Abstract
“My work is not traditional. I like it that way. If people tell me to turn my ends under, I’ll leave them raggedy. If they tell me to make my stitches small and tight, I’ll leave them loose. Sometimes you can trip over my stitches they’re so big. You can always recognize the traditional quilters who come by and see my quilts. They sort of cringe. They fold their hands in front of them as if to protect themselves from the cold. When they come up to my work they think to themselves, “God, what has happened here – all these big crooked stitches.” I appreciate these quilters. I admire their craft. But that’s not my kind of work. I would like them to appreciate what I’m doing. They are quilters. But I am an artist. And I tell stories.”
- Yvonne Wells, quoted in Stitching Memories: African American Story Quilts (Grudin, 1990)
This quote appears at the beginning of one of my favorite articles written by the historian Elsa Barkley Brown (1992). I have read the quote many times, and each time Wells’s description of her craft resonates with me. It describes so well the challenges and risks posed by doing work that is outside of the disciplinary canon, particularly feminist work that challenges core assumptions and methods of the orthodoxy.
In last year’s NEA Presidential address, Linwood Tauheed (2021) marked the beginning of our commemoration of 100 Years of African American Economists by suggesting that we “strike out on our own behalf and search for the solutions to our community’s problems by creating and employing our own lamps” that shed light on the economic problems that Black communities face, given the failures of mainstream economic analysis. Professor Tauheed’s address was a call to action to NEA members to increase our efforts to address the persistent racial disparities and daunting challenges facing our community.
Today, I would like to cap off the NEA’s commemoration of 100 Years of African American Economists by talking about my own efforts to shine a light on the unseen work of African American women and the continuing need for counter-hegemonic knowledge that more accurately reflects our history as we move into the next 100 years of African American Economists.
My research was borne out of frustration over African American women’s omission from the history of women and work within the economics profession. This neglect is inexcusable given the central role that African American women have played in the history of women and work in the U.S. Yet, Black women’s work – so vital to our community and nation – has so often been unseen or distorted.
I first began to think about the absence of Black women from the knowledge base about women and work when I was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the 1990s. As I contemplated topics for a dissertation, I realized that I had acquired a lifetime of classroom knowledge about European and Euro-American thoughts, writings, behavior, and cultural expressions but very little scholarly knowledge about African Americans. I was fortunate to have studied economics with scholars writing within a Marxist and Socialist-Feminist tradition. Their research, however, focused on 19th and 20th century white American households and industrial workplaces. I wondered to what extent were these theories applicable to African Americans as they became absorbed within the industrial sector and began the process of Proletarianization? The newly emerging field of Feminist Economics also influenced me since it provided a powerful critique of mainstream epistemology, methods, and methodologies in terms of gender. However, insurgent writings by Black feminist scholars, Patricia Hill Collins (1990), Kimberly Crenshaw (1989), Rose Brewer (1993), and Elsa Barkley Brown (1992) – among others - problematized the very concept of gender itself by insisting that it be contextualized racially.
My research has been an attempt to synthesize theoretical contributions from these divergent feminist traditions as they relate to African American women’s economic experience in the U.S. Given limitations in secondary data sources on African American women prior to the late 20th century, I learned the necessity of using archival research in order to obtain primary sources of information about African American women that included their own voices and self-perceptions. Importantly, by reading feminist literature outside of economics on the process of restoring women to history, I became aware of the ethics of unearthing African American women’s economic history so that it accurately reflects their values and priorities rather than my own. In so doing, I have tried to shine a light on the work that African American women have performed for the Black community so that their unseen work is visible and valued.
Feminist economist Myra Strober (2003:5) states that feminist economists believe that “what one chooses to work on and how one formulates theories and policy recommendations are dependent upon one’s culture, one’s position in society, and one’s life experiences.” Indeed. My early research tried to honor generations of African American women who labored long hours in socially devalued domestic service jobs but whose labor was so crucial for sustaining their families and communities.
As a feminist economist, I have thought a lot about women’s performance of unpaid household work in theory and in my own life. After I became a lone parent, I began to view feminist economists’ emphasis on the household as inadequate for capturing African American women’s unpaid work because it focused on relations within couples at a time when African American women are increasingly unlikely to be part of a couple. The emphasis that feminist economists often place on relations between men and women as the basis for women’s oppression overlooks the role of race and its oppressive effects on the lives of racialized women and girls.
In a Review of Black Political Economy article (Banks, 2020) published last year, I developed a broader economic framework of women’s unpaid work that drew on African American women’s long history of collectively working together to address racial disparities in response to unmet community needs and community harms. I re-conceptualized their community activism as economic activities that involve unpaid, nonmarket work. In the intersectional feminist political economy framework that I developed, the Community is a site of production on par with both the Firm and the Household. My analysis illustrates the ways in which racialized women experience multiple, intersecting forms of oppression – exploitation, dominance, and exclusion – in these different sites of production. Bringing the community into an economic framework enables economists to have a more accurate analysis of the ways in which racial exclusion and isolation and physical and structural violence operate to sustain and reproduce racial inequities.
