Shatema Threadcraft, "Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Sullivan Sommer
Guest: Dr. Shatema Threadcraft, Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Vanderbilt University
Episode: Shatema Threadcraft, Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2025)
Date: November 22, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on Dr. Shatema Threadcraft’s new book, Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy. The conversation explores how black women have labored—often in the shadows of history and politics—to resist, record, and respond to the ongoing crisis of black femicide, and how their activism interrogates the boundaries of democracy, violence, and memory. Sullivan Sommer delves deep into Threadcraft’s arguments, focusing on definitions of black femicide, the challenges of representation and recognition, and the book’s unique blend of social science, political theory, activism, and literary criticism, particularly via the work of Toni Morrison.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Defining the Scope: Labor, Femicide & Political Science

• Continued Focus on Labor and Political Science
  • Threadcraft’s work examines the overlap of sexual, reproductive violence with labor issues in black women’s lives—how violence is both a result of and compounded by forced labor, economic disenfranchisement, and political neglect.
    • “Both of my books are concerned with sexual and reproductive violence against black women…that's really often bound up with labor…this is a book about black femicide.” (03:09)
• Black Femicide: Active vs. Passive
  • Active femicide: The intentional murder of black women because they are women, exacerbated by structures of racism.
  • Passive femicide: Deaths from neglect (e.g., black maternal mortality, botched abortions)—the result of systemic failures, not direct violence.
    • “The Black maternal mortality crisis would be a textbook case of passive femicide… Pregnancy is an important point for the murder of women, both active and passive for black women.” (06:48)

Structural Violence, Policing, and Safety

• Role of Police and Public Institutions
  • The criminal justice system often fails to aid black women, sometimes escalating violence against them rather than preventing it.
    • “Police are not the immediate cause of death for most black women, but they are very much implicated in black women’s disproportionate exposure to premature death.” (09:02)
  • Crenshaw’s #SayHerName, abolition feminism and community-based solutions are highlighted as necessary correctives.
    • “Criminalizing violence against black women tends to restrain black women's actions in their own defense…tends to harm black women and survivors of violence more than it protects them.” (22:39)

Activism and Strategies

• Activist Organizations Profiled
  • Black and Missing Foundation: Fights for attention to missing black women and girls, exposing media and institutional neglect.
    • “I categorize [it] as a black police and media reform organization…media attention is key to driving police attention.” (11:19)
  • Data as Activism: Community-driven efforts to correct underreporting of black women’s disappearances and deaths; building “counterdata”.
    • “Wells’s activism was very much data activism…many people are doing activism around data…to counter official data.” (14:14)
• Media & Representation
  • The battle against “missing white women syndrome”—media fascination with white victims at the expense of people of color.
    • “We shouldn’t sweep their stories under the rug and move on to the next topic.” (13:38)
• Self-Defense and Community Organizing
  • Some activists provide self-defense training for black women, especially IPV survivors, framing this as a pragmatic response in the absence of institutional support.
    • “If no one else is going to help you, you have yourself left and you have a self to defend.” (20:13)
• Say Her Name & Abolition Feminism
  • #SayHerName centers black women’s deaths from state violence, and abolition feminists call for survivor-centered, non-punitive approaches to harm and justice.

Entering the Record: Data, Humanization, and the Archive

• Challenges of Being Remembered and Counted
  • The failure of official records to count black women’s deaths accurately; activists work to “enter the record in the right ways.”
    • “A lot of this is about the work of humanization and not just entering them into the record as a number, but also to include a story with that number.” (16:39)
• Violence of the Archive
  • Referencing Saidiya Hartman—entering history often compounds violence when black women are misrepresented or erased.

Public vs. Private Violence & Democratic Memory

• W.E.B. Du Bois and Lynching as Spectacle (for Men)
  • Du Bois wrote about lynching as crucifixion, tying public violence to black political consciousness—but this privileged (primarily male) victims.
    • “Relatively few women are lynched…if this form of violence is associated with the black people, it's a form of violence to which men are most often subject.” (25:06)
• Keeping the Dead Present: Black Feminist Necromancy
  • In contrast, black women’s mourning, activism, and storytelling “keep the dead with them,” refusing to let private, hidden deaths slip into oblivion.
    • “The black women I profile and Toni Morrison most clearly, don’t leave the dead dead…democratic practices that keep the dead with them.” (27:07)
• Emmett Till’s Continuous Resurrection
  • Emmett Till’s murder, and especially his mother Mamie Till Bradley’s decisions (e.g., the open casket), provide paradigmatic examples of political uses of black grief, making private loss public.
    • “She made the decision to let the world see what they had done to her boy…this is really important in that these pictures are probably one of the greatest cultural products of the twentieth century.” (31:29, 33:55)

Stories of Activism: Beyond Mamie Till

• Clementine Barfield and Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD)
  • Founded after losing her own son, Barfield organized mothers to address youth violence, trauma, and loss—developing practices of “restorative kinship” (e.g., birthday parties for deceased children, planting trees as memorials).
    • “They organized in prisons, schools, churches…they pioneered versions of healing justice.” (34:24)
• Margaret Prescott & the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Killers
  • A leader in sex worker rights and advocacy against state neglect of murdered black women, especially in LA.
    • “She developed an analysis between race-conscious, street-focused police work and violence against all black women on the street…labeling a woman as a sex worker…made [her] available for murder.” (38:43)

Literary Criticism & Morrisonian Democracy

• Pivoting to Toni Morrison’s Work
  • The book’s latter part analyzes Morrison’s novels and plays as interventions in how violence, memory, and community are conceptualized. Morrison’s fiction provides “feminist correctives” to patriarchal or masculinized politics of black grief and resurrection.
    • “Morrison in private murder, Du Bois in spectacle, public murder…Du Bois and lynching, Morrison in intimate stuff.” (46:50)
    • “Many people…turn to fiction to tell a true story. And I think Morrison is not only doing that…she is, you know, a leading light in American literature.” (49:53)
• Paradise, Home, and Dreaming Emmett
  • Morrison’s works foreground women’s experiences of violence (mass femicide, infanticide) and alternate paths to repair beyond retributive justice.
    • “There is a mass femicide that opens the book, therefore treating the very subject that's important to me…if you set that up, I think you're making an important point.” (52:44)

