For far too long, Black women’s significant contributions to movements for racial justice in America have been overshadowed and undervalued. The 2020 documentary Unapologetic gives Black women leaders within the ongoing Movement for Black Lives their flowers now while they can still smell them. Directed by Ashley O’Shay and produced by Morgan E. Johnson– two Black women– the film follows two young Chicago-based activists, Janae and Bella, as they fight for justice for the police murders of Rekia Boyd and Laquan McDonald.

Using clips from Unapologetic, this lesson provides a framework for viewing radical Black women’s activism in Chicago today as part of a continuum. Students will learn that there is no Janae and Bella without foremothers like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Margaret Burrroughs. The lesson encourages students to think about how the past has shaped the present and how the present will shape the future.

A Note from Curriculum Creator Bella BAHHSI came into Black womanhood during the first wave of the ongoing Movement for Black Lives and joined other young Black women on the frontlines of direct action protests– with the intention of disrupting, challenging and changing the conditions that have rendered our experiences of (and resistance to) racially gendered violence inconsequential and erasable. I created this lesson plan for the same reason that I agreed to be filmed for Unapologetic: to amplify Black women’s leadership and creative and professional contributions to historic Black liberation movements.The film is so much bigger than me, Janae, Ashley and Morgan. We are all part of a growing collective of Black women who are seeking and becoming examples for what it means to be Black and woman and decompartmentalized, and we do not exist within an ahistorical vacuum. We build upon the legacies of the Black women who dared to engage in radical activism during the movement to abolish slavery, the Reconstruction Era, the Progressive Era, the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the CIvil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. Their movements enabled ours.Our movement popularized the use of hashtags, social media campaigns, interstate takeovers and mutual aid as tools for political education and political defiance. We made defunding police departments a nationwide call to action, and we made police and prison abolition a part of public discourse– all while amplifying the need for intersectional policy analysis and development. What we’ve contributed to this temporal moment is undeniable and has already begun to change the future of this nation.But we could not have been empowered to lead if we had not learned whom to follow. This lesson plan grounds our work in its relationality to the work of the movement women who paved the way for us to be unapologetic.

Subject Areas

• Black History
• U.S. History
• Women and Gender Studies
• Social Studies
• Political Science
• Current Events
• Criminal Justice
• Sociology

Grade Levels: 9-12

Objectives:In this lesson, students will:

• Study radical Black women’s activism throughout history
• Discuss race and racially gendered violence
• Compare and contrast different eras of racial justice activism