This month we celebrate great women who celebrate great women of our history. The power of music is something I became deeply acquainted with growing up in a recently post colonial Zimbabwe, with South Africa still in the dark throes of apartheid situated right next door. I heard songs that had been sung during the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe, and songs being sung to bring awareness to the inhumane injustices that were rampant in South Africa. Songs sung to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s freedom, songs sung to admonish apartheid leaders like Botha, songs sung to acknowledge the tragic loss of many. Song has long been used as a palpable tool of activism.  

“The conqueror writes history. They came, they conquered and they wrote. Now you don’t expect people who came to invade us to write the truth about us, they will always write negative things about us. And they have to do that, because they have to justify their invasion.”  - Miriam Makeba

Miriam Makeba sits at the pinnacle of that struggle. A powerful political force who came to the US in the sixties from South Africa - exiled by the apartheid government from her own homeland. By accomplishing many firsts such as being the first black woman on the cover of TIME magazine, performing in a Hollywood film and earning a Grammy for her astounding work, she paved a path that still resonates today. She brought the true voice of African people to the global stage, not filtered through a western lens but entirely, authentically their voice; at a time when it was a matter of life or death that the black South African be seen and heard by the larger world. When you watch her singing in Xhosa in front of an American audience in the 1960s, bringing visibility to a people that many would prefer we forgot existed, you feel that she was a woman on a mission. Her vocal advocacy against apartheid and other injustices came at a cost, but never did she waver from speaking truth to power through her music. Known as “Mama Africa” she spoke fearlessly about the ills of white supremacy on every opportunity and the struggle her people.

“All we are worried about is to fight and liberate ourselves, what will happen after that will depend again on the invaders. Until the white man comes to any place nothing lives, it's only when he comes and says  'POOF! I have discovered you. Now you exist!' Which is ridiculous.”  - Miriam Makeba

Somi, an astounding storytelling multi-hyphenate songstress of this time, has created a musical and released an album in honor of Ms. Makeba. Somi is a revelation in her own right. Recently becoming the first African woman to be nominated for a grammy in the Jazz category, Somi is masterful at fusing several musical influences into a unique, singular voice that honors various peoples and narratives across the continent of Africa. Every album tells a story, focusing on a nation or a people, from African immigrants in Harlem, to the celebration of the city of Lagos, to the life of Zenzile Miriam Makeba.

The celebration of one great woman by another, is our focus this Woman’s History month at Love Our Girls, simultaneously commemorating the release of Somi’s sublime album: Zenzile: The re-imagination of Miriam Makeba. We honor women who have used their gift of song to break barriers, fight injustice and bring awareness to those often marginalized or forgotten. We feature Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and the organization STEP UP that focuses on the crucial act of mentorship. There are many stunning legendary women we may never get to meet, but the legacy they have left has nurtured and inspired those who have come behind them; empowering us to be bold, be courageous, find our own song and sing it.

Remembering Miriam Makeba: SOMI On Her New Play and Album Celebrating The South African Legend

SOMI is a Grammy-nominated singer, a songwriter, composer, actor and a playwright who has shared the stage with some of our world’s biggest stars—Angelique Kidjo, Common and her longtime mentor, the legendary South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela. Of Rwandan and Ugandan descent, Somi was the first African woman nominated in any of the Grammy Jazz categories last year for her live album Holy Room- Live at Alte Oper.

For the last seven years, Somi has been grappling with the legacy of Miriam Makeba. The South African singer/songwriter and anti-apartheid activist is an icon and legend across Africa and elsewhere. But despite spending time in America, being right in the center of the mid-20th century New York jazz and folk scene, Somi has been surprised at how many people in America either don’t know who Miriam Makeba is, or don’t know much about her. That may be changing.

On March 4, Somi is releasing her fifth studio album, Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba, on the heels of the Somi-penned play Dreaming Zenzile, an original musical theater production that is set on the night of Miriam Makeba’s final show, the last night of her storied life. Her presentation of the album will headline the Apollo Theater’s Africa Now! festival on March 19. The latest single from the album, “Khuluma” is out today.

While the play was being staged in Princeton, NJ, Somi took time from all of this to talk to Afropop’s Ben Richmond about the play and the album—whether she sings differently in the character of Miriam Makeba versus singing a Makeba song as herself, and why Makeba’s legacy is so tenuous in America.

