Considering History: 5 Valentine’s Day Couples to Celebrate During Black History Month

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present. 

Frederick Douglass never knew his actual birthday—as he writes in the opening paragraphs of his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), “I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday…A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood.” When Douglass escaped from bondage and was able to begin defining his own identity outside of that limiting and horrific system, one of his first acts was to choose a date on which to celebrate his birthday. And he chose February 14^th, in honor of the fact that, as he seemed to have been born sometime in February, his late mother had referred to him as her “Little Valentine.”

Many might not think of Valentine’s Day as being intrinsically interconnected with Black History Month. But if we turn to the holiday’s central meaning, as a celebration of romance and love, Valentine’s Day offers an opportunity to remember some of the inspiring couples who have shaped Black and American history, individually but even more so as a pair. Here are a handful of those noteworthy, impressive Black History Month Valentines.

1. Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr.

In a 1966 interview with New Lady magazine, Coretta Scott King argued that the stories of the civil rights movement far too often left out its female participants. “Not enough attention has been focused on the roles played by women in the struggle. By and large, men have formed the leadership in the civil rights struggle but women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement.” Those foundational women certainly should be remembered for their activism, work, and identities beyond marriage and relationships, all of which were part of Coretta’s life before her marriage to Martin and long after his assassination. But it also means recognizing that Martin’s leadership was truly a partnership, one consistently undertaken in collaboration with Coretta. Their joint work to help secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is just one of many examples of that crucial collaboration.

2. Rosa Parks and Raymond Parks

Rosa Parks is one of the few civil rights movement women who have been generally well remembered, but as I’ve traced in two different Considering History columns there are still many layers to her lifelong activism to recognize. Every part of that activism was interconnected with her husband Raymond, a Montgomery barber whom Rosa married in 1932 when she was just 19 years old; he was 29 and already an active member of the local NAACP chapter and brought her into the organization as well. Over their 45 years of marriage (until his 1977 passing from cancer) they would work together on countless efforts both within the NAACP and beyond, from their 1940s work for the League of Women Voters to register Black voters to their 1970s battles against housing discrimination in their adopted city of Detroit. A decade after Raymond’s death, Rosa founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to honor their partnership.

3. Ida B. Wells Barnett and Ferdinand Barnett

While the Kings and the Parks married very young, Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett were both well-established and successful journalists and community leaders by the time of their 1895 marriage (so much so that their wedding was front-page news in the New York Times!). Moreover, that marriage was not their first partnership; that would be their collaboration on writing, editing, and publishing The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), a vital response to the 1893 World’s Fair’s exclusion of African Americans (featuring an Introduction from none other than Frederick Douglass). Both their professional and personal partnerships would continue for the rest of their lives, often in overlapping ways as with her 1897 founding of a kindergarten in the basement of Chicago’s Bethel AME Church so that their young children (and other Black children) could have such an educational space.

4. Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis

Perhaps no couple in American history have better wedded the personal and professional than did Dee and Davis. They met in 1946 while co-starring in the Broadway play Jeb, and after their 1948 marriage were quite literally inseparable until Davis’s 2005 death: From using their activism and their artistic talents alike in support of the civil rights movement’s first 1950s actions to being arrested together in 1999 while protesting the police shooting of Amadou Diallo; from collaborating on a co-authored autobiography In This Life Together (1998) and winning a shared Grammy Award for the spoken word version of that book to jointly receiving the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004. to A good bit of late 20^th century American culture and society was influenced by this power couple.

5. Angelina Grimké and Theodore Weld

Black History Month is also an excellent occasion to remember white allies in the struggle for equal rights, and no couple were more inspiring allies than Angelina Grimké and Theodore Dwight Weld. Both were already abolitionist activists by the time of their May 1838 marriage — Grimké with her sister Sarah having emerged from a slave-owning family in South Carolina to become pioneering voices for both abolition and women’s rights, and Weld a Congregational pastor who left the ministry to become “the most mobbed man in America” due to his radical abolitionism. Just three days after their wedding in Philadelphia they were mobbed together, with an angry white supremacist crowd surrounding the building in which Angelina was addressing an abolitionist gathering. The mob would burn that building down the following day, but nothing deterred Angelina and Theodore, who continued their social and educational activism for their remaining 40 years together.

Far too much of American history is defined by the kind of hate that destroyed that Philadelphia building and affected every one of these couples. Here on Valentine’s Day, we can also remember the vital role that love has played in our collective story.