PEARLAND, Texas (KTRK) — Through her brand, Resilient Grace, Kyra Brown is highlighting Black women who have shaped history but whose stories have often gone untold.
“I noticed that outside of big figures like Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman, a lot of black women’s stories have been left out of our history books,” Brown shared.
To help share their stories, Brown features black female heroines on t-shirts. They are designed to spark conversation and recognition. With every shirt, customers also receive a postcard that tells the story of the woman it honors, offering a deeper understanding of her impact. Brown also shares their stories on TikTok.
“I use my platform to tell black women’s history and to hopefully influence more women to learn her story, share her story, but also to be inspired to go after their own dreams,” Brown said.
In the video above, Brown shares how she decides on which woman to feature and the special meaning behind the name Resilient Grace.
Welp, it happened. Donald Trump defeated VP Kamala Harris, reminding us that the prospect of a Black woman ascending to the presidency over a loud and proud white nationalist male was, unfortunately, always a longshot. But good things happened on Election Day too, particularly for Black women in politics.
Source: Andrew Harnik/ Anna Moneymaker / Getty
For the first time in U.S. history, two states elected Black women to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday night. Maryland elected Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks (D), and Delaware elected Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D), who is currently serving in her fourth term in the U.S. House.
Now, if we’re being honest, a breakdown of the Senate’s history with Black women makes this victory look like ridiculously slow progress. Still, that history also underscores what a significant achievement Alsobrooks and Rochester made.
Their victories double the number of Black women ever elected to the U.S. Senate, from two to four.
Carol Moseley Braun was the first, in 1992, while Vice President Kamala Harris became the second in 2016.
California Sen. Laphonza Butler is the third Black woman to serve in the chamber, but she was not elected — she was appointed in October 2023 to finish out the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s term, which ends in January. She is not seeking reelection.
In other words: Only three Black women have served in the Senate, and never at the same time.
That’s set to change when Alsobrooks, 53, and Blunt Rochester, 62, are sworn in next year.
In fact, not only will two Black women serve together in the U.S. Senate for the first time in U.S. history, but they’re the first Black women to be elected for the position in their respective states. Rochester will be Delaware’s first female senator. That a Black woman was the first to achieve that milestone in a state that is nearly 64% white and only 22% Black is impressive, and it says a lot in a country that obviously couldn’t fathom a qualified Black woman ascending to the presidency. Meanwhile, Alsobrooks is the first Black woman to be elected to any statewide office in Maryland.
To be sure, Alsobrooks’ and Blunt’s victories aren’t only to be celebrated because they’re Black women. They were elected after campaigning on issues that are of the utmost importance to Black people, especially Black women. Namely — Black health.
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The two have since referred to each other as their “senator sister,” and spoken about their shared experiences and motivations when it comes to tackling issues from prescription drug affordability to maternal mortality, which disproportionately impacts Black patients.
“The history-making part is good, but the impact is what we’re all going for, to make a difference in people’s lives,” Blunt Rochester told Ellein September. “The ability to go to the Senate and be one of 100 — but also as two of only five [Black women senators] in the history of this country — would be incredible.”
So, Nov. 5 wasn’t all bad.
Congrats and good luck to senators-elect Angela Alsobrooks and Lisa Blunt Rochester. Your wins are well-deserved and your leadership is much, much needed.
Carlene Davis, 57, started thinking about aging when she was still in her 30s, having spent eight years as her parents’ primary caretaker. Davis, a Black woman from Los Angeles, does not have a spouse, siblings, or children, and it dawned on her that there was no other family member to care for her needs as she got older. Davis is one of the nearly 1 million Americans who are “kinless.”
Family members provide more than 95% of the informal care for older adults who don’t live in nursing homes, according to the Population Reference Bureau. But with rising rates of single adults (through divorce and never marrying), at the same time births are declining, there’s a growing concern over who will look after this large cohort of kinless seniors who don’t have a partner or family member to provide care. The concern is particularly acute for Black women, who, according to a 2017 study, have lower levels of wealth and the highest rates of kinlessness.
University of Maryland sociologist Kris Marsh, Ph.D., tells Fortune this conclusion is “short-sighted” because it overlooks the support systems single Black women build. A 2013 study found Black Americans and Black Caribbeans have more extensive fictive kin networks, or family you choose, than their non-Hispanic white counterparts. Black Americans were also more likely to have support from—and daily interactions with—extended family members.
“We do have kin,” Marsh says. In her book The Loves Jones Cohort, she notes that single, middle-class Black Americans have tapped into a long cultural tradition of creating “kin” with people not related by blood, expanding their “families” beyond the traditional nuclear model.
The cost of being single
Like other experts who study singlehood, Marsh, says standards and policies, like those determining Social Security benefits and health insurance coverage, don’t align with U.S. single adults’ unique bonds and networks. As a result, being single is costly due to the lack of equitable coverage, reduced Social Security benefits, and limited ability to preserve money by there being only one person to generate income and benefits for a given household.
Furthermore, experts say U.S. policy around single status is damaging to people’s economic well-being, and that the treatment of this growing number of unmarried adults could have political ramifications. “Single status is the most important policy issue that we’re not discussing as a nation full stop, period,” says Jessica Moorman, Ph.D., professor at Wayne State University who studies Black women’s single socialization. She says the various benefits designated for married people are “policy fixes” that could easily apply to single adults.
“Marital policies exacerbated [an] already grim economic reality, “ she says, “I would argue that because more than half of this country is unmarried, that is one of the largest political causes of voters we could possibly have, right? All you need is half of all singles to get on the same page politically about something.”
The state of singlehood
Nearly half of U.S. adults are single, including people who are divorced, widowed, and never married, according to September 2023 data from the American Community Survey. In 2020, over a quarter of U.S. households were one-person households, according to the survey. In addition, most U.S. women are single, with significant labor force participation that has been particularly beneficial to the post-pandemic economy. Despite these significant shifts, policies that provide social and legal benefits tend to rely on Western nuclear family models.
“The women in my interviews were cognizant of the fact that they did not have a marital partner,” particularly for additional social security benefits or caretaking, which led them to build “intentional communities of found family,” says Moorman. Davis embodies this pursuit of intentional communities as she has made arrangements for support and caregiving with long-time friends. “My healthcare power of attorney is a friend who I’ve known since kindergarten,” says Davis, “I have a list in my trust of people to whom I have given HIPAA authorization,” she says.
Planning for the future as a ‘kinless’ adult
Carol Tucker, 63, is a lab manager at a medical school in Atlanta, Georgia, and has been divorced for about five years after a 27-year marriage. She says being single can be challenging regarding insurance and thinking about the future, “Who will care for me if I’m unable to care for myself?”
Carol did her research and turned to friends to learn their strategies for dealing with the fallout from divorce. She says being single has made her agile in preparing for aging and the future. She’s “ready to pivot,” as she calls it. As a result, she’s modified her will and invested more of her income in her long-term disability insurance, and each year, she reassesses her plans and financials. When seeking mental and financial support as a single woman, Carol says she turns to her trusted circle that she calls her “Senior Cabinet.”
“I’m quite fortunate to have a wonderful network from extended family, friends, and church community.”
Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist who has written extensively on the single experience, says,“research shows that single people are more likely than married people to stay in touch with their friends, parents, siblings, and neighbors and exchange help with them,” contrary to married couples who tend to “become more insular,” she says. DePaulo, who is the author of the forthcoming book Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life, summarizes the unique social networks that often thrive in the lives of single people this way: “Single people…have ‘The Ones’ rather than ‘The One.’” They are “tending to their bonds with the people who matter to them,” she says.
Delores Bushong, 76, is a retired school teacher of over 40 years who resides in Washington, D.C. She is never married and has no children, and relies on her long-time friends who have remained in the city.
She says single adults have to, or should, engage in “a lot of forward-thinking,” that is planning and anticipating scenarios for aging and death. “My personal representative is a friend right now,” she says, “One of the things he does is [say] ‘let’s pretend you’ve died. I knock on the door…I come in. Can I locate all the documents? Do I have access to all the account numbers and passwords?’”
Delores’s core community consists of “really long-term” friends and acquaintances from “being involved in different civic things,” including working to improve street lighting and protect forest areas within the city, as well as volunteering in her yoga and water aquatics classes and participating in her local Village, a membership organization consists of older people living in their own homes. “So through that. I’ve met lots of people.”
