We on the revolutionary left in the United States are inclined to interpret history through icons. Che, Assata, George Jackson, Fred Hampton, Malcolm, Marx: one look at their familiar images and we know what time it is.

But you don’t have to be an icon to be part of history; you don’t have to be in a famous underground cadre, or be martyred by prison or COINTELPRO. You just have to be one person, however “obscure.” You have to stand up for the people you love, to help them live. Then you keep working and fighting. That’s it. Everybody has this potential. And, given history, Black women tend to have it more than most.

Carol Jean Crooks was a Black dyke. Born October 12, 1946, she grew up on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and died alone in early 2022. She worked and fought all her life in relative obscurity. Though most of her work wasn’t legal, her fights created a better and fairer world. If you knew her at all, you probably knew her as Crooksie.

In the early 1970s, Crooksie unwittingly shared space with icons-to-be when she became lovers with, and later a longtime friend of, Afeni Shakur, a brilliant and highly publicized member of the Black Panther Party. A few years later, on August 29, 1974, Crooksie became a small part of recorded history—three years after the Attica Prison Revolt—as the catalyst for the August Rebellion at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where incarcerated women took over the institution and held it for hours. The August Rebellion remains one of the most resounding uprisings in the history of US women’s prisons; it generated a precedent-setting class action lawsuit whose ruling continues to safeguard the right of due process for people imprisoned in New York State, as well as nationally. What follows is a small, incomplete glimpse into Crooksie’s life, taken mostly from second- and third-hand sources. She deserves more, but for now…