LEGL 4500/6500 - Employment Law

Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander, Esq.

Terry College of Business

I wonder what Zora would say now.

Writing in the 1930s about the plight of Black women, Harlem Renissance novelist Zora Neale Hurston described her sisters as the mules of the world, destined to "tote" the weight of racism and sexism on their shoulders. But what if she know Oprah Winfrey, or Toni Morrison, or Maxine Waters - or Whoopi Goldberg, for goodness’ sake, a woman of independence and irreverence after Hurston’s own heart? Maybe today she would write of soaring eagles, their wings spread wide and wildly free against wind and sky.

It’s been 60 years since Hurston published her famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and in that time Black women have traveled from Southern fields and White women’s kitchens to the moon and beyond. We are CEOs and college presidents, lawyers and labor leaders, artists and activists, opera divas and doctors. Pick almost any category and a Black woman is there somewhere stretching the boundaries

Whether it’s economics or aesthetics, individual Black women are freer today than ever before. We have come this far by sheer will, in defiance of a world that would render us invisible. We have loved in a space where love was not meant to be. We have measured our lives in the sacrifices of our children and our men, and when we could no longer ignore our own needs, we have stood in defense of ourselves. We have led revolutions - quiet and otherwise - and done it with style and grace. Even our hair is an expression of who we are: braids or locks, finger waves or weaves, perms or Afro puffs. We are finding ways to define ourselves, and in the process redefine America.

"I see a lot of women exercising a lot of different choices and feeling good," says Los Angeles-based author Bebe Moore Campbell. "Your ‘fro can be blond. You are soaking your braids and soaking your dreads. In the same way, I think artistically we are expanding…. We are feeling a little freer culturally."

That cultural freedom has been combined with an economic freedom that most Black women have never enjoyed before. In some job categories, Black women have nearly closed the income gap between themselves and White women - quite an accomplishment considering that income disparities between Black and Whites in general remain a reality. It is especially significant considering that as late as 1960, one-third of employed Black women were domestics. Judy Ferguson Shaw, a mother, wife, educator and member of the city council of Berkeley, Mo., a St. Louis suburb, sums it up succinctly when she says, "For women with the esteem and tenacity who know it’s going to be hard work, it seems there is no where they can’t go. But no one is going to give it to us. You just have to take it."

Since we arrived on America’s shores, Black women have taken one leap after another. But in the ‘90s, the number of "first" has risen at a rapid rate. Ann Fudge heads Maxwell House Coffee Co. Oprah Winfrey, with stratospheric earnings and assets, is poised to become the first African-American billionaire. Ruth Simmons is the first Black president of the elite Smith College. Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize in literature is a first for us, as is Carol Moseley-Braun’s U.S. Senate seat.

But our problem remains as great as our progress.

It is told in the stories of women such as Angela Fisher, 33, of Chicago, a mother and recovering drug addicts living with HIV. Black women have the highest rate of HIV infection among women in the United States.

Or women such as the 19-year-old with a 2-year-old son who is struggling to find day care or she can finish high school. In her short life, she has been raped, had an abortion and even tried to commit suicide. Her mother is an addict. I know them well. They are members of my family.

Such stories are part of the other truth about Black women today: Too many of our grandmothers, mothers, daughters, sisters, nieces, aunts, and cousins are struggling in communities napalmed by drugs and wracked by despair and economic deprivation. In many cases, children suffer beside them.

Almost half of all the Black households are headed by women. Nearly half of these single Black mothers and their children - 46.1 percent - struggle under the federal poverty line on less than $16,029 for a family of four. But only a quarter of single White mothers, 24.8 percent, are similarly impoverished.

Still, most Black women are not defined by utter despair or skyrocketing success. Most live somewhere in the middle, where we work hard to make a place for ourselves and our children - with or without their fathers.

No matter where we are though, for Black women in America the price of deaing with race, sex and class is high. As a group, Black women still are at the bottom of the economic ladder. According to current census figures, Black women’s median income is about $14,000 less than White men and $4,400 less than Black me, but just $1,500 less than White women.

"Pay equity remains a serious issue for women and children," notes Dorothy Height, of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). "There is no way to improve the life for the African-American family without improving the conditions for women. Women carry such a heavy load in our families. Many of those families are poor because the women work for women’s wages."

As the 21^st century looms, job prospects for Black women also are changing - for the better and the worse. Noting gains in education for Black women, Jewell Jackson McCabe, founder of the National Coalition of 100 black Women, believes we "are in a position to be competitive." But African-American women also make up a disproportionate number of clerical and low-skilled office jobs - positions greatly threatened by technological advances and downsizing.

