We are Back, Right on Time

Welcome to the first 2026 edition of #SistoryLessons. I've been very busy building many new tools and resources to support our learning and growth, but it's a pleasure to return to this part of the practice!

But first! If you received a spammy looking, weird email from any account associated with Brave Sis Project, we are so sorry. No legitimate enterprise sends out a vague message with an attachment, unsolicited. And we’re legit! I hope it brought you less disturbance than it did me. Again, so sorry.

Back to the matters at hand… Besides launching our signature self-paced course: "Unengaged to Ally, Advocate to Sister," on the Teachable platform, I've launched a mini-coaching series for allyship on Substack (I won't be publishing it here on #SistoryLessons, so sign up there if you want this kind of content), and the Brave Sis Project Solidarity Lab, which will be the hub for resources for world-changing in our "post-DEI" world.

Your ongoing support and engagement mean everything, so please continue to share this newsletter and the other offerings with your people who want and need this kind of information and inspiration!

I’ve also been busy grieving and screaming about the violence being wrought again my fellow Americans, particularly but not only in Minneapolis, a city dear to me. This newsletter is about history as inspiration and activation, but if in this moment you need more, send a note and I’ll share some readings that help spur me towards action. And voice, use your voice!

A Short History of Black History Month

One hundred years ago this month, historian Carter G. Woodson launched the first Negro History Week. Born in Virginia to formerly enslaved parents on December 19, 1875, Woodson was able to earn his PhD in history from Harvard and devoted his life to a radical, and yet still so elusive, proposition: Black people had a history worth studying, sharing, and celebrating.

This year's theme, "A Century of Black History Commemorations," invites us to reflect not only on what has been preserved in memory, but on why such commemorations matter at all.

In 2026, when so much of Black (and other BIPOC) history is being excluded and erased from mainstream narratives, we must unite in affirming Black identity, resilience, and cultural legacy across generations—with an eye to all our other brethren and sistren whose voices and lives matter, and who collectively (honestly) make America “good.” (Which is about as much as we can hope for nowadays… "greatness" being an obtuse and mischaracterized construct!)

As we mark this centennial, Woodson's vision, that Negro History Week would be "a vehicle for racial transformation forever," feels more urgent than ever. We are living in a perfidious era of book bans, dismantling of DEI initiatives, and erosion of voting rights (to name just a few of our current challenges), and for these and many other reasons, Black History Month can serve as a reminder that if erasure is a political strategy, well then, remembering is an act of resistance.

So, with this edition of #SistoryLessons, I’d like to honor four women who understood that resistance requires action, courage, and an unwavering commitment to justice, even when the law, the government, media, and the culture wish to look the other way.

What Mary Evans Wilson, Ella Baker, Amelia Boynton Robinson, and Fannie Lou Hamer can Teach Us About Being Resolute

Mary Evans Wilson: Boston's Benevolent Black Brahmin

Had she been born a century later, civil rights activist, pioneering lifestyle writer, anti-lynching activist and orator, civic leader, mother of six, and member of Boston's Black elite Mary Evans Wilson might have been on magazine covers, lauded as a Renaissance woman of her time.

Born in Oberlin, Ohio, she followed the typical early trajectory for an educated woman. She graduated from Oberlin College, one of the first colleges in America to admit Black students and women, a pioneer in integrated education, and a hub for abolitionist activism and a station on the Underground Railroad, and then went to Washington, D.C. to teach in the public schools for a decade. Once she married prominent Boston civil rights attorney Anthony Butler R. Wilson, in 1894, the couple moved to Boston's swanky Roxbury neighborhood, where they became central figures in the city's Black elite community

Mary initially settled into a societal role as a health and beauty columnist for the groundbreaking New Era magazine, founded in 1894 by fellow Boston Black elite member Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. As the first national newspaper published by and for African American women, New Era (1894–1897) featured articles by Black women from across the country on politics, suffrage, racial justice, education, and anti-lynching reform.

For all of Mary's upper-crust privilege, the political realities of turn-of-the-century America required more of her than the pleasantries of tea parties and layettes. Regardless of class position, Negroes (to use the parlance of those times) faced discrimination in employment and medical care, as well as segregation in housing and education.

