for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf by ntozake shange
this is a book i always buy when i see it because i want to be able to give it to people. i feel like it’s a necessary book to have, one that both hurts and nourishes the soul. what are books you always/tend to buy when you see them?
J. Marion Sims is called “the Father of Gynecology” due to his experiments on enslaved women in Alabama who were often submitted as guinea pigs by their plantation owners who could not use them for sexual pleasure.
He kept seven women as subjects for four years, but left a trail of death and permanently traumatized black women.
Anarcha was one of the women Sims experimented upon. A detailed history of this monster is in Harriet Washington’s book, Medical Apartheid.
Sims believed that Africans were numb to pain and operated on the women without anesthesia or antiseptic. The procedures usually happened this way.
Black female slaves who were guinea pigs would hold one subject down as Sims performed hysterectomies, tubal ligation, and other procedures to examine various female disorders.
Sims also performed a host of operations on other slave populations. The following excerpt details his “practice” on enslaved infants.
Sims began to exercise his freedom to experiment on his captives. He took custody of slave infants and, with a shoemaker’s awl, tried to pry the bones of their skulls into proper alignment.
We can only imagine what they endured at the hands of Sims and what horror an enslaved woman must have felt at the news that she was being sent to him for treatment. Surely rumors must have run rampant among enslaved communities about what he did to women there. All over South Carolina, Sims has been honored and memorialized with statues and plaques. Buildings, hospitals, schools and streets bare his name. While it is impossible to negate the historical context of his racial, class and gender biases, shouldn’t we agree to apply some standard of humanity to those we choose to honor?
In this photograph, Coretta is upset with her husband, who had been attacked the night before by a disturbed white racist but had not defended himself. Though the police urged King to press charges, he refused. “The system we live under creates people such as this youth,” he said. “I’m not interested in pressing charges. I’m interested in changing the kind of system that produces such men.”
How To Tell How Bad Your Breath Is
Take a spoon, scrape the back of your tongue with the tip of it, let it dry. Place spoon under nose of someone you like, get their reaction without explaining to them what you just did.
Apparently in the 1950s, a popular nightclub, Mocambo would not book Ella Fitzgerald because she was black. Fortunately for Ella, she had a powerful and unlikely benefactor Marilyn Monroe.
“I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt…it was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the ’50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she promised she would take a front table every night. She told him - and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status - that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman - and ahead of her time and she didn’t know it.” - Ella Fitzgerald
