AN African proverb states: "Whose mother is at the pot will not lack soup?" Certainly, the Herstory of Black Women in America can attest to that proverb. From slavery to yesterday, women working in White kitchens fed not only themselves but also their families, but also whole communities. It was the slave mothers, packing bits of food in scraps of fabric, who fueled the long walk North to freedom for many of our ancestors. And it was on March 10, 1913, that Harriet Tubman, the formidable Black Moses, a major conductor on the Underground Railroad, died in her Auburn, N.Y., home. And while she was not a mother in the biological sense, she, and other pivotal women in Black History, like the great Rosa Parks (who ironically was born February 4, 1913, one month before Tubman's death), have been called the mothers of our people. They are among the women who changed America.

March is Women's History Month and the 2005 theme is "Women Change America." For Black women and Black people, few stars shine brighter in HERstory than Tubman. Nearly 45 years before her death, the great abolitionist statesman Frederick Douglass honored Tubman with a tribute worthy of her eulogy. "The difference between us is very marked," he wrote her. "Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day--you the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scared, and foot-sore bondsmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage and whose heartfelt "God Bless You" have been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witness of your devotion to freedom."

Black women's devotion to freedom is legend. On March 9, 1892, the lynching Of three Black men in Memphis, Tenn., led Ida B. Wells, to launch the anti-lynching movement that would nearly claim her life.

Black women like Parks, Ella Baker, Dorothy Height, Fannie Lou Hamer, Daisy Bates and many others were among the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

Forty years ago in March, the women sang and sighed, "Selma, Lord, Selma," in a movement that claimed many lives. Selma was the site of what one historian called the "last great march" of the Civil Rights era. It was the site that sparked "Bloody Sunday." It was a massacre that claimed the lives of many that fateful March, including a White woman from Detroit named Viola Liuzzo, who was shot to death on U.S. Highway 80 by Klansmen. The March 21 date of the Alabama march was chosen specifically in solidarity with South African apartheid victims of the infamous March 21, 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. Following the Selma bloodbath, thousands completed the five-day trek from Selma-to-Montgomery, protected by National Guardsmen and U.S. Army troops. The sacrifices and public beatings of "Bloody Sunday" witnessed on national television, and the outcry from the American public, prompted President Lyndon Baines Johnson to sign the historic Voting Rights Bill, authorizing the suspension of literacy tests and other affronts to voting freedom.

The HERstory of millions of Black women is the legacy of women like Wells, like the unsung women of Montgomery, Ala., who spearheaded the bus boycott, like the SNCC students and Harriet Tubman who "wrought in the night." And this month we shine the light on these unsung heroines at the epicenter of Black America's lifelong ongoing freedom fight.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group

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