Women fight differently. When the Taliban ordered Afghan women not to sing,they sang anyway.Soft, loud, hidden, public — they sang their existence
Women fight differently.
When the Taliban ordered Afghan women not to sing,
they sang anyway.
Soft, loud, hidden, public — they sang their existence into the air, refusing to be erased.
During Jim Crow, women like Mary Turner defended their husbands’ honor —
and paid with their lives.
Mary was lynched, her baby brutally cut from her body by a mob fueled by hatred and impunity.
Yet her name, her courage, her defiance still echoes.
Ida B. Wells took up her pen and wrote the truth of lynching when few dared.
Mary McLeod Bethune built schools for girls, carving out futures where society had only offered dead ends.
Maggie L. Walker founded a bank, breathing life into Black women’s economic independence.
Billie Holiday sang the sorrow of lynching into the world’s ears with “Strange Fruit,” risking her career, her safety, her very life.
Women become innovative under oppression. (Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, shop owners, beauticians, cooks, day care owners, healers, entertainers, seamstresses, housekeepers….)
Women build under siege.
Women start new things when old doors are slammed shut.
When faced with brutality, women create.
Not invasion.
Not calls for death.
Not threats to rape.
Not hopes that someone else is raped.
We do not inherit a legacy of terrorizing others.
We inherit a legacy of building in the face of devastation.
Of loving in the face of hate.
Of fighting with courage, not cruelty.
That’s why it is an insult — a deep, historical, and sacred insult — to the memory of women who fought oppression to claim that men who declare violence against women are “women.”
A man who threatens violence against women today
would have been the same man swinging the noose yesterday.
The same man dragging Mary Turner to her death.
The same man spitting on Ida B. Wells.
The same man throwing rocks at Black girls walking to school.
Changing costumes does not change the spirit of violence.
Claiming womanhood does not cleanse the hands that still reach for domination.
We are the daughters of fighters, builders, and visionaries.
We know the difference between a sister and an oppressor.
And we will not be shamed into silence.
Not now.
Not ever.
Because She Sang, We Speak: Honoring Billie Holiday’s Legacy of Truth
