We continue our exploration into the methodological contributions of African descended women. This post is about the knowledge production of bell hooks. For those African descended women who are PhD holders, many of us have varied stories of the ways knowledge production was shaped and encouraged through our advisors.

My own recollection is that my arguments had to be “rigorous.” While it was not fashionable to say, “You must rely upon the methods and framing of White men,” we were steered toward them, nonetheless. Each time I quoted the work of a womanist scholar, for example, the response was, “I don’t know that thinker.” I later started adding a footnote to introduce the contributions and awards of the Black thinkers that I quoted. The response to that was, “I don’t need you to do that.”

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I finally gave up! What did the doctoral supervisor want? In essence, she wanted to ensure that my viva committee didn’t fail my work based on thinkers they did not know. For her, the only way to ensure this was to quote White male thinkers. As the only act of rebellion available to me, I selected Michel Foucault - at least he wasn’t a straight White male.

But, I slipped in a bit of sauce with Emilie Townes, Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, Patricia Hill Collins - whoever I could find to help support my argument. But more importantly, I wanted to rely upon the concepts of people I enjoyed reading. Doing so meant I enjoyed reading and re-reading their texts, listening to their lectures, and really absorbing all the brilliance they wanted to share.

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I didn’t even know I was thirsty until I began to drink from their wells of knowledge. If that sounds familiar, or even if you think it sounds odd, I invite you to click the link above and listen to the thinking of bell hooks. Or, listen to her lecture here:

I don’t guarantee that you will agree with every word she utters. But I do hope you will rediscover a piece of yourself and, in so doing, begin to articulate your own sense of truth and power more freely when exposed to her thinking and others like her.

One of my friends described bell hooks as a bright comet that went blazing across our timeline. A prolific writer, she left us a tremendous legacy. Please see a few of her books listed below. We will also add a few videos to allow you to continue to enjoy her immense presence.

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CL Nash, PhD © 2026 , The Misogynoir to Mishpat Research Network

Bibliography

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 2014

Killing Rage: Ending Racism, 1995

Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, 2003

Teaching Critical Thinking Practical Wisdom (Bell Hooks Teaching Trilogy), 2010

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Harvest in Translation), 1994

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004

African American women have always endured existence from the margins. Harriet Tubman used stealth, cunning and faith to overcome many obstacles including wading through snake infected waters, repeatedly as she determined her own freedom could not be fully realized until she lead others to freedom.

In our contemporary context, Stacey Abrams felt compelled to enter the governor’s race where she weathered threats and ridicule. She is a Black woman who had the audacity to believe she could govern the State of Georgia and upset the racially hostile block of power there. Whether crawling through swamps, enduring brutal physical blows or having voter records expunged by an opponent who refuses to relinquish power, Black women understand there is power on the margins. (For more theory about the “margins,” please see book hooks’ book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 2000).

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Today, we would like to focus on Fannie Lou Hamer, a poor sharecropper whose quiet dignity and determination became a household name throughout the US. Fannie Lou Hamer’s riveting eloquence emboldened her to courageously speak out against the tremendous abuse she endured for daring to vote. Her power was so significant, that then President Lyndon Johnson preempted her speech on Aug. 22nd, 1964. Her televised speech was to the Democratic National Convention.

The Misognoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2026

We’ve been exploring and identifying the unique issues of misogynoir and the dangerous, often deadly, effects upon our lives. We do this to create knowledge that will lead to policy changes, and we do this to help equip Black women to make better choices that will protect us.

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Pursuing excellence within religious scholarship or religious leadership is often challenging because, any sense of accomplishment is seen as a threat to the established order. Black women, because we are operating within religious spaces, will be told we are not humble enough when we challenge those who steal our labor.

I once had a dean get up and publicly use my creative analysis of the imago Dei in a classroom without giving me credit. When I asked him about it, he never apologized, instead intimating that I should feel honored he thought my analysis worthy of theft! But when our UNPUBLISHED work is being used (without giving us credit) it will be presumed to be the property of the more established and powerful scholar. This is an intellectual form of theft.

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Black men and White women can wield incredible harm to Black women by allowing patriarchal norms to dictate our creative work is “just God’s work which no one can steal.” Yet, the same Dean who failed to give me credit also said that the first sin was to “steal fruit instead of being fruit.” (He said this as an analysis of what happened in the Garden of Eden.) Ironically, that is exactly what happens when we use citational politics that subvert any ethical accountability in how we use the work of other preachers and scholars. One of the ways to help eliminate misogynoiristic practices within the Academy and within religious spaces is to practice more ethical citational politics.

This is just one example of the specific ways that we make Black women more vulnerable. Self proclaimed “allies” are not immune to contributing to this sense of precarity. Click here to continue reading.

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The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network (c) 2026

The amazing Lisa Sharon Harper has done it again! In what we at M2M have hailed as one of her most interesting interviews, she shares with listeners what is meant by “The Religion of Whiteness.” Her interview with Michael Emerson is a “must” for those who are confused as to why the matrix of Christianity, Whiteness and POWER appear to be reaching a fevered pitch. (Scroll to the bottom for the link.)

Together, she and Emerson explore what is meant by the terms: “Christian” and “White.” They also identify some of the philosophical traces of racism which have influenced this matrix of Whiteness, Christianity and Power. How does Whiteness function within Christianity and what are its adherents? Are there symbols or icons which alert one to the existence of this problem within White Christian churches? What is the center of “power” within this form of Christianity? Can people of color also become pracitioners of this corrupt theology? If so, what can they do to be freed from the effects of a religiously supported form of racism?

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A prolific writer, Harper has written many books including Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican…or Democrat (The New Press, 2008); Left Right and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (Elevate, 2011); and the critically acclaimed, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong can be Made Right (Waterbrook, a division of Penguin Random House, 2016). The Very Good Gospel, was recognized as the “2016 Book of the Year” by Englewood Review of Books. It explores God’s intent for the wholeness of all relationships in light of today’s headlines. Follow Lisa Sharon Harper on her website: https://lisasharonharper.com/.

For additional study on this topic, please consider reading: The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones, Bring the War Home: the White Power Movement and Paramilitary of American by Kathleen Belew, and White Evangelical Racism by Anthea Butler.

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Check out this Podcast: Michael Emerson and The Religion Of Whiteness https://player.fm/1BUKNnV

We also warmly invite you to write and think more about the way Black resistance to racial hostility has informed religious praxis (whether in houses of worship or in the Religious Academy), please submit an abstract to our call for papers where we explore the “radical” nature of Black women exercising their faith: https://wp.me/pcx1XN-U3. Our deadline has been updated to April 10, 2023.We also invite you to read and submit an abstract to our call for papers where we explore the “radical” nature of Black women exercising their faith: https://wp.me/pcx1XN-U3.

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The Misogynoir to Mishpat Research Network © 2026

Beginning With Linda Brent

Not unlike the tragic and untimely death of George Floyd, the recent death of Prof. Jason Arday has caused the world to collectively pause and consider what has occurred. Many Black academics are seeing the death of Arday as part of a larger pattern. And, many feel the gaslighting when we call these patterns out — even when the end result is an untimely death of a Black academic colleague.

You might consider the British press which hounded Meghan Markle until she felt her own mental health nearly collapsed. Her husband got the family out of the country in order to ensure their safety. But, it is not just the British press at fault in this type of assault. Many may remember “plagiarism” charges were leveled against Dr. Claudine Gay until she resigned her post at Harvard — her appointment was both unprecedented and historic until a religio-political group pursued her until she resigned.

Whether this recent tragedy reminds you of the treatment received by Claudine Gay or the relentless media pursuit that Meghan Markle endured – the social significance of this tremendous loss has more historical grounding than may be initially evident. I read the death of Arday through the shared lens of Blackness as “presumed ignorant” within Britain’s closest ally — the United States. It is within the United States, I will argue, that we can see a clear historical antecedent to these events.

This is the first of five articles. This opening installment lays out the claim in its historical antecedents — the deep grammar, on both sides of the Atlantic, that has long required a Black person’s word to be countersigned before it could be believed. The second installment, “Who Gets to Be Flawed,” follows that grammar into the present, tracing how the same presumption structures which academics receive minor, private correction for perceived transgressions, which do not. The third, “Manufacturing the Verdict,” turns to the newsroom itself, asking why the press finds a Black scholar’s alleged fall so much more newsworthy than a White counterpart’s. The fourth and fifth articles explore what this pattern costs the people living inside it while boldly interrogating what protection and recovery can look like for those caught in its path.

A Slave Girl’s Word and Incidental Proof

In the United States, I begin the conversation with a woman who called herself Linda Brent, about whom I wrote my dissertation years before any of the men and women named above became the occasion for this series. Brent — the pseudonym Harriet Jacobs gave herself when she published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861 — opens her narrative with a sentence that has stayed with me for the better part of two decades: “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction.” She felt the need to say this before she said almost anything else. Not because her story was implausible on its face — it was, if anything, painfully ordinary for an enslaved woman of her time — but because she knew what awaited a Black woman’s word when it entered a White reading public unescorted.

