Atlantic World Slavery
African-based slavery began with the Portuguese and Spanish in the 15th century. In 1441, the Portuguese purchased 12 enslaved Africans from slave-traders in West-Central Africa, sending them back to Europe. Over the next century and a half, hundreds of thousands of Africans would be enslaved, sold to Europeans, and shipped to most of the New World colonies. The first enslaved Africans did not arrive in Britain’s North American colonies until 1619, and it would take several decades for colonial American officials to turn slavery into a condition reserved almost exclusively for African-descended people. African women’s wombs were a key part of that process. In 1662, lawmakers in colonial Virginia ruled that all children born to enslaved women would also be enslaved—transforming slavery into a status that passed down from birth.
Elizabeth Key Files Freedom Suit
The daughter of an enslaved woman and white planter, successfully sues for her and her son's freedom in colonial Virginia. Following English legal precedent, Virginia legislators declare that the father's status determines the child's status.
New Law Says Enslaved Status Follows Mother
Contradicting the Key ruling (above), a new Virginia law declares that slave status is inheritable through the mother. From here on, Black women’s reproductive capacities will, in effect, be under the legal control of white male authorities.
Slavery in the Antebellum South
The lives of enslaved people changed dramatically in the nineteenth century. The U.S. ban on the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 meant that over the next several decades the majority of enslaved people would be born on American soil. The slave trade ban coincided with a slew of state-level gradual emancipation laws in the North and the overthrow of slavery in Haiti, the latter completed in 1804 and led by enslaved people themselves. The spate of antislavery activity, however, did not slow slavery’s growth in the U.S. In fact, just the opposite had happened: slavery grew exponentially throughout the South, even while the institution was slowly being abolished in the North. By the eve of the Civil War, no nation held more enslaved people than the United States—roughly 4 million in 1860. Enslaved women’s bodies were a key part of slavery’s expansion. The U.S. ban on the Atlantic slave trade led slaveholders to take greater interest in enslaved women’s reproductive lives, as they were eager for them to produce enough children to feed the nation’s insatiable demand for slave labor.
U.S. International Slave Trade Ban Goes Into Effect
U.S. international slave trade ban goes into effect. Because the law cuts off the supply of newly enslaved Africans, it is now in the interest of the state to ensure that enslaved women bear children in significant numbers. The slave trade ban also increases the pressure to “breed” slaves, though slave-breeding likely only accounted for a small percentage of children born into slavery.
Banks’ Administration v. Marksberry Decision Confirms Slaveholder’s Right to Unborn Children of Black Women
The federal courts, in the Banks’ Administration v. Marksberry appellate court case, confirms that slave-owners have legal ownership over enslaved women’s future children, even before they are born. This law cements the ability of slave-owners to pass down unborn enslaved children to their descendants.
Experimentation on Enslaved Women Play Role in Rise of Modern Gynecology
Three enslaved women—Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey—are forced to endure dozens of vaginal experiments conducted by Dr. J. Marion Sims. The medical techniques Sims perfects on these enslaved women turn him into an internationally renowned physician.
Infant Mortality Rate of Black Babies Twice That of White Babies
A 1850 report finds that the infant mortality rate for babies born to enslaved women is twice that of white women. The same report reveals that almost 10 percent of enslaved infants die from suffocation, compared to 1.2 percent for white infants. The high number of suffocation deaths might reflect the lack of time mothers were able to spend with their infants during slavery, or they might reflect deliberate acts of infanticide—a not uncommon form of resistance.
Emancipation and Reconstruction
During the Civil War (1861-1865), enslaved and free Black people forced political leaders to liberate the nation’s four million enslaved African Americans—roughly 90% of the Black population. But freedom did not mean equality, and Black Americans would wage a decade-long campaign to ensure that the federal government also guaranteed Black people equal protection under the law, and all men—regardless of color—the right to vote. During the twelve years immediately following the Civil War, a period known as Reconstruction, African Americans achieved all of these goals. With the protection of the federal government, African Americans were able to elect over 2,000 Black politicians into local, state, and federal office during this period, and many of those legislators, concentrated in the South, enacted policies that guaranteed Black and white Americans equal access to public education and other public services. But the shock of Black equality was met with a ferocious backlash. In 1865, white supremacists in Tennessee created a terrorist organization—the Ku Klux Klan—bent on intimidating African Americans into submission; meanwhile, mob violence against Black Americans became increasingly common. By 1877, the federal government gave up defending Black southerners and pulled all federal troops out of the South, bringing Reconstruction to a close.
