Journal of African American History: Special Issue on "Black Women’s History in the Twenty-First Century: Engaging the Future"

The Journal of African American History is planning a special issue in 2027. Titled “Black Women’s History in the Twenty-First Century: Engaging the Future,” the issue will provide an opportunity to reflect seriously on the state of scholarship on Black women in the United States as well as reshape thinking about Black women’s impact on U.S. society. Guest editors, Karen Cook Bell and Hettie V. Williams, invite articles that analyze Black women’s experiences with focuses on the lives, labors, wartime experiences, and legal battles of Black women and their self-making practices, which allowed them to navigate slavery, freedom, Jane and Jim Crowism, and the turmoil of the Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights eras. This special issue will provide an examination of dominant narratives in the historiography of Black women’s history that have emerged in the twenty-first century and examine future explorations in the field.

Foundational texts including editors Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978), which was the first volume of historical essays on Black women; Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985); the multivolume Black Women in America: A Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine (1994); “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women’s History, edited by Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (1995); Hine and Kathleen Thompson’s A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (1998), and White’s Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in the Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (1999) have guided generations of scholars of Black women’s history as they reexamined the complex interweaving of politics, labor, identity, and gender in American history since the colonial era. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross’ more recent study, A Black Women’s History of the United States (2020), re-envisioned the history of Black women in the U.S. and imagined future explorations.  

Leslie Alexander stated, “There is a compelling need to study Black women in their own right.” Guest editors Karen Cook Bell and Hettie V. Williams seek articles that examine Black women’s history in the context of the following topics:

• Slavery and Abolition
• Black Women’s Resistance
• War and Gender Violence
• Emancipation
• Economic Development
• Culture (e.g., education, religion)
• Migration and Mobility
• Intellectualism 
• Black Internationalism
• Social and Political Movements (e.g., Black Feminism, Black Lives Matter)
• Politics
• Black Women’s Queer History
• Black Girlhood
• Reproductive Justice
• Black Women’s Health and Wellness

Authors should submit essays via the Editorial Manager® system. Manuscripts, including footnotes, should contain between 10,000 and 11,500 words (approximately 35 to 40 pages). “Instructions for Authors” are available on the JAAH website. For inquiries, please contact jaah@alasu.edu or the guest editors, Karen Cook Bell at kcookbell@bowiestate.edu and Hettie V. Williams at hwilliam@monmouth.edu. January 1, 2026, is the due date for manuscript submissions.