But those realities are not immobilizers. In face, they haveinspired action. The Nation Council of Negro Women, founded in 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethune and led by Height, last year launched a three-year, $30 million "fund for the future" campaign was unveiled in October with the help of such high-profile women as Camille Cosby and Maya Angelou.

At 84, Height is the premier race woman and the grande dame of the Civil Rights Movement. Motivated by a political climate filled with attacks on affirmative action, voting rights and other civil rights gains, NCNW’s goal, she says, is to find ways to bridge gaps between poor and professional Black women and to improve life for all African-Americans.

"Now, as we come to the end of the 20^th century we are confronted with so many problems," she says. "It’s a time when we have problem and changes and opportunities." The council’s efforts will include a leadership institute for Black women, work on community and international issues, and encouragement of entrepreneurial efforts.

McCabe’s organization is involved in a campaign drive to recruit young women on college campuses. "If you offer young Black women the right role models, our legacy comes forward very fast," she says. The legacy includes fighting racism and sexism, inside and outside our own Black communities, McCabe notes.

At 26, Natasha Tarpley is the kind of young woman McCabe and Height are seeking. She has an undergraduate degree from Harvard, is in law school at Northwestern University in Chicago, and has a budding literary career. She already has published an anthology and next year will publish two books. But Tarpley’s appeal is not just that she has skills to offer the Black community, she also a sense of commitment and responsibility. Still, Tarpley says she is not unlike some other young, well-educated Black women today who are socially conscious but fell disconnected. "There are a lot of women who have their careers on track. ….Some are going to work for big law firms, but they aren’t clear about other issues.

"There is a searching, a looking for a way to connect. They want to know who to make connections with, how to find positive people and positive organizations. That’s true of me," says Tarpley, who recently worked on the settlement of a lawsuit about conditions in a Chicago public housing project. She doesn’t want to practice law, but if she has to, she will choose something such as real estate law to help defend Black communities against unscrupulous developers.

Says Height, "This is the best trained…generation that we have ever had. …So we have to make that connection and help them understand the importance of working with and through organizations."

Anne Hill knows about the efforts of grass-roots organizations. From her neighborhood, the single mother and community activist can see downtown Washington, D.C., where the NCNW’s headquarters are located. But she is worlds away from the place where highly trained and educated Black women map out strategies to rescue struggling inner-city neighborhoods like hers.

Hill, 45, was born in Greenville, Ala., and moved away at 15. She has lived much of that time in Shaw, a historic neighborhood in Northwest Washington. For about nine years, this single mother of 19-year-old daughter has been a leader in her neighborhood patrol, trying to stem the tide of drugs and crime that swept over middle- and working-class communities when crack cocaine use peaked in the 1980s. Life has quieted since those nights when gunfire seemed a constant backdrop and mothers were burying their children at a heartbreaking rate. But men still hang on the corners and the gunfire, death and drugs - heroin has made a comeback - are far from gone.

In the midst of it all, some families still thrive. "I have a neighbor who has four children. She’s is in school and she is doing very well, but that sort of thing takes dedication," Hill says. "We experience a lot of problems that the rest of the world has no idea about."

Whether it is the dramatic actions of individuals or the efforts of organizations, Black women always have been the center of social and political struggles in our communities.

These days we have become a large enough force in American politics to be reflected in national political battles, whether being vilified as welfare queens and economic scapegoats, garnering presidential appointments - or being fired from them.

Says Cynthia McKinney, the Democratic congresswoman from Georgia who surprised many last fall when she won reelection after her district was redrawn, "Women in general constitute the majority of voters. …So elections are won and lost based on the presence of the women’s bot and which way it goes."

For example, Bill Clinton got 89 percent of Black women’s votes last year, compared with 78 percent of the ballots cast for him by Black men. "Now we have to translate that into public policy success, and that’s where the road is more difficult," says McKinney. "The ability of women to exercise power in every aspect of their lives hinges on the ability of women to network and communicate with each other. …The most important avenue to power for women is other women. That’s key."

The challenge, says McCabe, is for African-American women to organize among themselves and harness and direct that political power. "I think the Democratic Party takes Black women totally for granted. I don’t think they have embraced a black feminist ideology. …Our feminism is much more aggressive [than White women’s] because of our length of being in the workplace."

If there has been anything that has particularly helped to devastate African-American women and children, it has been the drug epidemic. Angela Fisher lost custody of her children this way. The former cocaine and heroin addict grew up on Chicago’s West Side. Abused as a child, she turned to the streets, drugs and a boyfriend - who eventually became abusive - for comfort. She soon was addicted, engaging in prostitution, and in and out of jail. Her sister took care of her two youngest daughters as long as she could, before they went to child protection authorities, Fisher says. It took three years, but Fisher entered a rehabilitation program, kicked her addiction and was reunited with her children.