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It did not enter unescorted. Jacobs’s narrative is bracketed, front and back, by two White women testifying on her behalf. Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who edited the manuscript, wrote an introduction assuring readers that she had “not added any thing to the incidents, or changed the import of her very pertinent remarks” — in other words, that this was really Jacobs’s writing and not Child’s own. Child went further still, explaining how a formerly enslaved woman had come to write so capably: a kind mistress had taught her letters as a girl, and she had continued to educate herself once free. The explanation was offered not as biography but as alibi — a reason competent prose could be trusted to have come from her own hand. At the back of the book, Quaker abolitionist Amy Post supplied a character reference dated October 1859, testifying that she had known Jacobs personally and could vouch for her “delicacy of feeling and purity of thought.” Jacobs’s own preface, sandwiched between these two testimonials, contains an apology that still stops me short: “I wish I were more competent to the task I have undertaken.” A woman who had survived seven years hidden in a garret to protect her children from a slave holder, Brent felt compelled, on the way into her own book, to apologize for her competence.

Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative follows the identical architecture. William Lloyd Garrison’s preface and Wendell Phillips’s introductory letter precede Douglass’s own text, each man staking his own considerable reputation on the claim that the story that follows is true and that Douglass, remarkably, wrote it himself. The scholar John Sekora gave this pattern a name that has outlived the debate it was coined for: the “black message” of the antebellum slave narrative. This, he argued, characteristically arrives “sealed within a White envelope” — a structure in which White sponsors do not merely introduce a Black narrator’s testimony but authorize it, and in authorizing it, control the terms on which it will be heard (Sekora, 1987).

A Presumption Written Into Law, Not Just Onto the Page

It would be a comfortable mistake to treat this as a literary curiosity — a quirk of nineteenth-century publishing, born of marketing rather than doctrine. It was doctrine. Every slave state except Louisiana restricted free Black testimony in cases involving White parties, and most barred it outright (Eisner, 2023). California’s 1850 testimony statute provided that “no black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of or against a White man” — a bar the state supreme court extended to Chinese witnesses four years later, on the reasoning that the same incapacity applied to anyone who was not White (People v. Hall, cited in ACLU of Northern California, n.d.). Ohio’s 1807 Black Laws did the same. So did Texas, whose legislature, even after the Confederacy’s defeat, initially rewrote its statute to permit Black testimony only in cases involving other Black people, leaving White-on-White and White-on-Black matters functionally closed to Black witnesses well into Reconstruction (Equal Justice Initiative, n.d.).

South Carolina’s version of the doctrine is, for my purposes, the most instructive, because it did not simply exclude Black testimony — it built in an exception, and the exception proves the rule with unusual precision. Following the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822, the legislature required free Black petitioners seeking a hearing in equity court to produce the testimony of a White “sponsor” who could personally vouch for their character before their own petition would even be received (H-Net, 2015, citing Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law). A Black person could still, in narrow circumstances, be heard — but only through a White intermediary willing to lend them, in effect, borrowed credibility. This is Sekora’s White envelope, drafted not by an editor but by a legislature.

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The doctrine had a name in the law of evidence: witness competency. Competency asks a prior question to credibility — not is this testimony believable but is this person the kind of person whose testimony may be weighed at all. Black witnesses, enslaved and often free alike, were categorically incompetent under this doctrine in most of the antebellum South — not less credible, but not qualified to be evaluated for credibility in the first place (Carlin, in UCLA Law Review, n.d.). Even after the Fourteenth Amendment nominally extended citizenship and its protections, some jurisdictions, including Kentucky, held that Black testimony remained barred as a matter of state law until courts were forced to say otherwise (Carlin, n.d.). Full Black participation on juries — a related but distinct right, since a juror does more than testify, they judge the testimony of others — was not affirmed by the Supreme Court until Strauder v. West Virginia in 1880, and even that ruling addressed only formal exclusion by statute, not the informal exclusion that continued for another century.

The Doctrine Crossed the Atlantic Before America Did

The American pattern was not invented in Charleston or Sacramento; it was imported, and it is worth pausing on that fact given how much of this series concerns a scholar whose career and death unfolded in Britain rather than the United States. Barbados’s 1661 slave code — the first comprehensive slave law passed by any English colony — barred enslaved testimony against White parties from its outset, and justified the exclusion in language that named Black people an “heathenish, brutish, and uncertain dangerous kind of people,” unfit for the ordinary trial by jury “as the subjects of England are” (An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes, 1661).

That code became the template the rest of the English-speaking slaveholding world copied nearly verbatim: Jamaica adopted it almost word for word in 1664, and South Carolina’s 1696 code, drafted by colonists with direct ties to Barbados, borrowed its structure in turn — meaning the very testimony-exclusion doctrine later written into California and Texas law had already made two prior crossings of the Atlantic before it ever reached them (Rugemer, 2013; Nicholson, 1994). Barbados did not extend Black testimony to “all cases” until 1826, and only then as a limited concession following Bussa’s Rebellion, granted in the same statute that also allowed a White person to kill an enslaved person during unrest with impunity (Beckles, 2006). The doctrine’s ordinary operation, rather than its exceptional cruelty, is captured with particular clarity in a single 1832 case: an all-White Barbadian jury convicted an enslaved man named Robert James of raping a White woman, on testimony that, under the same code, could never have run in the opposite direction had the accusation been reversed (Newton, 2005).

I raise this not to draw a straight line from a 1661 Barbados statute to a Cambridge sociology department in 2026 — no such line exists, and I want to resist the temptation to manufacture one. I raise it because the doctrine this series traces did not stay confined to a single nation’s law, and did not need to. It moved with empire, in both directions across the Atlantic, which is one reason a pattern with American legal roots can feel so immediately recognizable to British readers, and a British death can feel so immediately continuous with an American history.

What the Law and the Page Have in Common

Here is where I want to be careful, because it would be too easy — and too flattering to my own argument — to simply declare that a courtroom rule from 1850 and a plagiarism allegation from 2024/2026 are “the same thing.” They are not the same thing. Claudine Gay was never legally barred from testifying about her own dissertation. Jason Arday was never required to produce a White sponsor before Cambridge would hear him. The formal doctrine of witness incompetency no longer functions this way.

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But a doctrine can die formally and persist informally, and I think that is precisely what has happened here. Consider the structure of the reasoning, stripped of its historical costume. If a people’s own word has been treated, across centuries and institutions, as insufficient evidence of itself — as requiring a second, socially credentialed voice to certify it before it can be safely believed — then a society raised inside that structure does not need a standing law to keep reproducing its logic. It only needs an occasion. And if the animating suspicion beneath the modern charge of academic fraud against a Black scholar is not did this specific person commit this specific act of theft, but rather a prior and more diffuse doubt — could a person like this really have produced work this good on their own — then the plagiarism inquiry is not functioning as a neutral technical check applied evenhandedly. It is functioning as competency doctrine relocated from the witness stand to the citation footnote: not is this testimony credible, but is this person the kind of author whose authorship may be assumed at all.

Philosopher Miranda Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice — the wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower, when identity prejudice causes a hearer to discount their word below what the evidence warrants (Fricker, 2007) — gives this pattern a contemporary name. But Fricker’s framework describes a mechanism; it does not, on its own, explain why this particular mechanism attaches so persistently and so specifically to Black testimony on both sides of the Atlantic. The history does that work. The credibility deficit Fricker identifies in a 2007 philosophy seminar was doctrine on a Barbadian statute book in 1661, on a South Carolina statute book in 1822, and structural necessity in a Boston print shop in 1861. It has had well over three hundred years to become instinct.

From the Witness Stand to the Committee Room

Read this way, the pattern traced in the rest of this series comes into sharper focus. At the University of Cambridge, Prof. William O’Reilly’s upheld plagiarism finding against his own student generated a solicitor’s letter; the presumption of his competence as a scholar survived the finding against him largely intact, because no prior doubt about whether a White historian could really have authored his own work was waiting to be confirmed.

Jason Arday’s doctoral thesis, and Claudine Gay’s decades-old dissertation, were retried in public as though the burden rested on each of them to prove originality from scratch — not on their accusers to prove theft — which is precisely the inversion competency doctrine performed for two centuries: Black authorship treated as guilty of borrowing until independently corroborated, White authorship presumed innocent of it by default. Even the specific comfort many observers took in Gay’s citation record being reviewed by a body other than Gay herself, or in Arday’s thesis being re-litigated by journalists rather than simply accepted on his account of it, echoes something Amy Post and Lydia Maria Child would have recognized instantly: the sense that a Black scholar’s own account of her own work is a claim awaiting a second, more trusted signature.

I do not think most of the people participating in these modern episodes are consciously invoking 1822 South Carolina or 1661 Barbados. I doubt Christopher Rufo has read Thomas Morris’s legal history of Southern slavery, and I would not accuse him of doctrinal intent. That is exactly the point a womanist reading insists on, and exactly what makes the pattern harder to dislodge than a single bad actor: a presumption this old does not need to be remembered consciously in order to be reenacted faithfully. It only needs to have never been formally retired — only relocated, from the statute to the syllabus, from the courtroom to the comment section.

Closing Where I Began

Harriet Jacobs wrote, in that same anxious preface, that she wanted to “add my testimony to that of abler pens, to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is.” Abler pens. She had just finished writing one of the most devastating first-person accounts of enslavement produced in this country, and she still described her own pen as the lesser instrument — a doubt she may or may not have believed, but felt she had to perform for a readership trained to require it. That performance is the thread connecting a fugitive woman’s 1861 preface to a Cambridge sociologist’s 2026 resignation letter and a Harvard president’s 2024 one.