Theoretical & Methodological Reflections

• On Book Structure and Scholarly Method
  • Threadcraft shares her process: she initially tried to group all the activists in one chapter, but later, inspired by peer feedback, gave each her own chapter—individuating their vital contributions and allowing for a richer, more nuanced argument.
    • “You can't write about Du Bois and lynching if you're not going to put Ida B. Wells on equal footing…that…it made sense to give all these women their due.” (43:59)
  • The book became “a chance to marvel at badass women throughout the 20th and 21st century…this is a political…I'm making arguments about [their] innovative democratic practice…” (47:16)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Violence of Pregnancy:
  “Despite tremendous advances in obstetric care, if pregnancy were a job, it would be one of the 10 most dangerous jobs in America.” (B quoting C, 07:09)
  “For black women for whom it can rank as high as the second most dangerous job.” (07:27)

• On Black Women’s Political Labor:
  “It is unruly women who have best performed the work of resurrection. Loud mouthed unforgivable women, single mothers, welfare mothers, lesbians and sex workers…These are not the women so long trapped in democracy's household, but those marginal to it, expelled from it, yet still constrained by its gendered heterosexual work discipline.” (01:07, B)

• On Black Women’s Ongoing Struggle:
  “It's about the struggle black women face after death to enter the record and…related to…the violence of the archive…” (03:09, C)

• On Activist Data Work:
  “So in the book, I consider the work of Rosa Page…she worked as a nurse in an ER…became convinced that data regarding black women's murder was wrong and began scouring sort of non traditional sources and eventually demonstrated that the FBI was undercounting the murders…” (14:14)

• On the Political Power of Grief:
  “The funeral of Emmett Till stands as the most effective political use of a dead body in the 20th century.” (B quoting C, 33:55)

• On the Book’s Structure:
  “I began the book puzzling over the problem of the private deaths of black women and how to drive activism around murders that were not occurring in public like those that drove activism in the movement for black lives. Like, that's literally where I started…” (43:59)

• On Rebuilding the World:
  “For people…there are many ways to tell a true story. And even if many of the important things I have said may seem troublingly unverifiable, I assure you that most of the above is true. I have chosen to tell a ghost story…But the story of black femicide…could and indeed should one day be told as a story about data and power… I want to close, however, by thinking of the above as a story of engineering with the ghosts, tinkering and helping to reconfigure the machine.” (B quoting C, 54:17)

• On Resisting “Burn It Down” Politics:
  “If you've been unable to imagine what goes in its place, then I'm not sure what you think you're going to rebuild.” (Host’s comment, 56:58)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 01:07 - Introduction of Threadcraft and framing of black women’s labor and democratic work
• 03:09 – Definitions of black femicide and book’s major themes
• 05:26 – Active vs. passive femicide explained
• 09:21 – Policing, public safety, and black women’s exposure to violence
• 11:19 – Black and Missing Foundation and media activism
• 14:14 – Data as activism, alternative archives, and humanization
• 20:13 – Armed self-defense and survivor-led community interventions
• 21:48 – Say Her Name, abolition feminism, and criminalization critique
• 24:17 – Du Bois, lynching, and the formation of political consciousness
• 27:07 – “Being with the dead,” Morrison’s Beloved, and practices of resurrection
• 29:17 – Emmett Till’s continuing presence in black political memory
• 31:29 – Mamie Till Bradley’s decision for an open casket & impact
• 34:24 – Clementine Barfield and Save Our Sons and Daughters
• 38:43 – Margaret Prescott, sex work, and anti-serial killer activism
• 43:59 – Book structure, organizing women’s stories, and Morrison
• 49:12 – Morrison, literary criticism, and feminist correctives
• 54:17 – Book’s conclusion: reconfiguring the machine, building with ghosts
• 56:58 – Reflections on democratic redesign, imagining new futures
• 58:04 – Close and next research directions

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Flow & Tone

• The episode is reflective, engaged, and analytical—mixing academic depth with moments of admiration and affect (“Isn’t this woman cool?”).
• Dr. Threadcraft discusses complex theory with candor, humility, and clear commitments to both activism and scholarship.
• The host ensures key terms are defined for listeners and pauses for clarifications, making the discussion accessible.

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For Further Reading/Listening

• Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2025) by Shatema Threadcraft
• Works and interviews with Clementine Barfield, Margaret Prescott, Toni Morrison
• References to Saidiya Hartman, Kimberle Crenshaw, Beth Richie, Ida B. Wells, and scholarship on black maternal mortality

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This episode will be valuable to listeners interested in black feminist thought, political theory, activism, race and gender studies, and the intersection of literature and social justice. It underscores the stakes of both “recording” and “resurrecting” black women’s lives and deaths—both in data and in story—as movements toward a more inclusive, responsive democracy.

Transcript

[A]

Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

The centrality of Spectacular Death has functioned to marginalize black women in the stories of black peoplehood and has ensured that they are not the main beneficiaries of large scale black political mobilization. But this has in no way stopped black women's democratic work, nor stopped them from attending to that which haunts our democracy. And notably, it is unruly women who have best performed the work of resurrection. Loud mouthed unforgivable women, single mothers, welfare mothers, lesbians and sex workers, as well as those who explicitly cast their lot with such women. These are not the women so long trapped in democracy's household, but those marginal to it, expelled from it, yet still constrained by its gendered heterosexual work discipline. The loudmouthed unforgivable woman to whom I refer most directly is of course the pioneering anti lynching activist and newspaper woman, Ida B. Wells. The single mothers are Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, Clementine Barfield of the Detroit based anti youth violence organization Save Our Sons and Daughters, and one Toni Morrison. The work of these women and many others are detailed in the pages of the Labors of Resurrection, Black Women, Necromancy and Morrisonian Democracy by Professor Shatima Threadcraft, Associate professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. Shatima, welcome to the New Books Network.

