E. Frances White, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Mae G. Henderson, Ann duCille, Deborah E. McDowell, Toni Cade Bambara, and Mary Helen Washington were integral to this project. Concomitantly, black women in law and the social sciences sought to expose the racist and sexist underpinnings of the traditional disciplines, reveal the exclusion and marginalization of black women in studies and frameworks of society, behaviour, and the law, and reclaim space for the experiences of black women in research and scholarship. Here, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Patricia Bell-Scott, Deborah K. King, and Elizabeth Higginbotham were of paramount importance.  
Black women's studies introduced intersectional analyses of power and systems of oppression into black studies. The work of, inter alia, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, and later Joy James, Ula Y. Taylor, and Carole Boyce Davies, led the way. Such approaches introduced a novel critique of dominant intellectual systems and offered a host of reforms to transform higher education into a space that was more inclusive of, and open and relevant to, black people generally, and black women particularly. Anthologies including All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983), and The Black Feminist Reader (2000), alongside foundational texts such as Women, Race $\mathcal{E}$ Class (1981), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990), Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (1999), and The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (2002), critically reshaped the generally androcentric orientation of black studies, which too often 'socialized out of existence... black women' (Hooks, 1981, p. 7).