Recorded on February 19, 2026, this video presents a lecture by Ula Taylor, Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies. The talk centered on Professor Taylor’s current work in progress, an oral biography of Frances M. Beal.
The talk was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.
Matrix Teach-Ins are a new series designed to bring UC Berkeley’s most engaging social science lectures into a public setting. Instructors will share their favorite lesson, the one students remember long after the semester ends, as a stand-alone lecture reimagined for anyone curious to learn.
Abstract
In this talk, I am going to share with you snapshots into the making of Frances M. Beal’s Black Feminist House. A house that she describes as being built by hindsight bricks, moments where she questioned, critiqued, or became angry about racism and gender oppression. The scenes are from a larger book-length project that explores how Beal became both a feminist and a radical during the 1960s and 70s. Understanding her intellectual and political evolution is important for 21st-century activists because I explore fatigue and failures alongside empowering sisterhood, pleasurable heterosexual sex, and disciplined study. By doing so, I aim to bring to the fore the exhaustion and exhilaration.
About the Speaker
Ula Taylor earned her doctorate in American History from UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities. Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Women’s History, Feminist Studies, SOULS, and other academic journals and edited volumes. In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for UC Berkeley. Only 5% of the academic senate faculty receive this honor, and she is the second African American woman in the history of the University to receive this award.
Podcast and Transcript
Watch the panel above or on YouTube. Or listen to the audio recording via the Matrix Podcast below (or on Apple Podcasts).
(upbeat electronic music)
[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
[MARION FOURCADE]
Welcome, everybody. My name is Marion Fourcade.
I’m the director of Social Science Matrix. Thank you all for joining us. If you’ve ever dreamed of going back to school, and as you can see, the room was set up by Sarah here.
You know, as a classroom. The teach-ins are, you know, the opportunity to do that. We wanted a space where we could invite fabulous teachers from Berkeley to deliver a lecture of their choice.
And if you’re wondering, you know, how we selected Professor Taylor, you know, we have no access to, like, teaching evaluations. And we, we had heard some rumors, but basically, the way that Sarah did this is she went on social media.
She went on Reddit, she went and she found all of these fabulous comments.
(laughing)
[ULA TAYLOR]
Wow, thank you.
[MARION FOURCADE]
So, so this is, you know, this is how we decided that Professor Taylor would be, you know, a wonderful person for the, for the teach-in. So we’re delighted to welcome her to teach a lecture on the making of Frances M. Beal’s Black Feminist House. In this lecture, Professor Taylor offers snapshots from her larger project, next book project, exploring the intellectual and political evolution of Frances M. Beal, reflecting on activism and sisterhood, and bringing into view the exhaustion and exhilaration of political struggle. Please note that today’s event is, is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies, and African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies.
I would also like to thank very, very, very warmly Ula for providing lunch for us today.
(audience applauding)
You know that we always, you know, mention the upcoming events. We have a lot this semester. I’ll just point out, you know, two in March, the first two in March.
We’ll have New Directions panel. New Directions panels are panels with graduate students only where they present their work. And we thought that, you know, post-colonial perspectives have become really important, especially for graduate students and so we wanted to, you know, highlight that.
And so we have a panel on colonial legacies and post-colonial perspectives. And then, of course, we hope to see you all at the Matrix-BESI Open House on March 11th.
Now, let me go back to my job a person who is introducing our speaker. Ula Taylor earned her doctorate in American History from UC Santa Barbara. She’s the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Woman and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey. The co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film, and co-editor of Black California Dreaming: The Crisis of California African American Communities. Her articles on African American women’s history and feminist theory have appeared in plenty of journals.
In 2013, she received a Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for the University of California, Berkeley. That was another reason. Only 5% of the academics and the faculty receive this honor, and she’s the second African American woman in the history of the university to receive this award.
So without further ado, let me turn it over to Ula.
(applause)
[ULA TAYLOR]
Thank you so much for being here. Can you all hear me okay? Okay, lovely. I’m so thankful.
I’m coming down with a little cold, so this is why I have my sweater and my beanie on, okay. So please excuse my attire at this point. But I want to thank you guys for being in attendance, taking time out of your lives to come here and sit with me in a room to talk about my work in progress.
