Resting in gardens, battling in deserts: Black women's activism

Black Scholar

Volumn 29, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 2-7

  James, Joy ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748096975     PISSN: 00064246     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00064246.1999.11430979     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. This epigram is an excerpt from an inscription written by Audre Lorde to the author in September 1989 in Lorde's collection of poems The Black Unicorn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).
2. Combahee River Collective, "The Combahee River Collective Statement," in Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. ...All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (Old Westbury: NY: The Feminist Press, 1982).
3. See: Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: the Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970);
4. Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974);
5. Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1987).
6. For anthologies documenting the emergence of black feminist activism, see: Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995);
7. Toni Cade Bambara, ed. The Black Woman (New York: New American Library, 1970);
8. Barbara Smith, ed. Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983).
9. Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology Ibid., 6.
10. See Sklar, ed., Torture in the United States, 5.
11. Amnesty International, Rights for All, Not Part of My Sentence: Violations of the Human Rights of Women in Custody, New York: Amnesty International, March 1999, 15-16. Amnesty documents that these European countries combined have a combined population of 150 million women as compared to 120 million women in the United States.
12. The United States was to submit a report on its compliance with the Convention Against Torture in 1995 but no report to date has been released. In response, a coalition of over sixty non-governmental organizations (NGOs) issued a report in October 1998 titled Torture in the United States: The Status of Compliance by the U.S. Government with the International Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. See Morton Sklar, editor, Torture in the United States, Washington, D.C., World Organization Against Torture, October 1998. The report notes that the major areas of noncompliance in the United States center on: the death penalty, prison conditions and the treatment of refugee detainees; physical and sexual abuse of women in prisons; the return of refugees to situations of torture and persecution and their long-term detention under abusive conditions. Other violations noted in the report are: the United States' failure to extradite or prosecute torturers who worked with the Central Intelligence Agency or were trained at the School of the Americas; the United States' lack of adequate domestic implementation of the 1996 Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act; and arms sales and other assistance by the U.S. government that support torture in foreign countries (such as the sale of electronic stun gun equipment and some 10,000 shock batons to Turkey to be used against the Kurdish minority, the same equipment which Amnesty International has denounced in its use against U.S. prisoners).
13. See: the 1999 Human Rights Watch Report published on the Black Radical Congress website: "subscribe brc-news" to 〈majordomo@tao.ca〉; archive: http://www.egroups.com/group/brc-news; www.blackradicalcongress.org | BRC | blackradicalcongress@email.com