This is the first of five articles in the series, “Thinking While Black.” The remaining installments in this series examine how that requirement gets manufactured today, by newsrooms and committees rather than legislatures — and, in the article to follow, is asks who can be a knower? Whose knowledge production has validity – and whose does not? If the story is truly about plagiarism, then why are the rules applied differently – and the media coverage significantly different for Black versus White scholars?

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Dr. Nash, The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2026

Works Cited

ACLU of Northern California. (n.d.). George Gordon — Gold Chains: The Hidden History of Slavery in California.

An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes. (1661). Barbados. [Primary source, the Barbados Slave Code].

Beckles, H. McD. (2006). A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Carlin, D. (n.d.). The Courtroom as White Space: Racial Performance as Noncredibility. UCLA Law Review.

Eisner, E. (2023, October 12). Free Black Witnesses in the Antebellum Upper South. Law and History Review. Cambridge University Press.

Equal Justice Initiative. (n.d.). On Oct. 26, 1866: Texas Passes Law Restricting Black People From Testifying in Court Proceedings. calendar.eji.org.

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.

H-Net. (2015). Free black or slave testimony in colonial court? [Discussion thread, citing Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860].

Jacobs, H. A. [Linda Brent, pseud.]. (1861). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (L. M. Child, Ed.). Thayer & Eldridge.

Newton, M. J. (2005). The King v. Robert James, a Slave, for Rape: Inequality, Gender, and British Slave Amelioration, 1823–1834. Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Nicholson, B. J. (1994). Legal Borrowing and the Origins of Slave Law in the British Colonies. American Journal of Legal History, 38(1), 38–54.

Rugemer, E. B. (2013). The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century. The William and Mary Quarterly, 70(3), 429–458.

Sekora, J. (1987). Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative. Callaloo, 32, 482–515.

Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880).

For Further Reading

Freely accessible online:

● Jacobs, H. A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl — full text at Documenting the American South (docsouth.unc.edu) and the Internet Archive.

● Douglass, F. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself — full text at Documenting the American South.

● “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes” (1661) — full transcribed text at Laws of Enslavement and Freedom (slaveryandfreedomlaws.lib.unb.ca) and Slavery, Law, and Power (slaverylawpower.org).

● Colored Conventions Project (coloredconventions.org) — primary-source materials on Black organizing against testimony-exclusion laws, including the California conventions of 1855–57.

● Equal Justice Initiative, “A History of Racial Injustice” calendar (calendar.eji.org) — dated entries on state testimony and jury laws, with primary citations.

● Sekora, J. (1987). “Black Message/White Envelope” — widely available through university library databases (JSTOR) and cited in most subsequent slave-narrative scholarship.

Worth the investment for deeper study:

● Yellin, J. F. (2004). Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Basic Civitas Books. The definitive biography and authentication of Jacobs’s authorship.

● Morris, T. D. (1996). Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860. University of North Carolina Press. The standard legal history of testimony, competency, and evidentiary exclusion under American slave law.

● Beckles, H. McD. (2006). A History of Barbados. Cambridge University Press. Covers the 1826 Consolidated Slave Law and the trade-off structure between limited testimony rights and expanded owner impunity.

● Andrews, W. L. (1986). To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. University of Illinois Press.

● Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.

● Fabi, M. G. (2001). Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. University of Illinois Press. Useful on the authentication demands placed on Black authorship beyond the slave narrative proper.

“Close the door, you’re letting flies into the house!” That was my mother’s refrain every August of my childhood, called out behind a screen door as we chased each other in and outside of the house – playing tag or some other mindless game. I’ve spent my whole adult life thinking about doors that slammed shut versus those which are held open for the next person. But when I start looking for the women inside the history of Black August, I find so many doors left standing open behind them — their names spoken once, in passing, and then quietly closed on.

This is my second chronicle for Black August, and I promised at the end of the first one that I owed you more. I meant it. One of the things I refuse to do, in my own community and in my own writing, is practice selective memory — remembering the brothers, the sons, the martyrs, and letting the women who stood in the same fire fade into footnotes. So let’s open those doors back up.

Let’s start with two of the best known names for women associated with the era: Angela Davis and Assata Shakur. History likes to fold them into the same sentence, as if their stories rhymed.

When the guns used in the 1970 Marin County courthouse takeover were traced to Angela Davis, she went underground for two months, evading one of the largest manhunts the FBI had ever mounted. But when agents finally caught up to her in a New York City motel that October, Davis did not run again. She stayed, stood trial, and on June 4, 1972, an all-White jury acquitted her after thirteen hours of deliberation. She bet her freedom on the possibility — however slim — that the same system trying to bury her could be forced to let her go. She won that bet. Many others did not.

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Assata Shakur made a different wager. Convicted in 1977 for a 1973 New Jersey Turnpike shooting she has always maintained she did not commit, Shakur escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility in November of 1979 — just three months after the very first Black August was observed inside San Quentin. In 1984, she resurfaced in Cuba, was granted political asylum, and lived there until her recent death in September 2025. She is the only woman ever placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, still carrying a bounty on her name. Where Davis chose to fight from inside the courtroom, Shakur chose to stop negotiating with a country that had already shown her its verdict. Both choices were acts of survival. Neither was the easy one.

Not every woman’s resistance made it to a courthouse or a headline. Diane Nash did the opposite kind of work — the kind that takes a movement forward without ever standing in its spotlight. As a twenty-two-year-old student in Nashville, she chaired the student committee that organized the lunch counter sit-ins, and when Freedom Riders were beaten and their campaign nearly abandoned in 1961, it was Nash who made the call that many of her own colleagues thought was reckless: recruit new riders and keep the buses moving, because letting violence win even once would teach the whole country that violence always wins.

She was jailed more than once, including a thirty-day sentence she chose to serve while pregnant rather than pay a fine. Years later, she helped conceive the strategy behind the Selma campaign that led to the Voting Rights Act — largely from behind the scenes, shaping outcomes without becoming the face of them. Ask most people to name a leader of the civil rights movement, and her name rarely comes first. It should.

We look back on the women we can easily associate with “Black August” and there is something captivating about these stories. Yet, others play an even more subtle role. Women like Shirley Chisholm used her speeches and her writing to combat the violence of what we now call the Civil Rights Era. Chisholm walked into Congress in 1968 as the first Black woman ever elected to it, and in 1972 she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, telling anyone who doubted her, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” June Jordan carried that same refusal into poetry and the essay — a Harlem-born, Jamaican-rooted writer who spent her career insisting that Black liberation, women’s liberation, and every other struggle against empire were the same struggle wearing different clothes. Neither woman’s name is stitched into Black August the way George Jackson’s is. But naming what is broken, in a courtroom or a poem, is its own kind of fight.

And some of the truest Black August history belongs to women whose names most of us were never taught at all.

On the evening of August 29, 1974 — five years before Black August had a name — roughly two hundred women incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York rose up. Guards had just dragged a young organizer named Carol Crooks from her cell, thrown her down a flight of concrete stairs, and hauled her away after she’d won a lawsuit against the prison’s practice of throwing women in solitary without a hearing.

The women left behind did not know if Crooks was alive. So they took over two buildings and a recreation yard, held seven staff members for two and a half hours, and refused to stand down until they got proof.

State troopers were called in from a men’s prison to break it. Twenty-five women were injured. Twenty-four were shipped off to a facility for the “criminally insane” without so much as a hearing. It became known as the August Rebellion, and it forced the legal changes that followed in Powell v. Ward two years later. Attica, which happened in the same state three years earlier, is a name most Americans know.

The August Rebellion, led entirely by women, is not.

That asymmetry is not an accident of history. It is a choice, repeated so many times it starts to look natural, and it is precisely the kind of forgetting Black August exists to interrupt.

Even the tradition’s own calendar of loss holds women it rarely says aloud in the same breath as George Jackson. Safiya Bukhari — Black Panther, co-founder of the Jericho Movement for political prisoners, a woman who survived nearly a decade of incarceration and denied medical care — died on August 24, 2003. Her essays are still reprinted every Black August, often without her name reaching much further than the byline.

So much of my childhood was about music, church, and sitting down for my hair to be washed and pressed every other Saturday. Because so much of that visceral knowledge was transmitted through braids and hot comb ideology, Black women have sought ways to hold the door open to knowledge and opportunity without passing on the trauma.

Black women have always been the ones holding the door: standing in the doorway between what a family survived and what the children were allowed to know, deciding what got passed down and what got left outside in the heat. That is a memory tradition too, even when it doesn’t come with a courthouse date attached. It’s in the kitchen-table stories, the names repeated at the stove, the great-aunt who “knew somebody who knew somebody,” the mothers who taught their daughters both the sit-in and the folding chair. Some of that memory got written into law. Some of it got written into poems. Most of it just got said, out loud, in rooms with no reporters in them, which is exactly why it’s the first kind of memory we lose.

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So I find myself standing in that doorway to knowledge and history. I take in the memory of Angela Davis who returned to fight and Assata Shakur, whose fight was in the strength it took to embrace freedom on her own terms. I remind myself to commune with the stories about Diane Nash, who moved the mountain and let others stand on top of it. I hold space for Shirley Chisholm and June Jordan, who named the break in the system out loud, in Congress and on the page. I give thanks for Carol Crooks and the women of Bedford Hills, who rose up before anyone called it Black August at all. I remember Safiya Bukhari, whose words we still read every year, often without asking who wrote them.

