I finally got round to watching the Netflix series Bridgerton, by Executive producer Shonda Rhimes.
Like many Black women, I was eager to watch a fictitious show that would hopefully be “inclusive of all races” more importantly, I was sure that the show would go against the grain and cast Black dark skin women in leading roles.
I was sadly mistaken.
All the unambiguous looking Black women with dark to brown skin tones were casted as subservient characters with little to no lines, and used as part of the background scenery.
While the key female characters of colour were played by the following ambiguous looking Black women and Bi-racial women:
Golda Rosheuvel - plays Queen Charlotte
Adjoa Andoh - plays Lady Danbury
Ruby Barker - plays Marina Thompson
Kathryn Dysdale - plays Genevieve Delacroix
Emma Naomi plays - Alice Mondrich
I’m not surprised but I am disappointed, as this could have been avoided.
From a representation standpoint, Bridgerton is perpetuating the notion that Black women with light skin, particularly women with mixed ancestry, are more deserving of opportunities, admiration and a voice, over Black women with darker skin and Afrocentric phenotypes.
Colourism is just as dangerous on screen as it is off screen, as it reinforces the idea that dark skin is not good enough, or palatable for the dominate race to accept.
Anyway, I want to reinforce that lighter skin is not more beautiful than darker skin, they’re equally beautiful. However, I appreciate that so many, especially gatekeepers within media still haven’t got the memo.
On This Day in Herstory, November 14th 1960, Ruby Nell Bridges Hall an American civil rights activist, became the first Black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis.
Ruby Nell Bridges Hall was born on September 8th 1954 in Tylertown, Mississippi, the eldest of Abon and Lucille Bridges’ five children. She was born at the height of the Civil Rights Movement; only three months before she was born Brown v. Board of Education was decided, declaring the process segregating schools unconstitutional. Despite this ruling many southern states were extremely resistant to integration. Even though it was a federal ruling, many southern state governments were not enforcing the new laws, and this allowed many white schools to remain segregated for years. Eventually, significant pressure from the federal government forced schools to integrate.
When Ruby was four years old, she and her family moved to New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1959 she attended a segregated kindergarten, but at this time the Orleans Parish School Board was forced by the federal government to take steps towards integration. The school board administered an entrance exam to students at Ruby’s school with the intention to keep Black children out of their white schools. Ruby was one of the six Black children in New Orleans to pass the test, which determined they were eligible to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School. Initially Ruby’s father was reluctant to send her to the school, but her mother knew that this was a necessary step not just for Ruby’s education, but to “take this step forward…for all African-American children”.
The court order that the first day of integrated schools in New Orleans was on Monday, November 14, 1960. Two of the original six children decided to stay at their old school, and three children were transferred to McDonogh No. 19. So at just six years old, Ruby went to William Frantz Elementary all by herself. On her first day she was escorted by four federal marshals and her mother; the marshals were needed to escort Ruby for her first entire school year. She later described her first day saying, “Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.” One of her marshals later said, “She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier, and we’re all very very proud of her.” The same day that Ruby started at William Frantz Elementary, white parents pulled their children out of the school. All of the school’s teachers, with the exception of one person, refused to teach while a Black child was enrolled. Only Barbara Henry, from Boston, Massachusetts, agreed to teach Ruby, and for a year she taught her alone, “as if she were teaching a whole class.”
Eventually, the protests began to subside and the white children returned to school, despite this, Ruby remained the only child in her class, for an entire school year. Even though the protests wound down, for the entirety of her first year at William Frantz Elementary, every morning as she walked in one woman threatened to poison Ruby, while another woman held up a Black doll in a coffin. As a result, the marshals only allowed Ruby to eat the food she had brought from home. Unfortunately, Ruby’s entire family initially suffered for their role in the school’s integration; her father lost his job as a gas station attendant; the grocery store where they shopped no longer let them shop there; her grandparents, who were sharecroppers in Mississippi, were turned off their land; and her parents separated. However, many other people in their community showed support for the Bridges in other ways. Some white families continued to send their children to Frantz despite the protests, a neighbor provided her father with a new job, and local people babysat for Ruby’s siblings, watched the house as protectors, and walked behind the federal marshals’ car on the trips to school. Much later in life Ruby learned that even the immaculate clothing she wore to school in those first weeks were sent to her family by an acquaintance of the family.
Today, Ruby still lives in New Orleans with her husband, Malcolm Hall, and their four sons. After she graduated from a desegregated high school, she worked as a travel agent for 15 years and eventually became a stay-at-home parent. Now she is the chair of the Ruby Bridges Foundation, which she formed in 1999 to promote “the values of tolerance, respect, and appreciation of all differences”. She says the mission of the group is, “racism is a grown-up disease and we must stop using our children to spread it.”
Ruby is the subject of a 1964 painting, The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell. Her book, Through My Eyes won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award in 2000. On January 8, 2001, she was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Bill Clinton. Unfortunately, like many other, Ruby lost her home during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Katrina also greatly damaged William Frantz Elementary School, and Ruby was instrumental in fighting for the school to remain open. On July 15th 2011, she met with President Barack Obama at the White House. Together they viewed the Norman Rockwell painting of her on display, and he told her, “I think it’s fair to say that if it hadn’t been for you guys, I might not be here and we wouldn’t be looking at this together”. In 2014, a statue of Ruby was unveiled in the courtyard of William Frantz Elementary School.
On This Day in Herstory, August 28th 1929, Roxie Roker, an actress who portrayed Helen Willis on The Jeffersons, half of the first interracial couple regularly shown on TV, and mother of Lenny Kravitz and grandmother of Zoë Kravitz, was born in Miami, Florida.
