Books for Black History Month: Celebrating Black Women

Each week during Black History Month, we’re highlighting a selection of books on an important Black history topic. This week, we’re celebrating Black women’s activism, leadership, resistance, and scholarship.

Use code BHM22 for discount prices on these books and others through February 28.

Bertha Maxwell-Roddey
A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership
Sonya Y. Ramsey

This biography of educational activist and Black studies forerunner Bertha Maxwell-Roddey examines a life of remarkable achievements and leadership in the desegregated South. It describes how Maxwell-Roddey and her peers turned hard-won civil rights and feminist milestones into tangible accomplishments in North Carolina and nationwide from the late 1960s to the 1990s.

Available in June. Preorder now.

The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture
Deanna M. Gillespie

The grassroots Citizenship Education Program taught Black Southerners to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration—a powerful objective in the Jim Crow South. Gillespie traces the history of the African American women who used lessons in basic literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy and sow seeds for collective action.

Resistance Reimagined
Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival
Regis M. Fox

Looking closely at nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings by African American women that reimagine antebellum America, Fox introduces types of Black activism that differ from common associations with militancy and maleness.

The Public Health Nurses of Jim Crow Florida
Christine Ardalan

The Public Health Nurses of Jim Crow Florida tells the little-known story of female healthcare workers who served people out of reach of modern medical care while simultaneously battling racism in a state where white supremacy formed the bedrock of society.

Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954
An Intellectual History
Stephanie Y. Evans

Evans chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850. When Black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies, they made significant changes and contributions to higher education in the United States.

Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings
Donna Aza Weir-Soley

Black women’s narratives in literature, like those by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Edwidge Danticat, often contain a spirituality rooted in African cosmology. To these readings, Weir-Soley adds the importance of sexuality in the development of Black female subjectivity and self-determination.

African Diasporic Women’s Narratives
Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship
Simone A. James Alexander

Alexander analyzes literary works to show how Black women have used their bodily presence to complicate and challenge a migratory process often forced upon them by men or patriarchal society. By focusing on embodiment, she discusses how women’s bodies are read and seen, how bodies “perform” and are performed upon, and how they can challenge and disrupt norms.

Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba
Takkara K. Brunson

Between the 1886 abolition of slavery in Cuba and the 1959 Revolution, Black women—though without formal political power—navigated political movements in their efforts to create a more just society. Brunson reveals how women of African descent achieved individual victories in the collective for social justice and discusses why, even as legal definitions of Cuban citizenship evolved, racism and sexism persisted.