Category: Key People

E. Frances White is a historian, author, and academic serving as Professor Emerita of History and Black Studies at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her teaching and research interests include the history of Africa and its diaspora, history of gender and sexuality, and critical race theory. Her books include Sierra Leone’s Settler Women Traders, Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Dark Continent of Our Bodies. She is well-known for writing about sexism in Black nationalisms that romanticize African patriarchal traditions.

Kai Lumumba Barrow is a queer Black feminist, visual and performance artist, and the founder of Gallery of the Streets in New Orleans. For over 35 years, her work has been grounded in efforts to end structural oppression and state violence. Her work intersects theories and practices that transgress the borders of the arts, academic, and organizing worlds. She is also a co-founder of Critical Resistance and currently serves on their Community Advisory Board.

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, and curator. Her work focuses on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, advocating for transformative justice, and supporting youth leadership development. She is the founder and director of Project NIA and has co-founded multiple organizations and projects, including the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT), and We Charge Genocide.

Brittney Cooper is an author, feminist, teacher, activist, and cultural critic. Her areas of research and work include Black women organizations, Black women intellectuals, and hip-hop feminism. She is a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective (CFC). The Crunk Feminist Collective blog was named a top feminist blog by New York magazine in 2011 and a top race blog by TheRoot.com in 2012. Cooper writes for the CFC as “crunktastic.”

Cathy Cohen is an activist, political scientist, professor, and feminist who examines the participation of Black people in politics through the lens of intersectionality. She is the David and Mary Winton Green Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2010). In addition, she also created and oversees two major research and public-facing projects: the GenForward Survey and the Black Youth Project.

Barbara Ransby is a historian, writer, and longtime political activist. Ransby has published dozens of articles and essays in popular and scholarly venues. She is most notably the author of an award-winning biography of civil-rights activist Ella Baker, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina, 2003), which won no less than six major awards. Additionally, in 1995, Barbara Ransby helped found African American Agenda 2000 alongside leaders such as Angela Davis, Evelynn Hammonds, and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Elsa Barkley Brown is an author and associate professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland. Her primary interests are in African American political culture, with an emphasis on gender. Professor Barkley Brown is co-editor of the two-volume Major Problems in African-American History (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) and the two-volume Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Carlson Publishing, 1993).

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 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.

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.