This year marks 100 years of Black History Month. Here are 7 must-know women that have shaped not just Black History, but the entire Black Radical Tradition.
Ella Baker
Ella Baker was a key strategist and organizer of the Black freedom movement from the 1930s-1960s. She mentored the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and a whole generation of organizers in the tactics of grassroots organizing and movement building.
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells was a teacher and journalist whose research, writings and speeches exposed to the world the brutal reality of U.S. lynchings. A life-long crusader, she challenged discrimination on the railroads and help- ed found key Black women’s organizations.
Gloria Richardson
Gloria Richardson was drawn into the Civil Rights Movement by her daughter in Cambridge, Maryland, in the early 1960s. Leading the fight against segregation, she became increasingly militant, calling for mass self defense against racist violence, and serving as a transitional figure to Black Power.
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was an artist and activist who self-described as a “Black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet, warrior.” Lorde’s writing and speeches revealed in sharp clarity how various forms of oppression were inter- connected, and therefore the liberation struggles to overcome them must be as well.
Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer was a rural Mississippi plantation worker who became an instrumental leader of the Freedom Summer voting rights initiative of 1964. Leading a challenge against the all-white Democratic Party, her powerful and blunt denunciations of racism spoke for millions.
Queen Mother Audley Moore
Queen Mother Audley Moore was the granddaughter of slaves in Louisiana. She left for Harlem in the 1920s, becoming a leader in the Garveyite Movement. In the Communist Party for 17 years, she organized rent strikes and for the Scottsboro Boys’ freedom. She then became a leading pan-Africanist and Black nationalist, serving as a mentor to a generation of Black Power revolutionaries and championing the fight for reparations.
Assata Shakur
Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, falsely convicted of murder, who then escaped prison and lived in exile in Cuba until her death in 2025. Her story and her writings continue to serve as an inspiration for today’s revolutionaries.
