Tarana Burke

Tarana Burke had been running youth programmes in Selma, Alabama for years when she began saying the words me too to young Black women and girls who had survived abuse, as a way of telling them the listener had been there as well. That was 2006, eleven years before the phrase travelled the world on social media in the autumn of 2017 and was widely reported as new. Unbound, published by Flatiron in 2021, is her account of both halves: a childhood in the Bronx, the attack she did not talk about for years, the organising work in the South, and then the odd position of being handed credit for something she had built quietly and watching it turn into somebody else's story. She has been consistent that the work was meant to serve the people harmed rather than to name the accused.