Herstory

Black Live Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors coined the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. (photo via laweekly.com)

Hannah Reynolds was believed to have died while still a slave, but records now indicate she survived until after Lee surrendered to Grant

Most people know about Rosa Parks and the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. But nine months before Parks sat down and refused to move, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the same bus system. She was one of a number of women who refused to give up their seats in protest of Jim Crow segregation laws.

A frightening look at what happens when LGBTQ women of color refuse to accept street harassment and other violence

The many stereotypes of black women are used to justify violence and aggression against them.  Because black women are mythologized as gold-digging, angry, physically strong, provocative shrews some black men assume (and this is something that having a mama, a auntie, a grandmother who raised you, or your own damn daughters doesn’t change) that if/when black women are hit, they asked for (or deserved) it.  At the end of the day many men empathize with other men and instead of vilifying any act of violence, physical or otherwise, against anyone, especially a woman, they attempt to justify it.  They put themselves in the shoes of the aggressor, but not the victim, and see themselves as blameless and reactionary, rather than violent and misogynistic.

Grace Lee Boggs, 99, is a Chinese American philosopher, writer, and activist in Detroit with a thick FBI file and a surprising vision of what an American revolution can be. Rooted for 75 years in the labor, civil rights and Black Power movements, she challenges a new generation to throw off old assumptions, think creatively and redefine revolution for our times.

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Below is a remarkable commercial in which a white woman is told that if she buys Pampers, the company will donate vaccines to children in other countries.

When indigenous women disappear, their cases often get little coverage -- and their identities can be erased

Mo Asumang is the daughter of a black Ghanaian father and a white German mother.

Slavery, the value of chastity, and laws that favored men all made it difficult for women to find justice during the chaos of war.

So much in American Horror Story depends on the suspension of disbelief that it seems like lunacy to investigate the “true stories” on which it’s based. As in the more familiar forms of folklore, the story itself is less the point than the manner of the telling.

Michaela Angela Davis at Jezebel joins the flock of literary giants parsing 12 Years a Slave by examining the complicated relationship that was created during slavery and still persists between black women and white women.

I don’t know that I actually have to beat all the dead horses in this vintage ad, do I?  [But] while we are on the subject of hair…