The Power At the Margins: Sustaining Transformation at the Policy, Community, and Individual Levels Post Black Women's Truth and Reconciliation

Black Women’s Blueprint cordially invites you to the 2016 Tribunal of the U.S. Black Women’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a four day event from April 28-May 1, 2016, to be held as a part of the International Decade of People of African Descent at the United Nations. The Truth Commission reflects a continued process five years in the making, involving national grassroots activism, direct service healing practice and participatory action research by Black Women’s Blueprint and survivors across the country on sexual violence as a human rights atrocity against women and girls of African descent past and present, which has never been acknowledged or sufficiently addressed. The Black Women’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the first of its kind in the nation to focus on rape and sexual assault against Black women in the United States. Women and girls of African descent, many of whom were denied access and assistance from the criminal justice system, began to organize, realizing their own and collective transformation could not happen without public recognition and acknowledgment of the injustices and harms they had experienced. Out of these early discussions—first in New York City, and later in cities across the country such as Washington D.C., New Orleans, Mississippi, and Chicago—the BWTRC was born. Our Mandates: Truth. Justice. Healing. Reconciliation.

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