Anti-Black and gender bias means some schools fail to provide Black girls with curricula and policies that affirm their intersecting identities and lived-experiences. As more states—including Ohio—move to implement laws that restrict the teaching of gender and race theories, research shows that Black girls, like their male counterparts: rank lowest on standardized reading, writing and math tests as well as high school graduation rates and they are disproportionately enrolled in schools lacking credentialed teachers, rigorous courses, and extracurricular activities.

Black Girls Stay Lit™ is a social justice initiative that uses critical explorations of select African American women’s literature/multimodal texts to interrupt systemic racism and systems that have historically marginalized Black girls. Our exclusive Liberatory Literacy model engages reading and writing as shared social experiences of meaning-making, co-creating knowledge, and developing concrete actions for addressing personal, communal and global challenges to our self-actualization, freedom and well-being. Our evidence-based curriculum centers and affirms our girls, thus giving them a concrete purpose for the literacies they are developing. In BGSL, Black girls can see themselves in the stories that they read and give voice to their own experiences in the stories they write.