Study, Fast, Train, Fight: Black August and Reproductive Justice
PRH alumni reflect on Black August and how its principles can guide reproductive justice, resistance, and liberation.
As this August comes to its close and as we prepare for fall anniversaries, like the Hyde Amendment and the Federal Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill, Mifepristone, we did not want to close this month out without acknowledging Black August.
Started in 1979, in California’s San Quentin State Prison by the Black Guerrilla Family, Black August serves many purposes—introduced following the death of Black Political Prisoners: George Jackson and Johnathan P. Jackson, it’s a time to remember the Black Political Prisoners who have moved us closer to liberation through their struggle and resistance. We also use this month to celebrate the birthdays of many staunch leaders in the Black and Queer liberation movements. Marsha P. Johnson, Fred Hampton, Debbie Sims Afrikca, and Angela Davis are all leaders who have shaped our intersectional organizing efforts. Finally, rooted in the principles: study, fast, train, and fight, Black August is a time to grow in our collective resistance to fascism and other forms of intersecting oppressions.
We invited some of our Leader Training Academy Alums to join us in celebrating Black August by exploring how the Black August principles inform their work and how those principles can guide us as we build the path not just to restoration, but to liberation.
Dr. Eryn Wanyonyi is a California-based ob/gyn and is an alum of the Leadership Training Academy’s 2025 cohort.
How do you embody the Black August principles in your health care practice and in your everyday life?
The Black August principles resonate deeply with me professionally as a Black physician but also personally. “Study, fast, train, and fight” perfectly summarize the journey to becoming a physician but also what it means to practice as a Black ob/gyn and exist as a Black person in this country.
I study so I can continue providing my patients with comprehensive and evidence-based reproductive health care.
While I may not fast in the most traditional sense of the word, when I care for patients in these vulnerable moments in their lives, showing up for them sometimes requires self-sacrifice to be what they need in that moment.
I train to be ready for complex clinical encounters, situations, and obstacles that life inevitably brings.
And I will keep fighting until there is accessible and equitable, compassionate reproductive health care for all people.
As our sexual and reproductive health care landscape changes, further disenfranchising our communities, how can the Black August principles be leveraged to support the path to restoration? What foundations can be built by way of these principles?
The state of sexual and reproductive health care in this country is truly maddening. Abortion bans, unaffordable and inaccessible care, and the rise in misinformation and disinformation have only deepened the disparities that already exist for marginalized communities.
We must continue to loudly and proactively advocate for change. The Black August principles provide clear guidelines for action. To achieve a better reality for people and patients, I think our advocacy can and should be rooted in these principles.
To meet the moment we are in, we have to constantly study and be up to date, not just the science but the policies that are affecting people.
This work also requires self-sacrifice (fasting). What we see happening today is not new, but action and change require us to show up as the best versions of ourselves, so we have to keep training.
And we can’t stop fighting until things are better for the most disenfranchised among us.
Dr. Ashley Jeanlus is a New York-based ob/gyn, is PRH’s current Reproductive Health Advocacy Fellow, and is an alum of the Leadership Training Academy’s 2023 cohort.
How do you embody the Black August principles in your health care practice and in your everyday life?
I understand my body of work as a Black health care clinician through what Kimberly Crenshaw would call an intersectional analysis: my patients do not experience harm as isolated individuals, but at the crossroads of race, gender, class, and the historical machinery of medical racism.
I refuse to practice medicine as though it begins the day I walk into the exam room. I hold the full weight of that history in my body as I work: the Tuskegee experiments, the coerced sterilizations, the exclusion of Black patients from adequate care, and the parallel exclusion of Black people from the profession of medicine itself, and the barriers still placed before those of us who made it through anyway.
This is where reproductive justice, as Loretta Ross and her co-founders defined it, becomes not a slogan but a clinical practice: the right to have children, the right not to have children, and the right to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments, all secured by the social and political conditions that make those rights real.
I practice from the understanding that if I center the most marginalized patient in front of me, the one carrying the most layered harm, the whole collective is better served. That is how justice-centered health care actually works.
I understand the fear my patients carry into the room with them and refuse to read it as irrational. That fear is data. It is the accumulated, intergenerational record of what has been done to Black bodies in the name of medicine.
My job is to meet it with truth, not defensiveness. I move through this world knowing I live inside freedoms that were fought for, bled for, and organized for by people who never got to see the harvest.
My ability to practice medicine, to vote, to pursue an education, to move without every single barrier stacked against me, is not evidence that the struggle is over. It is evidence of unfinished work that others carried until it reached my hands. I try to carry it forward, for my patients and for myself, with that same discipline.
As our sexual and reproductive health care landscape changes, further disenfranchising our communities, how can the Black August principles be leveraged to support the path to restoration? What foundations can be built by way of these principles?
The path to restoration recedes a little further every day under this administration, as the gains of the civil rights movement are actively dismantled, as voting rights are stripped back, as our history is rewritten or erased from classrooms altogether. This is not incidental. Crenshaw’s framework reminds us that these attacks are never single-issue; they land simultaneously on race, gender, reproductive autonomy, and economic survival, which is exactly why the response must be intersectional and coalitional, not siloed.
This is where fighting back means something specific: staying vigilant, tracking the concrete policies this administration and allied organizations are advancing, and refusing to let erasure pass as neutrality. Reproductive justice tradition insists that fighting is not only opposition; it is also building. The foundation we lay must be rooted in the understanding that Black history and culture are not fragile things to be defended; they are resilient traditions to draw from.
Restoration will not come from a single policy win. It comes from communities disciplined enough to study our history, honest enough to name what is happening in real time and organized enough to build power across every front at once.