Category Archives: perSISTERS designs

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

RISE for Ketanji Brown Jackson

RISE for Ketanji Brown Jackson, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project.
Purchase this print in the store.

Here is a perSISTERS design for our newest Supreme Court Justice who is the first Black woman to be appointed to be a judge on the highest court in the United States.

DESIGN NOTES

I tell people I don’t do “firsts” unless there is a particular power or message involved. So I wasn’t inclined to do a piece for Ketanji Brown Jackson just because she will be our first Black woman Supreme Court justice. However, I have received an extraordinary number of requests so I know there is something important going on there. Granted, I live and work in an area with more lawyers than any other location in the U.S., and a substantial number of African American people. But still.

I try to stay positive in my perSISTERS works so I will not use space here to address in any detail the bizarre—but not unexpected—performance of Republican Senators during the confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. I will say that Jackson gave an impeccable performance during this ordeal. She held to her message on her professional principles, principles that should not be controversial: the rule of law and equal protection under the law.

The main message that I find to foreground in a perSISTERS print is rarely a direct quote. Here I have woven in text from Jackson’s recent speeches, but the large message I found, RISE, is not the obvious one you will see in other works made for Ketanji Brown Jackson. The most obvious message is PERSEVERE, which is the explicit message she has said she would give to young people. (See Jackson answer Senator Padilla’s question here: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/judge-jackson-s-advice-to-students-facing-challenges-persevere-136102981509). 

The thing is, all of the persisters are who they are because they have persevered. The series is pretty much named for that. I have three print designs that use the words, “Nevertheless she persisted.” Also, as a writer and typographer, I just don’t like the word “persevere.” I don’t like the sound, and I don’t like how it looks. So I studied the contexts within her speeches and I found some things that were more interesting, for me. 

Let’s look at the context of Jackson’s “persevere” message. This is a condensed quote, and it appears on the print. She is answering Padilla’s question, What would you say to all those young Americans, the most diverse in our nation’s history, what would you say if they doubt they can achieve the same great heights that you have:

I will tell them what an anonymous person said to me once, as I was walking through Harvard Yard my freshman year. … I was really questioning, do I belong here? Can I make it in this environment? And I was walking through the Yard in the evening, and a Black woman I did not know was passing me on the sidewalk. And she looked at me and I guess she knew how I was feeling. She leaned over as we crossed and said, “Persevere.”

For me, the great message in this statement is that in a crucial time in her life, it was the empathic statement of a stranger that gave Jackson some courage, enough so that she never forgot this encounter. I’m sure Jackson had been told to persevere previously, but it was this context that gave it particular weight. It was a gift. A gift from a person with similar ancestry and experience. And in this hearing, answering Mr. Padilla’s question, Ketanji Brown Jackson is re-gifting that message. 

I tried to think of a way to put this idea into the one or two big words I put on the prints, but it is too complicated. So I used imagery to communicate this. The pattern in the background is often called the “flower of life” and to me it communicates interconnectedness. (I have used this motif in scarf designs to communicate the way Virginia Woolf intersects the consciousnesses of her characters in her novel, Mrs. Dalloway.)

Ketanji Brown Jackson returns to the gifting idea in the speech she gave at the White House after her confirmation. An excerpt appears in the background on the print. The larger message she is trying to convey is that she is situated in history and history is showing that anything is possible in America (“We have come a long way toward perfecting our union.”) She speaks about how, even though she worked very hard, she could not be a role model herself if she hadn’t been standing on the shoulders of her own role models. She is speaking about the monumental achievements—in just a few generations—of African Americans in this country. Near the end of the speech, she quotes from the poem, “And Still I Rise,”  an amazing poem about Black female persistence and power. This is from the transcript the White House published online:

To be sure, I have worked hard to get to this point in my career, and I have now achieved something far beyond anything my grandparents could’ve possibly ever imagined.  But no one does this on their own.  The path was cleared for me so that I might rise to this occasion. 

And in the poetic words of Dr. Maya Angelou, I do so now, while “Bringing the gifts…my ancestors gave.”  (Applause.)  I –“I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”  (Applause.)

So this is where the message “RISE” comes from. It is a force of justice through history and a gift that can be shared. Also, it’s the thing you do when a judge walks into that room that is dedicated to the ceremonies of justice.

A NOTE ON THE COLORS

The color harmonies in this piece are based on the color of the spines of the law books appearing behind Ms. Jackson in the photo referenced (and changed) that can be found here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:10.18.2019,_Ketanji_Jackson.jpg   released under a creative commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en  The photographer has no responsibility for my artwork.

MORE LINKS

Excerpt: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/in-ketanji-brown-jackson-s-success-a-lesson-in-what-is-possible-in-a-democracy-137363525966

Full White House speech: https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/04/08/ketanji-brown-jackson-supreme-court-celebration-full-speech-sot-vpx.cnn

“And Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou https://poets.org/poem/still-i-rise

. . .

