Born during the Civil War, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) and Mary Eliza ChurchTerrell (1863-1954) helped lay the groundwork for a century of struggles against racist violence, legalized segregation and for women’s emancipation through self-organization

African women during the antebellum period in the United States were subjected to gross mistreatment and exploitation.

Enslaved women endured oppression on three different levels: race-national origin, labor exploitation and gendered domination.

Yet, during this period from the 17th to the mid-19th centuries was also characterized by resistance to enslavement where women played a pivotal role. Women fought back against the slave traffickers, landowners and their surrogates from the time of capture on the African continent to their placement on plantations and other work locations in North America and throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Various forms of resistance became widespread during the colonial and later antebellum periods in U.S. history. Flight from bondage was an important method of liberation from enslavement.

Violence and economic sabotage were also an important aspect of resistance to chattel slavery. African women utilized property destruction, work slowdowns, arson, poison and personal weapons to both defend themselves against beatings and sexual assault which were routine under enslavement as well as mechanisms to free themselves from bondage in their flights towards liberation. (Seethis)

Harriet Tubmanof Maryland was perhaps the best-known woman in liberating people from the plantations in the slave-owning states. Nonetheless, there were many others who participated in what became known as the Underground Railroad.

As the Civil War approached, anticipation of ending enslavement created even greater desires for freedom. Thousands of African men and women left the U.S. for Canada and Mexico where slavery had been outlawed since the late 1820s and 1830s. By the 1850s, more people had left North America for the Republic of Liberia which had been created by the U.S. for the expatriation of enslaved Africans in the U.S.

When the Civil War erupted in April 1861, African women became fully committed to transforming the conflagration from President Abraham Lincoln’s initial aim of preserving the Union to ending enslavement. Historian Hannah Katherine Hicksnoted of the role of women:

“Several hundred thousand enslaved women took flight during the Civil War, and women and children became the majority in Union-controlled refugee camps, which contemporaries called ‘contraband camps.’ Fourteen-year-old Susie King Taylor, then Susie Baker, escaped from slavery along with her family in 1862. After Union navy forces captured Fort Pulaski off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, the family reached a gunboat which escorted them to St. Simons Island, where they claimed their freedom. Taylor, who had been secretly educated for years by older Black women in Savannah, began teaching freed children in St. Simons’ refugee settlement.”

Source: Global Research