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Women

Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman were pioneering Black women leaders who championed equality in the church, politics, civic rights, and other areas of public life.

Black women are founders of American democracy. How will we live up to their ideals?

By Commentaries/Opinions

While too many Black were disenfranchised even after the 19th Amendment’s ratification a century ago, they never waited for permission before promoting their vision of fundamental rights. By Martha Jones, The Inquirer — When it comes to 21st-century politics, Black women are our founders. The double scourge of racism and sexism no longer defines American politics. The nomination of Sen. Kamala Harris to the Democrat’s VP slot, the more than…

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A civil rights marcher suffering from exposure to tear gas holds an unconscious Amelia Boynton Robinson after mounted police officers attacked marchers in Selma, Ala., as they were beginning a 50-mile march to Montgomery to protest race discrimination in voter registration.

The Voting Rights Act was signed 55 years ago. Black women led the movement behind it.

By Commentaries/Opinions

By N’dea Yancey-Bragg, USA Today — In March of 1965, Amelia Boynton Robinson walked with hundreds of other protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Boynton Robinson, who planned the march from Selma to the Alabama capital of Montgomery along with Rev. C.T. Vivian and others, was struck with a baton by Alabama state troopers that day. “They came from the right, the left, the front and started beating people,” she told The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, in…

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Lorraine Hansberry at an NAACP rally in New York City, 1959.

Lorraine Hansberry’s Radical Imagination

By Commentaries/Opinions

For the playwright and activist, neither liberal reform nor countercultural art were enough. The very foundations of American democracy needed to be transformed. By Elias Rodriques, The Nation — In October of 1964, three months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Lorraine Hansberry’s play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened on Broadway. At the time, Hansberry was already famous for A Raisin in the Sun, but the intervening years had…

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