The Collective: Telling the Stories of Women of Color

07/29/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1K2hrbxnJz/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Artist Betye Saar, a central figure of the 1960’s Black Arts Movement, died Sunday morning in Los Angeles at 99. Saar's death was confirmed Monday by relatives. She would have turned 100 this week. https://cnn.it/4yKWGgE

07/17/2026

Ida B. Wells used her voice when her people needed it most.

Born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells became one of the most fearless journalists and civil rights leaders in American history.

Through her anti-lynching activism, investigative reporting, and lifelong fight for justice, Wells helped lay the foundation for generations of civil rights work that followed.

07/17/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1BW29KEHHL/?mibextid=wwXIfr

BORN ON THIS DAY // JULY 16, 1862
Ida B. Wells transformed investigative journalism by exposing the truth about lynching, challenging racial injustice, and becoming one of the nation’s most influential advocates for civil rights and women’s suffrage.

Related Story: The Seat Ida B. Wells Refused to Surrender
Read the full story at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2026/05/04/the-seat-ida-b-wells-refused-to-surrender/

07/12/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CKqffyHcP/?mibextid=wwXIfr

This graduation story deserves all the love!

Makayla Nelson, an 18-year-old from Tyler, Texas, graduated from Tyler High School after surviving cancer four times since childhood.

Her journey has included surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, stem cell transplants, and the removal of her left kidney. Even after being diagnosed again with a brain tumor in April, Makayla is still holding on to faith, family, and purpose.

07/01/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1DCv3AJcji/?mibextid=wwXIfr

In a 6-3 decision, the court reaffirmed the long-held principle that children born in the U.S. are citizens

06/29/2026

🌹❤️🌹

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1EBdHtakkV/?mibextid=wwXIfr

06/27/2026

Where the Home Front Was Segregated
Before she was America’s oldest park ranger, Betty Reid Soskin was a Black woman navigating wartime labor, exclusion, and the paperwork of inequality.

Soskin died at home in Richmond, California, on December 21, 2025, at age 104, according to multiple reports and her family’s announcement. The fact of her death—on the winter solstice, her family noted—invited the kind of poetic framing America loves to apply to its elders. But Soskin spent her life resisting poetic framing when it blurred the facts. The real poetry, if you want to call it that, is the rigor of her insistence: tell the story as it was, not as we wish it had been.

To do that, you have to begin where she began—before the park, before the uniform—inside the early lessons that formed her sense of how a country trains you to accept your place, and how you decide whether you will.

Read the full article at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2025/12/23/where-the-home-front-was-segregated/

06/27/2026

The Candy Lady Was the System
Across Black America, a front-room business became a neighborhood’s smallest, steadiest institution—priced in quarters and governed by respect.

For many Black Americans, “the Candy Lady” is a memory so universal it can feel folkloric—one of those childhood references that prompts a smile before you’ve even decided you’re smiling. Yet if you treat the Candy Lady as nostalgia, you miss what she reveals: a neighborhood institution built at the scale of the living room.

She sold candy, yes. She sold chips and pickles and juice and sometimes baked goods bought in bulk and resold as individual portions. She sold frozen cups—Kool-Aid or fruit drink poured into plastic sleeves and frozen solid—called different names in different places, but recognized everywhere as the price of surviving summer. And she sold something else, less sentimental and more consequential: predictability.

The Candy Lady was a micro-economy calibrated to scarcity and a safety system that didn’t call itself one. In neighborhoods shaped by segregation, underinvestment, food deserts, and over-policing, the Candy Lady’s enterprise often filled gaps the formal economy left behind. She made childhood more navigable: one less hungry hour, one less unsupervised stretch, one more adult who knew your name and knew how to enforce a rule without calling the state.

Read the full article at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2025/12/21/the-candy-lady-was-the-system/