Comstock Law Inaugurates Efforts to Limit Women’s Access to Birth Control
Congress passes the Comstock Law, which prohibits the circulation of information about contraception through the mail, and encourages a host of state-level laws prohibiting contraception.
The Jim Crow Era
Immediately after the federal government pulled out of the South in 1877, white southern leaders began to impose a slate of segregation laws, also known as “Jim Crow” laws. These laws eviscerated Reconstruction era policies protecting Blacks and would not be overturned until the 1960s. But African Americans began challenging Jim Crow—and the waves of lynchings that accompanied it—long before the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1890s, Ida B. Wells emerged as a powerful anti-lynching campaigner as well as a leading advocate for Black women’s rights. Meanwhile, Black men with markedly different approaches to Black equality—W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, and Marcus Garvey—came to prominence. Beginning in the 1910s, millions of African Americans also fled the South on their own, looking for safety and opportunity in northern cities, a process known as the Great Migration. While African American culture flourished in northern cities, especially in 1920s Harlem, discrimination and segregation in the North—albeit customary and not imposed by law—was also rampant. In fact, it was the segregated and unsanitary conditions of Black neighborhoods in the North, as much as the South, that prompted Black civic leaders to turn healthcare—including Black women’s healthcare—into a key component of the larger struggle for Black freedom.
Fertility Rate of African American Women Declines By One-Third
Between 1880 and 1910, the fertility rate of African American women declines by one-third. This is the result of disease, poor nutrition, and unhealthy living conditions, as well as Black women’s use of voluntary birth control and high levels of child mortality.
Campaign to Improve Medical Care for Pregnant Black Women Has Mixed Results
During the 1920s, The Urban League, formed to help Black migrants moving to northern cities, begins a campaign for pregnant Black mothers to be attended to by physicians rather than midwives. The campaign builds on a national trend to take childbirths out of the hands of midwives and into the hands of hospitals, physicians, and medically trained nurses. While the initiative improves pregnant Black women’s access to decent medical care, the shift toward hospital-based childbirth marginalizes Black midwives—long a source of care and comfort for pregnant Black women.
Margaret Sanger Founds Birth Control Organization That Becomes Planned Parenthood
Margaret Sanger founds the American Birth Control League, which changes its name to Planned Parenthood in 1942. Sanger quickly becomes the nation’s leading advocate for reproductive freedom, but she in part promotes contraception by arguing that it will limit the number of African American births. Sanger’s racial arguments engender heated debate within Black communities over whether family planning services are good or bad for Black women.
Buck v. Bell Decision Allows Forced Sterilization
In Buck v. Bell the Supreme Court approves Virginia’s involuntarily sterilization laws, which target women deemed intellectually inferior. Sterilization gained widespread support under the influence of the eugenics movement, which sought to “improve” the human race by promoting discriminatory reproductive policies. By the Second World War, southern Black women would disproportionately bear the brunt of forced sterilizations. For example, between 1930 and 1950, 5,000 of the 8,000 women sterilized by the state were Black.
Birth Control Clinics Open in Black Neighborhoods, Stoking Controversy Over Intentions
Sanger’s new birth control organization creates a Division of Negro Service and pilots two programs in the South aimed at education Black women about contraception. The program is actively supported by many African American leaders and staffed by many Black women. Nonetheless, many Black women targeted for the campaign question whether the program is aimed at helping them achieve reproductive autonomy—or simply limiting the Black population.
