Fall is a time for restart and renewal; a reconnection to routines gleefully abandoned during summer. It is also the busiest season for the publishing of “big” books by “big” authors—like the person who could have been America’s first Black and South Asian woman president.
If you had asked me as a child growing up in the 80s whether a woman could be president, I would have, without hesitation, said yes; even before I had a model for what that would look like. Today, my Xennial traits are in full bloom and I am decidedly more pessimistic. Can a woman be president? Of course. But will I see it during my lifetime?
Women, especially Black women, have been leading resistance movements since the dawn of our country. (Yes, I just made an associative pivot from talking about the President of the United States to talking about resistance movements). Phillis Wheatley Peters was publishing poems about freedom—from British rule and from enslavement—before the American Revolution.
Inside and outside formal change-making bodies such as academies, legislatures, and halls of justice, Black women have run newspapers and schools, led protest marches and military operations, and fed and clothed whole communities of people fighting for rights that, perhaps until recently, some of us took for granted.
In history’s most challenging times, Black women have always been the model. Here are three new books celebrating our work.
Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights
Keisha N. Blain
W.W. Norton
September 16, 2025
A sweeping survey of Black women’s activism from Ida B. Wells’ call to criminalize lynching at the federal level at the close of the 19th century, to the fight for police accountability led by Kadi Diallo, mother of 23-year-old Amadou, shot at by police 41 times at the close of the 20th, Without Fear situates US-based advocacy within a global, sociopolitical context. The author and editor of several books examining Black history and activism, and fresh from the launch of Global Black Thought, the new journal of the African American Intellectual History Society (published by Penn Press), Keisha Blain offers readers insights into the lives of women and the organizations they founded and led, often overlooked in other texts. Anecdotes of human dignity abound in this book, and readers will have a hard time getting through without asking of particular people, organizations, and events, Why didn’t I know about this? Thanks to Blain, now you will know.
Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & and the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City
LaShawn Harris
Beacon Press
August 26, 2025
On October 29, 1984, Eleanor Bumpurs, a disabled, 66-year-old grandmother from the Bronx, was shot and killed with a 12-gauge shotgun by NYPD during an eviction proceeding. She owed $400. Ten-year-old LaShawn Harris lived across the street. Harris is now a professor and a historian, and 41-years after Bumpurs’ senseless murder, she has written the first ever biography of a woman who, in a time before viral videos and hashtags, was the name that activists and cultural critics, including Spike Lee and Audre Lorde, invoked when talking about police brutality. With meticulous research and expansive compassion, Harris tells, not only of Bumpurs’ life, but her legacy, advanced in no small part by Bumpurs’ daughter Mary who, like generations of daughters and mothers, was thrust into activism when injustice came to her family’s door.
Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership
Kenja McCray
New York University Press
August 5, 2025
The Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s are synonymous with Black power. The Black Panther Party, MOVE, and the Nation of Islam, among many others, were responsible for providing services and instilling pride in communities too often ignored, or targeted, by all levels of government. These movements have been criticized, however, for their patriarchal structures and philosophies. Focusing on “kazi leadership,” a specific form of leadership through service, author Kenja McCray shines a new light on Black power movements in Newark, New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles to center the work of Black women. “It is a fallacy to believe that one leader, organization, or ideology has the blueprint for Black empowerment,” McCray writes. In fact, Essential Soldiers offers readers a way to rethink the value of work undergirding, not only the movements of the late 20th century, but those rising now, and into the future.