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If you’ve read this far, you already understand what I’m building toward — a body of work that keeps insisting on the whole story, not the convenient half of it. I’d love for you to come find the rest of what I’m writing. You can become a subscriber to my Substack. I’d be honored to have you join us and have regular notifications about these and other important topics.

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We are the ones who remember first, and remember longest. Let’s not forget each other.

Dr. CL Nash, PhD. The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2026

There was a swing set in the backyard – not too far from our dog’s house. My cousins and I ran outside, sandals “clack-clacking” against our heels, through the spray of the hose. Then we ran back in just as fast, and every single time my mother called out behind us: “Close the door, you’re letting flies into the house” or “Stop slamming that door!”

My momma had a HiFi (not a WiFi), a proper piece of furniture in the dining room that we had to squeeze past just to get into the living room. When 8-tracks came along, Momma was first in line, so the station wagon could blast James Cleveland’s, “God Has Smiled on Me,” or an Andraé Crouch song.

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We were the Brady Bunch with better rhythm. We lived on a quiet block where, the moment one man started cutting his grass, everyone else was suddenly outside doing the same.

For kids, streetlights were the only clock that mattered. We looked forward to trips to the corner store where a quarter got you two of your three favorite dime candies — Lemon Heads, Hot Tamales, Red Hots, and Jaw Breakers were among my favorites. Lunch might be PB&J accompanied by lemonade and red Kool-Aid to kept us going between rounds.

After all that fun — and sugar —all the kids paid our dues in the punishing bath, pipes hissing with water too hot for comfort, my mother’s nose wrinkling as she leaned in the doorway: “Y’all smell like the outdoors.”

That was August. Heat, hymns, and the particular freedom that would only end when the school supply displays went up and the air itself seemed to change color.

Adulthood turned my August to red. For years, my calendar ran on teaching contracts that lasted nine, sometimes ten months, with nothing waiting for me in the gap. August became the month I lived in the red — no paycheck, no per diem, no safety net, just the quiet arithmetic of stretching what little remained from spring across a kitchen table with more bills on it than answers.

August is also my birth month; my birthday falls on the tenth. All year, I sang “Happy Birthday” for students and colleagues alike. But when my own turn came, there were no colleagues singing back, no parent showing up with cupcakes, no surprise to walk into. My gratitude for simply still being here — alive, upright, another year added — had nowhere to go but inward, a whisper only I could hear in my own home, plush with solitude but bereft of shared celebration.

I learned to celebrate myself quietly, the way you learn to hum a song you want to experience over and over because its melody is so sweet.

Black August, though, is neither the heat of a childhood summer, nor the coarse math of an adult living paycheck to paycheck. It is more somber.

So let me slow down and tell it properly.

On the morning of August 7, 1970, seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson walked into the Marin County courthouse with pistols, a shotgun, and an automatic weapon hidden under a raincoat. He was there for his older brother, George, and two other men — William Christmas and James McClain — who the state had locked away and, in George’s case, was determined never to release. Jonathan stood, announced himself, and began handing out weapons to the prisoners in the courtroom. Within minutes, a judge, a prosecutor, and three jurors were his hostages. By the time the getaway van was riddled with police gunfire outside, Jonathan, Christmas, and McClain were dead alongside the judge. Only Ruchell Magee survived that morning; he would spend more than fifty years behind bars before his release and death in 2023.

The guns Jonathan carried that day were traced to a twenty-six-year-old philosophy professor named Angela Davis. She had bought them legally, months earlier, with no way of knowing how they would be used. It did not matter. A warrant went out for her arrest on August 14th, and four days later, on August 18, 1970, she became the third woman ever placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list — her face, her afro, her name printed under the words armed and dangerous. She went underground for two months before agents found her in a New York City motel. Rather than disappear, Davis chose to stand trial. On June 4, 1972, an all-White jury took thirteen hours to acquit her of every charge.

A little over a year after Jonathan died reaching for his brother’s freedom, on August 21, 1971, George Jackson himself was killed by prison guards at San Quentin during an uprising whose facts are still disputed to this day. He was thirty years old. He had already given the state ten years of his life, seven and a half of them in solitary confinement, and in that confinement he had written Soledad Brother, the book that would make him one of the most read Black revolutionary voices in the country.

By 1979, incarcerated organizers inside California’s prisons had turned that grief into discipline. They called it Black August: a month of fasting from sunup to sundown, of wearing black armbands on the left arm, of trading entertainment for the study of revolutionary texts, of training the body the way you train the mind. Study, fast, train, fight — that was the whole practice, distilled to four words a person could hold onto even in a cell.

It spread beyond San Quentin’s walls into a national tradition, a way of insisting that the incarcerated and the free alike remember Nat Turner’s rebellion, which began in that same week in 1831; remember the enslaved men and women of Saint-Domingue who rose up in August of 1791 and became Haiti; remember every uprising this country has tried to file away as isolated, unconnected, forgettable.

I did not choose to be born the week after Jonathan Jackson died reaching for his brother’s freedom, two weeks before George Jackson was killed for refusing to stop being dangerous to a system built on his containment. But there is something in sharing a birth week with that history that I cannot take lightly. My small, quiet gratitude — the one I used to whisper to myself in the plush solitude of my own home — sits differently now, next to armbands and hunger strikes and a fifty-year sentence survived. Their discipline makes room for my joy. Their memory insists that I am allowed to still be here, loudly, and to say so.

My parents were not revolutionaries in the way the Panthers were. My mother used simple activities to create cultural memory – stories told from the other end of a hot comb. She and my aunties would insist that love, real love, is often a discipline before it is a comfort. They mapped protection across my scalp in neat rows because the world outside our kitchen would often make me unsafe. Black August maps protection across a whole people’s memory for the same reason: because forgetting has never once made us safer.

Study, fast, train, fight was never only for the men inside San Quentin. It is also for the woman writing this at her kitchen table, refusing to let her birth week — or her people’s history — pass by unnamed. And it is, I’ll admit, an incomplete history as I’ve told it so far. Angela Davis was not the only woman standing inside this story; she was only the one this particular week could not avoid naming. There is more — a great deal more — and I mean to tell it.

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I turned a year older on August 10th this year, sitting inside this same stretch of history I’ve just written you through — Jonathan on one side of my birthday, George on the other. I’m choosing, this year, to let that be loud instead of whispered. If you can relate to any of this — the child running through the hose, the adult counting pennies in August, the history we are still living inside of — I’d love for you to come find the rest of my work. You can learn more about my Substack and what I’m building there by clicking here. Thank you for making space for this reflection.

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Dr. Nash, The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2026

Bearing false witness has often been simplified to mean “lying.” The belief that lying is unethical is a central tenent to many religions. Bearing false witness is particularly lethal when it creates a unfair consequence for others. The admonition against “bearing false witness” is located two Old Testament texts and is number nine of the ten commandments.

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” This Commandment is recorded in Exodus 20:19 and Deuteronomy 5:20.

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Rev. David Wilson Rogers indicated that the two texts use different words for the word ‘false.’ According to Rogers, the Exodus text references intentional falsification - or a deliberately misleading statement. Despite the different nuance, he correctly states that,

This is a very hard truth to fully accept, and an even more challenging one to live out in our Christian lives. Any time we make broad and pejorative statements, we violate God’s commandment. Anytime we share or spread false, incomplete, or distorted information— knowingly or ignorantly — we violate God’s commandment. Anytime we cast condemnation upon whole classes of people we do not know, we violate God’s commandment.

My concern with bearing false witness is twofold: 1) the harm it causes to the recipient of the lie and, 2) the strangle hold it places upon the speaker. Whether conscious or unconscious bias, the result is still often a devastating result for the recipient. One example is the Central Park Five, who were coerced and wrongly convicted of raping a White woman. The five African American youths, aged 14-16, served seven years for a crime they did not and could not have committed. Using his privileged position to help advocate for their imprisonment, Donald Trump spoke untruthfully about their guilt and used considerable funds to demand the death penalty for the youths.

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The consequence to these teens, their families and their communities, is only the tip of the iceburg. The consquence went well beyond that to creating an impact for African Americans, more broadly, as proof that even our children are not safe from coercisive and illegal presumptions of guilt - that over very skin color is perceived as a weapon against the State.

The failure of Christians to live into the fullness of the Ninth Commandment is all around us. Bearing false witness does far more than distort and corrupt truth. It shatters peace, erodes trust, and violates all of humanity. Even well-intended statements that are rooted in presumed Christian doctrine violate God’s Law in powerful, albeit subtle ways.

My second concern is that this has an impact upon the speaker, and others who operated to condemn the youths as well. By advocating a presumption of their guilt, people like Trump do not only cause harm to other communities, but they harm themselves.

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“White Rage“ is closely tied to a need to maintain unfair levels of power through unjust actions. Without setting an example of the person who appears to transcend the racial caste system, without making an example to the rest of their community that “this is what we will do to you next ...” then White rage becomes unbearable. By eroding trust between communities, we create a wedge of mistrust that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

The Misogynoir to Mishpat Research Network © 2026

Stress is part of life, and some stress is even beneficial. Yet, dangerous levels of stress, particularly when we remain in the “fight or flight“ high hormonal stage, can be dangerous and deadly.