Furthermore, the rise of lynching, and other acts of racial brutality urged people of good will, like her, towards action. As early as 1899, Mary took to the oratory podium, delivering a keynote to some 300 concerned citizens at an anti-lynching demonstration in Boston's Chickering Hall. Demanding constitutional protections for her people was a very audacious act for any woman to assume, much less a Black female.

By 1911, as more African Americans began to coalesce around civic advocacy, Mary helped her husband recruit thousands to Boston's local NAACP, the organization's first chartered branch. She even traveled across western New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio to grow the Association's membership. In moving beyond beauty tips and quips from the social ledger, Wilson used her intellect and voice to enact civic engagement and organizational leadership, serving as an example to others of how to leverage their privilege for the greater good.

Reflection: How can you leverage facts and faith to fight injustice?

Fannie Lou Hamer: From Hardship to Heroism

Anyone who knows me or has followed Brave Sis Project for a while knows that Fannie Lou Hamer is one of my most favorite of all the Foremothers. A Mississippi sharecropper turned voting rights icon, is one of the people whose story and resilience I turn to when I am feeling the most dejected and defeated by what engulfs us in these times.

In 1870, forty-seven years before Fannie’s birth, the 15th Amendment was passed, promising (and quickly failing to deliver) suffrage for African American people.

Take note, this law extended to menfolk, not women.

She was three years old in 1920 when the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote.

Take note: this law did not apply to Black women in the Jim Crow South.

For all Black people, discriminatory voting restrictions ensured their enfranchisement existed on paper only. Impossibilities, from unjust and financially impossible poll taxes to unanswerable "literacy tests" (“how high is up?”), not to mention the arson and lynching rampages of 1919 ("Red Summer") ensured Black people remained estranged from any opportunity to exercise their constitutional rights.

Fannie Lou Hamer literally embodied what it meant to persevere against this arch injustice. On June 9, 1963, after doing local outreach and organizing to help people register to vote, she was arrested and brutally beaten in Winona, Mississippi—an assault that left her nearly dead. Just three days later, on June 12, 1963, the great Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, 90 minutes away. She also survived forced sterilization, threats to her life, and shots fired at her home. During the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, her fellow organizers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered by white supremacists.

Despite these horrors, Hamer continued to speak out. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, party leaders refused to seat her and the rest of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation, even given her searing televised testimony about voter suppression and racial terror that was broadcast on national TV, moving the nation and exposing the Democratic Party’s moral failure.

Undeterred, Fannie Lou continued organizing, registering voters, and giving her testimony. She understood that attainment of voting rights was only the beginning of the march towards justice—true freedom was going to require economic justice, educational opportunity, and human dignity.
​

Reflection: What do you want to say, even if no one wants to listen—or give you the floor?

Amelia Boynton Robinson: From the Jim Crow South to a Doyenne of Civil Rights

Black Excellence was ingrained in Amelia Boynton Robinson from childhood. As a nine-year-old, she accompanied her mother across rural Georgia to distribute pro-suffragist leaflets by horse and buggy. One of her uncles, a Civil War hero named Robert Smalls, was one of the earliest African Americans to serve in the US House of Representatives.

Once she matriculated at Alabama's Tuskegee University in 1927, Amelia studied under famed botanist George Washington Carver, the agricultural chemist who revolutionized Southern farming (he promoted sustainable agriculture decades before it became mainstream by developing the crop rotation system which used nitrogen-rich legumes like peanuts and sweet potatoes to restore depleted soil while providing nutrition for poor farmers; created over 300 peanut products such as milk, oil, flour, soap, plastics, and dyes, transforming the legume into one of America's six leading crops by 1940; and invented over 100 sweet potato products ). His example of using science and practical education to uplift poor Black rural communities strongly shaped Robinson's own grassroots organizing and voter education work. He became a close family friend, even godfather to her son Bruce Carver Boynton (named after the professor).

