Books: Wake - The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, Rebecca Hall, Illustrated by Hugo Martinez

When she was an attorney who represented low-income tenants and homeless families, Rebecca Hall would be pointed in the direction of the defendants' chair. Fed up of the racism and misogyny that could not imagine a Black woman as an attorney, she left the law and returned to the academy for a PhD in history.

She unearthed women-led slave revolts while researching her dissertation, which she has turned into Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts. Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is a powerful and captivating reminder of the ways that patriarchy has silenced and erased the women warriors who fought to emancipate themselves during the Middle Passage, in Colonial New York, and across the Americas.

For example, a woman known in court records only as the "Negro Fiend."