Keep Your Name on It
Updated: Sep 4
A word from a Black mother and grandmother to the daughters and granddaughters who will carry our names forward.
The Count of Monte Cristo has been one of my favourite stories since I was young.
Years later, when I began university, a professor asked me about my favourite books. I mentioned it, and he told me that its author, Alexandre Dumas, was Black.
I had not known that.
The story had been part of my life for years, yet nobody had ever told me that the man who wrote it was Black.
Then, this morning, I found myself thinking about that conversation again. I began wondering: How many Black women’s contributions have been dismissed, renamed or taken up by a white person who was then permitted to claim the work as their own?
There is no honest number. Successful erasure does not leave behind a neat list.
If it had happened to Black men, I was certain it had happened to Black women too.
And then I thought about our daughters and granddaughters. Many Black women have helped raise both. What should we be telling them about protecting their work, keeping their names attached to it and recognizing the Black women whose names history has tried to remove?
That is what led me to these four women.
Four is not the number of women. It is the number one talk can hold without turning their lives—or this talk—into a catalogue.
Four women you should know
Alice Ball
Alice Ball was 23 years old when she developed the first effective injectable treatment for Hansen’s disease, then commonly called leprosy. It was not a cure, but it was the first treatment that worked effectively, and it allowed many people who had been banished to isolation facilities to return to their families.
In 1915, she became the first Black person to graduate from the University of Hawaii and the first woman there to earn a master’s degree in chemistry. She was also the university’s first Black woman chemistry instructor.
She died at 24, before she could publish the work herself. Arthur Dean, president of the College of Hawaii, continued and published the research without crediting her essential contribution. He mass-produced the treatment, and it became known as the “Dean Method.”
In 1922, physician Harry Hollmann publicly called it the “Ball Method” and restored her name to the science. But broad public and institutional recognition took decades. The work began helping people almost immediately. Her name did not travel with it.
Ann Lowe
Ann Lowe designed one of the most famous wedding dresses in American history: the gown Jacqueline Bouvier wore when she married John F. Kennedy in 1953.
Ten days before the wedding, a flood destroyed the original gown and ten bridesmaid dresses. Lowe hired extra help, remade them in time and absorbed the additional cost herself.
Yet most contemporary coverage did not name her. One reporter, Nina Hyde of The Washington Post, followed up and identified Lowe; most of the other stories did not. Later coverage sometimes referred to her only as a “colored woman dressmaker.”
She dressed some of America’s wealthiest families and became a respected designer within the fashion world. Her clients were visible. Her dresses were visible. Her name was treated as optional.
Big Mama Thornton
Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton made the original recording of “Hound Dog” in 1952, four years before Elvis Presley recorded his version.
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote the song for her, so her contribution was not the composition. It was the original performance: the voice, force and interpretation that made the song a number-one rhythm-and-blues hit and helped lay the groundwork for rock and roll.
Thornton later said the record sold more than two million copies and that she received one cheque for $500 and never saw another. Presley’s version became a far larger commercial success and one of the recordings that helped define his career.
The music industry remembered the version around which it could build the larger empire. For far too long, it did not remember the Black woman whose recording came first.
Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley was not erased only after the fact. Her authorship was doubted before powerful men would permit her work to appear in print.
In 1772, when she was still enslaved, 18 prominent Boston men examined her to determine whether a young Black woman could truly have written her poems. They eventually signed an attestation saying they believed the work was hers. Her collection was published in London in 1773, making her the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry.
She passed their test. She still had to take it.
Here is what I want you to notice
These four women never met. They lived in different centuries and worked in different fields: chemistry, fashion, music and poetry.
Their stories are not identical. One woman’s scientific contribution was published without her name. One woman’s designs were admired while the designer remained unnamed. One woman’s original performance was commercially eclipsed by a white man’s later version. One woman’s authorship was treated as something a panel of men needed to verify.
But the pattern is recognizable: brilliant Black women’s work, followed by a system that found it easier to separate the achievement from the woman who made it possible.
When the same pattern appears across centuries, locations and professions, that is not bad luck arriving again and again. It is what happens when a society is trained to expect greatness from some people and overlook it in others.