I also want to thank Sarah, I had no clue that you had done all of that digging in order to contact me, and I appreciate all of your efforts. And Barbara Montano, who is our staff person in African American Studies, who at the last minute coordinated the food that you all are eating.
I’m excited to be here on the 19th day of Black History Month. My former student, Professor Jarvis Givens’ most recent book, To Make Me a World, is about Black History Month. And I want to read a paragraph that captures why this month is so important in 2026.
“The year 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of Negro History Week, which was established in February 1926 by famed educator and historian, Carter G. Woodson, then expanded to Black History Month in 1976. This milestone presents an opportunity to reflect on the Black historical tradition, a critically important task given the current political moment pertaining to what can and cannot be taught about race and history in American schools, and colleagues, or in colleges or engaged in public spaces. Such critical reflection is the purpose of To Make Me a World, which commemorates the 100-year journey of Black History Month by deeply engaging in the tradition that informed its creation. To thoughtfully engage this legacy, I will employ the language of Black memory work and Black memory workers as capacious terms borrowed from Black women archivists to describe the enterprise of recovering, preserving and bearing witness to Black history.”
I don’t need to tell anyone in this room about the worldly violence and chaos that is tugging at my heart as I stand here before you. Almost daily, I talk with Fran Beal about it. She is my sounding board and the memory worker who is most dear to me. She is also my youngest friend at the age of 86.
It was at her 75th birthday party that she asked me to write this book. So here I am, a decade and a year later, still grinding to put on the page a life filled with so many political lessons and just as many quotidian moments that reflect the history and culture of Black life. Fran and I have collaborated to narrate how race, class, gender, motherhood, and geography can shape possibilities in a capitalist-saturated, white supremist world. Our storytelling aims to bring to the fore a life history sutureed to transformative historical moments, McCarthyism, civil rights, the Vietnam War, Black Power, the women’s movement, and the New Left.
Today, I’m going to share with you snapshots into the making of Frances Beal’s Black feminist House, a house that she describes as being built by hindsight bricks, moments when she questioned, critiqued, or became angry about racism and gender oppression. The scenes are from a larger book-length project that explores how Beal became both a feminist and a radical, and why understanding her intellectual and political evolution is important for 21st century activists. Interpreting the life of a living subject can be filled with what I call formal intimacies, intellectual and emotional entanglements that require an innovative approach. My course of action is grounded in interdisciplinary methods, and overall can be defined as an oral memoir.
In the tradition of autobiography and griot storytelling, yet stretching beyond these narrative forms with interpretive analysis, I offer a seamless combination of a first and third person voices. Fran’s vision drives the storytelling. My third voice carefully leans into what she experienced and observed, both expanding and chronicling the most nuanced versions of her life.
Fran’s eye is boldly analytical, and my use of her name and the she pronoun layers her retelling. Ultimately, we present a brick-by-brick history that centers on the making of a radical Black feminist, her fantastic life, which continues to be lived in San Leandro, California.
Born in 1940 to a nonreligious Jewish mother and an African American father, Beal always felt alienated from everyone outside of her nuclear family. In fact, Black girlhood existed in Upstate Johnson City, New York because she lived there. It was in this small town that her radical parents were isolated as a political menace at the beginning of the Cold War.
Beal felt the sting of every newspaper paper article in detail and that that detailed their connection to the Communist Party and every racial epithet that marked her as other. As their only daughter, her coming-of-age experiences at times were different from her three brothers because of normative ideas about femininity. We begin in 1948, Johnson City, New York.
Like most kids, I felt free during outdoor play. But one of the first lessons about what girls shouldn’t do took place in the front yard of my grandmother’s house. During the 1940s and ’50s, girls only wore dresses, and I was climbing a big maple tree when I heard my Aunt Gert say, “Get out of that tree. I can see your panties.”
Showing my panties even during innocent play, at least in Aunt Gert’s thinking, was an unladylike act, and she was determined to make me into a respectable Black girl. I objected to these fences that were placed around me. I felt the contradictions and occasionally occurred them. But my Aunt Gert had her own strong will.
