that Audre Lorde's life's work helped us envision at Spelman a beloved community of sisters and brothers who are committed to a world free of all the isms-- poverty, religious intolerance, misogyny, and violence.
The Lorde papers were the first acquisition in a broader strategy on the part of the Women's Center and President Cole of becoming a major repository for the papers of influential, contemporary Black feminist scholars, activists, and writers. Professor Alexis De Veaux, who completed a biography of Audre, Warrior Poet, was the first to conduct research in the Lorde archive followed by Rudolph P. Byrd who conceptualized I Am Your Sister which Terrence used in his class.
Audre's journey at Spelman had a profound impact on what we would like to call its feminist transformations. And one of the questions that Terrence asked is, what does one do with Audre's legacy?
Well, we took that very seriously. The students who enrolled in our first Audre Lorde seminar on campus are witnesses to her continued presence on the campus which we believe Ruby Sales could not have imagined in 1978. And when I talked to her on the phone, we said, can you believe this?
Scholar activist Angela Davis, who had also the privilege of knowing Audre, captured her far-reaching impact in this way. Through her life, she galvanizes alliances among individuals and groups who are not expected to discover points of convergence. Thus, her legacy is claimed by poets, writers, scholars, and activists, by working class people and women and men of all racial backgrounds.
In a tribute to Audre Lorde three years after her death, poet Essex Hemphill wrote a letter in which he thanked her for welcoming-- and I'm going to quote from Essex-- your gay brothers to come into the circle you were creating. You never barred us from participating in envisioning a new world. You only ask-- I love this. You only ask that we be brave, we be strong, we could be committed to working for a joint liberation for the oppressed, a joint liberation for us all.
Self-defined as a white, antiracist, working class, transgender lesbian woman, socialist activist Leslie Feinberg acknowledges her indebtedness to Audre for her razor sharp truths and her profound insights about difference. I'm going to-- because it's 12:30, I'm going to move to the end.
With more gatherings like this one and elsewhere, which I've been trying to do a lot of, and concerted efforts to rewrite the history books, especially if we can get rid of these book bans, especially the textbooks that schoolchildren read, it might be possible, finally, that women such as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, Pauli Murray, and Audre Lorde, and countless others will become the praiseworthy, household names that Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and John Lewis have become. And that's not to take anything away from these legends.
More importantly, when a fuller history of Black women's activism is written, young women and men all over the world will understand more clearly the joys of struggle-- we talked about joy in Terrence's class-- the importance of lifelong commitment to social justice, and finally, in the words of Toni Cade Bambara, the irresistibility of revolution. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I left out a lot of stuff about how we enact Audre's vision, but I would rather do this than keep talking.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: All right, so thank you so much. Give her another round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
So Beverly, if you'd like, you can sit and--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: I'd like to begin-- Did you have a question or-- oh, being [INAUDIBLE]. Can you say more about Lorde's notion of silence and how silence is so important in political struggles?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Well, what she says-- and we have to-- I have to think about this on a regular basis. What she says is your silence will not protect you. In other words, you can stay silent, you can stay quiet, you can stay under the radar, you can-- but it will not protect you. You will still experience the toxic realities of all of these isms.
So her point was, we were never meant to survive anyway, so speak up, make noise, upset things because otherwise there will be no way that we can envision a new world. So silence is a really bad thing, which I say to my junior professor colleagues because it's not going to protect you and it's not going to shield you. Yes.
AUDIENCE: As you were talking, one question that came up for me, and it's kind of a-- I'd ask you to sort of speculate or think about what would they think about the expansiveness of our understanding of different [? divinities ?] today?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: What would who think?
AUDIENCE: Audre Lorde or the group of people that were operating [INAUDIBLE] or making those-- that list all of the things that they want.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: I would think that Audre would say finally, finally, finally. Finally somebody listened to these-- going back to the 19th century, somebody listened to these radical Black feminists, theorists, and activists about-- exactly. Just finally somebody listened to the ways in which we re-imagine what we mean by gender and sexuality. And so I think she would be pleased and say, how come it took so long?
