31 Days of Herstory: Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry was born in 1930 to Carl Augustus Hansberry, a real-estate broker, and Nannie Louise a school teacher. Both of her parents were active members of Chicago’s black communitity contributing large sums of money to the NAACP and the Urban League. Their household was visited by key-movers and shakers such as Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, and Jesse Owens.

In 1938, the family moved to a white neighbourhood with a restrictive covenant, refusing to move, despite violent attacks, until told to do so by a court. Their case made it to the Supreme Court as Hansberry v. Lee, ruling restrictive covenants illegal.

Following her parent’s lead, Lorraine was politically active from a young age beginning during her studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. in 1950 she left Madison the peruse her career as a writer in New York, attending The New School. A year later Lorraine moved to Harlem and became involved in activist struggles such as the fight against evictions.

The same year Lorraine joined the staff of Freedom, a black newspaper edited by Louis E. Burnham and published by Paul Robeson where she worked alongside W.E.B Du Bois. The topics she highlighted were both national and international covering issued such as the trail of Willie McGee and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.

In 1953, Lorraine married Jewish songwriter Robert Nemiroff. The two divorced in 1964 but continued to work together.

Lorraine’s play, A Raisin in the Sun became the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway when it opened in 1959. Directed by Lloyd Richards, the cast featured Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. At at 29, she became the youngest American playwright and only the fifth woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.

In 1963, Hansberry participated in a meeting with attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, set up by her friend James Baldwin.

Lorraine’s play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened in in 1964. After living with pancreatic cancer for two year, Lorraine died in 1965 at age 34.

Following her death, her ex-husband completed the play Les Blancs, and adapted many of her writings into the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black. It later appeared in book form the following year under the title To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words.

31 Days of Herstory: May Ayim

May Ayim was a poet, activist, scholar and one of the founders of the Afro-German movement.

May Ayim was born in 1960 in Berlin. May’s father, a Ghanain medical student want ether to be adopted by his sister, but was forbidden to do so by German law and he was not married to her mother. May was ultimately adopted by the Optiz family, who were violent toward her – something she explored through her poetry.

She attended the University of Regensburg, and her thesis Afro-Germans: Their Cultural and Social History on the Background of Social Change, was the first piect of scholarly work on Afro-German history. It later formed the basis of Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, a collection exploring the experiences of mixed raced women in Germany, edited by May (then May Optiz), Katharina Oguntoye and Dagmar Schultz.

May also founded the , a club which aims to represent the interests of black people in Germany, oppose racism and promote black consciousness.

During her studies, May travelled to Ghana and meet her paternal family before returning to Germany and training as a speech therapist. She went on to teach at the Free University of Berlin. She was active as an educator and writer, taking part in many conferences and publishing Blues in Black and White: a collection of essays, poetry and conversations.

May soften expoled the racism she experienced through her poetry and academic work. Blues in black and White features the poem afro-deutsh I (afro-german I), which mocked her everyday experiences of racism.

You’re Afro-German?
… oh, I see: African and German.
An interesting mixture, huh?
You know: there are people that still think
Mulattos won’t get
as far in life
as whites
I don’t believe that.
I mean: given the same type of education…
You‘re pretty lucky you grew up here.
With German parents even. Think of that!
D’you want to go back some day, hm?
What? You’ve never been in your Dad’s home
country?
That’s so sad… Listen, if you ask me:
A person’s origin, see, really leaves quite a
Mark
Take me, I’m from Westphalia,
and I feel
that’s where I belong…
Oh boy! All the misery there is in the world!
Be glad
You didn’t stay in the bush.
You wouldn’t be where you are today!
I mean, you’re really an intelligent girl, you
know.
If you work hard at your studies,
you can help your people in Africa, see:
That’s
What you’re predestined to do,
I’m sure they’ll listen to you,
while people Iike us –
there’s such a difference in cultural levels…
What do you mean, do something here? What
On earth would you want to do here?
Okay, okay, so it’s not all sunshine and roses.
But I think everybody should put their own
house in order first!

In 1996, she suffered a mental and physical collapse ands admitted to the psychiatric ward of the Auguste Viktoria Hospital in Berlin. During her admission, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. After a suicide attempt, May was readmitted to the hospital. Shortly after being discharged, she jumped from the 13th floor of a high-rise building.

Following her death, her friend, Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote the poem ‘Reggae fi May Ayim’ in her memory.

