Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)

Sep 22, 2025

Kenja McCray, Assistant Professor of History at Clayton State University, dives into her book, focusing on the pivotal role of women in the Black Power movement. She challenges the male-dominated narrative, highlighting how women’s unique, service-oriented leadership shaped organizations. McCray shares insights from her oral history research, emphasizing the importance of cultural nationalism through art and education. She introduces Qazi leadership, linking past activism to contemporary organizing, revealing invaluable lessons for today's advocates.

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INSIGHT

Women Shaped African Womanhood Earlier

Kenja McCray found her interest in Black cultural nationalism through personal experiences at Spelman and Osset's Journey to African Womanhood.
She realized women had articulated concepts of African womanhood decades before her generation did.

INSIGHT

What Kawaida Means In Context

Kawaida is a Swahili-influenced cultural nationalist philosophy developed by Ron Karenga in the mid-1960s.
It emphasized African-centered values, Swahili language adoption, and cultural nation-building distinct from revolutionary nationalists like the Panthers.

ANECDOTE

Why She Picked Four Organizations

McCray chose four case studies: US Organization, Committee for Unified Newark/Congress of African People, the East, and Ahiarmiyaa.
She selected them because each either pioneered or embraced Kawaida values within local contexts.

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Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun with autocratic leaders. Yet women’s strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations’ functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhibited a unique service-oriented, collaborative leadership style.
Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership (New York University Press, 2025) documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists’ experiences, considering the ways they produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Relying on oral histories, textual archival material, and scholarly literature, this book delves into women’s organizing and resistance efforts, investigating how they challenged the one-dimensional notions of gender roles within cultural nationalist organizations. Revealing a form of Black Power leadership that has never been highlighted, author Kenja McCray explores how women articulated and used their power to transform themselves and their environments. Through her examination, McCray argues that women’s Pan-Africanist cultural nationalist activism embodied a work-centered, people-centered, and African-centered form of service leadership. A dynamic and fascinating narrative of African American women activists, Essential Soldiers provides a new vantage point for considering Black Power leadership legacies.

This episode includes a reference to the book Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores by Katie Mitchell (Random House, 2025). Listen to Mitchell discuss her book at New Books in African American Studies, hosted by N’Kosi Oates.

Dr. Kenja McCray is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Clayton State University and coauthor of Atlanta Metropolitan State College: A Campus History (Arcadia Publishing, 2023). You can find Dr. McCray at her website, on Facebook, and on Instagram.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Dr. McCray continued their conversation.

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