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How Were Black Women Contributing to America on July 4, 1776?
They were doing a lot more than you probably learned in school
In American schools the history of black women typically begins with the abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. But black women have been arriving on American soil at least since 1619, the award-winning historians Daina Berry Ramey and Kali Nicole Gross show in their estimable A Black Women’s History of the United States (Beacon, 2020).
The first black women did not arrive on slave ships: “They came with Spanish and Portuguese explorers, and many could be classified as indentured servants, missionaries, interpreters, or simply leaders.”
These black women or others were contributing to American life in many and varied ways by the time the country declared its independence from Britain on July 4, 1776. They fought for their rights and freedom, by whatever means were available to them, then and in the centuries to come. Not all were enslaved. But some who were enslaved ran away from their enslavers. Others filed “freedom suits” that petitioned the courts for their release from captivity.
During the Revolutionary War, black women aided Gen. George Washington’s Continental Army by performing domestic work that might have included working as cooks, nurses…
