As part of the ongoing Black History Month celebrations, Google replaced the homepage logo with an animated slide show honoring Audre Lorde for her work as a poet, feminist and civil rights activist.
Audre Lorde was born on February 18, 1934 in Harlem, New York City – today would have been her 87th birthday. From a young age, Lorde had difficulty communicating, partly due to a difficult childhood. Instead, she recited poetry to share her feelings, and eventually started writing her own poetry from the age of 12. When she was 15, Lorde published her first work, with the love poem “Spring” appearing in Seventeen Magazine.
An interesting aspect of Lorde’s poetic view of life is that she was actually born as “Audrey Lorde”. As explained in her “Biomythography”, she dropped the “y” from her first name because she felt that “Audre Lorde” had an artistic symmetry, as both names end with an “e”.
Describing herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde became known in the civil rights movement and the LGBTQ community for her works calling for justice for the oppressed around the world. Her first collection, published by a major publisher, Coal, expertly delves into the unique beauties and difficulties of every aspect of her identity, including the challenges of being a lesbian in a straight marriage.
The quotes on today’s Google Doodle slide show are all from a speech entitled “Learning from the 60s” that Audre Lorde gave in 1982 at Harvard University. The doodle was contributed by guest artist Monica Ahanonu, who gave insights into the creation of the actual work of art and what kind of thoughts and emotions she wanted to evoke in a special Behind the Doodle video. The video also features powerful footage of Audre Lorde at work, whether she is speaking publicly, engaging in dialogue, or typing her words on paper.
Meanwhile, Lorde’s children Elizabeth and Jonathan shared their memories of their mother and how she may have reacted to being the subject of a Doodle on the Google Doodle blog.
Our mother Audre Lorde died in 1992 after a fourteen year battle with metastatic breast cancer, but she would have loved the Google Doodle. She loved learning new things – and it would have been a great honor to have been introduced to her. As noted above, she received her Masters in Library Science because she was very careful to catalog information in an orderly manner so that it could be located, even after centuries separated knowledge from its seeker. How much she would have loved to sit down at a keyboard and open up worlds of knowledge if she had entered a few key words or phrases!
– Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins and Jonathan Rollins
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