Emancipation's Daughters

Front matter

RICHÉ RICHARDSON |

SANE vi

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Preface

Like many other Americans, I got my first glimpse of Condoleezza Rice on television when she appeared before a national audience as a speaker at the 2000 Republican National Convention (RNC), held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the presidential campaign of Texas governor George W. Bush. The event officially marked his selection as the party’s nominee. During the television broadcast, I remember listening with rapt attention as Rice, who was at the time a professor of political science at Stanford University and the campus’s former provost, reflected on the experience of her father, John Rice, of becoming a Republican in 1952, when the Democrats of segregated Jim Crow Alabama had prohibited him from registering to vote because of the color of his skin.

Her other personal story in the speech highlighted her grandfather, “Granddaddy Rice.” It reflected on how he rose from farming in rural Alabama to attending Stillman College, where he eventually became a Presbyterian minister, a choice that provided him a scholarship to remain in school and that also opened the door for generations of her family members to become college educated. She underscores his story as “an American story” and as an illustration of hard work and perseverance in pursuing the American dream. The speech ends with a proclamation of her belief that “George W. Bush challenges us to call upon our better selves, to be compassionate toward those who are less fortunate, to cherish and educate every child, descendants of slaves and immigrants alike, and to thereby affirm the American dream for us all.”!

Significantly, Rice frames herself as a “daughter” in relation to a longer history of blacks in the United States since slavery. Furthermore, she frames her own family—a black family—as a representative American family within a national body from which people of African descent have typically been excluded. These terms tacitly mediate and authorize her entry into the nation’s public sphere.

Yet the Republican establishment’s long-standing investments in the notorious southern strategy—developed after the civil rights movement to dismantle major civil rights legislative gains and social progress toward racial integration through agendas premised on race baiting—were also likely not lost on some who heard her speech and caught the irony. The nationalization of this reactionary political ideology under the auspices of the neoconservative movement flew in the face of the Republican Party’s historical reputation as the party of Lincoln, which had opposed slavery, endorsed Emancipation, supported the project of Reconstruction during the post-Civil War era, and created a welcoming climate for earlier generations of black voters, such as Rice’s father. In the wake of her speech, Rice emerged as a symbol of a new kind of conservatism that promised to be more inclusive of blacks moving forward than it had been in the past and as a primary proponent of the political platform of “compassionate conservatism,” which George W. Bush was advocating as a cornerstone of his campaign.”

If this event, where she emphasized the influence of her paternal ancestors, gave Rice her most salient public exposure to a national audience on the Bush campaign trail, she became a familiar face in news and television media after Bush’s controversial and widely disputed presidential election victory over Vice President Al Gore in 2000 and Bush’s selection of Rice as national security adviser in his presidential cabinet, the first black woman to ever occupy this position, alongside Colin Powell as the nation’s first black secretary of state. Powell had served under Bush’s father, President George H. W. Bush, as the first black chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The unprecedented high-ranking appointments of African Americans in George W. Bush's administration seemed all the more significant because they were leadership roles that no blacks had ever held in the nation’s history, opening up new possibilities for these leaders to affect domestic and international affairs, including key policy decisions. In a way, the appointments also seemed to hearken back to the theme that Rice had introduced at the RNC, related to Republicans giving blacks access to opportunities that the Democratic Party—though no longer defined by the infamous segregationist Dixiecrat ideology premised on states’ rights, which had dominated southern politics since 1948—had systemically denied, notwithstanding the Democratic Party’s large and consistent African American voting base.’ Based on a constitutional provision that accorded states rather than the federal government the power to make decisions, the states’ rights doctrine had also been invoked by southern states invested in slaveholding to rationalize secession that led to the Civil War.

Although I did not share Rice’s party affiliation or investments in neoconservative political agendas, I was definitely intrigued and excited to see her so regularly on the national stage after her historic appointment to Bush’s cabi-

X PREFACE net. Rice stood out for me, as she did for a lot of other black women, because of the key role she played. Her symbolic power was undeniable. This fascination intensified all the more for me once Rice was appointed secretary of state in 2004, after President Bush was elected to a second term, for this appointment meant that Rice as a black woman held more power than any woman in the world. It made her the nation’s primary representative in the realm of international affairs. Never had a black woman been as influential in a president’s cabinet, as powerful in the realm of national and global politics, or had such a prominent national platform in my lifetime.