Ben Richmond: First off, for our readers who might not be familiar with you yet, do you want to introduce yourself?

Somi: Sure. My name is Somi. Kakoma is my last name. I'm a vocalist, a writer, a composer and an actor.

And your play has already played in St. Louis?

Yeah, it started in St. Louis. We were originally supposed to open in March 2020. So five days before opening night the pandemic hit. Obviously we were shut down. Thankfully we returned to St. Louis for all the subsequent productions that have been planned. That started in August of last year. So we were there and opened in September. We are doing a rolling world premiere in regional theaters across the country and then we will land in New York for an off-Broadway run this summer.

That's very exciting. And the play is of course something that you wrote. Does that weigh on you or how does it feel?

I feel excited. To date, I'm mostly known as a vocalist and composer and songwriter. But theater is something I've always loved. So the opportunity to really stretch out artistically has been deeply challenging and deeply rewarding. It feels like my most holistic representation and or presentation of self, artistically and intellectually—and musically. It's been exciting for me as a writer, as a performer and as a vocalist. As a performer I never would have introduced myself as an actor but that is what is required of the piece, so that's been exciting to really lean into that. And as a writer it's been really thrilling to share that. I've always written things outside of songs but to share a larger work in this way artistically and publicly has been really thrilling. It also has an honor to get to stand in the story of Miriam Makeba and be able to try to hold her voice and legacy. I really try to honor her voice while honoring my own. It has been a deeply rigorous spiritual and artistic practice. And I'm grateful for it. In exploring her voice I discovered new things on my own. So I'm excited about that. I'm excited about this large-scale cultural memory project. Not only sharing her recorded music but also being able to share this multi-dimensional story through theater and ask people to journey with me for a while. I'm excited about all of that. But it's definitely a heavy lift.

Which came first, the idea for the album or the idea for the play?

I would say it was the album first. I would say I was interested in trying to figure out how to tell her story. So the first support I had around, seven years ago I applied for a grant through the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. They have something called French American Jazz Exchange and I asked a longtime collaborator of mine, Hervé Samb, a guitarist/composer who is Senegalese but based in Paris whom I have worked with for many years, if he would like to collaborate with me on this. The grant application was to reimagine Miriam Makeba's music. I was really just interested in having time to understand her story, and take a deeper look at her story and life's journey, and hopefully get some insight into what her music was about. I think we all have broad stroke understandings of what she was about. That's something I realized, that as someone who thinks I know a lot about Miriam Makeba, I really only know the surface. I didn't know as much as I thought I knew. I think everyone can speak to her opposition to apartheid, her activism and what she represented culturally and so many of the first that she was able to do and be as an African artist and woman.

But I realized when I really started researching her story, reading her autobiography, translating the lyrics of her whole 50- 60-year catalog of music, talking to her colleagues and people who were close to her, I realized how much we didn't know. In many ways I was just committed to honoring her story and her life. I wasn't sure it was going to show up as a play. But the initial thing was to let me reimagine her music. And the more I learned the more I wanted to tell. That's when I realized that honestly the dimensionality of an album wasn't large enough for her life story. So these two projects are really meant to be in conversation with each other. The album as myself honoring her as a vocalist; and the play asks people to believe they're there on the night of her last performance, which was also the final night of her life. And stepping into memory with Miriam Makeba.

Become a singer despite the apartheid

The kid who became the muse of Pan-Africanism in songs could have missed out on her own destiny. Flashback on a young Makeba locked behind apartheid’s barbed wire.

Uzenzile: “You can only blame yourself”

If you want to sweep the course of an existence, you have to start from the beginning. The very beginning: birth. The day when African music “empress” – as they would call her later – was born, is a decisive one: indeed, she took her name from that very day.

On March 4th, 1932, Christina Makeba, a professional nurse, feels that the birth contractions are getting closer. Alone at home, she boils water and lays the rush mat on which she lies, and gives birth to a little girl. She cuts herself the cord that connects her to the newborn. The grandmother and the neighbors who heard the cries of the infant come running, only to find the mother lying on the floor. She fainted. The grandmother nods her head and, looking at her daughter, who has just regained consciousness, says: “Uzenzile, you can only blame yourself.” Christina had been told that she and her daughter would not survive the childbirth and, indeed, the thin and sickly girl already showed signs of weakness and could not even eat. As for the mother, she has only become a shadow of her former self. But finally, against all odds, regained their health, and the “Uzenzile” word that the grandmother had let out will remain in the family’s history as a tender reproach, falsely angry. Anyway, that’s where Miriam took her name: Zenzile. Full name, Zenzile Makeba Qgwashu Nguvama.

