January 19, 2024 • 42 mins
Yves joins us to breakdown the historical publishing first of Drusilla Dunjee Houston, and a beef that it caused at the time.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm welcome to Steff I've never told you a production
of iHeartRadio, and welcome to another edition of Female First,
the first of twenty twenty four, which means we are
once again joined by the wonderful, the winsome, the fantastic Eves.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Welcome you, Hey, y'all, Happy New Year, Happy twenty twenty four.
Still get used to say in that year, me too,
me too.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Very confused because that was an exploration date all my stuff.
I was like, that's next year, and I was like, wait,
oh no, this happens. Samantha, Hey, drinkety keep going.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yes, well, it is so good to have you with us, Eves,
because we didn't we weren't able to have you for
the last month the year of twenty twenty three, so
we have some catching up to do.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
How have you been What have you been up to?
I've been up to figure out what the heck is
going on in this new year?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Pretty much.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
What have I been up to? I didn't really do
much for the New Year. For the holidays, I just
kind of stuck around. It's been pretty quiet for this
for the end of the year. But I think this
new year is off and running to a good start.
I'm writing things I love, I'm reading good things. Yeah,
so I'm looking forward to the rest of twenty twenty
four and seeing what happens. Nice.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Nice it is. We we had a podcast episode about
this recently. Smith and I both really don't do anything
for New Year's either. But one of the things that
I love to do is just write whatever I want
to write, read whatever I want to do, read whatever
I want to read.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So yeah, I'm down with that completely. So nice. Yeah.
I didn't really make any I made some list for
things that I want to like, things that I'm aiming
for this year because or some big things that I'm
aiming for. But I don't feel too attached to anything,
like I think that the way things are pacing out
(02:08):
and things that are happening already in the beginning of
the year, I feel like I'm going in a good direction.
I don't need to be forcing anything, you know, trying
to hold on to anything too tightly that I have planned.
So I don't know. I got I got some things
that I'm I'm looking at that I wrote down, you know,
that I put out into the world, and then I'm
focused on, but I'm going with the flow. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Nice. Yes, we did learn a fun fact about you,
and that is the UFC.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yes, do guilty.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Okay, that's amazing. I think that's hilarious because that's just
so different from your personality that I'm like, that's what
you enjoy. That makes sense in my head of like
the opposite.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
You don't think I like to watch people beat other
people up.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
And that would not be something I would assume immediately,
that's not the first thing.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Yeah, honestly, I wish I had the skills. I kinda like,
I don't want to get beat up. I say that
every time I watched it. I don't. I just I
don't want to be hit in the face. I don't
want scars, I don't want cauliflower ear. I don't want
to be healing injuries all the time. I've been to
physical therapy multiple times in my life, and it is
(03:21):
a process. I don't want to have to go through
strict eating and regimens. I don't want to have to
be so serious about maintaining a certain schedule of exercise.
Like I like, you know, I'm good without those things,
but I do wish I had the fighting skills.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
At the same time, I do wish I could have,
like have the combat skills as well, and like just
in case, you know those you know, imagine moments like
what if this happens, would I be able to do
these reactionary things? But in general, like the thought of
being hit, no, thank you.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
The one thing about it, though, is that you really
realize how important skill is when it comes to combat.
It's like sometimes people, you know, people can be way
bigger than another person, but they just don't have the
skill that they have and whatever the skill may be,
like if it's grappling, it's like one person may not
know how to get out of a certain position because
(04:21):
they just don't have the skill. And you can be
so much smaller than them. And maybe when it comes
to power or strengths, you may have that over them,
but they can still they can still kill you, they
can still injure you. True very very deeply, and it's interesting,
it's very very primitive. There are a lot of times
(04:43):
when I'm watching and I'm looking at the crowd yelling
ridiculous things and seeing people just like fighting for fifteen
minutes in oct to God, and I'm like, yeah, that's
what humanity's about timeshah, ancient ancient history that I'm watching
(05:06):
with a lot of other politics wrapped up into right
right that aside, you know, good old fashion, clean fun.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Clean fun. You know. One of my favorite segments is
when those really big burly dudes have never had any training,
but they work out, want to challenge the UFCU women
and then they get their asses handed to them. That's
my favorite thing to watch, honestly, Like last see TikTok
clips of that. I'm like, yes, that is satisfaction. And
(05:36):
seeing like this one hundred and thirty pound woman because
she's all muscle with this two hundred and fifty pound
dude who's like I could take her, and then being
like taken out in like two seconds and in a
chokehold and asleep. I'm like, yeah, yeah, now I do
enjoy that. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
And I think with sports, because I don't watch a
lot of other sports, it's really fun to look at
people like I've learned a lot over the years of
watching it, like knowing what to look for when people
are more skilled than other people, when I'm pretty sure
I know how a fight's gonna go. But it's cool
to watch people and be like, you're not gonna get this.
You need to do this, you need to do that. Meanwhile,
I know nothing. I've never thought. I've never done any
(06:16):
sort of martial arts. Definitely haven't done mixed martial arts.
But you know, you get to be on the other
side of skirt the screen and just judge them.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
And yelling commentator. That sounds like that. You need to try.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
I pretend to be I do pretend to be a
commentation when I watch.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
I need you to try one time around for a
good fight and then just be commentator. That would be phenomenal.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
You know, that would be fun. But I think about it.
It's funny because you know, we all podcasters, so we
talk a lot. We do it for work. But when
I watch commentators, I'm like, that's a lot of talking.
They do so much filler talking it is to do.
They say the same things in different ways, which honestly,
I am very inspired by. I guess I speaker. They
(07:01):
know how to say the same thing over and over
in nine million different ways. And I you know, I
can't help, but I can't deny the legitimacy and the
skill in that you have to get.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
A catchphrase is what I found like in most like
commentators that you know so that they can be redone
by others and you know immediately who it is, like.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
The different football.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
I love soccer when it's the Irish commentators or Scottish
commentators where they just get angry. It's the players. Those
are my favorites.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
But I've never a skill.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Oh, I don't have to find something because they just
get yelled at about being a pansy and they need
to get up because they're like, so it's become and
I don't. I can't play soccer. I can't imagine the
strengthening itself. But a lot of the times different players
would try to get fouls penalties rather I guess, and
so would kind of dramatically fall or do these things.
(07:57):
And so some Scottish amidators would get really pissed off
about it and would just scream at the at the
tell them didn't get telling them to get up and
stop doing this because they were getting so upset by
all the penalties and constant stopping. That's really funny.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
It does seem like it would be frustrating.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
So anyway, I think you should take it on one guest.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Maybe if you need to mind. Wait, get this done. Yeah,
and then you should come up with your persona.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
We never were in a fantasy world going to be
a fighter. I mean that's the fun part in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Oh yeah, yeah, So we're giving you like homework to
ask well, yeah, thanks for that very long to do list.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yes, it's important. It's important to you need to be wrong.
I was going to do a transition about breaking down
(09:07):
things that haven't aged well. Now that relates to who
we're talking about today, because you were kind of talking
about that with UFC. But I say, let's just go
into no we got you the first time. Annie, Yes,
who did you bring for us to talk about today?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Eaves? So today we'll be talking about Drusilla Dungee Houston.
So I guess if we're talking about things that haven't
aged well, she did talk a lot about ancient history.