Brick number one. Historian Lindsay Jones reminds us that a pedagogy of play raises persistent questions about who has the power to determine what counts as girlish pleasures.
In the case of Fran, it was her Aunt Gert, who was watchful and used her commanding voice to redirect Fran. But why should a Black girl have to worry about possible eyes upon her covered bottom?
What could the image be mistaken for and how might it hinder the possibilities of Black girlhood? Aunt Gert’s critical gaze and words aimed to protect Fran in a racist patriarchal culture, and to counter the potential harm directly linked to stereotypes that haunt Black female bodies, no matter the age. Yet Fran recognized the inconsistencies.
Her three brothers were able to climb trees freely. Limited by notions of vulnerability, it was disturbing to Fran that her childhood play required regulation and discipline. Johnson City, 1950, New York. It was on a makeshift baseball diamond that I had my worst fight.
It was after supper, and it was on a lot near our house. My brother Raymond left the house before I did and arrived. And when I saw him, there were all these kids around him. He was 13 years old, and there was a white girl his age berating him and calling him all kind of racial epithets, calling him a nigger, a monkey, an ape, that should go back to the jungle, and she was poking him in his chest.
Immediately, I recognized her as Mary Ann, a girl in Raymond’s class. And he was just standing there because of my father’s words, “Boys never hit girls.” Brothers were not allowed to hit me, and I never saw my parents get into any kind of physical altercation.
Without hesitation, I weighed in and started to poke and hit her. It didn’t take long before she turned on me.
She was 13 years old and getting the best of me, badly beating my ass. My 10-year-old arms were flailing around, and fortunately for me, my hand caught ahold of her shirt and it started to rip. She stopped hitting me and crossed her arms to cover up her itty-bitty titties she was just beginning to grow.
I quickly saw a strategy before me. I stopped trying to hit her and went for the shirt, tearing it off while she tried to cover herself up, and then she started to run home.
I picked up stones and throw, threw them at her. I ran home with Raymond and burst into tears, telling my mother what had happened. Shortly thereafter, the phone rings and it’s Mary Ann’s mother.
She complained like hell and called me a little savage because of what I had done. I recall my mother saying, quote, ‘If your child will learn to behave and not use those kinds of words, these things wouldn’t happen, so you need to teach your child to behave.’ My mother accepted no blame.
W– when we were in this kind of s– situation, she didn’t say, ‘Well, you’re right. My kids shouldn’t fight.'” Although against violence, she believed in self-defense, and it was their fault for starting it. This fight was another example to me that my mother would back us up in these incidents.
Also, this fight exposed me to the dangers of a crowd. Kids were hooting and hollering and egging Mary Ann on when she was winning against my brother, and as soon as I started to win against her, they turned, like a chameleon, and were saying, ‘Go, go, go, go girl, go,’ like I was the leader of this mob. I felt uncomfortable about this because I was aware of lynchings and mob rule by the Nazis.” Brick number two.
“Fran recalled that boys shouldn’t hit girls, but she was clear that a girl could hit another girl when that said girl was a racist bully. At the beginning of the fight, Fran was losing in the face of a superior force.
It took an, it took exploiting an unscripted opening, the exposure of a developing female body, to survive the beat-down. Fran witnessed Mary Ann recoil and run away out of bodily shame. Visible 13-year-old breasts and later on, Fran’s so-called chubby body were deemed unseemly and examples of out of control flesh. Fran also recounted how the mob instigated the violence and quickly shifted loyalty.
It frightened her, as it should have. She came to play baseball, not to physically fight.”
The actions of Mary Ann ignited the battleground. Yet, in the view of Mary Ann’s mother, she was the victim of a little savage Fran’s mother, however, placed the onus back on Mary Ann and critiqued another mother for her lack of mothering. Self-defense reversed the violence, but culminate– culminated in Fran’s flowing tears.
Fighting back against hegemonic culture can be traumatic and painful. Fran learned early on that bumping and bruising were sometimes unavoidable and emotionally wrenching. Queens, New York, 1955. “Another family friend that I spent time with outside of babysitting was Bertha Hartman, who had three boys.”
