Maya Angelou once said, “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

It’s true; home is supposed to be a safe space where you feel that love and warmth. Home is a place to go when you lose your way. But what happens when your home becomes a battlefield? Or what if the people of your homeland are the ones committing the atrocities? Will you choose to fight, to protect your home or expose an injustice, even at the cost of your life and livelihood?

Sex workers have been at the forefront of abolitionist movements for centuries. Many have spent their lives fighting to be seen, heard, and taken seriously. As a collective, sex workers continue to fight against the church, politicians, police, and a society that doesn’t value them or their work. It’s no surprise that the event that marked the beginning of the modern sex workers movement happened while occupying a church—the Holy Cross Church, to be exact.

HerStry’s monthly theme for January, “The Rest of The Story,” connects with our Amplify of the Month. Learn about the extraordinary life of Anna Julia Cooper, a famous scholar in social science circles, also known as “the Mother of Black Feminism.” Check out how she spent her life advocating for equal education for Black women, and how she changed the course of history and HerStry.

Happy February, HerStry Readers! This month, we’re taking a look at the life of Madam C.J. Walker, America’s first (reported) self-made black woman millionaire. Sure, there are a lot of qualifiers there, but Madam Walker reached this accomplishment in the early 1900’s.

There are few people on this planet that would walk away from the trajectory of fame that Linda Martell left behind. After breaking big into the country music industry in 1969, our May AMPLIFY feature retired just five years later, in 1974. 

We’re back, with the second installment of Amplify! I have a weird connection to our February Amplify feature, Frances Harper, but we’ll get to that later. Frances Harper initially came on to my radar as the first black woman to publish a short story, but her actual life story is just as compelling as any work of fiction.