Develyn Biagas: a longtime educator and youth advocate now working on her PhD, with a specialty focus area of African-American girls and the school to prison pipeline. She also works in young adult literature and plans to publish her first Young Adult novel soon. I am happy girls she works with now have someone like her to look up to.
Category: Women
What Toni wrote to Obama…
In honor of her birthday and Black History Month, read a prescient excerpt from Toni Morrison's 2008 letter to Barack Obama.
No Excuses: 20 Black Male Soul Singers to Stream Besides R. Kelly
The ultimate power of evil is diversion, devouring, annihilation and blacking out of what is good. This is all our faults, not Kelly's. How many more men are out here for us to listen to, most of them much better vocalists than Kelly, and more romantic lyricists as well?
Remembering Maria-Hélène Schneider…
46 years ago, a moving picture testified to sexual assault against a woman. It moved all around the world, in fact. Only, the world called it “art.” Not much has changed since. This most visible example of a public rape frames sexual assault’s most misunderstood and excused forms: coerced consent, false pretenses and pressure as permission. And people can still buy and sell this sexual assault on film to this day. Why?
Lauryn Can Rest On Her Laurels.
Ms. Hill complicated the Negress image in all the right directions and ways, and she made it clear the auras of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone were more stubborn than stereotypes, and she made it known paying audiences were waiting for more like them.
Beah Richards, Bette Davis and the Male Member
Beah Richards and Bette Davis illuminate the essential if fraught alliance between Black women who serviced White men and White women who benefited from it all in the obscure 80's HBO movie "As Summers Die."
Cyntoia’s Done Her Time. Have Mercy and Let Her Go.
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.