After university, Amelia moved to Selma, Alabama and began voter registration and civil rights organizing there. She would become known as the "Queen of Selma" for her decades-long activism in that city. She wed Samuel William Boynton in 1936 and joined him in the daunting task of registering Black voters in Alabama. Even after Samuel died in 1963, Amelia chose to continue the fight by running for office. She was the first African American woman in Alabama since the Reconstruction Era to run for Congress, and the first woman to run for statewide office in the Democratic Party in Alabama. Though Amelia lost the race, she received about 10 percent of the vote, a decent showing, given how few Black voters were registered in her district at the time.

Given her longtime role as a voting rights activist, it is no surprise Boynton invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to her town of Selma to help promote the cause of Black voting rights in late 1964. Their collaboration would lead to both tragedy and breakthrough.

On March 7, 1965, approximately 600 protesters joined Amelia, John Lewis, and others in attempting to cross Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. Their goal was two-fold: 1) march to Montgomery, Alabama's state capital, where they would present voting rights grievances to Governor George Wallace and demand federal protection for Black voters' rights and 2) respond to the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black voting rights activist who had been shot by state police during a protest in nearby Marion, Alabama, just days before.

However, on that day, forever known as Bloody Sunday, the marchers were attacked by police with tear gas and billy clubs. Seventeen protesters were hospitalized, including Boynton Robinson, who was beaten unconscious.

A newspaper photo of her lying bloody and beaten drew national attention to the cause and the country's outrage helped propel President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

At age 103 on March 7, 2015—the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday—Amelia Boynton Robinson crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge again, this time alongside President Barack Obama.

As jubilant as the day way, she didn't hesitate to display her impatience with younger generations who she found passive in the never-ending need for more activism. She exhorted the youth to stop venerating the past and work harder today.

"Get off of my shoulders. The foundation has been laid, now it's time for you to build on it and get to work."

Reflection: What keeps you going after you are knocked down, either metaphorically or literally?

Ella Baker: Leading by Helping Others Rise

Of all the women I could not “fit” into my 2023 book, Ella Baker is the one whose legacy shines most brilliantly for me. Born in 1903 in Norfolk, VA, her life was about achieving change, not personal glory. Of the many heroes of the Civil Rights era, she worked relentlessly behind the scenes to build the infrastructure of the movement as well as to nurture the young people who would carry it forward.

In the 1920s, Ella was a collegian and eventual valedictorian at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina (class of 1927). After graduation, she moved to New York and was thrust into the thick of the Great Depression, working as a journalist and teacher for the Works Progress Administration and immersing herself in Harlem’s radical activism. Among her causes was protesting Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, supporting the Scottsboro campaign, and founding the grassroots Negro History Club, a study and discussion group at the Harlem Library that organized forums and educational programs on Black history and current issues. This was a first foray into the kind of political consciousness that would define her civil rights organizing.

By 1940, she had joined the NAACP as a field secretary, fearlessly traveling throughout the South to recruit members and investigate lynchings. Her success in organizing beleaguered small towns catapulted her to the role of National Director of NAACP Branches in 1943. Although this appointment made her the highest‑ranking woman in the organization, she chafed at its bureaucratic, top‑down culture and resigned in 1946.

As the Civil Rights Movement gathered steam in the late 1950s, Baker shifted her focus again. She moved to Atlanta in 1957 to help organize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and direct its “Crusade for Citizenship” voter‑registration campaign. After the 1960 Greensboro sit‑ins, she left SCLC and convened a gathering at Shaw University that launched the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—her most transformative contribution and the work for which she is now remembered as the “Godmother of SNCC.”

As SNCC’s advisor and strategist, Baker championed group‑centered leadership, participatory democracy, and grassroots organizing. She mentored many future Black activists, helped coordinate the Freedom Rides in 1961, and championed Freedom Summer in 1964, which registered Black voters in Mississippi. In her later years, she returned to New York, continued activism with the Southern Conference Education Fund, traveled for the “Free Angela Davis” campaign in 1972, and supported international solidarity work.

Ella Baker remained politically active until her death on her 83rd birthday, December 13, 1986. She should be a household name for how her philosophy of grassroots power and democratic participation influenced generations of activists worldwide.

Reflection: As a behind-the-scenes organizer of SNCC and SCLC, Ella Baker taught that true change begins when leaders listen deeply to community voices—not to speak for them. Where in your life are you practicing deep listening—and where might you lean back and truly hear?

Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone

Thinking about Mary Evans Wilson, how do you balance social action with self-care? How do you pamper and love yourself, even in the hard times?

If you consider the sacrifice and valor of Fannie Lou Hamer, what does it mean to be sick and tired of being sick and tired? Write about a time you reached your limit and what you did next.

If you reflect on the life of Amelia Boynton Robinson, think about how you can keep fighting after a setback.

As we remember Ella Baker, reflect: who in your community holds it down without needing applause?

HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color

To honor Mary Evans Wilson, consider: What local actions have made the biggest difference in your story?

In thanks to Fannie Lou Hamer, learn about other women leaders of the early 1960s voting rights movement, like Septima Poinsette Clark and Diane Nash (Amelia and Ella were right among them!)

In commemoration of Amelia Boynton Robinson, consider: when has your body held both protest and pain?

In consideration of Ella Baker’s role in history, where in your life are you practicing deep listening—and where might you lean back and truly hear?

Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends

Uplifting the spirit of women like Mary Evans Wilson, learn about early 20th century Black women's leadership in Boston's elite circles. What stereotype-busting lessons do they "normalize" for the rest of us?

Share Fannie Lou Hamer's 1964 DNC testimony. Reflect on how Black women built the movement. As you watch her testimony, take note of what feelings come up and what action they invite. Educate yourself about voter suppression and support fair voting initiatives.

For Amelia Boynton Robinson and other courageous woman of her era, support a voting rights initiative. Center Black women in civil rights timelines—share her name alongside John Lewis's. Learn about the Selma marches and their significance.

To honor Ella Baker’s legacy: Pass the mic. Practice being part of collective—not hierarchical—movements.

More on Their Lives

Mary Evans Wilson (1866–March 18, 1928): The First NAACP Branch Builder

When Mary Evans Wilson took to the oratory podium to deliver the keynote address at an anti-lynching demonstration in Boston's Chickering Hall, she was wrestling with nagging societal contradictions. How could America drive Spain out of Cuba and the Philippines in the name of freedom while allowing Black Americans to be hunted down and murdered on this homeland, she asked, directly calling out President William McKinley.

The contradictions and harms she witnessed and addressed in her speech remind us how important it is to speak out against political hypocrisies. Mary challenged her audience to consider why Black men who "saved the day" in the Cuban village of El Caney during the Spanish-American War shouldn't enjoy the right in their own country to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without being lynched.

The Battle of El Caney was a major conflagration that took place on July 1, 1898. Under President, President McKinley, the United States got involved in the struggle of Cuban rebels against Spanish rule. But there were other reasons for good ol' Uncle Sam, as there always are: economic pursuit ($50 million invested in Cuban industries); xenophobic "yellow journalism" that sensationalized Spanish atrocities (remember during this time in history, Spaniards were not considered "white"); nativistic fervor surrounding the (unresolved) February 1898 explosion of the USS Maine, which fueled public anger ("Remember the Maine!") even though most experts considered it was an accident; and (surprise!) imperial ambitions to expand U.S. territory globally.

War was declared on Spain on April 25, 1898, and on July 1, Americans captured the village of El Caney. The victory, combined with success in the battle at San Juan Hill, 3.75 miles away, on the same day, broke Spanish defenses and hastened the war's end.

Black soldiers played a crucial role in this war. Approximately 1,250 Buffalo Soldiers from four regiments (9th and 10th Cavalry, 24th and 25th Infantry) participated in the assault on San Juan Heights. An estimated 2,500-5,000 African American soldiers served overall in the Spanish-American War.

The Buffalo Soldiers were the first all-Black permanent Army regiments created by Congress in 1866 after the Civil War. Native American tribes gave them this nickname, possibly due to their fierce fighting or wooly hair.

Be that as it may, these warriors protected settlers during westward expansion, built infrastructure, and, fighting on the side of the expansionist Republic, earned 23 Medal of Honor awards in the Indian Wars. Despite this exceptional service, the regiments remained segregated until 1948.

