When I was five, we moved from the Bronx to Manhattan, where I became a Spanish Harlem latchkey kid. (It is true, I thought the Aretha Franklin version of “The Rose in Spanish Harlem” was literally about me!) Like many kiddos of the era, including future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, I stayed inside and watched a lot of reruns. Lotsa 60s tv spy shows. Drama or comedy, this was very popular fare: The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, and my favorite: Get Smart—funny all those decades later, talking watches and shoes that double as gadgets are not sci-fi stuff at all.

And the fashion! Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel in The Avengers throwing a man across a room in a leather catsuit (not so different from Eartha Kitt’s catsuit, which she wore to taunt Batman and Robin). Worth checking them out on cable for a nostalgic kick.

Now, Eartha Kitt was a true trailblazer on the tv screen because she was a Black woman playing a lead role as the irresistibly sexy villain-temptress (often conflated in the conservative media of the mid-century!) We’ve celebrated her a lot over the years of Brave Sis Project (her centenary of birth is this coming January 17, which is a mind-blower!) But I want to talk not about tv kitty cats this month, but spies.

This edition of #Sistorylessons salutes three outstanding BIPOC women of disguise and deception, subterfuge and survival. Let’s meet Ellen Smith Craft, who traveled a thousand miles dressed as a white gentleman, with her own husband playing her valet. And celebrate Florence Ebersole Smith Finch, who a Filipina American woman who diverted key supplies from inside a Japanese-controlled fuel office during World War Two. And finally, a Foremother who was not in my book, Yay Panlilio; Yay Panlilio, who broadcast for the occupiers by day and ran a guerrilla army at night.

But first, an update from our busy “home office.”

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And now, our #SistoryLesson.

Ellen Smith Craft (1826–1891)—A Thousand Miles Masquerading as a Man

Two Households, One Marriage

Ellen Smith was born in Clinton, Georgia, in 1826 to an enslaved mother and the white owner who forced her to bear his children. Her skin was fair enough, and her features European enough, that she was regularly mistaken for a member of the household rather than part of the property portfolio. This fact so bothered the white Mrs. Smith that Ellen was handed off as a wedding gift to the woman’s daughter and moved twelve miles away from her mother.

Her new town was Macon, Georgia. There, Ellen met and married a cabinetmaker named William Craft, also enslaved. Because they belonged to different owners, they could not live in the same house. Far worse, the conventions of slavery were such that any child they had would belong to somebody else (generally, the mother’s enslaver) and could and would be sold off to some other buyer at the owner’s convenience. Ellen did not want to face the same anguish her own mother had experienced, so she and her husband hatched a plan.

A Complex, and Ingenious, Ruse

Their idea was audacious to the point of absurdity, but it worked. Ellen would disguise herself as a young, wealthy, ailing planter going north for medical treatment. Traveling under the identity of Mr. William Johnson, the passenger would be accompanied by his manservant, William—her actual husband. Ellen cut her hair and donned a gentleman’s suit. First hurdle cleared.

As you are likely aware, enslaved people in Georgia were not allowed to learn to read or write, by law. And so, there was a tricky problem to solve. Hotel registers and travel documents could require passengers—not their servants—to sign their names. To avoid giving away this part of the ruse, the couple decided that the “gentleman traveler” would feign an injured arm and wear a sling—can’t sign anything with a broken arm!

“The face of a woman.”

Adult men in this era often sported beards and, even if not, the lack of any facial hair could look suspicious. The solution? Poor Mr. Johnson also had a terrible toothache, and so his chin was bandaged. Two other simulations: green eyeglasses to obscure the eyes and feigning deafness. Mr. Johnson not only traveled with “his servant,” he also used a cane. This poor, pitiful traveler certainly did not invite idle conversation, and his docile manservant was there to help, from station to station.

Nine Cities, Over Four Anxious Days

They left Macon early on the morning of December 21, 1848, and went north through Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Washington, and Baltimore. At one point a white man who knew the real Ellen, the enslaved person, sat down beside “her” on the train; Mr. Johnson’s deafness spared them from having any conversation. The travelers reached Philadelphia on Christmas morning, 1848.