Roxie Albertha Roker, was the daughter of Bessie Mitchell, a domestic worker, and Albert Roker, an immigrant from the Bahamas and a porter. She graduated from Howard University, where she was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the first sorority founded by Black college women. She later moved to Brooklyn, New York to pursue a career as an actress. In 1962, she married television producer Sy Kravitz, a white Jewish man. Together the couple had a son, singer-songwriter and actor Lenny Kravitz; the pair divorced in 1985.
Roxie found her start in professional acting with the Negro Ensemble Company. During her time with the company, she established herself as a successful stage actress. She won an Obie Award in 1974 and was also nominated for a Tony Award. She had supporting and guest starring roles on many TV shows from the 1970s to the 1990s; these shows included Punky Brewster, Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, A Different World, Murder, She Wrote, The Love Boat, and many others. She had roles in the television miniseries Roots and in the movie Claudine. However, she is best known for her portrayal of Helen Willis on The Jeffersons.
The Jeffersons first premiered on CBS in 1975. Straight away the show received a lot of attention because it portrayed a Black family that was upwardly mobile, additionally, the show featured one TVs first interracial couples, Tom and Helen Willis, the neighbors of the Jefferson family. Despite the show being a comedy, it also exemplified some of the bigotry and racism faced by interracial couples.
In addition to her acting, Roxie was a children’s advocate; and she was cited by Los Angeles for her community work. Roxie Roker died in Los Angeles, California, on December 2nd, 1995, as a result of breast cancer, she was 66 years old.
On This Day in Herstory, August 22nd 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, spoke at the US Democratic National Convention about her efforts to register to vote in Mississippi. Fannie Lou Hamer was a voting, Civil Rights, and women’s rights activist. As a result of her activism, she was threatened, shot at, and assaulted by white supremacists and police. Despite this, she helped thousands of Black people in Mississippi register to vote.
Fannie Lou Townsend was born on October 6th 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the youngest of Ella and James Lee Townsend’s 20 children. When she was 2, her family moved to a plantation, where they worked as sharecroppers; she worked picking cotton from age 6. In the off seasons she attended a one-room school for sharecropper’s children; though she excelled in school, she had to drop out at age 12 to support her aging parents. Despite having a leg disfigured by polio, she regularly picked nearly 300 lbs of cotton a day. When she was 27, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, a tractor driver on the plantation. Together they raised two girls who they later adopted. Unfortunately, one of the girls went on to die from internal hemorrhaging, when she was denied admission to the local hospital because of her mother’s activism. Fannie Lou was also the victim of racist hospital practices. In 1962, while having surgery to remove a tumor, she was given a hysterectomy without her consent; this was a normal occurrence in Mississippi hospitals, because of the state’s sterilization plan to reduce the number of poor Black people. Fannie Lou went on to coin the phrase “Mississippi appendectomy” as a euphemism for the involuntary or uninformed sterilization of Black women.Fannie Lou first became interested in the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. At this time she attended annual Regional Council of Negro Leadership conferences, where Black voting rights and other Civil Rights issues were discussed. She learned about the constitutional right to vote in 1962. On August 31st, she traveled to Indianola, Mississippi, to register to vote. The registration test, was designed to keep Black people from voting. One part of the test asked for an explanation of de facto laws. Fannie said, “I knowed [sic] as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day.” After she failed the test, she returned home to her boss. He said of her registration, “we’re not ready for that in Mississippi.” She was immediately fired and kicked off the plantation.The following month, Fannie Lou was shot at 16 times in a drive-by shooting by white supremacists; she came away unharmed. In December, she went to the courthouse in Indianola to take the literacy part of the registration test, but failed. She told the registrar that “You’ll see me every 30 days till I pass”. She later remarked, “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared — but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” In January, she took the registration test a third time. She passed, and became a registered voter in the State of Mississippi. When she attempted to vote that fall, she learned her registration was essentially useless; the county required voters to have two poll tax receipts, a rule had by many southern states. These laws along with the literacy tests and local government acts of coercion, were used to deter Black and Native American voter. She later paid for and acquired the requisite poll tax receipts.In 1963, Fannie Lou and other activists tried to travel by bus to a pro-citizenship conference in Charleston, South Carolina. The bus stopped in Winona, Mississippi, where some of the activists went inside a local cafe. They were refused service by the waitress, and then a Mississippi State highway patrolman took out his billy club and intimidated the activists into leaving. Eventually, the patrolman and a police chief arrested many of the activists. When Fannie Lou asked if the arrested activists could continue their journey, she arrested her as well. She was then taken to a cell where two inmates were ordered, by the police, to beat her. She was held down, and when she screamed, they were ordered to beat her harder. When she attempted to resist an officer, “walked over, took my dress, pulled it up over my shoulders, leaving my body exposed to five men.” Many others in the group were beaten and assaulted too. Following her release from jail, it took her more than a month to recover, but she never made a full recovery. Despite the physical and psychological effects, this incident had on her, she returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives. In 1964, she helped to co-found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In August of that year, she and other activists traveled to the Democratic National Convention to stand as the official delegation for the state of Mississippi. It was at this convention that she testified about the struggles Black people faced in Mississippi when registering to vote. Most major news networks broadcasted her testimony to the nation. As a result of her testimony and the demands made by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for Black representation, in 1968 the MFDP was finally seated, after the Democratic Party adopted a clause which demanded equality of representation from their states’ delegations. In 1972, Fannie Lou was elected as a national party delegate.She felt that Black people were not technically free if they were not afforded the same opportunities as white people. By June 1974, Fannie Lou was in very poor health. Two years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died of complications of hypertension and breast cancer on March 14th 1977, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, she was 59 years old. Her tombstone is engraved with one of her famous quotes, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