One side note about the Buffalo Soldiers: Despite the harsh racist treatment they endured from their white commanders, and although they fought against Native Americans for over 15 years during several wars, there are no recorded stories of defection from the US campaigns. Buffalo Soldiers were deployed specifically to subdue and confine Native Americans to reservations, making alliance impossible. Despite, or perhaps due to this role, the American Indians and Negro Buffalo Soldiers harbored mutual respect for each other’s battle prowess.

Fast forwarding to 1916 Massachusetts, Mary and her husband Butler were among the organizers of the Boston branch of the NAACP. That year, she led an investigation into discrimination at the New England Sanitarium after a Black woman from Melrose, Massachusetts, Mrs. H. E. Plunkett, was refused admission to the maternity ward, after previously arranging it by telephone. Another example of “oh my, we didn’t know you were Black when we spoke on the phone…”

Mary and Butler investigated and challenged the sanitarium’s tax-exempt status by arguing before the Stoneham Board of Selectmen that a “charitable and benevolent institution” could not lawfully or morally exclude a qualified patient on racial grounds. At an April 3, 1916 hearing, Wilson publicly shamed the town for betraying American ideals of equal citizenship.

Astoundingly, the hospital manager admitted the exclusion was wrong, apologized, and promised that Black patients would be admitted going forward—marking a significant strategic victory for the Boston NAACP.

Not one to rest on her laurels, that same year, Mary made a strong appeal to the Boston's department stores to hire Black women as salespeople. She also worked to combat discrimination in the citywide school system.

During World War I, she organized a knitting circle of 350 women and girls to provide gloves and scarves for Boston's Black soldiers. This group was significant because it put warm clothing directly into the hands of Black soldiers, a group white-led relief efforts often neglected. The Knitting circle forged a 350‑person network of Black women and girls that became a lasting base for community leadership, eventually evolving into Boston’s influential Women’s Service Club in 1919. One of Boston’s oldest organizations for women of color, this group evolved from wartime service to becoming a lasting institution for Black women’s leadership and community advocacy.​
​

Fannie Lou Hamer (October 6, 1917–March 14, 1977): The Voice That Wouldn't Be Silenced

Born in Montgomery, Mississippi, as the youngest of 20 children to sharecropper parents, Fannie Lou Hamer (née Townsend) began working in the cotton fields at the tender age of six. Like most Black children in her day, she was forced to abandon school after the sixth grade to contribute earnings to her family's survival. "We would work 14 and 15 hours a day for three lousy dollars," she would later recall.

In August 1962, at age 44, Hamer attended a meeting organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and decided to register to vote. When she tried to execute upon her legal right, she was fired from her job as a timekeeper on a plantation where she had worked for 18 years. When plantation owner told her she had to withdraw her registration or leave the job, she replied, 'I didn't try to register for you. I tried to register for myself."

Such heroism came at enormous cost for Fannie. She was intimidated, detained, and even shot at. As a result of her “Mississippi Appendectomy,” (involuntary hysterectomy performed on her while doctors removed a uterine tumor), Fannie Lou could not bear children, and she and her husband Pap took in relatives’ children and other youngsters in need. The couple ultimately raised four adopted daughters, as an extension of their belief that community care and family were part of the struggle for Black dignity and survival in the Delta.

Tragically and shamefully, one of the girls, their niece Dorothy Jean, died in her early twenties from internal bleeding after being refused emergency medical treatment at a local hospital. Many accounts ascribed this refusal of care to retaliation against Hamer’s civil-rights activism.

As alluded to, Fannie Lou was beaten nearly to death due to her activism. Here are the details: On June 9, 1963, during a trip to register Black voters in Winona, Mississippi, Hamer and four other SNCC volunteers were arrested by the police. The beating was savage; she later recalled that, from her cell, she could hear the sound of continued pummeling accompanied by a policeman's racial slurs. This atrocious violence left Hamer nearly dead and with permanent kidney damage.

Mississippi's NAACP state field director Medgar Evers was returning from an NAACP meeting three days later, June 12, when he shot in the back in the driveway of his Jackson home. Two all‑white juries initially failed to convict the shooter , but after new evidence and testimony—including the assassin's boasting of the murder—he was retried and convicted to life in prison in 1994 by an integrated jury. The sentence was upheld by the Mississippi Supreme Court in 1997.