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Ketanji Brown Jackson (born Ketanji Onyika Brown; September 14, 1970) is an American attorney and jurist who has served as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit since 2021. She has been confirmed as the next associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Jackson received Senate confirmation on April 7, 2022. When she is sworn in she will be the first black woman to sit on the Supreme Court.

Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Miami, Florida, Jackson attended Harvard University for college and law school, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She began her legal career with three clerkships, including one with U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer. Prior to her elevation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, she served as a district judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia from 2013 to 2021. Jackson was also vice chair of the United States Sentencing Commission from 2010 to 2014. Jackson worked in private legal practice from 2000 to 2003. From 2003 to 2005, she was an assistant special counsel to the United States Sentencing Commission. From 2005 to 2007, Jackson was an assistant federal public defender in Washington, D.C., where she handled cases before U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. From 2007 to 2010, Jackson was an appellate specialist at a law firm.

Based on Wikipedia 

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

New Variations on Older Favorites: Ruby and Harriet

I use first names to talk about and organize my perSISTERS designs. You may have noticed this when and if you’ve thumbed through my tabbed print bins. “Alphabetical by first name.”

These variations are based on some shirt designs I’ve made for Ruby and Harriet (soon to appear under “Wearables”). I also wanted to include these two people in the 2022 calendar, but I didn’t want to include the same designs I’ve used in calendars twice already. So here are FEARLESS and RUBY PERSISTED, 2.0. You can read about my FEARLESS project at this link. But I don’t think I’ve ever put the story of Ruby Bridges on the blog. So scroll on for the text that I include with the print designs I’ve made for her.

  • FEARLESS for Harriet Tubman, a perSISTERS print variation in the Female Power Project
  • NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED a new variation for Ruby Bridges, a perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project
New variations on some old favorites.

As a six-year-old, Ruby Bridges (born September 8, 1954) famously became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. When the 1st grader walked to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960 surrounded by a team of U.S. Marshals, she was met by a vicious mob shouting and throwing objects at her.

One of the federal marshals, Charles Burks, who was on her escort team, recalls Bridges’ courage in the face of such hatred: “For a little girl six years old going into a strange school with four strange deputy marshals, a place she had never been before, she showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier. We were all very proud of her.”

Once Ruby entered the school she discovered that there were no other children because they had all been removed by their parents. The only teacher willing to teach Ruby was Barbara Henry, who had recently moved from Boston. Ruby was taught by herself for her first year at the school due to the white parents’ refusal to have their children share a school with a black child.

Despite daily harassment, which required the federal marshals to continue escorting her to school for months; threats towards her family; and her father’s job loss due to his family’s role in school integration, Ruby persisted in attending school. The following year, when she returned for second grade, the mobs were gone and more African American students joined her at the school. The pioneering school integration effort was a success due to Ruby Bridges’ inspiring courage, perseverance, and resilience.

Bridges, now Ruby Bridges Hall, still lives in New Orleans with her husband, Malcolm Hall, and their four sons. After graduating from a desegregated high school, she worked as a travel agent for 15 years and later became a full-time parent. She is now chair of the Ruby Bridges Foundation, which she formed in 1999 to promote “the values of tolerance, respect, and appreciation of all differences”. Describing the mission of the group, she says, “racism is a grown-up disease and we must stop using our children to spread it.”

From “A Mighty Girl” Facebook page and Wikipedia. Image based on a photo by an unnamed Department of Justice employee.

  • Ruby Bridges at William Frantz Elementary School in 1960
  • The Creatrix at William Frantz Elementary School in 2017
Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

Question Categories for Pauli Murray

QUESTION CATEGORIES for Pauli Murray, a perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project

In a new documentary, Pauli Murray says that communication is at the center of everything she does. This thrilled me because I have for years been thinking about communication. Communication is fundamentally about the meeting of two persons, two subjectivities, and the bridging of differences. Differences are set up and perpetuated by social categories, most often binaries, and individuals are sort of tied in a web of these categories. Pauli Murray was a brilliant and perceptive human whose self was suspended in the threads between firm categories. I’m thinking of the categories of subject and object, not-white and white, female and male, heterosexual and homosexual. Binaries are distortions. She was capable of perceiving her situation, and effecting action upon it, long before we had (as a culture in U.S.) the language to talk about these things. She was like a grammarian to a language that had yet to exist. She had the astounding imagination to be able to sketch the landscape that Martin Luther King, Jr. could only partly see from his mountaintop. This is because he did not have people who were not heterosexual, or who were assigned female, standing there with him. Murray liked to say that she lived to see all her lost causes found. Many of them were. Many will be.

Ruth  (a poem by Pauli Murray)

Brown girl chanting Te Deum on Sunday
Rust-colored peasant with strength of granite,
Bronze girl welding ship hulls on Monday,
Let nothing smirch you, let no one crush you. 

