Thirteen Sisters - by Andrew S Baer (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The murder of thirteen women and girls in 1979 and the social movement they launched.

In four terrifying months in 1979, thirteen women and girls--twelve Black, one white--were murdered in Boston. All were found in or near Roxbury, a predominantly Black neighborhood in a city famously beset by racial strife and division. Fears of a serial killer spread within Black communities. But the authorities wouldn't hear of it: these were just ordinary, everyday murders of unimportant people, killed by men they knew. The police said Black residents had nothing to fear--and the media implied that white people could safely ignore the carnage.

Yet Black feminists refused to accept the murders of Black women and girls. The real serial killers, they argued, were chronic racism, sexism, poverty, and domestic violence, including violence committed by Black men. Something had to be done.

Thirteen Sisters tells the gripping stories of the women who died--their lives, their brutal deaths, the attempts to solve them--and the renowned Combahee River Collective, whose activism in the wake of the murders brought national attention to the overlapping oppressions that made Black women and girls so vulnerable to violence. Historian Andrew S. Baer interviews family members and activists to introduce readers to the victims as complete people and investigate the events surrounding their deaths, unspooling a fast-paced and urgent narrative about crime, race, and marginalization. Baer also pays tribute to the Black feminists who saw the social roots of this violence and called for radical change, demands that remain all too relevant today.

Riveting, enraging, and humane, Thirteen Sisters is an indictment of the neglectful institutions that have failed Black women and a testament to the activists who transformed how we understand systemic oppression.

Review Quotes

"Thirteen Sisters is a terrific and thoroughly engaging book on an important topic. Baer explores how a series of seemingly unrelated murders in the Roxbury section of Boston in 1979 mobilized African American residents, particularly feminists, to become activists. Their grassroots, neighborhood-based response to the violence spawned a dynamic, resilient social movement. Elegantly written, passionate, and well researched, Thirteen Sisters offers a powerful analysis of the connection among murder, race, and second-wave feminism. It deserves a wide audience."

About the Author

Andrew S. Baer is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago, also published by the University of Chicago Press.