Celebrate International Working Women Month!
Black Women are Foundational for All History and Black Studies
The First Black Woman to Run for Vice President of The U.S.

PBS.org

Charlotta Spears Bass (1874-1969) one of the first African American women to own and operate a newspaper, and the first African American woman to run for Vice President of the United States, crusaded for over 40 years against racial violence, and discrimination in schools, housing, and the job market, in the pages of the California Eagle.

Claudia Jones: A Woman Of Our Times: 
Elaine Brown -
A Statement from Ericka Huggins
In our schools: ‘Yes’ to books, science, diversity…and discomfort

By Rob Schofield
 
Public school book banning is back in the news.
Yes, I know; it’s an amazing development in an era in which every imaginable form of explicit violence, sex, and hate speech resides just seconds away at our children’s fingertips.

Research indicates that 95% of American teens have ready access to a smartphone and that more than 90 percent of kids play video games – more than 90% of which are rated E10+ or above contain violence. For heaven’s sake, a 2021 Northeastern University study found that “more than one-third of adolescents (ages 13 to 17) say they could gain access in less than five minutes to a loaded firearm kept in the home, and half could gain access in 60 minutes or less.”

Nonetheless, a small but noisy group of mostly conservative parents across the country have recently decided to make printed words found in books – books that reside in some public school libraries and that have, in some instances, been designated as assigned reading by professional educators – as their new bête noire. Read more here.
Black Feminist & Revolutionary: Black Women's Voices

Angela Davis Criticizes
"Mainstream Feminism"

Assata Shakur on Socialism
Esther Cooper Jackson at 96:
Still in the Struggle
Linda Burnham, Extended Talk: Navigating The Contradictions
of Our Moment  
Book banning battles hit North Carolina schools


Parents of sixth graders in a gifted language-arts class at Marvin Ridge Middle School received an email from their children’s teacher last month warning them that a book selected for the class’s unit on African American literature would at times be “uncomfortable.” 

The teacher at the Union County school, Cason Treharn, was confident, however, that her academically advanced students were mature enough to handle Melba Pattillo Beals’s autobiographical account of the Little Rock Nine’s integration of Central High School in Arkansas in 1957.  

Beals was one of nine Black students who stared down angry mobs of white racists and segregationists to attend the previously all-white school. The students were taunted by classmates and their parents, threatened by mobs and attacked with lighted sticks of dynamite. It was an ugly time in America but also a seminal moment in the struggle for civil rights, coming as it did in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that deemed “separate but equal” schools unconstitutional. 


According to an email shared with Policy Watch, Treharn thought the book would provide valuable insight into how segregation, racism and discrimination shaped the South during the 1950s. Read more here.
"STILL I RISE"
by Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave woman.
I rise
I rise
I rise.