Queen of ghetto, sturdy hill-climber,
Walk with the lilt of ballet dancer,
Walk like a strong down-East wind blowing,
Walk with the majesty of the First Woman. 

Gallant challenger, millioned-hope bearer,
The stars are your beacons, earth your inheritance,
Meet blaze and cannon with your own heart’s passion,
Surrender to none the fire of your soul.

Pauli Murray (November 20, 1910–July 1, 1985) was a poet, a writer of letters to powerful people, a lawyer, civil rights activist, women’s rights activist, organizer, professor, Episcopal priest, and a non-binary person. She was a Black person who had many white ancestors, and at least one indigenous ancestor. She was assigned female at birth but always felt that she was really a man, that there was some mistake in her body. She lived most of her life as a lesbian woman, after a short time presenting as a boy when riding the rails during the Great Depression. She never spoke publicly about her sexuality or sexual identity, but her voluminous archive does include many documents expressing them. She knew that she would be an object of study in the future—her archive includes photos and film from the 1930s!— and she did not hide her complex identity from us, here in the future, although she did destroy her letters with her greatest love. I am so grateful to whoever did not destroy this record of her non-binary self. I think we are ready to think about her as she really was in a way that was not possible while she lived. Maybe that’s why most people are only now discovering her.

Pauli Murray is not able to tell us explicitly which pronouns are hers. This choice was not available to her the way it is available to people now. I am using the third person pronouns she did use for herself. It is not wrong to use “they/them”. It is not wrong to use “he/him”. These are categories we can question FOR her. Another category we have now that I don’t think she had then is “non-binary.” This may have been the best home for her, but we just don’t know. That is why her power for us is to QUESTION CATEGORIES. As a lawyer, Murray questioned racial and gender categories and worked to show that laws discriminating against people based on these categories are arbitrary and unconstitutional. These laws are wrong at their core, not just in their implementation.  

In the same way it is not wrong to include her—someone who knew themselves to be a man—in a project about female power. If you have read this long, I am now going to tell you a secret (it was never a secret). Female Power is not just for females. My project is to expand the definition of power to include the power of females. We know that binaries are inadequate. Let’s imagine what replaces them.

I urge everyone to see the recent documentary called “My Name Is Pauli Murray” available at the link below. In it we hear Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney, say, “We can’t comprehend legal movements for justice without understanding Pauli’s role in them.” 

There is too much to include in this small space, so I will make a condensed list of Murray’s ground breaking human rights work. In the last decade of her life she worked in ministry as an Episcopal priest, the first ordained African American woman in that church. She felt she wanted to work directly in communion with individual people. 

• In 1940, Murray sits in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they are arrested for violating state segregation laws. They had been reading about Gandhian non-violent resistance. The NAACP drops her case when the charges are changed to disorderly conduct. This event fires her interest in Civil Rights law.

• In 1941 she enters Howard University Law School and stays at the top of her class. She writes a paper on a strategy to counter segregation and her reasoning is later used by Thurgood Marshall to argue Brown v. Board of Education. While at Howard she participates in sit-ins challenging discrimination at restaurants in D.C.

• Long before Kimberlé Crenshaw develops the idea of intersectionality, Murray uses the term “Jane Crow” to describe the special status of Black women as the targets of discrimination. She later criticizes the sexism of the civil rights movement, “It is indefensible to call a national march on Washington and send out a call which contains the name of not a single woman leader.”

• In 1950, Murray publishes a book surveying state racial segregation laws across the country. She continues her argument that lawyers should fight such laws as directly unconstitutional, instead of trying to make the separate accommodations more equal. Thurgood Marshall calls Murray’s book the “bible” of the civil rights movement. The text functions as a catalogue of laws for dismantling, similar to the Solicitor General’s list that RBG used.

• 1961–1964 Murray writes influential works on extending the developing civil rights law protections for Black people to women as well. Ruth Bader Ginsburg adds Murray as coauthor on her brief in her first case for the ACLU, Reed v. Reed (1971).

• In 1966, she originates the idea for, and then co-founds, the National Organization for Women (NOW), which she hoped could act as a NAACP for women’s rights. 

DESIGN NOTE

You might have noticed that the large titling typeface I used in this design is a “unicase font” (called Quinoa) in which upper case and lower case forms are combined into one case. In other words, this type is non-binary.

This print was published in October 2021.

SOURCES

Documentary: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B09DMPMWCP/

Artwork based on this Photo: Pauli Murray of New York, winner of Mademoiselle Merit Award for signal achievement in law, 1946. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Wikipedia

https://www.indiewire.com/2021/10/pauli-murray-trailblazing-advocacy-shaped-the-world-1234669711/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/the-many-lives-of-pauli-murray

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/sep/17/how-is-pauli-murray-not-a-household-name-the-extraordinary-life-of-the-uss-most-radical-activist