Vivid

by Beverly Jenkins

Together, they and twenty-four others with African blood were among the forty-four people from eleven families who founded the Spanish settlement of Los Angeles.

But Vivid's illustrious ancestry mattered not at all in 1876. Today she'd been bitten by Jim Crow, and even though she was one of a small but growing cadre of women able to declare themselves certified physicians, society forced her to travel under conditions even oxen would find appalling.

The women of today are looking toward the next century. There are issues to confront, a race to move forward, and we are not content to make a man's home our sole reason for being."

This started a discussion of the tradition of Black women helping the less fortunate members of the race. As early as 1793 the Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas, organized by free Black women in Philadelphia, aided fatherless children and widows. In 1809 the free Black women of Newport, Rhode Island, came together as the African Female Benevolent Society. In 1821 the Daughters of Africa, whose members were the washerwomen and domestics of Philadelphia, combined their extra pennies and paid out sick and death benefits for those in the community. In 1840 New York City had the second largest Black population in the segregated free North, but by 1827, the Black women had already seen a need and formed the African Dorcas Association. They met weekly in sewing meetings to provide clothing for the needy children in the city's Free African Schools. Even in the slave city of Washington D.C., in 1828, free Black women took it upon themselves to help their own under the auspices of the Coloured Female Roman Catholic Benefit Society.

When the Grove was founded, his grandmother Dorcas made it the law that every child, male and female, must learn to read.

The women owned many of the businesses, oftimes they voted as a bloc on Grove affairs, and generally they had their way when they wanted it. According to legend, during his grandfather's day the men once tried to rein in their wives. It resulted in a disaster so cataclysmic that even today Nate could not get any of the elder men to discuss what had transpired. The women won, that was all Nate and his contemporaries knew.

Every advance the race made was necessary if it was to survive. More women like Maria W. Stewart were needed, not fewer. In 1832 Miss Stewart, a Black woman, became the first American woman of any race to lecture to public audiences. And there was Mary Shadd, who in 1853 grew tired of being vilified in Henry Bibb's Black abolitionist weekly, The Voice of the Fugitive, and so founded The Provincial Freeman in response. By doing so she became one of the first women, and the first Black woman on the North American continent, to edit and publish a newspaper.

Fifteen years after Elizabeth Blackwell became the first American woman to gain a degree in medicine, Rebecca Lee received hers from the New England Medical College.

I've also learned it is far better to beg forgiveness than to seek permission in some situations,

Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, most free Blacks in the North worshipped in White Christian churches. Mainstream denominations such as the Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians welcomed Blacks into their flocks but rarely allowed them to pray with the main congregation. Instead, Blacks were relegated to uncomfortable benches placed in the back of the church marked B.M., for "Black Members," or forced to sit in balconies and galleries that bore such names as “African Corner" or the more denigrating "Nigger Heaven." Even the Quakers, who until 1830 stood at the forefront of the abolitionist movement, did not allow its Black and White members to pray side by side. In 1794, two Black men sought an alternative to this practice and forever changed the way America worshipped. Richard Allen had been born a slave in Philadelphia. When his lawyer-owner sold the Allen family to a planter in Delaware, Richard Allen became a devout Methodist. His convictions were so strong he converted the planter, who in turn allowed Richard and his brother to buy their freedom in 1777.

One cold November morning in 1787, Reverend Allen and an associate, Reverend Absalom Jones, entered St. George for the regular Sunday service. Aware of the change in seating, the Reverends Allen and Jones journeyed to the balcony which overlooked the seats they'd occupied before Jim Crow. The two men knelt to pray. Moments later, Allen heard a scuffle and raised his head to see a church trustee trying to raise Reverend Jones from his knees. It seemed the seating policy had undergone yet another change. That Sunday morning Blacks were allowed to worship only in the back of the balcony. Reverend Jones and Allen were kneeling in the front.

To deal with the very real need for separate Black churches where Blacks could pray free of Jim Crow Christianity, the two began to raise funds for a church site. To help with this cause they enlisted prominent Whites such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and the nation's first president, George Washington.

Jones an Episcopalian one and Allen a Methodist one.