[LAUGHTER]
These people have been writing and agitating around these issues for over 100 years. So I think she would say, yeah, it finally happened, is what I think she would think. You know, one of the things I'll say-- I had a 40 year friendship with bell hooks. We actually met at a National Women's Studies Association Conference, and I'd like to share this.
Met her at a National Women's Studies Association Conference in stores, and she was promoting her first book Ain't I a Woman, and she did not have a place to stay. She did not have a room because she didn't have resources. And we bumped into each other.
And I said, where are you staying? She said, I don't have anywhere to stay. I said, well, you can come up in my little raggedy dorm room and I'll sleep on the floor and you can take my single bed.
And we started talking that night and we talked for 40 years. One of the things that she-- I spent the last week of her life with her in Berea. And one of the things that she worried about was whether her words would be remembered. And she was thinking about people like Zora Neale Hurston, who died penniless and had an unmarked grave, and people like Alice Walker had to go and reintroduce us again to Alice-- to Zora.
So bell worried. And if she could see-- if she could see the symposia and the celebrations of her work since she passed, she would be stunned. And she also was worried that feminist theory and feminist activism was sinking. And one of the things that I used to tell her was-- at this point she was out of the classroom-- undergraduate classroom, and I sort of, I think, convinced her that feminism is alive and well in various places.
And I think about Black women's blueprint and even Black Lives Matter and in our classrooms, so she didn't have to worry when she shut her eyes that her work and the work of Audre Lorde around radical Black feminist activism-- and part of why I'm going to tell you she was a little bit worried is that she also saw how feminism the concept had been made so, so puny and palatable. So everybody was calling themselves a feminist. I won't call any names.
[LAUGHTER]
You know, lifestyle, I'm a feminist. I mean, even-- I will call her name. Even Sarah Palin says she was a feminist. And so that's what she worried about. Has feminism lost its radical edge?
And so I would say to her now if I could, Audre Lorde's legacy, I think, lives on. And it lives on because of classes like these and talks like these. And so I'm not worried about the death of radical feminism.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Beverly, could you say more about [INAUDIBLE] because there are some in academies saying, well, she's taking this thing on love, and what is love and relationships have to do with the earlier [INAUDIBLE] in this project. Can you say more about that?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: And she talked about it. She said, Beverly-- her notion was that love within the context of the US was a radical, revolutionary project, asking women to love themselves, asking people of color to love themselves. And she actually did believe that the revolutionary project of loving each other and supporting each other was what was going to sustain movements.
And so she was almost-- she just couldn't understand why people thought that her later work around love was not radical. And if you-- and you know what, it's very interesting. Her love books are the books that sell the most now. I was at Marc Lamont Hill's bookstore in Philadelphia a couple of months ago. He said, I have no explanation, the number one selling book in his bookstore.
And she's not talking about a sort of sentimental love project. She's talking about something else. And I think it's possible to get the revolutionary radical aspect of her feminist project about love if you deeply read her work. Has anybody-- does anybody want to say something about that, her love politics and her and the ethics of the project of love? Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] She's been with us all week. And I'll tell you [INAUDIBLE] with a collection of scholars and activists. [INAUDIBLE] And her works that are unpublished [INAUDIBLE]. Her poetry about love, all [INAUDIBLE].
So literally you are meditating. You're doing a communal reading [INAUDIBLE] love works. Stick with the divine. Divine love.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: And I tried to get her to see, bell, nobody's going to forget about you. I think she'd be stunned. I think she'd be stunned. Thank you very much. So this past weekend?
AUDIENCE: Last weekend.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: OK, all right. Yes.
AUDIENCE: I'm a graduate of Berea College.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: OK.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 1856. [INAUDIBLE] Have a presence there. [INAUDIBLE]
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: It is.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: That's true.
AUDIENCE: She [? thought ?] he was home. [INAUDIBLE]
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: And there's a bell hooks way. They named one of the streets--
AUDIENCE: I know.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: --at Berea College. They really were happy to have her.