[C]

Thank you for having me. I'm very happy to be here.

[B]

So your previous book was Intimate the Black Female Body and the Body Politic came out from Oxford University Press in 2016. It won the National Women's Studies Association 2017 Sarah A. Whaley Award for best book on women labor, as well as several other awards recognizing its contribution in the field of political science. This book, the Labors of Resurrection, also tackles labor and political science. What is it about these two topics that continue to draw you?

[C]

Yeah, no, thank you. That's an interesting point. So I would say that both of my books are concerned with sexual and reproductive violence against black women. And in this country, that's really often bound up with labor. So whether the labor they're forced to perform in the period of enslavement, a lack of access to living wages that exposes them to sexual and reproductive violence and often premature death, or I think centrally in this book, the labor that they must perform to deal with the ongoing impact of the above. And so, yeah, what I would like to say first is maybe I'll just give the pitch about the book. I want to say that this is a book about black femicide, that is the murder of black women because they are black women or the murder of black women because they are women, facilitated by structural racism, including racialized housing insecurity, inadequate safety provision and medical neglect. It highlights how these murders take place in private and the problems that that causes. It is also about the black women and black feminists organizing to stop the murder of black women and relatedly, the under recognized forms of political action in response to the murders. It's about the struggle black women face after death to enter the record and to enter the record in the right ways. And this is related to and the sort of now of what Saidiya Hartman calls the violence of the archive. So a lot of activism is about this specific issue. And then I'd say it is also about setting up Morrisonian democracy as a feminist corrective or addition to Du Bois abolition democracy, one that I think can attend to the sexual and reproductive violence that is defying black women's experience in the West. And finally, it is a way for black women to see themselves, a place for themselves in political theory as a part of important traditions, including thinking about femicide and black femicide.

[B]

This book spans a lot. Yeah, it spans a lot. And we're going to touch on. We're going to touch on some of it. We won't have a chance to touch on all that. We'll touch on some of it, you just gave us a definition there of. And black femicide. In the book, you also talk about active versus passive femicide. Can you talk about that as well?

[C]

Yeah, so. Yeah, so I don't think it'll hurt to say talk about the definition again because. So, again, so femicide has been defined as the murder of women because they are women, facilitated by a climate of impunity. So black femicide is the murder of black women because they are black women, or the murder of black women because they are women, facilitated by structural racism. Right. Including housing insecurity, inadequate safety provision and medical neglect. And those things as they intersect with classism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, or whorephobia. So femicide scholars like Catherine Degnasio want to draw attention to the fact that the murders of women takes different forms than the murders of men. So men are not usually killed in their homes or in sexualized ways. Right. Active femicide, un Latin American model protocol for the investigation of gender related killings defines active and passive femicide. So active femicide is the intentional slaying of a woman for the reasons above. But passive femicide we should think of as deaths of neglect. So deaths from botched abortions. Right. Botched or unsafe abortions, clandestine abortions, et cetera. But the black maternal mortality crisis would be a textbook case of passive femicide. Right. And really, pregnancy is an important point for the murder of women, both active and passive for black women, as researchers have hypothesized that pregnancy related deaths may account. May drive most of the racialized. Racial disparities in murder observed between black and white women.

[B]

You have a stat. Well, you have a stat. I want to read you a sentence. And it blew my mind quite frankly, when I read it. Despite tremendous advances in obstetric care, if pregnancy were a job, it would be one of the 10 most dangerous jobs in America.

[C]

Yes. And I think that, as I understand it, that would be true for all women in the United States, but in particular for black women for whom it can rank as high as the second most dangerous job. So it's a. There are a lot of deaths in pregnancy. Too many.

[B]

Yeah, that was. I mean, to read that. It. It was my. I'm. I'm even struggling to use words to talk about what it felt like to. To read. To read that. Because we don't talk about. We don't talk about that.

[C]

Yeah. I think in. In a talk I have, I say something like, pregnancy is a dangerous miracle that social conditions can either ameliorate or make worse. Right. So, you know, we've talked about the black maternal mortality crisis in years and, you know, in the last decade or so, maybe six, seven, eight years has become an issue. I think that part of this is about inadequate care provision and differences that are going on that are sort of linked to the history of misrecognition that black women face in this country. So I think I saw a meme or something going around the Internet, right. That doctors are to black women what police are to black men. So I think in thinking of things like that, you can sort of see the differences and the dangers. Right. That we face. And. Yeah, I'll leave it there.

[B]

You have another quote actually related to police, because you were just talking about that in terms of passive and active femicide that you write. Police are not the immediate cause of death for most black women, but they are very much implicated in black women's disproportionate exposure to premature death. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[C]

I can, yeah. So here I'm referring to scholarship by people like Purvis and Melissa Blanco, Dara Purvis, I believe, Andrea Richie, Beth Richie, Kimberle Crenshaw and others. And these feminists state that police, or, you know, they found that police are less likely to render aid when black women call for help in situations of intimate partner violence and more likely to further the violence they experience. So this is really about inadequate safety provision. So abolition feminists like Beth Richie contend that a criminalization approach to gender based violence tends to escalate violence against black women. So whether the problems that stem from an intimate partner violence related arrest, like job loss because of an arrest, can tend to escalate violence. Or as the women of color anti violence organization like Incite argues that police involvement does not tend to restrain male violence against women, but tends to restrain women's actions in their own defense, sort of leading them to be much more likely to be fatally harmed in the end. Right. So when I say that, I say our system of a racialized system of public safety provision where police. They found that police are less likely to help black women. They found that in general they see their defensive actions as violence and not defense. Right. And then that they're sort of a criminalization approach overall tends to make the situation worse. So that's what I'm saying there.

