Source: In These Times
by Stacy Davis Gates
“When people ask me what it means to be a woman in power, I think about Bea Lumpkin, because power means you don’t wait for permission. Not power as in proximity to the powerful, or having a seat at a table someone else built. I mean power as in knowing early which side you were on, then spending every day of your life standing on the business of that side. Bea passed away June 14 at 107 years old. A lifelong communist and the Jewish daughter of Russian immigrants, she married a Black man during the height of the Red Scare in 1949 and raised a family under the restrictive conventions of Jim Crow fascism.” (08/18/26)