/ by Paula Marie Seniors

This innovative, thoroughly researched, and captivating book offers a stunning portrait of the personal and political lives of a dynamic group of radical Black women activists. Paula Marie Seniors powerfully unveils how these women agitated for Black liberation on local, national, and international levels.

—Keisha N. Blain, author of Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America

The Black freedom struggle in Monroe, North Carolina, was a critical beachhead for the civil rights and Black Power movements. Paula Seniors’ Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions provides a unique look into the Monroe freedom movement and its role in building revolutionary politics, including armed self-defense and internationalism in the Black liberation struggle. Seniors' work contributes to the unearthing and illuminating of the role of unsung revolutionary Black female freedom fighters Mae Mallory, Ethel Azalea Johnson, and the author’s mother, Audrey Proctor Seniors, and centers their role in the building of the Black radical tradition. Seniors' reconstruction of her family and their comrades' story makes an important contribution to our understanding of the fight for Black freedom, left politics, and global solidarity from the 1950s through the 1980s.

—Akinyele Umoja, author of We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement

Deeply researched, cinematically told, and urgently needed, Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions’ excavation of radical black women as ideologues, global change agents, and as mothers and daughters leads the way to a fuller examination of Black radical women’s impact on history.

—Robyn Spencer, author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland

Toni Shaw Photography Group