Inequity in aging
To consider children, siblings, partners, spouses, and parents as a person’s only options for caretaking ignores cultural norms for families that are not white, experts say. Black Americans have always considered relations beyond the biological. However, these supportive networks do not receive the benefits often reserved for marital and familial bonds. “We have to think about marital status as a line of inequity, both in terms of policy and how it functions to exacerbate other inequities,” says Moorman.
In the last decade, marriage has become increasingly linked to socioeconomic status and race, with more marriages among white people and those with higher income and education. Additionally, couples receive more economic benefits after marriage. “Marriage is a result of inequality and then perpetuates that inequality going forward,” says Geoffrey Sanzebacher, an economics professor at Boston University.
Married people have “two shots” at health insurance and Social Security benefits—having a spouse provides a second chance at any set of benefits, says Sanzebache. This disadvantages single people, he says. “Right off the bat, you have this systemic choice to reward marriage because we allow two people, instead of one, to take advantage of this employer-sponsored benefit.”
He points out that the Social Security policy was implemented in 1935 when most U.S. adults were married and most white women did not work. That policy gave spouses access to their partner’s Social Security benefits. “Single people aren’t getting the same bang for their buck out of their social security contributions that a married person would,” he says. “When married people are showered with a whole array of benefits and protections, just because they are married when single people are denied those benefits, that is fundamentally unjust,” says DePaulo.
The number of single U.S. adults is growing. Those who marry do so at later ages; divorce remains high, and remarriage rates are decreasing, DePaulo points out. This means people spend more of their time unmarried than married, Scholars say it’s time policy recognizes the intentional communities and supportive networks single people create.
“It’s very easy to give single adults the tax rate of married adults. It’s very easy to say insurers, any legal adult attached to this person in whatever way they want to be attached to them, whether they’re a sibling, a friend, or a non-marital partner, you can have access to these benefits,” says Moorman.
Some developed nations have figured it out. In the U.K., people who live alone get a 25% discount on council tax, the U.S. equivalent to property tax. Single senior adults in New Zealand get a “living-alone allowance,” in which adults over 65 who live solo get a higher government pension payment to offset the “extra costs of running a household on your own.” Low-income residents who live alone in Quebec, Canada, can claim a tax credit. In Dublin, Ireland, people who live alone and already receive social welfare benefits may qualify for extra payments.
In the meantime, these inequities inspired Davis to cofound Sistahs Aging with Grace and Elegance in 2019, a research and policy project centering Black women within California’s Master Plan for Aging, which is a framework for supporting California’s population of residents who are 60 years and older. The initiative stems from Governor Gavin Newsome’s executive order to develop a strategy to promote the health and well-being of older Californians, whose population is projected to reach 10.8 million by 2030. “I wanted to think about what would equity in aging look like for Black women in California,” says Davis.
The perspectives of Davis and insight from scholars like DePaulo show that achieving equity in aging requires policy shifts and political will to support older adults, as well as redefining norms around relationship status and worth. “Everyone deserves the basics of human dignity. A person’s value is not defined by their marital or romantic relationship status, and their rights, benefits, and protections should not be linked to those statuses,” says DePaulo.
The Civil War produced two competing narratives, each an attempt to make sense of a conflict that had eradicated the pestilence of slavery.
Black Americans who believed in multiracial democracy extolled the emancipationist legacy of the war. These Reconstructionists envisioned a new America finally capable of safeguarding Black dignity and claims of citizenship. Black women and men created new civic, religious, political, educational, and economic institutions. They built thriving towns and districts, churches and schools. In so doing, they helped reimagine the purpose and promise of American democracy.
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For a time after the war, Black Reconstructionists also shaped the American government. They found allies in the Republican Party, where white abolitionists hoped to honor freedpeople’s demands and to create a progressive country in which all workers earned wages. Republicans in Congress pushed through amendments abolishing slavery, granting citizenship, and giving Black men the ballot. Congress also created the Freedmen’s Bureau, which offered provisions, clothing, fuel, and medical assistance to the formerly enslaved, and negotiated contracts to protect their newly won rights. With backing from the Union army, millions of Black people in the South received education, performed paid labor, voted in presidential elections, and held some of the highest offices in the country—all for the first time.
Black Reconstructionists told the country a new story about itself. These were people who believed in freedom beyond emancipation. They shared an expansive vision of a compassionate nation with a true democratic ethos.
Those who longed for the days of antebellum slavery felt differently. Advocates of the Lost Cause—who believed that the South’s defeat did nothing to diminish its moral superiority—sought to “redeem” their fellow white citizens from the scourge of “Negro rule.” Redemptionists did more than offer a different story about the nation. They demanded that their point of view be sanctified with blood. They threatened the nation’s infrastructure and institutions, and backed up their threats with violence.
The Redemption campaign was astoundingly successful. Intimidation and lynchings of Black voters and politicians quickly reversed gains in turnout. Reprisals against any white person who supported Black civil rights largely silenced dissent. This second rebellion hastened the national retreat from Reconstruction. Federal troops effectively withdrew from the Confederate states in 1877. White southerners soon dominated state legislatures once again, and passed Jim Crow laws designed to subjugate Black people and destroy their political power.
The official Reconstruction timeline usually ends there, in 1877. But this implies that the Reconstructionist vision of American democracy ceased to exist, or went dormant, without the backing of federal troops. Instead, we should consider a long Reconstruction—one that stretches well beyond 1877, and offers a view that transcends false binaries of political failure and success.
This view allows us to follow the travails of the Black activists and ordinary citizens who kept the struggle for freedom and dignity alive long after the Republican Party and white abolitionists had abandoned it. Black institutions, including the church, the schoolhouse, and the press, kept public vigil over promises made, broken, and, in some instances, renewed during the long march toward liberation. Their stories show that freedom’s flame, once boldly lit, could not be extinguished by the specter of white violence.
The concept of a long Reconstruction recognizes that a nation can be two things at once. After 1877, freedom and repression journeyed along parallel paths. Black Americans preserved a vision of a truly free nation in an archipelago of communities and institutions. Many of them exist today, and continue their work. This, perhaps, is the most important reason to resist the idea that Reconstruction ended when the North withdrew from the South: In a sense, the work of Reconstruction never ended, because the goal of a multiracial democracy has never been fully realized. And America has made its greatest gains toward that goal when it has rejected the Redemptionist narrative.
That the work of Reconstruction continued well after 1877 is illustrated by the life of Ida B. Wells, a woman who witnessed the death of slavery and fought against the beginning of Jim Crow. Wells kept alive the radical ideals of the Reconstructionists and punctured, through her journalism, the virulent mythology peddled by the Redemptionists. When Wells was born—in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862—her parents, Jim and Lizzie Wells, were enslaved. Later that year, the Union army took control of the town while staging an attack on Vicksburg. As they did elsewhere across the dying Confederacy, enslaved people in and around Holly Springs fled plantations for Union lines and emancipated themselves. But freedom proved contingent. Even when Union General Ulysses S. Grant made his headquarters in the town, Black refugees feared reprisals from their former enslavers. Their vulnerability to white violence, even under the watch of Union troops, foreshadowed the coming era.
After the war, Jim and Lizzie Wells chose to stay in Holly Springs. Jim joined the local Union League, which supported Republican Party politics and was committed to advancing Black male suffrage. In fall 1867, when Ida was 5 years old, her father cast his first ballot. Ida remembered her mother as an exemplar of domestic rectitude whose achievements were reflected in her children’s perfect Sunday-school attendance and good manners.
Ida grew up in a Mississippi full of miraculous change. She attended the first “colored” school in Holly Springs, a remarkable opportunity in a state that had been considered the most inhospitable to Black education and aspiration in the entire Confederacy. As a young girl, Ida read the newspaper aloud to her father’s admiring friends; just a few years earlier, it would have been illegal in Mississippi to teach her the alphabet.
In 1874, when Wells was 12, 69 Black men were serving in the Mississippi legislature, and a white governor, Adelbert Ames—placed in office partly by the votes of the formerly enslaved—promised to commit the state to equality for all. Around that time, Mississippi’s secretary of state, superintendent of education, and speaker of the House were all Black men.
The world around Ida was full of fiercely independent and economically prosperous Black citizens. These attainments buoyed her optimism for the rest of her life.
