An Ohioan, her childhood was spent with a heavy interest in learning and in social justice topics, which led to a conflicted relationship with her father and a supporting one with her mother.

Born in McDonaldsville, Ohio, to a steel-worker father and a nursing home worker mother, Corrigan had a complicated childhood due to constant layoffs in the steel manufacturing industry during her early years.

Her success in the club at national-level debate events led to her receiving a scholarship for starting college.

[5] Through this lens, she showed how imprisoned activists used their incarceration to organize their political activities and expressed the rhetoric that would form the black power ideologies.

[5][6] She also discussed in an interview the difficulties of publishing and promoting the book, as reviewers of the pre-publication version, who she noted were predominantly ethnically white, refused to believe the black power movement as influential or important for the civil rights effort.

In particular, it analyzed how the movement utilized emotional rhetoric in response to the ideology of "white hope" pushed by the Kennedy administration.