With her back to a large, full bookcase, writer and professor Barbara Ransby spoke virtually to Chapman University students April 16, highlighting numerous female leaders who have advocated for social movements, civil rights and environmental justice. Although Ransby is best known for her biography work on American civil rights activist Ella Baker, she centered the April 16 event on international female leaders.

The Zoom event, titled “Women in the Forefront of Change in the U.S. and Globally,” was co-hosted by the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and the college’s peace studies department. The event was a part of Wilkinson College’s “Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on the Significance of Race” event series, which began in fall 2020.

“In order to be conscientious citizens of this country in this pivotal historical moment, in order to be conscientious educators and thought leaders and students in the world, we have to be engaged and we have to be in motion,” Ransby said at the event. “We cannot sit back and think and have classroom discussions.”

Rozell “Prexy” Nesbitt, Chapman’s presidential fellow in peace studies and a friend of Ransby’s since the 1980s, introduced her to kick off the event. The two met during the anti-apartheid student divestment movement at Columbia University that was happening at the time.

While college students in America and other nations had been fighting to end apartheid in South Africa on a smaller scale in previous years, a single photograph taken during the Soweto uprising in 1976 caused students to pressure their universities into removing financial investments in South Africa corporations that were supporting apartheid.

Ransby began the event by reflecting on the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Adam Toledo to police, as well as Georgia’s recently passed voter suppression laws. She said these issues are extremely relevant to female leaders working to make change in the world.

“Women’s leadership that is either feminist or informed by intersectional feminist politics has been and is in the forefront of some of the most hopeful social movements in the world for change,” Ransby said at the event. “For new kinds of movements, for new language, for new leadership and new levels of inclusivity.” 

Ransby offered a working definition for intersectionality: understanding that there are several systems of oppression and that there are many identities, which are affected by issues such as sexism, racism and ableism.

“These large systems have ranked, divided, discriminated against and oppressed different sectors of the population, work in tandem with each other and have an intimate interrelationship with one another,” Ransby said at the event. “That’s what intersectionality reminds us of, and that is what the leadership of women that I have been talking about reminds us of.” 

Ransby went on to detail the stories of two lesser known Black female activists: civil rights activist Baker and actress and activist Eslanda Goode Robeson. Both women were made focuses of Ransby books. 

“(Baker) argued against this notion of a messianic leader — a charismatic, top-down kind of leader,” Ransby said. “She said movements that teach people following as the only way of fighting have done a disservice. So, she often clashed with Dr. (Martin Luther) King about the ways in which he was put on a pedestal.”

While Baker did not go on to receive a Ph.D. or teach at a college, Ransby described Baker as an intellectual.

“She influenced many people in her workshops, in her speeches and in the meetings that she was in where she was teaching history,” Baker said. “She was teaching theories of change, which was also teaching people that they had power to be change agents themselves.”

Robeson, on the other hand, traveled throughout colonial Africa during the 1930s and met with individuals like Nnamdi Azikiwe, who would later become the president of Nigeria. She also spoke about sexism, capitalism and the connections between Black Americans and Africans.

“In both (Robeson’s) work and Ella Baker’s work, there is this intersectionality without the name,” Ransby said. “I see them very much as part of a feminist-influenced Black Freedom Movement tradition, even though neither of them called themselves feminists at the time.”

Ransby highlighted anti-slavery activists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, as well as women’s rights activist Ida B. Wells and labor movement activists Addie Wyatt and Dolores Huerta. Ransby also talked about contemporary activists like Varshini Prakash, a Sunrise co-founder who pushed for the Green New Deal, and Greisa Martinez, an undocumented immigrant who works at United We Dream.

In terms of female-led activism in other nations, Ransby spoke of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, an organization that spokesperson Vanessa Contreras Capo and others are part of.

At the end of her discussion, Ransby announced the creation of The Portal Project, a collaborative group created by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Social Justice Initiative, which Ransby directs. The Portal Project will focus on problem-solving issues of abolition, economic democracy, climate justice.

The webinar then shifted into a question-and-answer session moderated by Lisa Leitz, the department of peace studies chair.

“I hope students will come away from the talk better understanding that the current and past movements for racial justice have been led by strong women, not only the men whose names they usually know,” Leitz wrote in an email to The Panther.

Of the anonymous student attendees, one asked how activists can find hope when they don’t see progress from advocating for change.

“History is not linear,” Ransby said in response. “We don’t fight to improve things and it just keeps getting better and better and then we land in this place of freedom. Every time we overcome one hurdle, we have to refocus our attention on the next one.”

Ransby also said her parents and grandmother worked as sharecroppers in the South and started voting after moving to Detroit, Michigan in the 1940s, where they witnessed lynchings and racial violence.

“There’s still racism all around us,” Ransby said. “There is still racial violence and state violence. It takes new forms, but I definitely see this moment as an advancement over that moment. And I think we disrespect the fight that people fought and how hard it was in different eras when we don’t recognize the victories that we’ve won.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said this was the last event of Wilkinson College’s “Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on the Significance of Race” series, which began in fall 2020. This information has been corrected.