She Took Justice

The Black Woman, Law, and Power – 1619 to 1969

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000283556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power – 1619 to 1969 proves that The Black Woman liberated herself. Readers go on a journey from the invasion of Africa into the Colonial period and the Civil Rights Movement. The Black Woman reveals power, from Queen Nzingha to Shirley Chisholm.In She Took Justice, we see centuries of courage in the face of racial prejudice and gender oppression. We gain insight into American history through The Black Woman's fight against race laws, especially criminal injustice. She became an organizer, leader, activist, lawyer, and judge – a fighter in her own advancement.These engaging true stories show that, for most of American history, the law was an enemy to The Black Woman. Using perseverance, tenacity, intelligence, and faith, she turned the law into a weapon to combat discrimination, a prestigious occupation, and a platform from which she could lift others as she rose. This is a book for every reader.

Chapter 1

We Were Queens

I was a Black woman when the Nile was young…

From the poem “Enjoying the Darkness”

She was royalty. Princess Nzingha stood, facing her European enemies. The Portuguese Governor sat with his functionaries, on high wooden chairs. They looked down on her, with disgust and amusement, sweating in layers of red and black wool. Nzingha’s brown shoulders were adorned with special cloth made only for the Ngola’s family. Her country was in civil war. Europeans took her African people to labor in Brazil, Mexico, and, by trick of fate, a struggling English colony. Nzingha was to negotiate a treaty for peace with Governor Joao Correia de Sousa. The Governor offered her a woven mat, on the stone floor of his fort, built on the highest hill in her city of Luanda, Angola. But there was no chair, and Nzingha would not sit on the floor. It was 1622.

Nzingha had political cunning and military prowess. Her reputation would rival European monarchs. Africa was known for female leaders of physical beauty, ingenuity in politics, and skill in battle.¹ They were Hatshepsut, Queen of Kemet (1503 B.C), Makeda, Queen of Sheba (960 B.C.), Candace, Empress of Ethiopia (332 B.C.), Nefertari (1290), Nefertiti, and Cleopatra VII of Egypt, Dahia-Al Kahina, Queen of Kahina (705 A.D.), and Amina, Queen of Zaria (1588). African culture influenced Homer, Herodotus, Pliny, and Diodorus.² They had power.

Nzingha: African Warrior Queen

‘Nzingha was born in Ndongo, a region of southwest Africa, known now as Angola. She was the child of the ruler or Ngola.³ It was 1583. Nzingha’s father would have watched Portugal’s ships slip into an inlet of Ndongo on⁴ Africa’s southwest coast, now known as Angola. Princess Nzingha, whose name would be spelled Njinga in some reports, later converted to Catholicism and named herself Ana de Sousa Nzingha Mbande in an effort to appease the Portuguese’s Catholic sensibilities. Ndongo lay south of Kongo to the north and the Kwanza River. Pristine beaches and fishing boats with drying nets lined the harbor when these tall ships landed on their ocean horizon.

Trails made hard by centuries of bare feet led to a complex of homes depicting the wealth and position of their residents. Angolan men, women, and children emerged to see the curious visitors. By the time Nzingha was 30 years old, the intent of the Portuguese was clear. They wanted to dominate Ndongo even if it meant decimating their land and most of the world they knew. The capital Mbanza Kongo began to fill with these interlopers who could not be controlled by Nzingha’s father, even though he was the Ngola, the most powerful of the network of small tribal clans. Nzingha must have watched the growing threat and her father skillfully direct the African leaders under him.

The Portuguese were traders of metals and curiosities before trading in human beings. On the other side of the world, Christopher Columbus had long entered the Caribbean. In taking six Arawak Indians to Spain, he proclaimed “they ought to make good and skilled servants.”⁵ But Columbus spoke of what the Portuguese already knew. Ships from Portugal, an Empire which began as early as 1415 with an armada of warships, were taking servants away from what is now Brazil. The Catholic Church issued a proclamation, a Papal Bull, to all Catholics, on June 18, 1452, making the enslavement of pagans a holy mission.⁶ Pope Nicholas V blessed the travels of Afonso V of Portugal to Angola with the mission to conquer people deemed pagans and place them into perpetual servitude.⁷ Religious zealots, imperialist fervor, curiosity and greed stoked exploration to a land some 4,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean from Brazil. The Portuguese explorers landed in Ndongo. The world would never be the same.

