Black Women Activists Research Articles

Revolutionary dreaming

ebonyjanice (sic) set out to imagine “a revolution that did not cost us our whole spirit, soul, and bodies” in a world in which she believes Black women are “being known for our resistance, and not for our living.” Her resulting text, All the Black Girls Are Activists: A Fourth‐Wave Womanist Pursuit of Dreams as Radical Resistance, explores the dreams and humanity of Black women activists in different spaces and encourages those doing the heavy lifting of resistance work to also take time for softness, hope, imagination, and dreams.

Revolutionary Dreaming

ebonyjanice (sic) set out to imagine “a revolution that did not cost us our whole spirit, soul, and bodies” in a world in which she believes Black women are “being known for our resistance, and not for our living.” Her resulting text, “All the Black Girls Are Activists: A Fourth‐Wave Womanist Pursuit of Dreams as Radical Resistance,” explores the dreams and humanity of Black women activists in different spaces and encourages those doing the heavy lifting of resistance work to also take time for softness, hope, imagination, and dreams.

Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965, by CherisseJones‐Branch, Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2021. 227 pp. $29.96 (cloth). ISBN: 9781682261668

Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965, by CherisseJones‐Branch, Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2021. 227 pp. $29.96 (cloth). ISBN: 9781682261668

Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965, by CherisseJones‐Branch, Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2021. 227 pp. $29.96 (cloth). ISBN: 9781682261668.

Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965, by CherisseJones‐Branch, Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2021. 227 pp. $29.96 (cloth). ISBN: 9781682261668.

Calling for justice with #JusticeforBreonnaTaylor: a case study of hashtag activism in the evolution of the black lives matter movement

Taking a stage-based approach, before and after the release of the 15-h audio recording files of the grand jury’s inquiry on the Breonna Taylor case on October 2, 2020, this study examined the #JusticeforBreonnaTaylor Twitter networks. By employing multimethodology, including natural language processing, social network analysis, and qualitative textual analysis, I examined keys connectors of the two Twitter networks and investigated major themes conducting thematic analysis of network discourses and highly associated hashtags with the hashtag #JusticeforBreonnaTaylor. In both networks, several key stakeholders, such as Benjamin Crump, Danial Cameron, and Black women activists were identified as key connectors along with social activists and ordinary participants. Demanding justice to the case was the core agenda of the hashtag activism. The findings of the study revealed that the participants not only shared breaking news and important information but also organized protests and routinely tagged people to spread messages about the Taylor’s case on Twitter. The participants conversed major issues about the Taylor case and set the agendas for the next action, such as encouraging to take part in voting for the 2020 presidential election. The thematic analysis concurrently demonstrated that the network participants strongly demanded legal prosecution to the three Louisville cops that involved in the act of killing Breonna Taylor during the botched raid in her apartment.

Black Women Activists and Pan-Africanism in the Black Atlantic Diaspora: Profiles and Dialogues,

Black Women Activists and Pan-Africanism in the Black Atlantic Diaspora: Profiles and Dialogues,

Garments, Accessories, and Stories

Activists often have used dress to express solidarity with Black resistance movements such as the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In our research, we built upon our own and previous scholars’ work by analyzing the intersections of activism, identity, and dress in a specific space, place, and context: twenty-first-century Black women college students during the Black Lives Matter movement from 2013 to 2019 who were attending land-grant, predominately white institutions in Iowa. We explored these women’s everyday “fashion activism” through analysis of objects, photographs, and stories. We found that dress practices historically used by Black women activists are being revived and repurposed in the twenty-first century at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement era. These women shared that they knowingly wore these styles to emulate both their own and previous Black women’s dress practices.

Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965

Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965

Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965

The field of rural history—especially rural women's history—is one that has seen exponential growth over the past two decades. The newest entry into this field from historian Cherisse Jones-Branch is not only an important contribution to this scholarship, but it also reasserts regional history's importance to the larger context of rural history. Rural women in the South, and especially African American women, were active in civil rights, reform, and activism, helping their communities at the local, regional, or state levels. Many of their stories and names are well known, while others are waiting to be remembered. This was especially evident in Arkansas; African American women sought to change and uplift their communities. These women whom Jones-Branch “lifts . . . from the obscurity of Arkansas rural history” navigated through, fought, and challenged the deep racism and segregation prevalent throughout the state (5). In Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps, Jones-Branch skillfully navigates five decades of these women's achievements, their struggles, and the evolution of their work.The book's main focus, as the title suggests, is on the women themselves. As Jones-Branch emphasizes throughout her book, the women she examines came from different areas of life. Their professions included home demonstration agents, professionals, teachers, club members, and agricultural laborers. They organized, responded, collaborated, and created, but most importantly, their work helped to change Arkansas's rural life. The majority of the women worked collaboratively and were engaged with the individual residents and communities for which they were advocating—in one of her examples concerning home demonstration agents, Jones-Branch notes, “they were mindful of how important it was to respect rural African Americans and earn their trust” (69).During the early to mid-twentieth century, rural Arkansas women faced hunger, health problems, financial and environmental crises, and job scarcity, in addition to the burdens of racism and segregation. Jones-Branch assesses how these women used reforms, education, direct challenges to the status quo of inequality, and other methods to create change and opportunities in their communities. Clubs or organizations like the Arkansas Association of Colored Women and the Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation's Negro Division were either created or existing ones utilized to foster more support, resources, and strength for the communities they were seeking to uplift and help.Jones-Branch follows previous works by LuAnn Jones, Melissa Walker, Rebecca Sharpless, Debra Reid, and Carmen V. Harris, to name a few. This rural and agricultural history literature is echoed in her sources, as well as the extensive primary sources she employs. One of the most fascinating aspects of Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps is that she focuses two of her chapters on mini biographies of two specific women—Ethel B. Dawson and Annie Zachary Pike. These two women had different approaches to their activism. Dawson used religion to encourage rural community uplift and Christian doctrine when defending or justifying her work to help empower African Americans who were working in agriculture as mechanization and farming technology continued to advance. Pike, or “Ms. Annie,” and her husband owned a considerable amount of farmland, with tenants and up-to-date farm technology, and they became politically active at the state level in the Republican Party. She was eventually appointed to the state welfare board, advocated for African American laborers and education, and ran for a state senate seat in the early 1970s.Any criticisms of this book are minor. One example is the brief mention of the 1919 Elaine Massacre early in the book, which is not fully defined until chapter 12 despite falling earlier in the book's timeline. Perhaps a clarification of this significant event would have been helpful to the reader if it had been discussed in an earlier chapter, since this local event is one that continues to reverberate. However, overall, Cherisse Jones-Branch has written a book that is confident in its materials and narrative. More importantly, the book introduces the rural African American women who fought for their neighbors and communities to have better lives and better opportunities against entrenched racism and discrimination. Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps is a welcome addition to the fields of southern women's history, rural history, agrarian history, and African American history.

(Re)Conceptualizing Black motherwork as political activism

AbstractIn 2020, Black Americans voted in historic numbers in the US presidential election. Black women political activists were instrumental in navigating voter suppression to increase voter turnout among Black communities. Here, I draw linkages between Patricia Hill Collins's conceptualization of motherwork and Black women's political activism. I reconceptualize Black women's motherwork as a political tool for preparing Black women for political candidacy to address issues that threaten Black family stability. I provide a conceptual history of motherwork and map out what Black women's political motherwork looks like for families and communities. I conclude with theoretical, analytical, and practical implications for family scientists to consider when using Black political motherwork in their scholarship and practice.

Seeing Shadows: The FBI Surveillance of Louise Thompson Patterson

This article explores the ways gender and race influenced the FBI’s surveillance of Black women activists. Previous scholarship has covered the role of surveillance in repressing revolutionary movements and neutralizing radical organizations. Historically, within many social movements, Black women have been marginalized, silenced, or reduced to only their gender because of patriarchal leadership. As a result, the persistence of sexism within these Black movements has affected Black women’s visibility within movement organizations. This piece asks, how does gendered marginalization impact their surveillance by and visibility to the FBI? It seeks to understand the influence of race and gender on the FBI’s surveillance of Louise Thompson Patterson. By examining the language and narrative components of her FBI file, the article provides an analysis across gender and across time to theorize the dynamics of surveillance, race, and gender. Based on a close analysis of Patterson’s FBI file, I argue that the tension between hypervisibility and invisibility deriving from gendered stereotypes resulted in the Bureau’s vague understanding of her personal life and political ideology.

Black Women Activists: Embracing the Struggle for Intertwined Freedoms on Multiple Fronts

AbstractDorothy Cobble's magnificent, sweeping saga of the 100 plus year struggle for “full rights feminism” introduces us to myriad activists who sought common ground in the expansion of civil, political, economic and social rights as the key for raising the standard for working women, and by extension for all of humanity. However, as Cobble notes, some full-rights activists did not measure up to the potential of this feminism. The juxtaposition of the activism of Black full-rights feminists helps expose this fault line of unexamined deep-seated racism, ethnocentrism, and stereotypical thinking that undermined the potential of full-rights feminism. Questions of economic and political democracy shaped the organizing efforts of Black full-rights feminists against disfranchisement, lynching, discrimination in housing, education and employment, and exclusion and segregation from public accommodations. In their transnational work, they supported policies and practices structured by Cold War imperatives, American racism and imperialism, and tensions between democracy and incipient autocracy in the emerging African nations. Cobble's book demonstrates the crucial ways that Black activists working together and with white allies pushed for the expansive promise of full-rights feminism, encompassing both political and economic rights and race and gender justice.

