The last couple of years there has been a publishing boom in the biographies of professional Black women. Here are four books that I have gotten a chance to read and review or be in conversation with the author. The scholars who have written these books are at the top of their craft as authors and researchers. And each of these women and the books all deserve to be read by a wider public.
These biographies are long overdue, and they are revelatory. These historical portraits open us to the world of Black women as professionals—fund developers, judges, lawyers, politicians, social workers, scholars and writers in the 20th century. These women were middle-class in terms of status and occupation. The women described in these pages were insiders. None lived a Bohemian lifestyle or broke the rules of class convention. They very much moved within the domain of respectable circles. Each of them fought off Jane and Jim Crow in their professional and personal lives. And each bore the burden of their communities, as well as desperately trying to keep afloat with personal commitments of families and love amid their demanding professional careers.
In addition to these books, actor Regina King portrays and served as one of the producers on the new Netflix film Shirley about Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 campaign to be the Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States.  This film joins the documentary based upon Chisolm’s political memoir Unbought and Unbossed.Â
In these portrayals we are reminded that the politics of gender has been present in Black communities at every level for a while. We should also know that Black men have been on all sides of the gender politics—both positively and negatively.
I am grateful to the filmmakers, historians, and writers who are telling a fuller dimension of Black women lives in the United States to make our country a more inclusive democracy for all people. Â I hope you go to your local public library, bookseller, or watch Youtube interviews with these various authors.