This is an excerpt from a speech given by the great Shirely Graham DuBois at UCLA on November 13, 1970, almost a decade after the African Summit Conference in Ethiopia where Pan-Africanists from all over the world came together to sign the Charter of African Unity. You can listen to the section below here, or the entire speech here. . . .
African Women
Women as Leaders
The exigencies of this present age require that women take their places beside their men. White women are rallying all their forces and uniting regardless of national boundaries to save their race from destruction, and preserve its ideals for posterity. . . . White men have begun to realize that as women are the backbone of the home, so can they, by their economic experience and their aptitude for details, participate effectively in guiding the destiny of nation and race. No line of endeavor remains closed for long to the modern woman. She agitates for equal opportunities and gets them; . . .
Women in the Haitian Revolution
The 1791 slave uprising of Saint-Domingue was the largest and most successful slave revolt in modern history. It transformed one of the wealthiest colonies in the world into a new nation led by the black leaders of the Revolution. Because Saint-Domingue was a French colony, the French Revolution was inextricably linked to the Revolution in Saint-Domingue, however, the two Revolutions functioned in largely separate spheres not least because of the ocean that separated them. The struggle for liberation took on a particularly bloody and brutal shape on the island of Saint-Domingue. Along with other French Caribbean colonies (such as Martinique . . .
The African Woman: The Invisible Soldier
A society without women can be compared to humans without air. Africa without African women is like a mango tree without roots. The indispensable role that African women play in the development of society in general and community, in particular, cannot be matched or debated. However, despite this role African women from Toronto to Harare to London to Kingston find themselves often invisible. . . .
Working-Class African Women in Revolution
It is the purpose of this piece to provide historical examples of how working-class African women, joined and supported by working-class African men, combatted the shackles of racism, colonialism, and imperialism regardless of their geographical position. We will use the women of Dahomey, Assata Shakur, and Claudia Jones as examples of significant working-class women who contributed greatly to African Liberation. . . .
Let Go of the Idea of the ‘Strong Black Woman’
I have seen too many of us who wanted to be a “strong Black woman” so badly that we denied ourselves the pleasure of emotional acknowledgment, refusing to accept we needed help in the name of such “strength.” This fallacy of strength attached to Blackness diminishes our well-being and hurts us more than it empowers us. . . .
Kelly Davis: The Wife That Won’t Go Away
Last year when Keith Davis Jr. was sentenced to 50 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, his wife Kelly Davis made a commitment to fight. The fight that Kelly has committed to is one with many moving pieces— it’s a fight to preserve her own sanity, a fight to raise her children, a fight to get up every day and go to work, a fight to hold on to her marriage, and a fight against the racist and corrupt Baltimore political establishment. For many African women and non-men, it’s a storied fight, old as our arrival . . .
African Women, Don’t Be a Mammy for Empire
All too often these days we are witnessing petit-bourgeois African women willingly taking positions of leadership, power, and influence within the political and military infrastructure of the United States. Positions that require, as part of their job descriptions, acts of extreme ongoing violence against the world’s most oppressed populations, including their own people. . . .