Weathering is a term to describe the disproportionate stress that Black women endure in America. Recently, the term “weathering“ has been used to explore the way that stress disproportionately impacts Black women. From poorer health outcomes to higher morbidity rates, this phenomenon is currently a crisis. Black women have been taught that we are exceptionally strong.

We ofen feel we are carrying the weight of the world, shouldering problems for our immediate families, care for aging parents, and leadership within our churches. We notoriously “do more with less.” The Misogynoir to Mishpat Research Network is seeking to find ways to strengthen African descended women, not only to amplify our voices, but to strengthen ourselves in body, mind and spirit.

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Learn more by listening to the podcast, “This Racism is Killing Me Inside.”

Check out this Podcast: This Racism Is Killing Me Inside (updated link below): https://www.npr.org/2018/01/10/576818478/this-racism-is-killing-me-inside

Original Link: https://player.fm/1BVJyXA

If you are experiencing stress that is interfering with your life, causing physical problems or creating constant anxiety, please speak with someone you trust, talk with your General Practitioner or even a trusted clergy member.

In addition, here are resources in the UK:

• Talk to Samaritans. ...

• Shout Crisis Text Line. (free 24/7 mental health support)

• Rethink Mental Illness. ...

• Mind. ...

• CALM Helpline and webchat. ...

• National Health Insurance (NHS).

  Leave a comment

The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2023, reprinted 2026

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“Academics for Black Survival and Wellness (A4BL) is a personal and professional development initiative for Non-Black academics to honor the toll of racial trauma on Black people, resist anti-Blackness and white supremacy, and facilitate accountability and collective action. A4BL also is a space for healing and wellness for Black people.”

https://www.academics4blacklives.com/

It is important for us to create a vision of what it means for us to all work together to ensure equity, so that each of us can make our contributions within Religious Education.

The Misogynoir to Mishpat Research Network © 2023, reprinted 2026

If you are examining issues of race within higher education, you are likely to have heard about “Afropessimism“ which provides a critical framework for understanding how colonialism and historical enslavement impact contemporary reality. One of its most significant assertions is that the impetus for Black pain will never be eradicated because the function of Black pain is to create White wholeness. James Baldwin’s critique of this is particularly relevant in his works such as I Am Not Your Negro. (See “I Am Not Your Negro,” in Media Diversified for more analysis.) Baldwin makes similar assertions but expands upon this to come to the conclusion that White angst is directly tied to a lack of identity and worth under the racial rubric of “White.”

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As one example, White women in 19th Century America understood the definition of “lady“ as being everything a Black woman was not: sexually pure, educated, and a producer of citizens (using this term in a broad and philosophical manner). By contrast, Black enslaved women were presumed to be sexually available, uneducated (particularly after laws forbiding their education), and producers of labor units - not citizens. (See this article “The Jezebel Stereotype“ featured on the website, The Jim Crow Museum. This provides pictures of artifacts and cinematic anlysis of movies such as Monsters Ball to help examine the Jezebel stereotype as a form of gendered anti-Blackness, or what we now call “misogynoir.”)

When Black scholars come against assumptions about their very bodies and intellect which keep them out of lectureships, professorships and even postdoctoral fellowships, a rigorous analysis of “why” these things occur is relevant within our theoretical framework.

Scholars of Afropessimism have quoted and used the work of thinkers such as Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers in their analysis. Yet, not all of these scholars agree with the way their work is aligned with Afropessimism. African descended academics will find these debates worth understanding when we identify appropriate theoretical frameworks for our own critical intellectual projects.

Here at M2M, we previously shared a video of Frank Wilderson engaging with the topic of Afropessimism as one of the founders of this school of thought. Today, we are sharing another video, where Hortense Spillers explores the relevance for and implications of Afropessimism. We believe this will encourage greater engagement with these frameworks.

We’ve added links to many of the scholars and information listed above as you further engage with this topic. However, you may need to use your university account to access some of the articles referenced.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcZWCAA8VvmLK49mkJ020RA

The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network 2026

Burnout has been an undeserved badge of honor within many Western job settings. People are seen as dedicated when they work an extraordinary amount of hours for a job that takes advantage of them, doesn’t fairly compensate them, and gives them “kudos” while sucking their life out of them.

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Burnout is tricky. We see its pernicious effects within the lives of those close to us, but we often fail to recognize it within ourselves. Symptoms of burn out can range from exhaustion, to lack of clear thinking, to the emotional impact of becoming weepy or angry. The World Health Organization defines burnout as a “syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” It further explains it as having three dimensions:

• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;

• increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and

• reduced professional efficacy.

Perhaps what we under-estimate is the potential for long-term effects, and the ability of burnout to actually substantially create co-morbidities, and premature death within Black women. That is because we deal with the intersectional issues of racialized stress, gendered stress and a host of other intersectional levels of stress and struggle. According to BMC Psychology, long-term effects after treatment can include,

“... extreme fatigue, sleep disturbances, problems with concentration, problems with memory and reduced stress tolerance, were rated with single item ...

Read the rest of the article here:

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By misogynoir2mishpat

In July 2024, we had a special honor of demonstrating our commitment to this very elevation by managing the special issue of the African Journal of Gender and Religion. The issue entitled, “Black Women’s Radical Religious Epistemologies in Mahogany and Steepled Towers” unites voices too often overlooked, presenting a profoundly transformative religious epistemology that challenges and redefines traditional narratives.

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Within these pages, you will find the wisdom of African-descended women not only centered but celebrated, drawing from the rich well of communal and ancestral knowledge. The five essays, introductory piece, and book reviews collectively exemplify this radical shift, making visible the essential contributions of these scholars. This work is not merely important; it is vital. We therefore invite you to engage with this issue, to share it, and to join us in amplifying these voices further.

As part of this celebration, the M2M Research Network editors—Drs. Nash, Webster, and Patel—hosted a Launch Party, where writers and editors connected to discuss their work. Following that meeting, we were featured in the first of two episodes for Beyond the Womanist Classroom. In the August 31^st episode, our esteemed host, Dr. Mitzi Smith, conducted interviews with some of our editors and authors, offering deeper insights into the significance of their scholarship. You can access Season 2, Episode 5, “Black Women’s Radical Religious Epistemologies in Mahogany and Steepled Towers,” through the provided link.

The implications of this work are far-reaching. We invite you to celebrate these extraordinary scholars by downloading and sharing the podcast, helping to shift the position of Black women from the margins to the center of religious scholarship. These scholars, often independent and burdened with student loan debt, face significant barriers to securing professorships and lectureships.

By amplifying their voices, we open doors to publishing opportunities, academic grants, paid fellowships, and employment. In addition to your financial support, please listen and share the podcast. Your support is invaluable.

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We truly appreciate you!

The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network (c) 2026

Here’s the link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2034701/15674737

Here are the show notes:

In Season 2, Episode 5, podcast host welcomes co-editors and contributors of the special issue of the African Journal of Gender and Religion entitled “Black Women’s Radical Religious Epistemologies in Mahogany & Steepled Towers.”

Co-editors:
Dr. CL Nash is a Political Theology Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science. She is also a recent recipient of the prestigioous JIAS Writing Fellowship. Nash directs the Misogynoir to Mishpat (”hatred of Black women to justice”) Research Network.

Dr. Geeta Patel is an interdisciplinary scholar, poet/translator, curator, and writer-activist, with degrees in three sciences, philosophy, and South Asian Studies. Institutional Affiliation: University of Virginia

Contributors:
Dr. Anna Perkins (”On/Unstained White Dress(es)...: Afro- Caribbean Female Purity in Sacred Spaces in Three Caribbean Women Poets”) is a Senior Programme Officer with the Quality Assurance Unit, Office of the Board for Undergraduate Studies, University of the West Indies. Perkins earned a PhD in ethics.

Dr. Clementine Nishimwe (”Doing Church Differently: Crafting a Church Using the Circle’s Theologizing Methodologies in a Xenophobic and Gendered Context”) is a postdoctoral researcher at Åbo Akademi University in Finland.

Dr. Claudette Anderson (”Obeah/Obia by Igbo Spelling: Affirming the Value of After God is Dibia”) is Executive Director and Professor of Ọbịa at Unụchi Foundation, an Afro-Atlantic Religious Reparations nonprofit.

You can find the petition mentioned in the podcast on Change.org under Repeal 1898 Obeah Law.

Support the Show.

Introduction

Black August is a month dedicated to reflecting on the struggles, sacrifices, and triumphs of Black freedom fighters. It is a time to honor those who have laid down their lives in the pursuit of justice and liberation, particularly those within the walls of the prison-industrial complex. The origins of Black August trace back to the 1970s in California prisons (such as the Folsom Prison Strike, 1970), where it was created to honor the lives and deaths of Black political prisoners killed by the state, raise awareness about prison conditions, and celebrate the radical tradition of Black resistance against systemic oppression. This blog delves into the ethical and validity of Black August, highlighting the often overlooked contributions of Black women in the fight for civil rights and liberation.

The Historical Significance of Black August

Black August is a month of historical significance for Black people. It marks numerous pivotal moments in Black history that continue to shape the contemporary struggle for freedom and justice. One of the most notable events associated with Black August is the assassination of George Jackson, a member of the Black Panther Party (see Power to the People, 2016), by a prison guard in San Quentin, California, on August 21, 1971. Jackson’s death, along with the earlier death of his brother Jonathan Jackson, who died in a courthouse shootout in August 1970, has left an indelible mark on the Black Liberation movement.

