ABSTRACT
African-American women's activism and courageous resistance qualified them as activists-intellectuals. Recovering the work of race women and civil rights radicals, such as Ella Baker, reveals other forms of agency. As Kathlene Cleaver notes in "Sex, Lies, and Videotapes", when the people look at the newsreel footage from the movement era, despite what male historiography tells the reader, the people see scores of women in meetings, at demonstrations, in protest. The view that black males introduced violence into the civil rights-black liberation movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s evokes the images of the stereotypical violence-prone black male to deflect from both state repression and women's responses to violence. Collins redefines most forms of black women's antiracist work, including social work, as "radicalism". Significantly, Collins focuses her brief discussion of black women's activism on black female domestics, educators, and churchgoers.