AUDIENCE: I would like to say that I met bell [INAUDIBLE] the year I was living [INAUDIBLE]
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: It began before then. And she was our most frequent visitor to the Women's Center. And you know what, this is the thing, we had no money to pay her. She would come for free until we got some. She would come-- she would come on a regular basis and just spend a whole amount of time with our students. But yeah.
There's a wonderful piece-- you know, Terrence, I had forgotten about it. There's a wonderful piece in I Am Your Sister where bell hooks writes about coming to the Women's Center with the Audre Lorde legacy, and it's an amazing essay which I have forgotten. So yeah. I still go to Berea. And in June, there's a symposium in her honor at the institute.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Oh, excuse me. Get the mic so we can get it on camera. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you for coming again. My name is Aliyah Collins. I'm a third year MDiv here. Also I graduated from Fisk University, so I know a little bit about HBCUs. And I think the way I was really introduced to Audre Lorde was kind of as Spelman. I was a Mellon Mays fellow in the-- I guess our program was centered at the AUC.
So I guess my question is around how-- just from your time at Spelman, how did you see like Audre Lorde being more engaged on campus? How did that affect the students or maybe the students' interest in learning about gender or sexuality, maybe even their influence in social action or different things like that on the campus?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: See, remember now, she comes once early on and is not treated very well and then she comes back for just one day. So Audre's presence on campus now is through her archives and through her papers and through the Audre Lorde course. So the students would not have had much interaction with her up close.
So it's her writings and the ways-- when you walk into the Women's Center at Spelman, Audre's photograph is right there. It's the first person I see when I walk into the Women's Center, and so the students want to know who is that. And so we honor Audre Lorde on a regular basis, so it's a little bit removed, unlike bell hooks who used to come on a regular basis and students still have memories of her.
But I think Audre Lorde's legacy lives at Spelman because of the memories of us and because of the ways in which her feminist ethics shaped the ways in which we imagine a Women's Center at Spelman and also the ways in which we imagine what it would mean to make or help make Spelman College more queer friendly, which is an ongoing project which we're very committed to, and we always invoke Audre Lorde in that regard.
And I mentioned how Audre was treated the first time she came and how she was willing to come back and give us another chance and left her papers there. So that's-- so Audre Lorde's legacy is there as a memory in her writings but not because students had a personal connection with her like bell hooks, or Shirley Chisholm who was there when Professor Williams was there and other folk-- Paula Giddings. Lots of people have been through there. Mari Evans, Sonia Sanchez, mostly when Johnnetta Cole was president.
AUDIENCE: Hi, professor. Thank you so much for your presentation today. Even in its truncated form I feel like you've given us much to think about. My name is [? Jensen. ?] I'm a PhD student here in theology, and I had two questions for you. One was about the National Black Feminist Organization's rejection of the strict feminist separatist line.
And it made me think about the fact that 21st century womanists will sometimes describe the difference between Black feminism and womanism precisely as an issue about separatism versus kind of a preservation of the integrity of the Black community. And womanists will sometimes describe themselves as trying to hold on to a nonseparatist version of gender liberation.
So I'm curious. It's a little bit of a trite question, the relationship between womanism and Black feminism, but I'm curious for you if there's-- how you kind of remember or narrate that history that you're telling us about with NBFO. Is this kind of a feminist stance or a womanist stance, or is the distinction actually unimportant?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: OK, we had this conversation. First off, there is absolutely no distinction in Alice Walker's head between womanism and feminism.
AUDIENCE: Uh-huh, OK.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: And I have to read the text. She says that womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender. In other words, it is a more intense form of feminism. I don't know-- I don't know why people, if they've read the texts, think of them as antithetical concepts because they're not.
Alice Walker was attempting at that point, because she knew that the term in language, feminism, lots of women of color and Black women were rejecting. So she tried to come up with a term, a concept that would say to us, this vision of liberation, which includes equality, is at the core of what it is that we think about, and it is not antithetical to feminism. And actually, if you keep reading that statement, it gets more and more radical.
