Write Her Name: Re-Calling the Disappeared, Erased, and Unknown

The path of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2016 reveals that we collectively still participate in the forces of erasure and amnesia that have muted and continue to mute the presence of women as historical actors. This process of erasure is being fought by the #SayHerName movement. The dynamics of the double jeopardy faced by black women is illuminated by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia, when she gives public lectures. She asks everyone to stand up until they hear an unfamiliar name. She then reads the names of unarmed black men and boys whose deaths ignited the Black Lives Matter movement; names such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin. Her audience are informed and interested in civil rights so “virtually no one will sit down”, Crenshaw says approvingly. “Then I say the names of Natasha McKenna, Tanisha Anderson, Michelle Cusseaux, Aura Rosser, Maya Hall. By the time I get to the third name, almost everyone has sat down. By the fifth, the only people standing are those working on our campaign.” (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/30/sayhername-why-kimberle-crenshaw- is-fighting-for-forgotten-women ) My paper will describe my efforts to uncover/recover/recall the lives of African American women in my two current projects: a television series about African Americans in 18th- and 19th-century New England and a public history network, “Reclaiming Our Ancestors,” in which descendants of 18th- and 19th-century African American antislavery writers and activists are working to reclaim their family histories and bring them to the present. The obstacles we face researching and rewriting the stories of men like Dred Scott and Solomon Northup are formidable, but the obstacles---the gaps, silences, erasures in the archives---that we face in trying to discover the stories of women like Harriet Scott and Anne Hampton Northup are sometimes insurmountable. I will discuss the problems of archival research and potential ways to surmount them, a task that is crucial to anyone concerned about writing women’s lives back into history.