Beyond Respectability charts the development of African
American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their
thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the
1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in
contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching
intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna
Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli
Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that
transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures,
including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and
personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically
reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also
confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial
knowledge.