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Black women have always been at the forefront of movements for social change, from abolition to suffrage to civil rights to feminism. Learn more about their leadership, creative expressions, and critiques of white supremacy and patriarchy.

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Movements of Resistance

enslaved women illustration

Two Women of the African Slave Resistance

African women, always a minority in the slave trade, often had to find their own ways of rebellion against slavery if they could.
Grandchildren of slaves.

A Formerly Enslaved Woman Successfully Won a Case for Reparations in 1783

In one of the earliest examples of reparations, an ex-slave named Belinda petitioned the government and was granted an annuity.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett

The Alpha Suffrage Club and Black Women’s Fight for the Vote

Black women's experiences in the suffrage movement show that the Nineteenth Amendment marked one event in the fight for the vote, not an endpoint.
Trinidad-born journalist and activist Claudia Jones at the offices of The West Indian Gazette in 1962. Jones joined the Communist Party in 1936

Why Black Women Joined the Communist Party

During the Great Depression, Communists took to the streets to fight racism, poverty, and injustice. Among them were Black women.
Elizabeth Jennings Graham

The Woman Who Refused to Leave a Whites-Only Streetcar

In 1854, Elizabeth Jennings rode the streetcar of her choice, in an early civil rights protest that led to desegregating public transportation in NYC.
City Federation of Colored Women's Clubs of Jacksonville, State Meeting, Palatka, Florida

Women’s Clubs and the “Lost Cause”

Women's clubs were popular after the Civil War among white and Black women. But white clubwomen used their influence to ingrain racist curriculum in schools.
New Orleans, 1939

How St. Louis Domestic Workers Fought Exploitation

Without many legal protections under the New Deal, Black women organized through the local Urban League.

 

Icons from History

Marian Anderson with Harold L. Ickes (Secretary of the Interior)

Marian Anderson Photo Archives

The African American opera singer made history with a stirring concert at the Lincoln Memorial. But there was much more to Marian Anderson.
Photograph: Beah Richards in a still from the film, "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner."

The Poem That Inspired Radical Black Women to Organize

Beah Richards is best known as an actor, but in 1951 she wrote a sweeping poem that influenced the Civil Rights Movement.
Dorothy B Porter

15 Black Women Who Should Be (More) Famous

Honoring the scientists, poets, activists, doctors, and librarians--those we know and those we don't.
Henrietta Lacks portrait

Henrietta Lacks, Immortalized

Henrietta Lacks's "immortal" cell line, called "HeLa," is used in everything from cancer treatments to vaccines. A new portrait memorializes her.

 

In Their Own Words

Morgan Jerkins

Morgan Jerkins: Exploring the Multitudes within American Blackness

In her new book, Wandering in Strange Lands, Morgan Jerkins takes a deeply personal look at the effects of the Great Migration.
Shirley Chisholm

Shirley Chisholm: Sisterhood Is Complicated

A 1974 interview on feminism and politics with the first Black major-party candidate for president.
Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, the first African American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born to working-class ...
Dr. Alondra Nelson

Interview with Alondra Nelson: Race + Gender + Technology + Medicine

Alondra Nelson studies gender and black studies at the intersection of science and technology.

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