At the same time, the space for Rice to occupy such a prominent leadership position in the nation’s government as a black woman had been established by a long line of predecessors. They had paved the way and established salient voices in politics in an effort to achieve a more democratic America for black people and all others who have been excluded from its opportunities. Among her predecessors were Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of Bethune-Cookman College, who had established the National Council of Negro Women and served as the only woman in the Black Cabinet of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rosa Parks’s courageous choice to remain seated on the Montgomery bus in 1955 had launched the Montgomery bus boycott and was the tipping point for the desegregation of public buses in the city, while establishing foundations for the Freedom Rides, making her a national and global symbol. She also had an intimate connection to politics as the secretary of Congressman John Conyers in Detroit from 1965 until she retired in 1988. As someone born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, during the post-civil rights era, I have been able to study and learn from her activist legacy in visceral ways.

Fewer people know that Pauli Murray, who had practiced passing as a boy during her teen years, was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus in Virginia in 1940, years before Parks, an incident that led Murray to become a civil rights lawyer. Murray, the first black woman ordained in the Episcopal church, was a lesbian who in more recent years has become legible as transgender. Such factors may help explain why Murray is not as widely celebrated in civil rights history for resisting discrimination and coining the term Jane Crow to describe the effects of systematized segregation on black women, or celebrated as a cofounder of the National Organization for Women and a foremost advocate for equal rights.

I was a baby when Shirley Chisholm—the first black woman ever elected to Congress—made her historic run for president in 1972 and emerged as a

PREFACE Xi national symbol, establishing new precedents in the nation’s political context as a black woman leader in the post-civil rights era, in the midst of the black power and women’s liberation movements, as she promoted policies designed to help ensure the well-being of women and children. Indeed, when I was thirteen, my grandfather Joe Richardson recommended Shirley Chisholm to me as a black woman who had achieved great things and whom I should think of as a role model. Rice's role would have been inconceivable without the foundations established by Chisholm.

Carol Moseley Braun, who made history in 1993 as the first African American senator and the first woman elected in the state of Illinois, had also helped pave the way for Rice. The same could be said for Barbara Jordan's significance as the first African American elected to the state senate in Texas in 1966, establishing the foundations for the formidable political contributions of Representative Sheila Jackson Lee. As someone living in California, I was also deeply inspired by Maxine Waters, who was first elected to Congress in 1991 to represent California’s Twenty-Ninth District, and who has become known to newer generations as Auntie Maxine for her bold and tireless advocacy in the national arena on behalf of the disenfranchised, alongside Barbara Lee, who was elected to represent Californias Ninth Congressional District in 1998.*

The lives and legacies of all these women provide powerful testimonies of the transformative influence on national politics of black women, all of whom have been identified as liberal Democrats whose political philosophies radically differ from the neoconservatism espoused by Rice. Even as Rice often invoked civil rights histories, the policy agendas she advanced and supported in the national arena were recurrently reactionary and differed radically from the agendas associated with other black women leaders. The new heights to which Rice had risen in the national and global arenas in the new millennium, coupled with that intriguing paradox, made me interested in learning more about her, as well as about her black women predecessors. I wanted to study the public voices that black women have been able to establish in the national arena, along with their writings, notwithstanding the marginality, stereotyping, and othering of black women in the public sphere. This goal put me on the path to writing this book, which examines how such iconic black women leaders in the political realm have expanded national femininity beyond its conventional white definitions.