But the idyll of her childhood was brief. Redemptionist forces in Mississippi struck back against Black political power with naked racist terror. In December 1874, a white mob in Vicksburg killed as many as 300 Black citizens after forcing the elected Black sheriff, Peter Crosby, to resign. Massacres and lynchings continued unabated across the state through 1875. By 1876, the number of Black men in the state legislature had fallen by more than half. Following the contested election that year, the new president, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, ordered the remaining active northern troops in the South to return to their barracks. Without the protection of federal troops, and with the symbolic abandonment by the president, Black people were on their own, completely vulnerable to voting restrictions, economic reprisals, and racial violence.
For Wells, the collapse of Reconstruction came at a moment of profound personal struggles. In 1878, her parents and one of her brothers died in a yellow-fever outbreak that killed hundreds in Holly Springs, leaving her, at 16, to care for five siblings, including her disabled sister, Eugenia. After Eugenia died, Wells moved to Memphis at the invitation of an aunt.
Wells’s escape from Mississippi did not protect her from the indignities of racism. In 1883, after a visit to Holly Springs, Wells purchased a train ticket back to Memphis, riding first class on a segregated train. She moved to the first-class car for white ladies after being bothered by another passenger’s smoking, and refused to go back to Black first class. Though barely five feet tall, Wells stood her ground until the white conductor physically removed her. She promptly filed suit and, initially at least, won $700 in damages before her two cases were reversed on appeal by the Tennessee State Supreme Court.
The defeat spurred Wells to find another means of fighting Jim Crow. She longed to attend Fisk University, and took summer classes there. By the end of the decade, she had become the editor and a co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, the newspaper founded by the Beale Street Church pastor Taylor Nightingale.
Wells took over editorial duties amid a surge of anti-Black violence, which had remained a feature of the South even after the Redemptionists achieved their goal of removing federal troops from the region. In the 1880s, the incidents began to intensify. In 1886, at least 13 Black citizens were lynched in a Mississippi courthouse, where free Black men were testifying against a white lawyer accused of assault. Attacks on Reconstructionists continued from there. The more that Black men and women engaged in political self-determination—choosing to own homes and businesses, to defend their families—the more thunderbolts of violence struck them. The bloodshed of Redemption was intended to touch the lives of all Black people in the South.
On March 9, 1892, that violence came to Wells’s life, when a mob of 75 white men in Memphis kidnapped three Black men: Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart. Moss was an owner of the People’s Grocery, an upstart Black cooperative that competed with the local grocery owned by William Barrett, who was white. The rivalry between the stores had escalated into a larger racial conflict, and Moss, McDowell, and Stewart had been sent to jail after guns were fired at a white mob that had attacked the People’s Grocery. Wells knew Moss and his wife, Betty, whom she considered one of her best friends. She was godmother to their daughter Maurine.
Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were given no due process or trial. Another mob took the men from jail and shot each to death, refusing Moss’s plea to spare his life for the sake of his daughter and pregnant wife. Their bodies were left in the Chesapeake & Ohio rail yard. The white-owned Memphis Appeal-Avalanche documented the horrors as fair justice for the troublesome Black men who had dared to fight white men.
In the Free Speech, Wells wrote a series of editorials decrying the killings and the constant threat of violence that Black Americans faced in the South, and urged northerners to renew their support for full Black citizenship. In one of those editorials, Wells called out the “threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” which was the justification for many lynchings. She filed the editorial shortly before a trip to the North. While she was gone, a group of men went to the Free Speech’s offices and destroyed the printing press, leaving a note warning that “anyone trying to publish the paper again would be punished with death.” She chose not to return to Memphis, and continued her campaign from New York.
That June, Wells wrote an essay, “The Truth About Lynching,” in the influential Black newspaper The New York Age. Wells reasoned that most anti-Black violence claimed its roots in economic competition, personal jealousy, and white supremacy. She also dispelled, again, the myth of Black-male sexual violence against white women. Wells pointed instead to the number of mixed-race children in the old Confederacy—evidence of the sexual violence that white men had inflicted on Black women.
Wells’s activism was more than a crusade to end lynching. She traveled the country and Great Britain to describe her vision of multiracial democracy. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery and become the foremost civil-rights activist and journalist of the antebellum and Reconstruction eras, admired Wells and characterized her contributions as a “service which can neither be weighed nor measured.”
Wells first met Douglass in the summer of 1892, when he was 74; Douglass had written a letter to her saying he was inspired by her courage. The two developed a close friendship. “There has been no word equal to it in convincing power,” Douglass wrote of Southern Horrors, a pamphlet Wells published in 1892 based on her groundbreaking anti-lynching essay. The pair corresponded and worked together for the rest of Douglass’s life. With his death, in 1895, a torch was passed.
Wells’s efforts, in a period of racial fatigue among white audiences, helped continue the central political struggle of Reconstruction. She delivered hundreds of speeches, organized anti-lynching campaigns, and worked to galvanize the public against the Redemptionists. Wells told America a story it needed, but did not want, to hear.
Wells’s work also intersected with that of W. E. B. Du Bois, the scholar, journalist, and civil-rights activist who took a forceful stand against lynching. Their relationship was sometimes collegial, sometimes contentious; Wells never found with Du Bois the same rapport she’d had with Douglass. But she supported Du Bois’s then-radical view of the importance of Black liberal-arts education, and Du Bois was shaped by Wells’s advocacy and critiques.
Du Bois viewed the legacy of Reconstruction as crucial to understanding America. At the behest of another Black intellectual and scholar, Anna Julia Cooper, he published in 1935 his monumental Black Reconstruction. The book traced the origins of the violence that Wells denounced. He wrote that “inter-racial sex jealousy and accompanying sadism” were the main basis of lynching, and echoed Wells’s argument that white men’s violence against Black women had been the true scourge of the South. Du Bois also wrote that the Reconstructionists were engaged in “abolition-democracy,” which he defined as a broader movement for social equality that went beyond political rights.
Du Bois’s scholarship paved the way for a reconsideration of the era. He challenged the Redemptionist narrative of venal corruption and Black men who were either in over their head or merely served white northern puppet masters and southern race traitors.
Du Bois’s work is a starting point for contemporary histories. Eric Foner’s magisterial Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, published more than half a century after Black Reconstruction, added texture to the story of the period, then largely untold. Foner’s work reframed the era as an unfinished experiment in multiracial democracy.
In this tradition of expansion, the historian Steven Hahn’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Nation Under Our Feet, published in 2003, widens earlier historical frameworks by looking beyond Reconstruction’s constitutional reforms. Hahn sought out the Black men and women who shaped Reconstruction at the state and local levels. More recently, the historian Kidada E. Williams’s I Saw Death Coming focuses on the daily lives of Black men and women during Reconstruction—witnesses to the violence of Redemption.
All of these works expand our conception of what Reconstruction was, and challenge the notion that the era came to an abrupt ending in 1877. They portray the era as a contested epic, where parallel movements for Reconstruction and Redemption rise, fall, and are recovered.
I first learned about Reconstruction from my late mother, Germaine Joseph, a Haitian immigrant turned American citizen whose love of history could be gauged by the crammed bookcases in our home in Queens, New York. My first lesson on Reconstruction came in the form of a story about Haiti’s revolution. Mom proudly informed me that Haiti had been the key to unlocking freedom for Black Americans: The Haitian Revolution, she explained, led to revolts of the enslaved, frightened so-called masters, and inspired Frederick Douglass.
Later, I found my way back to Reconstruction through an interest in the Black radical tradition, especially post–World War II movements for racial justice and equality. My mentor, the late historian Manning Marable, described the civil-rights movement, and the age of Black Power that followed, as a second Reconstruction. During this time, with a renewed interest in slavery and its aftermath, scholars rediscovered Du Bois’s work.
My research and writing of late has revolved around interpreting the past 15 years of American history, from Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House in 2008, to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election, to the events that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020. In my 2022 book, The Third Reconstruction, I argued that we might be living through another era filled with the kind of dizzying possibility and intense backlash that whipsawed the South during Wells’s life.
Today’s Reconstructionists have a vision for multiracial democracy that might astonish even Douglass, Wells, and Du Bois. Black women, queer folk, poor people, disabled people, prisoners, and formerly incarcerated people have adopted the term abolition from Du Bois’s idea of abolition-democracy, and now use it to refer to a broad movement to dismantle interlocking systems of oppression—many of which originated in Redemption policy. They have achieved important victories in taking down Confederate monuments; sharing a more accurate telling of America’s origin story and its relationship to slavery; and questioning systems of punishment, surveillance, and poverty.