[B]

There's. Throughout the book you talk about activists and activism throughout. I would love to talk about some of those different. Some of those different movements. And we'll just sort of Go kind of in. In order that they go through in the book. And the first is the Black and Missing Foundation.

[C]

Yeah. An interesting organization. So it was founded in 2008, but I think Derricka Wilson and her sister in law Natalie Wilson became interested in dealing with black missing persons cases in 2004 when 24 year old Tameka Houston, I think, went missing from her home in Spartanburg, South Carolina. And what they found is that the families couldn't get a lot of media attention. And media attention is key to driving police attention. Right. And so they I categorize as sort of a black police and media reform organization. Right. Trying to get the institutions that are important in searching for black people when they go missing and investigating the cases up to date. Right. So cultural awareness and bringing attention to the fact that often missing black children are categorized as runaways and not a lot of resources are devoted to looking for them.

[B]

And then you just mentioned how media being key. You also talk about that in the book as well. That as a strategy, as an activist strategy, media is really important.

[C]

Yeah. And I think the woman is Erica Rivers, who runs an organization that sort of categorizes black women who have died and the circumstances around their deaths, I mean, and attempts to sort of warn other. So I talk about this struggle to enter the record. Gwen Ifill, you know, the pioneering journalist coined the term missing white women syndrome. Right. And the, the overhype and the media fascination with missing white women sort of is also part and parcel of a media neglect of missing black, indigenous and other women where there's a struggle to get any coverage at all when, when these women go missing. And so websites like our black Girls. Right. For the site she says centers on the often untold stories of black girls and women who have gone missing or in some cases were found dead under mysterious circumstances. The women in these stories I report are more than the highlight clip on the 10 o' clock news, if they even get that right. These are and were our sisters, many of whom endured deception and. Or violence. We shouldn't sweep their stories under the rug and move on to the next topics.

[B]

Very closely related to this that you're talking about that stories of missing black women and girls don't get as much media attention is. You talk a lot about data as well, which I found a really interesting section. Talk about, talk about again, data. I mean, data as activism.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, so this goes, I think back to, you know, in black politics and black studies, to people like Ida B. Wells. Right. And whose activism was very much data. Activism. And so there are many people who are doing activism around data. Catherine Dignasio again, who wrote a brilliant book, Counting Feminicide, talks about this as counter data. Right. So data that women and feminist activists collect to counter official data. Data that is either missing, inaccurate or sparsely collected. Right. Like collected in a lax way. So in the book I consider the work of Rosa Page. And Page has been credited with coining the term black femicide. And she worked as a nurse in an ER and during her time watching the levels of violence to which black women were exposed, became convinced that data regarding black women's murder was wrong and began scouring sort of non traditional sources and eventually demonstrated that the FBI was undercounting the murders of women. These data activists also include Aisha Reynolds Tyler and her Pulitzer prize winning work Missing in Chicago that challenged the data collection practices of the Chicago Police Department regarding missing persons. Right. Like the data was incorrect. Right. Or missing important key, you know, variables and figures and also reporting people's deaths as non criminal in nature after they were found murdered. Right. And so this is an issue of how hard it is if you are a black woman, if you are gone or if you die to enter the record in the correct way. I also want to emphasize, and I think that this is key to Wells's work as well as Paige and Reynolds Tyler, that a lot of this is also about the work of humanization and not just entering them into the record as a number, but also to include a story with that number.

[D]

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[C]

This is a real good story about.

[F]

Bronx and his dad Ryan. Real United Airlines customers.

[C]

We were returning home and one of.

[E]

The flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew.

[C]

I got to sit in the driver's seat.

[G]

I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.

[F]

That's Andrew, a real United pilot.

[G]

These small interactions can shape a kid's future.

[C]

It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.

[G]

That's how good leads the way.

[B]

Do you think our current time of fake news and AI slop and having to parse the. The truth and I'll say air quotes. Truth, you know, truth from made up. Do you think that makes it easier or harder to, to accurately collect this information that you're talking about?

[C]

I think it makes it harder, yeah. And I don't know that I know any solution to this. Right. Determining what actually happened is really a minefield. A lot of this work was in the over 10 years of doing this work happened 10 and 20 years ago. But now. Yeah, I don't think I have anything particularly eloquent.

[B]

No, I was just, I was thinking about that because, you know, it was hard enough to your point in this period of time where, where the stories just weren't told. So you were sort of looking into the void for the information. But now you can look up something and you can actually get an affirmative answer that we know is actually it's not even true. It's a, it's a hallucination.

[C]

Um, yeah, I don't. Yes, absolutely. And I, and I think especially in a world of true crime. Right. And a fascination with murder and a murder industry in a lady murder industry in particular, I think that.

[B]

Yeah, that's a whole other book.

[C]

Yes. Yeah, that'll be for next time, I guess.

[B]

Yeah, I will, I will. Look, I'm going to come away thinking about that. Thinking about that book for next time for sure. Okay. We, we were talking about different activists and activism and strategies. You have armed self defense as well. I don't want to move on without talking about armed self defense.

[C]

Yeah, no. So these are women and many of whom I found who are intimate partner violence survivors themselves who make it a policy or who. Who have set themselves the task of training women in self defense. Right. So if the police aren't going to help you, if potentially community members aren't going to help you, who do you have left. And their argument is you have yourself left and you have a self to defend. So these include, I think most fascinatingly, one of the women was a doula. Right. And so she is, she runs this practice in Texas. It's Oshun Defense. And it is about, because pregnancy is such a dangerous time in a woman's life that this is for her a part of her birth work. Right. And Oshun is the goddess of fertility and goddess of the creative power of self destruction and an angry and retributive goddess. So it works very well together. It's a great name. But yeah, there are many women, again, many of them cite as the reason that they are training women is that they themselves have survived intimate partner violence and they want to help women to save themselves in these situations. It's a fairly individualistic approach. But if no one else is going to help you, you know.

