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This book analyzes writing about black girls in the nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. It asks why black writers of the period conveyed racial inequality, poverty, and discrimination through the lens of black girlhood; why black writers and activists emphasized certain types of girls; what tropes can be identified in the early literature of black girlhood; and where these girlhood tropes originated. The book draws on sources from some of the earliest black newspapers and on fiction, including the newspaper advice columns of Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Frances E. W. Harper's novel Trial and Triumph, and conduct books for black children. It thus unveils the possibilities for disciplinary intersections between African American literature, print culture, and black girlhood studies. The texts it examines reveal what it refers to as a genealogy of black girlhood.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of what Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) is and is not about, its major themes, and the contributions it makes to envisioning Black girlhood critically among and with Black girls. SOLHOT is a particular methodology of creating spaces to practice and enact a visionary Black girlhood. Whether the vision is simply stated as the celebration of Black girlhood in all of its complexity, or even revised and elongated, SOLHOT as utopia, SOLHOT as dismal failure, and SOLHOT as mostly everything in between is about foregrounding complexity in collective and creative work with Black girls and women.

This chapter examines the first writings of black women about girlhood during the antebellum era, with particular emphasis on the trope of the self-reliant black girl in the face of adversity. After reviewing representations of black girlhood in early American children's print culture, the chapter turns to some of the first short stories and full-length books by black women that centered on the lives of black girls. Focusing on the work of Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Maria W. Stewart along with an abolitionist text imported from England, it considers how black women writers distinguished between youthful girlhood and knowing girlhood to challenge the prevailing attitude on southern plantations that black girls were valuable solely for their future fecundity and economic potential. By revealing the qualities and behaviors exhibited by black girls across literary genres, black women writers showed that black girls were capable of seeking their own fate.

This chapter shows how Black girlhood must be made—in SOLHOT the space of Black girlhood is made through time, a timing that is infused with the sacred and spirit. In SOLHOT, to “homegirl” means engaging Black girls in the name of Black girlhood as sacred work that implicates time. Sacred work acknowledges the ways spirit moves one to act, often beyond the material conditions of one's immediate circumstance. The chapter considers how homegirls remember SOLHOT as a sacred experience that makes Black girlhood possible. It then features a creative and collective memory constructed from the interview transcripts of eight SOLHOT homegirls and M. Jacqui Alexander's (2005) Pedagogies of Crossing: Mediations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. The memory shows how homegirls' labor constructs SOLHOT as a methodology and cosmology that makes Black girlhood possible, affirms Black girls' lives, and enables personal and collective transformation.

This chapter examines how black girls were represented in the earliest extant examples of the black press by focusing on Freedom's Journal, published from 1827 to 1829, and the Colored American (1837–1841). Articles about black girlhood in the early black press offer insights into the everyday struggles of African Americans in the early republic. In a sense, early black newspapers served as conduct manuals as they emphasized the model family, encouraging readers to be temperate, industrious, and pursue intellectual development through literacy and education. Although the ideal black family figured prominently in both Freedom's Journal and the Colored American, this chapter argues that the stories and columns they published reveal stress and struggle in black households in the early decades of the nation. It cites the striking absence of black mothers in these articles in the heyday of the ideal of republican motherhood, an indication that many black mothers were working for wages outside the home.

This chapter foregrounds girls' stories about fighting against a critical literary backdrop of Black girlhood as recounted in June Jordan's (2000) Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Toni Cade Bambara's (1992) “A Girl's Story,” and performance poems written by four SOLHOT homegirls. This analysis of girls' narratives about fighting and violence in their daily schooled lives validates girls' stories about fighting within a larger context of structural and interpersonal violence, describes the kind of power Jordan argues is necessary to address both adults' complicity in violence (against youth) and the systemic nature of violence, and demonstrates how and why the performance of homegirls' poetry enables girls in SOLHOT to practice freedom as Bambara instructed. In response to girls' stories, a performance of listening, courage, and interdependence as exemplified by SOLHOT homegirls is advocated as a visionary solution to the popular–policy problem so often constructed as girlfighting, mean girls, and/or bullying.

This concluding chapter features a series of personal letters that underscore the necessity of envisioning Black girlhood differently than it is described on mainstream television; popular magazines; through statistics; and in policies that punish, segregate, and silence. The letters are addressed to people whose love and compassion is a testament to continue this work and who intimately know the necessity of maintaining personal healing while also advocating for the abolition of all forms of Black girl servitude. Moreover, it emphasizes that SOLHOT is not meant to be prescriptive and does not offer itself as a successful model of girl programming. The letters represent a kind of personal meditation that on the sly challenges systemic inequalities, appealing to those who inspire and motivate Black girlhood renewal as a space of freedom.

This chapter analyzes representations of black girlhood in early-twentieth-century conduct books written by African Americans by focusing on several selections from Floyd's Flowers: Or, Duty and Beauty for Colored Children. First published in 1905, Floyd's Flowers is an instructional manual for black children written by educator and activist Silas X. Floyd and illustrated by artist and educator John Henry Adams. It explores Floyd's ideas about the purpose of education for black girls, how girls should behave in public, and the roles parents should be preparing girls for at the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter first considers the discourse of conduct books before turning to Floyd's example of how black girls could contribute to racial progress through proper education, along with his ideals of beauty. It also highlights the ways black women differed from black men in imagining girlhood after emancipation, especially regarding black girls' duty to the race, to their families, and to themselves.

This book has documented a literary genealogy of the cultural attitudes toward black girls in the United States. By analyzing the images and tropes created by some nineteenth-century black writers to tackle black girlhood, it has painted a picture of a black girl who is not valued and whose accomplishments are undermined. This epilogue expresses the hope that the literary heritage of black girls will be recovered in a way that will contribute to solutions for black girls of today and tomorrow. It argues that black girls are often misrepresented in the media and offers a theoretical landscape for addressing such mirepresentations and for seeing beyond them to look at what black girls are actually doing, thinking, and dreaming. Finally, it discusses some of the major findings of the African American Policy Institute study on the treatment of black girls in schools entitled Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected, released in February 2015.

This chapter considers what it means to be seen and looked at as a Black girl. Building on the visual-poetic analysis of June Jordan's (1969) Who Look at Me and M. NourbeSe Philip's (2008) Zong!, the chapter offers an “anti-narrative photo-poem” that couples photography, poetry, and intersubjective insights of Black girlhood to specifically address the institutional norms and interpersonal dynamics that govern their lives and promote a limited knowing of Black girls premised on sight alone. The primary purpose of this chapter is to show that Black girls actively decide who and what is worthy of their presence and attention. The anti-narrative photo-poem invites those who dare to look to answer with action, as June Jordan suggested, but to do so while giving attention to the kinds of nuanced intersubjective interactions that hinge on the particular usable truth that Black girls are looking at you, watching them.