By Melissa Brown ·Updated June 29, 2023
“Black women have always been vulnerable to violence in this country and have long been judged as having ‘no selves to defend’” writes abolitionist Mariame Kaba in a 2019 op-ed.
In the op-ed, Kaba mentions Celia, an enslaved woman who killed her rapist enslaver in 1855, who Missouri law determined could not claim self-defense because she was his property. Indeed, this history looms over the