But today’s Redemptionists have had their victories as well. Their apocalyptic story of the present, one in which crime and moral decay threaten to destroy America, rationalizes a return to a past America and aims to dismantle the Reconstruction amendments that underpin fundamental civil rights. Redemptionists promote a regime of education that reverses the gains historians have made since the revival of Black Reconstruction.
The health of American democracy continues to rest upon whether we believe the Reconstructionist or Redemptionist version of history. Reconstruction, as a belief, as an ideal, outlasted the federal government’s political commitments by decades. Black people, the country’s most improbable architects, continued to make and shape history by preserving this rich legacy, and bequeathing it to their children. Their story has remained the heart of the American experiment both when the country has acknowledged them—and, most especially, when it has not.
This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Revolution Never Ended.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering a ban on certain hair-straightening chemicals that have been used by Black women for years and that research shows may increase the risk of uterine cancer.
But Black hair stylists say such products — specifically the ones being looked at by the FDA, which contain formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasing chemicals — have fallen out of favor, especially among younger generations.
“Relaxers have taken an extreme decline … as we became more knowledgeable about the effects of the relaxer on your hair and what it can do to your hair,” said Kayleigh Butler, a hair stylist in Atlanta who remembers getting relaxers when she was 5 years old. She added, “I think people just wanted to move away from that and live a healthier lifestyle.”
The FDA is in the first steps of the process: The notice of a possible rule was recently added to its regulatory agenda. The agency aims to publish an advance notice of proposed rulemaking by April 2024, but items can stay on the agenda for years.
The possible rule would apply to both salon-grade and at-home products, FDA spokesperson Courtney Rhodes said.
Jasmine Garcia, who owns Jasmine Nicole Xclusives Hair Salon in Atlanta, estimated that less than 5% of her clients — who are Black women — want relaxers. She told The Associated Press that a client texted her after learning about the potential ban, saying: “Of all the things the FDA needs to look into, why relaxers right now?”
Earlier this year, U.S. Reps. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Shontel Brown of Ohio asked the FDA to investigate chemical hair straighteners, pointing to a study published in 2022 from the National Institutes of Health that linked straighteners to an increased risk of uterine cancer. Pressley said in an Oct. 6 statement that the FDA’s possible action is “a win for public health — especially the health of Black women.”
“Regardless of how we wear our hair, we should be allowed to show up in the world without putting our health at risk,” she said.
The FDA posted a video Wednesday on social media, reminding people that no action has been taken yet and that the agency plans to work with and encourage the cosmetics industry to develop alternative straightening products.
In a study from Boston University published this month in the journal Environmental Research, researchers followed nearly 45,000 Black women for up to 22 years, the majority of them moderate or heavy users of relaxers. Among postmenopausal women, those who used relaxers most often had a greater than 50% increased risk of uterine cancer compared to those who never or seldom used them.
Black people have the highest rates of death from cancer, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The risks for Black women could shift with better regulation of chemical hair straighteners, said Dr. Kimberly Bertrand, an author of the Boston University study.
She added that FDA action would be a step in the right direction, but that it shouldn’t focus solely on formaldehyde.
“I think consideration of endocrine disrupters like phthalates and parabens would be important, and heavy metals, too,” she said. “Getting rid of formaldehyde in these products certainly is a good thing, but … I don’t know that it renders those products completely safe.”
Dr. Yolanda Lenzy, a dermatologist and licensed cosmetologist who co-authored the Boston University study, also said there’s still some pressure for Black women to have straight hair, especially in conservative job fields like law.
“I just know so many Black women who’ve made the choices about how they show up in the world based on codes at work, on rules at work, that … their hair has to be presentable,” Lenzy said. “What does that really mean?”
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The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating the deaths of two Black models whose bodies were found in their Downtown Los Angeles apartments just days apart.
Nichole “Nikki” Coats, a 32-year-old model, was found on Sept. 10, while Maleesa Mooney, a 31-year-old model and real estate agent, was found on Sept. 12, according to police. Their apartments are less than three miles away from each other.
The LAPD told HuffPost on Tuesday that Mooney’s death is being investigated as a homicide. However, Coats’ is being looked into as “an undetermined death at this point,” ABC News reports.
Thus far, the evidence found does not suggest that their deaths are related, the LAPD said. Despite the lack of evidence, some people on social media have expressed concern that the timing of the deaths suggests that Black women are being targeted, as Los Angeles Magazine reported on Monday.
Coats’ father and aunt — Guy Coats and May Stevens — decided to check on Nichole Coats and found her body at her apartment building, known as Eighth and Grand, according to KABC.
“I couldn’t recognize her,” Stevens told KTLA in an interview. “I believe it was murder, I really do.”
“Her smile brighten ever [sic] room she entered. Nikki’s personality was one that will never be forgotten. She was very happy, smart and a go-getter beyond measures,” Coats’ mother, Sharon Coats, posted on Facebook on Friday. “It’s like a dream to me, and I haven’t woke up but it’s real. Please keep me in your prayers as I ask for God’s strength to get through this terrible tragedy.”
Sharon Coats said that her daughter’s death was “senseless,” according to the KTLA interview.
“And it’s not fair. I want everybody to find out who did this to her. She shouldn’t be gone,” she added.
The Coats family and their friends have created a GoFundMe that has raised at least $15,930 of a $10,000 goal.
Days after Coats’ body was found, police officers found Mooney’s body during a welfare check, according to a statement from the LAPD.
Bailey Babb, a cousin of Mooney, told KTLA that their family began worrying about Mooney after not hearing from her for about a week.
“When a week went by, we just knew something was off,” Babb told KTLA. “Her messages weren’t delivering and we knew something was up because we all have a special relationship with Maleesa.”
Mooney’s sister, a music artist named Jourdin Pauline, told KABC that someone had also taken some of Mooney’s belongings.
“Whoever did it stole her belongings because they’re trying to sell her iPhone and her MacBook,” Pauline said. “Her iCloud had an alert like she was on.”
“How is this even possible,” Pauline questioned. “We was supposed to grow old together and have babies and cook off wars (you’re the best chef ever) this feels so surreal I keep waking up crying thinking I’m in a bad dream we will get justice for you my sister I promise you won’t be gone in vain!!!”
Several family members of Coats and Mooney, respectively, did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.
Why do so many Black women die in pregnancy? One reason: Doctors don’t take them seriously
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Angelica Lyons knew it was dangerous for Black women to give birth in America.
As a public health instructor, she taught college students about racial health disparities, including the fact that Black women in the U.S. are nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy or delivery than any other race. Her home state of Alabama has the third-highest maternal mortality rate in the nation.
Listen to an AP radio version of the story
Then, in 2019, it nearly happened to her.
What should have been a joyous first pregnancy quickly turned into a nightmare when she began to suffer debilitating stomach pain.
Her pleas for help were shrugged off, she said, and she was repeatedly sent home from the hospital. Doctors and nurses told her she was suffering from normal contractions, she said, even as her abdominal pain worsened and she began to vomit bile. Angelica said she wasn’t taken seriously until a searing pain rocketed throughout her body and her baby’s heart rate plummeted.
Rushed into the operating room for an emergency cesarean section, months before her due date, she nearly died of an undiagnosed case of sepsis.
Even more disheartening: Angelica worked at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the university affiliated with the hospital that treated her.
Her experience is a reflection of the medical racism, bias and inattentive care that Black Americans endure. Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States — 69.9 per 100,000 live births for 2021, almost three times the rate for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Black babies are more likely to die, and also far more likely to be born prematurely, setting the stage for health issues that could follow them through their lives.
“Race plays a huge part, especially in the South, in terms of how you’re treated,” Angelica said, and the effects are catastrophic. “People are dying.”
Angelica Lyons tears up while recalling her birthing experience during an interview in Birmingham, Ala., on Feb. 5, 2022.
To be Black anywhere in America is to experience higher rates of chronic ailments like asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s and, most recently, COVID-19. Black Americans have less access to adequate medical care; their life expectancy is shorter.
From birth to death, regardless of wealth or social standing, they are far more likely to get sick and die from common ailments.
Black Americans’ health issues have long been ascribed to genetics or behavior, when in actuality, an array of circumstances linked to racism — among them, restrictions on where people could live and historical lack of access to care — play major roles.
Discrimination and bias in hospital settings have been disastrous.
