Evette DionneLifting as We Climb: Black Women's Battle for the Ballot Box

Very happy to purchase this book. About time someone wrote about the contributions of Black Women legendary Activists in the struggle and battle for the the ballot box. I give this book a 5 star rating.

Eye opening and interesting read. It really makes you want to go out and fight for voting rights for all.

"Not the history you learned in school."Dionne begins Lifting as We Climb with recollections of many women "buzzing with excitement" in November 2016, at the prospect of electing the first woman president in the U.S. She describes the thousands who traveled to Rochester to leave "I voted" stickers on Susan B. Anthony's grave. But what about the Black women who also fought for the right to vote?This fantastic, detailed book on Black women's work toward abolition and suffrage is a middle grade novel, but I recommend it for adults too. (At 176 pages, it was actually a pretty slow read for me, as I tried to commit its information to memory.)As Morgan Jerkins puts it: "Evette Dionne’s voice is the first streak of light that announces a new and exciting dawn. Lifting as We Climb is impressively researched, its structure crafted as a mosaic where characters weave in and out, their politics lacing their conversations and interactions with one another.”

Why aren't the names of Black suffragettes as well known as their white counterparts? In this essential addition to YA nonfiction, Bitch Media editor-in-chief Evette Dionne explores the often-erased history and racist ideas that kept Black activists' names out of typical U.S. history books. Not only does Dionne go back into generations past, including heroes like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell, but she also speaks about more contemporary political heroes like Shirley Chisholm and Fannie Lou Hamer. The book, as a whole, is a powerful statement on why it is so very important for all of us -- people of all genders, all races -- to vote.

I'm not sure how one writes an entire book about Black women's involvement in the Suffrage Movement and completely leaves Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. out of the history. The FIRST Black women's group to march in a suffrage protest, even though forbidden and placed at the very end of the line. There's SO MUCH that should have been included. To not do so is negligent.