Mm-hmm. It’s supposed to be that way. Okay.
“She was shocked that I didn’t know anything about Jewish culture. I was around 15 and went out to shoot some baskets with her 14-year-old. I was much better than him, and he told his mother that I had won. Bertha said something along these lines, that I should’ve let him win because he was a boy.
I recall being pissed off about it, and I told my mother, and my mother said, ‘Don’t listen to her because she’s stupid.’ “This was supposed to be a Communist family, but stereotypical gender roles were everywhere, and they weren’t supposed to exist in those communities. Even though my mother didn’t talk much in terms of women’s liberation, she behaved it. My brothers were supposed to take care of their own bedrooms, and we shared other chores, like running the vacuum and clearing the kitchen.” Brick number three.
Fran refused to play into gender games of letting the boy win for their ego. “stupid” was the word her mother used to deflate Bertha. Stupid as in she doesn’t understand, stupid as in seamless, stupid as in empty-headed, stupid as in dumb. The power in imagery of one word can go a long way in capturing a moment in time.
Her mother’s homespun feminism was largely rooted in practice, but occasionally she would speak an empowering word to her only daughter, which forged a feminist brick. Queens, New York, 1957. “by my senior year in high school, Jimmy and I were going steady. I needed, I knew I needed more protection.
We used a lot of condoms because I left it up to Jimmy against becoming pregnant. We were screwing like rabbits. “Before Jimmy, I only knew about the missionary position.
He taught me a whole lot more about sex. One weekend, we never left my attic bedroom.
Sex and water are all I remember. I went to the Margaret Sanger Clinic because I had heard it was semi-private and you could get birth control there with no questions asked. I got a diaphragm, but we didn’t use it 100% of the time.
I was caught off guard when I missed my period and realized I was pregnant. Jimmy was very supportive. We agreed that I was too young to have a baby. I was preparing for college and we were not ready to be parents.
Jimmy took over and found someone to give me a back-alley abortion. It was 1957.
I was 17 years old, and it was stereotypical, in Harlem, on top of a kitchen table. The Black woman stuck a tube in me and gave me the medical instruction. If I started bleeding heavily, go to the hospital.
Afterwards, Jimmy took me back to his apartment in the Bronx. Later, we went dancing, and I started to feel really bad.
We went back to the apartment and I was bleeding all over the place. When it didn’t stop, Jimmy took me to a hospital in the Bronx. The nurses kept asking me, “What did you do?
What did you do?” I replied, “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything.” I was afraid and told Jimmy, “You got to get me a ring so they think we’re married.” The staff continued to batter me with the same question, “What did you do?
What did you do?” I was crying on the table. A nurse said to me, “Easier going up than coming down, isn’t it?” I don’t recall the details after that because I almost died.
I was taken to a hospital ward with older women. The conversation in the room was filled with raw sexual talk. I heard one woman flirting with a doctor say, “Hey, baby.
Oh, that feels good.” I have to say this was not my class background and I was terrified. But all of these women had had abortions, some saying it was their second and third time. I felt ashamed that this had happened to me.
At the same time, these women gave me a bit of comfort. I remember thinking, “This stuff happens to women. I’m not the only one.” Soon thereafter, a classmate, Cordelia, died after a botched backstreet abortion.
I was struck by this sad news and immediately thought, “This could have been my fate.” Her death had a profound effect on me, and I later learned when I studied the subject of reproductive rights that tens of thousands of women died each year from back-alley abortions. Brick number four.
When Fran and Jimmy agreed to move forward with an abortion, they entered into a realm of illegal activity. She recalls dancing after the procedure.
As she moved her feet, swayed her hips, and lifted her hands above her head, she might have felt a kind of physical release from an unwanted pregnancy. Yet when her body began to show signs that everything was not all right, Fran found herself in a hospital ward with other desperate women.
She believed that her class differences were announced to her by the language that she heard. But her own privilege had not shielded her from being in that same ward. Class, nonetheless, could shape how a woman experienced an abortion. For example, one woman, Ria Duncan, recalled her abortion experiences in the 1950s in New York State by proclaiming, “Almost everything I know about abortions I learned from not being able to get one.”
