

The Story of Black Women and the Economy in the U.S.
The war on poverty has been fought by Black women in the United States for centuries, beginning with their resistance to the wholesale exploitation of their physical and reproductive labor as enslaved people. At the start of the twentieth century, pervasive, overt racial and gender discrimination barred Black women from most jobs, denied them equal education, and disenfranchised them politically. Issues of equal pay, exploitation and physical and sexual violence and harassme