Indeed, in some ways, Rice’s rise to such prominent positions under the auspices of the Republican Party at the dawn of the twenty-first century seemed ironic. On top of notoriously polarizing rhetoric in the political arena xii PREFACE throughout the 1980s, characterizing young single black women with children who used forms of public assistance as “welfare queens,’ the Republican establishment had targeted several high-profile black women for propaganda attacks during the 1990s, in heated debates that arose over prominent leadership positions. In 1991, law professor Anita Hill experienced hostile interrogation before a Republican- and male-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Democratic senator Joe Biden, during hearings held in the months after she accused Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee of President George H. W. Bush and a colleague with whom she had worked at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment, prior to Thomas’s confirmation to the Court.

As the neoconservative movement of the 1990s consolidated in the concerted effort to oppose newly elected Democratic president and former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton’s administration, an increasingly hostile climate made high-profile black women, who were potential candidates for prominent posts because of their affiliation with Clinton, objects of public ridicule and spectacle. The targets included Clinton’s nomination for secretary of education in 1992, Johnetta B. Cole, a noted anthropologist and esteemed president of the historically black, all-female Spelman College; his appointment of Joycelyn Elders as the first African American and second female surgeon general of the United States in 1993; and his nomination of University of Pennsylvania law professor Lani Guinier as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993.

The centrist positions of the Clinton administration were perceived as detrimental to African Americans, leading to the crime bill that expanded mass incarceration and to the dismantling of the welfare system, but they were also obviously inimical for black women leaders. Moreover, its centrist agendas held dire implications for the gay and lesbian population in sanctioning the notorious Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in 1993. This Department of Defense directive prohibited discrimination and harassment in the military based on sexuality, but also threatened discharge for soldiers who disclosed information about their sexuality and same-sex relationships, expressly barring those who engaged in “homosexual acts.” Such policies encouraged the closeting of sexual difference at a time when the field of queer studies was expanding, challenging conventional understandings of gender and sexuality, and queer identities were gaining more visibility in popular culture.

Unlike Cole, Elders, and Guinier, Rice’s affiliation with the Republican Party made her an insider and afforded her some protection and immunity from the kinds of attacks that black women in the public sphere of politics

PREFACE xiii had experienced in previous years. Her acceptance, however, was premised on complicity with policy agendas that were widely perceived to be reactionary. Her alliances with a political party perceived to be invested in advancing the interests of wealthy and white Americans often led critics to question her blackness and, in some cases, to even think about making more productive and strategic political alliances between blacks and conservatism.

I found it fascinating in daily life that as I circulated in public spaces in Sacramento, California, where I lived while working on the faculty at the University of California, Davis, and as I traveled, even on vacation to Jamaica, people began to compare me to Rice. They would mention that I reminded them of her. These everyday casual comparisons not only pointed to Rice’s salience as one of the nation’s most recognizable leaders but also underscored her iconicity and influence as a black woman on the national stage.

Like many others, I admired Rice’s signature classic look, which regularly incorporated designer items such as St. John suits, Salvatore Ferragamo shoes, pearls, and a flipped bob hairstyle. I vividly remember excitedly calling my mother on the phone one evening as Rice walked into the House chamber for a State of the Union address wearing one of her St. John suits. Even before I could mention what I was calling about, my mother, Joanne Richardson, said, “I saw it? a moment that epitomized the collective admiring gaze that many black women in the nation were directing at Rice, even when others seemed not to be as invested in analyzing or talking about the masterful political showmanship embodied in her impeccable styling as a black woman circulating so saliently in the nation’s public sphere. Rice's impeccable style was clearly connected to some degree to her iconic force and impact. I also grasped the power and influence of Rice’s iconicity when my hairstylist at a Regis salon in downtown Sacramento, who prided himself on his deft cutting expertise, honed by a mentor trained at Vidal Sassoon, took to giving the ends of the chin-length bob I wore at the time an upward turn with the barrel of his curling iron to make my hairstyle resemble Rices famous flip.

