Celebrating Activists During Black History Month 2024
Black History Month is a time to celebrate and honor the achievements of Black Americans and their central role in U.S. history. In honor of Black History Month, Journey Center honors Black activists who have impacted the gender-based violence movement.
This month we are looking at just a few of the influential Black voices who have made history as part of the anti-violence movement. Journey Center is grateful to these, and many other, Black activists for leading the way.
Maya Angelo
Maya Angelou was a celebrated poet, memoirist, singer, dancer, actor, and civil rights activist.
She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. Her autobiography, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," a bestseller published in 1969 and nominated for the National Book Award, revealed her experiences growing up as an African American during the Jim Crow Era.
Maya Angelou was a trailblazer in achieving success in so many fields as an African American woman. She was respected as a spokesperson for Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Her books center on themes including racism, identity, family and travel; before her death, Angelou had been awarded more than 50 honorary degrees.
Alisa Bierria
Alisa Bierria is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. A Black feminist philosopher, Alisa’s writing and collaborative projects focus on racialized gender violence and critical acts of survival.
An advocate and organizer within the feminist anti-violence movement for over 20 years, Alisa has co-founded and co-led several national organizations, including Survived & Punished, which advocates for the decriminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
Alisa is also a co-editor of Abolition Feminisms, Volumes 1 and 2 and a special issue of the journal, Social Justice, entitled “Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence” (2012). Her writing can be found in Hypatia; Journal of Social Philosophy; American Philosophical Quarterly; American Quarterly; Philosophy Today; Feminist Philosophy Quarterly; and in numerous scholarly volumes, public anthologies, and op/eds.
Karma Cottman
Karma Cottman, pronouns she, her, hers, serves Ujima Inc., The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community as Chief Executive Officer.
Before joining Ujima Inc., Karma led the DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence as Executive Director for a decade, and prior to that, served the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), for a decade. Karma, a Washington, D.C. native, has worked with numerous national partners to address emerging issues in domestic violence service provision and sits on several national committees.
Patricia Hill Collins
Patricia Hill Collins an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. Collins's work primarily concerns issues involving race, gender, and social inequality within the African-American community.
She gained national attention for her book Black Feminist Thought. Collins's work concluded with three central claims: 1) Oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation are intersecting, mutually constructing systems of power. 2) Because Black women have unique histories at the intersections of systems of power, they have created world views out of a need for self-definition and to work on behalf of social justice. Black women's specific experiences with intersecting systems of oppression provide a window into these same processes for other individuals and social groups. 3) Black feminist thought on race and gender came from Black communities rather than in opposition to white feminism.
Collins is recognized as a social theorist, drawing from many intellectual traditions. She reconceptualizes the ideas of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationalism as interlocking systems of oppression. Her more than 40 articles and essays have been published in a wide range of fields.
Mariame Kaba
Mariame Kaba is a leading voice on the ways survivors are often criminalized and what transformative justice could look like- she is an organizer, educator, archivist and curator.
She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration with extensive experience working on issues of racial justice, gender justice, transformative/restorative justice and multiple forms of violence.
Florynce Kennedy
Florynce Rae Kennedy was an American lawyer, feminist, civil rights advocate, lecturer and activist.
Kennedy used intersectionality as her approach to activism. Kennedy kept revisiting the same aim: "urging women to examine the sources of their oppression”. She spoke of day to day acts of resistance that we can all take and hold her own arrests and political actions. She and others would picket and lobby the media over their representation of Black people. She stated that she would lead boycotts of major advertisers if they did not feature Black people in their ads.
In 1973 Kennedy co-founded with Margaret Sloan-Hunter the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), which also dealt with race and gender issues such as reproductive rights and sterilization campaigns that were aimed at specific races.
Resmaa Menakem
Resmaa Menakem is an American author and psychotherapist specializing in the effects of trauma on the human body and the relationship between trauma, white body supremacy, and racism in America.
He is the author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies and The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning.
Menakem has served as the director of counseling services for Tubman Family Alliance, a domestic violence treatment center in Minneapolis; the behavioral health director for African American Family Services in Minneapolis; a domestic violence counselor for Wilder Foundation; a divorce and family mediator; a social worker for Minneapolis Public Schools; a youth counselor; a community organizer; and a marketing strategist.
Dr. Beth Richie
Dr. Beth Ritchie, author of “Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation,” advanced our understanding of the punishment that mass incarceration inflicts on children and how it devastates Black families, while too often failing to deliver any measure of justice. Richie grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, graduating from Shaker Heights High School in 1975.
Dr. Richie is a longtime anti-violence advocate and activist who is a founding member of INCITE! Women, Gender on Conforming, and Trans people of Color Against Violence.
She is a professor of African American Studies, Sociology, Gender and Women's Studies, and Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she currently serves as head of the Criminology, Law, and Justice Department. In 2014, she was named a senior adviser to the National Football League Players Association Commission on domestic violence and sexual assault.
Recy Taylor
Recy Taylor was an African-American woman from Abbeville in Henry County, Alabama. She was born and raised in a sharecropping family in the Jim Crow era Southern United States.
On September 3, 1944, Taylor was kidnapped while leaving church and gang-raped by six white men. Despite the men's confessions to authorities, two grand juries subsequently declined to indict the men; no charges were ever brought against her assailants. Taylor defied their threats, identified her attackers, and testified against them. Her bravery inspired civil rights and women’s leaders and drew national attention to sexual violence faced by Black women.
Alice Walker
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist.
In 1982, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awarded for her novel The Color Purple. Over the span of her career, Walker has published seventeen novels and short story collections, twelve non-fiction works, and collections of essays and poetry.
Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in the early 1960s. She credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement.
Walker's specific brand of feminism included advocacy on behalf of women of color. In 1983, Walker coined the term womanist in her collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, to mean "a Black feminist or feminist of color". The term was made to unite women of color and the feminist movement at "the intersection of race, class, and gender oppression".
Journey Center recognizes the critical work that is needed to center the experiences of Black women in order to address the disproportionate impact of violence on Black women and girls.
Black women face higher rates of domestic violence than white women, and are over-represented among victims of severe domestic violence and domestic violence related homicides.
Black women are murdered by men at a rate 2.5 times higher than white women
Women from communities with histories of racial discrimination often have less access to services and resources that help reduce risk and increase safety. Journey Center is committed to serving all survivors on their unique path to safety and healing.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, call or text Journey Center's 24-Hour Helpline at 216.391.4357 (HELP).