Mary Annette Anderson: The first African American woman elected to Phi Beta Kappa
“The sunshine of her life she gives, To everything around her, Though brief the season that she lives Nor lost is her endeavor. She is...
Category : Herstory
Gwendolyn B. Bennett: The Harlem Renaissance Writer and Painter
Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an African-American poet, essayist, short-story writer, and artist. Although she never published her own volume of poetry, she was one of...
Marie Couvent: A Controversial African-American Philanthropist
“Marie Couvent was the first [Black] woman to set the example of an enlightened charity, and that for a long time she was the only...
Zelda Wynn Valdes: The Creator of the Playboy Bunny Costume
“I just had a God-given talent for making people beautiful…” Zelda Wynn Valdes was a fashion legend who was the first African-American designer to open...
Lucille Clifton: The Award-winning Poet
“I write to celebrate life.” “I would like to be seen as a woman whose roots go back to Africa, who tried to honor being...
Wilma Rudolph: The fastest woman in the world in the 1960s
Wilma Glodean Rudolph was an African-American athlete who in 1960 became the first American woman to win three gold medals in track and field at...
The Horrific Lynching of Mary Turner
Mary Turner was a young African-American woman, lynched on May 19, 1918, in Valdosta, Georgia, in a horrific manner. She was eight months pregnant at...
Her name was Redoshi: The last survivor of the Maafa in America?
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...
Ona Judge: The First Lady’s personal maid who freed herself from bondage and was ‘Never Caught’
Ona Judge, known as Oney Judge Staines after marriage, was a bondwoman who worked on George Washington’s Mount Vernon labor camp/plantation, in Virginia. Beginning in...
Ten Iconic Black Women of the Maafa (Atlantic Slavery)
“Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range...