As a married woman with a history of miscarriages, Ria had had three faulty fetuses removed in the hospital by a procedure commonly known as a D&C abortion. She thought the question of legality didn’t apply to her, but after she became sick and her gynecologist had no reason to remove the fetus, she had few choices.
With heavy Black poison seeping through her body, Ria asked her father, who was a physician, why she couldn’t get an abortion. He told her, quote, “Unless rape could be proved or near certain death predicted for the mother, doctors who performed abortions in 1957 could lose their license, even go to jail.” Ria’s father used his professional contacts and sent her to two other doctors, but their fear overcame friendship, and both refused to perform the procedure. In desperation, Ria considered an illegal abortion, but her father suggested that she get a psychiatrist to diagnose that she was emotionally incapable of raising a child.
This won the approval from a gynecologist for the abortion. Fran didn’t have Ria’s resources. Ria was an elite married woman, and her story helps to contextualize why so many women and girls were reduced to backstreet abortions. Usually performed by an unlicensed person, the procedure could be fatal if improperly done in unsanitary conditions.
Fran shared that she almost died and her high school classmate, Cordelia, did. In addition to the health risk, along with the person who performed the procedure, all could be indicted for breaking the law. The surveillance of working-class urban communities, like Harlem, resulted in the press reporting on clusters of abortion prosecutions during the 1950s. To proceed with an abortion, given that death and jail were ever present, speaks to Fran and other women’s unflinching resolve against having a child, for whatever reason.
Madison, Wisconsin, 1958. The Black population at the University of Madison was only a sprinkling here and there.
It was shameful because at least there’s Milwaukee and some other big cities. Most of the Black students were male athletes and scholarship recipients. There was one other Black woman in the dorm who was the daughter of a doctor. We were not particularly close.
She was a Jack and Jill Club type. I got invited to a meeting as a Negro student to help found the Delta Sororities on campus. I met for the first time four or five of the Black women who I didn’t even know were at the school. First of all, just getting ready for the meeting was a joke, because I didn’t have the appropriate attire.
I knew I was expected to wear a black dress, a girdle, black heels, stockings, and pearls, and I didn’t have most of those things. I remembered Harriet Tasman going into her closet and pulling out this dress that I ended up wearing. Harriet was also in the integrated liberal studies, and later I met her again in SNCC. We get to this meeting and I’m ultra-left up the gazoo.
I should have kept my mouth shut. I was already anti-Jill and cotillions, and now I’m also anti-sororities. These were not the things I was interested in. They ended up not forming a chapter because they felt they had lacked a critical mass.
At that time, I really didn’t understand the role of Black institutions and how important they were. I just saw this gathering as a mean group of people. Had I done enough investigation, I would have learned that the Deltas were the intellectuals.
Later, when I was working for the National Council of Negro Women national president of the Delta showed up at one of the board meetings wearing an Afro, and shared that she was confronted at her sorority meeting. The Deltas had asked her when she was going to stop wearing that afro, and she said, “When it starts growing straight, I’ll wear it straight.”
(laughter)
Brick number five. Hair texture, attire, and constricting undergarments were shackles for many Black women. The time, effort, and money it took to look unlike oneselves w– was factored into why many Black women decided to embrace aspects of women’s liberation.
Although Fran does not recall the details of why she felt the Deltas were a mean group of people, she clearly didn’t feel comfortable in their presence, and attributed her leftist thinking to being at odds with middle-class organizations. Exploitative capitalism and racial discrimination were intertwined in the enemies to be fought against. Fran had little patience for any other kind of political conversation.
Queens, New York, 1960. “We had a lovely wedding reception in my mother’s backyard. Mildred’s father, who was a sergeant in the Army and part-time caterer, provided a tasty feast. Many years had passed, and she never, and he never forgotten that my mother refused to press charges against his daughter.
My mother brought the food, but he wouldn’t pay, let her pay for the preparation or the service of it. He also let us cut down the bushes that separated our backyard lawns to enlarge the space.