[B]

Absolutely. And then you give two others abolition and then say Her Name.

[C]

Yes. And so say Her Name is an organization founded by the pioneering scholar of intersectionality, Kimberle Crenshaw, in order to drive activism around police violence in the specific forms of police violence against black women. Abolition feminists include Beth Richie, who I think I mentioned sort of, who argue against the criminalization approach to the problem of intimate partner violence and instead advocate for community accountability based solutions. And in sort of a survivor centered approach, mutual aid and other things to help, not that don't focus on punishing the perpetrator, but focus on sort of community repair in many places, but giving things to survivors. But again, as I said, they argue that criminalizing gender based violence in a country with a history of racialized policing tends to harm black women and survivors of violence more than it protects them. And this is sort of the base of their argument and pointing out that criminalizing violence against black women tends to restrain black women's actions in their own defense. So the women are stopped by the threat of criminalization in ways that the perpetrators of violence against them are not.

[B]

So earlier you talked about the importance not just of data in terms of collecting the numbers, but you also talked about humanizing these women through, through their stories and through storytelling. And the book makes a pivot then to start telling more of these stories. And you start with W.E.B. du Bois and the work that he did around storytelling as it related to, to lynching. And you, you write, you ask a really interesting question. You say, but why? And how did lynching become formative? And you're, you're talking about wbd, WB Du Bois work, but why and how did lynching become formative in the sense that it has formed and shaped black consciousness and the self understanding of blacks as a people? How did it become formative?

[C]

Well, thank you. In the book, I argue that. So I started along this track because I noticed that a lot of people were comparing police violence, contemporary police violence against black men to lynching. And I then started investigating it. And the theologian James cone, the philosopher Robert Gooding, Williams and others have looked at Du Bois work on lynching as crucifixion. And cone in particular says that Du Bois is just the best example of a group of scholars that included Gwendolyn Brooks County Cullen, cultural workers, like poets and artists and things like that, who were tying lynching to crucifixion in order to give it a specific political meaning, but also certain kinds of ethical significance to sort of raise the stakes of this form of meaningless violence for its political significance. So it was a set. It was a political project to tie the lynch black man to Christ so that black people could sort of be politically tied to the Christian virtues. Right. To think about themselves. Right. As a. And to not be a fallen race. Right. But to lift them up to the status of human humanity or above. But I think, excuse me, importantly, there relatively few women are lynched. Right. And so if this form of violence is associated with the black people, it's a form of violence to which men are most often subject. And so then they become more closely identified with this peoplehood project. Yeah. And you know, this is going back and forth between. This project started because I was thinking about spectacular violence versus the private violence to which black women are subject. Right. So intimate partner violence, violence against women, women's deaths take place behind doors. And public violence is the violence that's much more likely. And much has been historically much more closely associated with political mobilization for black people. Yeah.

[B]

So let's talk a little bit more about that then. This idea of spectacular violence and also the being with the dead then, which in the book you start to talk about, as we're getting into what we're talking about now, you start talking about being with the dead.

[C]

So Edward Bloom talks about Du Bois lynching as crucifixion stories which include Jesus Christ in Georgia, Jesus Christ in Texas and the Son of God. You know, several stories that he. He wrote maybe five or six. And Bloom says that importantly, Du Bois brought a black or colored Jesus to the Jim Crow South. And in these stories, he was either crucified, crucified or lynched for his association with black People. But in each of these stories, he rarely resurrected him. He only resurrected his Jesus. So he. He's crucified. He's crucified or lynched. And in all but one of these stories, he stays dead. He's not resurrected. And Bloom is very. Bloom is adamant about the fact that Du Bois does this on purpose because he wants to communicate that Jesus is not coming to save black people. They have to save themselves. Right. So he leaves Jesus dead. He doesn't. This black or colored Jesus remains dead and for a reason. Right. And what I compare that to is the ways in which the black women I profile and Toni Morrison most clearly don't leave the dead dead. Right. And there's the famous quote in Beloved, those who die bad can't stand the ground. Right. The ways in which the women I profile are engaged in democratic practices that keep the dead with them in the political action that they do. So it really, you know, it ended up being a bit of a cute trick in the book, Right. That Du Bois leaves them dead. But I see all these women in active. Right. Who are. Are staying with the dead in various ways. And the Right. But the dead are very much a part of the political organizing that they are doing. Right? Yeah.

[B]

Well, so let's talk about some of the women then. In the book, you have an entire chapter titled Emmett Till is with Us Still.

[C]

Yeah. So, yeah, this is about what Christopher Mitris calls the many reincarnations or many incarnations of Emmett Till. So he's first reincarnated as Christ, and then he's reincarnated by a group of writers and others as like, an angry, retributive person. Right. But he's saying that we see Emmett Till return in black. Right. Resurrected in black politics and black literature and black art over and over and over again. Right. That he remains with us, so he's still here. And that he is resurrected in each generation to perform the work that people need to do. But Mitras kind of almost says it as an aside that the first reincarnation we get is Till as Christ. And you can see it very much in the work and interviews and visual rhetoric of his mother, who understands, you know, my son died blamelessly as Christ so that he might bring an end to lynching. Right. And so her work, right. Her decisions around how he is displayed, her decision to let the world see is a part of what makes his lynching, the lynching in black culture, the most important one that ever happened. And that he remains. Right. That people will have referenced him since his death. And will continue to reference him and he will be here with us in black politics, you know, for the foreseeable future.

