Justice for Black Girls hosted its first national conference at the First Corinthian Baptist Church in New York City on October 12th, 2019. We hoped the conference would accomplish a few goals that would help advance our core missions: to dismantle societal systems that relegate Black girls to lives characterized by abuse and state violence. 

To that end, the conference offered meaningful education and resources to people striving to elevate the voices of Black girls and created spaces, authorized by justice, to do so. Therefore, we launched the cash bail funds and scholarships for formerly incarcerated girls and girls pursuing activism projects. Additionally, we established a social justice curriculum based on the experiences of Black girls. Th Black Girlhood Curriculum, aimed at teachers, provides lessons on liberation pedagogy for girls in schools and those who are system involved.

We also hosted Black Girl Activist Meetups, a networking event for middle and high school students, along with two workshops, “Black Women’s Healing: Loving Black Girls Better Than We Were Loved Ourselves,” and “Understanding the Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline and he Over Criminalization of Black Girls.” 

To further educate people about the systemic oppression of Black girls in America, we curated a virtual hosting space to view the film PUSHOUT, a documentary that takes an I-depth look at how schools criminalize Black girls. Monique W. Morris, the award-winning author who produced and co-wrote the film, was there to lead an intimate discussion about the film as well as wrote the book on which it was based, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools.

Most importantly, the organizers of the Justice for Black Girls 2019 National Conference hoped that, in coming together to further our understanding about dismantling systems of oppression, we would find liberation in the magic of our convening. We did just that, enabling Black girls to imagine a life beyond the confining structures of which they currently live.