Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership
Kenja McCray
NYU Press
Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun with autocratic leaders. Yet women’s strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations’ functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhibited a unique service-oriented, collaborative leadership style.
Essential Soldiers documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists’ experiences, considering the ways they produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Revealing a form of Black Power leadership that has never been highlighted, Kenja McCray explores how women articulated and used their power to transform themselves and their environments.