The nation’s health disparities have had a tragic impact: Over the past two decades, the higher mortality rate among Black Americans resulted in 1.6 million excess deaths compared to white Americans. That higher mortality rate resulted in a cumulative loss of more than 80 million years of life due to people dying young and billions of dollars in health care and lost opportunity.
A yearlong Associated Press project found that the health challenges Black Americans endure often begin before their first breath.
The AP conducted dozens of interviews with doctors, medical professionals, advocates, historians and researchers who detailed how a history of racism that began during the foundational years of America led to the disparities seen today.
Angelica Lyons carries her son while her younger sister, Ansonia Lyons, finishes her snack in the background.
Angelica Lyons’ pregnancy troubles began during her first trimester, with nausea and severe acid reflux. She was prescribed medication that helped alleviate her symptoms but it also caused severe constipation.
In the last week of October 2019, while she was giving her students a test, her stomach started to hurt badly.
“I remember talking to a couple of my students and they said, ‘You don’t look good, Ms. Lyons,’” Angelica recalled.
She called the University of Alabama-Birmingham Hospital’s labor and delivery unit to tell them she was having a hard time using the bathroom and her stomach was hurting. A woman who answered the phone told her it was a common pregnancy issue, Angelica said, and that she shouldn’t worry too much.
“She made me feel like my concern wasn’t important, and because this was my first pregnancy, I decided not to go because I wasn’t sure and thought maybe I was overreacting,” Angelica said.
The pain persisted. She went to the hospital a few days later and was admitted.
She had an enema — a procedure where fluids are used to cleanse or stimulate the emptying of bowels — to alleviate her constipation, but Angelica continued to plead with them that she was in pain.
“They were like, ‘Oh, it’s nothing, it’s just the Braxton Hicks contractions,’” she said. “They just ignored me.”
She was sent home but her stomach continued to ache, so she went back to the hospital a day later. Several tests, including MRIs, couldn’t find the source of the issue.
Angelica was eventually moved to the labor and delivery floor of the hospital so they could monitor her son’s heartbeat, which had dropped slightly. There, they performed another enema that finally helped with the pain. She also was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a dangerous condition that can cause severe pregnancy complications or death.
Then she began to vomit what appeared to be bile.
“I got worse and worse with the pain and I kept telling them, ‘Hey, I’m in pain,’” Angelica said. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you want some Tylenol?’ But it wasn’t helping.”
She struggled to eat dinner that night. When she stood up to go to the bathroom, she felt a sharp pain ricochet throughout her body.
“I started hollering because I had no idea what was going on,” she said. “I told my sister I was in so much pain and to please call the nurse.”
What happened next remains a blur. Angelica recalls the chaos of hospital staff rushing her to labor and delivery, putting up a blue sheet to prepare her for an emergency C-section as her family and ex-husband tried to understand what went wrong.
She later learned that she nearly died.
“I was on life support,” recalled Angelica, 34. “I coded.”
She woke up three days later, unable to talk because of a ventilator in her mouth. She remembers gesturing wildly to her mother, asking where her son, Malik, was.
He was OK. But Angelica felt so much had been taken from her. She never got to experience those first moments of joy of having her newborn placed on her chest. She didn’t even know what her son looked like.
Maternal sepsis is a leading cause of maternal mortality in America. Black women are twice as likely to develop severe maternal sepsis, as compared to their white counterparts. Common symptoms can include fever or pain in the area of infection. Sepsis can develop quickly, so a timely response is crucial.
Sepsis in its early stages can mirror common pregnancy symptoms, so it can be hard to diagnose. Due to a lack of training, some medical providers don’t know what to look for. But slow or missed diagnoses are also the result of bias, structural racism in medicine and inattentive care that leads to patients, particularly Black women, not being heard.
“The way structural racism can play out in this particular disease is not being taken seriously,” said Dr. Laura Riley, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “We know that delay in diagnosis is what leads to these really bad outcomes.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Angelica demanded explanations from the medical staff of what happened. But she felt the answers she received on how it occurred were sparse and confusing.
A spokesperson for the University of Alabama at Birmingham said in a statement to The Associated Press that they couldn’t talk about Angelica’s case because of patient privacy laws. They pointed to a recent internal survey done by its Obstetrics and Gynecology department that showed that most of its patients are satisfied with their care and “are largely feeling respected,” and said the university and hospital “maintain intentional, proactive efforts in addressing health disparities and maternal mortality.”
Angelica’s son, Malik, was born eight weeks early, weighing under 5 pounds. He spent a month in intensive care. He received home visits through the first year of life to monitor his growth.
While he’s now a curious and vivacious 3-year-old who loves to explore the world around him, Angelica recalls those days in the ICU, and she feels guilty because she could not be with him.
“It’s scary to know I could have died, that we could have died,” Lyons said, wiping away tears.
Top: Ansonia Lyons, left, finishes a snack while her mother, Shelonda Lyons, takes care of her son, Adrien Lyons, as her nephew, Malik Lyons-Law, plays in the kitchen. Left: Shelonda Lyons looks after her grandchildren, Malik Lyons-Law, center, and Adrien Lyons. Right: Malik Lyons-Law and Adrien Lyons play with their dog.
For decades, frustrated birth advocates and medical professionals have tried to sound an alarm about the ways medicine has failed Black women. Historians trace that maltreatment to racist medical practices that Black people endured amid and after slavery.
To fully understand maternal mortality and infant mortality crises for Black women and babies, the nation must first reckon with the dark history of how gynecology began, said Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian and author.
“The history of this particular medical branch … it begins on a slave farm in Alabama,” Owens said. “The advancement of obstetrics and gynecology had such an intimate relationship with slavery, and was literally built on the wounds of Black women.”
Reproductive surgeries that were experimental at the time, like cesarean sections, were commonly performed on enslaved Black women.
Physicians like the once-heralded J. Marion Sims, an Alabama doctor many call the “father of gynecology,” performed torturous surgical experiments on enslaved Black women in the 1840s without anesthesia.
And well after the abolition of slavery, hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on Black women, and eugenics programs sterilized them.
Health care segregation also played a major role in the racial health gap still experienced today.
Until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Black families were mostly barred from well-funded white hospitals and often received limited, poor or inhumane medical treatment. Black-led clinics and doctors worked hard to fill in the gaps, but even after the new protections, hospitals once reserved for Black families remained under-resourced, and Black women didn’t get the same support regularly available for white women.
That history of abuse and neglect led to deep-rooted distrust of health care institutions among communities of color.
“We have to recognize that it’s not about just some racist people or a few bad actors,” said Rana A. Hogarth, an associate professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “People need to stop thinking about things like slavery and racism as just these features that happened that are part of the contours of history and maybe think of them more as foundational and institutions that have been with us every step of the way.”
Some health care providers still hold false beliefs about biological differences between Black and white people, such as Black people having “less sensitive nerve endings, thicker skin, and stronger bones.” Those beliefs have caused medical providers today to rate Black patients’ pain lower, and recommend less relief.
The differences exist regardless of education or income level. Black women who have a college education or higher have a pregnancy-related mortality rate that is more than five times higher than that of white women. Notably, the pregnancy-related mortality rate for Black women with a college education is 1.6. times higher than that of white women with less than a high school degree.
Ansonia Lyons bottle feeds her son, Adrien Lyons, in the television room of her parents’ home.
In Angelica Lyons’ home state of Alabama, about 40 mothers die within one year after delivery. The toll on Black mothers is disproportionate.
The state’s infant mortality rate for 2021 was 7.6 deaths per 1,000 live births. The disparities between Black and white babies is stark: The infant mortality rate in 2021 for white mothers was 5.8, while the infant mortality rate for Black mothers was 12.1, an increase from 10.9 from the prior year.
Black babies account for just 29% of births in Alabama, yet nearly 47% of infant deaths.
A 2020 report by the Alabama Maternal Mortality Review Committee found that more than 55% of 80 pregnancy-related deaths that they reviewed in 2016 and 2017 could have been prevented.
Alabama launched its Maternal Mortality Review Committee in 2018 to investigate maternal deaths. But Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama’s Department of Public Health State Health Officer, said work remains to collect a fuller picture of why the disparities exist.
“We certainly know that from national numbers as well that Black women have worse maternal outcomes at every income level, which is pretty startling,” said Dr. Harris. “Age matters and just overall ZIP code matters. Unfortunately, where people live, where these children are born, is strongly associated with infant mortality. I think we’ll see something similar for maternal outcomes.”
