Callie House and Rosa Parks

The recent deaths of Rosa Parks, Vivian Malone, and C. Delores Tucker should lead us to pause and reflect on the pivotal roles women played, often without much fanfare, in the civil rights movement.  The pomp and circumstance surrounding Parks upon the announcement of her death confirm the iconic status she achieved.  It also gives us an opportunity to herald the contributions of many African American women who have not received their due.  For every Rosa Parks, who is nearly universally known, there are dozens of African American women whose stories have been forgotten.  Callie House is one such woman.  But if Mary Frances Berry has her way, House’s story will be much more widely known.  Berry, the civil rights activist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has written an enlightening and uplifting book on House, My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations, which details House’s struggle to get reparations for ex-slaves.

House, born into slavery, was a crusader who led a movement to get the federal government to provide pensions for ex-slaves.  She thought it an abomination that ex-slaves, whose work was the backbone of the southern economy and made many businessmen wealthy, were destitute and left to fend for themselves when their bodies gave out and they could no longer work.  For those who could still work, it wasn’t unusual to see domestic workers who were in their 80s and 90s.  Berry noted the plight of one women, 101 years old, who was still a working domestic.

House’s story is also a cautionary tale.  Her work was undermined by the usual suspects in the federal government as Congress and the Department of Justice created the environment that ultimately led to her incarceration and the destruction of her movement.  She was also undercut by Black newspapers and leaders who thought she and her supporters embodied something less than the “talented tenth” they were trying to promote to White America.  They sold out House in an effort to remain the “favored Negroes” in the eyes of the White power structure.

Berry wrote the book “because everybody started talking about reparations” and all those interested in the reparations debate, regardless of their position on the issue, should read it.  Supporters will likely learn more than they previously knew about the historical nature of the uphill battles facing.  Opponents will see that the reparations movement is not some scheme cooked up by the nationalist wing of the African American community to shake down the government for money. 

Berry believes that there are “other Callie House’s out there” and, while the contributions of women like House have been lost in history, their work is still relevant to dealing with contemporary issues.  Let’s hope that the leaders of the current reparations movement learn the lessons of the past so as not to repeat those mistakes.  That way, the legitimate arguments surrounding reparations are given a legitimate hearing in the court of public opinion.  Then House can take her place in the annals of African American history with all the others who gave their lives to the cause.

© Michael K. Fauntroy, November 5, 2005