And so I've always found it strange that people see those two concepts as antithetical to each other. And any time you say womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender, that lets what? So she's saying womanism is a more intense form of feminism but it is not antithetical.
And if you keep reading-- and when she talks about spirituality and when she talks about women's connections to each other, some people will say, oh, that's not what I meant. That's not what-- I'm not going there. And they'll reject that and say, I'm not a woman or a feminists. So I always like that question and I always have to bring the text out because it just is not opposed as antithetical concepts.
AUDIENCE: I see. Can I ask you one second brief question about the end of Audre Lorde's life, what people call her Berlin years, those last eight years of her life getting medical treatment in Germany? I'm curious for you about that being-- people will talk about that as an internationalist move, a movement away from being US centric. I'm curious what you make of that. Was this a later phase in her life, or was there actually already kind of a transnational strand?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: One of the things-- one of the things that you can see from what I described-- Black feminism has always been transnational. Always been transnational and has not been US centric. I mean, one of the things that the SNCC group did was they bonded with Puerto Rican women with respect to what was happening to the use of Puerto Rican women as guinea pigs to test contraceptives.
So Black feminism going back to the 19th century has always been global and always been transnational. And so Audre's move to going to Germany, which was to get alternative cancer treatment, she encountered Black Germans who did not have that racial lens. And so she bonded with Afro-German women and brought them back and forth.
So for her, that was a continuation of the transnational global work that Black feminists have always been involved in. And for them to call themselves third world women after the US-centric thing will show you-- when I go to very many national women's studies gatherings and there's all of these sessions about transnational feminism, it's always posited as something that is away from what US feminists have done. And I always say, radical Black feminism has always been global.
I mean, if you think about Alice Walker who tried to eradicate FGM on the continent, I mean, what is that? That's a transnational project. So we have never been just focused on the US. We've always had African diasporic consciousness and always been interested in the liberation of people of African descent no matter where in the world they live. So I don't-- it always is strange to me that we think that Black feminists in the US have been just focused on the US. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I'm an elderly alum who knew Audre through poetry. That's why I raised my hand. I wanted you to know that I had the privilege of knowing her too. And in the context of a gift that came from beyond me and that I let go through me and put out into the world and which didn't seem very useful, even frivolous, until Audre stood up and said poetry is not a luxury, it's just another language, another set of metaphors, another way of translating your experience, which is multifarious, and putting it out so that other people can get an idea of what that experience might be. That was the first thing.
In 1978, after she had already had the first mastectomy and decided not to reconstruct the breast that was removed, she wrote to me in a letter that is somewhere in my archive. I know where the archive is. I don't have the letter in my bag but she said, we get strong by doing the things we need to be strong for.
And that was when she was in her 50s. Well, I'm over 80 now, and the thing about being old is you've seen this stuff before. You can look back. You're here to testify I'm still alive, I'm going to pass on what I know about what's coming around again. And if you can smell it coming around the corner, you have an advantage.
Smell it. If it doesn't pass the smell test, fight it. Audre was not a binary person. She had many lives and she acknowledged all of them simultaneously. I am Black, woman, lesbian, daughter, mother-- I can't quote it exactly-- doing my work, and I'm here to ask you, are you doing yours?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Exactly.
AUDIENCE: That's-- I think it's from The Transformation of Silence. You do what you can with what you've got wherever you are at whatever point all of those intersectional isms are intersecting. And it moves. Social location is not a fixed point. It moves. One of the things that I finally realized about labels is you can multiply them infinitely, and it won't change the underlying structures.
More labels doesn't do it. You have to say yes and, not just this, not just that, not more hyphens. Change the underlying injustices. Get people to pool resources for a decent life for everybody. There's no other way. And it's in all-- everything you've ever read from any century, from any culture. They all say similar things. And then the next generation screws it up again.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Tell us how you came to have a connection to Audre.