And concerns about access and barriers to care remain.
In Alabama, 37% of counties are maternity care deserts — more than 240,000 women live in counties with no or little care. About 39% of counties don’t have a single obstetric provider.
Alabama is not alone in this. More than 2.2 million American women of childbearing age live in maternity care deserts, and another 4.8 million such women reside in counties with limited access to maternity care.
Angelica Lyons said she wanted to seek maternal care at another hospital but the University of Alabama was the only one near her home equipped to handle her high-risk pregnancy, which included high blood pressure near the beginning.
Dr. Harris acknowledged the lack of access to care is a barrier for Black women who live in the state’s rural areas. Much of the state’s public health efforts are targeted along the rural Black Belt, which gets its name from the rich soil but it was also a region where many plantations were clustered.
Centuries later, the Black Belt continues to be a high-poverty region with a large Black population. More than half of the nation’s Black population lives in the South.
“We’ve talked a lot about structural racism and the impact of that on African American women and how it has no place in society,” Harris said. “I think we have to publicly call it what it is.”
Angelica Lyons’ traumatic birth experience was not the only one in her family.
After two miscarriages, her younger sister, Ansonia, became pregnant in 2020, and it was difficult.
Angelica Lyons and Ansonia Lyons pose for portraits.
Doctors told her she was suffering from regular morning sickness, though she was vomiting blood.
She was eventually diagnosed with an excessive vomiting disorder, hyperemesis gravidarum, and was extremely dehydrated. Ansonia spent months in and out of the same hospital where her sister had been treated.
“They said, ‘Welcome to the pregnancy, sweetheart. This is what pregnancy is,’” Ansonia, 30, recalled. “I told her, ‘No, this is not normal for me to be throwing up 10 to 20 times a day.’ My own primary care wasn’t listening to me.”
Ansonia said throughout her pregnancy she encountered hospital staff that made stereotypical jokes, calling her child’s father her “baby daddy,” a trope often lobbed at Black parents.
“She said, ‘So, your baby daddy, where does he work?’” Ansonia recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know what a baby daddy is but the father of my child is at work.’ She asked where he worked and I told her he had two businesses and she acted like she was surprised.”
Ansonia said staff assumed she didn’t have any health insurance, when she had insurance through her employer.
Ansonia has Type 2 diabetes and had issues with her blood pressure and heart throughout the pregnancy. She started to see a cardiologist and by the time she was 21 weeks pregnant, she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. She was placed on a medley of medications, and her doctors decided to deliver the baby early via C-section.
Ansonia was scared, given everything she witnessed her sister go through nearly two years prior.
“There were several times I told my boyfriend that I thought that I was going to die,” she said.
The C-section went well. Ansonia’s son, Adrien, was due in July 2021 but he was born at the end of May.
He spent his first five days in the intensive care unit, then was hospitalized for some early breathing problems.
Ansonia Lyons spends time with her son, Adrien Lyons.
Cesarean delivery rates are higher for Black women than white women, 36.8% and 31%, respectively, in 2021.
Problems continued for Ansonia after the delivery. She ended up needing a blood transfusion and was unable to see her son for his first few days of life.
A few months postpartum, she was still vomiting and having fainting spells that led to her being admitted to the hospital off and on. Her arms suffered from bruising from needles used to treat her throughout the pregnancy. She had always been slow to heal from any bruising, a common problem for diabetics.
Yet a doctor who had been involved throughout her entire pregnancy questioned why she had bruises on her arms and asked if she “smoked weed” or took any other recreational drugs. The hospital declined to comment, citing patient privacy laws.
“I said, ‘This is from me being stuck so many times and having to be in the hospital.’ I told him I don’t do any drugs,” she said.
He still sent her blood work off to be tested. The tests came back negative.
“That just made me not trust them, it made me not want to go back,” she said.
Ansonia Lyons walks down the corridor of her parents’ home with her son, Adrien Lyons.
There are indications that the sufferings of Black mothers and their babies are being recognized, however late.
In 2019, U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood, an Illinois Democrat, and Rep. Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democrat, launched the Black Maternal Health Caucus. It is now one of the largest bipartisan congressional caucuses. The caucus introduced the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act in 2019 and again in 2021, proposing sweeping changes that would increase funding and strengthen oversight. Key parts of the legislation have been adopted but the bill itself has yet to be approved.
Biden’s budget for fiscal year 2024 includes $471 million in funding to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity rates, expand maternal health initiatives in rural communities, and implicit bias training and other initiatives. It also requires states to provide continuous Medicaid coverage for 12 months postpartum, to eliminate gaps in health insurance. It also includes $1.9 billion in funding for women and child health programs.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra told The Associated Press more must be done at all levels of government to root out racism and bias within health care.
“We know that if we provide access to care for mother and baby for a full year, that we probably help produce not just good health results, but a promising future for mom and baby moving forward,” he said.
Ansonia Lyons looks at a photograph of her younger self, right in photo, posing with her sister Angelica Lyons, left in photo.
Shelonda Lyons always taught both her daughters the bitter truth of racism, hoping it would prepare them to navigate life growing up in Birmingham, the Deep South city known for its place in civil rights history.
“When we were young, she was showing us those images of all the Black people being hung, being burned on the trees,” Angelica said, pointing to a book that remains on the family’s coffee table. “She wanted us to understand it, to know where we lived and that racism was something that we might have to deal with.”
But Shelonda never could have prepared for the treatment her daughters endured during their pregnancies. She remembers feeling helpless and angry.
“It’s like a slap in the face to me because at what point do you realize that you’re dealing with human beings? That it doesn’t matter what color they are,” she said, adding that now she worries any time they or her grandsons need to go to the doctor. “I don’t have a lot of trust.”
Angelica underwent two surgeries in the weeks that followed her C-section to repair internal damage and address her infection. She had to wear a colostomy bag for several months until she healed.
More than three years later, her stomach remains disfigured.
“I love my child, I love him all the same but this isn’t the body I was born with,” she said. “This is the body that they caused from them not paying attention to me, not listening to me.”
First: Angelica Lyons secures her son, Malik Lyons-Law, into his child car seat while her sister, Ansonia Lyons, prepares to ride with her after their breakfast outing to celebrate their father’s birthday. Second: James Lyons kisses his grandson, Adrien Lyons, in the kitchen of his home.
Digital Presentation Credits
Producers: Samantha Shotzbarger, Josh Housing, Wong Maye-E
Data Analysis: Angeliki Kastanis
Text Editing: Anna Jo Bratton, Andale Gross
Graphics: Kevin S. Vineys, Angeliki Kastanis
Design and Development: Linda Gorman, Eunice Esomonu, Kati Perry
Audience Coordination and Production: Edward Medeles, Elise Ryan, Almaz Abedje, Sophia Rosenbaum
Creative Development: Raghuram Vadarevu
Project Management: Andale Gross
Project Vision and Development: Kat Stafford
Stafford, based in Detroit, is a national investigative race writer for the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. She was a 2022 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow at the University of Michigan.
Imagine you need to send a letter. The mailbox is only two blocks away, but the task feels insurmountable. Air hunger seizes you whenever you walk, you’re plagued by dizziness and headaches, and anyway, you keep blanking on your zip code for the return address. So you sit in the kitchen, disheartened by the letter you can’t send, the deadlines you’ve missed, the commitments you’ve canceled. Months have passed since you got COVID. Weren’t you supposed to feel better by now?
Long COVID is a diverse and confusing condition, a new disease with an unclear prognosis, often-fluctuating symptoms, and a definition people still can’t agree on. And in many cases, it is disabling. In a recent survey, 1.6 percent of American adults said post-COVID symptoms limit their daily activities “a lot.” That degree of upheaval aligns with the Americans With Disabilities Act’s definition of disability: “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.”
But for many people experiencing long COVID who were able-bodied before, describing themselves as “disabled” is proving to be a complicated decision. This country is not kind to disabled people: American culture and institutions tend to operate on the belief that a person’s worth derives from their productivity and physical or cognitive abilities. That ableism was particularly stark in the early months of the pandemic, when some states explicitly de-prioritized certain groups of disabled people for ventilators. Despite the passage of the ADA in 1990, disabled people still confront barriers accessing things such as jobs and health care, and even a meal with friends at a restaurant. Most of our cultural narratives cast disability as either a tribulation to overcome or a tragedy.
