Until There Is Justice
The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman
Jennifer Scanlon
Reviews and Awards
"Jennifer Scanlon illumines Hedgeman's feminist contributions, showing that for Hedgeman and her colleagues, issues of race and sex were never separate. A biography of Hedgeman was long overdue, and Scanlon's work confirms that Hedgeman has much to teach us today. Hedgeman's decades-long commitment to coalition building anticipates the kinds of political organizing needed today. Furthermore, Hedgeman was notable for her willingness to listen and learn from younger Black Power activists, and she encouraged her colleagues to do the same." - Christian Century
"This powerful and poignant book lays bare the extraordinary courage and wisdom of a grand freedom fighter usually overlooked-Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Don't miss it!" - Cornel West
"Anna Arnold Hedgeman has long been excluded from positive credit in important civil rights conversations, though she was definitely critical to The Dream. In Jennifer Scanlon's important book, Hedgeman is finally receiving her due." - Nikki Giovanni, writer, commentator, activist, and educator
"Anna Arnold Hedgeman's life and work exemplify the often ignored interweaving of civil rights, faith-based activism, and feminism in what scholars are coming to see as a long and broad civil rights movement that encompassed many arenas of struggle. By showing how Hedgeman mediated between white religious leaders and black civil rights activists, interracialism and black power, and issues of race and gender, Scanlon reshapes our understanding of the civil rights movement's leadership and legacies. Until There Is Justice is a moving, insightful, and truly necessary book, one that illuminates inexplicably ignored aspects of our common history." - Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Scanlon provides excellent in-depth documentation in this first biography to be written about Hedgeman." - Library Journal
"Scanlon's splendid study not only recovers Hedgeman's important career but also compels readers to rethink biases in history that exclude women's deeds from the historical narrative." - CHOICE
"Scanlon's meticulously researched and eloquently written account of Hedgeman's life is more than a biography; it serves as a narrative account of the twentieth-century black freedom struggle. Finally, with Until There Is Justice, [Anna Arnold Hedgeman's] story receives the intellectual attention it deserves." - Journal of African American History
"Jennifer Scanlon's biography of the African-American activist Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who died in 1990, is long overdue. This biography presents readers with a puzzle: How did a naïve girl, growing up in the only African-American family in a small white town, develop such an inclusive understanding of justice?" - New York Times
"As Scanlon astutely points out in Until There Is Justice, Hedgeman's contributions to the Civil Rights Movement were obscured by the achievements of her male counterparts-A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, among others. Scanlon's monograph allows us to rethink the ways in which we include women of color in the history of the Long Civil Rights Movement in a manner that is not simply contributory, but transformative and substantial." - Reviews in American History
"A biography of Hedgeman is well overdue; like Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, and countless other African American women, Hedgeman has remained largely invisible despite her crucial role in the long civil rights movement. Jennifer Scanlon captures the historical significance of Hedgeman's shifting, complex career and offers important new insights into American politics across the twentieth century." - Journal of American History