Moreover, August holds other significant dates such as the arrival of the first group of enslaved Africans in Virginia in late August 1619, the enactment of the Slavery Abolition Act in August 1833, and the brutal murder of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. Each of these events underscores the long history of oppression and the ongoing fight for justice.

The Legacy of Black Women in the Struggle

While the narratives of Black August often highlight male figures such as George and Jonathan Jackson, it is crucial to recognize the indispensable contributions of Black women to the liberation struggle. (See Comrade Sisters, 2022). Black women have consistently been at the forefront of resistance, yet their efforts are frequently overlooked. Figures like Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and Fannie Lou Hamer have played pivotal roles in challenging systemic oppression and advocating for Black liberation.

Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, remains a symbol of Black resistance. (See Dialectics of Liberation, 2022; ) Her autobiography, Assata: An Autobiography, provides a profound insight into her life and the broader struggle for Black liberation. Angela Davis, another prominent figure, has dedicated her life to fighting against the prison-industrial complex and advocating for the rights of marginalized communities. Fannie Lou Hamer, a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, famously declared, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired,” capturing the exhaustion and determination of Black women fighting for justice.

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Honoring Black Women Freedom Fighters

To truly honor Black August, it is imperative to center the stories and leadership of Black women. These women have not only participated in but have often led movements for civil rights, social justice, and liberation. Their contributions are not ancillary but foundational to the progress that has been made.

For instance, the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist lesbian organization active in the 1970s, emphasized the interconnectedness of race, gender, and class oppression. Their work laid the groundwork for intersectional approaches to social justice that continue to influence contemporary movements. The imperative for justice is central to Christianity, for example, in the term mishpat, which is used over 400 times in the Bible.

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Challenging Anti-Blackness

Black August is also a time to confront and dismantle anti-Blackness in all its forms. This includes recognizing that anti-Blackness is not only propagated by White communities but also exists within non-Black communities of color and within Black communities themselves. The internalization of anti-Blackness can lead to behaviors and attitudes that perpetuate oppression.

The fight against anti-Blackness requires a commitment to continuous self-reflection and action. It involves educating oneself about Black history and the ongoing struggles faced by Black communities, supporting policies that address systemic inequalities, and amplifying the voices of Black leaders and activists.

Actions to Honor Black August

1. Learn Black History:

• Educate yourself and others about Black history and the contributions of Black freedom fighters. Share resources such as books, articles, and documentaries that highlight the rich and often suppressed history of Black resistance.

• Recommended reads include The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney.

2. Center Black Voices:

• Amplify Black voices in your community and workplace. Support Black creators, entrepreneurs, and activists. Ensure that Black perspectives are included and valued in discussions about social justice and equity. (See Social Justice Meaning and Main Principles Explained, 2024.)

• Engage with and support movements like Black Lives Matter and the fight for reparations.

3. Commit to Daily Actions:

• Take daily actions to support Black communities. This can include donating to Black-led organizations, volunteering for causes that benefit Black people, or simply being an ally in your everyday interactions.

4. Challenge Internalized Anti-Blackness:

• Reflect on your own biases and work to unlearn anti-Black attitudes and behaviors. Engage in conversations about anti-Blackness with friends, family, and colleagues.

• Recognize the ways in which non-Black communities of color also perpetuate anti-Blackness and work towards solidarity and allyship.

Conclusion

Black August is a powerful reminder of the ongoing struggle for Black liberation and the sacrifices made by countless freedom fighters. It is a call to honor their legacy by continuing the fight against systemic oppression and anti-Blackness. By centering the contributions of Black women and committing to daily actions that support Black communities, we can move closer to a future of true equity and justice.

But, it is more than this. It is a reminder that Black women have always been and continue to be standard bearers in America’s political landscape. Today, whether serving the highest court in the land, or the highest political office of the land, Black women continue to provide strong and reliable leadership which can galvanize us around our democratic goals and our ethical responsibilities.

Dr. CL Nash, The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2024

Resources for Further Reading

Books

• Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow, 2010.

• Alkalimat, Abdul. Dialectics of Liberation: The African Liberation Support Movement, January 12, 2022

• Corrigan, Lisa. Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement and Rhetoric of Black Liberation, 2016

• Davis, Angela. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, 2016

• Davis, Angela. Angela Davis: an Autobiography, 2013 (reprint)

• Davis, Angela. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture, 2023

• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, 2021 (reprint).

• Jackson, George. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, 2010 (reprint)

• Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984.

• Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 2018.

• Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography, 2001.

• Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, 2020.

Online Resources

• Black History Bootcamp,

https://blackhistorybootcamp.com/

• The Center for Constitutional Rights,

https://ccrjustice.org/

• Mollenkamp, Daniel. Social Justice Meaning and Main Principles Explained, 2024

• The Combahee River Collective Statement, https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf

• Equal Justice Initiative,

https://eji.org/

• The Movement for Black Lives,

https://m4bl.org/

For example, the women of MOVE—including Debbie Sims Africa, Janet Holloway Africa, and Janine Phillips Africa—represent a profound example of how womanist ethics operates within revolutionary communities that center ecological consciousness, collective child-rearing, and resistance to state violence. Their story reveals both the possibilities and the devastating costs of attempting to create alternative ways of living within a society structured by racial domination. Through examining their experiences, particularly the 1985 bombing that destroyed their community and killed eleven people, we can understand how situational ethics demands responses that prioritize community survival over individual safety.

MOVE: Revolutionary Community as Womanist Practice

Founded in Philadelphia in 1972 by John Africa (born Vincent Leaphart), MOVE operated as an intentional community committed to what they called “natural law”—living in harmony with nature, rejecting technology that harmed the environment, and raising children collectively. While John Africa served as the organization’s philosophical leader, the daily work of sustaining community life fell primarily to women who embraced what Alice Walker calls “womanist” consciousness—the commitment to the survival and wholeness of entire communities.

The women of MOVE practiced what womanist theologian Delores Williams identifies as “survival/quality-of-life” ethics, making decisions based on the immediate needs of their community rather than abstract principles. This included growing their own food, homeschooling their children, and developing alternative approaches to healthcare that emphasized prevention and natural remedies.

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Their communal approach to child-rearing reflected what Patricia Hill Collins calls “other-mothering”—the practice of shared responsibility for community children that has sustained Black communities through centuries of oppression. MOVE women understood that raising revolutionary children required challenging not just racial oppression but also the nuclear family structure that isolates child-rearing from broader community support.

Ecological Consciousness and Structural Resistance

MOVE’s ecological politics emerged from an understanding that environmental destruction and racial oppression were interconnected systems. Their commitment to “natural law” represented what environmental justice scholar Robert Bullard calls “environmental racism”—the recognition that communities of color bear disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards while being excluded from environmental decision-making.

The women of MOVE practiced what we might now call “intersectional environmentalism”—understanding that ecological health required challenging systems of racial, economic, and gender domination simultaneously. Their urban gardening, rejection of processed foods, and commitment to animal rights reflected a holistic understanding of liberation that connected personal health to community wellbeing to planetary survival.

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This ecological consciousness put them at odds with both mainstream environmental movements, which often ignored racial justice, and Black liberation movements, which sometimes viewed environmental concerns as secondary to more immediate struggles against racial oppression. MOVE women’s ability to hold these apparently contradictory commitments together reflects what Katie Geneva Cannon calls “the moral wisdom” of Black women—the capacity to navigate complex ethical terrain without reducing it to simple formulas.

State Violence and Community Vulnerability

The Philadelphia police department’s escalating harassment of MOVE throughout the 1970s and 1980s illustrates how communities that attempt to create alternatives to dominant social structures become targets of state violence. The 1978 confrontation that resulted in the death of police officer James Ramp and the imprisonment of nine MOVE members (known as the MOVE 9) demonstrated the state’s investment in criminalizing alternative ways of living.

From a womanist ethics perspective, the persecution of MOVE must be understood within the broader context of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment”—the systematic withdrawal of resources from marginalized communities combined with increased surveillance and punishment. MOVE’s West Philadelphia neighborhood had been subject to decades of disinvestment, environmental racism, and police violence that made community self-determination not just attractive but necessary for survival.

The women of MOVE understood that their community’s vulnerability stemmed not from their own choices but from structural forces beyond their control. Their commitment to collective living and ecological practices represented situational ethical responses to the reality that existing institutions consistently failed to serve their community’s needs.

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The 1985 Bombing: State Terrorism and Community Destruction

On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on the MOVE house, resulting in the deaths of eleven people—including five children—and the destruction of an entire neighborhood. This act of domestic terrorism, unprecedented in its use of military weapons against American civilians on American soil, revealed the lengths to which the state would go to destroy communities that challenged its authority.

The bombing represents what scholar Christina Sharpe calls “the afterlife of slavery”—the ongoing ways that Black bodies and communities remain subject to violence that would be unthinkable if directed against white communities. The fact that police prevented fire departments from responding to the blaze, allowing it to spread and destroy 61 homes, demonstrates the deliberate nature of this community destruction.

From a womanist ethics standpoint, the bombing exemplifies how state violence targets not just individual resisters but entire networks of care and support that sustain alternative ways of living. The destruction of the MOVE house eliminated not just a physical building but a decades-long experiment in collective living that had served as a model for other communities seeking alternatives to dominant social structures.