A lot of her work was focused on that. She
cared a lot about history and sharing history and educating
people on history. And there are some things in her
work that are disputed, have been kind of shot down,
(09:48):
and there are other things that have lasted and have
aged well. So I think there is somewhere we can
go with that, Annie, we have a transition. So Drusilla
Dungee Houston was the earliest African American woman to write
a multi volume study of ancient Africa. So she has
a long history of writing about history. And yeah, I'm
(10:13):
excited to share her story with everyone today.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yes, yes, this one is another fascinating one I didn't
know about. So thank you as always. Shall we get
into the history, yes we shall so.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Drusilla Dunchee Houston was born in January of eighteen seventy
six in Harper's Ferry in West Virginia. So her parents
were Reverend John William Dungee and Lydia and Taylor Dungee.
So they have their own history and the way that
they brought up Drusilla Dunchee Houston factored a lot into
the direction that she chose to go in because John
(10:49):
was an educator, he was a publisher, and he was
a missionary who had founded Baptist churches across the United
States that were mostly in rural areas. He was born
into slavery and he escaped in and he made his
way to Canada, but eventually he came back to the States.
And so John and Lydia went around the South building churches.
(11:10):
They were members of the American Baptist Home Missionary Society.
And that's how Houston herself too became devoted to the
Baptist Church throughout her life because that's something that was
really part of her early life. It is something that
her parents instilled in her at one point. This is
later in Houston's history, but she even said in this
(11:33):
response letter that she wrote to someone who was talking
down about the church. She said, quote, the faith of
the Negro race is the hope of America. So she
instilled a lot of importance. She placed a lot of
importance upon faith, specifically the Christian faith. It guided a
lot of what she did. It was the reason that
(11:53):
she wrote. It was a thing that was the foundation
of why she did so much of what she did
when it came to educating people and writing about history
and specifically the history of black people. So Houston had
nine siblings, but only four of them lived to adulthood
and their names were Roscoe, Irving, Plant, and Ella. So
(12:19):
her siblings also did notable things. Her brother, Roscoe, he
was an activist and he was the owner and editor
of the newspaper Black Dispatch, which is out of Oklahoma
and after John who was Houston's father, after he died, Roscoe,
Houston's brother, supported the family. He would sell vegetables, and
(12:40):
Houston's other brother, Irving, was a managing editor of the
Chicago Enterprise and an editor of the Negro Champion, which
was out of New York. So Houston she went to
finishing schools when her family lived in the Northern States,
but she didn't go to college, and the family moved
to Oklahoma Territory in eighteen ninety two, and they were
(13:01):
pretty well off. And Houston, even kind of later, really
places a lot of importance on how well she was.
She was like, I know my class, and I know
that I didn't go to college, but my parents had
a lot of books and we had a lot of
arts and culture around us. She did do a little
bit of that in her writing, which was interesting, but hey,
(13:23):
if you got it, flaunted, I guess. So she studied
music and went to the Northwestern Conservatory of Music in Minnesota.
She studied classical piano, and there are stories of how
she played piano for people and she gave poetry readings
that peoples get togethers, which sounds pretty swinky and She
had plans to be a concert pianist, but that didn't happen.
(13:45):
She switched her focus and from eighteen ninety two to
till around the turn of the century she worked as
a kindergarten teacher in Oklahoma. In eighteen ninety eight, she
married a man named Price Houston. He was apparently a
businessman who was twenty years older than her. I didn't
really know much about him, but I do know that
she had two children with him, one named Florence and
(14:06):
the other one was a daughter who died pretty young.
But Houston she opened McAllister Seminary for Girls in Oklahoma,
and she let that school for twelve years. She also
wrote a screenplay in nineteen fifteen called The Madden Mob,
which was written as a refutation of Birth of a Nation.
(14:28):
And in nineteen seventeen she went to Sepolpa, Oklahoma, and
she served as the principal of the Oklahoma Baptist College
for Girls, and there she stayed as the director and
the principal of the school until nineteen twenty three. She
also started the Oklahoma Vocational Institute of Fine Arts and Crafts,
which was a private school, so she did a bunch
(14:51):
of work in the school space. She was very invested
in the education specifically of black children, but also like
reading and education in general. She talked a lot about
how everybody needed to be educated, specifically about black history
and black history in the ways she was talking about it,
which we'll get to a little bit later, but she
(15:12):
cared a lot about it. And there is a scholar
her name is doctor Peggy Brooks Bertram, who I'm going
to be referring to more in this episode, because she
has been really invested in the history of the Dundee family,
especially Houston, and she wrote a lot about them, did
a lot of research, So I'm going to refer to
(15:33):
things she said in some of the research that she
has done quite a bit in this episode. One thing
that doctor Brooks Bertram said about Houston was that she
was quote an extraordinarily private woman who felt compelled to
thrust herself into the major social and political dialogues of
her era end quote. So that makes a lot of
sense because of her upbringing. Apparently her father didn't really
(15:57):
want novels in the house, which is for because I
love novels, love fiction, But I guess he was about
that nonfiction and that clearly showed up in her in
the work that Houston did. So Houston was involved in
her brother, Roscoe's newspaper. So this was a whole clearly
also having to do with the way their parents raised them.
(16:19):
The whole family was invested in journalism and scholarship, in
literary works, in political action and philosophy. You know, they
were invested in all of those spheres of interest. And
her brother Roscoe had a newspaper, the Black Dispatch, and
(16:40):
according to doctor Brooks Bertram, between nineteen fourteen and nineteen
thirty nine, Houston wrote more than two thousand editorials, so
she was busy with her pen. And Houston was also
a lecturer on African history. She was a self taught historian,
and she did a lot of independent research using all
of the blok that her family had in her library
(17:02):
and other ones that she came across in her independent research.
And this is where in her story we get to
the major focus of her biography. One of the things
that she's the most remembered for. So I think it
is you know, this happened so many times in people's
work that there is one large seminal text that is
(17:26):
the thing that they're really well remembered for. But Houston
did have, like I just said, she had two thousand editorials,
so she did have a wealth of writing. But it
seemed like this she considered this her what would you
call it, magnum opus as well, this book because she
was kind of like she had some comments where she said, yeah,
(17:48):
I did a bunch of those editorials and all that stuff,
but the serious thing, No, that's all the work that
I did in this research is ancient history. And the
work that I'm referring to is Wonderful Ethiopians, the ancient
Kushite Empire. That's the work. That is the thing that
she focused on in her life that she spent many
(18:09):
years working on, and she really cared a lot about
and she cares so much about people being able to
read it and understand the history that she was talking
about in the book, talking about Kushite as in kush
the ancient kingdom in Northern Africa, and she said that W. E. B.
Duboce's book The Negro was her inspiration for writing Wonderful Ethiopians.
(18:35):
And this is selfishly one of my favorite parts of
her story because I love beefs and this was kind
of a beef between two notable people to people who
were really intelligent and really invested in the work that
they were doing, really cared about black culture and about
(18:57):
black history. And this part of story is really really
interesting to me because she said she was inspired by
the negro W. E. B. Du Boyce's book, but Dubois
didn't mention it in his publication The Crisis, which I
mean was a very important publication. He said he would
(19:19):
mention it in there. And when she wrote to him
telling him about her book, he told her basically that
she needed to study a little bit more before writing
about ancient history. He was like, oh, yeah, this book
is very interesting, thank you for sending it to me,
But hm, I think you need to return to your
studies if you're going to write things that people can read.
(19:42):
And so understandably, she kind of took offense to that.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yeah, maybe that's why I started writing like I'm I've studied,
I know this level. I'm high class made like correspond
to him to embassy?