The Modern Civil Rights Era
Despite decades fighting racial discrimination, Black activism did not gain sustained national attention until the Second World War. The Civil Rights Movement, as it came to be known, built on the “Double V” campaign that began during the war itself, when Black leaders called for the U.S. government to honor African American soldiers fighting fascism abroad by eradicating discrimination at home. By the late 1940s, the NAACP began to win a string of Supreme Court cases that slowly ruled segregation laws unconstitutional, with the 1954 Brown vs. Board decision only the most famous. But the legal end of Jim Crow was met yet again with a vicious backlash, as white southerners largely refused to abide by federal law. In response, Black activists engaged in organized acts of civil disobedience to challenge segregation, whether it was Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus; Martin Luther King, Jr. leading protests throughout the South; or Black college students desegregating lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The Civil Rights Movement won major legislative victories in 1960s. But these successes masked simmering white hostility, especially as Black activists began to challenge northern discrimination in the late 1960s. In the face of northern white resistance, many civil rights leaders began to adopt a more confrontational approach, first embodied in the Black nationalism of Malcom X, and later epitomized by the “Black Power” slogan and the militancy of the Black Panther Party. It was amidst this flowering of Black activism that Black women’s health issues began to receive national attention. In 1965, the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer revealed that she and countless other southern Black women were routinely sterilized without their consent. Meanwhile, the popularity of the Black Panther Party’s free health clinics, coupled with the revelation, in 1972, of the Tuskegee Syphillis Study—in which the federal government enrolled hundreds of poor Black southerners in an observational trial without their consent, and without offering treatment—put racial health disparities on the national radar.
‘Moynihan Report’ Blames Single Black Mothers for Challenges Facing Black Communities
Daniel Moynihan, an assistant secretary in the U.S. Labor Department, releases his controversial report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. “The Moynihan Report,” as it came to be known, explained the high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births of Black women as the symptom of a Black cultural “pathology,” rooted in the destruction of Black families during the era of slavery. Black leaders vigorously challenge the report for, in effect, blaming the victim, which lead President Lyndon B. Johnson to publicly disown Moynihan’s conclusions.
Activist Fannie Lou Hamer Raises Awareness of Forced Sterilization
Fannie Lou Hamer, the Black civil rights leader in Mississippi, publicizes the fact that Black women routinely receive involuntary hysterectomies immediately after childbirth—which Black women had long called, among themselves, “Mississippi appendectomies.” Hamer identifies herself as a victim, and claims that 60 percent of child-bearing Black mothers in her hometown had received one. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government, through Medicaid, funds hundreds of thousands of coerced sterilizations on poor Black women. During the same period, physicians in teaching hospitals throughout the country pressure poor Black women to undergo hysterectomies in order to help train new physicians in the procedure.
Debate Rages Over Whether Family Planning Initiatives Targeting African American Communities Are Form of Black Genocide
A debate within Black communities over whether family planning initiatives aimed at Black communities are a form genocide intensifies. Adding fuel to the fire are a pair of studies published in 1972-73 in the American Journal of Public Health that reveal widespread fears within Black communities that family-planning services are indeed a form of genocide. Publicity of these anxieties lead mainstream Civil Rights organizations, like the NAACP and Urban League, to reverse their earlier support for family planning. However, many Black feminist leaders, including congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn-NY, vigorously challenge these fears, pointing to studies like one of Black women in Chicago from 1970, which showed that 80 percent of Black women approved of birth control.
Photo ©Linda Napikoski
Roe v. Wade Decision Legalizes Abortion Nationwide
In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court rules abortion constitutional.
Mary Alice Relf Files Lawsuit Demanding Compensation for Forced Sterilization
The parents of Mary Alice Relf, a 12-year-old Black girl from North Carolina, ask the Southern Poverty Law Center to file a class action lawsuit in federal court demanding remuneration for forced sterilizations. The case leads to the discover that nearly half of the 125,00 poor women annually sterilized under federally funded program were Black. The lawsuit leads to a 1978 federal law that includes clear guidelines about who can receive sterilizations with federal money.
