The most recommended Black feminism books

Springer’s book was one of the first to outline the multiple Black women’s feminist organizations that developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Situating now fairly well-known groups like the Combahee River Collective alongside lesser-known organizations like the Third World Women’s Alliance, Springer’s brief book is a fabulous primer to Black women’s feminism in an era when many people still think such a thing didn’t exist.

Cooper details the unique experiences that Black women have when feeling and expressing their anger.

I found this not only an indispensable resource for expanding my understanding of intersectional feminism but also an indispensable examination of the ways that white women like myself exacerbate the challenges faced by Cooper and other Black women.

This one is left field as it doesn’t fall neatly into the list. I included this book to avoid the impression that only Indigenous writers can write about Indigenous experiences. It’s important that we do, of course, but this book puts a slightly different slant on the “self-representation” question from an intersectional perspective.

Black feminist writer, Patricia Hill Collins, introduces the concept of intersecting lives and experiences, highlighting common struggles among Indigenous, Black, Minority, and Queer communities and how we are affected by violence in different and shared ways, invisible and public.

I encountered this work during a period of similar oppressions, finding it to be a transformative gift. Patricia’s ideas expand my world to new possibilities beyond institutional thinking. I love how the writing is so accessible, and the pages just fly along. Love this woman!

People often ask me who is the most important yet least known woman in U.S. history. Of course I am partial to Helen Hamilton Gardener, the woman whose biography I wrote, but overall I think the woman we all need to know about is Pauli Murray. We love to love RBG, but RBG credited Pauli Murray with some of her most effective legal strategies. In fact, Murry was the legal mastermind behind landmark civil rights and sex discrimination cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. And she bravely lived her life on her own terms (as what today we would likely understand as a trans man). Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, I think we could use a refresher on the 14th Amendment and how Americans, none more so than Pauli Murray, have used it to champion equality for all. 

As a young Black and West Indian academic and, importantly, an avid early Twitter user, I finally saw myself in the world of nonfiction works about technology when I first read this book.

Before I even got through the introduction, I dog-eared every other page and ran out of room in the margins for my notes (most of which included an embarrassing number of exclamation points on my part). Digital Black Feminism’s wit and historical heft weaves through multi-generational negotiations with Black feminism and beautifully writes Black women’s contributions back into existence.

While the Black freedom struggle is often approached through the activism of Black males, the history of the struggle in Europe—like in the United States and elsewhere in the world—owes much to Black women, Black female scholar-activists, and Black feminist and Queer networks. Yet they remain woefully underrepresented in scholarship and collective memory.

I, therefore, chose this edited volume, because it uniquely presents the stories, intersectional experiences, and visions of contemporary Black female activists, artists, and scholars from across the continent. This not only uncovers the significant intellectual, political, social, and cultural contributions of Black women, but also expands definitions of (political) activism to include, among others, motherhood and the home.

For years, I read memoirs by single women in search of people who would joyfully and unapologetically own their single lives. I found several who were insightful and engaging but ultimately disappointing. Typically, they hedged–sure, they would say, they were fine with being single, but they were not about to commit to staying single. Some were gobsmacked to discover that single life could be fulfilling as if that were the most amazing thing imaginable.

Then, Keturah Kendrick published this book. Kendrick knew who she was from an early age. She owns her singlehood and all her other choices about how to live her life, such as not having children. She brilliantly shatters stereotypes about single people, and her critiques of popular culture are skillful and searing.

adrienne maree brown taught me a lot about the lineage of sex-positive writing from the 1970s to today.

The book offered me a useful corrective to views of sexual politics which so often ignore and silence liberatory writing by Black women. This book reminded me that you cannot tell the story of sex-positive feminism without Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, or Fran White. But brown isn’t here to scold you – this book is a joyful read.

Radical Sisters does for the 1970s what I tried to do for the nineteenth century—to show that while Black and white women activists usually worked separately and embraced different and often opposing priorities, some women forged interracial alliances to address shared concerns. Valk also reminds us that divisions among white feminists and among Black liberationists could be as contentious as those between the two groups. By focusing on Washington, D.C., the population of which was over 70 percent Black in 1970, Valk ensures the centrality of race to every issue she analyzes. Providing in-depth case studies of anti-poverty movements, welfare rights, lesbian separatism, anti-sexual violence, and reproductive rights, Valk shows how these movements shaped each other as well as the limits of and possibilities for forging truly interracial coalitions. 

Daphne A. Brooks’ book is a revolutionary work, centering more than a century of innovations by Black women in popular music who have been marginalized, overlooked, or erased.

Situating Zora Neale Hurston as a sound archivist and performer and Lorraine Hansberry as a cultural critic alongside blues pioneers such as Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith and contemporary artists like Janelle Monáe and Valerie June, Brooks doesn’t merely fill in blind spots.

She exposes how those blind spots reflect the partial, subjective view of white male critics and historians.

Showing us a different way of seeing and listening to culture, Brooks has informed and inspired my thinking, and some of the best work I’ve done as a journalist, including this piece about Elizabeth Cotten, whose music fueled the 1960s folk revival.