Darlings of the Boston Abolitionist Circuit

Boston received the runaway couple as abolitionist celebrities, and they lectured to enormous crowds. A person crossing the color line and a woman crossing the gender line was an absolute affront to Southern morals. When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850, helping, helping the Crafts in any manner was now a federal crime—anywhere in the country. Slave catchers had a double motivation: earn some reward money, and punish any slave who dared to defy the laws of God and man (as they considered things, in Dixie.)

That October, two slave catchers named Willis Hughes and John Knight arrived in Boston with a warrant, but the local Bostonians were defiant. The Boston Vigilance Committee and the Reverend Theodore Parker, a prominent Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist thinker, and abolitionist, hid the Crafts. After the bounty hunters left the city, empty handed and sullen, Ellen and William realized they had to get out of the U.S. altogether. They headed to Halifax, Canada, and then a ship to Liverpool, England.

Two Decades in English Exile and Ease

The Crafts remained in England for roughly two decades, raising five children, and learning to read and write. In 1860, they published Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery—one of the few slave narratives authored by a couple. It is still in print.

Back, To School

After the South lost the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, it was no longer dangerous for the Craft family to be in America. Sometime between 1868 and 1870, they returned to Georgia, hoping for a more settled life in the era of Reconstruction. Wishing to bring educational opportunity to the children of the formerly enslaved, they opened the Woodville Co-operative Farm School in Woodville, Georgia, in 1873.

Unfortunately, trouble and scandal doomed the institution to a short existence. Funders accused William of mishandling money; he sued for libel in 1878 and lost. At the same time, the plummeting price of cotton wrecked the local economy.

Ellen Craft died in 1891; William lived another nine years. At least one of their children, Ellen Craft Crum, later made her home in Charleston, caring for her aging parents.

Reflection: What would you actually be willing to risk—not admire from a distance, but take head on—for your own freedom or somebody else’s?

Florence Ebersole Smith Finch (October 11, 1915–December 8, 2016)—Hiding the American in Her

Here’s another story, also full of adventure and intrigue, but this one taking place during World War II. Loring May Ebersole was born on October 11, 1915, in Santiago, in Isabela Province on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She would be known as Florence Ebersole. Her father was a white American who had come to the archipelago as a soldier during the Spanish-American War and remained, marrying a Filipina woman. Florence grew up in the Philippines, as the mestiza daughter of an American. By all accounts, her childhood was happy and uneventful.

Everything changed with the onset of World War II. Florence married Chief Electrician’s Mate Charles Edward “Bing” Smith of the U.S. Navy, on August 19, 1941, only months before the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. The honeymoon would be short lived, alas. Japanese forces captured Manila on January 2, 1942, rounded up American and other Allied civilians, and interned many of them at Santo Tomas, a camp on the campus of the University of Santo Tomas.

In an interesting twist on the conventional notion of “passing,” Florence could obscure the white part of her heredity and “pass” as Filipina, thereby avoiding internment. She found employment at the Philippine Liquid Fuel Distributing Union—the Japanese-controlled office that rationed gasoline, diesel fuel, oil, and alcohol in the city.

Charles was killed in action on February 8, 1942, during the defense of Bataan and Corregidor. Florence only learned of his death months after the fact.

Two Hundred and Fifty Gallons a Week

At the Liquid Fuel office, Florence’s job was to write the fuel vouchers. From June 1942 to October 1944, she invented names, and issued ration cards against them, moving roughly 250 gallons a week out of the Japanese supply and into the hands of the Philippine resistance. Alongside the fuel she smuggled food, medicine and supplies to American and British prisoners of war who were starving in the camps.

But her defiance soon caught up with her. She was arrested in October 1944, interrogated and tortured—including with electric shock—and held at Bilibid Prison and then the women’s prison at Mandaluyong, on Manila’s east side. By the time her harrowing imprisonment came to an end, on February 10, 1945, the American liberators found a woman who weighed only eighty pounds.

And Then She Enlisted

You would think a woman who had just spent four months being tortured, who had lost her husband and very nearly her life, and who was able to finally use her American heritage to gain passage to the United States, would try to put it all behind her and live a quiet life. Not Florence. After arriving in the United States in 1945, Florence Finch enlisted in the Coast Guard Women’s Reserve—the SPARs—and worked in the office of the Coast Guard League in Washington, D.C. Her Coast Guard service was brief and primarily clerical; she left as a seaman second class after the war ended.