As fascinated as I was, I shared the serious concern of her critics about the reactionary neoconservative political platforms that she seemed to be endorsing so willingly. Like her fiercest critics, I questioned the veracity of Rice’s claims on behalf of the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which culminated in the Iraq War in the months after the tragedy of September 11, 2001, when multiple groups of al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four flights from Boston to crash into three primary targets—the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and

Xiv PREFACE the nation’s capital—resulting in several thousand casualties. The bravery of a group of passengers on Flight 93, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, had thwarted the effort of the terrorists to reach the nation’s capital. In numerous interviews and public speeches, to rationalize the war on terror in the post- 9/11 era, Rice repeatedly mentioned her personal friendships and recollections related to Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, the four black girls who were killed during the horrific bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963. The tragedy made international news, and the girls became iconic symbols of the nation’s moral conscience in the wake of their tragic deaths.

Similarly, in 2005, I shared the public concern about the failure of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to send faster relief to New Orleans after the levees broke and flooded the city in the days after Hurricane Katrina, as thousands of people remained stranded in the city. I was deeply unsettled by stories alleging that Rice had been spotted shopping for Ferragamo shoes in New York City as the levees broke. During this period, I even remember puzzling inwardly and feeling frustration about why so many people kept comparing me to her in public, stubbornly insisting that I had absolutely nothing in common with “that woman.” I finally felt compelled to do some serious self-examining about what if anything I really did have in common with her beyond the level of superficial appearances people typically mentioned.

As a child born in Alabama who had also earned a doctorate, eventually lived in California, and worked as a university professor, I began to think more about the places where our histories converged and diverged. I began to study and reflect on her story. I read every book available related to her, including biographies, and began to research her in earnest and to present academic talks on her fashioning and iconicity as a woman in the public sphere of politics. I began to analyze her conservative political alliances with a more open and objective mind to think about how I could put myself into her shoes and understand where she was coming from.

I began to ponder from a critical standpoint what it meant to witness so many people across genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, regions, and nationalities citing Rice as an iconic figure in everyday life. She seemed to be both intensely fascinating and captivating as a point of reference in the minds of a diverse constellation of people I encountered in public spaces. Through Rice I began to grasp in a visceral sense how possible it is for a high level of symbolic capital to be associated with black women subjects in the national

PREFACE XV context, observations that also put me on the path to developing this study related to black women who have emerged as representative women in symbolizing and shaping definitions of national identity.

Like Rice, Michelle Obama seemed to signal new possibilities for black women’s representation in the nation’s public sphere of the twenty-first century. Just as I had been strongly affected when Rice spoke at the 2000 RNC, I remember being similarly fascinated the first time I heard of Michelle Obama on the night that her husband, Barack Obama, a veteran state senator in Illinois, community organizer, and law professor at the University of Chicago, spoke and stole the show as a keynote at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston, Massachusetts. To borrow the lingo of contemporary social media such as Facebook and Twitter, I began to “follow” her and track information about her once I became a member and contributor to the Barack Brigade, organized to support her husband’s election to the US. Senate, and even well before she became an object of fascination in the national media while on the campaign trail during her husband’s first bid for the presidency.

During these months, despite her committed work and powerful speeches on the campaign trail, a lot of propaganda seemed designed to distort Michelle Obama’s public image. Her DNC speech in 2008 countered such misleading representations. Presented on a night with the theme “One Nation,” Obama's speech was a watershed public address that gave her widespread salience on a national stage. Her delivery of this speech accomplished for her what her husband’s captivating presentation had accomplished at the prior DNC in 2004, when he was campaigning for the U.S. Senate, enabling her to connect in a visceral way with a national audience while also revealing the depth and sincerity in her ideas and the extent of her rhetorical talents, taking her to a new level of popularity, recognition, and appreciation.* Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie aptly describes this moment: “All over America, black women were still, their eyes watching a form of God, because she represented their image writ large in the worlds

At a rhetorical level, this speech, more than any prior one, established her alignments with the values of the U.S. mainstream and identification with it as a woman, increasing her legibility and symbolic force as an emerging feminine icon in the national arena. This speech was foundational in shaping narratives related to her as a wife and mother that have since crystallized in the U.S. public sphere, including in some of the major policy initiatives that she has advanced. Her major initiatives included the Let’s Move! campaign in

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2010, which was designed to address childhood obesity in the United States in an effort to improve nutrition in schools and to encourage physical activity and exercise, and her work with Vice President Joe Biden in 2011 to introduce Joining Forces in support of military veterans and their families, centered on American families and children. These projects frame her as a premier mother in the nation and as a primary representative and advocate for these groups in the national arena, drawing on her political capital as the nation’s First Lady.