Africans knew little of what awaited them. European monarchs planned for worldwide domination. Europeans wanted African servants. They were given prisoners of war. When there were no more war prisoners or debtors, the Portuguese enticed and armed African men to attack neighboring communities. Blinded by greed and mixed loyalty, some readily complied. The Portuguese found riches in the port city of Luanda. They used it as a trading post for slaves as well as a secure military outpost. Then they extended attacks into the interior of Africa. The Portuguese hungered for the labor needed to sustain the growth of Western Europe and their expansion into the New World.

Africans assisted the Europeans in kidnapping thousands of other Africans.⁸ In truth, Ndongo was merely a slave port, an extension of Portugal. It would become one of many along the West Coast of Africa. Nzingha had trained herself to lead. But in 1617, Ngola-a-Mbandi, the immature son of Mbandi, became king of Ndongo. Mbandi was a figurehead under Luis Mendes de Vasconcelos, Governor of the nascent Portuguese colony of Angola. To them, he was an unnecessary one. Vasconcelos trained their attack against Mbandi. They wanted the region, and its slave trade, under their complete control. To get it, the Portuguese used some Imbangala groups to kidnap men, women, and children. The hostages forced into slavery grew to nearly 50,000.⁹

Nzingha pleaded with her brother Mbandi. Fight against these European criminals who controlled the Ndongo countryside. Stand up against the taking of thousands of hostages, forcing them on ships bound for labor in South America and Europe. Nzingha understood that the slave trade might not include her royal family; however, it was destroying the nation. Her people were dying. Nzingha’s brother Mbandi inherited their father’s power. Mbandi was her ruler, the Ngola. But she believed Mbandi’s power did not come with wisdom. She wanted the title of the Ngola. A woman had never been the Ngola. The Kingdoms and provinces were led by strong-willed leaders. Feuding factions divided the region, allowing European power and thus slavery to grow.

In 1619 over 350 African hostages, kidnapped from their homes in the Angola region, were forced aboard the São João Bautista.¹⁰ They were among thousands held in a slave fort in Luanda. The ship São João Bautista was among a dozen such ships departing with kidnapped African women, men, and children. Nzingha saw Mbandi had become desperate. She watched their pillaged kingdom fall into civil war. Her people had become mercenaries used to plunder neighboring villages on behalf of the Portuguese. It must end.

Diplomacy was required to negotiate a peace with the invaders. In 1621, a new Portuguese governor arrived, Joao Correia de Sousa. It was decided that a truce must be negotiated to save their dying kingdom. Correia de Sousa had his sights only on the interests of the Portuguese. Nzingha had calculated the growing domination of the Portuguese. As the daughter of the Ngola of Ndongo, she was exposed to contrivances and schemes of the powerful. It is unclear if Mbandi sent Nzingha to negotiate the treaty because he was afraid or if she asked to negotiate the peace treaty.

It was decided. She would meet with them. In 1622, Nzingha and Correia de Sousa met in the capital, Luanda, to negotiate a treaty of peace. Nzingha, accompanied by an impressive delegation financed by her brother, faced the Europeans surrounded by guards.¹¹ The men sat. Nzingha stood. In a power play to emphasize their low appreciation of her status as an African and a woman, the Europeans did not offer her a chair. Nzingha was born with the ruling stool. The stool referred to the royal African throne that was her birthright. However, these men would have her stand or sit on the floor at their feet. Nzingha learned many lessons from her father. She was a cunning leader. Without showing anger, she called two female members of her delegation. They immediately knelt on the floor lending their backs as a seat for her to begin these important negotiations. Nzingha obtained a limited peace treaty between the Kingdom of Ndongo and the Portuguese.¹² In reality, it meant nothing. Europeans, with complicit Africans, pushed deeper into the African interior, pillaging, raiding, and burning villages, taking the able-bodied as hostages, leaving babies and the elderly. Their hunger for African laborers was insatiable.

