Michael Eric Dyson pens two books, Why I Love Black Women and Open Mike

Jet, Feb 17, 2003

Michael Eric Dyson sends a valentine to Black women in his new book, Why I Love Black Women.

The prolific author and noted University of Pennsylvania professor also has written Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion (Basic Civitas Books, $17.00), which has already been hailed as a must-read book for anyone interested in Black American studies.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Why I Love Black Women (Basic Civitas Books, $23.00) celebrates the beauty, intelligence and strength of Black women.

"This book is a small effort to love Black women in all of their remarkable beauty and wonderful complexity, their intellectual brilliance and their spiritual genius, and their soulfulness and sensuality," he writes in the book's preface.

Dyson praises the women who have inspired and challenged him and whose work has changed his life. He celebrates every woman in his life from his mother, Addie Mae Dyson, to his wife Marcia L. Dyson, to Miss James, his grammar teacher who taught him Black history, to activist-scholar Angela Davis, activist Myrlie Evers-Williams, novelist Toni Morrison, singer Freda Payne, Congresswoman Maxine Waters and others.

Dyson writes: "We live in a society that has failed to acknowledge the full extent of our debt to Black women's gifts. We have often absorbed their wisdom, sucked their lives, appealed to their insight, depended on their strength, desired their beauty, fed on their hope, hungered for their affirmation, sought their approval, and relied on their faith. And yet we have not paid sufficient tribute to how central Black women are to our race, our nation, indeed our globe ... This is my love letter to Black women."