Consequently, incorporating disability into your identity can require a lot of reflection. Lizzie Jones, who finished her doctoral research in disability studies last year and now works for an educational consultancy, suffered a 30-foot fall that shattered half of her body a week before her college graduation. She told me that her accident prompted “radical identity shifts” as she transitioned from trying to get the life she’d imagined back on track to envisioning a new one.
These are the sorts of mindset changes that Ibrahim Rashid struggled with after contracting COVID in November 2020, when he was a graduate student. He dealt with debilitating symptoms for months, but even after applying for disability accommodations to finish his degree, he “was so scared of that word,” he told me. Rashid was afraid of people treating him differently and of losing his internship offer. Most terrifying, calling himself disabled felt like an admission that his long COVID wasn’t going to suddenly resolve.
Aaron Teasdale, an outdoors and travel writer and a mountaineer, has also been wrestling with identity questions since he got COVID in January 2022. For months, he spent most of his time in a remote-controlled bed, gazing out the window at the Montana forests he once skied. Although his fatigue is now slowly improving, he had to take Ritalin to speak with me. He was still figuring out what being disabled meant to him, whether it simply described his current condition or reflected some new, deeper part of himself—a reckoning made more difficult by the unknowability of his prognosis. “Maybe I just need more time before I say I’m a disabled person,“ he said. “When you have your greatest passions completely taken away from you, it does leave you questioning, Well, who am I?”
Long COVID can wax and wane, leaving people scrambling to adapt. It doesn’t mesh with the stereotype of disability as static, visible, and binary—the wheelchair user cast in opposition to the pedestrian. Nor does the fact that long COVID is often imperceptible in casual interactions, which forces long-haulers to contend with disclosure and the possibility of passing as able-bodied. One such long-hauler is Julia Moore Vogel, a program director at Scripps Research, who initially hesitated at the idea of getting a disabled-parking permit. “My first thought was, I’m not disabled, because I can walk,” she told me. But if she did walk, she’d be drained for days. Taking her daughter to the zoo or the beach was out of the question.
Once she got over her apprehension, identifying as disabled ended up feeling empowering. Getting that permit was “one of the best things I’ve done for myself,” Vogel told me. She could drive her kid to the playground, park nearby, and then sit and watch her play. After plenty of therapy and conversations with other disabled people, Rashid, too, came to embrace disability as part of his identity, so much so that he now speaks and writes about chronic illness.
Usually, the community around a disease—including advocacy among those it disables—arises after scientists name it. Long COVID upended that order, because the term first spread through hashtags and support groups in 2020. Instead of doctors informing patients of whether their symptoms fit a certain illness, patients were telling doctors what symptoms their illness entailed. And there were a lot of symptoms: everything from life-altering neurocognitive problems and dizziness to a mild, persistent cough.
As long-COVID networks blossomed online, members began seeking support from wider disability-rights communities, and contributing fresh energy and resources to those groups. People who’d fought similar battles for decades sometimes bristled at the greater political capital afforded to long-haulers, whose advocacy didn’t universally extend to other disabled people; for the most part, though, long-haulers were welcomed.
Tapping into conversations among disabled people “has shown me that I’m simply not alone,” Eris Eady, a writer and an artist who works for Planned Parenthood, told me. Eady, who is queer and Black, found that long COVID interplayed with struggles they already faced on account of their identity. So they sought advice from disabled Black women about interdependence, mutual aid, and accessibility, as well as about being dismissed by doctors, an experience more prevalent among women and people of color.
Disabled communities have years of experience supporting people through identity changes. The writer and disability-justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha told me that when she was newly disabled, she was dogged with heavy questions: Am I going to be able to make a living? Am I datable? Her isolation and fear dissipated only when she met other young disabled people, who taught her how to be creative in “hacking the world.”
For long-haulers navigating these transitions for the first time, the process can be rocky. Rachel Robles, a contributor to The Long COVID Survival Guide, told me she spent her early months with long COVID “waking up every day and thinking, Okay, is this the day it’s left my body?” Conceiving of herself as disabled didn’t take away her long COVID. She didn’t stop seeing doctors and trying treatments. But thinking about accessibility did inspire her to return to gymnastics, which she’d quit decades earlier because of a heart condition. If she couldn’t lift her hands over her head sometimes, and if a dive roll would never be in her future, then so be it: Gymnastics could be about enjoying what her body could do, not yearning for what it couldn’t. Before she identified as disabled, returning to gymnastics “was something I would have never, ever imagined,” Robles said. And she never would have done it had she remained focused only on when she might recover.
Hoping for improvement is a natural response to illness, especially one with a trajectory as uncertain as long COVID’s. But focusing exclusively on relinquished past identities or unrealized future ones can dampen our curiosity about the present. A better way to think about it is “What are the things you can do with the body that you have, and what are the things you might not know you can do yet?” Piepzna-Samarasinha said. “Who am I right now?”
Born in Benin, Angélique Kidjo is as widely known for her cultural and humanitarian leadership as she is for her powerful music
Press Release –
Feb 7, 2023 10:45 EST
NEW YORK, February 7, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Angélique Kidjo receives a 2023 Vilcek Prize in Music in recognition of her exceptional range as a singer-songwriter, and for her creative leadership in bringing African music to the global stage through her performances, albums, and collaborations.
“Angélique Kidjo is known for the resonant power of her voice—both as a lyrical storyteller and as an advocate for women and girls in Africa,” says Vilcek Foundation President Rick Kinsel. “From captivating audiences at Carnegie Hall and the Grammy Awards to her establishment of the Batonga Foundation to provide African women and girls with access to education, employment, and economic independence, she has forged a path over the past four decades that has inspired generations of performers and advocates.”
In recognition of Kidjo’s leadership, the foundation has published a video biography and in-depth profile of the artist and humanitarian available on the foundation’s website: Angélique Kidjo: “The power of music exceeds us.”
The Vilcek Prize in Music is a $100,000 prize awarded by the Vilcek Foundation as part of the Vilcek Foundation Prizes. The prizes are awarded annually in recognition and celebration of immigrant vanguards in the arts and in biomedical science whose work has had a profound impact on culture and society. In addition to providing direct support to immigrant artists and scientists, the purpose of the prizes is to build greater awareness of the importance of immigration for intellectual and cultural life in the United States.
In 2023, the Vilcek Foundation is awarding two Vilcek Prizes in Music—one to Angélique Kidjo, and one to Chinese-born composer and performer Du Yun. The foundation is also awarding three smaller prizes of $50,000 each—the Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Music—to young immigrant musicians whose work demonstrates a unique perspective and represents an important contribution to their genre. The recipients of the 2023 Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Music are Arooj Aftab (b. Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents), Juan Pablo Contreras (b. Mexico), and Ruby Ibarra (b. Philippines).
The Vilcek Foundation raises awareness of immigrant contributions in the United States and fosters an appreciation for the arts and sciences. The foundation was established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia. The mission of the foundation was inspired by the couple’s respective careers in biomedical science and art history. Since 2000, the foundation has awarded over $7 million in prizes to foreign-born individuals and has supported organizations with over $6 million in grants.
The Vilcek Foundation is a private operating foundation, a federally tax-exempt nonprofit organization under IRS Section 501(c)(3). To learn more, please visit vilcek.org.
The podcast addresses livability metrics and recent findings surrounding the health and wellness challenges Black women face in Northeast Ohio, along with sharing firsthand accounts of Black women’s experiences in Cleveland’s workplaces, schools, and educational systems.
Press Release –
Jan 11, 2023
CLEVELAND, January 11, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Ohio’s largest independent, publicly supported media organization, Ideastream Public Media (Ideastream), and Evergreen Podcasts (Evergreen), one of the fastest-growing podcast networks in the United States, are teaming up to produce a new journalistic podcast series, Living for We. The podcast addresses livability metrics and recent findings surrounding the health and wellness challenges Black women face in Northeast Ohio, along with sharing firsthand accounts of Black women’s experiences in Cleveland’s workplaces, schools, and educational systems.
Living for We is a part of Connecting the Dots between Race and Health, an ongoing Ideastream Public Media initiative that looks at how racism contributes to poor health outcomes in Northeast Ohio, along with uncovering what actions local institutions are taking to tear down the structural barriers to good health.
