Well, good afternoon everyone.
It's good to be with you. My name is India, as Doctor
Robertson so eloquently introduced me earlier. Thank you
for that, Jane.
I was a bit of a dork and I forgot to acknowledge Shirk, so
I'm going to do that now. I'm going to publicly acknowledge
that this paper is supported in part by funding from the social
sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada, and I will not
repeat that in French.
Umm.
So today I might here's here's our presentation. How should we
ever learn to walk along the witness of a life?
OK, I'm going to start with a quote and it's going to show up
behind me as soon as we get some. And so Eliza Subs writes
in her book Shadow and Sunshine. The Lord is so good to me, he
often comes to my heart.
With such refreshing peace he melts my heart so that it is
easy to pray. I say, oh Lord, just help me to pray and prevail
for thee. This world is full of suffering humanity. There are
many in distress, running after the world seeking peace and
finding that the Lord helps me to pray. For such cannot help
longing to be in the active work of the Lord, helping to rescue 4
Lost Souls and those who are blinded in sin. But perhaps.
God can get more glory out of me as an invalid than he could if I
were well. He can help me pray for those who are strong and
able to work in his vineyard. I know that there is nothing
accomplished for God without earnest prayer, so I'm content
to fill my little corner and be what God wants me to be. I say
from my heart thy will be done in Earth as it is in heaven.
Should.
OK, so I'm just going to start off by providing a brief
overview over the black women intellectual traditions and
activism that I move into, who Eliza Suggs was and why I think
she's a disruptive force. And then we'll move into an
invitation to collective witness from her work before finally
concluding with some learnings from her life.
So I just want to say that there are very few.
Stories of free Methodist African American women. We heard
about 1:00 today. I'm a ray and Eliza Suggs is the other one. I
don't actually know if there are any more. Feel free to correct
me if I'm. If I've missed someone, I'd love to hear their
stories.
And I'm going to say that sucks actually stands in the broader
tradition of black women intellectual history and
tradition and black women activism. Her work speaks of as
much as speaks to her time. It's an ongoing theological practice
and reflection, with ideas produced in dialogue with her
lived experience and then reflected by social facts of
race, class, and gender.
So.
Black women intellectual traditions in North America span
almost 4 centuries, having been transmitted orally as well as
via text and along with their everyday activities. These range
from SA political tracts, journals, newspapers and then
also intimate settings like impellers and in highly public
podiums.
What's interesting about these traditions is that they really
connect.
Front to the binaries of understanding that intellectual
labor is divorced from the everyday setting and the oral
expressions of ideas are often mixed with the material demands
of their communities.
So given so I.
Get a couple of these women here who stand in the black women
intellectual traditions. So we've brought Phillis Wheatley
and Maria Stewart Sojourner Truth, Ida be wells, and there's
just so many more. So given recent scholarships. Explanation
of the centrality of black women to the construction of freedom,
democracy and citizenship through the intersectionality of
their activism and thoughts. The ongoing work of recovery and
recognition remains important, particularly because this
tradition has a knack for reviewing.
The artificiality of the many analytic categories.
So they just kind of knock down the binaries and say who are we
as embodied people?
Their contribution to history, then, is not understood as
passive observers or mere witnesses to history. Rather, we
have to understand them as people who acted with agency,
advocating for change and reform to great effect and art in their
own rights, credible thinkers and producers of ideas.
I want to differentiate the Black woman's intellectual
traditions from the men's.
So if you would bear with me. And they there were different
not because they weren't both challenging racial uplift, but
because they were separated or limited by gender private public
dichotomy rooted in patriarchal paradigms. Of course, like this
gender dichotomy often led black women to seek out support from
white women LED organizations, but unfortunately female anti
slavery societies, suffrage organizations, and temperance
clubs frequently excluded black members.
Um, so.
The rights and reforms that white feminists thought only
Anglo-Saxon women in mind.
So going back to the black woman and and black men in terms of
how they dealt with rhetoric of racial uplift, black men were
often grossed in debates over the relative merits of the races
of man, full quote and targeted by antebellum racial science and
accounts of inferiority stemming from a reading of Scripture that
condemned African Americans as sons of Ham, as well as
polygenetic challenges to scripture that questioned
whether race descended from Adam.
Whereas black women in the antebellum era found themselves
confronted with the idea of true womanhood that was basically
wrapped up in the domesticity. So for a black woman then just
step out to public while not even fully recognized as human
was actually.
An experience that was often marred with public
disapprobation prospects, they found all the more painful
because there were men played, was already so contested.
