Meet Maya Millett: The Founder of ‘Race Women’, A Project Highlighting “Our Black Feminist Foremothers”
Maya Millett, the creator of ‘Race Women.’ Photo Credit: Laurent Chevalier.
By Jaimee A. Swift
Maya Millett (she/her/hers) is on a mission to ensure the politics, activism, histories and lives of our earliest Black feminist foremothers will never be erased from history again.
“It is the duty of the true race-woman to study and discuss all phases of the race question.”
–– Pauline Hopkins
I came across this quote from one of the many informative posts housed on the “Race Women” Instagram page. The post highlighted the life and times of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and how as a “[p]ioneering novelist, playwright and journalist, [she] brazenly chronicled the achievements of other Black women in the Colored American magazine during the early 1900s.” When I read this post and several other posts on Race Women’s Instagram page and saw the photos of various trailblazing Black feminist activists, organizers, and writers of the twentieth century, several questions came to my mind: Why did I not know who they were? How come I was never taught about these amazing Black women and their contributions to socio-economic and political change throughout American history? How many other Black women's leadership and scholarship during that time period have been left either ignored or simply unacknowledged - even to this day?"
Maya Millett had some of those very same questions and more. Propelled by the chronic erasure of Black women’s activism in the United States and the dire need to ensure Black women’s testimonies, talents, triumphs and tribulations are seen, heard and felt, Millet –– the award-winning non-fiction writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York –– created the “Race Women” project to address this void. Using social media as a platform to inform and reaffirm Black women’s historical, political and cultural productions, Millett so eloquently and intentionally creates a safe and artistically-curated space where Black women’s personal and collected histories are unearthed, restored, preserved, celebrated and integrated into historical and contemporary socio-political canons that have often marginalized iterations of Black feminist thought and behavior.
I spoke with Millett about how the “Race Women” project was actualized; how she discovered and uncovered Black Women Radicals in her own family lineage and some of the many “Race Women” she admires.
Jaimee Swift (JS): What was the creative, scholarly and political impetus behind Race Women, ‘a project honoring our earliest Black feminist foremothers’?
Maya Millett (MM): “The impetus was very personal in that I was working on a project researching Black history at the turn of the twentieth century and the pivotal years after emancipation. I was specifically looking at some work W.E.B. DuBois was doing during that time period. DuBois and his students created statistical charts for the 1900 Paris exhibition that outlined Black progress since the year of emancipation. I was researching Black activism during this specific time period and I kept running up against these women and they were just popping up –– but popping up in the margins. I was reading historical newspapers that detailed political events that DuBois and other Black men were participating in and I would randomly see the name of a ‘Mrs. A.J. Cooper’ who was also there doing the work but there was no more space –– other than her name –– given to her or her work. And this just kept happening with different women. I discovered that the more [Black women] I uncovered, there was a realization of how pivotal Black women were to the conversation happening around that time period on what Black identity and freedom looked like.. They carved out a space of what Black identify and freedom looked like for Black women and the particular struggles we faced.”
“We are not valued enough to be reinforced in every generation that our stories as Black women are important and they matter. So we have to do the work ourselves to restore our history.”
“I was very angry and shocked that I did not know most of these women’s names, their histories and their stories; outside of Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. There was a whole generation of Black women that I did not know and I felt robbed of not knowing this history. The histories of these women and their stories are our responsibility to pass along. So [Race Women] became an obsession for me to know who these women were. It is also very important to me and I think for many Black women, to know about us, to know about who were are, to know that we existed and to know the legacy we come from.”
“I also realized how much history is actively working against us. We are minimized by history and we are regulated to the sidelines of it. We are not valued enough to be reinforced in every generation that our stories as Black women are important and they matter. So, we have to do the work ourselves to restore our history. This work has been done for decades and there are communities of Black women who are keeping Black historical women’s lives and leadership alive. To me, this is not an individual burden to uncover these stories because we, as Black women, are all in this together.”
JS: This project was also very personal for you because at the same time you were doing research, you discovered an ancestor of yours was a prominent and pioneering activist around the twentieth century. Do you mind sharing more about this?
MM: “One day, someone reached out to my family through Ancestry.com looking for a relative of Blanche H. Wilkins, a Black deaf woman who lived at the end of the nineteenth century. She was the first Black woman graduate of the Minnesota School for the Deaf. She also happened to be my great, great, great, great grandmother. The school reached out to us to tell us they were naming a dorm after Blanche and if anyone from the family was willing to come to the opening and naming of the dorm. I had no idea about this history and I did not know anything about her and she is in my family. She was a huge advocate for the Black deaf and during her time and she wrote in newspapers and did other activism for the community. So while I am discovering history for the “Race Women” project, I am also discovering my personal history as well. This made everything, including the [Race Women] project, feel so urgent.”
“That experience also made me realize that Black folks are custodians of our past in a way that larger society is not. This is why our stories need to be told.”
“That experience also made me realize that Black folks are custodians of our past in a way that larger society is not. This is why our stories need to be told. An experience with my mentee, a Black woman, also opened my eyes to this. I am in a writing mentorship program with her and we talk a lot about our history and the lack of inclusion of certain Black people in that history. For example, we talked about how when we get to Black History Month, there are only five people in Black History that we are taught about in school. This is why we need to know about Black women’s history so younger generations can have a more expansive vocabulary and perception of who our heroes are.”
JS: Who are some ‘Race Women’ you admire?
MM: “All of them! Honestly, I admire all of them. I have such a profound respect for all these women. I admire Anna Julia Cooper, who was the fourth Black woman in history to get a Ph.D. and who studied math at Oberlin College –– in a field she was told she should and could not do because she was a woman. What is interesting is that Anna Julia Cooper had a parallel life span to W.E.B. DuBois and had very similar benchmark experiences. Even though Anna Julia Cooper is one of the more well known women to emerge out of that time period, she still does not get her just due.”
Photograph of Anna Julia Cooper, from her book ''A Voice from the South'' (1892) via WikiMedia Commons.
“I also think of women like Maria Stewart, who was talking about Black women’s rights in 1832. She was speaking about our rights and had no one to the right or left of her; no one communicating similar struggles. Stewart died being almost totally unrecognized for the work she did and the courage she had to speak about us and how she loved us and exalted us. I think about these women who were incredibly courageous. However, to me, courageous is not the right word for what these women had because they were beyond courageous. They had a conviction that was so deep and they were so sure of the truth that they put the truth out there –– not only for themselves but for their community. And their conviction was so deep, they did not even give a fuck about the consequences. And [Black women] have been doing this for such a long time. I admire all of it. I am grateful for it. It is the reason why we are here.”
For more information about Maya Millett, please visit her website.
For more information about Race Women, please visit their Instagram page.