Isabella Baumfree, born in 1797, renamed herself Sojourner Truth and blazed a trail for activism and leadership. Escaping her life as a slave, she went to court and sought legal help to reclaim her 5-year-old son back from the slave owner. This made her the first black woman in American history to challenge a white man in court. She began to tour the country, giving rousing abolitionist speeches including the famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. A champion of women’s suffrage, anti-slavery, and desegregation, Sojourner Truth died in 1883.
Yes, she wrote “The Color Purple” and became a household name after that, but Alice Walker is also a fierce human rights activist. In the 1960s, she was part of the Civil Rights movement. She married her white Jewish husband, Melvyn Levanthal, in Jackson, Missisippi, when anti-miscegenation laws were still rampant. A fierce feminist through her fiction, essays, and poetry, she was also a voice for anti-apartheid South Africa, a critic of female genital mutilation, an advocate for Palestinian rights, and a leader in the campaign to get Barack Obama voted president.
The daughter of a slave, Clark was born in 1898, and in 1918 became an instructor on South Carolina’s St. John’s Island. The color of her skin barred her from teaching in public schools. She decided to change this, and joined the N.A.A.C.P., securing the rights of black teachers in the state. She later became the director of education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and headed the movement of citizenship shools, which educated underprivileged blacks in math and literacy, thereby qualifying them to vote according to national laws. Her advocacy of knowledge as power was groundbreaking. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. named her the Mother of the Movement.
Brazen, brilliant, controversial, hated, feared, revered, imprisoned, freed…all these describe activist Angela Davis during some of the most tumultuous times in American history. Prof. Davis joined the Black Panthers and the Communist movement in the 1960s, quickly becoming an enemy of the state and jeopardizing her teaching position at U.C.L.A. It was especially her involvement fighting for the rights of the Soledad brothers — three black inmates whom many felt were wrongfully accused — which led to a violent courtroom hostage situation and shootout. Davis became a fugitive, running from the FBI on account of her firearms purchases. President Richard Nixon called her a terrorist and President Ronald Reagan swore she would never work in the California school system again…but she was later found not guilty. She continued to fight for prisoners’ rights and to promote socialism worldwide.
Born in Memphis in 1863 — the same year President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — she graduated from Oberlin College, one of the only integrated higher education facilities in the nation during that time. In the 1870s, alarmed by the lack of rights for women, Terrell began to work in black women’s organizations, including National American Woman Suffrage Association, where she became friends with Susan B. Anthony. Merging various black women’s clubs, she became president of the newly-formed National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Among her accomplishments, she collaborated with W.E.B. DuBois when the N.A.A.C.P. was founded, becoming the first black woman to serve on the Washington D.C. school board, and she founded the College Alumni Club.
The unmovable founder of the National Council of Negro Women (N.C.N.W.), Bethune started out at the turn of the 20th century by opening the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls, which eventually became the co-ed Bethune-Cookman College. She also founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, but it was her work on Capitol Hill that is most remembered. During President Roosevelt’s New Deal government, she held the title of Race Leader at Large. She was a pillar of leadership for the Black Cabinet, organizing the Federal Council on Negro Affairs. Today, the N.C.N.W. has more than 4 million women affiliates.
Height was born running and fighting. A rousing orator at high school in Virginia, she vocally opposed lynch mobs. When Barnard College denied her entry because it had met its quota for black students, she earned her master’s degree at New York University. While working at the Harlem Y.W.C.A., she met Mary McLeod Bethune, and became president of National Council of Negro Women (N.C.N.W.) in 1957. She was a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement, helping Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. organize the 1963 March on Washington, D.C. Height stood right next to him during his “I Have a Dream” speech.
“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” Quotes like these embody the fiery, irreverent, and trail-blazing spirit of Florynce Kennedy. She was a lawyer and an activist, and during the ’60s and ’70s, she was one of the most powerful (but now quite forgotten) feminist voices, speaking up for black rights and legalized abortion. She traveled around the country with fellow writer Gloria Steinem, often dressed in pink sunglasses and a cowgirl outfit, angering or enthralling people with her flamboyant and guerrilla attitude towards equal rights. She founded the Feminist Party in 1971, as well the Women’s Political Caucus.
(About.com)
She wrote books, conveyed life lessons, was tough as a mother and gentle as a grandmother. She died this year, but her legacy is inarguable. Born in St. Louis in 1928, she knew the trials and tribulations of being a woman. By the time she was 20, she’d already been a prostitute, a waitress, a line cook and a trolley conductor. She met Malcolm X in Accra, Ghana, where she had been living in the black American expat community. She moved back to Harlem with him and helped run his Organization of African American Unity, aimed at drawing attention to black Americans’ struggles. Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965 halted that project. She quickly joined forces with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., serving as coordinator for his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His 1968 assassination left her anguished. James Baldwin helped pull her out of her grief, suggesting she write a book. The book was named “I Know why the Caged Bird Sings.”
With one swift move of civil disobedience against institutionalized racist Jim Crow separation laws, Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, wrote the book of activism on an afternoon in December 1955. Four days after refusing to give up her seat to a white man and her subsequent arrest, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. Led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., it ignited the flame under the Civil Rights Movement. Parks founded the Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation for college-seeking youth. She died at age 92 on Oct. 24, 2005.
