UPDATE: The winner is…Jennifer Beyer!
*~*~*

I first discovered Laura Wheeler Waring thanks to her portrait of Alice Dunbar Nelson, which I shared in my November 2024 D.D. blogpost. Then the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism introduced me to more of her work. Intrigued, I decided to create a post on the artist whom W.E.B. DuBois considered a “missionary of culture.”

Laura was born on May 26, 1887, in Hartford, Connecticut and came from a prominent African American family. Her father was the Reverend Robert Foster Wheeler, pastor of Talcott Street Congregational Church, the first all-black church in Connecticut. Her mother was Mary Freeman Wheeler, a teacher and amateur artist.

She greatly admired the painting of African American artist Henry O. Tanner. While attending Hartford Public High School, her own talent in painting was recognized. She graduated with honors from Hartford in 1906 and began teaching part-time at Cheyney Training School for Teachers in Pennsylvania. She matriculated into the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), making her the sixth generation of her family to attend college. Although her heart belonged to painting, she studied illustration with Henry McCarter which along with teaching enabled her to support herself as she pursued a career in painting.

She provided many illustrations for the NACCP’s Crisis magazine. Her first Crisis cover appeared in 1913. In 1914, she was the first African American woman to receive PAFA’s A. William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship to study art at the Louvre in Paris. In 1920, thanks to her NAACP connections, she became the first African American to illustrate for a major mainstream publisher.

When World War I interrupted her studies in Paris, she returned to teaching at Cheney and continued there for thirty years. She took sabbaticals to return to Europe and continue perfecting her craft. She became known for murals and landscapes. During this second trip, she exhibited her work in Parisian art galleries for the first time.

In 1927, her paintings won the William E. Harmon Foundation Award in Fine Arts with a special mention for the portrait done of Anna Washington Derry, a laundress at Cheney. During Laura’s lifetime the Corcoran Gallery,  in Washington, DC, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art displayed her work. In 1944, eight portraits were commissioned and shown by the Harmon Foundation in their exhibit Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin. These are now part of the Harmon Collection in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

While her work was dismissed as derivative by New Negro/Harlem Renaissance esthete Alain Locke, others appreciated the dignity she gave African Americans of all classes in her portraits and illustrations.

Laura married Walter Waring in 1927 but had no children. She died in Philadelphia in 1948. Grateful Cheney graduates succeeded in having a Philadelphia public school named for her. The Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame inducted her in 1997. You can learn more about her from PAFA’s presentation on youtube: https://youtu.be/6ltK486TaGY?si=dWfCHwt67lAqBkHV

For a chance at a $10 Amazon gift card, share your impressions of Laura Wheeler Waring in the comments.

UPDATE: The winner is…Mary Preston!
*~*~*

Ella was born enslaved on February 4, 1851, at The Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson’s plantation. Her father, who had purchased his own freedom, was unable to purchase his wife. He was allowed to purchase Ella’s freedom for $350 when her mother made it clear to her owners she’d rather her daughter die than live as a slave. Her father remarried and moved his wife, Ella, and her half-sister Rosa to Ohio, where Ella attended school in Cincinnati and took piano lessons. When he died in 1866, Ella provided financial support by playing at local functions, working as a maid, and teaching. In 1868, she moved to Nashville and enrolled in Fisk University (then the Fisk Free Colored School). Teaching enabled her to afford her classes. One of those assignments was as assistant music teacher at Fisk under Fisk’s treasurer and musician George White, making her the school’s only black staff member at the time.

White formed Ella and eight others into the Fisk Jubilee Singers. On October 6, 1871, they set off on their first tour to help their financially struggling school. At age seventeen, Ella was their primary vocal coach and eventual director. She arranged the music they sang on their tours and accompanied the singers on piano, organ, and guitar. Over seven years, they raised $150,000, which enabled the building of Fisk Hall.

