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...
Category : Herstory
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, near 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
“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...
Jackie Ormes: The first professional African American woman cartoonist
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...
Anna Mac Clarke: A Military Pioneer
Anna Mac Clarke was the first African American woman in the U.S. Army to command an otherwise all‑white unit while the military was still formally...