Freedom's Gate: Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, and Nina Simone Live at the New York Nightclub That Shaped the Civil Rights Movement
The book is a welcome corrective to masculine castings of the civil rights movement and of Black political and intellectual thought from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, in both the United States and the African diaspora ... Despite this storied history, the Gate struggles as a leitmotif ... She shores up her teetering conceit by scaffolding each of her subjects’ appearances at the Gate with evocations not only of the period’s political turbulence but also, poignantly, of the women’s private lives, serving up vivid examples of their efforts to balance their creative work with the fraught realities of marriage, motherhood, queerness, mental and physical illness, exile and racism ... if Black women’s friendships and artistry, coupled with political action and finely observed emotional nuance, are your siren’s call, then Colbert’s book is a rare treat.
Freedom’s Gate is not just about D’Lugoff’s establishment of this iconic concert hall; the book is also a biographical study of five fascinating women of color and their respective catalogues composed and performed within a prolific 10-year period.
As the author succinctly states, 'The women of the Gate staged performances that pulsated with the push of convention and the pull of revolution.' This book is a superb telling of their collective story.
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