Customer Reviews

And Not Afraid To Dare

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The cover of this book and the title 10 Stories of African American Women are deceptively simple. This isn't just a book about females or African American females. It's a story about inspiring individuals with a vision who changed the community around them and was just very motivating for me to read as an individual. The stories are of 10 different women but they interweave to create a bigger picture of life back then for African Americans- much of which still holds true today- like Mary Mcleode Bethune's wise words in her Last Testament to the people. It's especially important in highlighting through the stories the role that the "South" has had in shaping the African American experience both directly and indirectly.The stories themselves are packed with lots of factual information.I had filled a notebook by the time I had finished. I am West African and though I have read the biography of Frederick Douglas, Anne Moody, Dorothy Heights and others- and would like to read Black Women in White America- I found this book at a local bookstore here and it is the first book I'm reading exclusively on African American women. So it was a real eye opener to me and inspiring read. I had never heard of women like Leontyne Price- an opera singer whom I read broke the record for longest applause at the New York Metropolitan opera, where blacks were banned from before 1950. Or Mae Jemison- the first black female astronaut to go to space in the 1990s. Or Clara Hale- a woman in her 60s that opened the first not for profit nursery for drug-addicted children in Harlem. I mean- how beautiful is that? So simple yet so profound. And that's the beauty of this work by Tanya Bolden- the simple yet interesting story-telling. Also very useful is the short profiles of 21 other women "who dared" included in the end.

Bolden presents biographical sketches of 10 African American women, including such famous names as Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, Toni Morrison... Bibliography. Lauren Peterson