An Era of Hope and Renewed Struggle
The successes of the Civil Rights Movement ushered in a new era of Black life. Black people could now not only vote unimpeded but also elect politicians who looked like them. Among the most visible Black politicians in the 1970s was Shirley Chisholm, a representative of Brooklyn. In 1964, she became the first Black women elected to Congress, and her 1972 run for president in the Democratic primary, though unsuccessful, signaled the rise of an increasingly radical feminist movement, one that was beginning to challenge some of its own racial prejudices. But even as an increasing number of African Americans—men and women alike—gained political power and entered the middle class, new racial barriers emerged. The 1970s also witnessed the rise of “law and order” politics—a conservative term for heavy policing and punishment, which, in both intention and effect, disproportionally targeted African Americans. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration’s “War on Drugs” continued this trend, leading to the current era of mass incarceration. But these new realities emerged alongside undeniable achievements—like the election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, in 2008—and a renaissance in Black activism. The intense policing of Black communities was challenged, most visibly, by a new generation of Black artists, especially hip-hop artists, who shed a national spotlight on the harmful effects of “tough-on-crime” policies. A generation later, in the 2010s, Black communities across the nation brought national attention to the unaddressed problems of police brutality, school re-segregation, voting suppression, and host of the barriers Black communities continued to face, despite their collective progress. Amid the current era of Black and feminist activism—epitomized by the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements—national media outlets turned their attention to one of the most troubling realities of the 21st century: the alarming rates of Black maternal and infant mortality.
FDA Approves Birth Control Device Heavily Marketed to Low-Income African American Women, Renewing Concerns of Forced Sterilization
The FDA approves of a new contraception device called Norplant. The device is aggressively marketed to poor women, a disproportionate percentage of whom are Black, and often with state support. This leads to renewed debate over whether Norplant promotion represents a new form of Black population control.
New Research Suggests Race, Not Class, Drives Racial Disparity in Infant Mortality Rates
The New England Journal of Medicine publishes a landmark study showing that infants born to Black mothers with college degrees are more than twice as likely to die than infants born to white mothers with a similar education. The study implies that race—not class—is a key factor driving Black infant mortality rates, spawning a new era of research on the Black infant and maternal mortality.
The same year, Arline Geronimus, a public health scholar, publishes another landmark study suggesting that the stress Black women endure over the course of their lives, on account of racism, might help explain the high rates of Black maternal and infant mortality. Geronimus’s “weathering hypothesis” is publicly ridiculed for challenging the assumption that the irresponsible behavior of Black teenage girls largely explains the mortality rate. But over the following two decades, Geronimus’s theory gains significant academic support.
Casey v. Planned Parenthood Decision Limits Access to Abortion
In Casey v. Planned Parenthood the Supreme Court upholds a woman’s right to abortion, but narrows the grounds for pursuing one. The ruling opens the door for states to craft new laws restricting access to abortions.
SisterSong, Reproductive Justice Group for Women of Color, Is Founded
SisterSong, a reproductive rights advocacy groups for women of color, is founded by a coalition of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latina women. The collective will eventually become the largest reproductive justice advocacy group for women of color in the nation.
Major Scientific Report Synthesizes Decades of Research on Racial Health Disparities
The National Academy of Sciences publishes a seminal study of racial health disparities in the U.S., titled “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care.” The study synthesized decades of research and galvanizes further research into the causes of racial health disparities, especially among African Americans, and also prompts further activism against structural racism in the healthcare system.
At U.N., Activist Monica Simpson Calls U.S. Government Inaction on Black Infant and Maternal Mortality a Violation of Human Rights
Monica Simpson, the executive director of SisterSong, testifies before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva, Switzerland. Simpson highlights the failure of the U.S. government to address the crisis in Black maternal mortality, calling it a violation of human rights.
C.D.C. Raises Alarm Over Widening Gap Between Black and White Infant and Maternal Mortality Rates
A growing body of evidence shows that the gap between Black and white maternal and infant mortality rates have grown wider since at least the 1980s. As of 2014, the C.D.C. reports that Black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants—a gap larger than in 1850. In addition, Black women are three to four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white women. The rising rate of Black maternal mortality largely accounts for the entire country having a higher rate of maternal mortality than it did in 1990.
African American Women Activists Found New Advocacy Group for Black Mothers
Monica Simpson of SisterSong, and several other Black women activists, create the Black Mamas Matter Alliance. The organization brings together several advocacy groups promoting research and solutions to the maternal and infant mortality crisis.
Pregnancy Difficulties of Tennis Superstar Serena Williams Highlight Racism in Healthcare System
The tennis star Serena Williams publicizes her near-death experience a day after giving birth to her daughter, Alexis Olympia. Williams describes how her medical team repeatedly dismissed her pleas for immediate medical attention. The widely publicized episode highlights the roles that medical mistreatment and structural racism—not innate biology or even behavior—play in driving the Black maternal and infant mortality crisis.
Photo ©Edwin Martinez
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