I remember his generosity. The table and chairs were set up on Mildred’s lawn. The garage was the dancing area, and our backyard was for co-mingling.
Aunt Ida took a lot of photos at the reception. Jimmy’s family came all the way from New Jersey and attended as guests. The one thing that really bothered me at the reception was that my family handed Jimmy all of the wedding cash– because he was the man. Even my left family was stuck in gender norms that were discriminating against me.”
Brick number six. Fran’s work life began at the young age of 10. Her father had created a newspaper route for her and her brothers.
He pounded home the importance of honorable work and saving one’s money. As a teenager, Fran was a babysitter for progressive families, and in college, employed as an academic counselor and tutor.
She took pride in living within her means, and putting away cash for a rainy day. This money situation at the wedding reception, and later on in their marriage, was exceptionally hard for Fran because of their contrasting views toward money.
She was a spender– he was a spender, and she had been caught, she had been taught to be a penny-pincher. Scholars have analyzed how money can be manipulated, and used as a vice grip to uphold patriarchal power. This money exchange made Fran mindful of financial dependency, and how left families could also be committed to masculine notions of heads of households.
Paris, France, August 1960. “the six to se– the six to seven-day voyage to Paris from New York was our honeymoon. We played shuffleboard and enjoyed each other. Jimmy knew a whole lot more about sex, and we used his Kama Sutra book– which was a popular underground bestseller, to guide us.
We had sex everywhere, in the bathroom, in the bedroom, and at all times of the day. As he pulled me into his body, I became more and more uninhibited.
We were young, and I really enjoyed making love with him.” Brick number seven. Fran consistently describes how she enjoyed sex. Although she had moments of guilt when she was sexually active and unmarried, she didn’t deny herself the pleasure.
It was, however, a secret that she shared only with her lovers and her diary. A sisterly conversation about sex was stifled, because her generation was saddled with a binary tag of virgin or whore. And marriage was no guarantee that a woman would eventually embrace her sexuality.
For example, WEB Du Bois explained that his first wife, Nina, was uncomfortable in the bedroom, and it impacted their relationship. Quote, “My wife’s long-life training as a virgin made it almost impossible for her to ever regard sexual intercourse as not fundamentally indecent. I took careful restraint on my part not to make her unhappy at this most beautiful of human experiences.”
End of quote. Fran was not Nina. In tune with her body and the erotic feelings stoked with sexual intimacy, she by-steped the divide and said yes to sexual pleasure. Paris, France, 1960.
I’ve got to go a little faster. “it was late 1960. I was pregnant again.
In France, even contraception was illegal, let alone abortions. As a Catholic country, there was no separation of c– church and state.
This reality lingered over me during the early weeks of my pregnancy. I was fearful, but we agreed that I should have another abortion. Jimmy once again led the way by securing information through a coworker, who was a Communist. A Communist medical student came to our home and gave me a tubal abortion.
He told me if there was excessive bleeding to go to the hospital only after I had passed a heavy clot. After he left, I was bleeding heavily, but I waited. A day or so later, I passed something big in the toilet and began to feel really weak. I thought I was going to die.
Jimmy took me to the American hospital because he wanted to be able to converse in English. The hospital was far away in the western suburbs.
Like my experience in the United States, the hospital attendants badgered me, saying, ‘You better tell us what you did. Otherwise, we won’t know how to treat you.’ I had been coached not to admit anything.” Brick number eight. Pregnancy risk fluttered around Fran and Jimmy’s pleasurable sex life.
She was a wife, but not ready to be a mother. The life-threatening fear that Fran had experienced in Harlem was now compounded by life-threatening fear in Paris. Fran knew what was at stake. It didn’t matter if you were in France or in New York, a woman’s body was not her own in either place because abortion– abortions were illegal.
All of the possible medical risk of illegal abortions were not kept at bay by swapping a Harlem table with a bed in a Paris home. Her body hemorrhaged for several days. She was forced to go to the hospital to save her life. Death hovered, but she admitted nothing to avoid criminalization.