AUDIENCE: I submitted a poem to something she was editing. She accepted it. And then I went to New York in 1977. There was a huge demo for everybody's rights-- feminist demo that included all different women from everywhere. And I was a nobody. I still am actually. But I met her and Adrienne Rich and all of these poets who were making noise wherever they were in the academic world, on the ground, in their neighborhoods. They had wiggle room.
This is the thing about the middle-- about middle class feminism. If you have no wiggle room, you can get killed for speaking up. When somebody has wiggle room and starts shaking things, it makes more space for those who have less wiggle room or more to lose. So you start where you are, you do what you can with whatever you've got, and encourage other people to do the same. This is-- it's the best I can make of it. And I'm only in my 80s so I'm not done yet I don't think.
[LAUGHTER]
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Thank you so much. Thank you. Oh, did you have a question?
AUDIENCE: No, that's all. I came back to Div school in middle age. I got an MTS when I was over 50, and it was the best two years of my life. It really was. When I walked away from getting my diploma, I thought, I should have done an MDiv. I want a third year. And I couldn't afford to do it. But it was a good idea. You don't know now what you're going to do with it, but you'll find out.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you again so much for being here with us. I was really struck by-- oh, actually, I wanted to say about bell hooks that another place where people are really reading her books are in prisons. And I think that's important to point out. Yeah, just last week I was at a prison in the area and the brothers were talking about how much bell hooks means to them and how much her work has transformed them. And so it definitely goes probably beyond what she had expected.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Oh, absolutely.
AUDIENCE: Yeah. So I guess I was struck by two things in your talk. One is it seemed really important to you to lay out a sort of genealogy. And I'm kind of-- I'm wondering why you think that's so important? I mean, I ignorantly thought the Combahee River Collective just sort of sprung up, right? But now hearing this I want to know everything.
And then the other thing is, I was also struck by, as you described the manifesto and the different points, you said it was both broad and particular. And I'm kind of wondering how you see the movements you described but also the future of movements as sitting in that place between the broad and the particular.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: So let me start with-- if you read traditional narratives of the women's movement or second wave feminism, OK, so let's just go back to the faulty third wave theory. First wave, 1848, Seneca Falls, to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, OK? That's first wave.
The argument is the second wave began in 1960. So traditional narratives about the women's movement wipe out the years 1920 to 1960. 40 years gone. And there was a huge amount of feminist activism happening, of which I describe in Words Of Fire. And then here comes so-called-- what is it-- second wave.
And the history of second-wave feminism in the US talks about the publication of-- what's the book? Feminine Mystique. And talks about Kennedy's commission on the status of women and talks about the first women's studies forum.
That is a totally white narrative. SNCC is not even in there. You would not see anything about SNCC in traditional narratives of the women's movement. And you would not see that consciousness raising was a technique that came out of civil rights. That's Sarah whatever her name is.
We're told that the women's movement's major strategy was consciousness raising and that it came from them. You will not see anything about SNCC. You will not see anything about National Black Feminist Organization. Combahee will be mentioned, but like you said, it's like it dropped out of the sky and you don't have that context.
So I got tired of, first of all, being asked by Black people, why are you embracing a politics that is antithetical to racial liberation, OK? So that's the first thing. So I wanted to make the case with Words Of Fire is that starting in 1835 with Maria Stewart, there was intersectional feminism that marched its way from 1835 to now. So it's not an alien politics. And number two was more radical for all the reasons that I mentioned. So it's really important to give that genealogy.
People don't even necessarily give it about Audre Lorde. A lot of people don't know that Audre Lorde was in the Combahee River Collective. And so you cannot understand contemporary Black feminism unless you have this genealogy. And it starts with SNCC.
You will not see that in any traditional narratives. You won't even see anything about National Black Feminist Organization. Most people don't know that Combahee-- the women-- the radical lesbian women in National Black Feminist Organization left them because they were homophobic and formed Combahee.
And they wanted all of us to know that it was Black lesbian feminists who crafted Combahee and who formed the radical edge of the women's movement. So that's what-- I think that genealogy is extremely important. And you can't-- and you can't understand Audre-- I mean, all of these women come out of the civil rights movement. All of them. Alice, all of them, OK?
