Since slavery, Black women have struggled to liberate themselves
from racism and sexism. Yet despite these hurdles and under the
most difficult circumstances, they managed to achieve greatness.
TRAILBLAZERS shines a light on these their accomplishments, which
often led to widespread cultural change. TRAILBLAZERS is a
six-volume series that examines the lives and careers of over four
hundred brilliant women from the eighteenth century to the present
who blazed uncharted paths in every conceivable way. Each
TRAILBLAZERS volume is organized into several sections. Along with
biographical information and powerful photographs, David provides a
historical timeline for each section-written from the viewpoint of
Black women-that maps out the significance of the featured women
that follow. Volume 1 features an assortment of sixty-five
activists, dancers, and athletes. We learn about the significance
of activists like Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, Rosina Tucker, and
Clara Day, who represent the hundreds of unnamed women who
participated in the civil rights and labor movements. We
re-discover dancers Jeni Legon and Margot Webb, who are honored
alongside dance legends Josephine Baker, Katherine Dunham, Janet
Collins, and a new generation of dancers including Misty Copeland,
Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, and choreographers like Camille A. Brown,
and Cynthia Oliver. And then there are the Black women athletes who
disrupted the world of sports, from the nearly forgotten tennis
champion Ora Washington and Alice Coachman-the first to compete and
win in the Olympics-to Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in
Olympic history. Throughout the series, as David re-introduces many
of these women into the public sphere, they are not always in
predictable ways. For example, Debbie Allen makes a brief
appearance in this volume, not for her acting or as a director, but
rather as the dancer she initially trained to be, reminding us that
Black women are multifaceted, multitalented, and complex. What
binds these women together is that as they struggled on the front
lines, they shook up the status quo of Black people in America.
Throughout the volume, David also challenges the socially
conditioned assumptions, stereotypes, and false binaries that
denigrate Black women's bodies particularly in dance and sports,
including the barriers they face in how they wear their hair. In
this regard, David addresses the totality of Black womanhood:
physically, culturally, and politically. With painstaking research,
David has created an affordable, visually rich, and accessible
reference book. From the foremothers who blazed trails and broke
barriers, to the women who follow in their footsteps, TRAILBLAZERS
offers powerful and inspiring role models for women and girls from
all cultural backgrounds and for the intellectually curious.
TRAILBLAZERS is a clarion call for recognition of the
transformative work Black women have done and continue to do.
Written in accessible prose that contains personal reflections for
a broad audience, TRAILBLAZERS also serves as a vital reference
guide for use in schools and libraries.
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