Lifting As They Climbed

Mariame Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration, the author of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us as well as the children’s books Missing Daddy and See You Soon, and the recipient of the Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation.Essence McDowell has worked with numerous national and local entities including Illinois Humanities Council, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Incite National, the Chicago Public Library, and Chicago Teachers Union, and is currently collaborating with organizers in Chicago to develop a resource hub for a national Black Women's Organizing Coalition.

"A journey through the pages of Lifting as they Climbed and you will never walk Chicago's Southside streets again without remembering the amazing Black women that lived, worked, struggled, taught and worshiped there. Mariame Kaba and Essence McDowell conjure up Black women's history as lived experience on the streets of Chicago in this book. It is a tribute, a loving reclamation of memory, and a precious family album, all in one." —Barbara Ransby, historian, author, activist