- Roberts and Dr. Emilie Townes, a professor of African-American religion and theology at Yale University, asserted welfare reform had been aimed at controlling the sexuality and reproduction of poor Black women. Roberts argued the time limits placed on welfare penalizes them for having children outside marriage.
- Dr. Bernadette J. Brooten, the conference’s organizer and director of the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, said Black women are less likely to report rapes and authorities are less likely to prosecute and win a conviction. Rape of a slave had been rarely treated as a crime.
- Ellen Barry, director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, described the “prison industrial complex” that incarcerates a rapidly growing population of female inmates and subjects them to sexual abuse as “directly related to the plantation structure.”
- Dr. Frances Smith Foster, chair of the English department at Emory University, said many “otherwise progressive” Black women insist on Mrs., instead of Ms., because slave and freed wives were not addressed with the traditional title of respect.
- Dr. Barbara Savage, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, attributed what she called the outsized role of African-American ministers in the debate over same-sex marriage to deference accorded the “unelected Black male clerical class” since slavery.
Participants in the conference numbered more than 300 and were overwhelmingly female. Anita Hill, professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis, moderated the final panel discussion.
The most emotional session was a speech by Mende Nazer, whose voice rose with angst as she talked about being enslaved in the Sudan. Captured at age 12 by Arab raiders, she escaped seven years later in London.
“I am one of the few who escaped slavery and know what it was like,” she said. “I know slavery leaves you with a shadow for the rest of your life.”
The conference, held with Ford Foundation funding a week after another at Pace University on the slave narrative of Harriett Jacobs, was notable for even treating a subject that has many Americans in denial.
“In the South, slavery is not often discussed in plantation museums,” noted Dr. Delores Walters, an anthropology professor at Northern Kentucky University.
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
