“I am excited by these women,” Lorde wrote in a journal entry that became the book’s forward, “as they’re beginning to say in one way or another, ‘Let us be ourselves now as we define us. We are not a figment of your imagination or an exotic answer to your desires.’”

“Showing Our Colors” and the debate that arose around it, resulted in the founding of two organizations devoted to Germans of African heritage, the women’s group ADEFRA and the Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD), both of which are crucial resources today in the wake of the refugee crisis.

One of the ISD’s current initiatives, in cooperation with the Berlin Green Party, is the renaming of one of the city’s streets after Lorde. That street is yet to be determined, but visitors can already walk the May-Ayim-Ufer, named for one of Lorde’s most important protégés, a poet, educator and activist born to a German mother and Ghanaian father, who helped found ADEFRA and the ISD before taking her own life in 1996. The willow-lined May-Ayim-Ufer, which was previously named after a 17th-century Prussian colonialist associated with the slave trade, runs along the Kreuzberg side of the Spree River, opposite the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall in one of the most diverse, left-leaning areas of the city.

The forest, the lakes and other Lorde haunts

But it’s farther west where Lorde spent most of her time. Alone, with her partner, Dr. Gloria Joseph, or with the entourage of women that had begun to coalesce around her, she loved to explore the city’s bucolic western edges, a part of Berlin that has changed less dramatically since the 1980s than much of the rest of the city.