Feminism also gave me the impetus to recover the economic thought and unseen economic life of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander – the nation’s first African American economist. I became aware of Sadie Alexander as a graduate student when a graduate student friend 1 in the History Department showed me an entry on Sadie Alexander in the newly released volume, Black Women in America (Hine et al., 1993). It noted that Alexander was the first Black woman to earn a doctorate degree in economics in the U.S. I wondered why I had never heard of her in any of my undergraduate or graduate economics classes. A few years later, around 1997, while still a graduate student writing a dissertation in the new field of Feminist Economics, I ran across Sadie Alexander’s 1930 Opportunity Magazine article, “Negro Women in Our Economic Life.” It was in an anthology of African American feminist thought that I was using in a class that I was co-teaching.
The short article peaked my curiosity because I recognized that Alexander was discussing ideas about the devaluation of women’s household work with the rise of markets as the basis for production that were at the heart of feminist economic analysis some seventy years later. Although scholars outside of economics have researched Sadie Alexander’s life as a legal professional and civil rights activist, she was a footnote in economic analysis until 1991 when economist Julianne Malveaux published an article on Alexander in the American Economic Review (AER). Julianne’s mentor, Phyllis Wallace, had suggested that she look into Sadie Alexander as a topic for an American Economic Association (AEA) conference session on Black Economic History. 2 That suggestion inspired Julianne’s research. Julianne’s AER article explored the implications of the loss of Alexander’s economic thought to the nation and the economics profession in particular because of her inability to gain employment as an economist when she finished her doctorate degree in 1921. Due to gender and racial discrimination, no employer hired Sadie Alexander into an economics position. Julianne’s incisive, brilliant article inspired my research on Sadie Alexander.
Knowing that other feminist economists were doing archival research to uncover and to reclaim the economic thought of early white women economists, I felt the need to go to the University of Pennsylvania Archives in order to see if I could find some bits of information from Alexander’s life that indicated that she had continued to focus on economic issues. The general thinking at the time when I started my research in 2003 was that Sadie Alexander had let go of her interest in economics after becoming an attorney in 1927 (Malveaux, 1991). My hope was to see if I could uncover enough information in order to piece together a record of Alexander’s economic thought after she obtained her doctorate. I did not expect to find much but, based on my previous experience doing archival research, I knew the places in historical records to look for the evidence. Not long after I began researching Alexander’s archival files, I saw that she had left behind a large number of handwritten and typed speeches and as I read them, I realized that most of the speeches were about the economic status of African Americans (Bucknell World, 2006). From the 1920s to the 1970s, Sadie Alexander addressed a range of organizations and discussed economic issues affecting African Americans in most of the speeches (Banks, 2005). Alexander was an active member of many local and national civic organizations and she served in elected positions at the national level in the National Urban League, Delta Sigma Theta sorority, and National Bar Association.
The deeper I dug through the extensive archival collection of over 81 boxes, I was shocked and delighted to discover that Sadie Alexander had actually spent her life fighting for economic rights and full economic inclusion for African Americans. I determined that an overriding theme of her speeches was economic justice (Banks, 2008). The employment discrimination that Sadie Alexander experienced as a Black woman did not prevent her from continuing to use her economic knowledge and reasoning. Instead, it served as a catalyst for her lifelong challenges to economic and political policies and practices that were discriminatory and oppressive towards African Americans.
I also found by reading through numerous boxes of old correspondence that Sadie Alexander had in fact always continued to think of herself as an economist and had continued to function as an economist – even while having a very demanding career as an attorney (Alexander & Banks, 2021). Sadie Alexander was an economist in the public realm and yet her life as an economist was overlooked and, eventually, even her place as our first African American economist was forgotten within the economics profession. 3 In 2003, as a new assistant professor of economics, I resolved to restore Sadie Alexander’s economic thought to the economics discipline in order to right the historic wrong of her omission from the profession. As I gradually made my way through Alexander’s archival records, I came to the realization that her importance in African American history extended beyond the economics profession and that I would need to write a biography in addition to an edited volume of her speeches and writings.
The importance of historical memory was not lost on Sadie Alexander. Indeed, historical memory was a theme that ran through most of her speeches. The early speeches, for example, focused on the significant contributions of Africans and their African American descendants to the economic, political, and cultural development of the United States. Alexander noted the omission of Black American contributions from our history books and that the nation’s educational system encouraged white Americans to think of themselves as superior and encouraged all groups to think of Black Americans as inferior. About our nation’s history, in the 1920s, Alexander stated, “The histories you study, prepared by white men whose purpose is to impress on your minds the superiority of their race, have either omitted or mentioned briefly and without comment, regarding their true import” (Alexander & Banks, 2021:9).