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Did she did? And she responded back to him kind
of saying that where she was like, excuse me, I
don't need your white institutions to validate the work that
I do. I have a bunch of books in my life,
and well, you know, my family had a bunch of
books in their library. I've done my own research, you know,
I've created this whole book based on so many other
(20:20):
sources that I've read. So after this point, she really
came in heavy and came in hot with the criticism
in public and in private of Dubois, which was rough
because I know a lot of people who are listening
here will be familiar with W. E. B. Dubois. He
really was very influential in the literary world, in the
(20:45):
social world, political sphere at the time, so that was
a heavy target. You know, he wasn't a small target
to come up against. But she was not playing. She
was defending, you know, her own legitimacy and the importance
of work. But it was also hard one because women
were reliant on men for publication at the time. They
(21:07):
were the ones who were the liaisons and the ones
who ran these publishers, and so you needed these kinds
of connections to be able to get your work out
to more people. And of course Houston wanted to do
that because you really cared about more people knowing this
ancient history, and you know, on top of meeting men
(21:29):
in general for publication, it was Due Boys. So a
lot of people were in love with Due Boys because
of who he was and what he could do for people,
and rightfully so, he was a very notable scholar in
his own right. So the way that it seemed to
me because of how people responded, you know, they weren't
(21:51):
going to take too well to this woman who they
didn't know, Houston, who they were just being introduced to,
versus this big, this figure with this stature of Dubois,
are like, well, who are you coming up against?
Speaker 2 (22:03):
You?
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Boys? So in my mind I kind of see this
as a cancelation in a way because Houston, she didn't
her book didn't do amazingly well. It didn't get into
as many spaces as she wanted it to get into.
So that is a fascinating part of her story, I
(22:26):
feel like, and it goes deeper than that, and you can,
you know, you can see that in the public criticism
that she had of du Bois, where she would come
up against him, where she was louding him before in
newspapers and magazine, she started going in the other direction
and really calling him out in a negative way. So, yeah,
(22:50):
beef in history, that's amazing, but okay. So but on
the book, it was published in nineteen twenty six, and
this was volume. It was subtitled Nations of the Kushite
Empire Marvelous Facts from Authentic Records. Like I said earlier,
she couldn't really get access to these white publishing houses
(23:10):
that were publishing a lot of black text at the time,
so she established Ethiopian Press and she used the Black
Dispatches printing presses to make her book. So this was
a self publishing effort, and at first five hundred copies
were printed and they were sold for two dollars and
fifty cents, which would be about forty three dollars today.
But she couldn't market the book because her own funds
(23:33):
were wrapped up in this thing, and so she sold
it through mail order. So at this time was in
nineteen twenty so this was during the Harlem Renaissance. There
was a lot of focus on black work, on black culture, literature, poetry,
and fiction. But Houston herself, she wasn't really a fan
of the Harlem Renaissance kind of work. She was more
(23:57):
interested in history than she was in art and she
was kind of like upset about how people were gravitating
more toward the arts than history, which is very interesting
to me. I know that, you know, when you have
a work and you have this text that you work
so hard on, you really got to you gotta be
(24:18):
your own biggest fan. You got to root for yourself.
And I understand that part of me wonders, you know.
And I also know like when you're working on a
work that's that big, it can feel like the entire
world is revolving around it. So that part is really
interesting to me because it's not as if all those
things can't coexist together. And a lot of people who
(24:42):
were involved in the arts and during the Harlem Renaissance
period were obviously like making a lot of progress when
it came to writing works that were true to them
that they were able to get into larger mainstream attention.
But yeah, so it was important too, Like it's still obviously,
(25:03):
you know, everybody does, I care about history too, So
of course that's still important. But yeah, at the end
of volume one, she says that book two she mentions
a book too, and says that it gives more authentic
information upon this subject than any other book extant. So
these books she was it was there were kind of
(25:25):
a correction of the record, a way to uplift the
black history and how its origins were in Africa, specifically
the Nile Valley. She referred to it as a cradle
of civilization and was going up against this racist history
that was put forth by many archaeologists. So it's been
referred to of kind of like race writing or racial
(25:49):
uplift writing. But I don't want to downplay the work
because she was very focused in research and focused in
history in the work that she did. However, that original
publication didn't have a bibliography, it didn't have footnotes, it
didn't have endnotes or an index, which was standard for
(26:11):
this kind of factual writing at the time as it
is now. And so she got praised for her work
of how deeply she dug into this ancient history, how
she was refuting a history that revolved around European history
and how integral people in Africa and what she considered
(26:32):
the cradle of civilization to be. But she also got
criticism for not having sources listed in her work for
any of those things. So people were kind of like, yeah,
you're saying a lot and this is really fascinating and
it looks like you did your work, but I just
can't see your work. So that was also, you know,
(26:58):
a very real and a very valid child lenge for
people reading her work and trying to suss out the
credibility in her work and where the plausible deniability was.
She also got criticism for her language being too flowery,
though she said that she did that on purpose. She
made it less technical in order to reach people who
(27:20):
were new to the info that she was presenting. So
that makes sense too with her background, because she really
cared about educating children and people across all borders. She said, Oh,
I want this. I want white people to read this.
I want black people to read this. I want white
people to read this to see where they've gone wrong
and how they're misunderstand everything when it comes to history,
(27:42):
how they deny because of racism, that the greatness and
the splendor and the importance and the vastness of knowledge
that came from this area of the world. I want
everybody to read it. She wanted to sell enough books
to be able to put out a second a day,
and she wanted it to go to all kinds of places,
(28:05):
so She wanted it to be in the classroom, you know,
she wanted, you know, individuals to be able to read
the book. So she really cared about disseminating this knowledge.
She said that slavery had broke black folks in the
diaspora's knowledge of the greatness of our origin. So it
was very important for us to unlearn all of these
(28:26):
things that we were learning as standards in the curriculum
and classrooms. We were in learning about this European history,
but we weren't connecting it back to this ancient African history.
And she wanted that connection to be made. And she
said that a lot of that was broken because of
the institution of slavery and how that separated people from
(28:49):
knowledge of their own actual history and therefore also the
greatness of that history. So really was the work that
she cared a lot about. And according to doctor Brooks Bertram,
her work quote seriously challenged the belief that women writers
(29:11):
should limit themselves to poetry, novels, short stories, and place
because that was kind of the sphere that women could
have been expected to work in at the time. I mean,
we know that this was an accomplishment, like Houston was
(29:33):
a pioneer in this field for women. There were men
who were writing about work, who were writing about ancient
history as it related to Africa, but there weren't many
women who were doing this and doctor Brooks Bertram said
that Houston's work also challenged the idea that a person
(29:53):
had to be a PhD. To be a historian, which
is something that Houston herself railed against obviously in her
communications with Dubois, but in general she went forth with
her work without having to be validated by a degree,
to do the research and share the research that she did.
(30:15):
So there is some discrepancy around how many volumes actually exist.
So we know of the first one, the one that
we were just talking about. Houston herself said that she
wrote multiple volumes, maybe around six volumes of this work,
but there's not really a way to validate that because
(30:36):
we don't have a lot of those other works. There
are works that have been listed, like ones including Origin
of the Aryans and one called Cushites of Western Europe,
and there are some other ones that Houston mentioned as well,
but we don't know where any of those are, if
they even exist, if they existed in manuscript form, if
they were ever printed any of that kind of thing.
