Black Her-Story | Celebrating Black Women all #BlackHistoryMonth
A HIGHLIGHT OF WOMEN WHO MAKE BEING BLACK QUEEN WORTHY
Soujorner Truth
Soujorner was a former slave who became an abolitionist and Women’s Rights activist. She was born in New York in 1797. In 1826, she gained her freedom when she escaped with her infant daughter. After her escape, she found a family in a worship house and became a Christian. Her given name was Isabella Baumfree, which she later changed when she decided to become a preacher in 1843. To her, it was a sign from God urging her to become a spokesperson against inequality among races and genders. Her Speech, Ain’t I a Woman, was delivered during a woman’s conference, which became one of the most celebrated speeches of her time. Her noteworthy work brought her all the way to the White House where she was greeted by President Abraham Lincoln and acknowledge for all of her success.
Maya Angelou
Maya was a poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer. What most don’t know is that she was also a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood’s first female black director. She was born in St. Louis, MO but spent most of her life growing up in Arkansas. She talks heavily about her traumatic childhood in her early and most famous works like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X.
Lorraine Hansberry
Chicago native, Lorraine, was an African American playwright and writer. Her best known work is the famous play A Raisin in the Sun, talks about the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. She was an expert on this topic since the Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation. Her father was part of the infamous Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee, where he fought to purchase and/or lease land in the Chicago area.
Aretha Franklin
Aretha was a singer, songwriter, civil rights activist, actress, and pianist. She is known as "The Queen of Soul" with hits songs like Respect, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, and I Say a Little Prayer. In 1987 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the first female performer to do so.
Hattie McDaniel
Hattie was the first black woman to win an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress, she was also the first African American woman on the radio. You may know her famously as “Mammy,” who she played on Gone With the Wind.
Althea Gibson
Althea was a tennis player and was the first Black woman to compete at Wimbledon in 1951. Most don’t know she was also a pretty good golf player as well. She paved the way for many athletes, especially black women athletes like Venus and Serena Williams.
I don't want to be put on a pedestal. I just want to be reasonably successful and live a normal life with all the conveniences to make it so. I think I've already got the main thing I've always wanted, which is to be somebody, to have identity. I'm Althea Gibson, the tennis champion. I hope it makes me happy.
Marian Anderson
Marian Anderson was the first Black person to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955, per PBS. She was also the first Black woman invited to perform at the White House. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan gave the National Medal of Arts.
Dorothy Danridge
Dorothy was an American film and theatre actress, singer, and dancer. She is one of the most famous African-American actresses to have a successful Hollywood career and the first to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1954 film Carmen Jones.
Marie Maynard Daly
Marie is the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States. Her success came with her research with heart attacks, with the help of a colleague, when they came to an understanding of how foods and diet can affect the health of the heart and the circulatory system.
Beyoncé
Beyoncé Knowles Carter was apart of the R&B group Destiny's Child, before she she established a solo career. She has won 25 MTV Video Music Awards, making her the most-awarded artist in the award show history and also the most-awarded artist at the BET Awards and the Soul Train Awards. With a total of 23 awards and 63 nominations from the Grammy Awards for her music.
Claudette Colvin
We all know of Rosa Parks and the righteous things she has done for Black people, but she is not the only one who started a revolution with the refusal of giving up her seat. Claudette was only 15 years old when she was arrested for not giving her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus in 1955. She was apart of the Browder v. Gayle case that challenged bus segregation in the city.
Mary Church Terrell
Mary was a charter member of the NAACP and an early advocate for civil rights and the suffrage movement. She was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women was one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree.
Ida B Wells
Ida was an African-American investigative journalist, educator, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s and her writing skills had her writing for major Black newspapers across the country.
Phillis Wheatley
Phillis was the first African-American poet to publish a book. She was brought to New England from West Africa as a slave when she was only 8 years old. The family that owned her took a notice and interest in her passion for writing and decided to tutor her in reading and writing. She studied English literature, Latin, Greek and The Bible. She traveled to London in 1773 and published her first poems. Soon after, when she returned to America, she was granted her freedom.
