so wells and mary ann shadd cary are among those women who leave unequivocally a record of what theythought they were, what was happening around them and what the stakes were. so it's an honor in fact, to come back to that material and to try to ferret out for readers and help distill that for readers and to dispel the rub the center we can't write like women's history. that's what i was told 25 years years ago when i started writing, by some, not all, that there really wasn't enough there, and that's just a lie. but we have to you be willing o where black women were and to go to their materials in order to tell the past. >> i think about just the tremendous platform that self-publishing provided black women were being shutout of other avenues of expressing themselves and of organizing if you think of ida b. wells self-publishing southern horrors and single-handedly put lynching on the map as a global issue and the power of that and while we didn't have twitter and social media, newspapers were transferable. you would read and pass on some else and it would pass it on to someone else