July 2020 — I have been thinking a lot about Maya Angelou, the beloved American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist who died May 28, 2014 at the age of 86. An articulate activist in the fight for equality and social justice, her magical musical poetry caught the attention of President Bill Clinton who invited her to perform “On the Pulse of Morning” at his inauguration. A poet had not read at a presidential inauguration since 1961, when Robert Frost read  “The Gift Outright” for President John F. Kennedy.

She told The Washington Post at the time: “It is fitting, at the risk of taking away from the fact that he really likes my poetry, it is fitting that he asks a woman and a black woman to write a poem about the tenor of the times. It might be symbolic that black women when looked at are on the bottom of the graph. It is probably fitting that a black woman try to speak to the alienation, the abandonment and to the hope of healing those inflictions which have befallen all Americans, that accounts for white Americans feeling so estranged. Somehow a black woman knows all about that.”

Later, she told the Advocate in Baton Rouge that although she thinks racism is still “extremely ugly in America,” things are better than when she wrote “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in 1969. “Our country is better now than it may seem to be. You can look around and see black people in positions of leadership, and they’ve been voted in by large white majorities … men and women who head some of the large corporations and men and women who head some of the largely white universities.”

Which makes me wonder how she’d feel about the current protests that have exploded across America this spring. While my guess is that she’s be proud, I turned to eight other powerhouses in this issue of Inkandescent Women magazine for their insights. You’ll hear from:

• Cover girl Collette Eccleston, a pragmatic brain scientist in New York who talks with Inkandescent reporter and leadership expert Lisa Schenk about George Floyd, getting arrested for being black, and why she was afraid a neighbor might call the police after seeing her in his neighborhood.
• Activist Karen Hanrahan is a social justice expert who is fighting for human rights at the San Francisco-based Glide Foundation.
• Attorney Michelle Alexander, a professor and Civil Rights lawyer for decades, is the author of “The New Jim Crow,” which shines a light on mass incarceration.
• Author bell hooks, an internationally celebrated writer and speaker who penned “Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism” and more than 16 other books.
• Entrepreneur Kim Lee Minor speaks candidly about her life as a black woman in Corporate America, and her journey as a small business owner.
• Health & Wellness expert Johanna Reyes, a Richmond VA-based ER nurse who is bringing transformative yoga classes to black neighborhoods in town.
• Journalist Sheri Hunter who decided after her husband suddenly died that, indeed, she was “Daring to Live.”
• Graduate Student Raven Johnson who at 22 is getting her master’s degree in math and in this issue shares her newest poem, “Lament of a Black Queer Martyr.”

From all of us at Inkandescent™ we share our deepest wish for love, peace, and justice for all. — Hope Katz Gibbs, publisher, Inkandescent Women magazine