The legacies of the Black men and women who shaped our nation, as well as our own cities and towns, should always be celebrated, and never forgotten. This is why I am thrilled to share the voices and legacies of these exceptional Rhode Island women this month.
“The Hair Doctress”
Christiana Carteaux Bannister, or Madame Carteaux as she was later called, was born Christina Babcock in North Kingstown, RI in 1819. Her parents were African American and Narragansett Indian. Her ancestors were enslaved Africans who worked the plantations of South County. As a young woman, she sought employment as a wigmaker and hairdresser in Boston, and was briefly married to Mr. Desiline Carteaux, a clothing retailer and cigar maker. City census records show they lived on Beacon Hill. Christiana soon left her husband and moved back to Rhode Island where she continued to build her professional reputation by wig making, hair styling and creating her own hair products. As her fame grew, she opened salons in Boston, Cambridge and Providence. She met her future husband, the oil painter Edward Mitchell Bannister, when he applied for a job at one of her salons. They were both active in Boston abolitionist circles and collaborated closely with former slave, educator, abolitionist and politician, Lewis Hayden. Her salons were often safe havens for Underground Railroad travelers. During the Civil War, Christiana was an advocate for equal pay for Black soldiers and held fundraisers to benefit Black regiments, especially those in Massachusetts. She opened the Home for Aged Colored Women in Providence when she became aware of the increasing homelessness of elderly Black women who served as domestic servants when they were of working age. Bannister, herself, lived at this Home near the end of her life and was later transferred to an asylum where she died in 1902.
Bannister was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2003 and a bronze bust of her likeness, inspired by a portrait her husband created of her, is on display in the Rhode Island State House.
“The Suffragist Seamstress”
Bertha G. Higgins was born Bertha Grant Dillard in Danville, VA in 1872. As a young woman, she studied fashion design in London and Paris and was married as a teenager to Walker C. Thomas. The couple resided in Jersey City, NJ and Bertha, sadly, became a widow ten years later. A year later she married Dr. William H. Higgins, who was formerly a butler at the Biltmore estate in Asheville, NC and dreamed of becoming a doctor. They subsequently moved to Manhattan while William completed his residency and Bertha worked as a seamstress. The couple later relocated to Providence in 1903 where William opened a medical practice on Wendell Street. They had one child, Prudence, while they also helped to raise Bertha’s younger sister, Chesta.
In 1913, Bertha joined the women’s suffrage movement in Rhode Island. According to a 1997 Providence Journal Bulletin article, the one-time dressmaker, “…had a real genius … for manipulating the social fabric. She plunged waist-deep into every important civil rights cause of the early 20th century, from the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill to woman’s suffrage.” Higgins was one of the founding members of the Rhode Island League of Women Voters. She fervently wrote letters to elected officials, held variety show fundraisers, and debated at women’s club forums.
She founded the Julia Ward Howe Republican Women’s Club of Providence (later to be changed to the Democratic Women’s Club in 1932) to recruit more Black women to vote for Republican candidates. She became disillusioned with the Republican party and created the Colored Independent Political Association of Rhode Island. Her only child, Prudence Higgins Irving, became Rhode Island’s first Black social worker.
Widowed in 1938, she left politics and activism and threw her energy and connections into supporting soldiers and helping to reintegrate returning Black soldiers.
Bertha G. Higgins died at her home in Providence on Dec. 30, 1944. She was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2020.
“The Dressmaker Clubwoman”
Mary H. Dickerson (pictured above: back row, center) was born in 1830 and grew up in New Haven, CT. Dickerson and her husband, Silas, moved to Newport around 1865 where she opened a dressmaking shop a few years later, located on the upscale “Travers Block” of Bellevue Avenue. She was the first Black woman to do so, and her clients represented the Gilded Age elite. Silas was also well-known in Newport and worked for many years as a janitor at Rogers High School. They had one son together, Frederick, who became a businessman in New Bedford, MA.
Dickerson became a political voice and a leader of Black women’s clubs later in life. She founded the Women’s Newport League in 1895 and the RI Union of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1903, among other clubs she founded or presided over. She put Newport on the global stage by supplying photos of African American leaders to be included in the “negro exhibit” at the World’s Fair Paris Exposition of 1900. She died in 1914 in Newport at the age of 83.
I’d like to thank my mother, Bessie L. (Walker) Roberts, who taught me so much about these historically important women. She was a proud member of the Women’s Newport League until she passed on January 13, 2010 at 84 years old.
Sources: RI Heritage Hall of Fame, Wikipedia, Newport Daily News, Newport Life, RI Monthly
Charles L. Roberts is Executive Director and Founder of Rhode Island Slave History Medallions, www.rishm.org.
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