June 12, 1963 was the one-month anniversary of my birth.

Even in the face of such extreme danger, Fannie held onto a tenacious determination to secure the rights of women, children, and Black people. She became an increasingly central figure in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign, helped lead the Freedom Summer voting drive in 1964, and cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Fannie Lou fave an on-air testimony about the brutal beating she endured. Though President Lyndon Johnson tried to preempt her testimony by holding an impromptu press conference, major networks replayed Hamer's powerful speech in its entirety during prime time. The following year, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark achievement that Hamer's courage and suffering had helped make possible.

Hamer continued her activism throughout her life, founding the Freedom Farm Cooperative to address hunger and poverty in the Mississippi Delta, and running for Congress. Until her death in 1977, she remained a fierce advocate for economic justice, women's rights, and human dignity—never forgetting that voting rights alone would not bring true freedom if people remained hungry, poor, and oppressed. Let us learn from her!

Amelia Boynton Robinson (August 18, 1911–August 26, 2015): A Century of Fighting for Freedom

After her childhood and college years surrounded by very inspiring people, Amelia Boynton Robinson took on a role at the USDA instructing rural women in homemaking and health practices. Once she married Samuel William Boynton in 1936, the couple dedicated themselves to the daunting task of registering Black voters in Alabama.

Samuel died in 1963, and Amelia decided to continue his work by running for office. She became the first African American woman in Alabama since the Reconstruction Era to run for Congress, and the first woman to run for statewide office in the Democratic Party in Alabama. And though her bid for the legislature was unsuccessful, her willingness to step forward inspired others to follow her lead.

When Boynton Robinson invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to come to Selma in 1964, he and the SCLC set up their headquarters at her Selma home, where settling in to plan the Selma to Montgomery March, where were savagely attacked by segregationst police and a mob. Bloody Sunday was a brutal day in American history, and yet the legacy of that horrific event was the importance of bearing witness and having access to the truth of political violence. This is a right and a privilege we must not ever take for granted.

Just five months later, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, with Boynton Robinson attending as the landmark event's guest of honor. Her decades of organizing work, her willingness to put her body on the line, and her strategic vision had helped bring about one of the most significant civil rights achievements in American history.

Even as the Civil Rights Movement faded into the history books, Boynton Robinson continued her activism for the rest of her long life. Though she was understandably criticized for her involvement in the 1980s with the Schiller Institute, a political organization closely associated with the controversial LaRouche movement and its conspiracy‑oriented ideology, she remained active through groups such as the Dallas County Voters League and other efforts for civil rights and economic justice.

In 2015, at age 103, she returned to Selma to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. President Barack Obama walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with her in a wheelchair, honoring her as a living link to the movement that had transformed America.

Ella Baker (December 13, 1903–December 13, 1986): The Architect of Grassroots Power

Ella Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up in North Carolina, where her grandmother’s stories of resistance during slavery shaped her understanding of community, collective action, and what shared power could look like. One of the most harrowing tales was of her grandmother being whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen by the enslaver, instead insisting on marrying for love, (the family later claimed and farmed land from the old plantation).

For young Ella, such stories framed resistance, dignity, and shared landownership as the foundations of real collective power.

After graduating as valedictorian from Shaw University in Raleigh in 1927, she moved to New York during the height of the Harlem Renaissance and became deeply involved in social justice organizing, connecting local struggles in Black communities to global fights against colonialism and fascism.

Baker began her formal civil rights work with the NAACP in the 1940s, traveling throughout the South to recruit members and build local chapters. Unlike many leaders who sought the spotlight, she focused on developing leadership capacity in local communities. Ella believed movements succeeded not because of charismatic leaders, but because of strong, organized people who understood their own power.

In the 1950s, Baker worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), serving as its first executive director. Though she helped build the organization and organize key campaigns, she grew frustrated with its top‑down, male‑dominated leadership style. Baker advocated for participatory democracy and group‑centered leadership, not hero worship of individual ministers, and she pushed constantly for ordinary people—especially women and young people—to shape strategy.

