Month: August 2022

Claudette Colvin 1939 – When Claudette was 15 years old, she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger in a racially segregated bus in Alabama. Colvin stood her ground because she felt it was her constitutional right after paying the fare. She was forcibly removed from the bus and… Continue reading Claudette Colvin

1935–1991 On April 23, 1951, Barbara Johns, a 16 year-old high school girl in Prince Edward County, Virginia, led her classmates in a strike to protest the substandard conditions at Robert Russa Moton High School. Her idealism, planning, and persistence ultimately garnered the support of NAACP lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill to take up… Continue reading Barbara Johns

Josephine Baker started her career performing vaudeville in New York and later was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, Siren of the Tropics. She went on to perform her vaudeville numbers in Paris and decided to stay, to leave the racism of America. Successful in Paris, she added singing and… Continue reading Josephine Baker

1958-2021 Both an intellectual and a person who helped people pursue ‘right relations’ to others, bell hooks wrote more than 30 books on race, feminism and class. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell took her pen name from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. She made it lower case as she wanted the public to focus… Continue reading bell hooks

Alice Augusta Ball overcome the racial and gender barriers of her time to become the first woman and African-American to graduate with a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii. At 23 she became the first woman chemistry teacher there. As a research chemist she was able to create an injectable leprosy treatment using oil… Continue reading Alice Ball

Juliette Derricotte was an American educator and political activist whose death stemming from being refused treatment after a fatal car accident in Chattanooga, Tennessee sparked outrage in the African-American community. At the time of her death she was Dean of Women at Fisk University. In 1931, Juliette Derricotte was driving three students to her parents’… Continue reading Juliette Derricotte

Elizabeth Jennings Graham 1827 – 1901 Almost a century before Rosa Parks became known for desegregating the Montgomery bus system, Elizabeth Jennings Graham desegregated the private NYC streetcars. Elizabeth Graham was born free in 1827. She was a teacher who started the first African-American kindergarten in New York City. It was in her home and… Continue reading Elizabeth Jennings Graham

Mary Jane Patterson 1840 – 1894 Mary Jane Patterson is considered the first Black woman to receive a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College in 1862. Patterson initially took the one year female course of studies at Oberlin but continued on to the four year male course which included math, Greek and Latin. After she graduation,… Continue reading Mary Jane Patterson

Mary Shadd Cary was the first black woman law student, enrolling at Howard University in September 1869. She graduated from Howard in 1870 with her LL.B, the first African American woman to get a law degree in the United States. She joined the growing women’s voting movement just as fellow activists Frederick Douglass and Susan… Continue reading Mary Shadd Cary

 Painting inspired by photo in Chester Higgins Archive. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, Constance Motley played a pivotal role in the fight to end racial segregation. She was the first African American woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and the first to serve as a federal judge. As a… Continue reading Constance Motley