In this lyrical coming-of-age story about family, sisterhood, music, race, and identity, Mariama J. Lockington draws on some of the emotional truths from her own experiences growing up with an adoptive white family. I am a girl but most days I feel like a question mark. Makeda June Kirkland is eleven years old, adopted, and black.

Harriet Jacobs and her autobiography, The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , has become a fixture in courses on American slavery. Black women became founding contributors of what has developed into an entire field devoted to the life and meaning of black girlhood. In many ways, black women and girls are responsible for the recorded history of African American childhood in early America. Lucy Terry Prince produced a record of life as an enslaved girl and woman in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth-century. Prince witnessed an attack on colonists in Deerfield by Native Americans in while in her teenage years. The poem was the first record of a composition created by a person of African descent in the British colonies and was subsequently published in Throughout the nineteenth-century, black writers exposed the particular ways African American children, especially those who were enslaved, were deprived of their humanity and protection as children.

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Morris in Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools , is a condition that has plagued black girls and women for time immemorial. In short, black girls are devalued based on how others perceive them. As evidence, Morris offers the historical account of a black teen named Claudette Colvin , who refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger in March before Rosa Parks made history with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.