At first, they sang popular and classical music but eventually added slave songs (spirituals) to their repertoire, which proved more popular. Over time she collected and transcribed over one hundred of them. Her work with the Jubilee Singers led to the recognition and appreciation of Negro spirituals worldwide.  You can read an account of her experiences in her own words here: https://digital.lib.utk.edu/collections/islandora/object/volvoices%3A9934#page/1/mode/2up

In 1878, she married George Washington Moore. They had three children: Elizabeth, born 1879; George, born 1883; and Clinton, born 1892. Moore became ordained, pastored in Washington D.C., and worked as the Superintendent for Southern Church Work for the American Missionary Association. While he ministered, Ella lectured and organized Jubilee choirs. Together, they also championed temperance and other social advancement campaigns. In 1892, they moved back to Nashville and lived near Fisk where Ella began assisting with Fisk’s choirs. She became a researcher and continued lecturing on women’s and race issues.

Like many of her counterparts in the 19^th century, Ella used her success to help others. She paid tuition for a number of Fisk students, including her half-sister. By this time, she had other family members living at her Nashville home, including her birthmother and stepmother.

After delivering a graduation speech at an AMA school in Alabama, she returned home ill. She died on June 9, 1914, and was buried in Nashville. The site of her home has an historical marker erected by the Tennessee Historical Commission.

There’s an old gospel song whose words are “Let the life I live speak for me.” Ella Sheppard Moore’s accomplishments during her lifetime certainly speak for her.

For a chance at a $10 Amazon gift card, share your thoughts with me in the comments.

“The $5.00 Kiss of Life” by Michal Scott
from First Response

Trapped by the small-town conventions imposed on her, a pastor’s spinster daughter finds rescue in the town bad boy’s very public kiss.

Excerpt:

Lord have mercy, when had she become such a coward? It was just a kiss, for goodness sake. And in the name of a good cause. It would be fun. Besides, she didn’t have to present him with the card. She could just as easily pick one of the official kisses she’d written for her father on the Kiss for A Cause booth’s sign.

Beverly firmed her lips, took a deep breath, and stepped up to the booth.

“Come to pucker up for a good cause, Beverly?”

The mischievous glint in Rob’s smile and equally mischievous lilt in his tone did nothing to still the throb between her legs. “

You’re a good sport to do this,” she said. “Given the way people talk about you and all.”

Rob chuckled. “Hey, if a bad reputation can’t do a good turn once in a while, what’s the point of having it?”

“You saved lives in the war. You’ve saved lives here in town. It’s time you make people acknowledge that for a change.”

“Pigs’ll sprout wings and fly before that happens.” Rob snorted. “Let them think what they want. I’ve lived with too much space around me to be hemmed in by their small minds.”

Beverly sighed. “I’ve always admired that about you, Rob. You don’t care what people say about you.”

He waved that off. “Sure, I care. I’m just very good at handling the slights.”

“No, really,” she insisted. “You don’t seek anyone’s approval. You live by what you’re for, not what you’re against.” She looked at the rates on the booth kissing chart, and then considered the card in her pocket. “I admire you.” She cast her gaze down. “I wish I were more courageous, like you.”

“No time like the present,” he teased.

Beverly looked up and saw him thumb toward the kissing rate chart.

“Do you have the courage to be seen getting a kiss before God and everybody from the town bad boy?”

Buylink: Amazon – https://amzn.to/3dRvwLE

In my blog posts, I do my best to destroy the myth of the single narrative usually painted of African Americans in the 19^th century, i.e., destitute, formerly enslaved, and/or dependent on the largesse of well-meaning Whites. Eliza Potter with her book, A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life, does the same only to depictions of aspirational black women who sought only to uplift the race. Eliza bettered her personal situation first and then used that experience in her book to turn a mirror not only on the “high life” superiority assumptions Whites had about themselves, but also on blacks who exploited blacks.

Depending on your source, Eliza Potter was born of mixed-race parentage in 1820, either in NYC or Virginia. Little is known about her formative years. She married twice, the first time to Mr. Johnson and the second to Howard Potter in 1853, who died in 1860, a few months after her work, A Hairdresser’s Experience of High Life, was published in 1859.

Potter first made her living as a nanny/nurse and a domestic to families of the American “ton” in places like Newport R.I. and Saratoga N.Y. This enabled her to travel not only across the country but to Europe. In 1841, while in Paris, she learned to dress hair, which she did once she returned to the US and settled in Cincinnati. There, she pursued a full-time higher-paying career as a beauty expert and one knowledgeable about European standards of “ladylike” behavior.

