Race Women

A project honoring our earliest Black feminist foremothers

Giving thanks for the strength, spirit, fight, hope and defiance of those who made our existence today possible🖤 #repost @wellreadblackgirl . . . Today marks the 150th anniversary of #Juneteenth - the day that brought freedom to Black folks from sl
Today we give flowers to revolutionary reparations movement leader Callie Guy House, who died #OTD June 6, 1928. Born enslaved in Rutherford County, Tennessee, a washerwoman and widow with five children, House co-led one of the earliest grassroots re
“I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror, of the lives we are living. Social protest is to say that we do not have to live this way.” -Audre Lorde, “My Words Will Be There,&rdq
On May 27, 1899 journalist Victoria Earle Matthews published an article in a Minneapolis, Minnesota newspaper called the Afro-American Advance, responding to a recent string of lynchings that had reverberated across the country. During six weeks betw
“Let us insist then on special encouragement for the education of our women and special care in their training. Let our girls feel that we expect something more of them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society. Teach them th
Bringing back my most favorite #EarthDay photo—the ancestors in their element in Colorado c. 1904, discovered inside my grandparents’ boxes of old family memorabilia. Thinking of them today, alongside these lines from the great Harlem Ren
“...Let me learn now where Beauty is; I was born to know her mysteries”—from the poem Questing, by Anne Spencer (1882-1975). Known typically as a Harlem Renaissance writer, the Harlem Renaissance mainly came to her. Unimpressed with
🌷✨ Goddess of Spring ✨🌷 . . . . . (Photograph from the Lynchburg Museum’s Smith Collection. James Thomas Smith worked for the railroad and did photography as a hobby. His favorite subject was Lynchburg, Virginia’s Black community, which
“I can remember when I was much smaller, she’d come home and she’d be reading the paper, catch[ing] up on her information, and I would climb up on the chair in back of her and take her hair down and comb it, you know, and braid it u