Paris, France, 1961. It was impossible not to see evidence of multiple wars in Paris. Remnants of World War II were not just the selling of cats as rabbits. Former World War II soldiers, many of whom were– whom were amputees, sold lottery tickets on the street.
The political past mingled with the President. President Charles de Gaulle initiated peace talks with the view of ending direct colonial control of Algeria. In response, a flood of former French colonists fled Algeria, to the outrage of the French.
Looked down upon as tainted by Africa, the French po– pejoratively called them Blackfeet. I even felt this personally.
In class and on Paris streets, I was often misidentified as Algerian. Algerian students would come up to me speaking in Arabic because they assumed I was Algerian. This happened repeatedly. First, I would start stuttering in French, but eventually I would say in English, “I am a Negro American.”
Algerians got angry and didn’t believe me. I would continue in English saying, “I don’t understand. I am an American.” My Americanness became a kind of buffer to scary situations.
Paris was not my home. I was an expatriate and needed to interact on that basis. I told my friend Julia Wright, daughter of Richard, about these incidents, and she explained to me that they thought I was trying to pass. Julia’s political colleague, Herve, was Algerian, or at least that’s what he said back then.
I learned years later when they were no longer a couple that he was a swarthy French Jewish guy. He was an Afrophile who could pass for Algerian.
Brick number nine. Context can uniquely mark embodiment. Black subjecthood is a complicated construction that Herve was drawn to. Laced with creativity and clawback, it’s seductive for those who seek to replicate powerful self-possession.
At the same time, loathed and violently desired by their oppressors, Black bodies must fight for their humanity. In the case of Frances, her body was read as both Black and white in the United States, and in Paris as Arab.
Jim Crow racialization in the United States placed Frances in and out of danger. But in Paris, a misstep could make her a target for deadly violence, given that the Algerian political terrain included the FLN opposition, the Algerian National Movement. Moreover, the protection afforded darker-hued Black Americans in Paris was elusive to Frances. No matter where she lived, Frances could never fully shake loose from racial categorization and all of its violent baggage.
Paris, France, 1964. My days were mapped by breastfeeding schedules and increased domestic work.
One time, I spent the entire day scrubbing the hardwood floors, and Jimmy came into the house and ran upstairs to change his clothes. When he returned downstairs, I was sitting in the living room expecting praise for my hard work. Instead, he aggressively said, “How come the bed is not made?” When he asked that question, I was furious because I had spent three to four hours scrubbing with steel wool on my hands and knees to pick up the embedded dirt I then swept away that dirt with a heavy corn broom. I sealed the floor and stairs with wax.
I became a human buffer, sliding across the floor with a dry towel under my feet, not stopping until it shined like new money, only for Jimmy to notice the unmade bed. I learnt that day that Jimmy, and most people, only saw housework by what was not done as opposed to what was finished.
Brick number 10. Housework is one of the most underappreciated forms of labor.
Why women do this under capitalism is connected to patriarchal culture. Housework can also be linked to the political economy of establishing non-egalitarian households. No wonder housework, littered with inescapable subordination, was a major site for women’s liberation.
Once Fran had clarity on how undervalued housework was in her home, she pulled back from investing in it and attaching her worth to it. Paris, France, 1964.
In Paris, I continued to consume news about the United States’ freedom movement and anti-colonial efforts in Africa and the Caribbean islands. So much was going on which magnified my understanding that revolution was in the air.
But it wasn’t enough for me to take comfort in my knowledge. I felt that I had to participate in making the world that I so desperately wanted for myself and my girls. Each day already presented some form of challenge: my children, Jimmy, my classes.
So why not add something to my life that aimed at what I perceived to be the global root of violence and injustice, racism and its intersection with the United States empire? There would be no magical way to make this come about.
I couldn’t add more hours to the day, and I certainly couldn’t anticipate every family need. Over time, however, I found it more difficult to be on the periphery of the movement.
I was also becoming less attractive to Paris and more drawn to the epicenter of the struggle in the United States. So when I heard that the political collective Présence Africaine vowed to bring Malcolm X to Paris on November 23rd, 1964, I saw this as a perfect opportunity to fully engage with like-minded folks. Ellen Wright hosted the meeting, planning meetings at her home.
