On a summer day in 1979, the poet Adrienne Rich interviewed her friend and fellow poet Audre Lorde. Throughout the interview, excerpted in Sister, Outsider, The pair talked about everything from feminist race relations and the salvage that only comes from articulating your emotions.

Audre Lorde was known for her commitment to vocalizing differences in race, class, and sexual orientation among women. This interview was no exception. As a black, lesbian feminist, Lorde was intimately familiar with issues that most white feminists overlooked, and she mentions to Rich one of her chief concerns: police violence against African-American children. In fact, her description of a 1973 murder is eerily similar to what we might see in headlines today.

That spring, a uniformed officer shot and killed 10-year-old Clifford Glover, a black boy from Queens. The white policeman was charged with murder, but eventually acquitted, much like those officers who walked after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and so many others. When Lorde heard on her car radio that the policeman was found not guilty, she tells Rich, “I was really sickened with fury, and I decided to pull over and just jot some things down in my notebook.” Her scribblings turned into one of her most famous poems: “Power.”