Chapter 1: The West of African American women, 1600-2000 / Shirley Ann Wilson Moore and Quintard Taylor
Chapter 2: African American women in Western history: past and prospect / Glenda Riley
The Spanish-Mexican period / Isabel de Olvera Arrives in New Mexico
Chapter 3: To be black and female in the Spanish Southwest: toward a history of African women on New Spain's far Northern frontier / Dedra S. McDonald
The Antebellum West / A Texas slave's letter to her husband, 1862
Chapter 4: Mining a mythic past: the history of Mary Ellen Pleasant / Lynn M. Hudson
A voice from the oppressed to the friends of humanity
Chapter 5: Rights of passage: gendered-rights consciousness and the quest for freedom, San Francisco, California, 1850-1870 / Barbara Y. Welke
Chapter 6: "Anxious foot soldiers": Sacramento's black women and education in Nineteenth-century California / Susan Bragg / Willianna Hickman's Nicodemus sage
Homesteading on the plains: the Ava Speese Day story
Chapter 7: Women of the Great Falls African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1870-1910 / Peggy Riley
Kate D. Chapman describes blacks in Yankton, Dakota territory
A black woman on the Montana frontier
Chapter 8: "Is there no blessing for me?: Jane Elizabeth Manning James, a Mormon African American woman / Ronald G. Coleman
The Early Twentieth century
Chapter 9: "The mountains were free and we loved them": Dr. Ruth Flowers of Boulder, Colorado / Susan Armitage
Nettie J. Asberry: African American Club woman in the Pacific Northwest
Chapter 10: Susie Revels Cayton, Beatrice Morrow Cannady, and the campaign for social justice in the Pacific Northwest / Quintard Taylor
Marcus Garvey: A Seattle woman remembers
Chapter 11: "Try being a black woman!": Jobs in Denver, 1900-1970 / Moya B. Hansen
Hattie McDaniel wins an Oscar
Chapter 12: From Peola to Carmen: Fredi Washington, Dorothy Dandridge, and Hollywood's portrayal of the tragic mulatto / Alicia I. Rodriquez-Estrada
World War II / Lyn Childs confronts a racist act
Etta Germany writes to the President
Chapter 13: Women made the community: African American migrant women and the cultural transformation of the San Francisco East Bay area / Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo
Chapter 14: "Eight dollars a day and working in the shade": an oral history of African American migrant women in the Las Vegas Gaming industry / Claytee D. White
Chapter 15: Lulu B. White and the integration of the University of Texas, 1945-1950 / Merline Pitre
Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher and the U.S. Supreme Court
Chapter 16: Lucinda Todd and the invisible petitioners of Brown v. Board of education of Topeka, Kansas / Cheryl Brown Henderson
Chapter 17: Clara Luper and the Civil Rights movement In Oklahoma City, 1958-1964 / Linda Williams Reese / Elaine Brown: Black Panther
Chapter 18: Black radicalism in 1960s California: women in the Black Panther Party / Jane Rhodes.