by Kenja McCray
New York University Press
8/5/2025, hardcover
SKU: 9781479833047
A new perspective on women's Black Power leadership legacies
Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s-that it was male dominated and overrun with autocratic leaders. Yet women's strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations' functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhibited a unique service-oriented, collaborative leadership style.
Essential Soldiers documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists' experiences, considering the ways they produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Relying on oral histories, textual archival material, and scholarly literature, this book delves into women's organizing and resistance efforts, investigating how they challenged the one-dimensional notions of gender roles within cultural nationalist organizations. Revealing a form of Black Power leadership that has never been highlighted, Kenja McCray explores how women articulated and used their power to transform themselves and their environments. Through her examination, McCray argues that women's Pan-Africanist cultural nationalist activism embodied a work-centered, people-centered, and African-centered form of service leadership. A dynamic and fascinating narrative of African American women activists, Essential Soldiers provides a new vantage point for considering Black Power leadership legacies.
Reviews:
"Skillfully demonstrates that women's kazi leadership was indispensable in the functioning and evolution of Kawaida-influenced organizations. By centering these essential soldiers' voices and memories, McCray enhances the scholarly analysis of women's key roles within black organizing efforts during the latter half of the twentieth century." -- Edward Onaci, author of Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State
"Hundreds of urban uprisings in the 1960s produced a surge of Black Power Politics; Black women were central actors in that epic drama. But who were they? Essential Soldiers is the most ambitious study of the Black women in Cultural Nationalism who built four major national organizations in the 1960s and 1970s: the Congress of African People, the National Black Political Assembly, the African Liberation Support Committee, and the Black Women's United Front. Before Kenja McCray's book, those pioneering women remained unnamed in the shadow of their own historic achievements, finally, this book tells their story." -- Komozi Woodard, author of A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics
About the Author:
Kenja McCray is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Clayton State University and coauthor of Atlanta Metropolitan State College, a campus history .