GenderAvenger's Divine Nineteenth for Juneteenth Revisited
To celebrate Black History Month, we are revisiting our “The Divine Nineteenth” list of 19 distinguished Black women authors and their influential books, which we created last year to commemorate Juneteenth (June 19), the national day for celebration of freedom from slavery first marked in 1865.
This year, we are asking you to help build lists of Black women from all walks of life and their accomplishments. They could be women you know or know of, whether they’ve authored a book or not. Share their notable accomplishments and positive impact on others, because we’d love to help amplify their contributions. Just point us in the right direction, and we’ll spread the word!
Freed Man & Freed Woman, and Child sculptures by Adrienne Rison Isom at the Juneteenth Memorial Sculpture Monument at the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center. Photo credit: Jennifer Rangubphai [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
The Divine Nineteenth for Juneteenth
Today is Juneteenth! For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, Juneteenth is a day to celebrate and commemorate the liberation of Black people in the United States from post-Civil War enslavement. In this moment, when Black people are still fighting for equality and are pushing against racism and injustice, Juneteenth is the perfect time for all of us to educate ourselves on how Black people, particularly Black women living in the margins, define liberation.
We’ve put together a Divine Nineteenth list of Black feminist-womanist thinkers, writers, poets, storytellers, and activists that we think you should get to know. We’ve linked to their suggested books below to provide background information on them and their works. If you like what you read, we challenge you to take it one step further by purchasing your books from Black-owned bookstores.
In no particular order… we present our Divine Nineteenth:
FANNIE LOU HAMER
Fannie Lou Hamer: Stand Up (MPB) (documentary video)
AUDRE LORDE
Sister Outsider
ANGELA Y. DAVIS
Women, Race & Class
SOJOURNER TRUTH
“Ain’t I a Woman” (speech)
IDA B. WELLS
Crusade for Justice
DOROTHY HEIGHT
Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir
MARY CHURCH TERRELL
The Progress of Colored Women
ROXANE GAY
Bad Feminist
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
We Should All Be Feminists
ALICE WALKER
The Color Purple
JOAN MORGAN
When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost
Selecting our Divine Nineteenth was a challenge, because we wanted to provide a mixture of well-known and lesser-known Black feminist writers. We hope you appreciate the variety of genres present and the range of historic and contemporary Black feminist voices on liberation and emancipation from patriarchy and white supremacy culture.