Excerpts of, "To Whom Will She Cry Rape?"

*Abbey Lincoln speaks to me:

"We are the women (Black Women) who were kidnapped and brought to this continents as slaves. We are the women who were raped, are still being raped, and our bastards children snatched from our breasts and scattered to the winds to be lynched, castrated, de-egoed, robbed, burned, and deceived. We are the women whose strong and beautiful Black bodies were-- and are-- still being used as cheap labor force for Miss. Anne's kitchen and Mr. Charlie's bed, whose rich, black, and warm milk nurtured--and still nurtures--the heir to the racist and evil slave master.

We are the women who dwell in the hell-hole ghettos all over the land. We are the women whose bodies are sacrificed, as living cadavers, to experimental surgery in the white man's hospital for the sake of white medicine. We are the women who are invisible on the television and move screens, on the Broadway stage. We are the women who are lusted after, sneered at, leered at, yelled at, grabbed at, tracked down by white degenerated in our own pitable, poverty-stricken, and priceless neighborhoods.

We are the women whose hair is compulsively fried, whose skin is bleached, whose nose is "too big," whose mouth is "too big and too loud," whose behind is "too big and broad," whose feet are "too big and flat," whose face is "too black and shiny," and whose suffering and patience is too long and enduring to be believed. Who are just too damned much for everybody. We are the women whose bars and recreation halls are invaded by flagrantly disrespectful, bigoted, simpering, amoral, emotionally unstable, outcast, maladjusted, nymphomaniacal, condescending white women...in desperate and untiring search of the "frothing-at-the-mouth-for-a-white-woman, strongbacked, sixty minutes hot black."Our men.

We are the women who, upon protesting this invasion of our privacy and sanctity and sanity, are called "jealous," and "evil," and "small-minded," and "prejudiced," We are the women whose husbands and fathers and brother's and sons have been plagiarized, imitated, denied, and robbed of the fruits of their genius, and who consequently we see emasculated, jailed, lynched, driven mad, deprived, enraged, and made suicidal.

We are the women whom nobody, seemingly, cares about, who are made to feel inadequate stupid and backward, and who inevitably have the most colossal inferiority complexes to be found. And who is spreading the propaganda that "the only free people in this country are the white man and the Black woman?" If this be freedom, then Heaven is Hell. Who will revere the Black Woman? Who will keep our neighborhoods safe for Black innocent womanhood? Black womanhood is outraged and humiliated. Black womanhood cries for dignity and restitution and salvation. Black womanhood wants and needs protection, and keeping, and holding. Who will assuage her indignation ? Who will keep her precious and pure? Who will glorify and proclaim her beautiful image? To whom will she cry rape?