AUDIENCE: Are there-- is there a bibliography that-- or books that show that history from like SNCC--
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Not really. Not really. If you read about contemporary Black feminism, it will sort of start with Combahee, all right? It'll sort of start with Combahee. And it will not talk about SNCC. Now, the other thing that I'm going to say is that the history of the so-called civil rights movement also doesn't talk about SNCC's gender-- radical gender politics.
You will not-- I mean, I'm in Atlanta and I know all about SNCC. I did not realize that it was those organizations that I mentioned that came out of SNCC. You read Frances Beal's Double Jeopardy, but you don't realize the organizational apparatus that produced that. So the silences are in both spaces-- civil rights and women's rights.
AUDIENCE: And that kind of feeds into the thing about the book that you were saying.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Yeah, I mean, what did I say it was? His was Soul-- Soul On Fire. I mean, can you imagine? I mean, we have looked everywhere. It wasn't a book. It was like a pamphlet. And Frances Beal can't find it. And you know, it's going to show up one of these days.
But people-- that book, that Soul On Ice book was very problematic. But that's the book that-- people read Soul On Ice. It's one of the most important books that come out of the civil rights movement. And we didn't-- and we didn't talk about the misogyny in there.
And I was actually even at a gathering where Eldridge Cleaver's wife Kathleen was there. And she got up and challenged Rudolph Byrd and I about Eldridge Cleaver's toxic, misogynist behavior, not just ideology. She stood up and told us that Eldridge Cleaver was a feminist.
AUDIENCE: Was this is when she was at Emory Law?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: When she was at Emory Law School. Now, she came to Spelman-- I will say this-- and our students confronted her about the violence that she experienced. And she at first tried to deny it, and then she said, but I did leave him. So I said, well, that's good to say.
But yeah, so the way in which-- I don't know. The way in which Eldridge Cleaver was like an icon. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm [? Hiram ?] Jackson. I'm a third-year MDiv graduate of Morehouse College. And I initially heard about Audre Lorde through Dean Carter. He kind of recommended that I-- he just threw the book at me and said, read it.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Really?
AUDIENCE: Yeah. And I was--
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Which one was it that he threw at you?
AUDIENCE: Sister Outsider.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Sister Outsider, OK.
AUDIENCE: And I was just kind of blown away. I was a freshman at Morehouse, didn't know what I was reading.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: I know. What year was this?
AUDIENCE: What's up?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: What year?
AUDIENCE: This was in 2016. Yeah. And I just want to ask about your experience at Morehouse and dealing with the students in terms of getting them to really understand what they're reading. Not really just glossing over for a grade, but really trying to [? capsulate ?] reading like Black women as readers and understanding their experiences aside from just for the grade.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: That's a great question. When Rudolph Byrd and I edited Traps, African-American Men on Gender and Sexuality, we thought that that book would be adopted at Morehouse-- that book would be adopted at Morehouse. Particularly there were a couple of courses.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Oh yeah, it was [INAUDIBLE].
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Yes.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Oh, he wouldn't adopt it.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: That's what I'm saying. Say something about that.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: [INAUDIBLE]
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Yeah. So they wouldn't even adopt the book. They wouldn't even adopt Traps. And we have Benjamin E. Mays's article in there. He grew up with an alcoholic father, and he vowed that he would not treat women badly. It's a wonderful essay that comes out of his [INAUDIBLE]. All right.
So we said, OK, this is the perfect book for Morehouse since they won't read bell hooks. And when they started the African-American studies program, those courses were male-centered. And Terrence is one of them. So I get a few, though not many, students from Morehouse to take our women's studies courses.
And one of the things that they say to me is they cannot believe that they've been in college for four years-- this semester I have seniors graduating political science majors, and they said they have-- in the four years they've been in Morehouse, they have not read any of this material. Now, one thing that's good, Carter has hired an associate chaplain person-- I don't know what the title is-- who is out and gay, and he's teaching a course on Audre Lorde and Pauli Murray.
