ITHACA, N.Y. – Southside Community Center has a term for the girls who create art and community during their after-school and summer programs: black girl alchemists.
“Black girl alchemists use their voices through spoken word, writing, dance and art to demand space for visibility,” Nia Nunn, president of the board at Southside Community Center and professor of education at Ithaca College, said during the weekend’s “African Americans in Ithaca” forum, co-hosted by Southside and the History Center in Tompkins County.
The term “black girl alchemists” is new, a spin on the more widely used term “black girl magic” that emphasizes the transformative power of black girls. But while the term is new at Southside, the sentiment behind it is anything but. Southside has been lifting the voices of black girls for 85 years since it was founded by members of the Francis Harper Women’s Club.
Southside provides programming for many children in Ithaca. Nunn estimated about 175 kids come to the center’s after-school, performing arts and mentoring programs each year. The weekend event, though, focused on the center’s work to empower black girls to see their value and assert their presence in spaces that are often implicitly white or male.
Several times, Nunn led the audience in a call-and-response: “Honor specificity, unapologetically.”
Invoking feminist thinkers from Sojourner Truth to bell hooks, she explained how black women’s experiences have been systematically silenced or erased. “Ain’t I a woman?” Truth demanded at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. “Are we people of color, or women?” Nunn echoed in 2018.
Too often, Nunn said, when people say “women” they are only talking about white women, and when people say “black” or “people of color” they are only talking about black or brown men. “Don’t say ‘women’ if you’re not talking about me, too,” she said.
By being specific about the experiences of black girls, Southside is working to interrupt this pattern. Nunn said “black girl alchemy” is an overarching philosophy at the center, meant to create visibility for black girls caught in overlapping systems of racism and sexism.
“We are not going to apologize for our focus on black girls,” Nunn said, adding, “When the community prioritizes the voices and work of black girls and women, everybody benefits.”
A legacy of lifting black girls
Presenters and commenters at the forum this weekend drew on a variety of historical methods to track Southside’s legacy with specificity.
Bob Kibbee, former map and geospatial librarian at Cornell University, shared an app called HistoryForge that he is developing at the History Center. The app compiles U.S. Census data and historical maps into an interactive database, so users can zoom in on the people and buildings that made up Ithaca’s neighborhoods in the early 20th century.
Where the Southside Community Center Building now stands, for instance, there was a house at 221 S. Plain St. Sometime between 1900 and 1910, a woman named Elizabeth Carter began renting the house. According to Census records, Carter was born in Virginia in 1866, a black child born into a Confederate state three years after emancipation. Her parents had been born there. She met her husband there and had at least four of her eight kids there. But by 1910, she was living in Ithaca.
By 1910, the Census shows Carter was widowed and had lost one child. She worked as a cook at a boarding house and headed a house where six black kids were coming up: daughters Roxie, Beatrice, and Carrie all worked as maids, while the youngest children of the family, Mamie and Robert, went to school. Mabel, who lodged at the house with her mother, worked as a servant.
The Carter family moved from 211 S. Plain St. sometime between 1920 and 1927, the year the women of Francis Harper Women’s Club rented the house as an office and launched their new Serv-Us League there. The Serv-Us League, an organization meant to serve black residents of the Southside neighborhood, quickly grew. The women took over the house next to 211 S. Plain St. and called it “the Southside House.” By 1938, their first and second headquarters were torn down to make way for their lasting home, the current Southside Community Center Building.
Christine O’Malley, preservation services coordinator for Historic Ithaca, showed the audience at the forum how to navigate HistoryForge to find information about specific buildings and families. She also noted, however, that Census records are thin and can be inconsistent. She invited community members to reach out to the HistoryForge project to share documents, photos, and memories of 20th-century Southside life.
But however spotty, what is clear from early Census records is that before the Southside Community Center was built, the site where it stands was a site of black girl alchemy. A black woman from Virginia found space to bring up six kids. A group of black women in Ithaca found a space to organize and strategize. From a small rented house to a stately brick building, the site was transformed.
Forging new black girl alchemists at Southside
To talk about the path forward for Southside, Nunn looked back to her own childhood there. She celebrated mentors who taught her and her peers how to be proud of their blackness and to demand space in a white society.
She said she often asks how her mentors were made, how they became who they are. She shared an anecdote from Jackie Melton Scott, a longtime local activist. When Scott was a student at Ithaca’s Central Elementary School, a teacher told her girls couldn’t play the drums.
“So she stood up and said, ‘Well if I can’t drum then there would be no beat!’” Nunn said.
Nunn said she noticed that all her mentors at Southside had stories of times when they’d interrupted white spaces to insist on their visibility, and said these experiences “forged powerful women.”
Now, Nunn and Southside executive director Nydia Blas are working to help a younger generation claim their space. At a Friday evening panel, an Ithaca College student asked what students like herself could do to help Southside. “You could tutor us,” a middle schooler who spends her afternoons there answered with little hesitation.
The same middle schooler said when she saw Nunn and Harmony Malone, co-director of the Community United Music Education Program, dancing during a summer performing arts program, “I thought, ‘I want to be like you and be a community leader.’”
Friday, she performed a routine called “Black Love” with her fellow UNITED dance group members.
Nunn said when she was a child, “I thought Southside was a place where I got to be black.” She said she realized as an adult, “Southside was where we got to be human.”
“We could honor our uniqueness, honor our individuality, but also celebrate our collectivity and our sisterhood…the experience helped to normalize black girlhood,” Nunn said.
Just as mentors like Scott were formative in Nunn’s youth, she said she and the other women she grew up with at Southside “are recognizing our roots here and now our responsibility as leaders. It is our responsibility to prepare these young women to take our place.”
Scott was in the audience to weigh in on the current generation of leaders. “You’re teaching what I’ve been preaching,” Scott said.
Featured image: The UNITED dance group performs “Black Love” at the “African Americans in Ithaca” forum. (Devon Magliozzi/The Ithaca Voice)