Chick History wants to uncover black women's suffrage stories in Tennessee

Women's history, for Rebecca Price and her organization Chick History, has become about rephrasing the question.

For too long, Price, whose early career was dedicated to curating exhibits and public programming at national museums, struggled with her field's interpretation of historical events involving women. Even when females were the focus of an exhibit or display, it was often a man telling the story, Price said.

"Women's history is preserved in different ways than men’s history," Price said. "You have to do detective work. It's hidden behind husbands, hidden behind brothers, hidden behind neighbors. We are not in the archives the way men are. You aren’t going to find our names like men’s names, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing things."

You just have to ask the right questions.

Right now, Chick History has an important question to ask: "How do you show the political activity of African-American women in Tennessee?"

In 2020, the United States will mark the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment. Tennessee was the final state that ratified the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. Yet, nearly a century later, so many experiences, voices and stories from that movement remain uncovered — particularly those of black women.

To address that, Chick History is in the midst of a five-year, grassroots campaign called "March to the 19th." In partnership with Humanities Tennessee, a diverse set of committees will soon begin a statewide effort to collect items and stories that go beyond what is widely known.

They will work in each of Tennessee's four major metropolitan cities, going deep into the cities' communities and calling on individuals to share their family's history and experiences. The first work will be done in Memphis.

"The traditional narrative does often leave out large groups of women who don’t fit into the white, middle-class story of women's rights," said Earnestine Jenkins, a professor of art history in the department of art at the University of Memphis whose research includes the history of African Americans in the urban south.

"You have to be honest about the racism in the movement and the extent they kept women of color out of the movement. ... You have to look for those hidden histories because, otherwise, you are not going to get it."

That begins with rephrasing the question, asking: "What do we classify as history and what work do we value?"

"Once you frame it that way," Price said, "for me, all of a sudden the lights come on, in a way, and you start to see the women’s history all around you.

"If you ask the right questions, then you see the answer."

The current movie blockbuster "Hidden Figures" — with its No. 1 spot at the box office and Oscar buzz — is an example of that power.

If you ask: "What women were in space the day U.S. astronauts first orbited the earth or walked on the moon?" The answer will be none.

Instead, if you wonder if there were any women at NASA involved in the history-making events, you will discover a trio of women who crossed gender and race barriers to help launch astronaut John Glenn into space.

In Tennessee, Chick History wants to find more untold stories — and make sure they are shared.

The non-profit organization began in 2010 as a blog by Price — a Memphis-native-turned-Nashvillian who had experience working at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Institute of Museums and Library Services, and the American Association for State and Local History. She wanted to help women find people in history they could identify with in authentic ways.

As an extension of her blog, she started a podcast called HerStory, which asked 50 contemporary women to share the story of the historical woman who inspired them. She included, among others, Maryland Delegate Maggie Mcintosh and Lisa Maatz,  the vice president for government relations at the American Association of University Women.

Soon, the discovery and sharing of women's history became Price's passion and full-time pursuit. In 2015, she founded Chick History with the belief that "every great story has not been told, and more importantly, what we’ve been told isn’t the whole picture."

The current "March to the 19th" initiative has four phases. It began with a series of statewide, day-long bootcamps, where museum and history professionals talked about how race and gender are used to interpret historic sites and the challenges they face when it comes to collecting, preserving, and interpreting women’s history. Next, Chick History will work to protect the legacy of history makers by collecting suffrage stories of African American women.

Black women have been politically active in many ways, Jenkins said. That trail begins with the more well-known stories of Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became famous as both an abolitionist and an advocate of woman suffrage, and Ida B. Wells, who founded the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago. But there's so much more history here in Tennessee, Jenkins said.

To hear those stories, you have to go into the communities and then work within those communities to look for the material that documents that activity in churches and schools and hospitals and homes. That means looking, for example, for old newspapers or church programs with meeting notices for the local chapters of National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. It means getting people to look differently at everyday material long stashed away in an attic, and getting them to rethink the sense of their community history.

"Like in any culture that did community work, things have been forgotten," Jenkins said.

Chick History wants to change that. First collecting and digitizing the stories, and then working with museums, historic sites, the public and schools to commemorate the important event in America’s history.

"Lots of people are doing this work and are out there recovering these stories of women and putting them back on the shelf where they belong with our collective narrative," Price said. "We are tackling one part of a huge, huge, huge puzzle that has to be rebuilt."

Reach Jessica Bliss at 615-259-8253 and on Twitter @jlbliss.