Nina Simone’s remark about not discussing fashion but “Marx, Lenin, and revolution” offers a glimpse into the daily political life of Simone away from her more well-known story as civil rights activist and musician. This “girls’ talk” took place with her friend and playwright Lorraine Hansberry — a conversation between two black women that, as Simone says, was not about men or clothes, but about the creative work they were producing and how they saw its role in the liberation of their community.

Referencing Hansberry’s autobiographical play To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, Simone later wrote a song with the same title in tribute to her friend and comrade after Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at the tragically young age of thirty-four. This friendship and comradeship demonstrates how intimate conversations between political black women have the power to inspire. They take place away from the gaze of men, away from white people; they can be places of respite in which one can reenergize and rejoin the wider movement that often marginalizes and erases the political insights of black women.

To say Nina Simone has been “erased” would be absurd. She is one of the most celebrated musicians of the twentieth century. There’s no need to write another article, biography, or analysis of her political songs. But on the anniversary of her death, we can look at how the story of Simone’s political life is told, and who is telling it; at what they choose to include, and what they do, in fact, “erase.”