Please join us for a virtual event celebrating the release of BLACK WOMEN TAUGHT US: AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF BLACK FEMINISM by Jenn M. Jackson, PhD. For this event, Jenn will be joined in conversation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. 

Please note: this is a virtual event that will be hosted on Zoom Webinar. Registration is required to receive the Zoom link. 

REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT HERE!

A reclamation of essential history and a hopeful gesture toward a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like—from a professor of political science and columnist for Teen Vogue.

“Jenn M. Jackson is a beautiful writer and excellent scholar. In this book, they pay tribute to generations of Black women organizers and set forward a bold and courageous blueprint for our collective liberation.”—Imani Perry, author of South to America

This is my offering. My love letter to them, and to us.

Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, has been known to bring historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women’s freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost because of our refusal to engage with our forestrugglers’ lessons?

A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women’s intellectual and political work at the center of today’s liberation movements.

Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders—from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde—Jackson sets the record straight about Black women’s longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods.

For a new generation of movement organizers and co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Us serves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for everyone.

Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, is an award-winning professor of political science at Syracuse University and a columnist for Teen Vogue, where they write the popular “Speak On It” column that “explores how today’s social and political life is influenced by generations of racial and gender (dis)order.” A queer genderflux androgynous Black woman, Jackson primary research is in Black Politics with a focus on Black Feminism, racial trauma and threat, gender and sexuality, and social movements. Black Women Taught Us is their first book.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Her third book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. Taylor is a Contributing Opinion Writer for the New York Times and a columnist at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others.

Accessibility: This is a virtual event that will be hosted on Zoom Webinar. Closed captioning is available. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: BLACK WOMEN TAUGHT US, BLACK WOMEN TAUGHT US by Jenn M. Jackson, Chicago, Edgewater, Jenn M. Jackson, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, Women & Children First Bookstore