By Jill Nelson

It’s probably a sacrilege to ask this question, but when was the last time Dorothy Height, chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, who died April 20 at age 98, was heard speaking on the national stage about issues of importance to black women? How many women do you know who are members of the NCNW? How many of us actually know what the NCNW does?

Look, I’ve got great respect for Height, whose life spanned just short of 100 momentous years. I’m glad she was at the 1963 March on Washington, standing on the stage in her signature hat and suit with Dr. King and the menfolk. But let’s not forget that she was not invited to speak a word that day. The only woman who spoke was Josephine Baker. It seems that Height occupied the niche that was least threatening to Dr. Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Roy Wilkins, and the other men on the dais, a place defined by both its symbolism and deafening silence. For Dorothy Height, like Chauncey Gardner, (Jerzy Kozinski’s memorable character in the novel Being There, played expertly in the film by Peter Sellers), was simply being there and subject to the interpretation of others enough? Is it enough for black women?

As a black woman feminist, more often than not to say in public what I actually think about policy or politics, and particularly to challenge the designated roles black women are assigned in this culture, results in being attacked and dismissed as overbearing, demanding, intimidating, emasculating, or in contemporary, all-inclusive jargon, a hater. The sad truth is that too often black men seem most comfortable when black women in the public sphere are silent, long-suffering, old, or all of the above.

Even sadder is that black women frequently collude in this diminution of their role. Many of us have been raised to feel that part of our responsibility in life is to support black men as they take their rightful place along with other men in the patriarchy, at the cost of the political empowerment and dignity of all black women. In order to empower others, black women are encouraged to behave not as grown, intelligent, independent women, but as background figures, statues, for the most part seen, not heard. I’m not begrudging Dorothy Height, Coretta Scott King, or anyone else. But where’s the rest of us?

An exception to this rule is the sharp, elegant, astute Evelyn Cunningham, so intrepid during the 20 years she worked for the Pittsburgh Courier she was nicknamed the “lynching editor,” who died April 28 in Harlem at 94. Cunningham’s career as a journalist ended in the 1960’s, just as female and black journalists were pushing open the doors of the journalistic establishment. Where were the newspapers and magazines clamoring to employ her? The black organizations?

It was then-governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller, a white Republican, who hired Cunningham as a special assistant, unthreatened by her powerful persona and freely expressed opinions. Cunningham had four husbands. Yet as she said in a 1998 profile in the New York Times, “Each one of my husbands tried to diminish my independence and my work. They all loved me most while I was cooking – and I am not a good cook.” Still, Cunningham never gave up. She was in her 80s when she married for the last time.

More recently, the death of singer, actress and activist Lena Horne on May 8 at the age of 92 is another reminder of the struggles for voice, visibility and respect that define so many black women’s lives. Horne successfully navigated American racism, sexism, segregation and, in ways obvious and subtle and from all sides, notions of black authenticity, to create a life and career that spanned more than half a century.

Horne’s refusal to take advantage of her complexion and pass for white; her courageous confrontation of racism when and where she saw it, often at personal and professional risk; and her ability to engage her times and recreate herself as she aged – she was 65 when her one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music began a smash 14 month run on Broadway– are skills we all can aspire to.

“My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free,” Lena Horne said when she was 80. “I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody. I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Surely it’s not too much to want to be a free black woman, too, now, and not wait until I’m in my 80s.

My sadness at the passing of Height, Cunningham and Horne is more sweet than bitter, knowing that they all lived long, rich lives. As a black woman in my 50‘s, their deaths rekindle worries about my future and the futures of women younger and older than myself.

Why?

Because we don’t control cultural representations of ourselves, political power eludes us, and if we challenge the persistence of the silent, elderly supportive woman as female adjunct to male power we risk becoming pariahs in our own communities. With infrequent exceptions, unless we are Oprah, Michelle Obama, or an entertainer, real-life, flesh-and-blood black women don’t exist in a positive context. Me, I’m tired of praising and celebrating black women when they’re dead and gone. I think I speak for millions of sisters when I say that I don’t want to have to keep my mouth shut, or live alone, or wait until I’m elderly or dead before I’m seen and heard.

Now that the eulogies are over, the best memorial to these women and all the others before them, named and nameless, would be for black women inter-generationally to speak up, organize, and take leadership. The most fitting tribute would be our collective demand for voice, visibility, power, and our refusal to be seduced into silence by the dubious perks and suspect iconography of being an old black woman.

Jill Nelson is a journalist and author of five books. She lectures widely on race, gender, politics and media.