[B]

To what I mean, so many. I hope, ideally, I would love everyone who's listening to this right now to immediately understand and put together everything that you just said. That said, if there is someone that is listening that cannot immediately recall what you mean when you're just talking about Emmett Till's death or. Or the. Or his. His dis. The decisions his mother made, then I would love for people to be able to walk away and now know what you were saying and so talk for just a second about the decisions his mother made.

[C]

Okay, so his. Yes. So his mother, Mamie, made the decision to let the world see what they had done to her boy, right? To let the world see what she saw and importantly, to let the world see what it. That is the world lost. So instead of having a closed casket funeral after her son was lynched in Money, Mississippi and brought back to Chicago, she made the decision to have an open casket and invited JET magazine to take pictures above his brutally disfigured body. She displayed three photos, including her. She and him together. He and his Christmas outfit. And I think one other that I'm not recalling, right? So she is sort of in the. In the chapter. I think it. I say it recalls the paeta, if that's correct. It. You know, so both Christian imagery and the imagery of his lynching and crucifixion, right? And bringing those things together. So that we have this idea of a blameless sacrifice in the fight for lynching. But this, you know, and many authors, including Elizabeth Alexander, but many others say that this is really important in that these pictures are probably one of the greatest cultural products of the. Of the 20th century, right? In sort of communicating something, in fostering a sense of identification with Till. Right? To understand Till yourself as Till your life is being interchangeable. What happened to him could happen to me. And this is a pro, right? So that as we are one in the same, we are one and of a group, right? That we. We are together and the things that can happen to him can happen to me. So you see this from Muhammad Ali, I would say, even to my younger brother, right? Like that this process of seeing yourself as tell. Right. And that him being resurrected in all of us continues and it would not have happened, right. He is one of many people, tragically, who were lynched. And he is who he is. And Elizabeth Alexander and others would say the pinnacle of lynching because of the visual decisions that his Mother made.

[B]

Yeah. You write the funeral of Emmett Till stands as the most effective political use of a dead body in the 20th century.

[C]

Yes. And I'm not alone in saying that Emmett Till.

[B]

Yeah. The next two chapters you talk about two other women that maybe not as, perhaps not as well known as Mamie Till. Bradley, talk first about Clementine Barfield.

[C]

Okay. Yeah. So Clementine Barfield. Now, I first want to say that I found out about her work through the work of my friend Melinda Price, who is working on a book about Barfield and her incredible work. But in the summer of 1986, two weeks after her 16 year old son Derek was killed and her 15 year old son Roger gravely injured in an act of teen violence, Barfield organized a meeting for Detroit families affected by violence against children and teens. So the resulting organization called at first Mothers of the Slain and then the group with no Name before members settled on the name Save Our Sons and Daughters was founded by Barfield and others the following year. They were resolute at the outset saying that at our first meeting held January 4, 1987 at the Church of the New Covenant, Ms. Barfield, together with other parents of slain children, decided that we had to go beyond mourning and begin working together to create positive alternatives for our young people. So it's Save Our Sons and Daughters is just an incredible organization. You know, I can't say enough about it. And I encourage all readers to find out as much as they can, as much as they can about it, even if they don't read my book, go read my book. But they, you know, they organized in prisons, they organized in schools, they organized in churches. They organized at the, at the point of violence against. Right. So they would go to the corners and places where kids were slain. Right. They, they did a radio show, they had a newsletter. They, you know, they went up to the houses of people who were dealing drugs in communities. Like they really organized kind of everywhere. I think they pioneered versions of healing justice. Melinda Price, Professor Price talks about how throughout the the Detroit chapter's run of so Sad, they had a grief support group for parents of slain children. So really worked at, I would say a trauma, informed understanding of, of violence and its impact. But Barfield's work and in particular Melinda Price's work on Barfield helped me to understand this political work with the dead. One of the things that the group would do is many of the family members would have birthday parties for their slain children. And the New York Times and other, maybe the Detroit Free Press, I'm not sure would kind of say that this was like a coping mechanism and not a way of. Not something that the anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter has referred to as restorative kinship. And that is in climate and cultures of premature death, putting the person who has gone too soon back into their relationships and into appropriate relationships that. That have been taken away. So, yeah, it's a. It's a fantastic organization. But one of the things that they did was they encouraged their. The living children to plant a tree as a. A symbol, as a, you know, as a practice to remember the lives of the kids who were gone too soon. But they understood children as trees. Right. So both living children as trees and children who passed on as trees. And having living children tend to symbolically to the children who had passed on. Right. Is an important way. And I talk about in a speech that Barfield gives it at Penn State how Price points out that she is sort of in an ongoing dialogue with her son about what she needs to do to make the world a place where he could thrive. So that these children are very much present in the political work that they're doing here on earth. Right. They're being tended symbolically, but also, I think, in actual. Actually too.

[B]

You talk also about Mary Prescott.

[C]

Yes. Who's a very truly phenomenal woman. So she would help to found the Black Coalition Fighting back serial Killers in response to a series of murders of black women in Los angeles in the 80s. And the police initially named the suspected killer a prostitute slayer. And I think that this really matters. Right. So it's a happy accident for us that she found herself in Los Angeles at the time of the murders. So she had recently relocated from New York because of her husband's job. But she had an extraordinary political biography. And so I think she was uniquely position to understand the forces at play. So in particular the role of the state via police and policing in producing violence against black women and disproportionate death. So in 1976, she co founded Black Women for Wages for Housework with Will Met Brown. She was a longtime spokesperson for the US Prostitutes Collective, which began as the New York Prostitutes Collective that was founded in the 80s by a group of black women who worked in different aspects of the sex trade. And she had done sex worker organizing on and off before these killings began, including work aimed at illing at ending the police harassment against sex workers. And she was explicitly for decriminal. The decriminalization of sex work and not the legalization of sex work. Because she was clear that legalization, which would still leave marginalized women, including black women in forms of illegal work. Right. So it all had to be decriminalized in order to keep black women from being harassed by the police. Police. But she developed an analysis between race conscious, street focused police work and violence against all black women on the street. And in recognition that labeling a woman as a sex worker. Right. Helped define her as outside of the community and outside of community and legal concern and therefore made available for murder. So she is this sort of pioneering activist, you know, she still has a radio show today. I encourage you to listen to it. She's still kicking and still doing amazing work. But in the 70s into the 80s, she's doing this work around policing and how police work impacts the disproportionate murder of black women around the serial killing of women in ladies Shopping is hard, right?