Her memoir also falls into the category of travel narrative, popular in her day, because of the various places she visited but she didn’t just provide a travelogue. She commented on what she saw, particularly on slavery as she traveled the South. With her account of a black woman who owned slaves and was just as vicious as white slave owners, Potter shocked abolitionists who wanted to portray all blacks as victims.

The tone she employs in her book defies the deferential posture 19^th century blacks and women in particular were supposed to adopt.  Historian Henry Louis Gates in his chapter on her in The Portable Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers, describes her memoir not only as gossipy but sharp-tongued. In her introduction to A Hairdresser’s Experience Professor Xiomara Santamarina describes how deftly Potter’s critique comes off as advice on breeding rather than criticism.

When she died in 1893, she was reported to own $2400 in property, roughly seventy-two to seventy-five thousand dollars in today’s money. And lest I give you the impression she was self-serving, Potter regularly helped others. In Cincinnati, she served as a trustee of the Colored Orphan Asylum. While on a visit to Louisville, KY, Potter shared information on the Underground Railroad that helped a slave to freedom. For this act she was extradited, jailed and tried, but fortunately acquitted.

I’ll be forever grateful for the legacy left by 19^th century African American women like Eliza Potter and for the efforts of those who selflessly share so I can learn about them.

For a chance at a $10 gift card, share your thoughts on my post in the comments below.

“Put It in a Book” by Michal Scott
Inside Stranded

Trapped in a book by a sorcerer for rejecting his sexual advances,
an ex-slave’s daughter discovers one hope of rescue – a nosy thief.

Excerpt:

“No one will ever read your story,” he whispered with snake-like malice. His laugh bruised her heart each time he congratulated himself on his ingenuity. “You will remain hidden in these pages until you give yourself to me.”

Never had been her answer when he’d propositioned her a week after she’d arrived in Liberia. Never was her answer when he’d caught her pleasuring herself by the river’s edge after her morning swim. Never remained her answer from the day she’d awakened entombed within the pages of her own story to this.

How often had hope flared at the possibility of someone opening these pages and setting her free?

Too often.

How many times had Morlu’s possessive grip caressed her prison’s spine, his wet thumb sliding down the edges of its pages?

Too many.

“Everyone I’ve imprisoned yielded within a day. You’ve resisted for thirty,” he exclaimed. “I must dedicate a chapter to your resilience.”

He splayed his fingers across her prison’s pages, too accurately mimicking the spreading of her thighs. Her captive limbs shuddered. His calloused finger slid along the book’s gutter. Her inert hands tensed, unable to shield herself from the erotic—albeit vicarious—chafing his touch provoked.

“Your opposition makes your eventual capitulation that much sweeter.” He slid his finger faster, deeper between the pages. “And make no mistake…you will surrender.”

Each time he placed her back on the shelf, he planted a cold kiss on the book’s spine. Aziza quivered against the chill, unable to staunch the revulsion roiling in her throat—or at least, where she imagined her throat might still be.

“Until then,” he whispered.

Her spirit cringed at those words. She’d escaped from plantation owners eager to punish her for secretly teaching slaves to read. Her spirit had remained unbowed after fourteen harrowing weeks crossing the Atlantic. Even the hardships that had killed more than three-quarters of all who had emigrated to Liberia hadn’t vanquished her. If neither threats to her life nor dangers at sea nor the high mortality rate could defeat her, she’d be damned if this self-serving sorcerer would.

Buylink: Amazon – https://amzn.to/3dLd9rM

UPDATE: The winner is…Dana Zamora!
*~*~*

It’s not often one of my blog post subjects has an obituary published in the New York Times, but such is the case with Gertrude Bustill Mossell, journalist, author, poet, teacher, suffragist, and civil rights activist.

Born on July 3, 1855, Gertrude Bustill was born into a Black Quaker and Presbyterian family in Philadelphia, PA. Her family’s activism ranged from baking for the Continental Army at Valley Forge to creating the first mutual aid society with black activists Richard Allen and James Forten to engaging in the Underground Railroad. No wonder activism filled all aspects of Gertrude’s life. Her graduation speech, “Influence,” so impressed AME Bishop Henry McNeal, he published it in his newspaper, The Christian Recorder, and encouraged her to send him her poetry and essays for publication.