The Small Spaces of Global Struggle

The Small Spaces of Global Struggle

Graduate school recruitment should begin day one — as a freshman

Cherisse Jones‐Branch, Ph.D., Dean of the Graduate School and a Vaughn Endowed Professor of History at Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, has been at ASU since 2003. Her scholarship focuses on rural Black activism, and she recently published the book Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965 in 2020. And in 2020, she also took over her role as the Dean of the newly reinstated Graduate School at ASU.

Graduate school recruitment should begin day one — as a freshman

Cherisse Jones‐Branch, Ph.D., Dean of the Graduate School and a Vaughn Endowed Professor of History at Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, has been at ASU since 2003. Her scholarship focuses on rural Black activism, and she recently published the book Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965 in 2020. And in 2020, she also took over her role as the Dean of the newly reinstated Graduate School at ASU.

Social movements, community education, and the fight for racial justice: Black women and social transformation

AbstractThis article addresses the role of community learning within social movements and the fight for social justice and human rights. To understand contemporary social movements and their role in community learning and advocacy for social change, it is essential to contextualize them within the long history of Black women's activist labor and accomplishments. The #BLM movement is presented as a continuation of Black women's longstanding inclusive activism, punctuated by the Abolition, Suffrage, Civil Rights, and modern feminist movements. It highlights the efforts of specific Black women community leaders in creating counterpublics that make claims to power and work to change the status quo. Black women, through their inclusive, community‐based activist endeavors, continue to carve out fugitive spaces and counterpublics where counternarratives are actively generated to fight for a more equitable and inclusive democracy that serves all. This article conceptualizes the role of adult education in social movements and transformative change.

Educational practices and knowledge constituted in the political training processes of black activists: a literature review

This text undertakes a bibliographic survey of academic discussions involving the trajectories of black women activists. Historically, black women have challenged institutional powers, facing racism and sexism, while oppressions crystallized in society. One of the strategies to face oppression is the movement of black women, in the form of organizations that fight within an intersectional perspective. We understand that Black Feminism plays a leading role in the action of educating, highlighting its pedagogical role in the dissemination of knowledge, in addition to its political role throughout Brazilian history. Black feminism highlights the specificity of the feminine that aggregates struggles and processes experienced by black women. We hope, with this text, to present reflections that problematize black women's movements, showing the complexity of concepts related to educational practices and knowledge constituted in political formation processes of black women activists, based on research registered in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations of CAPES.

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones

Reviewed by: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones Monica L. Mercado (bio) Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All By Martha S. Jones. New York: Basic Books, 2020. 352 pages, illustrations, 6" x 9". $30.00 cloth, $16.99 ebook. If women's history was going to have a moment, 2020 was poised to be it. For years, women's history stakeholders looked forward to that year—now memorable for a global pandemic that disrupted even the best laid plans—to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. With one sentence ("The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex"), US suffragists celebrated victory. Women's right to vote, requiring decades of continued action by women of color and their allies to extend and secure the franchise, has long been the subject of political and social histories. In Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, historian Martha S. Jones rewrites conventional narratives of women's rights in US history by centering the work of Black women, whose expansive politics, by necessity, addressed both sexism and racism. Building on the foundational work of late suffrage historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, and published amid a wave of new books, podcasts, documentaries, museum exhibitions, and public sculpture timed to commemorate the "suffrage centennial," Vanguard is a standout volume that deserves our engagement long after 2020 is in the rearview mirror. But Vanguard is not a book about suffrage and suffragists. Those terms, Jones declares in her introduction, are "far too narrow to capture" the scope of Black women's activism (14). As the vanguard, the women Jones profiles are visionaries and volunteers, interrogating the meaning of freedom and demanding it for themselves and their communities. They joined clubs, churches, and conventions—and, as the endnotes underscore, historians still need to do a better job of acknowledging their contributions. The need for such a volume is clear, and it is personal to Jones, a native New Yorker and Johns Hopkins University professor. Movingly, Vanguard begins with a genealogy. Starting with her great-great-grandmother, Jones briefly unpacks the experiences of her ancestors, introducing us to Black women who "built power where [they] could" even when the vote was denied them (3). Club women, church women, educators, community organizers, fundraisers—each promoted a vision of "winning women's power that would serve all humanity" (8). The introduction lays the groundwork for Jones's argument that woman suffrage was only a small piece of Black women's politics; human rights, not women's rights, [End Page 427] might be a more appropriate term for the vanguard's imaginary in the wake of slavery and emancipation. If the chronological scope of Vanguard feels familiar—beginning around the time of the American Revolution and working its way toward the present—the stories Jones chooses to tell make for a fresh reworking of the history survey genre. There are familiar actors here, of course (Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell), as well as a host of new names (women like Troy, New York, speaker Elizabeth Wicks and New York City businesswoman Hester Lane). Most significantly, Jones maps out Black geographies that rarely intersect with formal suffrage organizing. The 1848 Seneca Falls convention is covered in just a handful of paragraphs, for example, enlarged with a few fascinating hints at the lives of free Black women who lived just a stone's throw from the meeting site. Instead, Vanguard takes seriously the middle decades of the nineteenth century as an era of conventions, plural. Black women attended, spoke up, and even lectured to other women and men at a host of women's rights conventions, colored conventions, and religious meetings. The founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) at the turn of the twentieth century solidified many of the networks that Black women forged in this earlier era, and shaped Black politics. "Black men...