When her husband was elected president, Michelle Obama became the first black First Lady in this nation’s history, a role that expanded representational possibilities for black women in the national arena and placed a black woman front and center in the nation’s consciousness. To be sure, her role as First Lady made her a new and unprecedented symbol of American womanhood in the twenty-first century. As a black woman, she introduced a new paradigm for the concept of the First Lady by reframing the position in relation to black feminine subjectivity and unsettling the position’s conventional essentialist associations with white womanhood, just as Barack Obama's 2008 election unsettled the tacit white masculine subjectivity conventionally associated with the office of the president in the United States.

Once Michelle Obama emerged on the national stage, I had the experience of being compared to her a lot in public spaces as well. For me, witnessing this phenomenon all over again, as I had with Rice, underscored Michelle Obama's iconic force, increasing popularity, and legibility for everyday people and attested to her profound effect on the national imaginary. Rice and Obama are clearly positioned on opposite ends of the political spectrum, yet they share common ground for introducing themselves to national audiences through speeches at national political conventions while framing themselves as “daughters” and their families as representative American families, as well as invoking the interests of children. My research has shown me that their examples are far from unique. Reflecting on black women such as Rice and Obama, who became nationally prominent within contemporary politics of the twenty-first century, led me to raise questions about the role that black women have played historically in shaping notions of national selfhood within a diverse citizenry.

Condoleezza Rice and Michelle Obama stand on the shoulders of black women within a long cultural legacy, spanning back to the late nineteenth century, who have, in their speeches and writings, recurrently invoked notions of the nation as a “family” and prioritized the interests of children to

PREFACE xvii affirm the place of black subjectivity within national narratives, which have conventionally excluded and othered black identities. This study traces the development of these themes in African American literary and cultural history by examining Rice and Obama within the continuum of black women leaders who have become emblems of the nation and who have persistently deployed such strategies in writing, speech, and public discourses in the political arena since Emancipation. In the process, I draw on some of the signal writings in which they have voiced their political agendas alongside some of the cultural texts that foreground representations as well as contestations over black women’s scripts in relation to national femininity. Such black women are also connected to the story of “daughters of sorrow” chronicled by Beverly Guy-Sheftall.

In Stacey Abrams’s historic bid to become governor of Georgia in 2018 and her work to address issues such as voter suppression, she has emerged as a national leader and stands at the vanguard of a new generation of black women in the twenty-first century who are helping to transform politics at the national level. Her example also moves us closer to the democracy advocated by Cathy Cohen, in which black youth voices are amplified and heard.’ California senator Kamala Harris made history in 2020 when Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden selected her as his vice presidential running mate, making her the first black woman and Asian American nominated for one of the country’s top two offices by a major U.S. party. As black queer women who founded Black Lives Matter in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013 for murdering Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi have mobilized grassroots communities across the nation to protest against issues such as police violence against blacks and racial profiling. At the same time, they have brought an intersectional view of race, class, gender, and sexuality to their agendas and challenged the conventional patriarchy and male-centered leadership in black political movements, as well as homophobia.

Similarly, Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle challenged the infamous male-dominated political machine in Chicago in the historic 2019 election in which they faced off as two black lesbian women running for mayor. Lightfoot made history yet again as the city’s first lesbian and woman elected mayor. Pamela Rocker’s bid for the presidency as a black trans candidate in a field that included several other LGBTQ candidates also disrupts the conventional logics and optics of gender and sexuality within national politics, emphasizing the need for more inclusive narratives of selfhood in the nation.

