Yesterday, visiting the Legacy Museum and the Mothers of Gynecology monument was a life-changing experience. These were not just moments of reflection—they were moments of reckoning. For this blog post, I want to center the experiences of Black women who have been—and continue to be—victimized and brutalized by sexual violence. Their stories are often left untold, but they are foundational to understanding our history and our present.
My first “professional” job in college was as an intern at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center. That experience profoundly shifted my worldview. It exposed me to the realities so many women face and marked the beginning of my journey toward becoming a feminist and an ally to women. Being raised by a single mother, I became strong, independent, and unwavering, which undoubtedly shaped my identity as well.
At the Legacy Museum, the excerpts and artifacts offered only glimpses into the horrors endured. But even those fragments were enough to shake something loose in me. And later, at the Mothers of Gynecology monument, I stood face to face with the stories of Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey—Black women who were experimented on without anesthesia or consent in the name of science. I couldn’t help but think of my own family. Of my mother. My grandmother. My great-grandmother. All of them are light-skinned Black women. My great-grandmother, in particular, was extremely fair. I always knew there was a story there—one shaped by violence and silence. My grandmother would share fragments over the years, but never the whole, painful truth.
Last night, I finally decided to trace my ancestry through Ancestry.com. I’ve been able to trace my ancestry back to my great-great-great-grandmother, Mariah Jackson, born in 1863 in Culpeper, Virginia. The 1850 census lists her as “mulatto,” as well as her daughter, my great-great-grandmother, Jennie Jackson-Johnson. Mildred Murray, my great-grandmother, was later listed as “Negro.” These seemingly cold and clinical labels carry significant implications.
To verify what I had found, I called my mom, aunt, and grandmother on FaceTime the next morning. For over an hour, we talked. My grandmother lit up as she shared what she knew. Yes, these women were indeed our ancestors. Mariah was born to an enslaved mother. She had no father listed, and the assumption, painful but likely, is that she was the product of either a non-consensual “relationship” or more likely, rape. Another act of violence. Another silenced story. The census listed her occupation as “homemaker,” which I naively assumed meant she was a wife. My grandmother quickly corrected me: “No, baby, she was a house slave.”
Then she told me something that took my breath away: the plantation where our ancestors once worked is still in our family. Bittersweet doesn’t begin to describe the feeling. I’m fortunate to be able to trace my lineage back this far, to put names to women who endured so much. But I’m also heartbroken by what it confirms: these women, my grandmothers, were raped, enslaved, and forced to labor for their oppressors.
And yet they endured.
Because of them, I am here. And I feel a deep responsibility to do more than acknowledge their suffering. I want to become a chronicler of my family’s history. I want to sit with my grandmother and her remaining siblings and cousins, and listen to them. I want to preserve their stories. I want to document their strength, their memories, and their truths.
Experiencing the Legacy Museum and learning about the Mothers of Gynecology made it unmistakably clear: there are countless untold stories within my family and our communities. I want to change that, even if only in a small way, because our stories matter. Because they mattered.