(30:58):
Doctor Brooks Bertram did say that she was given a
corrected edition in two thousand and one of Wonderful Ethiopians,
and she said that it was undated but had a bibliography, index, footnotes,
and more chapters, and that the corrections that were included
in that edition may have been made in the late
nineteen twenties or early nineteen thirties. But in the end,
(31:22):
a lot of Houston's work is lost to time, including
some of her fiction, poetry, essays, things like that. But
we have some of it, and we know a little
bit more about Houston's life. We know that she was
an active member of different clubs, like the Federated Women's
Clubs of Oklahoma. We also know that in nineteen thirty
(31:45):
four she served as a religious director of the Oklahoma
Home for Delinquent Boys. She was fluent in different languages,
and in nineteen thirty six she was interviewed by folks
in the Negro Studies unit of the Federal Writers Project
that was under the Works Progress Administration. But she did
deal with illness for many years of her life. She
(32:06):
was affected by the flu epidemic in nineteen eighteen, and
she later got to berculosis and that was something that
really weighed heavily on her health over the years, and
she ended up dying in February of nineteen forty one
in Arizona, and true to her faith in Christianity, her
headstone says, to die is to gain. Yeah. So in
(32:28):
nineteen eighty five, Wonderful Ethiopians was republished through Black Classic Press,
which publishes obscure and significant works by and about people
of African descent. And she was also recognized posthumously, and
there is a memorial scholarship that's named in her honor
that recognizes emergent women's scholars of African descent. So she
(32:53):
did get recognition. During her time. She was able to
sell some copies of her work, though I imagine is
not as many copies that she would have wanted to sell,
and not as many volumes of the book as she
would have wanted to pass out. But her legacy lives
on in the work of all the other scholars who
went on to talk about the relate the history of
(33:17):
people in the Black diaspora going back to Africa, showing
how those origins were ones that needed to be uplifted
and ones that needed to be learned about and honored,
and how a lot of the separation from that history
came from the history of the slave trade around the world,
so very noble work, work that was pioneering and happy
(33:40):
to be able to share it today.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
I did not know the UFC, the mature at the top,
would have so much, truly, I didn't know there's going
to be beef exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
There was fighting involved, some punches were throwing. She sounds
like a fascinating person.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, like I love her kind of like shunning the
arts and the Harlem Renaissance, like this history way just
what we should be dealing with talking about.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
Yeah, I'm kind of like, okay, Boomer kind of a
situation like, yeah, like we should be talking about history.
What do you know about that? You're worried about your arts? Yeah,
I mean no, I know she didn't mean it that way.
I'm just joking, no, for sure, But it does have
that kind of because I have a relative who's like that,
(34:50):
who thinks fiction is worthless, like art is worthless, Like
he would be somebody who wouldn't have any non anything
but nonfiction in his home. And I've never understood it.
I don't get it.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
But I just when you were sharing that story, I
was like, yeah, I feel like I know this person.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Yeah, yeah, I'm there. As you know, there are still
people who who feel this way.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yes, you know, I find it fascinating too. Though. She
was kind of ahead of her time with that needing
the flowery language so that people can find history accessible,
like we see that today with historians writing almost fictional
levels of accounts of what's happening, and they're not fictional,
but they just draw out into a storytelling so that
people can read and understand better what was happening during
(35:34):
his historical times and also bring more interest probably also
sell more books.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
But like she was.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Ahead of her time in that way in creating something
that was accessible instead of just being like this is
what it is.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Yeah, I agree with you, Samanthas, So thanks for bringing
up that point, because, like publishing was a lot different
than than it is now and to get things to
more people's bookshelves because the focus is on you know,
how big can we make this reach? How many people's
shelves can we reach? Home, more money can we make
because of volume, But back then it was more like
(36:05):
well where are your sources there wasn't so much separation
between like, Okay, what kind of balance can we bring
between the factual the facts in this thing and also
the readability of this thing didn't seem to be so
much of a concern back then. But it does seem
like kind of a kind of a pity because she
(36:28):
had something that could touch so many people's hands, but
it wasn't able to get out there like that because
of the challenges that she had with the actual publishing
process and the holes that were dug with the beef
and your health contributed to it, you know, I know
there was no longitudinal study done on what were the
(36:49):
factors that caused her book to not make it to
more people and fewer people to read it, but yeah,
I'm sure those things did not help a book that
could have been in the interest of way more people.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Yeah, And I also think, you know, I think she
made a very great valid point about the kind of
the PhD thing and that you don't have to because
that can be so like gatekeepy and how much money
do you have and what connections you have in the
first place, and takes so long, which in one way
is yes, that makes sense, and that is good, but
if we were only getting information from from people who
(37:29):
had the time and ability to do that, then it
would be far less that we would have. But it
is also kind of funny because Samantha and I wrote
a book recently and it was a big thing about
the bibliography because we were both like, why can't we
put every source in there? And they were like, only
(37:51):
the ones that you really used, And this confused us
greatly and we're like, well, if we've listed it, we
used it, because I thought that was just like you
act like common practice, but they had us like go
through and cut out wow only and so only the
ones that we used like a lot from are in
the back and it's more of like a sources listed thing.
(38:12):
But it was just because we've talked about that in
the podcasting world for a long time, is that sometimes
you we used to list our sources and now we don't,
and we still keep them in case anyone asked. But
I always thought when you write a book.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
In the back.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
Is a historical contact, Like we didn't make this up.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
But it's just interesting hearing this where she got a
lot of flak for not having the sources, and now
today it seems.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
They don't want them. They don't care. TikTok is the source.
You can just put TikTok in the back. And they
were like, I saw it on the internet. I'm glad
that next time, next book, y'all just put up put
us on it on the internet and be done with that.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
The publishers like.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Yeah, it's great, yeah, perfect, thank you to love it.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Yes, oh I know about TikTok for me. Yeah. To
be fair, though, I think that there was a little
bit more of a burden of proof on Houston because
of the theory she was espousing. She was put in
for a things. A lot of people were like, hmmm,
I don't know about that. Can you prove it to me? Like,
this is the origin of civilization, this came from where
(39:26):
you know, we have alternate knowledge. Who are you? They
were like, you know, so they had all these questions. Yeah,
they had a lot of questions. I think because it
was such it was they were such big ideas that
she was putting for. Yes, and I am a big fan.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
I think, yes, it's good to have sources and then
you can like look at them up and do more
reading yourself and maybe find out more yourself. It was
just kind of funny to me because we had this
happened with recently.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Yes, I didn't hope it didn't hit home too hard, y'all.
It's okay, We're sorry.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Sorry, Now we need to find someone to have a
beef with.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yeah, let's go.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
I'm just like and then we get like all kinds
of stockersh emails. Right, you don't want we don't care
about do organ? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (40:32):
Take that back, take that back.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Well, it was a delight as always, Eves, thank you
so much for sharing this story with us.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
Uh, where can the good listeners find you? You can
find me on Instagram at not Apologizing. You can also
go to my website there you can get to all
of the other places. My website is Eve's Jeffcoat dot com.
You can also find me on the podcast on Theme,
which is a podcast about black storytelling. If you want
(41:06):
to learn more about that show, you can go to
wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can go to
on Theme dot show. If you can also hear me
on many many other episodes of Sminty doing female First
talking about women in history who have pioneering accomplishments. Yes,
and we think we're coming up on a milestone, although
there's confusion about what the milestone is, but we'll Speaking
(41:28):
of record keeping, I'm not doing a great job over
here on Smithty, but we will.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
We will look into it in the meantime. Listeners, if
you would like to contact us, you can. You can
emails at stephaniea mom Stuff at iHeartMedia dot com. You
can find us on Twitter at mom Stuff podcast, or
on Instagram and TikTok at stephone Never Told You. We
have a tbelg story and yes we do have a book.