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[B]

So these women that we were just talking about to again remind remind listeners how we got there. We, we were. We Talked briefly about W.E.B. du Bois and his work around lynching and crucifixion, but that his work really focused on men and so pivoting then to talk about some of these women then brings us to a person you mentioned already once before, and that's Toni Morrison. And the last chapter is devoted to Toni Morrison. And before we get into the substance of that chapter, talk a little bit about the book's structure then, because we said before, there's a lot. There's a lot in this book, in reading it and going from point A to point B to point C to point D, I thought, wow, it must have been really hard to put this, to organize this in a way. Whereas a reader. I'm with you, I'm holding your hand, I'm following along. But as the researcher and the scholar talk about the organization of the book and how you got there.

[C]

Yeah, I love podcasts for this because who else is going to ask me this? And of course I want to talk about it because, you know, so I won't annoy my friends with this. I really like this question. So I began the book puzzling over the problem of the private deaths of black women and how to drive activism around murders that were not incur occurring in public like those that drove activism in the movement for black lives. Like, that's literally where I started. And then I began to notice how often people called police murderers lynching. And while I was working through that, I attended a lecture, as I said, by Robert Gooding Williams, that discussed Du Bois, Jesus Christ in Georgia, and lynching as crucifixion. So I began to look into that. Okay, well, what does it mean? Is it significant? Right? And I initially came to see Morrison's work as an important foil. But as I was doing all of this, in early work, I'd referenced the necropolitical activism of Ida B. Wells. And as I said, my friend Melinda Price was working on Clementine Barfield. Juliet Hooker, a friend and mentor of mine, was doing work on Mamie Till Bradley. And I read a great article on Margaret Prescott by the scholar Julie Grigsby. And I realized, right, that I was really not alone in puzzling about death, right, that black women had been puzzling over these murder mysteries for a really long. So initially, I wanted to put all the activist women in one chapter. So this would have been a book that was, this is the murder. This is what Du Bois is doing. Here's what a bunch of black activists have done. Let me tell you about Toni Morrison. But I had. And a lot of this was, I think my friends were doing these projects, so they didn't seem to be related to me. I was working on this other thing. But I had a manuscript workshop and Lori Balfour, whose work on Morrison and the Fugitives, Democracy is very important in my own. But she said, you know, I'm going to stop you right here. You can't write about Du Bois and lynching if you're not going to put Ida B. Wells on equal footing. Like, it's just not. It's ridiculous. You can't do it that way. Right. And she was, of course, right. But once I pulled out Wells to make her her own chapter, it made sense to give all of these women their due. Right? So they all contributed something. And therefore, trying to squish them together on my way to somewhere else didn't make sense. And doing that and giving them their treatment changed my thinking about Morrison and what they were all contributing to this project. So I think it ultimately helped my thinking about Morrison to try to figure out where each of them fit, if I was thinking about them as related to this concept of Morrisonian democracy. So in one sense. So like I said, there's the through line of me trying to deal with black femicide and really understand Morrison as an important corrective to Du Bois in the way that he was thinking. So Morrison in Private Murder, Du Bois in Spectacle, Public Murder. Right. Du Bois and Lynching, Morrison in Intimate Stuff. But the book, and, you know, and I spent a summer reading all of the work of Toni Morrison, and I like, highly recommend everybody, if you get.

[B]

A chance, do that Morrison summer. Everyone should have a Morris in Summer Hot Morrison Summer.

[C]

But I think that. But as it. As I went on, the book also became something of an excuse for me, not an excuse, but me to, like, marvel at badass women throughout the 20th and 21st century who were doing work that, you know, I mean, I would have whole things where I'd be just, like, enamored of Margaret Prescott, you know, or like Barbara Smith or, like, you know, so it's a time. So this is a political. You know, I'm making arguments about them doing innovative democratic practice, but I'm also like, isn't this woman cool? Like, isn't it interesting? Like, isn't it good to know that there was a woman in the 70s and the 80s dealing with, like, the most racist police department who would eventually become infamous for Rodney King, who. She's telling him off five years before. Right. Like, isn't that cool? Yeah. So. And it became a chance to say, you know, I want people to know about what these women did and what they did with much less than I would think that we have now. So it became a great opportunity to sort of sit with them and really think about their contributions.

[B]

Well, when we get then, to the Morrison chapter and. Which predominantly focuses on three of her works, which is the play Dreaming Emmet and then the stories Home and Paradise and the book, essentially. I mean, it for me, as the reader became almost literary criticism in that chapter, which I'm a huge literary criticism fan. So I thought that was great. And also interesting in a book that has talked so much about politics and political activism.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

That we get this chapter that is. That is deconstructing fiction. I mean, Dreaming Emmett is Emmett Till, but she's not writing a biography.

[C]

Yeah. I don't. I mean, that's terrifying to me because I would have to be. I'm like, definitely all the pioneering and rock star literary critics. I don't. I don't want to be in any of that. Like, don't. You know, I'm a very literal reader of books. I'm terrible. I'm like, okay, well, this thing happened. This thing happened. And, you know, any literary critic will be like, I think you missed the whole point of the book.

[B]

But, yeah, I'm not sure. I don't think that was my takeaway from reading that chapter.

