When Women Refuse ✊🏿

This week, we’re having a herstory moment! Professor and Chair of the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson joins the show this week to talk Black abolitionists and resistance. We get to know civil rights leader Mabel Williams, spouse and partner of Robert F. Williams, and how she and her husband mobilized Black folks to take up arms and defend themselves in the face of extreme racism in the sixties. 

• We start off with a moment for the cover of Professor Carter Jackson’s latest book We Refuse. It features Soldier of Love, not Sade’s chart topper, but the beautiful and poignant painting by Brooklyn-based artist Taha Clayton.
• Disclaimer: While we’re happy that gun violence has overall decreased in the United States, it continues to be troubling. We’re conscious of how intense gun debates can get and want to stress that this conversation explores how communities took up arms in self-defense against lethal racism. We are not advocating for general gun violence.
• Remoy introduces Mabel and Robert Williams via their infamous black and white Bonnie and Clyde photo.
• The Kissing Case in Monroe, NC is a turning point for the Williamses.
• Mabel knew how the presence of guns was enough to deter potential violence. And she was right. Violence severely deescalated.
• Carter Jackson stresses the importance of Mabel and Robert’s partnership because Robert tends to get all the credit for these efforts.
• Racism is not the only thing folks were fighting. Violent sexism must also be challenged and that calls for women’s leadership.

In our Five Questions segment, Professor Kellie Carter Jackson distills women’s anger and how they can use it as a driving force. 

• Our guest shares how anger is a big driving force for a lot of her work.
• Carter Jackson breaks down how she arrived at the title of her forthcoming book, We Refuse.
• bell hooks has a famous quote about Black men and white women being one stage away from the ultimate social power: white men’s power.
• We close out with a great note on how to get to liberation. Dr. Carter Jackson stresses how binaries and individualism pigeon-hole us away from collective freedom. She envisions how to move past that.

Thanks for listening!

Referenced on this episode:

• Audre Lorde's speech about women's anger being useful
• bell hooks’s quote about Black men and white women each being one degree away from the highest rank of social power from her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
• Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a pacifist in the street but a gun owner behind closed doors.
• Dr. Carter Jackson’s books, We Refuse and the award-winning Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence cover a wide history of Black resistance and women’s roles
• F*** Your Slave Laws - RGP1-produced Not Past It episode featuring Dr. Carter Jackson

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