Black Women Taught Us

In their first book, Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women's freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost because of our refusal to engage with our forestrugglers' lessons?

Black Women Taught Us is a love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, repositioning Black women's intellectual and political work at the center of today's liberation movements.

Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders—from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde—Jackson sets the record straight about Black women's longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. For a new generation of movement organizers and co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Us serves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for everyone.

364 pages. Hardcover. 

About the Author

Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, is an award-winning professor of political science at Syracuse University and a columnist for Teen Vogue, where they write the popular "Speak On It" column that "explores how today's social and political life is influenced by generations of racial and gender (dis)order." A queer genderflux androgynous Black woman, Jackson primary research is in Black Politics with a focus on Black Feminism, racial trauma and threat, gender and sexuality, and social movements. Black Women Taught Us is their first book.