She taught in the public schools of three states for seven years. While teaching she also wrote and edited for seven magazines and newspapers. In 1883, she married Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell, ending her teaching career and taking a break from journalism to have two children.

She began writing again when editor T. Thomas Fortune hired her to write for his newspaper, The New York Age. From 1885 to1889, her column, “Our Women’s Department,” focused on issues from how to care for a household to civil rights and being politically active.

After that, she was the editor of the Indianapolis World from 1891 to 1892. Her byline was Mrs. N.F. Mossell. Gertrude wrote for both black and white publications, becoming the highest paid black newspaperwoman of the late 18th century, earning $500 a year.

She not only wrote articles but encouraged African American women to write and submit their work, making her an early advocate for women journalists. Gertrude wrote The Work of the Afro-American Woman in 1894, in which she wrote essays that highlighted the accomplishments of African American women in many walks of life, included a number of her poems, and challenged African American universities for not hiring enough of their own graduates and African American teachers in general. The book includes a photo of Gertrude and her two daughters, Mary Campbell and Florence Alma to whom her dedication prays “that they may grow into a pure and noble womanhood.” Her book reminded me of Hallie Q. Brown’s 1926 Homespun Heroines which I blogged about here back in February 2024. In 1902, Gertrude published a children’s book, Little Dansie’s One Day at Sabbath School.

In Philadelphia, Gertrude and her husband founded the Frederick Douglass Hospital for which she raised $30,000 ($1,000,000 in today’s dollars). The hospital included a training school for nurses. She also organized the Philadelphia branch of the national Afro-American Council, the first national civil rights organization in the US.

Gertrude died in 1948 in Philadelphia. An historic marker stands at 1432 Lombard Street in Philadelphia where she lived.

In the HBO series, the Gilded Age black journalist Peggy Scott is confronted by her father who tells her he doesn’t know any women who make a living writing. He obviously never heard of Gertrude. Unfortunately, there are movements in the US today hell bent on making sure the accomplishments of marginalized communities remain unheard of. I share these posts as my way of joining the fight with other groups to make sure those movements fail.

To win a $10 Amazon gift card, share your thoughts in the comments.

“The Patience of Unanswered Prayer” by Michal Scott inside Cowboys

Kidnapped and destined to be another victim of Reconstruction-era violence, a feisty shop owner is rescued by a trail boss whose dark secret might save them both.

Excerpt:

Franklin crawled hidden in the tall grass toward the voice. The smells of oil and sulfur assaulted his senses. Echoes of the two explosions that ripped the night apart still played in his ears. The first body thudded against the ground. The second splashed into the creek. Moonlight glinted off the shooter’s gun and chest. Franklin’s upper lip raised over his incisors as he recognized the metal of a sheriff’s badge.

The man stalked over to the body sprawled by the creek bank.

The woman.

A Black woman.

The cur gloated and pointed his gun barrel at her unmoving form.

Franklin snarled. He leapt and went straight for the sheriff’s throat. The man’s horrified cry yielded to stuttered curses as he choked and writhed in the grip of Franklin’s jaws. The copper tang of blood fueled his indignation. The crunch of cartilage sounded lovely in Franklin’s ears. Flesh and bone yielded to canines and incisors.

The man staggered under Franklin’s weight. Lithe and lean in his wolf form, he still carried the heft of his human two hundred and fifty pounds.

The man convulsed, slumped then stilled.

Life flowed in the villain’s veins yet, but wouldn’t for long. The merciful thing to do would be to finish him off before some other predators made a meal of him.

Franklin felt nothing akin to mercy.

Buylink: https://amzn.to/3zfDpo2

UPDATE: The winner is…Beckie!
*~*~*

When I was a kid, my aunt had a round, white washing machine with a wringer on top. Little did I know I was watching Black history unfold before my eyes as my aunt cranked the clothes through the wringer. That system of wringer rollers was patented by Ellen F. Eglin.