AUDIENCE: Oh, [INAUDIBLE]?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: What's his name?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Yes. So he's going to make a difference. But in general, the curriculum is phallocentric. And so students have to come to Spelman, unfortunately. But the fact that they would not use Traps, still don't use Traps, is amazing.
KEVIN ROSS: I just want to make a comment since he brought it up, since the door is now open, I am Kevin Ross. I'm a graduate of Morehouse College and a former student of Dr. Guy-Sheftall. And I witnessed firsthand the Beverly Guy-Sheftalling of Dean Carter.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
Tell them about that.
KEVIN ROSS: So it was an occasion where there was an accusation of-- do you remember the story? Accusation of a Spelman student regarding Morehouse students raping, some kind of violent incident. So the Morehouse men were arrested and were in jail, and it brought a lot of tension on the campus. The young lady's identity was not disclosed to the public. And eventually, when things like this happen, eventually, Morehouse and Spelman will get together maybe in a service. In this case, it was at King Chapel at Morehouse. [LAUGHS]
And I'm not laughing about the incident. It's just where this-- and so all of the students end up in a chapel service at Morehouse-- Morehouse, Spelman. And it was hot. It was hot. And I was a chapel assistant at the time with Dean Carter. And so I think Dr. Cole was there and Eddie Gaffney, the former provost-- a former dean of students, and several--
And Eddie Gaffney was a psychologist, and so he was like the one who was named to stand up and make the soothing statement, you know? And he said it and the students were comfortable and we were good and it was OK. And Dean Carter that day was scheduled to preach, so he was the speaker.
And Dean Carter-- I could hear his brain saying that wasn't enough. I'll speak to it when I get up, you know? And so in his preliminary comments, he retold a story that revealed some misogyny and sexism that was alive in him.
And what he said was-- what he said-- he retold the story of a young man who said-- who was with his father on the campus of Morehouse around 12:00 noon and witnessed a young lady come out of the dormitory. And so he said, see, Dad, why we can't focus and study?
So in that context with Morehouse men and Spelman women gathered, Dean Carter repeated this story and the place caught fire. Women stood up and-- you sexist pig, and got up out of the choir stand. People started bolting out of the room. It was just-- and of course, we were his chapel assistants, so we were stunned not knowing what to do.
Long story short, the way this got resolved after Dean Carter really got taken through the ringer and came to a place of reckoning with his own sexism, he, in repentance, enrolled in Beverly Guy-Sheftall's feminist thought class at the Women's Center. And so that he would have company, I took the class with him to make sure I was not making those same mistakes later in life.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: And I have to write about that.
KEVIN ROSS: And we read Words Of Fire. That was your book at the time. And so I just wanted to thank you. I want to thank you for your contribution in my life.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: And he didn't stay the whole semester, you remember?
KEVIN ROSS: I remained though. I remained.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: And he dropped out. He was a dropout.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm so glad you mentioned that. But so he had-- so--
KEVIN ROSS: He transformed his life though.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Yeah, and maybe that's why he gave you the Audre Lorde book. And he had Quincy, and Quincy is doing some wonderful things there.
KEVIN ROSS: Yeah. I mention that because I just wanted to--
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Oh, I'm happy you mentioned it.
KEVIN ROSS: --acknowledge your influence on Dean and the Chapel and me personally. So I'm so happy that you're here.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Yeah, he sat up there in class. I don't know if he did the reading.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm glad you mentioned it because, you know what, I had forgotten about that. And I'm getting ready to write an essay on-- because we have some horrible rape cases right now. I'm getting ready to write an essay on the situation of rapes in the AUC, so I'm going to remember that. So Terrence, did you take any more--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] course. One of the things that I always said at the beginning was that the civil rights movement was patriarchal. And it goes back to your reference to Soul On Ice and Cleaver. And I can't remember now the specific statement he made in that book, but it was something which was adopted by the movement.
