Black Women Have Dreams: A Photo Essay of My Ancestors
As we celebrate Women’s History Month, it’s essential to honor the resilience and strength of Black women throughout history. In this blog post Brittany Friedman, author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, delves into the resilience and strength of her grandmother, great grandmother, and their descendants, highlighting their unwavering hope and determination in the face of adversity. It is a tribute to the enduring spirit of Black families and the powerful legacy of Black women who continue to dream and strive for a better world.
Black women have dreams. We always have, just like everybody else.
The Reconstruction Era after the Civil War was a time when a people once enslaved began charting out the meaning of freedom. This could be the chance for our joy to rise, our families to prosper, our love to flourish unabated—my ancestors hoped. I like to think that just like many of us in the here and now, they looked up to the sky, said their wishes out loud, and prayed for a divine presence to hear them.
But, in the shadows of America’s great plan for reconstruction, violence loomed. Across the southern states, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889-1929—white mobs scoured the land brutally mutilating and killing Black people at such a high rate, that most Black people had either witnessed a lynching personally or knew someone who had.
Amidst the racial terror that structured everyday Black life, in 1914 Early Ida Marie Coffee Wilderness Avery was born in Marston, Missouri, a rural town of only 258 people, in a former slave state and Civil War battleground. She lived her whole life within a 5-mile radius of where she was born.
Only two generations from slavery, Early worked the land tirelessly, growing crops on a parcel owned by a wealthy white landlord—just like her family always had. This time she endured a reinvention of chattel slavery as a poor Black sharecropper. Sharecropping was a labor arrangement where white landowners, furious at the thought of paying Black workers who they had once owned as slaves, developed a system akin to slavery where Black people were taken on as “tenants.” Also called tenant farmers, Black sharecroppers had to lease growing materials and pay rent with interest in the form of a share of their crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice.
Unpredictable harvests, high interest rates, laws preventing the sale of crops to anyone but the white landlord, and the threat of white mob violence and the Ku Klux Klan forced sharecroppers to continue working the land against their will and kept them at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy. Under these conditions, Early still held onto her hopes and dreams, believing she could one day provide a future for her children.
There is a photo of Early holding one of her children that’s kept at the Library of Congress. If you were to look at it, given you never knew her you would only see a young Black woman, looking sternly at the camera, while holding her baby. When I see this photo, however, I see my grandma, holding my Aunt Nora. I see their belongings, and those of my grandma’s first husband, scattered along the side of a highway as a result of them being evicted with roughly 1500 other sharecroppers. Not too many years later, grandma Early would face more adversity as she became a widow and struggled to provide for her children.
My mother’s family found this photograph of grandma and Aunt Nora, which the Library of Congress labeled “Evicted sharecropper,” but when I see the image, “I see my family, our hopes and dreams, and a world that has forced us to be resilient,” as I describe in my book’s prologue. Fast forward to the present moment, and Black women with children continue to be evicted more than any other group in the United States—representing over 28% of those evicted in 2023.
This photograph of my grandma was taken in 1939 when she was a part of a major protest staged by evicted sharecroppers and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, who lined up along Highway 60 in New Madrid County, Missouri, otherwise known as the “Bootheel.”
Their hopes, dreams, and memories lay strewn across the road for all to see.
Highway patrolmen threatened the protestors with violence while local police forcibly relocated several hundred people to nearby swamplands.
In addition to the exploitation and humiliation of sharecropping, there were at least 85 documented lynchings in Missouri from 1889-1942, and this number is likely to be an under-representation of the true number of people who were murdered in this ritualistic fashion.
Most of the time my grandma, Early, was rumored to be armed with a handgun in her purse and a shotgun at home, given what she survived and the propensity for white supremacist violence in the region that threatened her family’s survival.
She eventually met my grandpa, remarried, and had more children—twelve living children in total—with my mother being the youngest.
Protecting our family and her legacy was grandma Early’s utmost concern. Born in the 1950s, my mother and father grew up like grandma, in the small rural towns of the Missouri Bootheel, an area of my home state I frequently visited as a child.
As I write in Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons:
“Driving down to grandma’s house, Dad would point out the swamplands where rice was grown, the fields where he picked cotton as a small child after school, the iconic Hayti Negro School where my Dad received a segregated education even after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling to end segregation, and the tiny house in the ‘projects’ where my grandma raised my Mom and eleven other children.”
“Strong and unstoppable, grandma taught me that in this family we speak the truth.”
And at the turn of the 1970s, when my mother and her siblings were among the first wave of Black kids to integrate the local white high school, my mother also taught us that if a white girl bumps into you and tells you to “get your Black hands off her,” you respond by stuffing her in a locker. As kids this story terrified us but as we grew older, we better understood its seriousness and the true adversity our mother had to face as a young Black girl.
When my mom first told me of this incident, I asked her “well weren’t you scared of the white people at the school or in the town” and she replied, “no because my mama wasn’t scared of em’.”
My grandma and grandpa had a dream that my mother and her siblings could escape this life and be the first in our family to attend college, far away from the threat of violence, but close enough to drive home to the Bootheel.
My grandparents would travel north to the center of Missouri and send my mother to Lincoln University, a Historically Black University, founded a year after the Civil War ended.
My mom and her siblings looked out for each other, just like grandma taught them to.
In the 1970s, over 700,000 Black students were enrolled in college. My grandparents were among a wave of other Black parents who would celebrate the dream of sending their children to college in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.
Just like my grandma and mother, I have dreams for my children too. I grew up in Missouri, but now I am raising my family in Los Angeles. And whenever my kids ask me to tell them about our family down South, I tell them we come from a long line of ancestors who cherish this life and honor those who have come before us.
When they are old enough, I will tell my kids more stories of my grandpa Sam Avery’s family too, my great grandmother Katie McMichael Avery, and our family farm that we have somehow kept even to this day in rural Mississippi, land where our family was once held captive as slaves—by our white, land-owning relatives, the McMichaels.
Land we inherited after one of my ancestors was brutally raped by her own white half-brother, and as a penance drenched in guilt, her white father eventually freed his Black children, their mother, and gave them land. This land was the farm my grandpa Sam grew up on before he made his way to Missouri where he’d meet my grandma and become her second husband. Our farm in Mississippi is a place where that side of my family now has reunions, and we pay respects to our ancestors who are laid to rest in the family cemetery. This was a story all of us learned as soon as we were old enough to understand the farm’s history and place within our family.
This photograph of my grandpa’s mother Katie holding her children on our farm, warms my heart because I see her likeness in my mother and now that I am older, I see the resemblance in myself. My children too, look so much like her.
I want my kids to know we are a strong people who deserve the right to thrive, not just survive.
I want them to grow up in a world where they can visit their local library and find books illustrated with pictures of people who look like their family. African American people who have a shared legacy in our diaspora. I want them to know our history—the highs, the lows, and their great grandmother Early’s and great great grandmother Katie’s visions for a better world.
I want them to be able to see the words I’ve written here and in my book, and know they are coming from a place of care, a belief in radical hope, and an homage to generations of Black women truth-tellers.
The truth lasts forever. Even as the lies of this world—racism, patriarchy, and exploitation—seek to hold us down.
I write for all of us. To show that despite our past, we can overcome. I can have a dream, like my mother had a dream, and my grandmother, and great grandmother before us.
Because Black people—Black women—have dreams.
Brittany Friedman is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California.
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