Several newly published books are hitting the shelves and firing up the cultural conversation for Women’s History Month. I’m loving the sound of woman’s wisdom unearthing untold stories, highlighting honed scholarship, and offering perspectives born of hard-won experience. Here are three authors in the March on! Washington Film Festival (MOWFF) community.
Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement by Tanisha Ford, published by Amistad.
Hattiesburg, Gary, and Detroit; Moscow and Berlin; back to Washington D.C. and Harlem, New York. Mollie Moon’s early-life travels laid the foundation for her eventual prowess as an activist, society host, and prodigious fundraiser for the National Urban League.
With her husband and coterie of friends in attendance, including Langston Hughes, Paul and Eslanda Robeson, Romare Bearden, and Lorraine Hansberry, with some Rockefellers thrown in, her Beaux Arts Ball reigned supreme for half a century. In the process, she raised millions of dollars for the Civil Rights Movement.
Dr. Tanisha Ford’s comprehensive biography captures the personalities, relationships, and political intrigue of the times with color, feeling, and depth.
Blackbirds Singing: Inspiring Black Women’s Speeches From the Civil War to the Twenty-First Century by Janet Dewart Bell, published by The New Press.
When it comes to the movement for the freedom of African-ancestored people, the first name “Harriet” immediately brings “Tubman” to mind. “Sojourner”? “Truth,” of course. But what about the name “Mary Ann Shadd Cary” (she was the first Black woman publisher in the U.S.) or the name “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper” (she was an abolitionist, suffragist, and poet)?
These women and scores more are included in this new book. Many well-known names, some new discoveries — all of them lifting their voices in stirring addresses delivered to congregations and conventions, rallies, and legislatures.
And because Black women were prohibited from participating in the American political system, Dr. Bell included writings that women could not make in public forums.
Dr. Bell’s previous book, Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, is a powerful collection of life stories told in the voices of the movement’s luminaries.
Dr. Bell’s late husband, legal scholar Derrick Bell, was the first tenured Black professor at Harvard University and is known as the father of critical race theory.
Imagine Freedom by Rahiel Tesfamariam, published by Amistad.
Social activist, public theologian, writer, and editor — with myriad talents, Tesfamariam brings a multitude of perspectives on transforming pain into political and spiritual power, which is the subtitle of her new book.
Born in Eritrea, she is a new generational voice that has witnessed the Ferguson and Baltimore uprisings; served as a delegate in Darfur, Palestine, and South Africa; matriculated from Yale Divinity School and written for The Washington Post.
From those diverse experiences, she has woven together a path from the strands of pan-Africanism, liberation theology, storytelling, and socioeconomic analysis.
Through her book, readers delve into ancestry, cultural legacy, global connecting, spiritual questing, and political power. It is a journey that traverses the mind, heart, and soul.
March On!
