Blackbirds Singing - Inspiring Black Women's Speeches From The Civil War To The Twenty-First Century
An uplifting collection of speeches by African American women, curated by the civil and human rights activist, scholar, and author.
“Bell reminds readers that one story is never enough to truly explain a movement.”
—Shelf Awareness
When Mary Ann Shadd Cary—the first Black woman publisher in North America—declared, “break every yoke . . . let the oppressed go free” to congregants in Chatham, Canada, in 1858, she joined a tradition of African American women speaking for their own liberation. Drawing from a rich archive of political speeches, acclaimed activist and author Janet Dewart Bell, the author of Lighting the Fires of Freedom, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, explores this tradition in Blackbirds Singing.
Gathering an array of recognized names as well as new discoveries, Bell curates two centuries of stirring public addresses by Black women, from Harriet Tubman and Ella Baker to Barbara Lee and Barbara Jordan. These magnificent speakers explore ethics, morality, courage, authenticity, and leadership, highlighting Black women speaking truth to power in service of freedom and justice.
With an expansive historical lens, Blackbirds Singing celebrates the tradition of Black women’s political speech and labor, allowing the voices and powerful visions of African American women to speak across generations building power for the world.
Race, Rights, and Redemption - The Derrick Bell Lectures On The Law And Critical Race Theory
When Derrick Bell, one of the originators of critical race theory, turned sixty-five, his wife founded a lecture series with leading scholars, including critical race theorists, many of them Bell’s former students. Now these lectures, given over the course of twenty-five years, are collected for the first time in a volume Library Journal calls “potent” and Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, says “powerfully acknowledge[s] the persistence of structural racism.
“To what extent does equal protection protect?” asks Ian Haney López in a penetrating analysis of the gaps that remain in our civil rights legal codes. Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, describes the hypersegregation of our cities and the limits of the law’s ability to change deep-seated attitudes about race. Patricia J. Williams explores the legacy of slavery in the law’s current constructions of sanity. Anita Allen discusses competing privacy and accountability interests in the lives of African American celebrities. Chuck Lawrence interrogates the judicial backlash against affirmative action. And Michelle Alexander describes what caused her to break ranks with the civil rights community and take up the cause of those our legal system has labeled unworthy.
Race, Rights, and Redemption (which was originally published in hardcover under the title Carving Out a Humanity) gathers some of our country’s brightest progressive legal stars in a volume that illuminates facets of the law that have continued to perpetuate racial inequality and to confound our nation at the start of a new millennium.
With contributions by:
- Michelle Alexander
- Anita Allen
- Derrick Bell
- Stephen Bright
- Paul Butler
- John Calmore
- Devon W. Carbado
- William Carter, Jr.
- Richard Delgado
- Annette Gordon-Reed
- Lani Guinier
- Cheryl I. Harris
- Emma Coleman Jordan
- Ian Haney López
- Sherrilyn Ifill
- Charles Lawrence
- Kenneth W. Mack
- Mari Matsuda
- Charles Ogletree
- Angela Onwuachi-Willig
- Jasmine Gonzales Rose
- Theodore M. Shaw
- Kendall Thomas
- Patricia J. Williams
- Robert A. Williams
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: Lighting the Fires of Freedom
Nominated for a 2019 NAACP Image Award, a groundbreaking collection of profiles of African American women leaders in the twentieth-century fight for civil rights.
During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women did not stand on ceremony; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels of the Movement, they remain mostly invisible to the larger public. Beyond Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, most Americans would be hard-pressed to name other leaders at the community, local, and national levels. In Lighting the Fires of Freedom, Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on women’s all-too-often overlooked achievements in the Movement.
Kirkus Reviews described Lighting the Fires of Freedom as “candid testimony from impressive and influential women,” and Publishers Weekly called it “a valuable and enlightening companion to other accounts of the movement.” Through wide-ranging conversations with nine women, including Myrlie Evers, Leah Chase, and June Jackson Christmas—several now in their nineties with decades of previously untold stories—we hear what ignited and fueled their activism. Bell vividly captures their inspiring voices.
Lighting the Fires of Freedom offers these deeply personal and intimate accounts of extraordinary struggles for justice that resulted in profound social change, stories that are vital and relevant today.