As a result, Alexander provided a counter history of African Americans that defied prevailing beliefs that Black people were racially inferior by documenting African American economic, cultural, and political contributions to the nation. These speeches provided oppositional knowledge about African Americans and their ability to prevail in a hostile nation. In the 1920s, she also spoke of cultural contributions in literature and music, saying: “The Negro has contributed as is now established the only American music. The Spirituals which we once were ashamed of, thank God, we have come ourselves to appreciate and to realize are a unique contribution to American art. The jazz music of today, which has taken not only America but Europe, is the product of Negro genius…. jazz—it represents in every detail, the blare, the rush, the discord of modern America. Our music is destined to place us with the great gifted races of the world” (Alexander & Banks, 2021:15).
Alexander further described Black Americans as a people whose significant economic and cultural contributions to the nation were made under extreme forms of oppression and whose challenges to racial inequities made them the actual bearers of American democracy, saying in 1947, “The American Negroes are not beggars for privileges but rather we are leaven in the bread of [the] American way of life, prickers of the conscience of the people, sentinels of justice (Alexander & Banks, 2021:210).” With respect to economic contributions, Sadie Alexander stated in 1936 “The Negro has undoubtedly contributed more labor in proportion to his numbers to American civilization than any other of the many racial groups that constitute this heterogeneous population (Alexander & Banks, 2021:30).” African American’s greatest accomplishment, she believed, however, was their ability to survive in a hostile land through 300 years of racial tyranny (Alexander & Banks, 2021).
The speeches that Sadie Alexander delivered – primarily to Black audiences - left not only a record of her intellectual thought but also a social history of African-Americans through major periods of the 20th century. Sadie Alexander, therefore, occupies a unique position in our history of economics not just as the first African-American economist but also as the only African-American economist who lived through and chronicled the political economic changes that affected African Americans’ economic status through major periods of the 20th century: World War I and Great Migration, Great Depression and World War II and post war era, Civil Rights era and racial uprisings, and the job losses of the 1970s. The only economist.
Unlike her white economist counterparts, Sadie Alexander developed solutions to our community’s problems by creating and employing her own lamp that shed light on the central role racial oppression played in our economy. As a broadly trained Institutional economist, Alexander focused on systemic, structural oppression in education, jobs, housing, health, policing, criminal justice, and voting. Her economic recommendations specifically benefitted African Americans through policies that were compensatory. She advocated for an expansion of citizenship rights to include federal job guarantees in order to counter persistent job discrimination against African Americans and public works programs that provided jobs that addressed urgent social needs (Banks, 2008).
Sadie Alexander’s economics was based on liberation of the Black masses –working class African American men and women who were relegated to low-wage Black jobs that often put them in harm’s way and who suffered from high rates of unemployment and economic precarity. In this regard, her economics was consistent with an earlier African-American feminist tradition that viewed Black women’s liberation as inextricably tied to policies that also benefitted the larger community of African American men and children (Banks, 2005). Theirs’ was a bottom-up feminism that is unlike the liberal or corporate feminism so prevalent today that seeks to provide an elite group of women access to circles of power held by white men. Sadie Alexander, however, was against the idea that advances of the few into positions of power led to meaningful social change. She expressed this sentiment in 1935 when discussing the plight of domestic workers by stating, “I ask you, what advantage to the Negro laborer are a dozen Assistant Attorney Generals in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and Illinois when legislation specifically dooms the masses to starvation wages, unemployment and poverty? The ultimate solution of our problem lies in obtaining the favorable laws to protect and advance the Negro masses (Alexander & Banks, 2021:164).”
The knowledge of Sadie Alexander’s life and work as an economist would have remained lost to the economics profession had I not gone in search of it and persisted in my research to excavate it despite considerable challenges and setbacks over a nearly twenty year period. Some of the challenges were logistical and others were tied to the difficulties of publishing and securing funding for research that is qualitative, archival, and focused on an African American woman in a discipline that places little value on each of these and, especially, on their combination. The outcome of my research has been the recovery of the intellectual thought of the first African American economist and publication of the only book that evaluates the economic thought of an African American woman economist.
Seeing African American Economists’ Work
The omission of Sadie Alexander’s ideas from our historical memory is a reflection of the time during which she lived when white Americans often overlooked or dismissed the critical thought of African-American scholars and intellectuals, most of whom operated in racially segregated institutions because of white exclusion. Racial segregation, therefore, undermined Sadie Alexander’s life as well as the collective memory of her life. Sadie Alexander’s omission from the history of economic thought also occurred because she did not publish books or articles in economic journals. Unlike other economists who published in academic journals, I found that Sadie Alexander conveyed her ideas about the economic status of African Americans primarily through the spoken word to non-academic audiences.
