Black women on iMiMatch tell different stories about Black History!
Tuesday, November 12th, on Welcome to Daughters of Lorraine, a podcast from a friendly neighborhood of Black feminists which explores the legacies, present, and futures of Black theatre, Leticia Ridley and Jordan Ealey, the co-hosts took their audience back into the history of anti-lynching dramas, a genre of theatre created by Black women playwrights. The form is dedicated to social justice and community practice and set a precedent for the power of theatre to transform and inspire. In fact, the lynching dramatists refused to recreate lynchings on stage, choosing instead to tell stories different from those people knew, stories which depict the Black home and the resulting damage that lynchings had on Black domesticity and Black social life.
A prominent figure of anti-lynching organizing was activist and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, who would publish her groundbreaking research in 1892 in a pamphlet called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, which challenged the alleged reason that Black men were getting lynch because of the rape of white women. Instead, Wells cited Black economic progress as the “real reason” for lynching. Three years later, she followed up Southern Horrors with a 100-page pamphlet describing the high rates of lynching in the United States. Following in the activism of Ida B. Wells, a number of African American women poets and authors turned to drama to address racial violence.
That was at the beginning of the twentieth century but it must be important for you to know that even today, Black women, especially those on iMiMatch are writing and publishing books on the horrors of their history. These women are correcting some of the falseness that has reigned through history concerning the black race. In order to have more strength and to gather more evidence, Black women from all over the planet are meeting on iMiMatch and they are forming associations where they can all gather to share their different stories and testimonies and rectify the errors on their names and those of their forefathers.
