This event takes place in person at Charis and on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Please read the in-person event guidelines at the bottom of this page to be sure you can participate in the event. 

Charis welcomes Kenja McCray in conversation with Crystal R. Sanders for a discussion of Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership, which documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists' experiences and offers a new perspective on women's Black Power leadership legacies.

Academics and popular commenters 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 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, 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.

Kenja McCray is an Associate Professor in the Humanities Division at Clayton State University, where she teaches history. She holds a Ph.D. from Georgia State University, an M.A. from Clark Atlanta University, and a B.A. from Spelman College. Her research focuses on the 20th century United States, African Americans, Africa and the diaspora, transnational histories, women, and leadership. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians, the Sixties, Social History, and The Wisdom of Ifá: An Ancient Paradigm for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond.

Crystal R. Sanders is an award-winning historian of the United States in the twentieth century.  Her research and teaching interests include African American History, Black Women's History, and the History of Black Education.  She received her BA (cum laude) in History and Public Policy from Duke University and a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University.  She is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University.  Previously, she was an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University.

Sanders is the author of A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. The book won the 2025 Pauli Murray Prize from the African American Intellectual History Society and the 2025 Outstanding Publication Award from SIG 168 of the American Educational Research Association. She is also the author of A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi's Black Freedom Struggle published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016 as part of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.  The book won the 2017 Critics Choice Award from the American Educational Research Association and the 2017 New Scholar’s Book Award from Division F of the American Educational Research Association. The book was also a finalist for the 2016 Hooks National Book Award.  Sanders’ work can also be found in many of the leading history journals including the Journal of Southern History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of African American History.

The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate or in person at the event.

Charis Books is a fully wheelchair accessible space with on site van accessible parking, two ramps, and additional overflow accessible parking nearby. Additional accessibility information can be found on the Accessibility page of our website. 

In-person event guidelines:

All attendees must wear a face mask during the event.

We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.

This event will be live-streamed via Crowdcast.

As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request specific accessibility accommodations, please contact info@charisbooksandmore.com or call the store at 404-524-0304.

Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org.

By attending our event, whether in person or virtually, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately or email info@chariscircle.org.

Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership -- Kenja McCray in Conversation with Crystal R. Sanders