A 16-year old woman of color received what female slaves may have if they refused their master’s sexual advances: death sentences at worst, and more tortured lives at best. Continue reading
Cyntoia’s Done Her Time. Have Mercy and Let Her Go.
Category Archives: #SayHerName
When We Are Witnesses…for Kitty Genovese
No matter what I have learned from her brother Bill Genovese’s heart-wrenching push for the truth, I still can not extinguish the feeling of seeing myself in Kitty Genovese: young, happy, independent, innocent, moving toward the future, and fated to be a woman living alone in American big cities. Continue reading
10 Black Women Who Lost Their Lives to Violence
This gallery contains 8 photos.
The women I want the world to start remembering forever are pictured here. Please click on their photos for more information about their lives and stories, as well as ongoing activism in their memories for this remainder of Black History Month. #SayHerName Continue reading
Little Rock Nine, Four Little Girls, and One Confederate Flag: A Retrospective
One way to move this tragedy and the deceased in it past public ephemera and into history is to forever connect the loss of their lives to a national symbolic act against domestic terrorism: the legally-mandated abolition of our Confederate flag, and civil prosecution of anyone who waves it. Continue reading
“We have to give our black girls “the Talk”- and it’s not about sex…”…my essay on the horrifying McKinney, Texas, injustice, on SheKnows.com…
Racial profiling does not discriminate by gender…it’s time to tell our black girls the police may not be working for them. Continue reading
What Billie and Phyllis Sang About
Read my story “What Billie and Phyllis Sang About”, about an abandoned black woman left to survive alone in Harlem, in the new issue of Atticus Review. My favorite Billie Holiday and Phyllis Hyman music is on the story’s companion soundtrack Here. #BillieandPhyllis Continue reading
Are You a Joyce Vincent?
Originally posted on negression:
I still from documentary film on Joyce Vincent: “Dreams of a Life” There is a defining 21st Century Western World story about a Black female Londonder who passed away in her government-subsidized bedsit/SRO flat in 2003,…
Harsh History: A Gem of Our Libraries
The Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, housed in Chicago’s Carter G. Woodson Library, is an invaluable display of the flowering of Black history and culture within a Northern, urban environment galvanized by the energy of hundreds of thousands of post-war Black migrants from the South. Continue reading
Real Talk: On The Loss of Olympian Kamara James and Black Women’s Mental Health
How did Kamara James, at 29, wind up mysteriously deceased in her U.S. apartment…with her last years on Earth clouded by mental illness, presumed schizophrenia, poverty and homelessness? Continue reading