Mae Jemison
Mae is an engineer, physician and NASA astronaut. She became the first African-American woman to travel into space in 1992. She studied at Stanford University when she was just 16 years old, earning her degree in chemical engineering and in 1981 a doctorate in medicine from Cornell University.
Octavia Butler
Octavia was an American science fiction writer, one of very few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant. Her novels include Patternmaster, Kindred, and Parable of the Sower.
Evelyn Ashford
Evelyn is retired track and field athlete. She ran under the 11-second barrier over 30 times and was the first to run under 11 seconds in an Olympic Games. At 19, she finished 5th in the 100 m event at the 1976 Summer Olympics.
Ruby Bridges
Ruby Bridges is an American civil rights activist, who was the first African-American child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis in 1960.
Michele Roberts
Michele Roberts is the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association. She is the first woman to hold that position and the first woman to head a major professional sports in North America
Patricia Roberts Harris
Patrica was the first African American woman to hold a cabinet position, serve as U.S. Ambassador and head a law school. She served in the American administration of President Jimmy Carter as United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Ava DuVernay
Ava DuVernay is an acclaimed award-winning director and writer. Her film, Selma, earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.
Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan- Lori is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her 2001 play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2002. She is the first African American woman to achieve this honor for drama.
Jasmine Plummer
Jasmine became the first female quarterback to take a Pop Warner football team to the national championships. You may have seen her biopic film, Longshots in theatres.
Charlayne Hunter - Gault
Charlayne was a newspaper reporter and broadcast journalist who covered current events, geopolitics, and issues of race. In 1961 Hunter became the first African American woman to enroll in the University of Georgia; she was also among the first African American women to graduate from the university, earning a degree in journalism in 1963.
Billie Holiday
Billie was known as a famous jazz singer, but what most does not know is that she was also a civil rights activist. Growing up she had a childhood filled with instability and dealt with that through music. In 1939, she debuted the song she’s most known for, “Strange Fruit,” a poem turned song that talked about the lynchings of black people in the South.
Marsha P Johnson
Marshawas an American gay liberation activist and self-identified drag queen. She was one of the prominent figures in the Stonewall uprising of 1969. A founding member of the Gay Liberation Front, Johnson co-founded the gay and transvestite advocacy organization S.T.A.R. She modeled for Andy Warhol, and performed onstage with the drag performance troupe, Hot Peaches.
Alexa Canady
Dr. Alexa Canady became the first Black female neurosurgeon in the U.S. in 1981. She was the chief of neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital in Michigan. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame, and in 1993 she received the American Medical Women's Association President's Award.
dr. Regina Benjamin
Doctor Benjamin is the first African American woman to become president of the state medical society of Alabama. She is founder and CEO of Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic. She was appointed by President Barack Obama as the 18th U.S. surgeon general in 2009.
Florence Beatrice Price
Florence was a classical composer and was the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. With her mother teaching her music, she had her first piano performance when she was four and had her first composition published when she was 11. In 1949, she published two famous pieces, "I Am Bound for the Kingdom," and "I'm Workin’ on My Buildin'", and dedicated them to Marian Anderson, who performed them on a regular basis.
Michele Obama
Michelle is our former first lady who is married to President Barack Obama. She is, in her own right, a writer, lawyer, and university administrator. She attended Princeton University, graduating cum laude in 1985, and then recieved her law degree at Harvard Law School in 1988. Shes launched many successful projects like Let Girls Learn, Reach Higher Initiative, and Let’s Move! And this past year published her first book Becoming.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn was an American poet, author, and teacher. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive the Pulitzer.
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.
Mary Mahoney
Mary Mahoney became the first licensed Black nurse in the U.S. in 1879. She was one of the first African Americans to graduate from a nursing school. And because they were so against her skin color, she was not able to work in a hospital, instead spent the most of her career as a private nurse.
Maritza Correia
Maritza is an Olympian swimmer who became the first black woman to break an American record in 2002 and later became the first black woman to earn a place on the U.S. Olympic swim team. She became the first Puerto Rican of African descent to be a member of the U.S. Olympic swimming team.
Shirley Chisolm
Shirley was a politician and the first African American woman in Congress in 1968 and the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from one of the two major political parties. She had an outspoken advocacy for women and minorities during her seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.