Depending on your source, Ellen F. Eglin was born either in Maryland in February 1836 or in Washington, D.C., in 1849. She lived in Washington D.C. with her parents, brother Charles, and two other siblings. There she worked as a housekeeper. Sources believe it was due to this stoop work that necessity, the mother of invention, tapped Ellen on the shoulder. In 1888, she devised a clothes wringer made of two wooden rollers with a crank used to squeeze excess water from laundry. Unfortunately, she never received just compensation for her invention.

Because of race prejudice, Ellen sold her invention for $18 (about $598 in today’s dollars). $18 wasn’t an inconsiderable sum when at the time a loaf of bread cost five cents, a pound of meat was ten, and a gallon of milk was twenty. But giving away the rights to her patent for such a paltry sum was a disgrace. The American Wringer company made huge profits from the sales of its product based on that patent. Her wringer is still in use today to wring out mops.

We wouldn’t even know about Ellen and her invention if not for feminist Charlotte Smith, who interviewed Ellen for Smith’s The Woman Inventor in 1890. Asked why she sold her patent, Ellen’s answer was heartbreakingly simple. “You know I am Black, and if it was known that a negro woman patented the invention, white ladies would not buy the wringer. I was afraid to be known because of my color in having it introduced to the market; that is the only reason.” She hoped to create another invention and exhibit it at an upcoming Women’s International Industrial Inventors Congress, but her plans never came to pass.

Those of you who may be watching Sir Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded Age will have heard this truth echoed in the situation of the character Peggy Scott. Wanting to be a writer, Peggy is told by the publisher interested in her work that if they don’t hide the fact that she’s black they’ll lose white subscribers in the South.

The year Charlotte Smith interviewed her, Ellen was working as a charwoman for the Department of the Interior. Records show she was still living in Washington D.C. in 1916, and that is the year assigned to her death.

I like to think that by sharing these blogposts I’m following in the footsteps of women like Charlotte Smith and Hallie Q. Brown (featured in my Oct. 2023 and Feb. 2024 D.D. blogposts) lifting up the lives and achievements of women so they won’t be forgotten.

For a chance at a $10 Amazon gift card, share your thoughts in the comments.

Her Heavenly Phantom
by Michal Scott

Forced into a marriage of convenience neither wants, a mild-mannered banker with an intriguing secret discovers his reluctant bride has a secret, too.

Excerpt:

Unwed and pregnant, Emily Hampton needed a husband. Newly freed and hungry for a foothold among the ranks of the Black elite in 1880s Brooklyn, William Broadman had the answer.

His son Harold.

The warmth shared between the two men stood in stark contrast to the cold chaste kiss Harold and his bride shared. Their coolness continued as they walked up the aisle. Guests, oblivious to their shared contempt, showered them with hugs and handshakes. Harold shivered even more as his father and father-in-law back-patted themselves and toasted the couple’s future happiness at the wedding reception. No doubt the arctic chill between the couple would extend to their first lay as man and wife, too.

If they had to that is. Emily Hampton hated this arrangement as much as he did. Therein lay his salvation. If she wanted as little to do with him as he wanted to do with her, his life didn’t have to change at all. Milquetoast straightlaced banker by day. Virile promiscuous masked singer by night.

The lady of the balcony numbered among his many admirers. Her missives of gratitude roiled with cock-stirring heat.

Your singing ravishes my body.

My core weeps for you.

Oh, for a coupling I know would thrust me into a heaven far beyond my grasp.

The last message had reached him after an exhausting browbeating from his father. He’d come to the theater in need of an escape that even singing couldn’t provide. She’d accepted the invite to join him backstage conveyed by way of his manager. In the dark windowless privacy of his dressing room, they’d thrust their way to a heaven beyond both their grasps.

He looked forward to what she’d write to him tonight. He’d need it as he lay alone on his wedding night.

Buylinks:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DBJ47ND6/
B&N https://shorturl.at/B0NLA
KOBO: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/secret-identities-8

When I pastored in Brooklyn, visiting members at the Susan Smith McKinney Rehabilitation Center and Nursing Home was a regular part of my week. I never gave much thought to the woman for whom the care center was named. This month, I make up for that oversight.

