taught me to ignore men who thought women were inferior and to deflect verbal attacks that might dampen my aspirations. She showed me how to respond to people who held to certain social conventions about race and gender or presumed I wasn’t intelligent because of my skin color. As I got older and began to read about historical figures like Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Julia Foote, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and more recently Nancy Ambrose, Sue Bailey Thurman, Pauli Murray, and Coretta Scott King, I saw in them the same kind of inner authority I saw in my mother. They shared
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