A Shining Thread of Hope

This history of the experience of black women opens with an account of the life of Lucy Terry, who was brought as a slave to Deerfield, Massachusetts, when she was a child in about 1735. At 16, Terry wrote a poem, "Bars Fight," the first work of literature by a black American. Years later, married and free, Terry argued for the admission of her son to Williams College and, when a white man tried to take her family's land, she took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Terry's story is typical of those in A Shining Thread of Hope, which brings together centuries of achievement by black women. As coauthors Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson put it, "The extraordinary achievements of black women in the 19th and 20th centuries did not grow out of degradation but out of a legacy of courage, resourcefulness, initiative, and dignity that goes back to 1619."