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Inroads into the mainstream political arena by black queer and trans leaders in the contemporary era, along with historical figures such as Murray, throw into relief the extent to which the most legible models of black national femininity have been limited, despite how provocatively they have challenged white- and male-centered models of national selfhood. They reflect the prevailing heterosexist models of gender and family, which marginalize and exclude black trans and queer subjects, whose role in constituting black womanhood’s representations in the public sphere is also important to acknowledge as part of the national story. As Audre Lorde illustrated, outsider identities hold the greatest potential to challenge conventional stories and to bring about revolutionary change.’

PREFACE xix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While my first book focused on the role of the U.S. South in nationalizing ideologies of black masculinity, this project builds on it by looking at the role of the region in nationalizing models of black femininity. Cathy N. Davidson encouraged this book’s potential from its early stages of development. I am also thankful to the scholars Houston A. Baker Jr.; his wife, Charlotte Pierce- Baker; and Valerie Smith for encouraging this study from the very beginning.

I appreciate the enthusiasm and feedback I received from colleagues and students when I presented an early version of my chapter on Condoleezza Rice at the University of California, Davis, in the English Department's Scholar’s Symposium in 2008. At uc Davis, I especially want to thank Patricia A. Turner (now at UCLA), Clarence Major, and Clarence Walker. I also shared aspects of this project when I was hosted at uc Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society in 2008 by the late scholar Emory Elliott, and as an invited speaker at the conference on the hemispheric South at uc Santa Barbara in 2011, which was coordinated by Carl Gutiérrez-Jones and the late Clyde Woods.

This study continued to move forward in new and exciting directions once I joined the faculty at Cornell University in the Africana Studies and Research Center in 2008. I appreciate Salah M. Hassan’s and Grant Farred’s reading of my early work on Michelle Obama. Robert L. Harris’s historical insights, along with his work as the national historian of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and contributions in the development of the Martin Luther King Jr. national memorial in the capital, added important perspective. I have valued and learned from dialogues with James Turner, Locksley Edmondson, Anne Adams, and Beverly Blackshear as veteran Africana colleagues. Moreover, I am thankful for dialogues with Margaret Washington, N’Dri Assie-Lumumba, and Carole Boyce-Davies on black feminism and womanism. Travis Lars Gosa passed along a rich ensemble of hip-hop songs dedicated to Michelle Obama. Furthermore, I have also valued Judith Byfield, Noliwe Rooks, Gerard Aching, Oneka LaBennett, C. Riley Snorton, Olufemi Taiwo, Siba Grovogui, Kevin Gaines, Adeolu Ademoyo, and Happiness Bulugu as colleagues in Africana. I extend my sincere thanks for the administrative staff support provided by

Treva Levine, Renee Milligan, and Donna Pinnisi. I have appreciated the support, collegiality, and insights of Kenneth McClane on campus in the African American literature field, along with those of Margo Crawford, Dagmawi Woubshet, Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Naminata Diabate, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Eric Cheyfitz, Shirley Samuels, and George Hutchinson. I am thankful for dialogues on this project with colleagues in the brilliant Mellon Diversity Group in 2016-17, especially Debra Castillo, Ella Diaz, Bobby Smith, Sara Warner, Anna Bartel, Gerald Torres, and Ed Baptist. I have also valued insights from Carol Kammen, Ken Glover, Russell Rickford, and Adrienne Clay. In 2017, it was an honor to share work from the conclusion of this study in the Rabinor Lecture in American Studies. I also benefited from the opportunity to dialogue with Lauren Berlant about this project when she was a scholar in Cornell’s School for Criticism and Theory in 2012.

On the journey to this book’s completion, I conducted research in the archives of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University, along with archival materials and institutions related to Rosa Parks and Mary McLeod Bethune. At Cornell, this project has been enabled by access to resources at the Cornell Law School, the Olin Library, and the John Henrik Clarke Library in the asrc, as well as the support of Eric Acree, Sharon Powers, and Saah Nue Quigee. I thank my undergraduate and graduate students for dialogues in the classroom and beyond. I appreciate the work of Marshall Smith, Kristen Wright, and Lauren Siegel as research assistants for this project. I extend my deepest thanks to Courtney Berger at Duke University Press, a dream editor, as well as my anonymous reviewers.