THE LEGACY OF BLACK WOMANHOOD (continued from page 5)

will continue to socialize their children in this manner until the conditions in America have changed to the point that mothers can honestly tell their children that they are free to go wherever they please, achieve any goals they set for themselves, and so forth. Such a time-though on its way-has not yet arrived.

Yet, one has to be impressed with the highly successful achievements Black mothers have made with rearing their children despite unfavorable conditions. One is often reminded of all the so-called "illegitimate" Black men and women who went on to excel in highly skilled professions. Or the countless individuals who grew up in homes with absent fathers (through death, divorce or desertion) and never knew that they had been reared in a "matriarchal" society until they read psychology and sociology books. To this day, they are perhaps unable to fully understand what is meant by those writers who say that a child must be reared by both parents in order to insure that he develops a stable personality. Obviously, two parents are always ideally better than one, but this doesn't lead to the conclusion that both parents are abso-

lutely essential to the child's emotional health.

And, there remains that majority of women who have served as strong supportive mates to their husbands, and who absorbed all of the hateful invectives which were hurled against him-women who hold unswerving devotion to Black men and to all the ideals and goals they embrace. These are the women who have rarely lost the faith in their men, and have, thus, aligned themselves with them in the many battles they have had to wage in the cause of justice, equality and human dignity. These women are easily found in any spectrum of the community. For example, there has not been a Black woman more devoted to her husband than the Mississippi leader, Fannie Lou Hamer, although she stands prominently in the spotlight and he does not. Mrs. Hamer never fails to give recognition to the role that "Paps" (as she affectionately calls him) has played in her life. The same holds true for Coretta King whose devotion to her husband and his work knew no limits or boundaries in his life and death. Of course, there are the countless millions of unknown Black women and Black men who have always related

to each other in this way.

A serious problem which Black women now face is the severe shortage of Black men. The Black female sociologist, Jacquelyn Jackson, reported in the March, 1972 issue of Ebony magazine that there are at least 1,069,694 Black women in the U.S. (according to the 1970 census report) without available monogamous mates (married to one spouse at a time). Where are the men? To this query Dr. Jackson replies, “... Black males generally die earlier than Black females from heart and lung diseases, chronic alcoholism, automobile and industrial accidents, homicide and increasing suicides." She suggests that drug overdose, imprisonment, war casualties, interracial unions and those who prefer homosexual relationships further reduce the "available' Black male population.

How do Black women cope with this problem? The most viable alternative, unfortunately, appears to be a long-term one. The social causes which produce chronic diseases; the problems which drive men to commit "survival" crimes whereby they draw indeterminate or long prison sentences; and the monetary, political and social causes behind the drug

traffic in our communities-all of these must be eliminated before we will know that the men are, to use a popular cliché, “alive and well.”

Again, it is important to emphasize that the Black man cannot get his freedom and liberation from these crippling factors out of Black women. Black women did not take away his freedom, and they did not create the conditions which have crippled him. A man must wrest his liberation from the source that denied it to him in the first place.

We cannot afford to isolate the Black woman and analyze her roles, relationships and responsibilities outside the context of the Black man, the family and the community. Although, we can pinpoint certain negative features of her life and try to find solutions for them, they are interdependently related to the rest of the Black population.

While she represents the ideal model of what all womankind might very well try to become-feminine, courageous, humanitarian-it is also necessary to remember that she will remain the "carrier" of Black culture only if she is permitted to continue to make her contributions in the professions, the family, community-in a word, to nation-building. ■