The initial data that inspired Living For We was released back in 2020when cityLAB of Pittsburgh released a study that ranked Cleveland dead last in terms of livability for Black women. In response, Cleveland’s Bethany Studenic and Chinenye Nkemere of Enlightened Solutions published Project Noir, a survey featuring over 450 Black women from the Cleveland area who share accounts of frustration, isolation, marginalization, and discrimination, within the workplace, healthcare facilities, and the education sector. With ChiChi and Bethany of Enlightened Solutions on their team, Ideastream has worked with Evergreen Podcasts to explore these findings through their new audio series, Living for We.
“I’m so proud that we are sharing the unfiltered voices and perspectives of Black women in Cleveland from their lived experiences. We have some well-known guests, including Samaria Rice – the mother of Tamir Rice, and Ayesha Bell Hardaway – Case Western Reserve professor and interim monitor overseeing Cleveland police reform,” says Host Marlene Harris-Taylor. “There are also many other women from all walks of life who share their unique experiences about the education, health, and business sectors in Cleveland and what Black women must do to navigate these spaces.”
The limited-run journalistic podcast series will be released weekly over three months, beginning March 1st, 2023. Season One of the Connecting the Dots between Race and Health Podcast: Living for We, is made possible by generous support from the Dr. Donald J. Goodman and Ruth Weber Goodman Philanthropic Fund of the Cleveland Foundation. One can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and many other podcast platforms.
“Evergreen is thrilled to be a production partner for the Living for We podcast,” noted Michael C. DeAoia, Chief Executive Officer of Evergreen Podcasts, “When we launched the company six years ago this month – this was the type of investigative, journalistic content we were dreaming of creating. Ideastream has been a wonderful and provocative partner on this podcast. It is required listening.”
Ideastream Public Media serves the people of Northeast Ohio as a trustworthy and dynamic multimedia source for illuminating the world around us. Ideastream Public Media is the home of five public television stations (WVIZ, WVIZ OHIO, WVIZ WORLD, WVIZ CREATE, and WVIZ KIDS); WKSU, Northeast Ohio’s NPR news and public affairs radio station; and WCLV, Northeast Ohio’s classical music radio station. Ideastream Public Media programs and services are used by 3.6 million people in a typical month, across a 22-county service area. Ideastream Public Media produces the award-winning children’s series “NewsDepth” and manages The Ohio Channel and the Ohio Public Radio and Television Statehouse News Bureau on behalf of all Ohio’s public broadcasting stations. Ideastream Public Media is indispensable and highly valued for its unique ability to strengthen our community.
For more information about Ideastream Public Media’s rich legacy of innovation and credible content, visit ideastream.org.
About Evergreen Podcasts
Evergreen Podcasts’ mission is to become the largest independent podcasting company worldwide, committed to a premier collection of shows from an international cast of storytellers. Offering global distribution and platforms for dynamic podcast growth, Evergreen produces content that celebrates modern thinkers, influencers, and personalities. Top thought leaders and breakout brands choose Evergreen to create inspiring stories through branded content, original shows, and partner podcasts. Our team specializes in comprehensive podcast production, creative marketing, and distribution solutions, connecting brands to a broader audience. The Company, which launched with four original podcasts in 2017, now manages over 200 shows across six unique podcast networks.
Released during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the Non-Toxic Black Beauty Project focuses specifically on supporting Black women’s health because Black women face the highest breast cancer mortality rate of any racial or ethnic group in America. Beauty products marketed to Black women often contain the most toxic cosmetics ingredients, including chemicals linked to cancer. In fact, Black women who regularly dye their hair have a 60% increased risk of breast cancer, and those who use chemical hair straighteners are 30% more likely to develop the disease. By uplifting leading non-toxic Black-owned beauty brands and connecting Black women with products they can trust, CSC aims to combat toxic health disparities to help prevent breast cancer and other diseases.
The 80 small and medium-sized businesses who made the list raise the bar for ingredient safety and lead the movement to address the injustice of Black beauty by selling products free of CSC’s 241 “Do Not Use” Red List Chemicals of Concern in Cosmetics. CSC vetted all 700+ products included in the first-ever searchable database for safety and verified them to be free of harmful chemicals linked to health concerns like cancer, diabetes, early puberty, endometriosis, infertility, maternal health, pregnancy complications, and uterine fibroids.
“We are thrilled to announce the launch of our searchable database of non-toxic Black beauty products,” said Janet Nudelman, Director of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a program of Breast Cancer Prevention Partners. “These leading Black entrepreneurs are making safer beauty products that won’t harm the health of Black women and girls. We hope that more companies will follow their lead and grow the clean Black beauty industry by selling non-toxic beauty and personal care products that Black women can trust.”
As Black women purchase and use more beauty products per capita than any other demographic, spending more than $7.5 billion dollars on beauty products a year and nine times more on hair products than the average consumer, toxic exposure from beauty products is of particular concern.
By eliminating toxic ingredients that negatively impact Black women, these companies have made a significant commitment to protecting their customers’ health and well-being. They are also helping to reduce the disproportionate toxic burden that Black women face from unsafe chemicals in beauty and other consumer products they use, which can help prevent the development of chronic diseases like breast and ovarian cancer.
The Non-Toxic Black Beauty Project is guided by an Advisory Committee made up of leading non-profit organizations and scientists working to improve Black women’s health. This project represents the first comprehensive effort to generate a list of chemicals of concern in Black beauty products that should be avoided by consumers, cosmetic manufacturers, and retailers.
The 2020 Women of Color in Business: Cross Generational Survey, in Co-Sponsorship With the Executive Leadership Council, involves nearly 2,500 respondents across all generations, including Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers amongst Black, LatinX, Asian and Caucasian women. And for the first time, the research also included White male manager respondents.
Although the new survey covers a wide variety of topics, two major new findings involve “generational diversity” and the importance of manager training. “Generational diversity” is a term the co-authors coined to highlight the nuances that are being overlooked in today’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion conversations, specifically, representation across the generations. The 2020 survey found that Gen Z and Millennial female “desk workers,” especially those who are Black and LatinX, are supremely confident that they will control their careers. They are mission-driven and tech-forward, with 42% of Black Gen Z respondents saying that they are always the first to know about technological innovations, twice the percentage of women of the other races.
The data has convinced the co-authors that “great managers matter.” When asked about mentoring, the female managers of all races were more magnanimous in their willingness to help anyone regardless of race or gender, ranging from 56%-65%. Only 34% of the white male managers concurred. Fifty-one percent preferred to give and 61% preferred to receive advice on the job from other white men because: “I feel I can better identify with them.”
To win the race for exceptional talent, leaders and managers must become comfortable with hiring underrepresented minorities in multiples, providing honest feedback and stretch assignments, and creating an inclusive environment for ideas to flow freely from all employees across all generations, genders and races.
Other areas in the research included finance and investments, professional development, and the pursuit of “side-preneurship,” especially by Black women who were three-times more likely than their white counterparts to be leading a side business in their spare time.
The 2020 data found that 46% of Black women were frequently or always the only person of their race in a professional setting, down just one point from 2019. By contrast, 72% of white women said they were not very often or never the only person of their race in a professional setting, again down by one point from 2019.
This “onlyness” has costs. Twice as many Black women as their white counterparts said they faced extra scrutiny of their job applications and job performances because of their race. Large majorities of all of the female desk workers reported additional stress on the job as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic: 70% for Black, 72% for LatinX, 60% for Asian and 67% for white women. The female desk workers also reported additional stress as a result of the racial and social justice protests: 54% for Black, 39% for LatinX, 34% for Asian and 30% for white women.
Stewart and Adams’ findings are particularly pertinent as we continue to see a number of landmark appointments to leadership positions by women of color.
Stewart and Adams said: “The bottom line is that great leaders and managers – male and female – want to win. We advocate for a commitment to manager excellence through additional manager training and finding ways to create psychological safety so that everyone, especially the white male managers, can confidently ‘team up’ with highly qualified, ambitious women of color.”
The Executive Leadership Council’s (ELC) decision to announce with Stewart and Adams on the release of this consequential survey’s findings is particularly significant because the information directly aligns with the organization’s purpose of increasing the number of successful Black executives by adding value to their development, leadership, and philanthropic endeavors across the life cycle of their careers. “The past several months have seen multiple Black women make history rising to CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies and the highest leadership positions in government,” says Michael C. Hyter, President and CEO of The ELC. “The issue is not the lack of qualified Black women. It’s the lack of opportunity for Black women to ascend to these roles. The ELC is proud to support this research to empower and energize Black women, and enlighten their organizations, as they strive for future career success.”