Now, women's activities, in contrast to men, also tended to
be rooted in the church. I think that's true all time, space,
maybe from the colonial era. For present, most members of Black
American congregations have been limited, and so they were
primarily responsible for creating new ties and meetings
of kinship, and often served as the conduits of knowledge and
authority from Africa upon landing in the so-called New
World. Their spiritual labor rights scholar John Sandbach
represented a form of.
Embodied knowledge that, in its intertwining with political and
the prophetic, helped enslaved people convert movement
dispossession and lost into reimagining of captive spaces as
new religious communities.
So towards the end of the gilded Ages, Gilded Age sorry, we began
speaking out against racial prejudice, particularly with a
new kind of quotes, racist invective that singled them out
as the primary cause of racial inferiority, UN quote. This was
due in part to the rise of social Darwinism, with black
women specifically claimed she feared to black men and that
black women were actually responsible for corrupting the
entire race, while black women have never truly fits into the
ideology of this so-called.
Your womanhood. They increasingly abandoned that cult
of Filistin city for in favor of racial self-defense. The other
reason for speaking out against racial prejudice? Land affect
the middle class. Black women increasingly witnessed that a
fellow black Americans moved from enslavement to a new former
socioeconomic and political ******* and formally enslaved
people compromised by their struggle to address pressing
social, economic and political inequalities.
Uh, which were derived from proper or popular pro slavery
arguments we weaponized for the post Reconstruction Era. These
arguments were buffered by the appropriation of social
Darwinism.
And it really did inspire particularly African American
men to prove that by by metrics of.
Independence and so on and so forth. They were more than
capable of full citizenship. So, for instance, because we're
talking about Eliza Sex today, I'm going to talk a little bit
about disability. So disability, for instance, was recruited,
quote, as a medicalized biopolitical sign, the legal
childlike dependence status of African Americans, and quote the
public figure of sick disabled black Americans.
Quote operated simultaneously as material evidence for exclusion
and a symbol of their place in society.
Racist politicians endeavored to prove that disability occurred
at a higher rate post emancipation than in slavery.
This inspired particularly a few black American men to try to
prove that they didn't need to fulfill the criteria for
citizenship, which are self-sufficiency, competence,
productivity, rationality, and respectability. So in this way,
the myth of the self-made man also made its way into rhetoric
of racial uplift in the work of figures like Booker T
Washington.
And which end up tying worth with ability, self-sufficiency,
and radical individualism. In contrast, black women so argues
Hazel Carby in her critique of WEB Dubois. Gendered ideology
and the soul of black folk were reduced by their male
counterparts to silent domestic objects hidden from the public.
In some instances, woman's virtues was closely linked to
sedimental rhetoric of virtue. So while black men quote fashion
public narratives that veil disability to some extent women.
Even while addressing medical disparities in the community,
black women were often the primary agents of black public
health and network and outreach and, quote, seeing their
involvement as an extension of their maternal.
Responsibilities for the physical and moral health of
their families. So in some by the gilded and progressive eras,
black men and women continue to advocate for racial uplift there
despite their discourses and their activism varied.
So here we go, our protagonist for today. So I'm going to argue
that she was this disruptive force in this cultural moment
just given.
Who she was, as well as her fiery activism, she didn't fit
all of the mold for self-sufficiency or the supposed
domestic virtues of the day, such as only ever at most 33
inches tall. Let's see your photo behind me.
Because of an extreme case of childhood rickets and she
couldn't walk and instead relied on a makeshift baby carriage and
eventually a wheelchair donated by close family friends.
She was often mistaken for her baby. I'm going to leave that
quote for you to go search in her book when you go read it.
Um, but it was very demeaning and diminishing for her.
So according to the logic of the cultural miliar, Suggs
exemplified inferiority to be discarded another but beneath
the bluster of public rhetoric, Subs, along with other black
women, partly played a vital part in public health work and
outreach, as evidenced by her involvement in the temperance
movement. Such was also an advocate supporter of world
missions and was said to have been politically on the subject
as well as other reform issues.
Everyone.
And some she demonstrated that she had agency with full
participant in her community. I'll show you why. It was not
merely an object of pity or a recipient of charity. So our
book Shadow and sunshine combined the literary forms of
biography and autobiography, and she was most likely the first
African American woman in Nebraska to publish a book.
While her work is elements of the traditional Wesleyan
conversion narrative, it wasn't simply concerned with the
individual, but instead of folds. It's sort of a family
album, the 1st 2/3 of our work.