Next, she moved to New York City, where she attended secretarial school. She married a second time, to Robert (“Bob”) Finch, an Army veteran who had been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. The couple moved to Ithaca, New York, raised two children, and Florence worked as a secretary at Cornell University.

During the postwar years, U.S. military officials documented Finch’s resistance activities and recommended her for the Medal of Freedom, which President Harry S. Truman awarded in 1947. This was not her first accolade: she had received the Asiatic–Pacific Campaign Ribbon (the World War II service decoration recognizing participation in the Pacific theater). She was the first woman ever to receive this award. Later, the U.S. Coast Guard named its Honolulu headquarters building for her in 1995, and in 2022 it commissioned a fast response cutter, the USCGC Florence Finch.

The Neighbors Had No Idea

Florence, now a regular old Ithaca, NY housewife and mother, rarely spoke about her heroic past. When she died on December 8, 2016, at 101 years old, her obituary came as a shock to many of her neighbors. Asked about it late in life, she said: "I feel very humble because my activities in the war effort were trivial compared with those of the people who gave their lives for their country."

Reflection: What's a secret action “for good” you've taken that you still never told anybody about?

Yay Panlilio (May 22, 1913–January 12, 1978)—Colonel Yay

Valeria Panlilio, called Yay her whole life, is a Foremother who I did not know of when I wrote Our Brave Foremothers. I’d like to give her a bit of recognition and celebration here. She was born on May 22, 1913, in Denver to Valentina, a Filipina woman, who had reached the United States as a stowaway, and an Irish American father. Her mother later married a Filipino man named Ildefonso Corpus. The family struggled to stay afloat, living in tenements, in boxcars, in ranch shacks. They even spent one harsh Colorado winter living in a canvas tent.

Married at Sixteen

When she was sixteen, Valeria married Eduardo Panlilio, a mining engineer nine years her senior, and in the early 1930s, they reverse-migrated back to the Philippines. Though they had three children, the marriage did not last. By the onset of World War II, Yay was a single working mother to three in Manila.

The "Best Known" Woman in the Islands

She became a correspondent, covering politics as a reporter, photographer, and radio broadcaster—one contemporary description called her "the best known woman" in the Islands. She wore a sharkskin suit or brightly colored trousers in a time and place where a woman wearing trousers in public was very rare.

She also had a secret: Yay was an informant for United States Army intelligence.

You wouldn’t be wrong to call her a double agent. When Manila fell on January 2, 1942, Yay did something that to the uninitiated would have looked like collaboration: she went on the radio for the invading Japanese. But, to hear her tell the story—and this is a story that has been corroborated by American intelligence officers who ran her—she was inserting coded material for the Allies into her reporting and feeding what she learned back to U.S. Army intelligence.

Her last broadcast, in early March 1942, was addressed to Carlos Romulo, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. This is not some insignificant bit of trivia: Romulo was General Douglas MacArthur’s aide-de-camp and made radio broadcasts that became known as the “Voice of Freedom.” After leaving Corregidor Island with MacArthur’s party for Australia, he joined President Manuel Quezon’s government in exile in Washington as secretary of information. In her broadcast, Yay delivered an on-air appeal and promise: the Filipino people would keep faith with him.

After that broadcast, Yay went underground.

What She Left Behind

Warned that the Japanese were closing in, Yay fled Manila for the Sierra Madre foothills east of the city, where the first, ragged guerrilla bands were beginning to coalesce. This must have been a wrenching decision, as she left her three children—Rae, about ten, Edward around seven, and Curtis likely four—with an American couple, Herbert and Janet Walker. In July 1942, she found Marcos Villa Agustin, a former boxer and taxi driver who went by “Marking,” and his group of some 150 men in the hills. They were a guerrilla army—collecting intelligence, recruiting and training fighters, sabotaging Japanese lines, and awaiting the Allied return. Within a month Panlilio was effectively his second-in-command, and within the year the organization was calling her Colonel Yay.

