Black Women’s History Month
SewRena the Vintage Queen, the 6888 Brigade, DEI, and Me
Part of the Glowing Two-Percent
As I wrote in my piece about prima ballerina Misty Copeland, sometimes I scroll through YouTube “shorts” as a pastime. Copeland was the dancer whose triumphant debut in the notably challenging Tchaikovsky ballet, Swan Lake, was undermined by naysayers.
While scrolling, I’ll see fashion, politics, TV throwbacks, and Reddit AITA clips. But recently, during Black History Month 2025, two videos stopped me in my tracks. One video was a Copeland interview about her first experience with Swan Lake. In my piece, I mentioned how she and I are black women representing less than 2% in our respective fields — prima ballerina and tenured full professor.
The other video features a woman who cleverly represents historic black women to explain how we got to where we are today and how we can still triumph — but how the glow of that triumph can often be dimmed.
SewRena (pronounced “Serena”) is a black woman on YouTube who’s obsessed with vintage clothing and décor. She has even had vintage appliances installed in her vintage-designed kitchen. She makes her own clothing on a vintage sewing machine using vintage patterns. She made vintage overalls to overhaul her vintage Chevy Corvair. Although there are many vintage-oriented channels on YouTube — including cooking, history, literature, cocktails, and more — I can’t help but feel that SewRena must represent much less than 2% of that community.
For February 2025, SewRena decided to celebrate black women by posting videos of herself in vintage clothing from the same era as the women she selected. She featured looks honoring Ella Fitzgerald, Marian Anderson, Lena Horne, and more, but on one video, she decided to honor a group of servicewomen to the music of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” These women have also been honored in a Tyler Perry film, The Six Triple Eight, starring Kerry Washington.
The 6888 (pronounced “six triple-eight”) Postal Battalion in WWII was a section of the Women’s Army Corps comprised of black women. As one of very few women’s battalions posted overseas, they were given a task thought to be impossible — get over 17 million backlogged letters from American families sorted and delivered to their soldiers and vice versa. They were given six months.
The powers-that-be were conflicted. They wanted the job done because it would be a huge “morale boost” for the troops, but they didn’t want these black women to succeed. If success occurred, that meant the powers had to look in the mirror and admit their bigotry. What to do, what to do?
There was also the important point that Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator/activist, had the ear of Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States. Bethune, after whom Bethune-Cookman University in Florida is named, was convinced that black women had a role to play in World War II. She, along with other African Americans, felt strongly that military service would be a way of proving our loyalty to our nation and therefore moving some steps forward toward equal rights.
Fortunately, unlike her husband FDR, who interned Japanese Americans and refused to have black Olympians in the White House, the First Lady was a true progressive. Working together with Bethune, she found a place for black women in the military postal service.
Stationed in London and Paris, the women got the gargantuan job done in three months, half the time, but as they celebrated their achievement — like Misty, like me — our progenitors in black women badassery all knew that leaders in their own country had expected their failure.
In my own life, there was a time when an orchestra contractor was hiring for a challenging Rossini opera to be performed in a popular summer amphitheater. Rossini comedies (like Bugs Bunny’s Barber of Seville) are much like Gilbert and Sullivan, lighthearted, but devilishly difficult to play because they go at the speed of light and, because I’d be playing the piccolo, as high as the sky. But I had a master’s from a major music conservatory and had played in classes conducted by the principal flutist of the New York Philharmonic.
This contractor, a percussionist, had played with me in other groups and knew my credentials, so she knew I could handle it. But, most likely because she is also black, the all-white woodwind section initially looked at me with the deepest suspicion. When I greeted them, each flutist, clarinetist, oboist, and bassoonist did the minimum — a wordless nod. It was as if they thought there might be a risk of public orchestral disaster by being “politically correct.” After all, the piccolo is high and loud, it can’t be hidden in the middle of a section like a mediocre violinist.
I took some calming breaths as we started rehearsing. Then it was on! I was flitting, fluttering, flying all over that part. And to their credit, the surprise in the woodwind section was not a resentful “you should have warned us you were qualified; now you’ve made a fool of us” surprise, but instead, a “This is great, she can really play!” surprise.
And this is the thing: Whenever a black person is referred to as a “DEI” hire, using that term as an obvious racial slur, the users are not thinking of the disabled, the people from differing regions and social classes, the white women — all those who benefit from programs like these more than black folks. What they’re saying is they don’t want us to succeed, and if — like Misty, the 6888, and me — we succeed despite their irrational biases, they’ll do their level best to make sure we enjoy our well-earned achievements as little as possible. They will rain acid drops on our parades out of spite.
But, occasionally, there’ll be a Rossini experience where, yes, their attitude starts out on the wrong track, but in the face of the evidence, it course-corrects back in the right direction. I hope I live long enough to experience a time when that moment of negativity-tinged doubt is no longer part of the mix. But until then, I’ll join creative black women like SewRena in treasuring the glow of our successes when they occur.