In July 1794 Philadelphia witnessed an historic event, the dedication of the Reverend Jones's St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, and the Reverend Richard Allen's Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Both Black churches were the first of their kind.

In 1808, the Jim Crow services at the First Baptist Church of New York led to the formation of the all-Black Abyssinia Baptist Church, and in 1809, Reverend Thomas Paul started several independent Black churches in major cities in the East.

"One only has to look back at Jefferson's writings to know Jefferson was no friend. And that poor Sally Hemings and the children she bore him," Abigail

"First a mule, then a wagon, and now flowers and a swing. I may put you in charge of my happiness on a permanent basis if you're not careful, Nate Grayson," she whispered.

"Lacrosse?" He took the stick from her hands and turned it over. "It's a game played originally by the People. They call it Little Brother of War."

On April 7, 1870, Blacks and Whites had come to the Detroit Opera House to celebrate the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

How could she fulfill her career goals and yet want nothing more out of life than to have him hold her and love her? The two paths couldn't possibly be compatible, could they?

As they ate, Eli regaled them with what he planned to see on his visit to the Philadelphia Centennial exposition.

Ten million people were expected to attend and he would see everything from electric-powered lights, to something called linoleum that was supposed to cover floors. He told them about the wondrous telephone that would be in one of the thousands of displays and the animated wax rendering of Cleopatra.

Blacks had been barred from the Centennial's construction gangs and for the most part e...

Still, the noted Black painter Edward Bannister won a Centennial prize for his painting Under the Oaks, and Mary Lewis Montgomery of the Montgomery family of Davis Bend, Mississippi, won the agricultural award for the world's b...

"William Welles Brown's The Blackman: His Antecedents, His Genius and His Achievements."

Back before the French and Americans, the Little Brother of War would sometimes go on for days and hundreds of men would participate. A playing field could be as large as twelve acres." She further explained to Vivid that during the old days the games were very intense because they were sometimes used as practices for war.

But it was not the only reason the People played. Intertribal ball games were also called to settle land disputes and hunting boundaries. Sometimes a chief called for ball games on his deathbed, and tribes played to honor his life and to ease his passage to the ancestors. The Menominee played ball every spring before the first thunder to cure illness. Each tribe had its own ceremonies and methods of playing.

"Now," she said a bit sadly, "there are so few of us left, we have taken customs from all who care to come. The apisaci were originally part of the Choctaw game, the drivers are Cherokee and wore turbans on their heads in the old days. We in the Lakes play wi...

What money can buy, money can replace. But your life, that is priceless."

Saratoga chips, or potato chips as some folks called them, had been first introduced by a Black chef up in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Black men had been given the vote in Michigan in 1867 and had always voted Republican. Like their brethren in the South, they stood solidly behind the party of Mr. Lincoln, even though President Grant's refusal to send troops into the blood-soaked counties of Mississippi had left many Southern Republicans at the mercy of the Redemptionists.

In the end the Republican name on the ballot turned out to be that of Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, described as "colorless" by some when compared to Lincoln and Grant, and termed "a third-rate nonentity" by Henry Adams.

Many of the Black women practicing medicine were not only the first Black women to practice medicine in some states but the first female physicians as well, especially in the South. Women were teachers, businesswomen, lecturers, and entertainers. Maggie Lena Walker was an insurance executive and one of the nation's first female bankers. Flora Batson Berger was known as the Black Jenny Lind.

Cimprich, John, and Mainfort, Robert C. Jr. "Fort Pillow Revisited: New Evidence about an Old Controversy." Civil War History 28 (1982): 292-306. Fields, Harold B. "Free Negroes in Cass County Before the Civil War." Michigan History, 44 (December 1960): 375-383. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter. New York: William Morrow, 1984. Jerrido, Margaret J. "Early Black Women Physicians." Women & Health, 5, no. 3 (Fall 1980). Katz, William Loren. The Black West. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. Lapp, Rudolph M. "The Negro in Gold Rush California." Journal of Negro History, 49, no. 2 (April 1964). Sterling, Dorothy A. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Double-day, 1986. Vennum, Thomas, Jr. American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1994.