It woz in di dazzlin atmosfare
A di black radical bookfair
Dat mi site yu
Sweet sistah
Brite-eyed like hope
Like a young antelope
Who couda cope

Wid di daily deflowahin a di spirit
Wit di evryday erowshan a di soul

Listen to Linton reading the poem in full via the British Library Sound Archives.

31 Days of Herstory: Queen Nanny of the Maroons

The details of the life of this huge figure are not conclusive, with much of our presently held information drawn from oral testimony. She appears only four times in historical texts, one of which being a land patent offering five hundred acres of land to Nanny and the people residing with her.

Nanny was born into the Ashanti tribe in Ghana and was brought to Jamaica as a slave. Heavily influenced by Maroons as a child, Nanny was a Maroon leader in the 18th Century. For over 30 year, Nanny freed over 800 slaves, integrating them intuit eh Maroon community.

Nanny and her brother settled in an area of the Blue Mountains which became known as Nanny Town. Nanny Town became a Maroon stronghold with guards at strategic look-out points.

Her ability to plan strategic warfare was central to the Maroon’s ability to defend Nanny Town against British attacks between 1728 and 1734. Nanny Town was eventually captured.

In 1739, Quaco (one of Nanny’s comrades) signed a treaty with the British, with promised the Maroon’s 2500 acres of land across two locations. Some have stated that Nanny was displeased with the principle of peace with the British as the treaty in question stated that the Maroons would not help runaway slaves, but help capture them.

When and how Nanny died is debated, some argue that she died in 1733 whereas others say she lived to be an old woman.

Nanny’s remains are buried at “Bump Grave” in Moore Town, one of the communities established by the Windward Maroons in Portland Parish.

31 Days of Herstory: Claudia Jones

Claudia Jones was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in1915. At age eight, Claudia and her family moved to Harlem, New York. As a result of their impoverish living conditions, Claudia caught tuberculosis and suffers from respiratory problems for the rest of her life.

After her mother’s death, stemming from poor working conditions, Claudia became committed to improving the working conditions of working class people. She became an active member of the American Communist Party and in the late 1940s, she became the ‘Negro Affairs’ for the party’s paper, The Daily Worker. In 1940, she wrote her most well-known piece, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” for the magazine Political Affairs. In the article she wrote:

The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced….

As mother, as Negro, and as worker, the Negro woman fights against the wiping out of the Negro family, against the Jim Crow ghetto existence which destroys the health, morale, and very life of millions of her sisters, brothers, and children.

Viewed in this light, it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie has intensified its oppression, not only of the Negro people in general, but of Negro women in particular. Nothing so exposes the drive to fascization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie displays and cultivates toward Negro women.

Claudia was an elected member of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), often speaking at events. As a result of these activities, she was arrested and deported, eventually ending up in the UK.

Upon arriving in Britain, she became heavily involved in the early movement for equal rights, campaigning against racism in housing, education and employment.

In 1958, Jones became the founder and editor of the first black British weekly newspaper, The West Indian Gazette. An anti-imperialist and anti-racist publication, Claudia wrote for an edited the paper until her death.

With the West-Indian Gazette folding six moths after Claudia’s death in 1964, her greatest lasting legacy is the Notting Hill Carnival. The event was launched in response to the 1958 race riots, where racist mobs attacked blacks residents. Differing from carnival as we now imagine int, the first carnival was held in January 1959 in St Pancras Town Hall.

Claudia died of a heart attack aged 49. She is buried next to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery.

31 Days of Herstory: Lillian Masediba Ngoyi

Lilian Masediba Ngoyi was an anti-apartheid activist and President of the African National Congress (ANC) Women’s League.

A committed and dedicated activist, her work was recognised early. During her time working as a machinist, Lilian joined the Garment Worker’s Union (GWU), soon becoming one of it’s leading figures. In 1952, she joined the ANC Women’s League and after one year, she was elected as it’s president. When the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) was formed in 1954, she became one of its national vice-presidents, and in 1956 she was elected president.

1955 saw Lilian travelling to Swizerland for the World Congress of Mothers held by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and was invited to tour Russian and other eastern bloc countries. She became a member of the Transvaal ANC committee in 1955 and in 1956 she was the first woman to be elected to the ANC national executive committee.

With Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, Bertha Gxowa and Albertina Sisulu, Lilian led a march on 20,000 women in Pretoria and protest against the government’s requirement for women to carry passbooks and part of the pass laws, one of the largest demonstrations on South African history.

In 1956, as a result of her anti-apartheid activism, she was arrested and charged with high treason along with 155 others at the and was subjected to a number of bannings and house arrests.

Lilian Lilian Ngoyi died at age 69 in 1980.