SANKOFA VIEWS Black American Women

poster to Black Women

I love Black Girls

3 Black women's natural hair styles

Three Black American women with their 'naturals' sitting on the ground talking and laughing unabashedly reminds me of the climate when I was a young man; and Black women engaging life was intimidating and exhilarating at the same time challenged me and other young cats to exceed our limitations. Standing in close proximity to their presence did more to bring us into the concept of better where it could dwell comfortably within us. That is what Black women inspired in us. They were the glimpses of the Goddess compelling us to push our intellectual capacities over the horizon, and they were the Muse of creative impulses in ways foreign to this generation of Black women. 

It was and looking backwards, astonishing to feel that beside our parents a Black woman's appreciation of us made all the difference in the world. Those daily pushes from Black women's vitality diminished the social climate set against us, and made a world of possibilities a real world to create and leave as a legacy. That is part of the story of how I developed during and after the Civil Rights movement when I was stateside: internally and through indirect and direct communication with what I felt from the wombs of countless women engaged with their vital energies. It was a theater unlike today's world with the current fashion of disconnection from those energies and the hipness of being someone else, and less the feminine of the Black female doesn't inspire; it creates questions away from the why of existence! 

Gregory E. Woods,
Keeper of Stories 11.16.14 

legs agape - Keke Palmer