Hidden Figures

Chicago Crusader Illustration

This Women’s History Month I’d like to lift up some strong statuesque Black African women of the Bible, or “Hidden Figures.”

Many of you will remember the 2016 movie Hidden Figures, which starred Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as the real-life Black women who configured mathematical miracles to save NASA and send American astronauts into space.

There are other such Black women, “hidden figures,” in the Bible. I will introduce five of them to you in this article.

Picture it, a hot Northeast African day as people of faith gather together on the plains of Sinai. However, something disrupts and distracts from the proceedings on the plains of these nomadic African people. What disrupts and distracts is an intrusion of five women, dressed in the bright colors of African attire … orange, red, yellow, blue, green, white and black.

The hair of the women is worn either in an elegant headwrap, beckoning braids or gracefully natural. The beauty of their blue-black dark chocolate complexions seems to shimmer in the sunlight.

Numbers 27:1-11 says, “Then drew near the daughters of Zelophehad the son of Hepher, son of Gilead, son of Machir, son of Manasseh, from the families of Manas’seh the son of Joseph.

“The names of his daughters were Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. And they stood before Moses, and before Eleazar the priest, and before the leaders and all the congregation, at the door of the tent of meeting, saying, “Our father died in the wilderness; he was not among the company of those who gathered themselves together against the Lord in the company of Korah, but died for his own sin; and he had no sons.

“Why should the name of our father be taken away from his family, because he had no son? Give to us a possession among our father’s brethren.”

I need to say right here that I am indebted to the scholarship of another brilliant and beautiful Black biblical scholar named Dr. Wilda Gafney and her book, “Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne,” for the invaluable insights I am about to share with you.

These sisters stepped to the assembled gathering to exert their Agency!

They exert their agency by first being all on one accord.

They exercise agency next in when they arrive on the scene. They come just as the distribution of land has completed but before the people have dispersed – Strategic!

They exert their agency next by the area they position themselves in. They all stand together at the door of the tent of meeting – that’s where Moses normally stood.

The tent of meeting is the Tabernacle built for God in the wilderness. And when God had a message for the people, God’s presence would come down in a cloud and completely cover the tent. Moses would go in the tent while the people stood back at least 100 feet. When God was finished instructing Moses, the cloud would rise and Moses would emerge. These sisters stand where the person speaking on behalf of God would stand.

They exercise their agency next by first absolving their daddy of any accusation of rebellion and then by articulating their demand for justice. They make it clear that their daddy Zelophehad did not participate in the rebellion in the wilderness and died a faithful man, but they also do not ask, request or plead for their daddy’s share of land inheritance but demand it because it was a righteous case.

You see, the system of the time was that if a man died and had no sons, his land inheritance would not go to his wife or daughters but would be divided up among the other men unless he had brothers. This left the wife and daughters with no way to support themselves, no means to take care of themselves and no ability to build wealth for themselves.

They exert and exude their own agency because everybody has agency. Even people who seem powerless possess more power than they realize. People who are marginalized to think they are voiceless, in reality have a voice given by God that can send shockwaves across millennia.

In other words, the reason evil people in this country are creating laws to take your vote away is because voting does matter and your vote has power.

Moses then decides to take their case before the Lord and guess what? God not only affirms the assertiveness of these bold, beautiful and brilliant Black women concerning their case, God announces a new Commandment.

Look at Verse 6; God says, “The Daughters of Zelophehad are right, you shall give them possession of an inheritance among their father’s brethren and cause the inheritance of the father to pass to them…”

The God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is a God of justice and is on the side of those marginalized and oppressed by those in power.

And God stepped in on the side of the daughters of Zelophehad, just like God stepped in on the side of the Black women known as hidden figures at NASA. And God has stepped in on the sides of Black women historically ostracized in the nation by both white settler colonial oppression and Black male dysfunction.

There’s a powerful lesson lifted in the lives of Black women who are so-called “hidden figures.”

As the great Black woman educator, sociologist, Black liberation activist and scholar Anna Julia Cooper (August 10, 1858 – February 27, 1964) has said, “Only the Black woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”