The Council stories of her father and mother slave
narratives and then turns to sex on story in context of her
family. The book ends with some of the sexiest poetry that are
fused the scriptural references and are marked by their
temperance stories themes as well as anecdotes regarding the
cruelty and hardships of slavery. These latter stories
were told to suggest by her mother and Subs were printed
them as a testament to the horrors of slavery inflicted,
perhaps to remind the reader that such story is not separate
from that for those she herself was Born Free.
So turning to the book itself.
The emphasis is really curious here. It's actually on
collective identity that's deeply rooted in her life and
her family and church, woman's clubs in her community. And it's
especially striking this emphasis on collective by dandy
alongside her refusal to quote play on her audiences,
metaphoric linking of disability of ******* and quote refuted the
narratives of able bodied healthy self-sufficiency and the
idea is that the self-made percent. Further, this
collective emphasis both arose from our faith and motivated her
activism, which I'm going to call her witness.
So both our parents were born slaves. Her father was an
ordained minister, among the earliest in the Free Methodist
movement. She was credited with founding the Free Methodist
Churches, and he was credited with founding Methodist churches
in Kansas. He often took his family to camp meetings, first
in Kansas and then later moved his entire family to Nebraska so
that his daughters could go to seminary, which I find really
encouraging. Her mother separated from her husband when
he went off to fight for the union and died suffering at the
hand of her mistress in the face she gained her conversion
moments sustained her.
Through the trials.
So tomorrow you notes that her mother's faith bore witness to
Lord to her children. Such book also carries the preparatory
testimonials with two pastors who attest to the authenticity
of retail. Such ministry included secretarial work for
missions organizations assisting with the ritualistic work,
presiding over public meetings and, of course, writing.
The book itself is believed to have been sold through church
subscription and it wasn't worked, really contemplated,
done without the empowerment support of our community.
Now her activism, I believe, is out of a desire to invite others
to a wholehearted pursuit of holiness and to God. It out of
this desire included a critique of the White Church and
apologetic for the Black Church. Her book liberally approached
you, wasn't Wesley and language of holiness and entire
sanctification in order to bring to light the most pressing
issues of the black community of the day, abolition, temperance,
and abject poverty. Using language familiar to the White
Church, Suggs calls the church at large to pay attention, to
attend.
To work towards amending for the sufferings of the black
community. This is likely because the sexes were the only
black members of their foundation, it said in a
newspaper article that I found her father had enjoyed respect
from the white majority in Orleans NE.
So in a section incidents of slavery Sherman to reader, that
those have been enslaved were human beings even before the
Emancipation Project Proclamation, albeit under
******* and supply all human rights. She does however note
Riley at the close of her opening paragraph that at quote
one stroke of the Emancipation Park Proclamation, these
millions of lowly creatures were now human beings of reality as
well as name. This paragraph being the opening is notable.
Such then proceeds through account from other slave stories
given to her.
Following these accounts is the real depiction of the
consequences of slavery playing out in the community.
Generational trauma as exemplified and alcoholism,
broken families and poverty. However, such rights of our
people and they're suffering that quote many of them were God
fearing that took every advantage of every chance they
had to meet together to serve the Lord, even meeting in secret
to worship and proclaim faith and hope for deliverance.
This story, though, is juxtaposed by the presentation
of white people who did not always attend church or ejected
slaves from church services. If quote, white people came in
sufficient numbers to fill the church by framing her mother's
stories and reminding her readers of black humanity. The
horrors eliminate at worst white atrocity and evil and enslaving
their brothers and sisters. And that best white apathy to
worshipping God. And contrary to our first remarks that the
Emancipation Proclamation freedom for.
Slavery is privately thought arriving and showing his
powerful, which allows it quotes desire to give God all the
glory. And doing so, such proclaims, the certainty that
God has rescued his people from slavery will continue to save
his people both spiritually and physically, and that her
people's identity, salvation and future arises from God himself.
The way her book is trained also recalls the reader to African
American discourse. I'm going to skip this paragraph because I
noticed I think I'm running out of time. You can ask me about
that paragraph later.
But what I want to talk about here is that she expands this
frame of the African-American discourse to include those with
disabilities as fundamental to kinfolk and to identity.
So in his introduction, the Reverend CM Damon recounts the
story of such testifying, shouting, and testifying, often
serving historically as the way in which black women could
express their feelings and pain without within the larger
patriarchal and white supremacist culture, such
testifying is shaped as a collaborative praise song,
incorporating both Eliza and her sister Katie's advocacy of her
so quote. When Eliza, hidden in church behind the seats in
front, would testify, she rises with her in arms and she speaks
clearly and forcibly.
