About This Episode
Dr. Brenda M. Greene and writer and social justice activist Dr. Janet Dewart Bell discuss Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement (The New Press, 2018). Greene and Bell discuss the interviews that Bell conducted with nine women who provide authentic, compelling, and stirring accounts of their lives as activists. They share their challenges, highlights, and the nature of the movement. The reader obtains a firsthand account of what it was like to be a Black woman in the Civil Rights movement. A significant feature of these interviews is that some, such as Myrlie Evers-Williams, share aspects of their lives that they have not shared with anyone. Among the women featured, in addition to Myrlie Evers-Williams, are Dr. June Jackson Christmas, a trailblazing psychiatrist; Diane Nash, a leader of the Nashville Sit-In Movement; Judy Richardson, associate producer and education director for the documentary Eyes on the Prize; and Kathleen Cleaver, activist and professor of law.
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