Todd-Breland, E. (2018). A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781469646589 (Paperback)

In her recent book A Political Education, Elizabeth Todd-Breland tells the story of black education reform in Chicago since the modern civil rights movement. In doing so, she demonstrates how black educators and communities have ceaselessly fought against white supremacist structures that perpetuate racial and class disparities, and shows how their victories, though important, were often undermined by these same structures. More importantly, Todd-Breland uncovers the forgotten stories and contributions of black women educators and activists at the heart of these movements that were heretofore disregarded in favor of those of their male counterparts. Writing against patriarchal norms that historically sidestep women’s contributions, Todd-Breland organizes her historical analysis around the stories of these women.

An Education in Black Women's Activism

An Education in Black Women's Activism John Frederick Bell (bio) Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 286 pages. Figures, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. Education has been a civil rights battleground since before the Civil War. From the failure of the New Haven "African College" in 1831 to mob attacks on the Canterbury Female Seminary in 1833 and the Noyes Academy in 1835 to the Roberts desegregation case in 1849, contests over access to schooling and higher learning helped define the northern Black freedom struggle. After abolition itself, the right to education was a chief priority for African American reformers. For many Black leaders, the issue was personal. Encountering racial discrimination as students helped make lifelong activists out of some preeminent abolitionists, including William Howard Day, Henry Highland Garnet, and William Cooper Nell. But if exclusion or expulsion from school is where narratives of Black men's activism begin, it is often where narratives of Black women's activism end. Alexander Crummell is rejected from General Theological Seminary and becomes an exponent of racial self-determination. Rosetta Douglass is ousted from Seward Seminary and becomes a side note in her famous father's biographies. Kabria Baumgartner's In Pursuit of Knowledge gives women like Rosetta Douglass their due. Her monograph, the first book-length treatment of its subject, shows how personal struggles for education inspired and empowered antebellum Black women to demand "equal school rights" for their communities. Prior historians of race, gender, and education in this period have concentrated mainly on African American alumnae of Oberlin College who hailed primarily from the West and South. Baumgartner shifts the focus to student and teacher activists in the Northeast. Some of the characters in this book—Sarah Mapps Douglass, Charlotte Forten, Sarah Parker Remond—will be familiar to historians of Black abolitionism. Others like Ursula James, Rosetta Morrison, and Eunice Ross likely will not. Together, these women's school experiences and subsequent teaching careers form the connective tissue of Baumgartner's narrative, which she divides into two parts. The first half examines private female seminaries, while the second analyzes public [End Page 531] schools, specifically in Massachusetts. The author's fastidious research yields a wealth of new information about the Black student experience in each of these settings. Baumgartner uses these findings to demonstrate the crucial role Black women played in making education integral to the fight for civil rights. Collectively, they deployed their own brand of social protest, an "ethic of Christian love," which set them apart from vicious adversaries and steeled them against retribution (p. 16). While its contributions are singular, In Pursuit of Knowledge is indebted to pathbreaking works of historians like Jane Dabel, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, and Martha S. Jones, whose influence Baumgartner acknowledges. Starting in the late 1990s, these and other scholars began re-envisioning the history of Black protest in the antebellum North by placing African American women at its center. Their research recovered female participation in political entities more often associated with Black men, such as fraternal orders, vigilance committees, and Colored Conventions. But their histories also recognized the myriad other institutions of civil society through which African American women shaped public culture, from church auxiliaries and schools to lyceums and literary associations, mutual aid circles, war relief agencies, and antislavery societies. Confronting intersecting forms of racial and gender prejudice, Black women displayed their respectability through these private organizations and then used that authority to agitate publicly for racial equality and women's rights. Not all of their advocacy was discursive, however. Carol Lasser describes how African American women at Oberlin College "shaped their lives themselves as texts" and "performed the abolition for which others argued" through their daily pursuits of education, piety, and refinement.1 Likewise, Erica Ball highlights Black women's (and men's) efforts "to live an antislavery life" by approaching every aspect of their private lives in light of the freedom struggle.2 Collectively, these scholars not only reoriented a historiography that had privileged men's activism, they also revised the definition of "activism" itself to account for the unique situation of African...