Lifting as We Climb, Evette Dionne
Lifting as We Climb, Evette Dionne
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Lifting as We Climb
Black Women's Battle for the Ballot Box

Author: Evette Dionne

Narrator: Karen Chilton

Unabridged: 4 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 04/21/2020


Synopsis

For African American women, the fight for the right to vote was only one battle.

An eye-opening book that tells the important, overlooked story of black women as a force in the suffrage movement--when fellow suffragists did not accept them as equal partners in the struggle.

Susan B. Anthony. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Alice Paul. The Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. The 1913 Women's March in D.C. When the epic story of the suffrage movement in the United States is told, the most familiar leaders, speakers at meetings, and participants in marches written about or pictured are generally white.

That's not the real story.

Women of color, especially African American women, were fighting for their right to vote and to be treated as full, equal citizens of the United States. Their battlefront wasn't just about gender. African American women had to deal with white abolitionist-suffragists who drew the line at sharing power with their black sisters. They had to overcome deep, exclusionary racial prejudices that were rife in the American suffrage movement. And they had to maintain their dignity--and safety--in a society that tried to keep them in its bottom ranks.

Lifting as We Climb is the empowering story of African American women who refused to accept all this. Women in black church groups, black female sororities, black women's improvement societies and social clubs. Women who formed their own black suffrage associations when white-dominated national suffrage groups rejected them. Women like Mary Church Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women and of the NAACP; or educator-activist Anna Julia Cooper who championed women getting the vote and a college education; or the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, a leader in both the suffrage and anti-lynching movements.

Author Evette Dionne, a feminist culture writer and the editor-in-chief of Bitch Media, has uncovered an extraordinary and underrepresented history of black women. In her powerful book, she draws an important historical line from abolition to suffrage to civil rights to contemporary young activists--filling in the blanks of the American suffrage story.

About Evette Dionne

Evette Dionne is a journalist, an editor, and a pop-culture critic. She is the National Book Award–nominated author of Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box, a middle- grade nonfiction book about Black women suffragists. Her work has appeared in Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Time, the New York Times, the Guardian, and Teen Vogue, among other publications. A graduate of Bennett College, Dionne is based in Denver, where she works as the executive editor of YES! Media.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Brenda on April 09, 2020

Wow. Again, breaking my "no star" rule to give this five! This book was compelling and infuriating. I recently read The Downstairs Girl. In it were scenes depicting the treatment of Black women and the mc, who was Chinese attempting to join the local women's suffrage meeting in the south. I was remi......more

Goodreads review by Faith on February 07, 2020

"guaranteeing that all people can exercise their right to vote is one of the only ways to ensure that equality continues being a part of America's future." To put it bluntly, Evetre Dionne's LIFTING AS WE CLIMB is a book we desperately need right now. It is a Middle Grade nonfiction volume about the......more

Goodreads review by kate on March 02, 2022

Written in a way that’s accessible, readable and incredibly informative, Lifting As We Climb is a must read for anyone wanting the full picture of the Suffragist movement in the US and the countless extra back breaking and dangerous hurdles Black specifically came up against, especially in compariso......more