“These Days, Black Women Are Singing Strong,” photographed by Irving Penn, was originally published in the May 1969 issue of Vogue.
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Their minds sinewy, their tactics delicate, feminine, five of them shown here and on the next four pages are special women—five out of hundreds who in one way or another have the ropes of power in their hands. All of them have been on the way for years, devoted to the service of all their countrymen. Like Mrs. Elizabeth Duncan Koontz who was the first Black woman to serve as President of the National Education Association before President Nixon appointed her as the Director of the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor. Like thousands of Black women who are teachers and principals. Like hundreds of Black women who are doctors, judges, psychologists, medical researchers. Like thousands more with bold minds, working in almost every field. They are one of the immense resources of this country, with no chance of depletion.
Armed with faith, warmed with humour, beautiful, disciplined, as outgoing as a flower, a non-violent activist, Coretta Scott King has almost disappeared into Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., within the year since the murder of her husband. The Kings worked together but not always at identical tasks ever since they first met when she studied singing at the New England Conservatory of Music and he worked on his doctorate at Boston University. Now, in their house at Atlanta, Georgia, where she still lives with their four children, she spends evenings with them, perhaps singing the folk songs of the Louisiana Creoles, especially “Mr. Banjo.” Much of her time still goes to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, much to the writing of her book, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., to be published this September. With verve and exaltation she recently gave the Sunday sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the first woman to do so. Calling her talk “The Dawn of a New Day,” she preached, with a low but powerful cadence in her voice, from the same pulpit as Dr. King had in 1964 on his way to Sweden to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
An ascetic, small, contained woman with a misleading modesty and a stubborn spine, Dr. Bateman, Director of the West Virginia Department of Mental Health, is a Menninger-trained psychiatrist with an enormous job. She administers six hospitals, twenty-six hundred employees, has advanced West Virginia from lock-up institutions (“an expensive way to spend money”) to comprehensive mental-health centres that provide pre- and post-hospital care, rehabilitation, teacher training, programs for alcoholism, and prevention of mental handicapping in children. Using VISTA workers and the Federal Foster Grandparents program, she helps the state’s mountaineers to find emergency services near home, gets people out to work with people. A physician, wife, mother, Dr. Bateman can draw on the discipline and devotion of her Presbyterian girlhood in curing social-medical-economic ills long neglected. She speaks so softly that legislators must listen.
A rebel with a thrusting sense of mission, Mrs. Chisholm wants to be known as a “politician who developed trust in public servants for the young, both Black and white, not just as the first Black woman in Congress.” After service in New York’s State Legislature, this Democrat was elected last November by a three-to-one majority to the House of Representatives from her Brooklyn district, Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she was born and still lives when not in Washington. (She is married to Conrad Chisholm, an investigator for the New York City Bureau of Medical Services.) A fine pianist, a good dancer, this educator, fluent in Spanish, has degrees from Brooklyn College and Columbia University. Her answer to the Power System is more women in power. She said: “When I want to pound the heads of the boys on the Hill, I pound out, instead, ‘Clair de Lune.’ ”
Strong, buxom, shrewd, voluble, with the kind of firmness of an archetypal mother, an authority in medicine, Dr. Ferebee for twenty years watched over ten thousand students as Director of the Howard University Health Service in Washington, D.C., before becoming Lecturer in Preventive Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. (When she lectured on preventive medicine for the State Department in eighteen African countries, she tried the tribal languages, found Swahili easiest.) Visits to the health centre Tufts has in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, will take her back to the spot where she headed a health project in 1935 for many of the same farm workers. Dr. Ferebee’s family has included among seven lawyers the first Negro judge in Massachusetts. Her own abilities have landed her on so many national boards, associations, and committees (seventeen) that a grandson advised against listing her honours: “You’ll sound like an item in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue.”
Dynamic and warm, as convincing as she is convinced, Elma Lewis, a challenger with vision, faith, and energy, is changing the Roxbury district of Boston from deprived ghetto to cultural celebrant with her new National Center of Afro-American Artists. “We are growing as it grows,” she said of the Center, an offshoot of the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts. The Center will hold two vast theatres, a museum, library, studios for dance and television, a school of fine arts, and an integrated elementary school. “I believe in Black artists rather than Black art,” said Elma Lewis, a ballet and drama teacher with degrees from Emerson College and Boston University. “I am a breakthrough and my kids are working in ballet, in television, and on Broadway.” Elma Lewis campaigns for millions—few of the students can afford the low monthly tuition. She also lures great teachers and performers: Talley Beatty, the choreographer, Babatunde Olatunji, the Nigerian drummer, and the Boston Pops orchestra, which will give three concerts at her summer Playhouse in Franklin Park. “All the artists are cooperative. I find no problems,” said Elma Lewis, “except more money.”