Black Feminists Make History Everyday: A Black History Month Reading List

 

By Black Women Radicals

Black feminists make history everyday. We must honor their leadership during Black History Month and beyond.

Every Black History Month and beyond, we are thankful for the leadership, legacies, and lineages of Black organizers, workers, activists, and community builders–both past and present. However, while we are appreciative of the foundation and blueprint many Black leaders have made, we have noticed how year-in and year-out mainstream media (and even community based media and discourses) have often offered a one-sided and revisionist perspective on the same Black leaders that they promote during the month of February. 

Moreover, due to cisheteronormative, masculinist, and Western perspectives and frameworks, Black women and gender expansive people’s contributions to Black history and the Black present are either othered, erased, or overlooked. We also have noticed that during Black History Month, that many Black media outlets also participate in anti-Black erasure and revisionist narratives, as they only promote the historical leadership of Black cisgender movement builders, and not Black trans, queer, and gender expansive organizers. 

We see you. We are calling you out. You cannot talk about Black history or promote Black History Month while only telling half the truth because half the truth is still a lie. 

With the contemporary assaults on critical race theory and intersectionality and the push by conservative politicians to enact legislation that will silence educators so they cannot teach the truth about the history of the United States, now more than ever, it is our responsibility and duty to tell the truth, especially to the children. And the truth is: Black history is not Black history if certain people are left behind–especially Black women and gender expansive people who have always been at the vanguard of movement building. 

Black feminists make history everyday. And don’t forget it. 

In honor of Black History Month 2022, we created a reading list that centers the contributions of historical and contemporary Black feminists from around the world you do not usually see in mainstream media during Black History Month. 

We are here and always have been.

The Reading List

Photo: Albertina Sisulu in Johannesburg in 1984. Photo: Paul Weinberg, University of Cape Town Libraries.

 

Movement Building + Activism

“Friends, brothers, and sisters in the struggle for human dignity and freedom. I am here to represent the struggle that has gone on for three-hundred or more years — a struggle to be recognized as citizens in a country in which we were born. I have had about forty or fifty years of struggle, ever since a little boy on the streets of Norfolk called me a nigger. I struck him back. And then I had to learn that hitting back with my fists one individual was not enough. It takes organization. It takes dedication. It takes the willingness to stand by and do what has to be done, when it has to be done.”

”A nice gathering like today is not enough. You have to go back and reach out to your neighbors who don’t speak to you. And you have to reach out to your friends who think they are making it good. And get them to understand that they-as well as you and I-cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism. Until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year until they win it.”
— Ella Baker


Literature + Poetry

 

Photography + Film + Archives + Art 

 

Music

“I have never felt that I had to change or do anything that wasn’t natural to me. I will never, ever be some kind of wishy-washy creature that pretends or lets others guide me. I guide my life. It is mine. No matter what anyone says, I’m going to be Jackie. That’s all I can be. That’s all I know. It’s what I feel from my heart and my soul. I was a phony person-if I was not doing what makes me live the way I do, makes me think, makes me feel, makes me be the person I am, then there’s no point in me being at all. I’ve got to be who I am. Most people are planted in someone else’s soil, which means they’re a carbon copy. I say to them, uproot yourself. Get into your own soil. You may be surprised who you really are.”
— Jackie Shane
NewsJaimee SwiftNews