To the Front and Center of the Field:: Recent Histories of Black Women, Gender, and Black Power

Soul Sisters to the front(lines) of struggle. Black women intellectuals, artists, educators, organizers, and fashionistas at the center of political culture. Black Militant, Revolutionary, African, Pan-African, Third World, (African)Every Woman on the (battle)fields of history. These expressions and their syntactic strikeouts stylistically proclaim: For too long, the historical images and historiography conjured by the words black power have been traditionally dominated by either black men as historical actors or analyses of hegemonic patriarchal power. Appreciatively, neither the "traditional" nor "hegemonic" prevail in these deeply researched books by Tanisha C. Ford, Robyn C. Spencer, and Ashley D. Farmer. In their works, black women are not only visible as historical actors, contributors, and sometimes visionaries in struggles for black liberation. They are also navigating, wrestling, rethinking, abiding, retooling, and even changing the course of culture, ideas, organizations, and everyday social and intimate spaces.

Let us begin with the book jackets. The front cover of Ford's Liberated Threads features a photo of Olive Morris with a manicured Afro and geometric-patterned skirt, her hands firmly holding a bullhorn to her lips. Morris is speaking at a rally at the central library in Brixton to protest "special" police patrols of the predominantly black neighborhood in London in 1978. Spencer's The Revolution Has Come also features a photo—six Afro-coiffed Black Panther Party women at De Fremery Park in Oakland, California, in 1968. This image of the relatively known (Kathleen Cleaver), little known (Tarika Lewis), and unknown (the other four women are not identified) women bridge familiar, corrective, and still-to-be-written narratives of the Black Panther Party. The cover of Farmer's Remaking Black Power is a black-and-white illustration of various black women's faces punctuated by stars and one clenched black power fist; they anchor the title in allusive red, black, and green.¹

As suggested by their covers, these books, which literally and figuratively frame hundreds of pages of research, signal the centrality of black women's stories and activist legacies. Writing different types of history—cultural, organizational, and intellectual, respectively—Ford, Spencer, and Farmer document black women's presence, voices, ideas, arduous work, influence, and, to varying degrees, the multifaceted gendered terrains of struggle in the post-World War II, civil rights-black power era. All three authors interrupt perfunctorily framed, male-inspired liberation narratives, as well as model ways to interrogate patriarchy without simplistically erasing black men or conflating black power with gender oppression. In these ways, their studies are emblematic of the newest wave of scholarship, chiefly prompted by black women historians, that complicates the historiography and enriches the history of race, women, gender, and social struggle.²

What Is Soul, Soul Sisters?

Seriously investigating the common moniker soul and its power to signify "style," Liberated Threads examines how black women's "body politics" both inspired and emerged out of individual and collective black self-determination struggles. Ford argues that expressions of "soul style," steeped in black women's transgressive cultural performances, helped produce spaces of liberation, as well as physical and political danger, for black people who opposed divergent status quos structured by race, gender, class, sexuality, and the state. These black women created a language of the body. They asserted their freedom to define self...