Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters

Profile. Zinn Education Project.
Brief bios of two dozen women of note in the labor movement.

Teaching Activity. By Say Burgin, Jeanne Theoharis, and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students learn to “talk back” to official accounts of the Detroit Uprising of 1967 by focusing on its root causes. They also get a fuller sense of Rosa Parks’s life and politics, and the Black freedom struggle outside of the South.

Picture book. By Carole Boston Weatherford. Illustrated by Ekua Holmes. 2015. 45 pages.
Illustrated biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, activist for voting and economic rights from Mississippi.

Book — Non-fiction. By Jeanne Theoharis. 2013. 320 pages.
A revealing window into Rosa Parks’ politics and years of activism.

Film. By Joan Sadoff, Robert Sadoff, and Laura Lipson. 2002. 60 minutes.
Documentary film on women in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.

Born on this day, Ella Baker was a civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s whose career spanned more than five decades.

Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, opened her historic campaign for President.

Shirley Chisholm was an historic candidate at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. Chisholm was outspoken on behalf of civil rights legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and a minimum family income; she opposed wiretapping, domestic spying, and the Vietnam War.