Sometimes Farmgirls Become Revolutionaries is Florence Tate's memoir and covers her political work and career, including early memories as one of the first black reporters at the Dayton Daily News, to becoming communications director for political organizations including the ALDCC (African Liberation Day Coordinating Committee) and National Urban Coalition. Also covered are her years as Marion Barry's communications director during his candidacy and first year as mayor of D.C., and her tenure as press secretary for Rev. Jesse Jackson during his historic 1984 presidential campaign.
Becoming an ardent Pan Africanist who spent time in various African countries in the 70s, the memoir includes observations from Florence's experiences at the Sixth Pan African Conference (6PAC), as well as conversations and letters from heads of African nations amassed during her time running the African Services Bureau. It records her eventual blackballing and denunciation in the 80s by many in the Black activist circle for her support of UNITA, the Angolan revolutionary party headed by the infamous Jonas Savimbi, and the devastation she suffered when Savimbi killed a family of young Angolan revolutionaries she'd embraced during the violent civil war.
Tate recalls her earliest years in Jim Crow Tennessee and poignantly recounts her struggles as an abandoned child who grew to raise her own family while battling an often debilitating, life-long clinical depression. Her first-person narrative is punctuated with personal accounts and memories of friends, including civil rights lawyer Michael Tarif Warren and
New York Times writer Paul Delaney.
Jones, Jake-Ann: - Award-winning writer Jake-ann Jones has penned scripts for stage and screen. Her work has been published and written about in Plays from the Boom Box Galaxy: Theater from the Hip Hop Generation (Theatre Communications Group, 2009), Women Who Write Plays (Smith & Krauss, 2001), The Portable Lower East Side, and Eyeball Literary Magazine. In 2011 and 2012 she was a contributing editor for Hope for Women Magazine. Jones currently resides in Largo, Florida. Longer bio: Jake-ann Jones is an award-winning writer who has garnered acclaim for her work in the theatre as a playwright, including scripting Portrait of the Artist as a Soul Man Dead, which premiered at St. Paul's Penumbra Theater. Her play, Death of a Ho: A Fairy, Scarey, Whorey Tale was published by Theater Communications Group (TCG) in their anthology, PLAYS FROM THE BOOM BOX GALAXY. She is featured in the book Women who Write Plays: Interviews with American Dramatists (Smith and Kraus, 2001). She co-wrote Urban World/HBO Film Festival's Grand Prize-winning screenplay SPOOK CITY and was the co-writer and co-producer of the webseries MONDO BLACK produced by BlackPublic Media. Her prose has appeared in The Portable Lower East Side, Eyeball Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and she is a contributing writer in the upcoming limited-edition coffee table collection of Sun Ra-inspired photographs by heralded photographer Gerald Jenkins, It's After the End of the World (ArtYard). Jones received her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University, and has taught at the City University of New York, the College of New Rochelle, and The Writer's Voice at the West Side YMCA. She currently writes for The Weekly Challenger newspaper in St. Petersburg, FL, and works extensively with nonprofits helping them to build their brand through her marketing company PeoplePower Communications, LLC.
Tate, Florence: - Florence Tate, was former communications director/press secretary to both Marion Barry and Jesse Jackson, and was under FBI investigation for over two decades -- considered a radical black activist deserving of her own "FBI file" due to her close personal relationship to Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and work with SNCC during the early 60s. As the FBI followed Carmichael's rise to power during his transition from head of SNCC to Black Power Movement leader, Hoover was to personally target Tate and her with work with DARE (Dayton Alliance for Racial Equality), which she helped to found, and Dayton's Afro American Cultural Center, which she started.
