Thank you to my family—Ariel Greenidge, Kirsten Greenidge, Kerri Greenidge, Ron Nigro, Katia Nigro and Hunter Nigro, David Dance, Suzanne Dance, Tyron Dance, Kwame Dance, Eric Davis, Candice Corbie-Davis, and Fidel and Che Corbie-Davis.

And thank you to my daughter.

Readers Guide

LIBERTIE

Beyond the Talented Tenth: An Essay by Kaitlyn Greenidge

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Black Motherhood as Literary Creation: An Interview with Kaitlyn Greenidge

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Questions for Discussion

Beyond the Talented Tenth
An Essay by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Before I became a writer, I worked for many years at the Weeksville Heritage Center, which is a house and museum in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, dedicated to the history of the free Black community founded in central Brooklyn in 1838. Weeksville was a space explicitly dedicated to Black political power and self-sufficiency. Black landholders sold smaller lots to other Black people, hoping to give Black males enough land to qualify to vote in New York State elections and thus be able to steer the destinies of Black people in Kings County. As Weeksville expanded throughout the nineteenth century, it became a destination for people escaping slavery as well as a bedrock for a burgeoning Black middle class. Of the many accomplished people connected to the community, one was Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward.

She was the daughter of one of Weeksville’s landowners—her father, Sylvanus Smith, was a pig farmer and a relatively wealthy member of the community. She was the first Black female doctor in New York State and the third Black female doctor in the US. From 1870 to 1895, she ran her own practice in Brooklyn and co-founded the Brooklyn Women’s Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary. She sat on the board and practiced medicine at the Brooklyn Home for Aged Colored People. From 1906 she worked as a college physician at the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Wilberforce University in Ohio. She was trained as a homeopath, in part because this newer discipline of medicine was especially accepting of women students and students of color. And most notably, her practice saw both Black and white patients.

All of this is standard talented-tenth, exceptional-Negro fare. That kind of narrative is deeply, deeply boring to me—not to mention not really helpful for liberation, which is the ultimate goal of my work. My personal aesthetic will always be in favor of the stories that are strange, that are out of character, that highlight the complexities of power, that talk about the things none of us want to talk about, that would look really jarring on a Black History daily calendar.

The thing that drew me to this particular story was the information that is not in the official biography. One of my jobs at Weeksville was to work alongside Jennifer Scott, our Director of Research, on an oral history project in which we interviewed descendants of Weeksville residents. And Dr. Smith McKinney Steward’s great-granddaughter was a famous actress, Ellen Holly, who was also an excellent genealogist and keeper of her family’s history. Ellen Holly sat with us for a good portion of the afternoon to talk about her grandmother, Anna Peaches McKinney, the daughter of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward.