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Following on the heels of the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance was a resonant flourishing of African American arts, literature, theater, music, and intellectualism, from 1930 to 1955. Anne Meis Knupfer's The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism demonstrates the complexity of black women's many vital contributions to this unique cultural flowering.

The book examines various groups of black female activists, including writers and actresses, social workers, artists, school teachers, and women's club members to document the impact of social class, gender, nativity, educational attainment, and professional affiliations on their activism. Together, these women worked to sponsor black history and literature, to protest overcrowded schools, and to act as a force for improved South Side housing and employment opportunities. Knupfer also reveals the crucial role these women played in founding and sustaining black cultural institutions, such as the first African American art museum in the country; the first African American library in Chicago; and various African American literary journals and newspapers. As a point of contrast, Knupfer also examines the overlooked activism of working-class and poor women in the Ida B. Wells and Altgeld Gardens housing projects.

A perceptive and inspiring biography of an extraordinary woman born into slavery who, through grit and determination, became a historic social and educational leader.
                          
The life of Betsey Stockton (ca. 1798–1865) is a remarkable story of a Black woman’s journey from slavery to emancipation, from antebellum New Jersey to the Hawai‘ian Islands, and from her own self-education to a lifetime of teaching others—all told against the backdrop of the early United States’ pervasive racism. It’s a compelling chronicle of a critical time in American history and a testament to the courage and commitment of a woman whose persistence grew into a potent form of resistance.

When Betsey Stockton was a child, she was “given, as a slave” to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green’s library. After being emancipated, she used that education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai‘i as a missionary, then Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, Princeton—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility. Betsey Stockton became a revered figure in Princeton’s sizeable Black population, a founder of religious and educational institutions, and a leader engaged in the day-to-day business of building communities.

In this first book-length telling of Betsey Stockton’s story, Gregory Nobles illuminates both a woman and her world, following her around the globe, and showing how a determined individual could challenge her society’s racial obstacles from the ground up. It’s at once a revealing lesson on the struggles of Stockton’s times and a fresh inspiration for our own.

Investigating Mary Ellen Pleasant's convoluted legacy

Mary Ellen Pleasant arrived in Gold Rush-era San Francisco a free black woman with abolitionist convictions and a predilection for entrepreneurial success. Behind the convenient and trusted disguise of "Mammy," she transformed domestic labor into enterprise, amassed remarkable real estate, wealth, and power, and gained notoriety for her work in fighting Jim Crow.

Pleasant's legacy is steeped in scandals and lore. Was she a voodoo queen who traded in sexual secrets? A madam? A murderer? In The Making of "Mammy Pleasant," Lynn M. Hudson examines the folklore of Pleasant's real and imagined powers. Emphasizing the significance of her life in the context of how it has been interpreted or ignored in the larger trends of American history, Hudson integrates fact and speculation culled from periodicals, court cases, diaries, letters, Pleasant's interviews with the San Francisco press, and various biographical and fictional accounts.

Addressing the lack of a historical record of black women's lives, the author argues that the silences and mysteries of Pleasant's past, whether never recorded or intentionally omitted, reveal as much about her life as what has been documented. Through Pleasant's life, Hudson also interrogates the constructions of race, gender, and sexuality during the formative years of California's economy and challenges popular mythology about the liberatory sexual culture of the American West.

Founded in 1975, the non-partisan National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) played a critical role in the Black women’s liberation movement and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. The Chicago-based organization’s Black humanist feminism powered a singular dedication to building coalitions while influencing its historic set of comprehensive political, economic, and cultural demands.

Ileana Nachescu places the NABF’s history as the bridge between Black women’s social activism in the 1970s and the intellectual activism of the 1980s. Her account details the NABF’s work and how it reflected the group’s strong humanist belief in the transformation of all human beings. Nachescu also shows that the NABF’s post-Eighties erasure from movement histories is consistent with how many white feminists marginalized women of color and rejected their leadership. From there, Nachescu examines Black lesbians’ vibrant support of the NABF and shows how respectability politics pressured the group to support its lesbian membership in private but maintain a public silence on the issue.

A rare in-depth look at an overlooked organization, The National Alliance of Black Feminists tells an untold story of Black women’s liberation in the Midwest.

The remarkable life story of Ella Jenkins, “The First Lady of Children’s Music.”
 
Ella Jenkins was one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. Her songs “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song” and “Who Fed the Chickens?” are classics in the world of children’s music. In a career spanning more than sixty years, she recorded forty albums, won a lifetime-achievement Grammy, and became the best-selling individual artist in the history of Smithsonian Folkways Records, the independent label that played a significant role in the 1960s folk revival movement and introduced listeners to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. During her remarkable career, Jenkins joined forces with twentieth-century luminaries such as Odetta, Big Bill Broonzy, Armando Peraza, Bayard Rustin, and Fred Rogers. Despite her wide-reaching influence on children’s music, Ella Jenkins’s sonic civil rights activism isn’t widely known today.
 
Based on dozens of interviews and access to Ella Jenkins’s personal archives, Gayle F. Wald’s This Is Rhythm shares how Jenkins, a “rhythm specialist” with no formal musical training, became the most prolific and significant American children’s musician of the twentieth century, creating a beloved catalog of songs grounded in values of community-building, antiracism, and cultural pluralism. Wald traces how the daughter of southern migrants translated the music of her own Black girlhood on the South Side of Chicago into a form of civil rights activism—a musical education that empowered children by introducing them to Black history, African diasporic rhythms, and a participatory, community-centered approach to music. Wald also discusses how, beginning in 1961, Jenkins built a life with a female partner who supported her materially and emotionally. Although Jenkins did not talk publicly about her sixty-three-year relationship, she opened up to Wald, offering insight into how a “private” Black woman in the public eye negotiated sexuality in an era before gay and lesbian liberation movements. Throughout her career, her innovative music found its way into thousands of community centers, classrooms, and concert venues, and her “call-and-response” method has influenced and empowered generations of children and adults. 

A beautifully written tribute to Ella Jenkins’s legacy, this biography illustrates her impact on children’s music and expands our understanding of folk music’s relationship with social justice. Jenkins used music to build a new world in which children—and adults—are encouraged to listen to each other’s distinct rhythms.

A stunning lyrical commentary on the constructions of race, gender, and class in the fraught nexus of a Black woman’s personal experience and cultural history

 

The Fair Housing Act passed in 1968, and more than fifty years later, yours seems to be the only Black family on your block in Minneapolis. You and your Black African husband, both college graduates, make less money than some White people with a felony record and no high school diploma. You’re the only Black student in your graduate program. You just aren’t working hard enough. You’re too sensitive. Sandra Bland? George Floyd? Don't take everything so personally. Amid the White smiles of Minnesota Nice and the Minnesota Paradox—the insidious racism of an ostensibly inclusive place to live—what do you do? If you’re Taiyon J. Coleman, you write.

 

In Traveling without Moving, Coleman shares intimate essays from her life: her childhood in Chicago—growing up in poverty with four siblings and a single mother—and the empowering decision to leave her first marriage. She writes about being the only Black student in a prestigious and predominantly White creative writing program, about institutional racism and implicit bias in writing instruction, about the violent legacies of racism in the U.S. housing market, about the maternal health disparities seen across the country and their implication in her own miscarriage. She explores what it means to write her story and that of her family—an act at once a responsibility and a privilege—bringing forth the inherent contradictions between American ideals and Black reality.

 

Using a powerful blend of perspectives that move between a first-person lens of lived experience and a wider-ranging critique of U.S. culture, policy, and academia, Coleman’s writing evinces how a Black woman in America is always on the run, always Harriet Tubman, traveling with her babies in tow, seeking safety, desperate to survive, thrive, and finally find freedom.

 

 

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