You can get it wherever you get your books. Thanks
as always to our super producer Christina or executive producer
Maya and our contributor Joey.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
Thank you and thanks to you for listening.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Steffan Never Told You is production by Heart Radio. For
more podcast from my Heart Radio, you can check out
that heart app, Apple Podcast, orhever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
H
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm welcome to Steff I've never told you a production
of iHeartRadio, and welcome to another edition of Female First,
the first of twenty twenty four, which means we are
once again joined by the wonderful, the winsome, the fantastic Eves.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Welcome you, Hey, y'all, Happy New Year, Happy twenty twenty four.
Still get used to say in that year, me too,
me too.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Very confused because that was an exploration date all my stuff.
I was like, that's next year, and I was like, wait,
oh no, this happens. Samantha, Hey, drinkety keep going.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yes, well, it is so good to have you with us, Eves,
because we didn't we weren't able to have you for
the last month the year of twenty twenty three, so
we have some catching up to do.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
How have you been What have you been up to?
I've been up to figure out what the heck is
going on in this new year?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Pretty much.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
What have I been up to? I didn't really do
much for the New Year. For the holidays, I just
kind of stuck around. It's been pretty quiet for this
for the end of the year. But I think this
new year is off and running to a good start.
I'm writing things I love, I'm reading good things. Yeah,
so I'm looking forward to the rest of twenty twenty
four and seeing what happens. Nice.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Nice it is. We we had a podcast episode about
this recently. Smith and I both really don't do anything
for New Year's either. But one of the things that
I love to do is just write whatever I want
to write, read whatever I want to do, read whatever
I want to read.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So yeah, I'm down with that completely. So nice. Yeah.
I didn't really make any I made some list for
things that I want to like, things that I'm aiming
for this year because or some big things that I'm
aiming for. But I don't feel too attached to anything,
like I think that the way things are pacing out
(02:08):
and things that are happening already in the beginning of
the year, I feel like I'm going in a good direction.
I don't need to be forcing anything, you know, trying
to hold on to anything too tightly that I have planned.
So I don't know. I got I got some things
that I'm I'm looking at that I wrote down, you know,
that I put out into the world, and then I'm
focused on, but I'm going with the flow. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Nice. Yes, we did learn a fun fact about you,
and that is the UFC.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yes, do guilty.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Okay, that's amazing. I think that's hilarious because that's just
so different from your personality that I'm like, that's what
you enjoy. That makes sense in my head of like
the opposite.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
You don't think I like to watch people beat other
people up.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
And that would not be something I would assume immediately,
that's not the first thing.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Yeah, honestly, I wish I had the skills. I kinda like,
I don't want to get beat up. I say that
every time I watched it. I don't. I just I
don't want to be hit in the face. I don't
want scars, I don't want cauliflower ear. I don't want
to be healing injuries all the time. I've been to
physical therapy multiple times in my life, and it is
(03:21):
a process. I don't want to have to go through
strict eating and regimens. I don't want to have to
be so serious about maintaining a certain schedule of exercise.
Like I like, you know, I'm good without those things,
but I do wish I had the fighting skills.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
At the same time, I do wish I could have,
like have the combat skills as well, and like just
in case, you know those you know, imagine moments like
what if this happens, would I be able to do
these reactionary things? But in general, like the thought of
being hit, no, thank you.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
The one thing about it, though, is that you really
realize how important skill is when it comes to combat.
It's like sometimes people, you know, people can be way
bigger than another person, but they just don't have the
skill that they have and whatever the skill may be,
like if it's grappling, it's like one person may not
know how to get out of a certain position because
(04:21):
they just don't have the skill. And you can be
so much smaller than them. And maybe when it comes
to power or strengths, you may have that over them,
but they can still they can still kill you, they
can still injure you. True very very deeply, and it's interesting,
it's very very primitive. There are a lot of times
(04:43):
when I'm watching and I'm looking at the crowd yelling
ridiculous things and seeing people just like fighting for fifteen
minutes in oct to God, and I'm like, yeah, that's
what humanity's about timeshah, ancient ancient history that I'm watching
(05:06):
with a lot of other politics wrapped up into right
right that aside, you know, good old fashion, clean fun.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Clean fun. You know. One of my favorite segments is
when those really big burly dudes have never had any training,
but they work out, want to challenge the UFCU women
and then they get their asses handed to them. That's
my favorite thing to watch, honestly, Like last see TikTok
clips of that. I'm like, yes, that is satisfaction. And
(05:36):
seeing like this one hundred and thirty pound woman because
she's all muscle with this two hundred and fifty pound
dude who's like I could take her, and then being
like taken out in like two seconds and in a
chokehold and asleep. I'm like, yeah, yeah, now I do
enjoy that. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
And I think with sports, because I don't watch a
lot of other sports, it's really fun to look at
people like I've learned a lot over the years of
watching it, like knowing what to look for when people
are more skilled than other people, when I'm pretty sure
I know how a fight's gonna go. But it's cool
to watch people and be like, you're not gonna get this.
You need to do this, you need to do that. Meanwhile,
I know nothing. I've never thought. I've never done any
(06:16):
sort of martial arts. Definitely haven't done mixed martial arts.
But you know, you get to be on the other
side of skirt the screen and just judge them.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
And yelling commentator. That sounds like that. You need to try.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
I pretend to be I do pretend to be a
commentation when I watch.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
I need you to try one time around for a
good fight and then just be commentator. That would be phenomenal.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
You know, that would be fun. But I think about it.
It's funny because you know, we all podcasters, so we
talk a lot. We do it for work. But when
I watch commentators, I'm like, that's a lot of talking.
They do so much filler talking it is to do.
They say the same things in different ways, which honestly,
I am very inspired by. I guess I speaker. They
(07:01):
know how to say the same thing over and over
in nine million different ways. And I you know, I
can't help, but I can't deny the legitimacy and the
skill in that you have to get.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
A catchphrase is what I found like in most like
commentators that you know so that they can be redone
by others and you know immediately who it is, like.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
The different football.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
I love soccer when it's the Irish commentators or Scottish
commentators where they just get angry. It's the players. Those
are my favorites.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
But I've never a skill.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Oh, I don't have to find something because they just
get yelled at about being a pansy and they need
to get up because they're like, so it's become and
I don't. I can't play soccer. I can't imagine the
strengthening itself. But a lot of the times different players
would try to get fouls penalties rather I guess, and
so would kind of dramatically fall or do these things.
(07:57):
And so some Scottish amidators would get really pissed off
about it and would just scream at the at the
tell them didn't get telling them to get up and
stop doing this because they were getting so upset by
all the penalties and constant stopping. That's really funny.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
It does seem like it would be frustrating.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
So anyway, I think you should take it on one guest.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Maybe if you need to mind. Wait, get this done. Yeah,
and then you should come up with your persona.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
We never were in a fantasy world going to be
a fighter. I mean that's the fun part in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Oh yeah, yeah, So we're giving you like homework to
ask well, yeah, thanks for that very long to do list.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yes, it's important. It's important to you need to be wrong.
I was going to do a transition about breaking down
(09:07):
things that haven't aged well. Now that relates to who
we're talking about today, because you were kind of talking
about that with UFC. But I say, let's just go
into no we got you the first time. Annie, Yes,
who did you bring for us to talk about today?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Eaves? So today we'll be talking about Drusilla Dungee Houston.
So I guess if we're talking about things that haven't
aged well, she did talk a lot about ancient history.
