Daina Ramey Berry - A Black Womens History of the United States

A powerful and important book that charts the rich and dynamic history of Black women in the United States. It shows how these courageous women challenged racial and gender oppression and boldly asserted their authority and visions of freedom even in the face of resistance. This book is required reading for anyone interested in social justice.

KEISHA N . BLAIN , author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom

This book is a gift to anyone interested in a more completea more truthfulstory about the United States. By starting the history about Black women on this land with us as free people and as people agitating for our freedom, by prioritizing all Black womens voices and coming up to the present day, Dr. Berry and Dr. Gross illuminate greater possibilities for our collective freedom dreams and struggles for collective liberation.

CHARLENE A . CARRUTHERS , author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

Remarkably comprehensive and accessible, introductory and sophisticated, two groundbreaking historians have come together to produce a groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States. To know the story of the United States is to know this indispensable story.

IBRAM X . KENDI , author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

At a time when some womens voices seem to be more amplified than ever, the Black womans voice is still being muted and distorted from the highest level of government, and the autonomy over our bodies is being stripped away, more and more every day.

Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross have gifted us with a book of heroines whose voices are here to tell us we arent the first, and though it may sometimes seem an unwinnable struggle just to exist as Black women in an ever more oppressive space of aggressively suffocating and weaponized whiteness and daily misogyny, we have come through much worse, and we can and do effect change every day.

What a wonderful breath of fresh air to start our journey on American soil before slavery, with women who came by their own choice, to move through the strength of those who didnt just survive but persevered through the most unthinkable horrors of bondage, Reconstruction, the deep disappointments that came with the Great Migration, and the struggles (even internally) of the civil rights era. And how inspiring to end (or persist) with our very own living legends, like Serena Williams, Bree Newsome Bass, Angela Whitehead, and Patricia Okoumou.

Black women have always been at the front line of change, and A Black Womens History of the United States shows us in no uncertain terms that our DNA will have us here sculpting and writing the next chapters. Tell your sisters, mothers, and daughters to get this book for someone they love, because we owe it to ourselves, our daughters, our sons, and our future to know the history that isnt being taught in our schools. And it starts with us.

ANIKA NONI ROSE , actor, producer, and singer

A Black Womens History of the United States is an extraordinary contribution to our collective understanding of the most profound injustices and equalities, as well as the most committed struggles to realize true justice and equality, that have shaped this nation since its birth. Through the courageous and complex voices of black women, and with deft attention to the lives that black women have led from the earliest moments of conquest and colonialism to the dawn of the twenty-first century, historians Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Gross have utterly upended traditional accounts of the American past in ways most desperately needed in our American present.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON , historian and Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

BOOKS IN THE REVISIONING AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES

A Queer History of the United States

by Michael Bronski

A Disability History of the United States

by Kim E. Nielsen

An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

Melvin R. Ramey, PhD

September 13, 1938June 26, 2017

Mrs. June Maria Gross

March 2, 1941December 3, 2017

Londa Ann Lovell

March 25, 1967January 9, 2019

ON A COOL SEPTEMBER EVENING IN 1832, Black and white women descended on Franklin Hall in Boston to hear a speech delivered by Maria Stewart. It was a special evening because Maria, who was Black, was the first American woman of any race to give public remarks, and this was only her second speech. There are no chains so galling as the chains of ignoranceno fetters so binding as those that bind the soul, and exclude it from the vast field of useful and scientific knowledge, Maria proclaimed to her captivated audience. Why Sit Ye Here and Die? she asked in the title of her remarks, which challenged women to stand up and address racial and gender bias. Speaking on behalf of African American womens rights, Maria urged her white counterparts to think about the condition of Blacksin particular, women.

Marias challenge drives this book and informs our thinking about creating a more inclusive history. Her mission guided our writing of this history of the United States in which Black women and their contributions are on full display. Here we lift the chains and explore the knowledge and influence of women like Maria who had something to say about their place in history. We also could not help but contemplate our own locations along that continuum.

Although we did not come of age during segregation, we spent much of our early childhoods witnessing African American women across the country speaking truth to power by declaring, Black is Beautiful, and wearing their natural hair in Afros. We grew up on opposite sides of the country: one on the East Coast, the other on the West. And we were reared in different kinds of families: one born into a two-parent household where both parents held degrees in higher education, the other raised in a female-headed household where the sole caregiver and provider attended college but was unable to finish. One has ancestral roots in the American South; one has descendants who emigrated from the British West Indies in the early and mid-twentieth century.

We both attended college and eventually went on to pursue doctorates in history, yet despite our differences, the academy put the same obstacles in our paths, and as Black women historians, we confronted them continuously. Even with the major advances in the field of African American womens history by the 1990s, we still faced a biased system that did not believe in our potential as scholars or in the validity of our chosen area of study: Black women. It did not matter that one of us focused on enslavement and the other on crime and violence. That Black women in America had a history at all was itself contested, as was our capacity as Black women thinkers. Fortunately, we had Black women historians as advisers and role models, and we were the beneficiaries of incredible new books on African American womens historyworks that energized and challenged us, and left us wanting to know more. But that was then.