Zenzi is only eighteen days old when she is sent to prison for the first time! To make ends meet, her mother brews traditional corn beer (“umqombothi”). But the laws of what is not yet officially called “apartheid” policy forbid Black people from consuming or possessing alcohol. Particularly, to produce any. The young kid and her mother spent six months in prison, as the father could not gather the 18-pound-fine required by the police to free them. Later, Zenzi will remember the words that her mother repeatedly told her during childhood: “If you go to prison once, you will go back at least three times.” And she will go back inside a cell more than this during her life.

“Who can stop us from stand back up as long as we have our music?”

Zenzi – Miriam by her English name – is only six when she loses her father. Her mother, busy cleaning the houses of White people, only sees her once a month. But the girl, who lives with her grandmother surrounded by a flock of cousins, already has a taste for singing, and sneaks to attend the rehearsals of the school choir her older sister is a member of. The director spots her and she joins the chorus, then participating in competitions, sometimes singing compositions in Sotho, Xhosa or Zulu language full of metaphors Whites cannot seem to understand… if only they knew! “Who can stop us from standing back up as long as we have our music?”, she thinks already, aware of the unifying and spiritual role of the songs of an entire people. And even today, there is no ANC demonstration without these powerful choirs that carry the history of the struggle of South Africa’s Black people.

Getting back to this young girl who grew up in the shade of a Pretoria’s township, she would soon have to give up music. First she has to leave school, in order to help her mother make ends meet. Like her, she becomes a housemaid in White families, at the mercy of their cruel tantrums. It is 1948, and the National Party has recently won the elections (in which, obviously, only the Whites voted). The infernal legal arsenal of apartheid politics is quickly setting up, brick after brick, barbed wire after barbed wire. Cast in the marble of laws. The interracial relations are banned, the different populations (Blacks, mixed-race, Indians, Whites) must live separately and in reserved areas from which they can not move without authorization. Blacks, therefore, can not go to the white quarters unless they can justify a job, and must prove it by showing their pass, a kind of internal passport for the use of Blacks. Not to mention the Bantu Education Act, which continues segregation in education and also limits the teachings Blacks receive to only what they need to know to serve the Whites. Everyday a little more, South Africa becomes a prison.

This is the context in which Miriam gets pregnant by James Kubay, a young man who is about to become a police officer. She marries him in 1950 and gives birth to a little girl, Bongi (literally “I give thanks to you”). But Miriam’s life is not happy: she is exploited by her mother-in-law and beaten by her husband… She ends up escaping, leaving Bongi to her mother so she can look for a job. One of her cousins ​​offers her to sing for the Cuban Brothers, an amateur orchestra in which he sings himself. The band (that has nothing Cuban) does covers of American standards and adapts songs in the languages ​​of the country. They are really successful in Orlando East, in the suburbs of Johannesburg (where Soweto is currently located). This is where, one night, a certain Nathan Mdledle hears her, and offers her to integrate the Manhattan Brothers, one of the most popular vocal quartets at the time. The only female vocalist of the band, she brings all her grace and tours all over the country with Nathan and his friends. She also records a song that she would often repeat during her career, “Laku Tshoni ’Ilanga”, and “Tula Ndivile” where she handles the lead vocals. That’s when, on the advice of the Manhattan Brothers, she takes her English name as a stage name. Here is Miriam Makeba.

WHAT WE DO

Mentorship

Step Up believes mentorship is the key toward a world where all girls have the opportunity to pursue their dreams of success.

Our Approach
Step Up creates and implements impactful virtual and in-person mentorship programs open to girls, young women and gender-expansive young adults ages 14-23. These programs introduce social emotional learning skills, community and connection, and opportunities for career practice. Mentorship opportunities are open to Step Up members to participate in both one-on-one and group mentorship sessions with Step Up teens and young women.

Impact
Step Up works to close the opportunity gap, transcend gender and racial inequities, and advance communities and families. 97% of Step Up teens graduate high school on time and 85% report feeling more prepared for the workforce. 100% of Step Up girls, young women and gender-expansive young adults have access to multiple mentors.

