Published in 2015
408 pages
Brittney Cooper writes a popular monthly column on race, gender, and politics for Cosmopolitan. A professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, she co-founded the Crunk Feminist Collective, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Ebony.com, and The Root.com, among many others. In 2017, she was named to The Root 100 List, and in 2018, to the Essence Woke 100 List.
Patricia Bell-Scott is an American scholar of women’s studies and black feminism. She is currently a professor emerita of women’s studies and human development and family science at the University of Georgia. As an author, she has been widely collected by libraries worldwide.
Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith’s essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. She has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.
Akasha Gloria Hull is an American poet, educator, writer, and critic whose work in African-American literature and as a Black feminist activist has helped shape Women’s Studies. As one of the architects of Black Women’s Studies, her scholarship and activism has increased the prestige, legitimacy, respect, and popularity of feminism and African-American studies.
What is this book about?
Published in 1982, But Some of Us Are Brave was the first-ever Black women’s studies reader and a foundational text of contemporary feminism.
Featuring writing from eminent scholars, activists, teachers, and writers, such as the Combahee River Collective and Alice Walker, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Bravechallenges the absence of Black feminist thought in women’s studies, confronts racism, and investigates the mythology surrounding Black women in the social sciences.
As the first comprehensive collection of Black feminist scholarship, But Some of Us Are Brave was recognized by Audre Lorde as “the beginning of a new era, where the ‘women’ in women’s studies will no longer mean ‘white.’”
Coeditors Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith are authors and former women’s studies professors. Brittney C. Cooper is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University.