She did it with the help of a Cook County hospital program run by Mildred Williamson, an African-American woman who for eight years has worked with Black women and children living with HIV. Fisher is now a speaker for the program and soon will be moving with her children into Vision House, an HIV housing program established by Williamson with the help of a local Black church. "I think for all Black women, we are at the point where exercising power will also mean understanding the social and economic forces affecting our lives. Welfare reform, for example, will be devastating for many women and children," says Williamson.

Saving each other must be a priority for African-American women, says Marcia L. Fudge, a lawyer and director of budget and finance in the prosecutor’s office in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County. In her job, Fudge, who also is national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., deals with girls who come into the criminal justice system. "There are more coming in all the time," she says, adding that violence is a growing trend among them.

Like many Black women, she has combined her work with social and community efforts. Her sorority is organizing a national tutoring and mentoring program for girls ages 11 to 14.

Georgia Supreme Court Justice Leah Sears watches closely what happens to Black women offenders. The rise of Black women in prison is relates as much to class as to race, she says. "It’s mostly poor Black women who get arrested."

But Sears sees an up side, too. These days, more Black women are pursuing legal careers. Sears herself joined Georgia’s high court at 36. Most of the judges do not arrive until they are in their 50s. "As women we bring our unique insight. As Blacks, oppressed people and females…we have a unique perspective that needs to be in the mix."

Mental and physical health also are mountains Black women are still climbing. We die at a higher rate from cancer and stroke. Obesity and breast cancer also affect us disproportionately, and Black women suffer clinical depression at about twice the rate of men, says Fudge, whose sorority has launched a national campaign on the issue.

It is impossible to talk about Black women without talking about Black men. Although marriage remains a viable option for some, Black women have been inundated with stories about the declining prospects. In the United States in general, marriage has been declining, and for Blacks it dropped from 52.7 percent of adults in 1970 to 35.3 percent in 1995.

Tarpley, the Harvard graduate, is searching for a good relationship. She has heard about the two-to-one ratio of Black women to Black men. But according to the most recent census, the numbers are nearly equal. Meanwhile, one-third of young Black men in her age range are involved in the criminal justice system-in prison or on parole or probation. Although Black men are on par with women in getting college degrees, Tarpley worries that her elite education will be another hindrance: "I have heard men say they don’t want a woman who has more degrees than they do."

On the other hand, there are marriages that thrive. Shaw had been married 20 years. She and her husband are both educators and have two daughters. "What helped us a lot is learning to communicate," she says.

More fundamentally, violence continues to take its toll.

On a warm spring night nearly two years ago, I watched a little girl run with her family to a crime scene, where two Black men had been shot to death. One of the men was her uncle. She was half-running, half-walking, her small round face distorted by terror and tears. "I don’t have any more uncles left. I don’t have any more uncles left," she screamed, stomping her feet near the yellow police tape. "That was the last one. That was the last one."

It is an image that’s hard to shake. What happens to girls who have lost the men in their lives?

Our relationship with our fathers, brothers, husbands, lovers and uncles are even more complicated because they are shaped by racism and patriarchy. Zora Neale Hurston capsulized this in Their Eyes Were Watching God:

"Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell the nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks."

Her words were timeless in capturing the dilemma of African-American women. "I think that one of the challenges in the 21^st century is to come out of a provincial mindset…and understand that when we are talking about co-equity, we are not talking about our personal lives but in terms of…authority and governance," says McCabe. "Hazel O’Leary could have headed up the Department of Energy…but could not be considered seriously [to head] a civil rights organization," she adds, citing an example of what she sees as sexism within the Black community. McCabe was a candidate to lead the NAACP when Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. was hired in 1993. "I wasn’t taken seriously," she says.

Height, who worked for years alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., knows the dilemma, too. "African-American women have been so concerned about institutional racism and its impact on our lives that often we as women have done what we so often do: make our concerns second."

Campbell, whose books have dealt with race relations, says that Black women must make alliances with women of all races. "Common ground is important…[sexism is] a battle that can be won more easily if it can be fought by all women."

Despite the obstacles African-American women still face, Campbell and others say there is reason to be optimistic as we head into the 21^st century; "African-American women are beginning to learn that they don’t have to apologize for their success, for making money, wearing nice clothes, for living where they want to live. They don’t have to say, ‘I’m sorry for speaking standard English, and for working in a huge corporation and doing quite well. For not being married. For not having kids.’ No need to apologize for any of it. For dating out of race, for marrying out of race…There’s no need to say, ‘I’m sorry.’"

Zora couldn’t have said it better.
 
 
 
 

Emerge Magazine, March 1997