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Foreword

Over a Way that with Tears Has Been Watered

By Dr. Julianne Malveaux

When Bennett Belles cross the stage to receive their diplomas on graduation day, it is exhilarating to watch their expressions and compare them to the expressions their faces have held at other times in their academic careers. Most cross the stage with expressions of unmitigated joy, and yet many cannot hold back tears that are often tears of joy and pain, tears that track years of challenge and success, of struggle and overcoming, of triumph over adversity.

Half of our students are first generation, and their families don’t understand their academic lives and victories. When they look to loved ones for support, they sometimes find puzzlement instead. There have been times at Bennett when they have cried tears of frustration, and on graduation day their tears are of triumph.

Other students have put their whole souls into their work, stayed up all night to finish papers, passed up a social event to study, and cried at the effort required to meet their requirements. Now, on graduation day, their tears are the sweet relief of “a job well done.” Their hard work has been rewarded by graduate school acceptances, internship opportunities, and job offers. They are crying tears of triumph.

In writing about graduation tears, I am not portraying Bennett Belles as crybabies. Shedding tears is human and part of the full range of emotional expression. Tears represent fullness, frustration, grief, relief, joy, and so many more emotions. A friend of mine says that tears are your face leaking when your emotions are too full for your body to contain. In watching women cry, and in participating with tears of my own, I identify with the notion that tears are simply overflow, release, a way to let it out. There is no shame, but instead a freedom, that comes from the release of crying.

Dawn Marie Daniels, Candace Sandy, and Dr. Jarralynne Agee have explored tears through the stories of women who have moved from tears to triumph. Their thoughtful, inspirational, and motivational work explores some of the challenges that women face, the tears they shed, and the way they have used their tears, an expression of their pain, to take them to another level. In some of the stories they share, tears both soothe pain and water dreams. How else could Dr. Sharron Herron-Williams use the pain of the loss of her baby girl Whittaker to start an organization to help others who lose newborns? Her grieving tears watered a powerful tree that has provided shade for others in pain.

Tears, then, can be a bridge to transformation from victim to victory. We cry when we experience losses, and we triumph when we use our experiences to strengthen ourselves and to help others. Tears to Triumph examines the possibility of turning pain into power, of using pain to shape us, craft us, build us into stronger and more productive human beings. Through these interviews, analysis, and work tools, the authors ask what role obstacles and challenges play in our development.

The only constant we can expect in our lives is change, and yet we resist it. Nobody relishes change like a wet baby, and even the wet baby cries. Some changes are good, and some are challenging, but all changes force us out of a comfort zone, sometimes gently, sometimes abruptly. All change requires a paradigm shift, the act of twirling the kaleidoscope to watch new patterns emerge, then twirling again to find additional perspective. Sometimes we blink through our tears to discern the patterns. Sometimes our tears propel us forward.

These tears are part of the resilience for which African American women are known. Our tears are twice referenced in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Negro National Anthem. The second stanza, “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,” references the distance we have come to this place, and the pain in our path associated with the distance. One can only imagine that these words, written in the waning days of the nineteenth century, referenced the changes that African American people had experienced since 1865, when the Civil War ended, full citizenship was established, and the right to vote was established by federal law, and then compromised by Jim Crow. Yet the people did not stop struggling, fighting, challenging the status quo, or even crying. I think of Ida B. Wells and the anti-lynching crusade. Paula Giddings has written movingly of the multidimensional Ida B. Wells, of the challenges she faced and the tears she may have cried. Yet there is much triumph in the agitation she embraced, a triumph that has enriched people of African descent for many generations.

In the third stanza of the Negro National Anthem, tears are again referenced. “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who has by Thy might, led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray.” When Reverend Joseph Lowery opened his inaugural benediction with these words, he brought the full weight of the African American struggle for freedom and equality to the historic moment of the Barack Obama presidential inauguration. In the context of Tears to Triumph, the Negro National Anthem reminds us of our weary years, but also of our righteous path, all watered by the “silent tears” of struggle. African American people have certainly moved from tears to some triumph with the leadership of President Obama, though not triumphant enough to rest on our laurels, as it will take more than the election of one man to eliminate the reality of social and economic injustice.

Gandhi challenged all of us to be the change we wish to see in the world. It is easier, often, to speak of social change than to do the hard work of personal change. The process is not dichotomous, in which we are forced to choose one kind of change over the other. Instead, it is, in the words of Dr. Marilyn Sanders Mobley, Case Western Reserve University Vice President (and former Bennett College for Women Provost), “both-and.” The two are connected, though, when we understand that the women of the civil rights movement were not only social change agents, but also women, human beings, who had to struggle in their personal lives even as they struggled for justice. We can gain inspiration from them for their tenacity and fealty to a movement and, if we extrapolate, we can gain inspiration from the struggles we know they must have experienced as they dealt with the challenges of daily life.

Dr. Maya Angelou writes, “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” Similarly, we are often riveted by tears, but must be reminded of the triumph that some tears have watered. When Bennett Belles shed joyful tears as they cross the graduation stage, we see the triumph of tears. We see the triumph, too, in this inspirational book that uses real women’s stories to help us all move from tears to triumph in our lives.

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is the fifteenth President of Bennett College for Women. Recognized for her progressive and insightful observations, she is also an economist, author, and commentator, and has been described by Dr. Cornel West as “the most iconoclastic public intellectual in the country.” Dr. Malveaux’s contributions to the public dialogue on issues such as race, culture, gender, and their economic impacts are shaping public opinion in twenty-first century America.