Herstory

Redoshi was born in modern-day Benin and abducted from her home aged 12 before being sold as a child bride. She was renamed Sally Smith in the United States after arriving there in 1860 and stayed on the same p...

Ona Judge, known as Oney Judge Staines after marriage, was a bondwoman who worked on George Washington's Mount Vernon labour camp/plantation, in Virginia. Beginning in 1789, she worked as a lady's maid to First...

Did you know that May B. Mason staked a gold claim in the Yukon mining territory in 1898, finding gold dust valued (back then) at $5000? May is believed to be the first African-American woman to go to the Y...

"Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feelings is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls i...

"Ayiti has been blessed to be a country where we have created all the essentials of the identity of a human. We have created our own cosmogony, which is what Vodun is. This is our perception of the cosmos.....

Jackie Ormes (August 1, 1911 – December 26, 1985) was born Zelda Jackson in a small town outside Pittsburgh. She was a self-taught artist who had several successful comic strips and cartoon characters, and th...

Anna Mac Clarke was the first African American woman to be a commanding officer of an otherwise all European regiment, when the United States military was still segregated. Clarke joined the Women's Army Corps ...

Elizabeth Jennings Graham (March 1827 – June 5, 1901) was an African-American teacher and civil rights activist, who challenged segregation on public transportation, a full 100 years before Rosa Parks did so....

Ella Fitzgerald, known as the First Lady of Song, Queen of Jazz, and Lady Ella was an extraordinary jazz and song vocalist, who won 13 Grammys. In all, Fitzgerald recorded more than 200 albums and some 2,000 so...

"My desires were to be free as soon as I learned that there had been slavery of human beings." Rosa Parks was nationally recognized as the “mother of the civil rights movement” in America. Her refusal to s...