A lot of her work was focused on that. She
cared a lot about history and sharing history and educating
people on history. And there are some things in her
work that are disputed, have been kind of shot down,
(09:48):
and there are other things that have lasted and have
aged well. So I think there is somewhere we can
go with that, Annie, we have a transition. So Drusilla
Dungee Houston was the earliest African American woman to write
a multi volume study of ancient Africa. So she has
a long history of writing about history. And yeah, I'm
(10:13):
excited to share her story with everyone today.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yes, yes, this one is another fascinating one I didn't
know about. So thank you as always. Shall we get
into the history, yes we shall so.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Drusilla Dunchee Houston was born in January of eighteen seventy
six in Harper's Ferry in West Virginia. So her parents
were Reverend John William Dungee and Lydia and Taylor Dungee.
So they have their own history and the way that
they brought up Drusilla Dunchee Houston factored a lot into
the direction that she chose to go in because John
(10:49):
was an educator, he was a publisher, and he was
a missionary who had founded Baptist churches across the United
States that were mostly in rural areas. He was born
into slavery and he escaped in and he made his
way to Canada, but eventually he came back to the States.
And so John and Lydia went around the South building churches.
(11:10):
They were members of the American Baptist Home Missionary Society.
And that's how Houston herself too became devoted to the
Baptist Church throughout her life because that's something that was
really part of her early life. It is something that
her parents instilled in her at one point. This is
later in Houston's history, but she even said in this
(11:33):
response letter that she wrote to someone who was talking
down about the church. She said, quote, the faith of
the Negro race is the hope of America. So she
instilled a lot of importance. She placed a lot of
importance upon faith, specifically the Christian faith. It guided a
lot of what she did. It was the reason that
(11:53):
she wrote. It was a thing that was the foundation
of why she did so much of what she did
when it came to educating people and writing about history
and specifically the history of black people. So Houston had
nine siblings, but only four of them lived to adulthood
and their names were Roscoe, Irving, Plant, and Ella. So
(12:19):
her siblings also did notable things. Her brother, Roscoe, he
was an activist and he was the owner and editor
of the newspaper Black Dispatch, which is out of Oklahoma
and after John who was Houston's father, after he died, Roscoe,
Houston's brother, supported the family. He would sell vegetables, and
(12:40):
Houston's other brother, Irving, was a managing editor of the
Chicago Enterprise and an editor of the Negro Champion, which
was out of New York. So Houston she went to
finishing schools when her family lived in the Northern States,
but she didn't go to college, and the family moved
to Oklahoma Territory in eighteen ninety two, and they were
(13:01):
pretty well off. And Houston, even kind of later, really
places a lot of importance on how well she was.
She was like, I know my class, and I know
that I didn't go to college, but my parents had
a lot of books and we had a lot of
arts and culture around us. She did do a little
bit of that in her writing, which was interesting, but hey,
(13:23):
if you got it, flaunted, I guess. So she studied
music and went to the Northwestern Conservatory of Music in Minnesota.
She studied classical piano, and there are stories of how
she played piano for people and she gave poetry readings
that peoples get togethers, which sounds pretty swinky and She
had plans to be a concert pianist, but that didn't happen.
(13:45):
She switched her focus and from eighteen ninety two to
till around the turn of the century she worked as
a kindergarten teacher in Oklahoma. In eighteen ninety eight, she
married a man named Price Houston. He was apparently a
businessman who was twenty years older than her. I didn't
really know much about him, but I do know that
she had two children with him, one named Florence and
(14:06):
the other one was a daughter who died pretty young.
But Houston she opened McAllister Seminary for Girls in Oklahoma,
and she let that school for twelve years. She also
wrote a screenplay in nineteen fifteen called The Madden Mob,
which was written as a refutation of Birth of a Nation.
(14:28):
And in nineteen seventeen she went to Sepolpa, Oklahoma, and
she served as the principal of the Oklahoma Baptist College
for Girls, and there she stayed as the director and
the principal of the school until nineteen twenty three. She
also started the Oklahoma Vocational Institute of Fine Arts and Crafts,
which was a private school, so she did a bunch
(14:51):
of work in the school space. She was very invested
in the education specifically of black children, but also like
reading and education in general. She talked a lot about
how everybody needed to be educated, specifically about black history
and black history in the ways she was talking about it,
which we'll get to a little bit later, but she
(15:12):
cared a lot about it. And there is a scholar
her name is doctor Peggy Brooks Bertram, who I'm going
to be referring to more in this episode, because she
has been really invested in the history of the Dundee family,
especially Houston, and she wrote a lot about them, did
a lot of research, So I'm going to refer to
(15:33):
things she said in some of the research that she
has done quite a bit in this episode. One thing
that doctor Brooks Bertram said about Houston was that she
was quote an extraordinarily private woman who felt compelled to
thrust herself into the major social and political dialogues of
her era end quote. So that makes a lot of
sense because of her upbringing. Apparently her father didn't really
(15:57):
want novels in the house, which is for because I
love novels, love fiction, But I guess he was about
that nonfiction and that clearly showed up in her in
the work that Houston did. So Houston was involved in
her brother, Roscoe's newspaper. So this was a whole clearly
also having to do with the way their parents raised them.
(16:19):
The whole family was invested in journalism and scholarship, in
literary works, in political action and philosophy. You know, they
were invested in all of those spheres of interest. And
her brother Roscoe had a newspaper, the Black Dispatch, and
(16:40):
according to doctor Brooks Bertram, between nineteen fourteen and nineteen
thirty nine, Houston wrote more than two thousand editorials, so
she was busy with her pen. And Houston was also
a lecturer on African history. She was a self taught historian,
and she did a lot of independent research using all
of the blok that her family had in her library
(17:02):
and other ones that she came across in her independent research.
And this is where in her story we get to
the major focus of her biography. One of the things
that she's the most remembered for. So I think it
is you know, this happened so many times in people's
work that there is one large seminal text that is
(17:26):
the thing that they're really well remembered for. But Houston
did have, like I just said, she had two thousand editorials,
so she did have a wealth of writing. But it
seemed like this she considered this her what would you
call it, magnum opus as well, this book because she
was kind of like she had some comments where she said, yeah,
(17:48):
I did a bunch of those editorials and all that stuff,
but the serious thing, No, that's all the work that
I did in this research is ancient history. And the
work that I'm referring to is Wonderful Ethiopians, the ancient
Kushite Empire. That's the work. That is the thing that
she focused on in her life that she spent many
(18:09):
years working on, and she really cared a lot about
and she cares so much about people being able to
read it and understand the history that she was talking
about in the book, talking about Kushite as in kush
the ancient kingdom in Northern Africa, and she said that W. E. B.
Duboce's book The Negro was her inspiration for writing Wonderful Ethiopians.
(18:35):
And this is selfishly one of my favorite parts of
her story because I love beefs and this was kind
of a beef between two notable people to people who
were really intelligent and really invested in the work that
they were doing, really cared about black culture and about
(18:57):
black history. And this part of story is really really
interesting to me because she said she was inspired by
the negro W. E. B. Du Boyce's book, but Dubois
didn't mention it in his publication The Crisis, which I
mean was a very important publication. He said he would
(19:19):
mention it in there. And when she wrote to him
telling him about her book, he told her basically that
she needed to study a little bit more before writing
about ancient history. He was like, oh, yeah, this book
is very interesting, thank you for sending it to me,
But hm, I think you need to return to your
studies if you're going to write things that people can read.
(19:42):
And so understandably, she kind of took offense to that.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yeah, maybe that's why I started writing like I'm I've studied,
I know this level. I'm high class made like correspond
to him to embassy?
