Why I Love Black Women

In this open love letter to black women everywhere, Michael Eric Dyson celebrates the strength and beauty of African-American women. From Miss James, his grammar school teacher, to Linda Johnson Rice, who heads the communications empire that publishes Ebony and Jet; from Toni Morrison, whose novels inspired him, as a young welfare dad, to Debbie Bethea, the housecleaner whose labors remind him of his mother in Detroit; from civil rights widow Myrlie Evers-Williams to activist and scholar Angela Davis-and many more-the women in Dyson's pantheon inspire us to remember, "When we love black women, we love ourselves, and the God who made us."