I could bet good money you don’t know who Mae Mallory is, and even I didn’t know until I started to research. Mae Mallory is a forgotten Black power intellectual who was almost erased from history. Even she herself said she was, “just an insignificant black woman who believes that the tree of liberty has to be watered in blood!” and that her “white oppressors” were soon going to realize that the “idea of self-defense ha[d] penetrated the black man’s thinking.” While Malcolm X is recognized as a national black power symbol in support of armed self defense, Mae Mallory had been preaching those ideas way before Malcolm had, and well before it was popular.

Mae Mallory was born in Georgia in 1927, and had grown up practicing self defense as a child. She knew that her and her mother would struggle in the south, and so they packed up and moved to the North amidst the Great Migration. She then grew up in Harlem in the mix of black progressive and radical organizations. In the early 1950s she associated with the communist party and joined several grassroots black nationalist organizations.

She made headlines in 1957 after filing a lawsuit against the New York City Board of Education. It had been 3 years after the Brown vs. The Board of Education decision, but black children still remained in inferior, segregated schools. Eight other mothers joined her in the suit and a boycott of several Harlem junior high schools. The media called them the “Harlem Nine.” Mallory and the other mothers asked for an “open transfer” policy that allowed them to send their children to schools outside of their district and community control of Harlem schools through parent associations. They won the right to transfer their children and made the Board of Education declare that there was still segregation in schools.

In the early 1960s Mae Mallory formed a friendship with a known black nationalist, Robert F. Williams, who lived in Monroe, NC. In 1961 she agreed to help him host Freedom Riders, non-violent interracial activists who rode interstate buses to test local compliance with desegregation laws. On August 27, white people attacked freedom riders and went to predominantly Black neighborhoods to harass them. Black residents began to gather at Williams house. Mallory remained at his home throughout the day and was present when a white couple—Bruce and Mabel Stegall—drove into the crowd to “see what defenses” they were planning for the night. Mallory, Williams, and his wife let the couple stay in the house until the crowd dispersed. After they returned home, the couple told local police that they had been kidnapped.

Mallory and Williams fled because they were sure that the KKK would kill them. Williams escaped to Cuba, and Mae Mallory hid in Cleveland for 6 weeks before she was captured. While in prison, she worked to publicize her case and began to use the spotlight to advocate for her beliefs. She supported separatism, self-defense, and socialism, advocated for Black nationalist principles, critiqued black liberals, and made press releases. Some of her ideas released in the press were:

– Black men and women wanted to be “masters of [their] fate” and that they realized that they needed “liberation—the same as other oppressed peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

– Capitalism caused racial discord. 

– African Americans “realize[d] that the enemy” was not poor white Americans. The problem was that they “still [did] not realize that [African Americans] were not [their] enemy.” 

– Middle-class African Americans and religious officials were “shook up over [her] theory of self-defense” and that they did not support her because she was not “fighting for accessibility” but “for freedom.”

– Highlighted the abuse that Black women faced at the hands of white Americans

Mallory was in prison for 5 years and continued to fight until her death in 2007. Personally, I think her story is very inspiring and I encourage you to learn more about her! Dr. Ashley Farmer has written some works about her that I would recommend.

NOTE: This article is part of a series celebrating unsung African American heroes. Click here to read about the series and check out the other articles.