FREEDOM'S DAUGHTERS

A great-granddaughter claims her legacy.

Investigating gaps in her family tree, Headlee (Speaking of Race, 2021) discovered a generation of Black women who devoted their lives to nurturing education and literacy as a means of racial uplift. Notable among them were her great-great-grandmother Anne Fambro, who scrimped to send her daughters to historically Black colleges and universities, and great-grandmother Carrie Still Shepperson, the central figure in this revelatory melding of memoir, biography, and Black history. Both women were born into slavery, and both believed that “resistance took the form of sharing knowledge, an act that was inherently threatening to power structures in the antebellum South.” Shepperson was one among many formerly enslaved people who built schools across the South, equipped them at their own expense, and established libraries. By 1869, nearly 3,000 schools served more than 150,000 students; by the end of the century, the illiteracy rate among Blacks was “virtually non-existent.” Widowed when her husband was murdered by the KKK in Mississippi, Shepperson moved with her 4-month-old son to Arkansas, where she involved herself in more than education: She became an activist for Black rights, participating in or leading between eight and 12 groups at any one time, including the NAACP. She remarried and set high expectations for her son, William. Although she wanted him to become a doctor, he was drawn to music, eventually becoming lauded as the “Dean of African American Composers.” In 1925, two years before her death, Shepperson was awarded the Madam C. J. Walker Prize by the NAACP for her accomplishments. Headlee’s dogged unearthing of buried truths revives a woman who has been unjustly ignored by historians, and she makes a persuasive case that many other Black women, like the indefatigable Shepperson, deserve to be celebrated.

A stirring contribution to America’s historical narrative.