Last year, Patrick Mason shared a story with me about African American economist Rhonda Williams. They had talked about the difficulty African American economists have in publishing, and Patrick said, “Rhonda explained something important. She said, "We have to publish to leave footprints. We have to publish so that others will have something to build on." So, for Rhonda, research and journal publications weren't a selfish/careerist activity. It was her contribution to the struggle; we are all part of a collective enterprise.”
4
On June 15, 2021, I published an edited volume of Sadie Alexander’s economic speeches and writings on the 100th anniversary to the day of when she received her doctorate degree with Sadie Alexander as the author. Alexander’s footprints are now visible so that we can finally recognize her part in our collective struggle.
Over the past year, the NEA has tried to shed light on the footprints of subsequent generations of Black American economists for their pioneering efforts to confront racism within the economics profession and our nation more generally. 5
Our Commemoration of 100 Years of African American Economists has provided many opportunities to listen to the wisdom of our Founders, our Cornerstone Economists, and our Westerfield recipients as they reflected on our past, our present, and our possibilities as we move forward into the next 100 years while leaving a legacy for those who will follow in their footprints. 6 As my friend Rhonda Sharpe so frequently notes, these are the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
Like Sadie Alexander, these scholars and other Black American economists have produced oppositional knowledge about Black life in the U.S., knowledge that challenges the central assumptions and claims of mainstream economic analysis. Black American economists have always been critical of the failures of the economics discipline to address persistent and deep racial disparities and have always been at the forefront in developing bold and innovative initiatives that would diminish racial disparities and inequities if implemented. There is much that the profession can and should learn from Black American economists who produce oppositional knowledge.
Additionally, one of the defining characteristics of Black American economists has been their commitment to scholarly activism, according to Jim Stewart (2015), our centennial year Westerfield recipient. Activism is what propelled our association into existence in 1969 by our Founders as an act of protest against racism in the economics profession and as a means for addressing the extreme underrepresentation of Black economists (Browne, 1970; Simms, 2020). The vision and efforts of NEA members led to the creation of institutions that are central to addressing racial inequities within the profession. Their efforts led to the creation of the AEA summer pipeline program, started in 1974 for undergraduates from underrepresented groups who are interested in entering doctoral programs in economics (Alexis, 1975). According to Simms (2020), a meeting between delegates from the Caucus of Black Economists and the AEA Executive Committee led to the formation of the Committee on the Education and Training of Minority Economists in 1969, later becoming the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics (CSMEG) profession. Our journal, the Review of Black Political Economy is the premiere economic journal on matters of race and ethnicity and the economic status of Black Americans and other members of the African diaspora (Coleman, 2020; Jones 2020; Sharpe, 2020; Simms, 2020; Swinton, 2020). 7
Jim’s notion of scholarly activism means that Black economists have a tradition of engaging in scholarship that – like Sadie Alexander - is informed by their association with Black civic organizations. Scholarly activism also means that Black American economists have a tradition of producing knowledge that is responsive to the needs of the Black community. Their research has not been undertaken primarily for “selfish/careerist” purposes but rather so that they can enhance the lives and wellbeing of Black people by producing useful knowledge.
As I reflect on the 100-year history of African American economists, it is clear that we must reclaim prior knowledge and strategies and our ways of doing things that were beneficial to our community. The NEA webinar series has captured some of this knowledge. 8 We will supplement the webinar series with an oral history project guided by the wise insights of Willene Johnson, a current NEA Board member, and a written monograph that together will provide a narrative of our history, preserved for posterity.
We must also reclaim prior institutions that supported and carried out our community values. The launch of the Black Economic Research Center for the 21st Century is an ideal way for us to honor Robert Browne and Black economists connected to BERC for leaving us a legacy of activism and socially responsible research that will continue to serve the needs of everyday people (Browne, 1993). 9 Our people.
It has been my great privilege to serve as NEA president during a year when we honored our pioneering leaders. Rhonda Sharpe conceived the idea to commemorate Sadie Alexander’s centennial anniversary with NEA events and to recognize 100 years of African American economics in January 2019 when she convinced me to stand for the president-elect nomination. During summer 2020, Linwood Tauheed, then NEA president, developed the idea of focusing on my recovery of Sadie Alexander’s economic thought as the first event in our 100 Years of African American Economists webinar series in an attempt to ensure that my work is accurately and appropriately recognized and cited. I thank each of them for their vision in developing the idea for the 100 Years of African American Economists webinar series and for their unfailing support.
Finally, I thank the members of the NEA who saw my work – saw all the big, crooked stiches in the quilt that I wove – and saw its value.
Thank you.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
