Black Women’s Activism and Leadership Workshop

By Lizzie McCord

During the 2021 Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action Curriculum Fair, Jaimee A. Swift led a workshop building on her work at Black Women Radicals (BWR), the organization she founded to uplift the stories of Black women and gender expansive people’s activism.

BWR has created a database with over 100 stories of historical Black women and gender expansive leaders, with the goal of sharing stories that Swift herself didn’t get to learn in school growing up. She explained that teaching these histories avoids revisionist histories which center white, cis-gendered, heterosexual people. Instead, as historians and history teachers, it is necessary to identify the “wholeness” of people, in order to break the mold of respectability politics.

Swift shared several examples, including their gender pronouns and brief histories of their activism. She included Pauli Murray, Chi Hughes, Lucy Diggs Slow, and Zora Neale Hurston. Specifically, she highlighted elements of their histories which we might not already know, like that Pauli Murray held a trans identity but struggled to share it and that they were the brainchild behind the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, or that Zora Neale Hurston would take queer students to the Bohemian caverns in Washington D.C.

Swift also emphasized the importance of using a transnational lens and looking beyond the United States, following the lead of Dr. Angela Davis’ advocacy for an internationalist approach to Black women’s stories. In addition, including the histories of the most marginalized Black women and gender expansive people—disabled, queer and trans, and dark-skinned figures in particular.

Swift closed sharing several resources in addition to her own website, blackwomenradicals.com, which features reading lists and has a Youtube channel with content for lessons. She also highlighted the Zinn Education Project, SNCC Digital Gateway, and Voices of a People’s History.