Lena Dunham’s feminist newsletter, Lenny, isn’t set to launch for weeks, but its publishers have sent out a special early edition to celebrate the launch of woman4woman, a women’s network and forum website created by Sandra Bland. Bland, a 28 year old black woman from Texas, was planning the website launch before she died in police custody in a holding cell three days after being arrested for a minor traffic infraction — crossing lanes without signaling.
Lenny editor Doreen St. Félix, who i-D profiled in March, introduces an interview between Dunham and woman4woman co-founder Chenai Okammor by explaining that, “Police brutality visits upon black American citizens the sort of dehumanization that persists even after death; full, complicated, and healthy lives get flattened out in memory, becoming only the length of the fatal interaction,” adding that, “We wanted to tell you about it before Lenny’s official launch this fall, so that you could share it with your friends and cement Sandra’s legacy.”
“I want to be able to share my story with young women out there,” Sandra Bland had told co-founder Okammor about her hopes for the woman4woman project. “She had such a commitment to having women tell their own stories and she helped them talk about things they hadn’t talked about before,” Okammor tells Dunham.
Okammor closes by saying that, “it’s always the women who hold up the country in times of war. It’s the women who hold up anything or everything. That’s why we’re doing this.”