Loyalty is so excited to welcome Treva B. Lindsey and Derecka Purnell for America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice or you can order the book on our website to be added to the event's registration list. Donations will go to BLM DC. There will also be an option to snag the book during the event.

A powerful account of violence against Black women and girls in the United States and their fight for liberation.

America, Goddam explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today. Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. America, Goddam powerfully demonstrates that the struggle for justice begins with reckoning with the pervasiveness of violence against Black women and girls in the United States.

Combining history, theory, and memoir, America, Goddam renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls occupy a unique status of vulnerability to harm and death, while the circumstances and traumas of this violence go underreported and understudied. Lindsey also shows that the sanctity of life and liberty for Black men has been a galvanizing rallying cry within Black freedom movements. But Black women—who have been both victims of anti-Black violence as well as frontline participants in it, and quite often architects of these freedom movements—are rarely the focus. Black women have led movements demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Toyin Salau, Riah Milton, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and countless other Black women and girls whose lives have been curtailed by numerous forms of violence. Across generations and centuries, their refusal to remain silent about violence against them led many to envisioning and building toward Black liberation through organizing and radical politics. Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song that inspired the title, America, Goddam is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures.

Treva B. Lindsey is a Black feminist historian and commentator. She is the author of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2017 Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C. She received her PhD from Duke University and is currently a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships including the inaugural University of Missouri Faculty Achievement in Diversity Award and the inaugural Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University.  She has written for outlets such as The Washington Post, Time, NBC News, Bustle, BET, Complex, Vox, The Root, Huffington Post, PopSugar, Teen Vogue, The Grio, Zora, Women’s Media Center, and Cosmopolitan. She has been a featured commentator/expert on MSNBC, Al Jazeera, BET, Black News Channel, PBS, NPR, and CNN. She is also a frequently invited guest for local and national radio and podcasts as well as for keynote addresses for colleges and universities and organizations

Derecka Purnell is a lawyer, organizer, and author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. She works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and training in grassroots organizations through an abolitionist framework. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Purnell co-created the COVID-19 Policing Project at the Community Resource Hub for Safety Accountability to track police arrests, harassment, citations and other enforcement through public health orders related to the pandemic. She received her JD from Harvard Law School, her BA from the University of Missouri- Kansas City, and studied public policy and economics at the University of California- Berkeley as a Public Policy and International Affairs Law Fellow. Her writing has been published widely, including in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Teen Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar. Purnell has lectured, studied, and strategized around social movements across the United States, The Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Australia. She is currently a columnist at The Guardian, a Margaret Burroughs Fellow for the Social Justice Initiative’s Portal Project at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Treva B. Lindsey and Derecka Purnell for AMERICA, GODDAM