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Black women in America, from slavery to emancipation, from Reconstruction to the Great Urban migration, and from civil rights to other movements for social justice, have a long history of survival-resistance through performing multiple leadership roles, especially educating, training, and imparting their knowledge to others (Barnett, 1993; 1995; Brewer 1993; Hine and Thompson 1998). Hence, it is a pleasure to introduce a Black American woman leader in civil rights struggles, activist-intellectual, knowledge constructor, professor, philosopher, and global citizen-scholar. Dr. Angela Yvonne Davis is being honored a pioneer in integrative race, gender, class studies reflected by the 1981 publication of her book Women, Race, & Class. This pioneer award is a long time coming; but, I am reminded of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who said: "We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope."
Thus, the day long hoped for finally has come for many active in integrative race, gender, and class (RGC) studies and for many who have been touched, stimulated, provoked, challenged, stirred up, mobilized, organized, informed, transformed, and empowered by her pathbreaking book Women, Race, & Class to show appreciation and to give recognition to Angela Davis for being one of the early scholarly pioneers in integrative race, gender, class studies. Generations of African American women, other racial ethnic minority women, working class women, and others have been beneficiaries of her cutting-edge radical integrative, antielitist, antiracist, and feminist scholarship on Black women in the community of slaves and on their historically unique, complex, interlocking, and simultaneous experiences as women, as Blacks, and as workers. In my introduction, I focus on five topics: (1) my application of the label "pioneer" to today's honoree; (2) a brief personal, political, professional biography of Angela Davis; (3) an abbreviated biography of the RCG studies movement to which her book contributed so significantly; (4) the RGC focus of the body of her lifetime liberation scholarship; and (5) the specific pioneering aspects of her book Women, Race & Class, which boldly was written and published in 1981 when RGC was not yet as legitimate, established, and popular field of inquiry, theorizing, and teaching in the academy as it is today.
WHAT OR WHO IS A PIONEER?
What exactly do I mean when...