She was the widow of Richard Wright and worked as the executive of his estate. Attending these gatherings where people discussed the dynamics of Black liberation were invigorating for me. It was at Ellen’s that I met Carlos Moore, a Cuban expatriate who later became the darling of the right wing by speaking against and calling Cuba racist. Sandy Bethune, who was a West Indian po– poet, was also there.
Ellen was raising money to pay for the venue and I had 50 francs, $10.00 in my purse, and I quickly gave it up. That was a lot of money, and Jimmy gave me a dirty look and did not give a dime.
Yet imagine helping to ensure that the logistics were in place and on the day of the event, I almost missed Malcolm X’s talk because I couldn’t find a babysitter. Brick number 11.
Teenage babysitters kept the nuclear family afloat, which is why scrambling to find one was the hallmark of modern motherhood. Earning between 35 and 55 cents per hour, Life Magazine reported in 1957 that 48% of America’s 7.9 million teenage girls were babysitters.
In this informal economy, teenagers could be exploited: sexual advances, employers adding unexpected expectations of housecleaning, not paying upon the agreed amount. Fran had been one of those teen babysitters in America. All right as a mother, she knew that the babysitting challenges were directly linked to how the term disguised the hard work.
When she cared for the children of Gerda Lerner, who would help to usher in the academic field of women’s history, Elaine Jones, who broke the color bar as the first Black member of the New York Philharmonic, and Ewart Guinier, the first department chair of African America Studies at Harvard University, and the father of famed civil rights attorney Lo– Lani Guinier, all of whom were her mother’s left-wing contacts, Fran clearly knew that babysitting required doing so much more than just sitting.
(laughter)
New York, 1966. Jimmy and I split up for good when he stopped coming home to our house in Great Neck. He had disappeared into the ether and I’m scared out of my mind. I’ve never lived on my own, let alone with two small children.
I can’t handle the rent by myself and I begin to look for a better job in the city. My brother told me to take the civil service exam, which I did. When I heard I was in the top 1% of the applicants, I believed a good job was around the corner.
In the meantime, I found a regular job in Manhattan as a legal secretary in a real estate firm. The job is horrible, but I have to work to maintain my family. I find an apartment near my mother on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens. The neighborhood is all Black and poor.
The apartment is on the second tier and is roach-infested. One day, Anne is putting on her sneaker and a huge roach is inside. She went to put on the other shoe and felt a big water bug.
For years, Anne would never put on a pair of shoes without shaking them upside down first. Working at the real estate office gives me insight into the laws.
I take the landlord to court over the roaches. I also have to push the same landlord down the stairs when he propositioned me. I need heat in my unit, not a creepy man who feels he can take advantage of me. Poverty is tough.
No mother wants her child to be cold and afraid at home. Brick number 12. Working hard and still poor. This could be a mantra for the working class.
Single Black mothers like Fran felt the snowball effect of low wages, high rent, few benefits, and the constant pressure to live on a tight schedule and a restrictive budget. Capitalism and racism framed how Fran and her children lived a life of struggle.
Poor working Black women were the demographic that Fran was most concerned about as an activist because she had to solve her own problems. The heartfelt cry of her daughter’s fear made Fran even more committed to radical change.
In conclusion, overall, Fran Beale’s experiences highlight how a woman of a certain era could become a Black feminist. As Fran became committed to building a more just world with her comrades, she reflected on her experiences in consciousness-raising groups, where she and other activists were forced to recall and rethink their lives.
Fran was often caught off guard by the insightful knowledge and marveled at why it had previously escaped her. Her life encounters provided an unpredictable understanding of herself and others.
Black feminism, for Fran, was not a politic that came from one experience or one moment in her life. It was a culmination of the brick of girlhood frustrations, the brick of early adolescent battles, the brick of teenage gendered expectation, the brick of abortions, the brick of sexual pleasure, the brick of housework, and the brick of single motherhood. All and so many other theoretical and practical life bricks informed the construction of her Black feminist house, grounded in social justice feminism. Thank you for your attention.
(applause)
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[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