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The Desecration Continues: Stolen Bones and Academic Violence

The aftermath of the bombing revealed additional layers of violation that demonstrate how academic institutions participate in the ongoing dehumanization of Black communities. The bones of two girls killed in the bombing—Delisha Africa, age 12, and Tree Africa, age 14—were retained by the city’s medical examiner and later given to anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University for research purposes.

For over three decades, these remains were used in academic research and teaching without family knowledge or consent. The discovery of this desecration in 2021 forced a long-overdue reckoning with how universities extract knowledge from Black bodies without regard for basic human dignity or family rights.

This bone theft represents what womanist scholar M. Shawn Copeland calls “enfleshed knowing”—the understanding that knowledge produced through violence against Black bodies serves to reinforce rather than challenge systems of oppression. The academic use of these children’s remains without family consent demonstrates how institutions of higher education participate in what Sylvia Wynter calls “the coloniality of knowledge”—the ongoing extraction of resources from marginalized communities for the benefit of privileged institutions.

Permanent Displacement and Community Trauma

The bombing and its aftermath created what scholar Mindy Thompson Fullilove calls “root shock”—the traumatic stress experienced by communities when they are displaced from familiar environments. The destruction of the MOVE house eliminated not just individual lives but an entire social network that had sustained dozens of families over more than a decade.

The survivors of the bombing faced what we might call “permanent displacement”—the inability to rebuild their community due to ongoing state surveillance and persecution. This displacement extends beyond the immediate MOVE family to include neighbors and supporters whose lives were fundamentally altered by the destruction of their neighborhood.

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From a womanist ethics perspective, this permanent displacement represents a form of cultural genocide—the deliberate destruction of alternative ways of living that challenge dominant social structures. The inability of MOVE survivors to rebuild their community demonstrates how state violence operates not just through spectacular moments of destruction but through ongoing processes that prevent healing and regeneration.

Women’s Leadership in Survival and Resistance

Despite the devastating losses they faced, MOVE women continued to provide leadership in preserving their community’s values and practices. Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor of the 1985 bombing, has spent decades documenting the truth about what happened and advocating for the release of the remaining MOVE 9 members.

Other MOVE women, including those imprisoned after the 1978 confrontation, maintained their commitment to collective values even within the isolating environment of prison. Their ability to preserve community bonds despite physical separation reflects what Audre Lorde calls “survival”—not mere existence but the active cultivation of life and connection under conditions of extreme constraint.

The recent releases of Debbie Sims Africa, Janet Holloway Africa, and Janine Phillips Africa after serving over four decades in prison demonstrate the ongoing nature of their resistance. These women emerged from prison with their commitment to MOVE’s values intact, immediately resuming work to support their community and advocate for remaining imprisoned members.

Contemporary Relevance and Ongoing Struggle

The story of MOVE women resonates powerfully with contemporary movements for environmental justice, community self-determination, and police abolition. Their example demonstrates both the possibilities and the dangers of attempting to create alternative communities within a society structured by racial domination.

Their ecological consciousness anticipates current discussions about climate justice and the connections between environmental degradation and racial oppression. Their commitment to collective child-rearing and community self-defense prefigures contemporary movements for community control of schools and alternatives to policing.

Most importantly, their survival despite overwhelming state violence demonstrates what womanist ethics offers to contemporary liberation movements—the understanding that resistance must be rooted in concrete community needs while maintaining vision of radical alternatives to existing systems of oppression.

Moral Obligations and Ethical Clarity

The story of MOVE women challenges us to confront fundamental questions about the relationship between law and justice, between individual rights and collective survival, between reform and revolution. Their experience reveals how communities become vulnerable not through their own failings but through deliberate policy choices that concentrate poverty, limit opportunities, and criminalize alternative ways of living.

As we commemorate Black August, the women of MOVE remind us that liberation struggle requires not just opposition to existing systems but sustained work to create alternative ways of living. Their example demonstrates how womanist ethics can guide communities in developing forms of resistance that are both immediately practical and profoundly transformative.

Their story demands that we understand our moral obligations not just as individuals but as members of communities responsible for each other’s survival and flourishing. In a womanist ethical framework, the destruction of MOVE represents not just an attack on one community but an assault on all our possibilities for creating more just and sustainable ways of living.

Amanda Golden-Peace, The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2026

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Women of MOVE - Reading List

Books

• 25 Years On The MOVE by Ramona Africa and Mumia Abu-Jamal

• Burning Down the House by John Anderson and Hilary Hevenor

• Let the Fire Burn (companion book to documentary)

• The MOVE Organization by Hizkias Assefa and Paul Wahrhaftig

• Long Distance Revolutionary: A Biography of Mumia Abu-Jamal by Pam Africa

Articles & Online Resources

• “MOVE Bombing at 30” - Philadelphia Magazine

• “The Day Philadelphia Bombed Its Own People” - Vox

• “The 1985 MOVE Bombing” - Zinn Education Project

• MOVE organization official website

• “Penn Museum Returns Bones of MOVE Bombing Victims” - NPR

• “How the Bones of Two Children Killed in a 1985 Police Bombing Ended Up in a University Collection” - The Intercept

Videos/Documentaries

• “Let the Fire Burn” (2013) documentary

• “MOVE: Confrontation in Philadelphia” (1986)

• “40 Years a Prisoner” HBO documentary (2020)

• Ramona Africa interviews and speeches (YouTube)

• “The MOVE Bombing” - Democracy Now! special coverage

The Origins and Meaning of Black August

Black August emerged in the 1970s as a month-long period of remembrance, reflection, and resistance, commemorating the deaths of revolutionary figures like George Jackson, who was killed at San Quentin State Prison on August 21, 1971. The observance honors those who died fighting against systemic oppression, particularly within the prison industrial complex, and serves as a time for political education and renewed commitment to liberation struggles.

Traditionally, Black August has been framed around male martyrs and heroes—Jackson, Jonathan Jackson, and other men who died in armed resistance or state custody. This framing, while honoring legitimate sacrifices, perpetuates what womanist scholar Alice Walker identified as the dangerous tendency to reduce liberation movements to masculine narratives of violent confrontation, thereby rendering invisible the equally courageous and strategic contributions of Black women.

The Gendered Erasure of Liberation History

When we examine Black August through a womanist ethics framework, we discover that the exclusion of Black women from these commemorative narratives is neither accidental nor inconsequential. Womanist ethics, as articulated by scholars like Katie Geneva Cannon and Emilie Townes, emphasizes that Black women have always operated from a position of “situational ethics”—making moral decisions based on the immediate needs of their communities rather than abstract philosophical principles.

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This situational approach to ethics emerges from what Cannon calls the “moral wisdom” developed by Black women through centuries of navigating intersecting systems of racial, gender, and class oppression. Unlike traditional Western ethical frameworks that prioritize universal principles, situational ethics recognizes that moral action must be contextual, responsive to the specific vulnerabilities and needs of marginalized communities.

The erasure of Black women from Black August narratives thus represents more than historical oversight—it constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of how liberation movements actually function. Black women have consistently served as the backbone of resistance efforts, providing the organizing infrastructure, community care, and strategic thinking that sustain movements beyond moments of spectacular confrontation.

Understanding Vulnerability Through Structural Analysis

A womanist ethics approach demands that we understand community vulnerability not as personal failing but as the predictable outcome of structural violence. The communities that Black August commemorates—particularly those targeted by the prison industrial complex—are rendered vulnerable through deliberate policy choices that concentrate poverty, limit educational opportunities, and criminalize survival strategies.

Consider the case of the MOVE organization in Philadelphia, where women like Debbie Sims Africa, Janet Holloway Africa, and Janine Phillips Africa faced extraordinary state violence. On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on the MOVE house, killing eleven people including five children, and destroying an entire neighborhood. This bombing—illegal under both domestic and international law when conducted against civilians on American soil—exemplifies how state violence creates and perpetuates community vulnerability.

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The aftermath reveals additional layers of violation that a womanist ethics framework helps us recognize. The bones of two young girls killed in the bombing, Delisha Africa and Tree Africa, were retained and used by anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University for decades without family consent. This desecration represents what scholar Christina Sharpe calls “the afterlife of slavery”—the ongoing ways that Black bodies are treated as property available for white academic consumption.

The Moral Obligation to Resist

Womanist ethics insists that when systems consistently harm the most vulnerable members of society, resistance becomes not just permissible but morally obligatory. This obligation emerges from what theologian Delores Williams calls “survival/quality-of-life” ethics—the understanding that preserving and enhancing life for marginalized communities sometimes requires challenging laws and institutions that claim legitimacy but operate through violence.

The women commemorated during Black August understood this moral obligation intimately. Their resistance took multiple forms: armed self-defense, legal advocacy, community organizing, intellectual work, and cultural production. Each form of resistance represented a situational ethical response to immediate threats facing their communities.

Reclaiming Black August Through Womanist Vision

To truly honor Black August means expanding our understanding of what liberation looks like and who creates it. When we center Black women’s contributions, we discover that liberation movements require not just spectacular moments of resistance but sustained work of community building, healing, and vision-holding.

The womanist tradition teaches us that authentic liberation must address not only racial oppression but also the ways that patriarchy operates within liberation movements themselves. This means recognizing how Black women have always practiced intersectional analysis, understanding that their freedom requires challenging multiple systems of domination simultaneously.

