Contributors to this volume explore the life experiences of African American women in the West, the ways in which African American women have influenced the experiences of the diverse peoples of the region, and their legacy in rural and urban communities from Montana to Texas and California to Kansas. The contributors make use of individual and collective biographies, first-person narratives, and interviews that explore what it has meant to be an African American woman, from the era of Spanish colonial rule in eighteenth-century New Mexico into the black power era of the 1960s and 1970s.