Notice the ambiguous she who is speaking Eliza Arkadie.
Eliza probably.
Well, certainly this scene displays history. Affection were
pertinent is how substory overcast the web of
interdependent relationships and networks as essential to the
created and fulfilled individuals. She is who she is
because of her participation. Community and our communities
welcome of her participation. In other words, the worth of an
individual lies not in preformed traits of ability, independence,
or self-sufficiency, but rather as grounded in relationship and
interdependence. Further, she insists on the inclusion of the
disabled and the race.
As well as quote the usefulness of those pathologic pathologized
bodies to the civic community, and quote sucks insists
consistently that she is not helpless in her activism or her
work in the context within the black woman's discourse of
racial uplift. While she does acknowledge that her readers may
question whether she has a diminished quality of life,
sucks rarely mentions any obstacles or inconveniences.
Instead, she chooses to give thanks to God and to mention
what she can do. Work, earn a living doing needlework which
supports family or activism, work which provides liberation
to others.
As scholar Stephen Nadler also suggests that this latter work,
particularly her missions work, performs a double move quote
overturning stereotypes of the disabled as two dysfunctional to
work and as a sign of racial regression, and 2nd invoking a
broader appeal to human rights that reaches beyond the nation
bound struggle for civil rights. Such an appeal to international
human rights of freedom and equality function does familiar
parts of an earlier black abolitionist discourse, the
black woman activist at the end of the century recovered to
imagine their duties.
Is going to transnational framework.
Finally, Subs refuses to bend to the African American disability
narratives for time like those are circus prodigies, she
writes.
There have been people who said to my mother, why don't you take
her to the shower museum? Others would say there's Fortune night
girl. But dear reader, God did not create me for this purpose.
He created me for his glory. And if I could be of help to anyone,
and if I can get the glory to his name out of my life, Amen.
So rather than consenting to being objectified or fetishized,
such insists that she is worth in her community and thus
renounces this particular type of personal agency and its
monetary profits.
I've seen her mother understands that to consent to such
objectification would undermine everything that she stood for.
Racial uplift, responsibility to her community, compassion for
those and beyond American borders, and their own self
worth and understanding for purposes bestowed by God. Such
demonstrates her identity is tied up in her family, church
and community as much as they are with her. Ultimately, this
web of interdependence leads that testimony, the
collaborative praise on I just mentioned.
But her life we see the work of a family, church, and community,
and action that actively disentangles from the pervasive
norms of the day, that excluded, demeaned, and debased those seen
as lesser. Instead, they actively embraced the gifts that
Suggs had and allowed her to lead them to a greater witness
of what God had for the community as a whole, which is a
gospel of uplift, inclusion, salvation, and liberation.
On my my over. You've got about 3 minutes, OK?
Conclude with.
2 paragraphs.
So both sucks. Work in her life redefines what it means to be
competent, economically sufficient and mobile. It is
pure fantasy. She suggests understand permanent, able buyer
independence as the criteria for worth, value and personhood.
This is most poignantly illustrated at the end of her
sketch of her father and her limitation of his passing Subs
rights. But none knew his worth so well as his own family. He
was a strong staff upon which mother and all of us had
learned. How should we ever learn to walk?
Alone, she speaks metaphorically, given that she
spends most of her life in a wheelchair. But notice it, this
quote isn't actually in first person singular, but in first
person plural.
The Senate the myth of Independence and
self-sufficiency sex suggests that no one ever really wants
alone is only those with disability. It is not only those
with disabilities who need others. For all the flourishes
embodied by her in her community, Mutual Mutual
interdependence is essential to the individual and their
efficiency, whether they are able bodied. Moreover, it isn't
father's facing God that continues to sustain her family
and her and her and their continued work.
So her legacy might very well be that she challenged notions of
what it is good society entails, what a good church entails. She
expanded the witness of the African American discourse and
defied the prevailing ideas and worth and personhood in the face
of violent ideologies, discrimination, inequality, and
the spirit of the age. But in so doing, Subs also reminds us that
it was done together alongside her family, her church, and her
community.
Taking the already established norms of her community, she
expands Kinbote. Those who belong to include those excluded
on the basis of the ability and challenges what responsibility
to our Community looks like. Our life invites us to consider the
diversity of ways in which everyone contributes to the
Community and that each individual's worth is not based
in utilitarian value.
Finally, should prompt us to remember that God is following.
God is not accomplished by self-sufficient or independent
needs, but a mutual interdependence and obligation
that recognizes the image of God and one another, which
ultimately works all in her words for the glory of God.
Thank you, happy to hear.