Now, Lawrence Carter was a student at BU when I was at BU. And I know him very well. And I would tend to see Lawrence in a different way. And I would want to point out also that one of the things that he did was to bring Morehouse students to Harvard Divinity School. And a number of them did come to Harvard Divinity School and maybe here their eyes were opened.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Yes. You know, Terrence, I think I shared this with you, but another piece that I have finally finished is a piece about Coretta Scott King's radical politics, which people don't know anything about. And I would say she was the most outspoken civil rights leader around LGBTQ rights. People don't know that.
For 20 years, her personal assistant was an out, white, gay male. And I've spent a lot of time with him. And I said, do you think you're the reason? He said, no, she was already there. He said, Beverly, she wouldn't have hired me. She had met Bayard Rustin when she was in high school. And wives of famous men also fall through the cracks.
But when I give that paper, Terrence, people are stunned because all they know about Coretta Scott King is that she was a widow of Martin. But she spoke out when Matthew Shepard was killed. Coretta Scott King spoke out about Matthew Shepard's death.
And she was-- she was the one who pushed King to have an antiwar perspective because she was a pacifist having become a pacifist at Antioch College. And [? Andy ?] [? Young ?] acknowledges that. She pushed him. So that's another silence and absence. But eventually, we will see the fullness of Coretta Scott King.
And I don't know if you all have seen the documentary of Rosa Parks. She was an antirape activist before she sat down. And the documentary captures the fullness of-- I mean, the narrative that we got and the schoolchildren still read is that she's an old woman who got tired. She was 39 years old. Old woman who got tired and sat down. I mean, the narrative is so antithetical.
She was-- she worked for the NAACP. She had been trained at Highlander School, and she was an antirape activist. And I relooked at the Recy Taylor documentary. She was a person who did investigative journalism for the rape of Recy Taylor. But all of that is just erased from her history. So she also deserves-- Coretta deserves a documentary and a new treatment. Part of the problem is her children. Anyway--
[LAUGHTER]
I hope they-- when I publish this essay they won't sue me. But anyway. In terms of this fuller, more radical image of their mother, which they should be happy to have out there. But anyway. How many of you have seen the new Rosa Parks documentary?
So I'm going to put that on your list and the Lowndes County documentary where Ruby Sales is in there. And which other one did I mention? Oh, I said the Recy Taylor one. What else did I say? And Rosa Parks and Lowndes County. Those are three documentaries that are really worth seeing and which focus on Black women.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: One last question [INAUDIBLE] in terms of thinking through what's happening now. One, your commitment to HBCUs and why you stayed at Spelman all these years. And what do you think about the partnership between Harvard and HBCUs, and how can one either advocate for it or push for it with a Black feminist lens?
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Ooh. I really hope that that partnership is an egalitarian, nonhierarchical, radical, and, of course, feminist project. And we don't have any models for that because partnerships between a place like Harvard and an HBCU, you know what that is. It's very hierarchical. We're coming here to help the poor Negroes in the South at these little pitiful HBCUs. Even Spelman and Morehouse.
So I'm hoping that in this year and with Ruth Simmons being a major interlocutor there and Evelyn Hammonds who are going to have something to do with the partnership, that it will be a new model. Trying to infuse a radical Black feminist lens in there might happen mainly because of Evelyn and a radical queer Black feminist lens. And of course, Ruth will be on the case and I think won't let certain things happen. So I have a wait-and-see attitude. And I want to be hopeful. What do you think?
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Like you, I'm hopeful. But I'm convinced that Ruth Simmons has not only the moral character but the intellectual fierceness to push an agenda that will be egalitarian because I think her experience at Prairie View has really, I think, opened up a whole lot in terms of the severe inequalities long-term at HBCUs.
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: And she understands these institutions. She really does understand them. And she's tough. You would not want to get on her wrong side.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Any final questions? Well, let's give Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall another round of applause.
[LAUGHTER]
BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL: Thank you, Terrence.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Really grateful for her taking time out and thankful for you all coming out. Feel free to talk to her as we close. So thank you, and have a great rest of the day.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Professor Terrence Johnson.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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