Researchers have given parts of this pattern names. The Matilda Effect describes the bias that denies women proper credit for their work. Intersectionality explains how forms of power such as racism and sexism overlap rather than operating separately. Misogynoir names the particular anti-Black misogyny directed at Black women.
You are not imagining a pattern that is not there. People have studied it, named it and documented it.
Nobody steals what is not valuable.
Arthur Dean did not continue Alice Ball’s research because it was mediocre. The world did not admire Ann Lowe’s gowns because the workmanship was ordinary. The music industry did not keep returning to “Hound Dog” because Big Mama Thornton’s original recording was forgettable. Eighteen men did not assemble to examine Phillis Wheatley’s authorship because her poems had nothing to say.
Not every one of these stories is theft in the same legal sense. But every attempt to erase the name, control the credit, exploit the value or doubt the authorship is, backwards, a confession. It tells us that the contribution mattered.
That does not undo the unfairness. But it should change how you hear the word “overlooked.” Being overlooked was never proof that the work lacked quality. It tells us something about who the system was prepared to see holding it.
What I am not going to tell you
I am not going to tell you, “Do not worry. You will receive credit eventually. Just be patient.”
Alice Ball waited decades for broad public recognition. Ann Lowe’s place in fashion history was not properly celebrated until after her death. That is not a satisfying ending, and I will not pretend it is.
Credit does not always arrive simply because you deserve it. Historians had to go looking. Family members had to insist. Researchers, archivists, teachers and ordinary people had to refuse to let the record remain wrong.
The record does not fix itself. People fix it. That can include you.
What I am asking you to do
Keep your paper trail. Write your name on your work. Keep your drafts, notes, dates and emails. Ask how you will be credited. An unfinished record leaves room for someone else to finish the story in a way that removes you.
Say other women’s names. The reason we know Alice Ball’s name is that people refused to let it disappear. Correcting the record—saying, “Actually, she did that first”—is its own contribution.
Know what you are standing on. You are not the first Black girl in your field, your school or your neighbourhood to be brilliant. You are part of a long line. Some names entered the history books. Many did not. The missing names do not mean the women were not there. They mean the ground beneath your feet is deeper and older than you have been told.
Four names cannot hold the whole record
Before I give you your final assignment, I want you to hear a few more names. Their stories are different, but each shows another way Black women’s contributions can be used, hidden, underpaid or recognized late.
Henrietta Lacks — Her cells were taken without her knowledge or consent and became foundational to modern medical research.
Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten — She wrote “Freight Train” as a child, but did not record her first album until she was in her sixties; major recognition arrived near the end of her life.
Dr. Gladys West — Her mathematical modelling helped make GPS possible, while her contribution remained largely unknown to the public for decades.
Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Christine Darden — Their mathematics and engineering helped power the American space programme while their names remained outside the popular account for years.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe — Her voice and electric-guitar work helped build the language of rock and roll before men influenced by that tradition became known as its pioneers.
Your two assignments
First, choose one woman from that additional list—or find a Black woman who is not on it. Learn her story well enough to tell somebody else.
What did she create or contribute?
Who benefited from it?
What happened to her name?
Has the record been corrected?
Then say her name. Tell her story to a friend, a classmate, your mother or your grandmother. That is how we keep one more woman from disappearing.
Second, begin protecting your own name.
Put it on your work. Keep your drafts, dates, notes and emails. Ask how you will be credited. Learn to describe what you contributed without shrinking it. When you see another Black girl’s work being overlooked, say her name too.
A final word
I want to be careful here: if someone attempts to erase you, that is not because you failed to protect yourself. The wrongdoing belongs to the person or institution doing the erasing. But we can make erasure harder by keeping records, speaking clearly and becoming witnesses for one another.
Your name belongs on your work—not on a future list of Black women somebody had to rediscover.
Learn the names of the women who came before you. Protect the names of the girls standing beside you. And make certain that the girls who come after you know yours.
Historical sources consulted
Keep going with the stories of Black women, authorship, credit and survival.
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