Original Feature | March 2016
Race, gender, and class inequality are seemingly a permanent fixture in American society. In a time period where people of every race, nationality, and sex are arguably more free than ever before, inequality abounds. A look at recent events in U.S. history corroborated this. In the past decade, we have seen a reemergence of civil rights issues that plagued the nation following World War II. From the struggle of African-American freedom and self-determination, as seen in the Black Lives Matter movement, to anti-war sentiment, economic boycotts, environmental justice calls, and the fight for gender (and gender expression) equality, today activist are rising up and re-imagining the possibilities of a truly equal world. While in 2016, it is commonplace for both men and women of all races to join in the public address of social inequity, in the decades before the Civil War, a war that fundamentally changed race and gender relations in the U.S., public discourse was generally reserved for men of status--that is property holding educated white men. There were, however, a few brave souls who despite a social milieu that marginalized them, challenged the passive acceptance of discrimination. Forgotten heroine Maria W. Stewart was one such person.
“In the perilous years of ‘33-35, a colored woman-
Mrs. Maria W. Stewart-fired with a holy zeal
To speak her sentiments on the improvement of colored Americans…”
Hailed as the “first black feminist abolitionist,” Stewart was the first American-born woman of any race to speak in public on political themes. Although much of her early life is unknown, we do know that Maria W. Stewart, whose maiden name was Miller, was born free in 1803 in Hartford Connecticut. Orphaned at five and widowed at 26, Stewart was no stranger to hardship or perseverance. Like most free women of color, it is likely she lived in a precarious environment where discrimination of race and gender were a part of her everyday experience. While she was legally free, as a woman and an African American her freedom most often must have felt like a mockery for she was denied most social and political protections afforded white Americans. This was most acutely demonstrated when her husband died in 1829. Inheriting one-third of his estate, Stewart was soon cheated out of her portion of the estate by unscrupulous white businessmen. It was during this time that Stewart underwent a personal religious awakening in which she said she was compelled by God to speak out on behalf of abolition and women’s rights.
“All the nations of the earth are crying out for liberty and equality, away, away with tyranny and oppression!
And shall Afric’s sons be silent any longer?”
During a time when standing up and speaking out about African American rights was considered a radical act regardless of race or gender, Maria Stewart’s rhetoric was unquestionably an early form of militant Black Nationalism. Although Stewart only gave four public speeches during her tenure as an abolitionist lecturer, her prose, which was exceedingly sophisticated, foreshadowed themes that were incorporated in the various black civil rights struggles over the next 150 years. Discussing issues political marginalization, economic self-sufficiency, and social equality, themes that would be echoed in Malcolm X’s The Ballot or the Bullet speech, Stewart’s words were imbued with religious imagery and militant language inspired by her study of the Bible and her reading of David Walker’s Appeal. In all of her works Stewart called forth black men and women to fight for their right to self-determination, or die trying. In her very first public address in 1831, Stewart with an air of militancy, asked Black America “Why sit ye here and die?” Go on and confront White America, Stewart goes on to boldly assert, for in the end all that could be lost was one’s life.
Before the emergence of the most preeminent African American civil rights leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, there was Maria Stewart. She was one woman with one message, and one voice; one militant voice.
“African rights and
But before I go, the bayonet shall pierce me through.
They would drive us to a strange land.
…[they say] we can never rise to respectability in this country.
liberty is a subject that ought to fire
The breast of every free man of color in these United States…”
Andrea Wilson |
Uplift #HERstory Contributor
@womanist101
Historian | U.S. History | Cross-Cultural Women's History
A graduate of the University of California, Davis Andrea Wilson is ABD in American history (specializing in U.S. History and Cross-Cultural Women's History). She also holds a Master's Degree in Secondary Education from St. John's University where she focused on the lack of cultural awareness on high stakes test. She is currently a secondary instructor at a preeminent NYC all-girls public school. Andrea's specialties include African American history, 19th and 20th-century women's, gender, and racial studies and bridging the potential of web-based digital resources with an instructional model to facilitate use in K-12 and college classrooms. As a self-proclaimed HERstorian, writeHer, and InnovatHER, Andrea is currently working on a blog, WOMANHOODREVOKED, that explores the multifaceted lives of African American women and how they have often rescinded others definitions of what it means to be a black woman. Through her work, Andrea hopes to provide her audience with a glimpse into the lives of some history's most resilient women.