Then, Nzingha’s brother, Ngola-a-Mbandi, died suddenly in 1624. His death was suspicious. According to rumors, Nzingha had her brother poisoned to seize his power.¹³ Other accounts suggest that he committed suicide, crushed by the shame of losing the kingdom to slave traders. Some say that instead of giving him the comfort of a sister, Nzingha gave him the poison that took her brother’s life. Perhaps she loved her people enough to kill her own brother. Whether love or power, suicide or murder, Mbandi was dead. Nzingha inherited the kingdom of Ndongo and Matamba, becoming the first woman to lead her people. She inherited a kingdom in civil war, controlled by European invaders, with traitors in every corner plotting against her.

She would be called by many names. She was Queen Ana de Sousa Nzingha Mbande, Njinga. She was daughter of King Ngola Kiluanji and mother Kangela, and she was now Ngola, ruler of Ndongo and Matamba. As a child she had trained in secret, listened to her father’s negotiations with clan leaders, studied her weapons. Her kingdom, weakened by inner conflicts, fell apart. Her people were tools for the Portuguese whose wealth depended heavily on the slave trade.¹⁴ It is said that Queen Nzingha’s refusal to engage in the slave trade so infuriated the Portuguese that they joined forces with African mercenaries to kill her.¹⁵ Linda Heywood’s book Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen speaks to the bitter feuds encircling the region. Queen Nzingha had to display the political and military prowess of generals and the diplomacy of attachés. By all accounts, Queen Nzingha’s tactical ability rivaled Catherine the Great of Russia and Elizabeth the First of England.

Had she been a man, perhaps other African leaders would have joined forces to defend their homeland. Queen Nzingha retreated to the mountains. She led attacks against the Portuguese using guerilla warfare. For decades, she led raids and ambushes, battling Europeans as well as those Africans who traded away their homeland for trinkets or would rather follow a European man than an African woman.¹⁶ Queen Nzingha fought the good fight. She struck her enemy from the hills. She led her troops without surrender. The Queen died peacefully, on December 17, 1663, an elder of war, not a victim of it.¹⁷

Nzingha’s legacy lives. Black women have taken her name as a symbol of strength. Her fighting spirit has spread beyond the Queen’s imagination. She fought to save her kingdom and end the slave trade. Perhaps if she had won, the devastation of the Atlantic Slave Trade could have been prevented. If this bitter cup could have passed, one can only consider the possibility. One can only wonder how different the world would be if the slave trade had ended in her lifetime. In every century there is a crossroads. During the first of four centuries of African female perseverance, the Europeans created empires using African labor and intellect. The price of slavery in human life, culture, languages, and religion would be immeasurable. But for The Black Woman there is little time to mourn roads taken by men. Her life is a fight against all odds, aided only by tepid allies and worn-out tools.

The First Africans: Resilient Families

Queen Nzingha’s fight reached across the Atlantic Ocean. She could not know the destiny of those disease-ridden ships. African women and men chained inside, for weeks, covered in vomit, menses, and feces. Back in 1619, the São João Bautista sailed from Luanda to Mexico with human cargo. The Bautista was bound for the slave auctions of Vera Cruz, Mexico.¹⁸ After weeks at sea, it entered the Gulf of Mexico and an ambush. English privateers near the Gulf of Mexico were intent on stealing her human cargo.

A battle erupted. In the heat of summer, two English ships, the White Lion and her consort the Treasurer, attacked the São João Bautista.¹⁹ The noise must have been deafening below deck, in the darkness, tossed to the walls, chained and helpless as the battle waged, their ship maneuvering to gain advantage, flesh torn by iron shack...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline of Selected Cases and Events
• Prelude
• 1 We Were Queens
• 2 Her Bondage
• 3 Trials and Tribulations
• 4 Female Fugitives
• 5 Slaves in Court
• 6 Segregated Freedom
• 7 Lynched, Raped, and Violated
• 8 Her Mind Matters
• 9 Politics of Freedom
• 10 A Force for Good
• 11 She Is an Activist
• 12 Sankofa
• Table of Cases
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index