Civil rights scholar and professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw started writing her memoir “while literally Rome was burning,” she said. It was 2020, and the country was experiencing what she refers to as a twin pandemic—the fallout from COVID-19 and the mass demonstrations over policing.
“[I felt] kind of irresponsible,” said Crenshaw, who is perhaps best known for her work in the critical race theory movement and coining the term intersectionality. “Shouldn’t we all be out there in the streets doing this work?”
But Backtalker (Simon & Schuster), a book that represents “the sum total of what it means to come of age … when most of us were born in a time of unfreedom,” Crenshaw said, has an important message.
“We’re being told to accept things the way they are, take our dissent and bury it,” Crenshaw said, but people should be talking back to authoritarianism “if we believe we have a democracy worth saving.”
Crenshaw appeared as a Featured Speaker at the American Library Association’s 2026 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago on June 29. In conversation with Reuters journalist Bianca Flowers, she discussed recollections and themes from her book, spanning her early years in Canton, Ohio, to her later work as a feminist legal theorist.
One story that Crenshaw hopes will stick with readers is the practice of so-called “urban renewal.”
“I talk about how my family owned a fair amount of property in a Black community,” Crenshaw said. But the planned urban renewal turned out to be simply Black removal—her family was displaced, the promised industrial park never arrived, and the community lost generations of investment.
“This story didn’t just happen in one community, it happened in 2,500 communities,” Crenshaw said. “It’s from direct exercise of public policy.”
The book is a tapestry of touchpoints in American history—such as the Selma marches and Anita Hill hearings—as they have intersected with Crenshaw’s civil rights research and lived experiences, but she highlighted one key breakout character.
“My mother is pretty much the star of my book,” she said. “She would point out places [in Canton, Ohio,] where segregation had occurred, where she fought back.”
Crenshaw’s mother showed her, for instance, the theater where Black patrons were forced to sit in the peanut gallery, resulting in her grandfather suing for discrimination.
“The structures that we live in are still echoes of that past,” Crenshaw said. “Nothing should ever be taken for granted.”
Amid current threats of book bans and censorship, librarians represent a profession that embodies this vigilance, Crenshaw noted. “So many institutions can learn a thing or two from what libraries and librarians are doing,” she said. “I am so proud when librarians push back.”
Ultimately, Crenshaw hopes the “joy, humor, family, struggle” of Backtalker help others challenge injustice in their own communities.
“The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, I believe that,” Crenshaw said. “But I believe that because humans make it so.”
