The Women at the Heart of Black Power

Abstract

Ashley D. Farmer’s Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era is a compelling, groundbreaking work that intervenes in an impressive array of historical subfields. First and foremost, Farmer’s book represents a significant corrective to interpretations of the Black Power movement that have excluded women from the movement’s history. This alone marks a substantial contribution to our understanding of the Black freedom struggle and African American history more generally. Farmer demolishes the widespread but mistaken notion that women operated on the margins of Black nationalism, struggling to have their voices heard in organizations controlled by men.