Susan Smith McKinney Steward was born in the black Brooklyn town of Weeksville in 1847. Her father was a prosperous pig farmer and fierce abolitionist. Her eldest sister, Sarah J. Garnet, who I blogged about in December 2023, became the first African American female public school principal in New York City.

In 1870, Susan graduated valedictorian from medical school and became the first African American woman doctor in New York State and only the third African American female doctor in the country. From 1870 to 1895, she practiced medicine in Brooklyn serving patients of all races. She co-founded the Brooklyn Women’s Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary. She served at as well as helped establish other hospitals for African Americans and the aged. She continued her medical education, becoming the only woman in the 1887-1888 post-graduate class at Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn. She focused on homeopathic medicine and gained a reputation for her work treating malnourished children. She was elected into the New York Homeopathic Medical Society in 1896.

In 1871, she married Reverend William G. McKinney and had two children. Four years after his death, she married Theophilus Gould Steward, chaplain of the 25th U.S. Colored Infantry. She continued to practice wherever he was stationed. In 1898, Wilberforce University hired Dr. Steward as a resident physician. She taught health and nutrition there until her death in 1918.

No surprise Susan had talents that extended beyond medicine. Early on, she was organist and choir director at two prominent black Brooklyn churches, Siloam Presbyterian and Bridge Street AME. In politics, she was active in the Equal Suffrage League of Brooklyn, and as a member of the Women’s Loyal Union, she lobbied Congress from 1894-1895 to investigate lynching. In social reform, she served as president of her local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In the 1880s, she published two papers, one on a pregnant woman’s incorrect diagnosis and the next on childhood diseases. In 1911, at the Universal Race Congress in London, she presented a paper on famous African American women, and in 1914, she gave a speech to the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs on the history of women in medicine from Biblical times to 1914.

Dr. Susan McKinney Steward died aged 71 in Ohio on March 7, 1918. Her body was returned to Brooklyn and buried in the famous Green-Wood Cemetery. Hallie Quinn Brown, the subject of my February 2024 and October 2023 D.D. blogposts, delivered the eulogy.

Writing this blogpost has taken me back to the streets of Brooklyn where I, like she, served as a community leader. I hope I left a legacy of work as impactful as hers. For a chance at a $10 Amazon gift card leave a comment about Susan or another woman you’ve found inspiring.

“The Patience of Unanswered Prayer” by Michal Scott
from Cowboys

Kidnapped and destined to be another victim of Reconstruction-era violence, a feisty shop owner is rescued by a trail boss whose dark secret might save them both

Excerpt:

The sounds of horse hooves clopping, drunken laughter, and saloon music had faded long ago. Only chirruping crickets, croaking bullfrogs, and Sheriff Radcliffe’s lies penetrated Eleanor’s covering. Where were they taking her?

The wagon wheels creaked with every rut they hit. Eleanor wheezed, desperate for fresh air. Nausea roiled at the base of her throat. Would she die choking on her own vomit? Fear squeezed her chest as yes flitted through her mind like a lightning bug.

The wagon lurched to the right. Her nausea intensified.

“Mind how you go there, boy. We don’t want to be accused of mistreating the prisoner.”

Being arrested on false charges didn’t count as mistreatment? How about being abducted by ones sworn to uphold the law? Eleanor’s agony mirrored that of Christ’s on the cross.

My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

She moaned, her spirit smothered by despair. The pressure at the small of her back eased only to be followed by a sharp jab to her spine.

“Shut up, damn you,” Radcliffe snapped. “Your days of troubling me will soon be over.”

“What was that you said, Sheriff?”

“Thank God this trouble’ll soon be over. We’ll have delivered her safe and sound to the county seat tomorrow.”

“Safe and sound,” Deputy Jim Flyte said. “Thank the good Lord.”

His tone, full of innocence and ignorance, penetrated Eleanor’s cloth prison and killed all hope that he’d be of any help. She stifled a groan lest her tormentor kicked her again. Flyte was too young to know that safe and sound to Sheriff Hobart Radcliffe meant only one thing: Eleanor’s death.

Buylink:
Amazon: https://amzn.to/3zfDpo2