For Black History Month, ChicagoCAC celebrates voices of African-American survivors of child sexual abuse, especially survivors who have made an impact in their communities and in children’s lives. We wanted to show that experiencing abuse does not limit anyone’s potential or achievement. While the people we highlighted are open about their abuse history, we want to remind you that sharing any experience is a choice everyone makes for themselves.
The following is a collection of profiles written in 2021 and 2022 that show an amazing array of African-American voices and Black excellence in the face of adversity.
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou changed the world with her words. Her book “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” tells the story of her childhood, including her sexual abuse, and she once said she found relief in “telling the truth.” Both her books and her poetry broke new ground for Black writers, and she is often considered “The Black Woman’s Poet Laureate”. Her writing about her childhood is even considered a great learning tool for child development professionals, and her poetry has influenced modern hip-hop. Angelou was also an educator, singer, filmmaker, actress, and activist who passed away in 2014, but her influence will never fade. Enjoy some of her poems here.
Mary J. Blige
Mary J. Blige is open about the pain of trauma in her award-winning music. She has also overcome drug and alcohol addiction, which were a byproduct of her early abuse. Blige is a renaissance woman, credited with influencing the current sound of hip hop and R&B, but also able to take on musical theater and old standards. She has won NINE Grammys, and was the first person nominated for acting and songwriting in the same year at the Oscars.
Blige also wants to help women and teenage girls have an easier path to success than she did. The Mary J. Blige Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now, Inc. (FFAWN) provides adult education opportunities, including parenting education, and also offers programs and scholarships specifically to teenage girls. We love that this highlight of her 20 best songs describes her as “a conduit for communal pain and healing.”
Charles Blow
Charles Blow is a familiar name in the pages of the New York Times. Since 2008, his weekly columns have brought political and racial consciousness to millions around the country. His 2014 memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, is an intricately written tale of his Louisiana childhood, which eventually became an opera by Black composer Terence Blanchard. The central event of the memoir is his sexual abuse by his cousin at the age of 7, and it can be seen to have shaped Blow’s personality in permanent ways.
In the wake of the abuse, Blow describes struggling with feeling dead inside, and having trouble displaying healthy emotions and having relationships. The abuse also complicated Blow’s relationship to his own sexuality, and it took him a number of years to acknowledge that he is a bisexual man. Yet Fire Shut Up in My Bones beautifully relates Blow’s coming of age through college and his path to eventual success, and is a testament to self-insight and determination, and ultimately provides hope rather than despair. Read an excerpt here.
Common
Common is a Grammy-winning rapper, Golden Globe and Academy Award-winning songwriter, and actor who’s been performing for over three decades. In his recent book, “Let Love Have The Last Word”, he discloses his abuse and expresses his desire to start a conversation about sexual abuse, particularly among Black men.
While Common is an activist for many causes, including animal rights and the rights of the incarcerated, he also founded the Common Ground Foundation, a non-profit that seeks to empower underprivileged youth to be contributing citizens and strong leaders in the world.
Enjoy this selection of Common’s songs.
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday is one of a few truly distinctive voices in the world. A jazz singer from the 1930s to her 1959 death, many today know her for the civil rights protest anthem “Strange Fruit”. The song delivers a powerful, timeless message about racial violence and discrimination, but became her biggest hit in a career of hits. Her following crossed race and class boundaries and brought her fame and fortune – but also, tragedy.
Holiday never had an easy life. As she shares in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, she was often raised by relatives while her mother was away trying to support the family. She had very little consistent schooling. And in the midst of so much instability, she was the victim of sexual assault by a neighbor at age 11. She ended up in protective custody for a year while the case went to trial, which further eroded her family relationships. But soon, she heard jazz music for the very first time and she found inspiration to begin a nightclub career.
Like many survivors, Holiday struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, and it contributed to her early death. She also had many challenging abusive relationships and legal trouble leading to some brief jail time. Her life is a mixture of the complexities that often stem from trauma, but her story and music have brought meaning and hope to countless people. We urge you to take a moment out of your day to listen to Billie Holiday and honor her courage and talent and the resilience she showed for so long. Here’s a list of some of her best work.
