Black LGBTQ Pride, which began with D.C. Black Pride in 1991, is a movement that creates space for Black LGBTQ+ people to have an alternative to the white, mainstream LGBTQ+ movement that often invisibilizes them. Black LGBTQ Pride emphasizes the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality. It serves as a space for Black LGBTQ+ people to celebrate and build community with people who look like them and have similar experiences.
Author: developer
Women of Color Resource Center
Founded in 1990 by Linda Burnham, Caroline Guilartes, Jung Hee Choi, Angela Davis, Derethia DuVal, Chris Lymbertos, Genevieve Negron-Gonzales, Margo Okazawa-Rey, and Cindy Wiesner, according to Changing the Present, “Women of Color Resource Center (WCRC) increases the effective leadership of women of color in working for social justice; educates and mobilizes low-income women of color to become effective change agents; improves the lives of women of color by impacting public policy; brings women-of-color issues central to the women’s rights and social-justice agendas; and brings the lens of social-justice feminism to critical contemporary issues.”
Black Maternal and Infant Mortality
Due to structural racism, Black pregnant people receive low-quality medical care, which can lead to life-threatening complications for them and their infant(s). Despite the decrease in cases of maternal mortality in the 1980s, maternal deaths in the U.S. began to increase in the 1990s. Currently, Black children are more than two times likely to die during infancy than white children. Additionally, Black mothers are more than three times likely to die due to childbirth-related complications than white mothers.
Linda Burnham
Linda Burnham is an activist, journalist, and leader in the women’s rights movement. She is the research director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance, an organization that fought for the rights of women of color. In 1990, she co-founded the Women of Color Resource Center and was its executive director for 18 years.
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Kimberlé Crenshaw is a scholar, writer, lawyer, civil-rights advocate, philosopher, and professor. Her work has been integral to Black feminist legal theory and critical race theory. In 1989, she coined the term intersectionality, which describes “the double bind of racial and gender prejudice.” She is a co-founder of the Columbia Law School African American Policy Forum (AAPF). She is also a co-author (alongside Andrea Ritchie) of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.
Intersectionality
Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 that describes how individual characteristics like race, gender, and class overlap and intersect with each other. Rather than being classified as a theory, Crenshaw describes it as a “prism for understanding certain kinds of problems,” such as the unique issues that Black girls experience.
Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole
Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole is an anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. In 1987, Cole became Spelman College’s seventh president and the first Black woman to lead the college, which was founded specifically for the education of women of African descent. She was also the former director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, president emerita of Bennett College, and professor emerita of Emory University. She is currently the president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Prison Abolition
According to Critical Resistance, prison abolition “is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance, and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.” One of the leaders in the prison abolition movement is Angela Davis, who authored a key abolitionist text, Are Prisons Obsolete?, in 2023. Other people who are integral to the movement include Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba.
Hortense Spillers
Hortense Spillers is an American literary critic, Black feminist scholar, and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of a number of texts, including Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Indiana University Press, 1985); Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (Routledge, 1991); and Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde
Published in 1984 by Crossing Press, Sister Outsider is a collection of 15 essays and speeches written by Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde. In this book, she takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change.