PROGRAMS

Mentors Change

Support
Step Up girls feel supported by their mentors, who have made an investment in their success through their Step Up membership.

Inspire
Step Up mentors inspire girls to become confident, college-bound and career-focused.

Encourage
Step Up girls receive encouragement from many different mentors, who help the girls dream of countless career possibilities.

Role Model
Step Up mentors serve as role models, enabling the girls to create a vision for their own lives.

Inspire Women

Step Up Together
Step Up Together is a digital summit connecting women and girls through mentorship for this moment. The day's content covers topics including social justice, mentorship, leadership, networking, workplace, style, fulfilling your potential and fun. Learn more about the annual summit here.

Summer Series
Summer Series events unite the Step Up community for pivotal conversations and connections. Events facilitate moments of collaboration, personal development, wellness and reflection. Explore the series here. 

Town Halls
Step Up brings a panel of women together for a conversation that connects, inspires, and creates a space for all voices to be heard. Take a look at Step Up’s previous Black Girls’ Town Hall and Latinx Town Hall.

The Artists Turning Nina Simone’s Childhood Home Into a Creative Destination

Five years ago, Rashid Johnson partnered with three other prominent Black American artists — the conceptualist Adam Pendleton, the abstract painter Julie Mehretu and the painter, collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher — to help bring another towering ancestor into focus: the genre-defying musical performer and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Simone’s childhood home, located in Tryon, N.C., a small town of 1,600 nestled at the base of the southern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was at risk of succumbing to age and neglect. Once the artists were made aware of this, they bought the house, for $95,000, in 2017. The following year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated it a national treasure.

The French historian Pierre Nora invented the concept of les lieux de mémoire, “sites of memory” — be they places or personas, objects or concepts — that contribute to the symbolic coherence of a nation’s identity. In 2022, much as in the 1960s when Simone answered the call to activism, the United States is openly contesting its collective identity. Some seek a return to an imagined America whose greatness depends on selective erasure of its diverse and complex history. “We live in a moment when half the country would be perfectly content to forget somebody like Nina Simone,” Pendleton says. “What a precarious state; what a precarious place to be culturally, historically.”

The artists have an important partner in Brent Leggs, the executive director of the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Launched in 2017, the action fund aims to identify and preserve what Leggs calls “nationally significant projects that express the Black experience.” Leggs, 49, saw in the modest clapboard home the very qualities that make many historical Black American sites so necessary — and so vulnerable to loss. “I was inspired by the simplicity of this unadorned vernacular structure that at first glance might appear to be missing history and meaning,” he says. “I believe deeply that places like the Nina Simone childhood home deserve the same stewardship and admiration as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore estate.”

NINA SIMONE WAS born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on Feb. 21, 1933, in the 660-square-foot house at 30 East Livingston Street. Simone’s mother was an ordained minister and domestic worker; her father ran his own dry-cleaning business and worked as a handyman. Modest though the home might seem today, back then it embodied the promise of prosperity. The Waymons’ plot of land afforded them room for a vegetable garden. They enjoyed other small luxuries, as well, as described in Nadine Cohodas’s 2010 biography, “Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone”: a stove in two of the three rooms to keep the house warm during cold months and to heat water for bathing; a small pump organ where Eunice picked out her first notes; a swing in the yard; even a tennis court just across the street. The exercise of segregation was more nuanced in Tryon than it was in large metropolitan areas like Charlotte and Atlanta, but it nonetheless exerted itself as a palpable lack. Simone, her parents and her siblings (she was the sixth of eight children) lived in the home until early 1937, when her father suffered an intestinal illness that left him incapacitated for a time. The next several years were itinerant, the family moving to close to half a dozen now-forgotten homes in and around Tryon.

Watch Video -  I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free (Montreux 1976)

Those early years on Livingston Street established Simone’s foundation as an artist. “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music,” Simone wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You.” “It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.” Her mother, Mary Kate, sang church songs to her daughter; her father, John, introduced her to jazz and the blues. By the time Eunice was 4, she was accompanying her mother on piano as she preached Sunday sermons at St. Luke C.M.E. Church.