By the historical accounts and the oral histories of those who were part of this movement, Yay was the backbone and the brains of the resistance: she ran the accounting, she ran communications, and she set policy—including discipline, including what the guerrillas were and were not permitted to do to civilians. By April 1943 they had moved into the Sierra Madre and grown into a serious force.

The resisters executed two significant operations. In February 1945, during the Battle of Manila, Yay’s guerrillas took custody of Emilio Aguinaldo. He was the first president of the Philippines, hero of the revolution against Spain, but by then a turncoat collaborator with the Japanese occupation. And in May 1945 the unit, by this time known as the Yay Regiment, fought to keep the Ipo Dam, which held Manila’s water supply, out of Japanese hands and intact. Forty of her fighters died in that defense. A United States Army historian afterward gave her regiment the lion’s share of the credit for the outcome.

Rescue and Reunion

By early 1945, the war was finally ending as U.S. forces retook Manila and the Japanese occupation collapsed. On April 2, 1945 she left Manila on the SS John Lykes with all three of her children. In Los Angeles the Red Cross housed the wartime hero and family in a slum hotel. She didn’t complain, however: “It has walls,” she said. For someone who had spent three years sleeping in the Sierra Madre mountains, a shoddy hotel was no big deal.

The Medal, and the Forgetting

She remained in touch with her collaborator, Marcos (“Marking”), and they married in Mexico on September 11, 1945. This second marriage was not much longer-lived than the first, unfortunately. But she settled into a new life in LA nonetheless: in 1950 she published her memoir, The Crucible, and Truman awarded her the Medal of Freedom. She wrote a magazine column in Manila from 1955. She came back to the United States in the 1970s and died on January 12, 1978 in Aquebogue, New York.

By then her role as a guerrilla leader had been almost entirely forgotten. The Crucible went out of print and stayed so until Rutgers University Press reissued it in 2010 in an edition prepared by the scholar Denise Cruz. In 2024 she was portrayed by the actress Max Collins in the Philippine television series Pulang Araw, which is how many Filipinos learned her name for the first time.

Reflection: Who in your own family or community has a war, or a crossing, or a disappearance in them that nobody has written down?

Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone

In commemoration of Ellen Smith Craft: write about a time you took a real, scary risk for something that mattered. What did it cost you to do that, and would you do it again?

Celebrating Florence Ebersole Smith Finch: Describe a time you "disguised" yourself to get something you needed.

Thanking Yay Panlilio: which part of your own story do you leave out when you tell it, and what would it take to put it back in?

HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color

In thanks to Ellen Smith Craft: when have you had to become somebody else just to get through the day?

Lifting up the legacy of Florence Ebersole Smith Finch: when have you taken quiet action nobody saw that made the whole difference?

When you consider Yay Panlilio: how has telling your own story helped you reclaim it?

Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends

For Ellen Smith Craft: learn about which freedoms of movement are being restricted in your own state right now.

In honor of Florence Ebersole Smith Finch: check out the Filipino American National Historical Society and learn more about the history and culture.

With gratitude to Yay Panlilio: Check out The Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project. Eighty years on, they are working to get the Rescission Act off the books.”

What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember

The three Foremothers we celebrated in this edition show us that with a clear-minded goal and determination, heroism can be more attainable than we imagine. Keep this in mind: being underestimated and cast as “just” a woman can sometimes be a great cover for doing extraordinary things.

PS: October is Filipino American History Month

This commemoration was established in 1992 by the Filipino American National Historical Society under Dr. Fred Cordova and Dr. Dorothy Laigo Cordova, and formally recognized by Congress in 2009. The month was chosen for October 18, 1587, when Filipino sailors—known as the Luzones Indios—came ashore at what is now Morro Bay, California, from the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Esperanza. The Mayflower didn’t show up until 33 years later. The lesson here is that the history we were taught is not always the full story, yo—often it’s not even the true one

P.P.S.: Two Medals, One Signature

Harry Truman pinned the Medal of Freedom on Florence Finch in 1947 and on Yay Panlilio in 1950. On February 18, 1946—between the war they fought and the medals he gave them—that same man signed the Rescission Act, which declared that Filipino service in the United States Armed Forces of the Far East had not been American service at all. Ironic and very sad.

Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research. Visit our newly relaunched website for resources to help you Celebrate - Learn - Act.

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