In a tiny room in Landis House, enthralled students stood shoulder to shoulder as Tammy Owens regaled them with the tale of Florence Martin, a young black rape victim from the 1900s who used her powers of writing to escape forced marriage with her rapist.

Tammy C. Owens, a post-doctorate fellow at Dickinson, presented her research on black girls in American history to a group of twenty students and faculty on Tuesday, November 15.

During the small, informal event, Owens presented what she has learned and her analysis of Martin’s specific story.

Martin lived in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, where she was taught useful skills such as cooking and penmanship, which Owens described as “one of the most important tools [the girls learned].”

When she was 16 years old, Martin was placed in the home of Benjamin and Bertha Blackman as a domestic worker. There, she was raped by an Italian worker, and as a result, became pregnant.  Her attacker hired a lawyer who recommended that he marry Martin so as to legitimize the child and avoid legal consequences.

Martin wrote to the headmaster of her orphanage to “staunchly oppose” the marriage, described Owens.  Shortly after, Martin’s letter went missing, making it a “fugitive document.” Its existence is indisputable, however, explained Owens, because of 12 other correspondences between the Blackmans and the orphanage staff that mention her letter.  Essentially, says Owens, “[Martin] used her pen and writing to stop her attacker from having access to her and her child.”

Owens suspects that Martin’s original letter was destroyed by the orphanage in order to protect girls like Florence, and to prevent the anomaly of “aligning [black women] with deviant sexual behavior.”  Owens believes that, for the orphanage, “protection mean[t] the silence of fugitive documents.”

For Owens, her research is “personal and political” because, as a black woman, she feels strongly about being able to “give the gift of black girls’ histories to black girls.”  She says that “scholars are starting to take children’s histories seriously,” but the histories of black girls are missing.  Owens said this is largely because “it’s risky” to fill in so many gaps in historical documents, but she strives to “put together the pieces of silences and black girls’ lives to weave a narrative into the fabric of American history.”

Attendee Taeya Viruet ’20 “didn’t know that this silence could be analyzed in a way of cultural dissemblance and how silence may be used as a form of protection for black girls, whether it may be sexual autonomy or sexual assault…and the possibility of them being stereotyped after being assaulted or being attacked in some way.”  After the presentation, Viruet was already seeing similarities between the treatment of black girls during the pre-Civil War era and the lives of black orphan girls at the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum.  “The black girls were put out into houses as domestic workers…[which] paralleled a lot to slavery and when there were women inside the house and … were subjected to sexual assault, to rape, and things like that…I think that the placement of [the girls] doing domestic work in these households was also making these girls vulnerable.”  Vireut is looking forward to learning more about these parts of history in the future.

Owens’ presentation was followed by a question and answer session.