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Did she did? And she responded back to him kind
of saying that where she was like, excuse me, I
don't need your white institutions to validate the work that
I do. I have a bunch of books in my life,
and well, you know, my family had a bunch of
books in their library. I've done my own research, you know,
I've created this whole book based on so many other
(20:20):
sources that I've read. So after this point, she really
came in heavy and came in hot with the criticism
in public and in private of Dubois, which was rough
because I know a lot of people who are listening
here will be familiar with W. E. B. Dubois. He
really was very influential in the literary world, in the
(20:45):
social world, political sphere at the time, so that was
a heavy target. You know, he wasn't a small target
to come up against. But she was not playing. She
was defending, you know, her own legitimacy and the importance
of work. But it was also hard one because women
were reliant on men for publication at the time. They
(21:07):
were the ones who were the liaisons and the ones
who ran these publishers, and so you needed these kinds
of connections to be able to get your work out
to more people. And of course Houston wanted to do
that because you really cared about more people knowing this
ancient history, and you know, on top of meeting men
(21:29):
in general for publication, it was Due Boys. So a
lot of people were in love with Due Boys because
of who he was and what he could do for people,
and rightfully so, he was a very notable scholar in
his own right. So the way that it seemed to
me because of how people responded, you know, they weren't
(21:51):
going to take too well to this woman who they
didn't know, Houston, who they were just being introduced to,
versus this big, this figure with this stature of Dubois,
are like, well, who are you coming up against?
Speaker 2 (22:03):
You?
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Boys? So in my mind I kind of see this
as a cancelation in a way because Houston, she didn't
her book didn't do amazingly well. It didn't get into
as many spaces as she wanted it to get into.
So that is a fascinating part of her story, I
(22:26):
feel like, and it goes deeper than that, and you can,
you know, you can see that in the public criticism
that she had of du Bois, where she would come
up against him, where she was louding him before in
newspapers and magazine, she started going in the other direction
and really calling him out in a negative way. So, yeah,
(22:50):
beef in history, that's amazing, but okay. So but on
the book, it was published in nineteen twenty six, and
this was volume. It was subtitled Nations of the Kushite
Empire Marvelous Facts from Authentic Records. Like I said earlier,
she couldn't really get access to these white publishing houses
(23:10):
that were publishing a lot of black text at the time,
so she established Ethiopian Press and she used the Black
Dispatches printing presses to make her book. So this was
a self publishing effort, and at first five hundred copies
were printed and they were sold for two dollars and
fifty cents, which would be about forty three dollars today.
But she couldn't market the book because her own funds
(23:33):
were wrapped up in this thing, and so she sold
it through mail order. So at this time was in
nineteen twenty so this was during the Harlem Renaissance. There
was a lot of focus on black work, on black culture, literature, poetry,
and fiction. But Houston herself, she wasn't really a fan
of the Harlem Renaissance kind of work. She was more
(23:57):
interested in history than she was in art and she
was kind of like upset about how people were gravitating
more toward the arts than history, which is very interesting
to me. I know that, you know, when you have
a work and you have this text that you work
so hard on, you really got to you gotta be
(24:18):
your own biggest fan. You got to root for yourself.
And I understand that part of me wonders, you know.
And I also know like when you're working on a
work that's that big, it can feel like the entire
world is revolving around it. So that part is really
interesting to me because it's not as if all those
things can't coexist together. And a lot of people who
(24:42):
were involved in the arts and during the Harlem Renaissance
period were obviously like making a lot of progress when
it came to writing works that were true to them
that they were able to get into larger mainstream attention.
But yeah, so it was important too, Like it's still obviously,
(25:03):
you know, everybody does, I care about history too, So
of course that's still important. But yeah, at the end
of volume one, she says that book two she mentions
a book too, and says that it gives more authentic
information upon this subject than any other book extant. So
these books she was it was there were kind of
(25:25):
a correction of the record, a way to uplift the
black history and how its origins were in Africa, specifically
the Nile Valley. She referred to it as a cradle
of civilization and was going up against this racist history
that was put forth by many archaeologists. So it's been
referred to of kind of like race writing or racial
(25:49):
uplift writing. But I don't want to downplay the work
because she was very focused in research and focused in
history in the work that she did. However, that original
publication didn't have a bibliography, it didn't have footnotes, it
didn't have endnotes or an index, which was standard for
(26:11):
this kind of factual writing at the time as it
is now. And so she got praised for her work
of how deeply she dug into this ancient history, how
she was refuting a history that revolved around European history
and how integral people in Africa and what she considered
(26:32):
the cradle of civilization to be. But she also got
criticism for not having sources listed in her work for
any of those things. So people were kind of like, yeah,
you're saying a lot and this is really fascinating and
it looks like you did your work, but I just
can't see your work. So that was also, you know,
(26:58):
a very real and a very valid child lenge for
people reading her work and trying to suss out the
credibility in her work and where the plausible deniability was.
She also got criticism for her language being too flowery,
though she said that she did that on purpose. She
made it less technical in order to reach people who
(27:20):
were new to the info that she was presenting. So
that makes sense too with her background, because she really
cared about educating children and people across all borders. She said, Oh,
I want this. I want white people to read this.
I want black people to read this. I want white
people to read this to see where they've gone wrong
and how they're misunderstand everything when it comes to history,
(27:42):
how they deny because of racism, that the greatness and
the splendor and the importance and the vastness of knowledge
that came from this area of the world. I want
everybody to read it. She wanted to sell enough books
to be able to put out a second a day,
and she wanted it to go to all kinds of places,
(28:05):
so She wanted it to be in the classroom, you know,
she wanted, you know, individuals to be able to read
the book. So she really cared about disseminating this knowledge.
She said that slavery had broke black folks in the
diaspora's knowledge of the greatness of our origin. So it
was very important for us to unlearn all of these
(28:26):
things that we were learning as standards in the curriculum
and classrooms. We were in learning about this European history,
but we weren't connecting it back to this ancient African history.
And she wanted that connection to be made. And she
said that a lot of that was broken because of
the institution of slavery and how that separated people from
(28:49):
knowledge of their own actual history and therefore also the
greatness of that history. So really was the work that
she cared a lot about. And according to doctor Brooks Bertram,
her work quote seriously challenged the belief that women writers
(29:11):
should limit themselves to poetry, novels, short stories, and place
because that was kind of the sphere that women could
have been expected to work in at the time. I mean,
we know that this was an accomplishment, like Houston was
(29:33):
a pioneer in this field for women. There were men
who were writing about work, who were writing about ancient
history as it related to Africa, but there weren't many
women who were doing this and doctor Brooks Bertram said
that Houston's work also challenged the idea that a person
(29:53):
had to be a PhD. To be a historian, which
is something that Houston herself railed against obviously in her
communications with Dubois, but in general she went forth with
her work without having to be validated by a degree,
to do the research and share the research that she did.
(30:15):
So there is some discrepancy around how many volumes actually exist.
So we know of the first one, the one that
we were just talking about. Houston herself said that she
wrote multiple volumes, maybe around six volumes of this work,
but there's not really a way to validate that because
(30:36):
we don't have a lot of those other works. There
are works that have been listed, like ones including Origin
of the Aryans and one called Cushites of Western Europe,
and there are some other ones that Houston mentioned as well,
but we don't know where any of those are, if
they even exist, if they existed in manuscript form, if
they were ever printed any of that kind of thing.
