“Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.” - Sara Ahmed, “Living a Feminist Life”
Octavia Butler
Earthseed
The first time I read an Octavia Butler book was in 2015 and I’ve been hooked ever since. I am inspired by Octavia both in her personal journey of recognizing and manifesting herself as an award winning science fiction author long before the world saw her and also through her intellectual offerings via novels like the Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, in which she provided living roadmaps of how we got here and how we find our way out and towards a more liberated world.
Toni Morrison
Rememory
Something I’ve come to learn as a Black memory worker is that when preserving and researching Black history as Black folks we are often working with distorted and fragmented source materials that usually were not created with the mission in mind of remembering us. Toni Morrison offers a framework through her concept of rememory that pushes us to embrace the reconfiguration that is necessary within this work and to understand that we are living within the memory always.
'I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and race-free': an essay by Toni Morrison
Charlene Carruthers
Black Queer Feminist Lens
From 2015 - 2020 my organizing experience with Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) was formational in more ways than one, this is the organization that introduced me to the concept of a Black queer feminist lens. This framework shaped not only how I view the world and myself, but also the contributions I seek to make in my lifetime. Charlene was a key leader of BYP100 and served as a mentor and early supporter of me as a young Black queer feminist exploring how I could utilize archiving as a tool for Black liberation.
“If the stories we tell about Black people’s experiences of resistance and resilience are incomplete, our movement to transform them, to enact them, will be insufficient and ineffective…If we told a more complete story of the Black radical tradition, one that grounds itself in the stories of Black feminist, queer, and trans liberation work, we would have more complete and effective solutions for the problems we encounter.” - Charlene Carruthers
“Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements”
“Storing Our Memories in the Water: Black women's organizing in the Detroit water crisis” by: Marcia Black, MA/MSIS
Black women’s activism in Detroit’s radical tradition is often overlooked and under documented but regardless we all benefit from their sacrifices, leadership, and resistance. The fight against Detroit’s water crisis is just one of many movements that Black women have led locally. In the face of water shutoffs, water unaffordability, and poisoned water they continue to organize for clean water to be freely available to all because water is life. In my master’s thesis “Storing Our Memories in the Water” I used oral histories from some of the Black women leading this work to document their contributions to this critical movement. Below are some of the Black Detroit women leaders who’ve inspired me and transitioned to ancestors.
Click each to learn more about their legacy on Voices from the Grassroots
Charity Hicks
Rev. Dr. JoAnn Watson