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As we commemorate Black August, we must ask ourselves: What does it mean to honor liberation history while perpetuating the very exclusions that liberation movements seek to end? How do we move beyond tokenistic inclusion to fundamental transformation of how we understand resistance, heroism, and moral action?

The answers to these questions require us to embrace what Audre Lorde called “the master’s tools”—using the very act of historical remembrance to dismantle hierarchies of value that privilege some forms of resistance over others. Through a womanist ethics lens, Black August becomes not just a time to honor past martyrs but an opportunity to recommit ourselves to the inclusive, intersectional vision of liberation that Black women have always embodied.

This recommitment demands that we understand Black women not as supporting characters in male-dominated narratives but as primary architects of liberation theory and practice. Only then can Black August fulfill its promise as a time of genuine remembrance and renewed resistance.

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Additional Recommended Resources Across All Articles:

Womanist Theology & Ethics

• Sisters in the Wilderness by Delores Williams

• Katie’s Canon by Katie Geneva Cannon

• Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil by Emilie Townes

• A Troubling in My Soul edited by Emilie Townes

Black Feminism & Intersectionality

• Mapping the Margins by Kimberlé Crenshaw

• All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave edited by Gloria T. Hull

• When and Where I Enter by Paula Giddings

Prison Abolition & Resistance

• Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

• Captive Genders edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith

Websites & Organizations

• Center for Constitutional Rights (ccrjustice.org)

• Critical Resistance (criticalresistance.org)

• Black Lives Matter official resources

• The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

• International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal

Podcasts

• “1619” by The New York Times

• “Intercepted” by The Intercept

• “About Race” podcast

• “Seeing White” by Scene on Radio

This reading list provides readers with comprehensive resources to deepen their understanding of Black women’s contributions to liberation movements, womanist ethics, and the ongoing struggles commemorated during Black August.

C. Anderson-Ingalls, The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2026

Words are never only descriptive. They can also be load-bearing walls, holding up structures they were never honest about supporting. “Religious freedom” and “traditional values” are two such walls in Christian nationalist rhetoric — phrases warm enough to sound universally good, vague enough to justify almost anything done in their name.

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What the Words Actually Do

In practice, “religious freedom” has been invoked to justify denying care to LGBTQ people, excluding others from public accommodation, and shielding institutions from accountability for harm. “Traditional values” has been used to defend hierarchies of race and gender that most traditions, examined honestly, never uniformly held. Neither phrase is doing descriptive work anymore. Both are doing protective work — protecting exclusion from being named as exclusion, and control from being named as control.

Eisegesis in Everyday Language

This is the same move as proof-texting scripture, applied to public language instead of biblical text. Just as a verse gets lifted from context to justify a predetermined conclusion, a phrase like “family values” gets emptied of its plain meaning and refilled with whatever content serves the speaker’s political aim. The words survive; their honesty does not.

A Womanist Refusal of Euphemism

Womanist writers and theologians have long insisted on plain naming as a form of moral courage — calling exploitation exploitation, calling violence violence, refusing the comfortable vagueness that lets harm hide in respectable language. That refusal is instructive here. The corrective to euphemism is not more argument about definitions. It is the discipline of naming plainly what a policy or practice actually does, regardless of the label attached to it.

Toward Honest Language

None of this requires abandoning the vocabulary of faith. It requires reclaiming it. Religious freedom, honestly used, protects the vulnerable from coercion — it does not grant institutions permission to harm others. Tradition, honestly examined, includes far more resistance and justice-seeking than nationalist rhetoric admits. The work ahead is not linguistic purity for its own sake. It is refusing to let comfortable words keep doing power’s dirty work — and insisting, instead, that our language tell the truth about what it protects and whom it costs.

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Dr. Amada Golden-Peace, The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2026

Reading list:

• Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020).

• Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).

• Americans United for Separation of Church and State — analysis distinguishing genuine religious liberty from its political misuse.

• Freedom From Religion Foundation and Baptist Joint Committee — contrasting perspectives on religious liberty framing, both useful for tracing the term’s contested use.

• Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

“The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the LORD, and say, Is not the LORD among us? none evil can come upon us.” — Micah 3:11, KJV

A Question Scripture Already Asks

Long before modern nonprofit disclosure forms, scripture asked a version of the same question we should be asking now: who profits from this? The prophet Micah put it bluntly — he condemned leaders in Israel who “judge for reward,” priests who “teach for hire,” and prophets who “divine for money,” all while insisting that the LORD was still on their side (Micah 3:11). The prophets did not treat wealth as morally neutral. They asked where it came from and whom it displaced. That same discipline — tracing resources to their actual beneficiaries — belongs at the center of any honest reckoning with Christian nationalism.

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Who Actually Benefits

Christian nationalist institutions are sustained by a mix of wealthy donors, political action funding, and grassroots small-dollar appeals often built on fear-based messaging. Much of this money flows through organizations that hold religious or charitable tax status while functioning, in practice, as political operations. The gap between stated purpose and actual use is not incidental — it is structural. Following that money reveals whose interests are actually being served: not the communities scripture calls the faithful to protect, but the donors and political actors who benefit from a mobilized, frightened base.

Eisegesis as Fundraising Strategy

Proof-texting is not only a theological error — it is often a business model. Fear-based appeals built on selectively chosen scripture generate reliable revenue precisely because they bypass careful reading. A congregation taught to read scripture as an arsenal of proof-texts, rather than a coherent moral witness, is also a congregation primed to respond to urgent, fear-driven fundraising language. The two forms of manipulation reinforce each other.

A Womanist Standard for Accountability

Womanist ethics has never separated economic justice from theological integrity. Katie Cannon and others insisted that any claim to moral authority be tested against material reality — who eats, who is protected, who is left exposed. Applying that standard here is not an act of hostility toward faith. It is a demand that institutions claiming moral authority meet the same accountability they preach to everyone else.

Transparency Is Not the Enemy of Faith

Some will frame financial scrutiny of religious institutions as an attack on faith itself. It is not. A tradition confident in its own integrity has nothing to fear from transparency. What resists scrutiny is not faith — it is the machinery built to profit from faith’s language while serving other ends. Asking where the money goes, and who it actually protects, is not cynicism. It is one of the oldest forms of prophetic accountability scripture offers us.

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Dr. Nash, The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2026

Reading list:

• ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer — public tax filings for religious and political nonprofits.

• Political Research Associates — funding and network analysis of Christian nationalist organizations.

• Anne Nelson, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).

• Sarah Posner, Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind (New York: Random House, 2020).

• OpenSecrets.org — campaign and political funding transparency database.

“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” — Joel 2:28, KJV

There is an old test for whether a moral tradition is alive or merely performing life: can the generation raised inside it embrace it freely, or must it be enforced? Christian nationalism is failing that test in real time. Surveys and lived testimony alike show a widening exodus of younger Christians from institutions aligned with nationalist politics — not toward atheism in most cases, but toward communities oriented around justice, humility, and inclusion. A tradition that must coerce its own children has already confessed something about its condition.

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What They Are Actually Leaving

Young people raised inside Christian nationalist spaces are not simply drifting. Many can name, with striking clarity, the exact contradictions that drove them out: a faith that preached love of neighbor while demonizing immigrants; a faith that claimed to protect children while defending abusers within its own institutions; a faith that spoke fluently about sin but went silent in the face of racial harm. Eisegesis — bending scripture to fit a predetermined political conclusion — cannot survive close reading forever. Each generation that learns to read the text for itself is a generation harder to control with proof-texts alone.

Womanist Wisdom on Legacy

Womanist theology has always taken seriously the question of what gets passed down and what must be refused. Black women’s theological tradition has never romanticized inheritance for its own sake; it has asked whether an inheritance sustains life or merely sustains hierarchy. That same discernment is now visible in a broader generational shift — a refusal to accept “this is how it’s always been” as sufficient justification for harm.

The Cost of Staying, the Cost of Leaving

None of this is painless. Leaving a childhood faith community carries real grief — the loss of ritual, belonging, and family relationships strained or broken. Some who stay do so not out of agreement but in hopes of changing the institution from within, pushing quietly against its edges. Both paths carry cost. What both share is a refusal to let silence stand in for consent.

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The Future Being Built Elsewhere

Christian nationalism depends on presenting itself as the inevitable future of American Christianity. The generational data says otherwise. A faith actually oriented toward justice is not disappearing — it is relocating, often outside the institutions that once claimed exclusive ownership of the label “Christian.”

That relocation is not the death of faith.

… It may be its most faithful survival strategy yet.

Dr. Nash, The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2026

• Pew Research Center — religious affiliation and generational trend data among American Christians.

• Barna Group — research on Gen Z faith, deconstruction, and institutional trust.

• Jemar Tisby, The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2024).

• Exvangelical podcast, hosted by Blake Chastain — firsthand testimony from those leaving nationalist-aligned traditions.

• The Cottage — Diana Butler Bass’s newsletter, with commentary on generational shifts in American Christianity.Misogynoir2Mishpat’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you use summers to catch up on your reading, you may begin to think about the increased issue of book banning.

The books being banned are not random. That is the fact I keep returning to.

The Books Being Banned Are Not Random

PEN America’s most recent accounting found 6,870 book bans enacted during the 2024–2025 school ye…

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