(30:58):
Doctor Brooks Bertram did say that she was given a
corrected edition in two thousand and one of Wonderful Ethiopians,
and she said that it was undated but had a bibliography, index, footnotes,
and more chapters, and that the corrections that were included
in that edition may have been made in the late
nineteen twenties or early nineteen thirties. But in the end,
(31:22):
a lot of Houston's work is lost to time, including
some of her fiction, poetry, essays, things like that. But
we have some of it, and we know a little
bit more about Houston's life. We know that she was
an active member of different clubs, like the Federated Women's
Clubs of Oklahoma. We also know that in nineteen thirty
(31:45):
four she served as a religious director of the Oklahoma
Home for Delinquent Boys. She was fluent in different languages,
and in nineteen thirty six she was interviewed by folks
in the Negro Studies unit of the Federal Writers Project
that was under the Works Progress Administration. But she did
deal with illness for many years of her life. She
(32:06):
was affected by the flu epidemic in nineteen eighteen, and
she later got to berculosis and that was something that
really weighed heavily on her health over the years, and
she ended up dying in February of nineteen forty one
in Arizona, and true to her faith in Christianity, her
headstone says, to die is to gain. Yeah. So in
(32:28):
nineteen eighty five, Wonderful Ethiopians was republished through Black Classic Press,
which publishes obscure and significant works by and about people
of African descent. And she was also recognized posthumously, and
there is a memorial scholarship that's named in her honor
that recognizes emergent women's scholars of African descent. So she
(32:53):
did get recognition. During her time. She was able to
sell some copies of her work, though I imagine is
not as many copies that she would have wanted to sell,
and not as many volumes of the book as she
would have wanted to pass out. But her legacy lives
on in the work of all the other scholars who
went on to talk about the relate the history of
(33:17):
people in the Black diaspora going back to Africa, showing
how those origins were ones that needed to be uplifted
and ones that needed to be learned about and honored,
and how a lot of the separation from that history
came from the history of the slave trade around the world,
so very noble work, work that was pioneering and happy
(33:40):
to be able to share it today.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
I did not know the UFC, the mature at the top,
would have so much, truly, I didn't know there's going
to be beef exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
There was fighting involved, some punches were throwing. She sounds
like a fascinating person.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, like I love her kind of like shunning the
arts and the Harlem Renaissance, like this history way just
what we should be dealing with talking about.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
Yeah, I'm kind of like, okay, Boomer kind of a
situation like, yeah, like we should be talking about history.
What do you know about that? You're worried about your arts? Yeah,
I mean no, I know she didn't mean it that way.
I'm just joking, no, for sure, But it does have
that kind of because I have a relative who's like that,
(34:50):
who thinks fiction is worthless, like art is worthless, Like
he would be somebody who wouldn't have any non anything
but nonfiction in his home. And I've never understood it.
I don't get it.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
But I just when you were sharing that story, I
was like, yeah, I feel like I know this person.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Yeah, yeah, I'm there. As you know, there are still
people who who feel this way.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yes, you know, I find it fascinating too. Though. She
was kind of ahead of her time with that needing
the flowery language so that people can find history accessible,
like we see that today with historians writing almost fictional
levels of accounts of what's happening, and they're not fictional,
but they just draw out into a storytelling so that
people can read and understand better what was happening during
(35:34):
his historical times and also bring more interest probably also
sell more books.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
But like she was.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Ahead of her time in that way in creating something
that was accessible instead of just being like this is
what it is.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Yeah, I agree with you, Samanthas, So thanks for bringing
up that point, because, like publishing was a lot different
than than it is now and to get things to
more people's bookshelves because the focus is on you know,
how big can we make this reach? How many people's
shelves can we reach? Home, more money can we make
because of volume, But back then it was more like
(36:05):
well where are your sources there wasn't so much separation
between like, Okay, what kind of balance can we bring
between the factual the facts in this thing and also
the readability of this thing didn't seem to be so
much of a concern back then. But it does seem
like kind of a kind of a pity because she
(36:28):
had something that could touch so many people's hands, but
it wasn't able to get out there like that because
of the challenges that she had with the actual publishing
process and the holes that were dug with the beef
and your health contributed to it, you know, I know
there was no longitudinal study done on what were the
(36:49):
factors that caused her book to not make it to
more people and fewer people to read it, but yeah,
I'm sure those things did not help a book that
could have been in the interest of way more people.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Yeah, And I also think, you know, I think she
made a very great valid point about the kind of
the PhD thing and that you don't have to because
that can be so like gatekeepy and how much money
do you have and what connections you have in the
first place, and takes so long, which in one way
is yes, that makes sense, and that is good, but
if we were only getting information from from people who
(37:29):
had the time and ability to do that, then it
would be far less that we would have. But it
is also kind of funny because Samantha and I wrote
a book recently and it was a big thing about
the bibliography because we were both like, why can't we
put every source in there? And they were like, only
(37:51):
the ones that you really used, And this confused us
greatly and we're like, well, if we've listed it, we
used it, because I thought that was just like you
act like common practice, but they had us like go
through and cut out wow only and so only the
ones that we used like a lot from are in
the back and it's more of like a sources listed thing.
(38:12):
But it was just because we've talked about that in
the podcasting world for a long time, is that sometimes
you we used to list our sources and now we don't,
and we still keep them in case anyone asked. But
I always thought when you write a book.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
In the back.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
Is a historical contact, Like we didn't make this up.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
But it's just interesting hearing this where she got a
lot of flak for not having the sources, and now
today it seems.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
They don't want them. They don't care. TikTok is the source.
You can just put TikTok in the back. And they
were like, I saw it on the internet. I'm glad
that next time, next book, y'all just put up put
us on it on the internet and be done with that.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
The publishers like.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Yeah, it's great, yeah, perfect, thank you to love it.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Yes, oh I know about TikTok for me. Yeah. To
be fair, though, I think that there was a little
bit more of a burden of proof on Houston because
of the theory she was espousing. She was put in
for a things. A lot of people were like, hmmm,
I don't know about that. Can you prove it to me? Like,
this is the origin of civilization, this came from where
(39:26):
you know, we have alternate knowledge. Who are you? They
were like, you know, so they had all these questions. Yeah,
they had a lot of questions. I think because it
was such it was they were such big ideas that
she was putting for. Yes, and I am a big fan.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
I think, yes, it's good to have sources and then
you can like look at them up and do more
reading yourself and maybe find out more yourself. It was
just kind of funny to me because we had this
happened with recently.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Yes, I didn't hope it didn't hit home too hard, y'all.
It's okay, We're sorry.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Sorry, Now we need to find someone to have a
beef with.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yeah, let's go.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
I'm just like and then we get like all kinds
of stockersh emails. Right, you don't want we don't care
about do organ? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (40:32):
Take that back, take that back.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Well, it was a delight as always, Eves, thank you
so much for sharing this story with us.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
Uh, where can the good listeners find you? You can
find me on Instagram at not Apologizing. You can also
go to my website there you can get to all
of the other places. My website is Eve's Jeffcoat dot com.
You can also find me on the podcast on Theme,
which is a podcast about black storytelling. If you want
(41:06):
to learn more about that show, you can go to
wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can go to
on Theme dot show. If you can also hear me
on many many other episodes of Sminty doing female First
talking about women in history who have pioneering accomplishments. Yes,
and we think we're coming up on a milestone, although
there's confusion about what the milestone is, but we'll Speaking
(41:28):
of record keeping, I'm not doing a great job over
here on Smithty, but we will.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
We will look into it in the meantime. Listeners, if
you would like to contact us, you can. You can
emails at stephaniea mom Stuff at iHeartMedia dot com. You
can find us on Twitter at mom Stuff podcast, or
on Instagram and TikTok at stephone Never Told You. We
have a tbelg story and yes we do have a book.
You can get it wherever you get your books. Thanks
as always to our super producer Christina or executive producer
Maya and our contributor Joey.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
Thank you and thanks to you for listening.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Steffan Never Told You is production by Heart Radio. For
more podcast from my Heart Radio, you can check out
that heart app, Apple Podcast, orhever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
H
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