By Arden Berry | Staff Writer
Julia Chinn and Mary Church Terrell entered the spotlight at “Biographies in Bold: Black Women & U.S. Systems of Power” Thursday afternoon.
Award-winning authors Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers and Dr. Alison Parker discussed their books about these women at 3:30 p.m. in Moody Memorial Library’s Schumacher Flex Commons. Dr. Ronald Johnson, Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn chair of history, facilitated the discussion.
Myers is a professor of history at Indiana University in Bloomington. While writing her dissertation, Myers said she noticed that Black women’s stories were not centralized in history and the media.
“I realized that I had spent my whole life reading history books that never had anybody in them that looked like me, who had stories that were similar to mine or my parents’ — that I had grown up watching TV shows that didn’t have anyone who really looked like me or had my kind of experiences,” Myers said. “They’re there, but nobody’s written them.”
Myers discussed her book, “The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn.” The book centers around Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman who was both owned by and in a sexual relationship with Richard Mentor Johnson, vice president under President Martin Van Buren.
Myers said Chinn was Johnson’s wife “in every sense of the word,” as she oversaw everything on Johnson’s plantation. However, Myers said the book is not a love story.
“Race, gender and freedom meant that Richard Johnson always had the upper hand,” Myers said. “Julia was in a relationship with a man who could actually sell or kill her and their children without fear of legal reprisal. Goodness, it’s highly unlikely that she ever forgot that.”
Parker is a professor of American history at the University of Delaware. She discussed her book, “Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell.” Terrell was a civil rights activist, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP.
Parker said it was rumored that Terrell had agreed to walk in the back of a suffrage parade at the Capitol in 1913.
“For a long time, when I was doing my 12 years worth of research, I was like, ‘That just does not seem right,’ because it seemed to me, if she had been told to, and even agreed to, march in the back, she would be complaining about it for the rest of her life,” Parker said.
Parker studied Terrell’s diaries, letters and other sources, all to discover that Terrell marched with the New York delegation, and that she had fought for a Black sorority to walk with the white sororities.
“Once I was able to find that out, I felt like that changes the history of the suffrage movement, because it does prove that Black women were involved in a much more substantial way from the beginning and that they were telling the story of how they view themselves in this movement, and so that’s why I think telling that story matters,” Parker said.
Woodway freshman Ellia Gibson attended the lecture because Johnson, who is her history professor, offered extra credit to his students for attending the event.
“I’m really glad that he did that because that was amazing to hear,” Gibson said. “I’ve just always been so interested in becoming a historian myself, so I loved hearing their journeys with that.”
Myers said it is critical that people continue to read and write these stories. Some view Meyers’ work as “un-American,” but to Meyers it’s essential to understanding American history.
“What happens to future generations if they don’t know about women like Julia?” Meyers said. “What happens if they don’t know about Mary Church Terrell? It’s not just that they lose the stories of two people, because when you do biographical work, you touch on the lives, times and organizations of all that those individuals touched.”
