“It is essential for the continued feminist struggle that Black women recognize the special vantage point our marginality gives us and make use of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony. I am suggesting that we have a central role to play in the making of feminist theory and a contribution to offer that is unique and valuable.” 

bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 1984

In the wake of bell hooks’ death in December 2021, one cannot but turn to her words affirming the role that Black women play in shaping feminist movements around the world. These words, echoed by many, found resonance in the conferences held at BCRW in its earlier years. The aftermath of the 1968 protests had made it clear that Black women needed places to speak and think about what it meant to be both Black and a woman outside of popular feminist discourse–which often centered whiteness and popular civil rights discourse–which often centered maleness. Soon after its founding, BCRW hosted the inaugural Reid Lecture (1975) where writers June Jordan and Alice Walker spoke. The conference brought to light some of the key challenges affecting Black women in higher educational institutions and reflected on the ways they not only ignored but seemed out of sync with the realities of Black students. June Jordan, for example, reflected on the alienation she experienced as a Black student at Barnard and how it led her to leaving before graduating. Alice Walker, who at that time was reviving information on Zora Neale Hurston, explored similar feelings of discontentment and exclusion from the Academy. The Reid Lecture thereafter became a popular lecture for Black feminists to speak at and attend later hosting eminent thinkers such as Thulani Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, Ntozake Shange and most recently, Anita Hill in 2012. 

Four years later, in 1979 at The Scholar and the Feminist VI, then English lecturer Quandra Prettyman delivered a paper tracing the legacy of Black feminisms through literature. Prettyman, the first Black professor at Barnard and the first professor to create a Black literary studies program in the United States, presented a critique of the lack of diversity at women’s conferences and an inquiry into what was seen then as an aversion from Black women towards the feminist movement. Building from Jane Galvin-Lewis’s lecture two years earlier that drew out the links between sexism and racism, Prettyman highlighted the underlying racial biases within the popular Women’s Lib Movement. She brought attention to the fact that white women’s push to attain corporate jobs meant that Black women would be called in to perform the labor that white women left in their houses. In a racialized system that failed to account for what Kimberle Crenshaw later called the “intersectionality” of experiences, the Women’s Liberation Movement would always be at odds with Black emancipation–Black women’s emancipation in particular. Black women, “the last to be hired and first to be fired,” Prettyman recounted, were in a unique yet precarious position for being both women and Black in a country that has “a particular penchant towards racism and antifeminism”–unique because of the double view it offers to see the interconnected nature of oppression, and precarious because to be Black and a woman means to be subject to constant denial of personhood.

Clearing the path for further Black feminist thought, Prettyman pulled from history the far-reaching legacy of Black feminisms across literature. From Phyllis Wheatley to Sojourner Truth, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Zora Neale Hurston ‘28, Prettyman reminded the audience that Black women, since arriving in the Americas, have always been working women, have always been feminists, and have always been self-made. What was important for Prettyman was to reassert–as many other Black women were at the time–that Black women were not at all behind or outside the Women’s Liberation movement, nor were they starting from scratch. For Prettyman, Black women had been thinking about emancipation since the very first slave ship “had landed on these shores”. In drawing from the archive, Prettyman did to Black feminisms what Walker did to Zora Neale Hurston ‘28 and the women before her: she created a genealogy of Black women–feminist mothers, if you must–whose work and lives are living proof of Black feminist resistance.

Afterlives of Professor Prettyman’s experiments with the archive are visible in today’s Harlem Semester and Digital Shange Projects. Spurred by similar motives of enlivening the past and showing how it exists in the present, these two BCRW initiatives launched in 2016 return to the archive and situate it in the now. The Harlem Semester regards Harlem as a living entity and works with community activists and cultural centers to see how the intersection of social justice, art, and political action through time has made Harlem what it is today. Emerging from an explicitly Black feminist tradition, The Digital Shange project allows students to engage with the life, work, and legacy of Barnard alum, poet and playwright Ntozake Shange ‘70 to think about the seeds she left behind. Extending Walker’s metaphor, the project allows us to dance in Shange’s garden and tend to the flowers she planted. 

Despite her optimism about Black feminisms, however, Professor Prettyman lamented the lack of Black people in attendance and questioned the inaccessibility of such conferences to poor, working-class Black women. Without representation, she stressed, Black women would always be barred from places such as these and would continue to be relegated to the margins of the feminist movement. In later interviews, she recounted being hesitant to speak at BCRW events for the tokenization she felt as the only tenured Black professor on campus; being asked to speak at workshops, in her view, suggested a sense of diversity in an institution,  at the time of her speaking, was not there. Rightly so, it is disconcerting to think about the proportion of Black women invited to speak at early BCRW panels and the proportion of those in attendance–let alone those who organized the conferences at all. 

Prettyman’s sentiments remind us of the question posed in this project’s introduction: “what does it mean to evoke Frederick A.P. Barnard’s name in this way when he enslaved Black people prior to his time as Columbia’s 10th President? What kind of feminism are we uplifting if we claim Barnard as a feminist name?”. The question asks us to recognize what Galvin-Lewis, Walker, Prettyman, and Jordan did; it asks us to consider critically the ways that Black people are excluded from institutions that inherit a history of anti-Blackness; it asks us to consider whether, when we say women or feminists, do Black people come to mind?  Even in their attempts to widen the space for marginalized communities, how can institutions not only account for but counter the racism that their legacies hold?