The years that followed were quite literally the stuff of storybooks (two children’s books about Simone’s life have come out in the last five years): Recognized as a prodigy, Eunice studied under a white woman, whom she called Miss Mazzy, who schooled her in Beethoven and Bach; the town rallied around Eunice and raised money to support her education, including time in New York City, at Juilliard; soon thereafter, she faced wrenching rejection from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, where she had hoped to continue her studies in classical music; instead, she made a surprising star turn as a lounge singer at an Atlantic City, N.J., nightclub, leading to a recording contract; a string of hits followed for Eunice (now called Nina); then, galvanized by the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, she achieved artistic complexity and individualism through what she would later call “civil rights music.”

A fully illustrated middle-grade anthology celebrating Black women singers throughout history in a first-of-its-kind collection.

From jazz and blues, hip hop and R&B, pop, punk, and opera, Black women have made major contributions to the history and formation of musical genres for more than a century. In this fully illustrated middle grade anthology, 50 strong, empowering, and inspiring Black women singers' bios will teach kids to follow their dreams, to think outside the box, and to push the boundaries of what's expected. Written by music writer and journalist Jordannah Elizabeth and illustrated by Briana Dengoue, She Raised Her Voice! will inspire readers to find their voice and their own way of expressing themselves.

Betsy Bird: Ms. Elizabeth (just LOVE your name!) thank you so much for joining me today. I’m always fascinated by the process that comes with selection. In SHE RAISED HER VOICE your limit in terms of inclusions was 50, which couldn’t have been easy. How did you decide whom to keep? And did other people make suggestions of people to include to you that you followed up on?

Jordannah Elizabeth: The selection went pretty smoothly. When Running Press Kids approached me about writing the book they already had a sample list of women. I went through the list and made some changes, focusing on having a diverse group of women from all different ages, backgrounds, and genres. I took me about a week to make the augmentation, but in the end, the list turned out to be great. We are all very happy with the final selections.

BB: Did you find it necessary to concentrate primarily on Black American women? Was there any thought of going international with some of the inclusions?

JE: Well, there are so few books on Black women in music in the kid lit world. Our goal is to fill parts of the market that are virtually untapped. In my journalism career, I have been focused on highlighting unsung Black women, POC and women musicians from the very beginning. This book would have been very handy when I was growing up. While discovering music has become easier, there’s so much access, it’s important for us to make sure that Black women artists of the past and present are documented in a manner where their legacies can continue by introducing them to young readers from the new generation.

BB: What ended up on the cutting room floor? When you’re cutting a life down to fit on a page, particularly for a young audience, there’s going to be some things you just can’t say. Was there anything you lost that you wish you could have kept?

JE: There’s nothing that I lost that I wish I could have kept (thanks to my amazing editor, Julie Matysik who really let me be myself). Regarding drug use and some of the women’s sex lives, we tried to be thoughtful about which details to include. We made sure the book is kid friendly and appropriate, and I think parents can learn a lot from this book as well. I personally hope families will read it and explore it together and talk about the women’s histories as a unit, with honesty and openness.

BB: If this book had included 51 women, who would you have selected for that very last slot?

JE: I would have included Alice Coltrane. She is one of my favorite musicians of all time. Although she sang, she was more of a composer and instrumentalist. I am hoping we can follow up this book with a collection of composers. I saved a few women I’d like to write about for the possibility of that book. Right now, we are really focused on making sure SRHV is the best book it can possibly be. No matter what happens, I think it has come along really well. I am excited for people to read it.

BB: This would make a heck of a Spotify playlist. What are some songs in particular that you would most like to include on a SHE RAISED HER VOICE playlist for young readers?

JE: 

Nina Simone – Four Women

Queen Latifah – Ladies First (feat. Monie Love)

Janet Jackson – Got Til It’s Gone

Erykah Badu – On & On

The Slits – Typical Girl

Aretha Franklin – Bridge Over Troubled Water

BB: I just listened to the Aretha Franklin on your suggestion. I’m a little ashamed I hadn’t heard it before. That’s an amazing list. So, finally, what are you working on next?

JE: I’m working on a couple of books for my publisher Running Press Kids and their imprint, Black Dog & Leventhal. I’m always working on new articles and essays and a few different projects. I really care about the books we are working on. It’s been my life’s work to write about different topics that are informative, educational and a little outside of the box.

She was a traumatized child, a teenage mother, a gospel prodigy and a civil-rights champion. She channeled a world of pain into a sound all her own, but till the end, the greatest singer of her generation remained a mystery.