Her philosophy was perhaps best expressed in her most famous statement: “My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.” She went on: “You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come.” For Baker, the measure of success was not individual adoration, but whether communities had the tools to keep organizing long after the cameras rolled away.

Ella Baker’s greatest legacy may be her role in founding and shaping SNCC in 1960. After the Greensboro sit‑ins, she organized a conference at Shaw University that brought together student activists from across the South. Rather than steering them into existing organizations, she encouraged them to form their own group with their own vision. SNCC became one of the most innovative organizations of the civil rights movement, and Baker served as its unofficial advisor and mentor, modeling a leadership style rooted in listening, facilitation, and shared responsibility.

Baker taught SNCC activists about grassroots organizing, community empowerment, and the importance of listening to those most affected by injustice. She insisted that organizers should not parachute into communities with pre‑determined solutions, but should help people identify their own needs and develop their own leaders. “Give light and people will find the way,” she said, trusting in the wisdom and capacity of ordinary people to create extraordinary change. Because of her refusal to cow to the male leadership, it is said she and Martin Luther King, Jr. had a feisty collaborative relationship.

Throughout her life, Baker challenged the civil rights movement to think beyond integration and voting rights. She understood that true freedom required economic justice, educational opportunity, safety from police violence, and a fundamental transformation of power structures. She continued organizing until her death, working on issues ranging from Puerto Rican independence to ending South African apartheid. She was, as noted above, a vocal advocate for the release of activist Angela Davis.

Though she never sought fame, Ella's influence shaped generations of activists; many key civil rights leaders—including Bob Moses, Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, and Julian Bond—credit her with teaching them how to organize and how to lead by empowering others.

Her model of participatory democracy, grassroots organizing, and collective leadership remains vitally relevant today, and reminds us that lasting change doesn't come from heroes, but from building power together.

Read this NPR report on her amazing legacy.

What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember

As we celebrate the centennial of Carter G. Woodson's vision, we face the agonizing reality that the fights these four women waged are far from over. Voting rights are under assault. Educational curricula are being whitewashed. Economic inequality is perhaps worse than ever. The tools of oppression have evolved, and the federal leadership show disregard for the people and the Constitution alike. In the face of all of this, our need for resistance remains more acute than ever.

For this reason, I believe we all need to commemorate Black History Month. Not as a a feel-good celebration with food and dance (though that’s important, too!) but rather, Black History Month 2026 should serve as our mirror and our map. Our mindsets and actions can help us all remember where we’ve come from, what we’ve come through, and where we gotta keep heading.

Let’s not fool around here: every right we take for granted was fought for, bled for, organized for, and defended by people who refused to accept injustice as inevitable. Mary Evans Wilson's outcry for constitutional justice, Fannie Lou Hamer's refusal to stay silent, Amelia Boynton Robinson's persistence after trauma, and Ella Baker's commitment to collective power are living strategies for survival and transformation that we need today.

As I’ve said in the past, these valiant Foremothers showed us that change doesn't wait for permission. It is built by ordinary people doing extraordinary things, over and over again, until the world has no choice but to shift.

Postscript: the Evolution of History Weeks

In 1915, while working as a high school teacher and principal in the Washington, D.C. public schools, Carter G. Woodson found himself growing increasingly frustrated by the widespread erasure and misrepresentation of Black achievements in American society.

Taking change-making into his own hands, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (today called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) in Chicago on September 9, 1915. Woodson formed the group with like‑minded Black intellectuals he'd met at the groundbreaking Exposition of Negro Progress. This Chicago Expo showcasing Black achievements since emancipation was associated with the 1915 National Half Century Exposition and Lincoln Jubilee.​

(I share all this level of detail to inspire and remind us that small groups of like-minded people can absolutely band together for positive purposes and change the world!)

The Association’s original purpose was the scientific study and publication of the neglected history of people of African descent, chiefly through research, books, and the creation of The Journal of Negro History in 1916. A decade on, in February 1926, Woodson established Negro History Week—yes, it was just a week. Woodson was deliberate in choosing February, the month that held the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass—two figures central to Black freedom (NOT because it was the shortest month of the year!)

