During Black History Month, I’ve been highlighting at least one black woman each day on the Saints, Sisters, and Sluts Facebook page. I share other people’s posts, but I’ve made an effort to post at least one woman each day that is new to me or that I’ve learned something new about, and I’ve learned so much. However, there are people who follow the blog or follow me on twitter that don’t see the Facebook posts, so I decided to post that information here as well. It will also give me a handy place to refer to, because some of these women I want to learn more about, possibly for future blog posts.
All of the women I’ve posted have been African Americans. I didn’t necessarily intend it to be that way, Canada and Britain celebrate as well, there are two women Presidents in Africa now, and black women who have won the Nobel Peace Prize recently, but there is so much of my own country’s history that I still don’t know, so I just went where my search led me. There are many more women who could be highlighted, 28 days just isn’t enough. I’m going to break this up into several posts to keep them relatively short and readable. Please comment and let me know who your favorites are or more information about these women.
Maggie Lena Walker
Maggie Lena Walker (1864 – 1934) was an African-American business woman. She was the first woman to charter a bank in the US and the first female bank president. Working with the Independent Order of St. Luke, she established a newspaper, The St. Luke Herald, and chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank.
Maggie Walker worked to create tangible improvements in the lives of women and African Americans. She also was an example for people with disabilities later in life when she was confined to a wheelchair. The Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School for Government and International Studies in Richmond, VA is named for her and her home was designated a National Historic Site and opened as a museum in 1985.
Edith Spurlock Sampson
Edith Spurlock Sampson (1898 – 1979) left school at 14 because of family financial difficulties. She cleaned and de-boned fish at a fish market, but was able to return to school and graduate. She went on to study social work at the New York School of Social Work, then went to law school while working full time as a social worker.
After graduating from John Marshall Law School, she opened a law office and worked with the Juvenile Court system and as a probation officer. In 1927, she became the first woman to receive a Master of Laws from Loyola University’s graduate program and passed the Illinois bar exam. In 1934 she was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the US. Sampson was the first black woman elected as a judge in the state of Illinois, was the first African-American appointed as a delegate to the United Nations, and was the first African American US representative to NATO.
Audrey Forbes Manley
Audrey Forbes Manley (b. 1934) is an American pediatrician and public health administrator. After graduating from Spelman College and Meharry Medical College, she began a distinguished career that included private practice and becoming chief of medical services at Grady Memorial Hospital’s Emory University Family Planning Clinic. Manley began her career in Public Health in 1976 eventually becoming US Deputy Surgeon General and acting Surgeon General from 1995 to 1997 when she became the President of her alma mater Spelman College.
Rosa Parks
February 4th of this year would have been Rosa Park’s 100th birthday. Most of us are familiar with her act of civil disobedience in 1955, when she refused to give up her seat in the ‘colored’ section of the bus to a white man, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But Parks was more than a demure seamstress, she had been an active participant in the fight for civil rights since 1943. She also endured many hardships due to her involvement in the movement. She and her husband eventually moved to Detroit MI to try to find work. Jeanne Theoharis, political science professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, has written a new biography of Rosa Parks which sounds excellent, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. She gave a presentation about Rosa Parks which you can view online.
Elizabeth Jennings
One hundred years before Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat on the bus, Elizabeth Jennings insisted on her right to ride on a street car in NYC. When she was removed, she filed a law suit. Future President Chester Arthur won the case and the street cars of the city were integrated as a result. See Patricia Dolton’s blog post for more information. Not much is known about her later life. She was a teacher, church organist, and she opened the first kindergarten for black children in NYC.
Leontyne Price
Leontyne Price is an American soprano with an exquisite voice. Although Price wasn’t the first African American to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, she was the first to sing many different roles at the Met and to build an opera career in the US and in Europe. When she debuted on January 27, 1961, the final ovation was 35 minutes, one of the longest in the history of the Met. Prior to this she had developed her reputation in Europe including being the first African American to sing a leading role in Italy’s great opera house, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Her many awards include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, and 19 Grammy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award..
Plácido Domingo wrote, “The power and sensuousness of Leontyne’s voice were phenomenal–the most beautiful Verdi soprano I have ever heard.”
Delta Sigma Theta Sorority
The Delta Sigma Theta Sorority was founded by 22 women from Howard University in 1913. Their first public act was to march in the Women’s Suffrage March on March 3, 1913. The participation of African American women in 1913 was controversial, but this year ΔΣθ is sponsoring the march on March 3, 2013 to commemorate the Centennial of the 1913 march which changed the tide of the women’s suffrage movement. The National Women’s History Museum invites you to join them.
Regarding their decision to march in the Suffrage Parade in 1913, founder Florence Letcher Toms commented, “We marched that day in order that women might come into their own, because we believed that women not only needed an education, but they needed a broader horizon in which they may use that education. And the right to vote would give them that privilege.”
A sisterhood of more than 300,000 predominantly Black college-educated women, the sorority currently has over 1,000 chapters located in the United States, England, Japan (Tokyo and Okinawa), Germany, the Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas and the Republic of Korea. (from Wikipedia)
Continue to read Celebrating Black History Month in Part2 and Part 3.