"I think of Aretha as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows,” Jerry Wexler once said of Aretha Franklin. Wexler was the Atlantic Records producer who, in 1967, helped raise the singer to her sudden and incomparable soul heights. “Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don’t pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura.”

Those doleful eyes were sometimes mistaken for shyness. That was how a group of white musicians viewed her in a first meeting at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on January 24th, 1967. Wexler thought the exploding Southern style of soul would bring out the best in the 24-year-old Aretha’s still-under-recognized artistry, even though she’d been making records since 1956. These were experienced session men: Most had played with Wilson Pickett at Wexler’s behest. Aretha didn’t enter FAME with a reputation as a soul singer, and she certainly wasn’t overbearing, as some thought Pickett could be. “And just suddenly,” said FAME songwriter Dan Penn, “she walks over to the piano, she sits down at the piano stool, and I’m watchin’ her. She kinda looks around, like, ‘Nobody’s watchin’ me.’ I thought she thought for just a second, ‘Is this not my session?’ And with all the talent she had, she just hit this unknown chord. Kind of kawunka-kawunka-kawung! Like a bell ringing. And every musician in the room stopped what they were doing, went to their guitars and started tunin’ up.”

That day and night would end up as the most eventful in Aretha Franklin’s career — an unprecedented musical triumph and a near-terminal disaster. Franklin would later have little to say about the events. But then, she often proved reticent over the years. Yet others recalled Franklin as anything but timid. Mavis Staples — who had toured with her during their teen gospel years — thought Franklin was in fact inclined to “devilment” out of the public eye: “One time she hid behind the tree with a baseball bat to knock her own sister on the head. . . . Aretha was tough.”

Which is to say that Aretha Franklin was paradoxical — and learned to be at a young age. From childhood on, she saw as much pain as she did glory. Her mother left her family when the girl was six; she had babies while still a child herself; she married a man who dominated her career and publicly battered her; she became a superstar, only to watch her matchless and lustrous career slide for too many years, to the indifference of almost everybody who had once applauded or empowered her. And then she witnessed deaths — too many: first her mother; then her father, after lingering for years in a coma from gunshot wounds; then three siblings, all lost to cancer.

Aretha Franklin’s voice — bred from gospel, blues and jazz, American traditions that reached indelible glory because they had to overcome America itself — made all the difference. It was how, in the words of a gospel song she loved, she got over. “You had a number of gospel singers who were filled with the spirit,” said writer Peter Guralnick. “She translated that spirit into the secular field. . . . She translated that feel and fire.” More than that, Franklin’s voice raised and defined her. Nobody came close to touching it, though she emboldened many others to follow her — Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, Alicia Keys and Beyoncé among them. More than any of them, Franklin possessed a roar that wasn’t merely technically breathtaking; it was also a natural and self-derived instrument that testified to her truths in ways she otherwise refused to address. Some say Franklin was insecure at times in her gift, but with something so fearsome moving through their body, mind and history, who wouldn’t be both daunted and proud?

Upon learning of her death in August, at age 76, from pancreatic cancer, Barack and Michelle Obama said in a statement, “Aretha helped define the American experience. In her voice, we could feel our history, all of it and in every shade — our power and our pain, our darkness and our light, our quest for redemption and our hard-won respect.”

Stand With Breonna

Saturday. March 13th, 2021 marked one year since police killed Breonna Taylor during a botched raid. Her family and millions of others continue their demand for justice. 

Breonna was asleep at home when a rogue task-force of the Louisville police broke down her door in the middle of the night and murdered her. They were attempting an illegal drug raid in the wrong neighborhood for a suspect that they'd already arrested earlier that day.

The police officers have yet to be arrested or charged. Breonna's family saw no progress in their fight for justice, so they reached out to our team at the Action PAC. We need all hands on deck!!!

Add your name: We’re calling on the Louisville Metro Police Department to terminate the police involved, and for a special prosecutor to be appointed to bring forward charges against the officers and oversee all parts of this case. We’re demanding that the Louisville Metro Council pass new rules banning the use of no-knock raids like the one used to break into Breonna’s home.

Since the launch of this petition, Commonwealth Attorney Tom Wine has recused himself from the investigation into the LMPD conduct that night, the FBI is now investigating the killing of Breonna Taylor, the LMPD Police Chief, Steve Conrad, announced his retirement, and all charges have been dropped against Breonna’s boyfriend, Kenny Walker, but our work is not done.