The commemoration expanded organically over the decades. In the 1920s, Negro History Week centered on school lessons, assemblies, and church programs using themed packets for teachers with short lessons, biographical sketches, pictures, suggested programs, and plays about Black history. By the 1930s, it was a common fixture in Black schools, with pageants and civic proclamations led by local branches and history clubs. Remember, at this time, schools were segregated, as was much of American society.

As the War years of the 1940s progressed, more and more Black teachers were integrating Black history into regular curricula, and in some communities, leaders expanded the week into a broader February season of lectures and church events. In the 1950s, one was likely to see Negro History Week functioning almost as “a season,” with pageants like “Miss Negro History Week,” public talks, and widespread school and church observances.

It was in the 1960s, amid the civil rights movement and growing Black consciousness, that Negro History Week evolved into Black History Month. The commemoration was formally recognized by President Gerald Ford in 1976 during the nation's bicentennial.

This declaration helped normalize the idea of nationally observed heritage months and encouraged similar commemorations for other groups. Over the following decades, the United States saw the establishment of observances:

• March: Women's History Month, established in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan, building on National Women's History Week recognized since 1978.
• March: National Disability Awareness Month (U.S.), first proclaimed in 1987 to spotlight barriers facing disabled people and promote full inclusion in community life
• June: LGBTQ Pride Month, created to commemorate the June 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City, which catalyzed the modern LGBTQ rights movement and inspired the first Pride marches in 1970.​
• July: Disability Pride Month, which grew out of the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and subsequent Disability Pride events celebrating disability as a valued aspect of human diversity.​
• September 15-October 15: Hispanic Heritage Month, which was established in 1988, officially expanding the one-week celebration that had commenced in 1988. (A reminder, this heritage month spans four weeks over two months, to align with the September 15 independence anniversary of five Latin American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) and Mexico’s independence on September 16 and that of Chile on September 18.​)
• May: Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, established in 1992 as a federal observance, though communities had already been celebrating Asian American heritage going back to the 1970s–80s.
• ​November: Native American Heritage Month, which replaced "Native American Day" with a full month-long observance, starting in 1990.

The evolution of commemorative months is just one more way in which Black communities have contributed deeply to the fabric of America.

Postscript: The Dems? For Real?

Very much for real. In 1964, the Democratic Party was absolutely not pro-Black.

Dominated by Southern Democrats, the party fiercely opposed civil rights and had just watched many of its Southern state parties pass resolutions denouncing the new Civil Rights Act and demanding “separation of the races in all phases of our society.”

The party refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation at the 1964 convention despite the violence Black Mississippians faced registering to vote. This was the convention where Fannie Lou Hamer delivered her historic testimony before the Credentials Committee.​

Though President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the party remained deeply divided, with Southern Democrats prioritizing white political power over racial justice and threatening to bolt if Black delegates like the MFDP were fully recognized.

As the sixties went on, many white segregationists began leaving the Democratic Party in larger numbers, accelerating a longer migration of racially conservative Southern whites into the Republican Party. This shift was accelerated by Barry Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights in 1964, Nixon’s “law and order” Southern Strategy, and Reagan’s race‑coded appeals to “states’ rights” and resentment of federal civil rights gains.

This realignment still shapes U.S. politics today, as we know...

Postscript: Boston's Black Elite

Many people are unaware of the turn of the 20th century Black elite class of Boston. This was a distinguished and interconnected community of professionals, intellectuals, and activists—including figures like Judge George Lewis Ruffin (the first Black Harvard Law graduate and municipal judge and husband of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, the suffragist, civil rights advocate, and publisher). Other notables in this cadre included Mary Evans Wilson and her husband of course, and educator Maria Louise Baldwin.

These were privileged people who leveraged their education, wealth, and social standing to advance civil rights and racial justice.

Out of this community came the Woman's Era Club, a soon-to-be-nearly national organization for the advancement of Negro women and a direct precursor to the 1896 founding of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), a still-standing national federation that became the most prominent Black women's organization of the early 20th century.

Recommended reading on this topic includes The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class, 1750–1950 by Adelaide M. Cromwell. This study traces Boston’s Black elite (often called “Black Brahmins”), detailing interconnected families, professionals, activists, and institutions and situating them within broader Black Boston political and intellectual life.

Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research.

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