Marsha P. Johnson
Marsha P. Johnson is considered one of the mothers of the LGBTQ rights movement: some even say she threw the first brick at Stonewall, the protest that catapulted gay rights into the national spotlight. Her bubbly personality and care for everyone around her made her a recognizable figure in New York City’s gay scene.
She was explicit about her youthful experiences, including her abuse, influencing her adult activism. With her close friend and fellow activist Sylvia Rivera, Johnson helped found STAR house, a shelter for gay and trans youth experiencing homelessness or who were runaways. This was one of the first times LGBTQ youth had been specifically prioritized by activists in this way. Though she often had very little herself, to the end of her life Johnson could often be found providing food, clothes, money and emotional support to younger members of her community. Tragically, she was found dead at 42 in 1992, but her legacy absolutely lives on in the fierce activism of young Black trans people.
While she’s often referred to as a transgender woman and used she/her pronouns for herself, Johnson didn’t necessarily identify as trans in her lifetime and we want to respect that distinction, even if that’s the way we might see her gender identity today. (She preferred the term “queen”.) Enjoy this brief clip of Johnson discussing the night of Stonewall in her own words, and we hope her story inspires you to learn more about her.
Don Lemon
Don Lemon has been in broadcast news for decades – in fact, he was an anchor on NBC5 here in Chicago and won three Emmys before moving onto greater prominence at CNN, where he has been since 2006. He is known for his emphasis on truth and for his willingness to share his beliefs, even at the risk of pushback.
His 2011 memoir, where he publicly came out as gay, is titled “Transparent”. It was a time when public opinion on LGBTQ+ rights was shifting, and Lemon was moved to share his story by the recent suicide of a young gay man, Tyler Clementi, to whom his book is dedicated. He believes his experiences as a gay Black man lead his empathetic journalism, and he remains one of just a few out Black journalists in broadcasting.
In “Transparent”, Lemon also disclosed his experience of child sexual abuse. He is steadfast in his belief that his sexuality and his abuse are unrelated, citing the fact that straight abuse survivors often have their own struggles with intimacy and relationships. Now with his very own news show, Lemon continues to be highly visible on CNN and uses his relationship to his identities to bring current events to life.
ChicagoCAC and other child advocacy centers were grateful to have Lemon take part in our 2021 virtual event “Uniting Against Child Abuse” which talked about the role of CACs across the nation. Watch him deliver the facts about child sexual abuse around the 59 minute mark in this event video.
Ayanna Pressley
Ayanna Pressley is a Democratic Congresswoman from Massachusetts, and part of a group of young female politicians known as “The Squad” when they were elected to Congress in 2018. She is known for her strong critique of former president Donald Trump and her endorsements of policies to provide social safety nets in areas like healthcare and immigration.
She is a particularly strong proponent of policies around ending sexual violence. This dates back to her time on Boston’s City Council when she formed the Committee on Healthy Women, Families, and Communities. Its focus included domestic violence, child abuse, and human trafficking. She worked collaboratively with community members to develop a comprehensive sex education and health curriculum and update the expectant and parenting student policy, all implemented into Boston Public schools in the mid 2010s. Pressley was the first black woman elected to the Boston City Council and the first black woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts.
Pressley is open about her survivorship of both child sexual abuse and sexual assault in her college years. She is also known for her unique hairstyles. Prior to 2020, her Sengalese twists became her signature – a choice made to highlight Black hair diversity, challenge norms that say Black hair isn’t professional, and inspire young Black girls. But in 2020, she revealed her recent diagnosis with alopecia, a disease that causes hair loss, and revealed her new look – a stunning bald head, which she continues to sport with pride and glamor.
A fun Pressley fact – while she may represent the Boston area in Congress, she grew up in Chicago and was voted most likely to be Chicago’s Mayor in her high school class! We’ll see where her political aspirations take her next. And while Pressley has done far more than be beautiful, this piece about her hair journey from the Root illustrates her thoughtful, inclusive approach to her work and the world.
