But when I started looking at Anna Julia Cooper and some of the elders for clues about stress management, it recalibrated how I thought about wellness in this historical context. I am not saying, “Well, if you just shore up your personal practice with yoga—if you just meditate—it will all be OK.” I’m trying to understand a Black feminist approach, which is a practice of collective self-care, which you see in the narratives and life writings. Rosa Parks was not only taking yoga, she was also teaching yoga. So this idea of self-care in the Black feminist and African feminist context is not about self and survival only. It is what Rosalyn Terborg-Penn calls African feminist values of survival and self-care in networks.

While asking these questions about wellness in the historical context, I looked at the American Psychological Association’s study of stress in the nation in 2017. They do the report every year, but that was a banner year.⁴ I looked at the main stress management strategies during that time. Meditation, music, prayer, yoga, and exercise—those were the most prominent strategies.

I took that lens—these five strategies—and looked at them in comparison to some historical practices. I focused on meditation, and I was specifically looking at octogenerians, nonagenarians, and centenarians. Long-living Black women. Through this lens, I was able to recognize Anna Julia Cooper as someone who meditated every morning. I spoke with two of her great nephews, and they said “Sis Annie” would go in her sunroom, and she would sit and write every morning. Cooper also gardened. There were pictures of her in the garden.⁵ And there was evidence that she was adept at creating community and family narratives of her personal self-care.

Music is also a historical practice. I looked at Marian Anderson’s narrative of her life as an opera singer and how singing gospel impacted her state of being. Jessye Norman talks about this as well—how the vibrational practices of singing really helped shape her mind, her body, and her spirit.

Dovey Johnson Roundtree was an active, practicing lawyer in the desegregation cases of 1955. We all know about Brown v. Board of Education desegregating schools, but Roundtree was a head lawyer on the also important desegregation of transportation. At one point, she found herself in the hospital with fibroids as a result of her constant stress level, and she recognized that she had a calling.

Even though Roundtree was a high-powered civil rights lawyer, she understood that her work was negatively impacting her health, and decided she had ignored the calling long enough. So she went to seminary. We have her narrative published in 2009 at which point she had lived to be 100. She ended up living to be 106, passing in 2018. Roundtree’s partner (Julius Winfield Robinson 1916–1961) was also doing this very difficult work, traumatizing work—he passed away early, at age 45.

Then I started looking at yoga and the Delaney sisters, who started doing yoga in their 60s. Their mother lived with them, and they began to notice, “Mama started to get hunched over.” They saw some “exercise” on TV so, they said, “we started doing our morning exercises.” They didn’t know it was yoga. Bessie saw that Sadie was doing a little bit better, and she thought, “Wait a minute. I’m going to get up and do yoga too!” They ended up living to be 109 and 104.

Another example of Black women’s exercise practice can be seen with Ida Keeling, who just passed a few years ago, also at age 106. Some of you may have seen her doing pushups on The View, but her exercise practice came out of grief. Both of Keeling’s sons were murdered about three years apart in drug-related incidents and no one was held accountable. Her youngest daughter said, “We saw the light coming out of mama’s eyes. So I knocked on her door one day and said I’m going to do this five-kilometer run. Here’s some shoes. We’re just going to walk.” Keeling said walking was the first time that her mind was free, and that she started to feel a release from the grief that she had from her hard life.

She started walking in her 60s. That walk turned into running, and she set world records in marathons for her age group.

In each of the five areas from the Stress Report, there were examples of historical practices that Black women’s life writing allowed us to see.

My research agenda of historical wellness was inspired by a textual reference from Our Auntie Rosa, which was written by eleven of her nieces and nephews, and stated, “Our Auntie Rosa used to come with us to yoga class.” At first I thought to myself, that’s got to be lie . . . I’ve never heard of that! One of her nephews wrote, “Our Auntie Rosa used to answer the door in yoga pants.” I said . . . now, wait, stop!

I went to the Library of Congress, and at the time, there was a block on the pictures of her teaching yoga because, rightly so, the Rosa and Raymond Parks estate is very protective of her name, image, and how images are used. But I found the photos that matched the textual reference of her yoga practice. I had to get permission from the estate and the Library of Congress, to publish the pictures—and then it was all over the internet.⁶ This story is so inspiring. It is one thing to say Rosa Parks did yoga. It is another thing to see her in a Thunderbolt pose, which is on the knee, and then in the Bow Pose with her feet behind her head. Mind you, she had just turned 60 in that picture, and Rosa Parks lived into her 90s.

When you go back to the list of long-living women, we then better understand the strategic practices that enabled Harriet Tubman to live into her 90s.

Strategic historical practices are there when we think about yoga as an Indian practice but also an African practice. It’s said that the Queen of Sheba and her people bent down to greet the rising and setting sun. That’s a Sun Salutation!

Black women’s intellectual history and Black women’s memoirs are an opening for us to be able to understand the historical wellness practices that have allowed women to write their stories, to survive as individuals, and to create communities and networks of healing.

Stephanie Y. Evans is Professor of Black Women’s Studies at Georgia State University. She is author and editor of nine books. Her single-authored works include Black Feminist Writing: A Practical Guide to Publishing Academic Books (SUNY Press, 2024), Black Women’s Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace (SUNY, 2021), and Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History (University Press of Florida, 2007).