[C]

No. I mean, I remember Hazel Carby once told me that black women, you know, would take access to whatever form they had, from the slave narrative to the essay. Right. To make the points that they had to make. And many people. I think Alice Weinbaum says this. Well, about why in dealing with an archive that. Dealing with this sort of violent archive that Saidiya Hartman points out, like, why people turn to fiction to tell a true story. And I think that, you know, Morrison is not only doing that. Right. She is, you know, a leading light in American literature. But I do think that it is not an accident that it works so well as this corrective. Right. That there's public violence, private violence. Right. That she is really concerned with dealing with life and repair in the wake of these sort of private acts of violence. Right. So infanticide, sterilization. Sorry, infanticide in the wake of sexual assault. Right. Women who were killed because they are women. Paradise opens with an apparent mass femicide.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So she had a point, Right. Fyra Jasmine Griffin has really written quite eloquently on her theory of justice. Right. So she is really addressing. And how she moved from an idea of retributive justice, which she's gonna reject in the novel Song of Solomon, to her arguments about transformative justice, which she sees as her talking about in the novel Home. Right. And so she is constantly dealing with the private violence that women have to attend and often sort of in the background. So Emmett Till is a part of what's going on in Song of Solomon. She has this play, Dreaming Emmett. Right. So she's addressing this and thinking about it. So that's kind of forming the, like, background condition of these really granular experiences of women dealing with private violence that are foregrounded in the text. Right. So they are sort of already playing to each other at these registers. Yeah. And I think that. Yeah, I don't. I think in terms of the form. Right. If you can write like Toni Morrison, why not make the argument is it novel and not, you know, the tone that is black Reconstruction? But, you know, in paradise, as I said, there's a. There is a mass femicide that opens the book, therefore treating the very subject that's important, you know, to me in this community that women are sort of truantly attending as they escape their lives in a patriarchal town down the road. Right. And I think if you set that up, I think you're making an important point. Right, like that. Yeah. You know, the form, the feminist point, I think, is her own. The form is like her gift, you know, And I think that that then becomes for. For someone to see and just point out to other people so that they can think about it, I guess. I don't know if I have anything other than.

[B]

So I want to read you a quote. A quote that you wrote from. From the book's conclusion. It's. And it's a little bit of a long quote, so I'll ask you to bear with me while I read it. But I also really love it. So like it. It makes me happy to. It makes me happy to. To read it. For people you write, there are many ways to tell a true story. And even if many of the important things I have said may seem troublingly unverifiable, I assure you that most of the above is true. I have chosen to tell a ghost story. But the story of black femicide in the United States could and indeed should one day be told as a story about data and power. And how, as I observed while writing this book, statistics regarding black female murder rates traveled from obscure activist and nonprofit websites to esteemed journals. The Lancet, perhaps. I want to close, however, by thinking of the above as a story of engineering with the ghosts tinkering and helping to reconfigure the machine.

[C]

Yeah. No, in the conclusion, I Talk about the work of the scholar Amy Hemrai and their building access Universal design in the Politics of Disability. And I wanted to think about their concept of epistemic activism and crip. Technoscience, that is the. The techno scientific work of disabled justice activists and how they sort of reconfigured our world. And I wanted to think of Morrison and her democratic clearings as analogous to this material world building project of disabled justice pioneers. So it was just that I loved both of their works and I thought that there. There was a. They both had the commonality of figuring out access and the ways in which black women in their truant creation of rival geographies, as Stephanie Camp says, is analogous to these kids that are busting curves so that we, you know, so that wheelchairs can access curves like that. These are similar and analogous processes of, like, knowledge creation and world building. And that if we think about. We think about Morrison, you know, I want you to think about her as a democratic theorist. I want her. You to think about her as a person who creates language. But I want us to think about both of those things as like a thing that is material and puts a different set of things and possibilities into the world. And the architectural focus of. Of Hamri sort of helps us think about it. Right. And Morrison. But Morrison, I'm constantly saying, is a project that the living and the dead are taking part in. Right. And so the ghosts that she's talking to are a part of the machinery of rebuilding the world. But, yeah, I was having a bit of fun with that.

[B]

Yeah, well, it was fun to read. And it's also, it's. I found myself thinking about this paragraph, both, of course, as it relates to. To the book on the whole, but then, you know, into the wider world, this idea of reconfiguring the machine. I have a. I have a very good friend named Dana Tennille Weeks, and she always talks about we have these grand visions of, like, burning it down. You know, we'll say, like burn it down. You know, we have these great visions, grand visions of burning down whatever the it is. But then she always says, well, what do you. Have you imagined what's in its place? Because if you've been unable to imagine what goes in its place, then I'm not sure what you think you're going to rebuild.

[C]

Right. Yeah. And I think I read an article by Lisa Beard on June Jordan and her theory of redesign. And I think I'm moving toward thinking about democracy and design and spatial justice. And so it is like this is really the bridge trying to think about this new way and redesign. Right. As a. And Jordan is thinking about this in opposition to urban renewal and slum clearance and displacement and gentrification. Right. How do you figure out how to rebuild the world without destroying it and the people on it? Right. And so how do we tinker with. Right. Tinkering toward revolution or something, but rebuilding around us so that the people can stay. And in that way, you know, as you might know from home renovation, you can't blast a thing. You gotta move in stages to get it done. But it's a lot of tinkering.

[B]

Yeah. Is that the next project?

[C]

I hope so. We will see. It's long, it's gonna take a while, but this is what I'm thinking about right now. So. Democracy and design.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

All right.

[B]

Well, this book is the Labors of Black Women, Necromancy and Morrisonian Democracy by Professor Shatima Threadcraft. And I'm your host, Sullivan Sommer. You can find me online at SullivanSummer.com on Instagram at the SullivanSummer and on Substack SullivanSummer. Thank you for listening to the New Books Network.

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