Conference turris::womannotes-v2

Important medical knowledge including a smallpox inoculation came from 
Africa and was practiced by black women before the Civil War.  Yet for 
women interested in pursuing a formal medical career, the obstacles 
were nearly insurmountable.

However, in 1864, Rebecca Lee became the first formally trained black 
female physician.  Others followed and remarkably, black women were the 
first practicing female doctors in four southern states.

After the Civil War, black medical schools were established to meet 
freemen's need.  Two which continue to train the majority of blacks 
are Howard University and Meharry University.

Barred from membership in the American Medical Association, black 
doctors formed the National Medical Association in 1895.  After World 
War II, this organization fought discriminatory admissions policies at 
medical schools.

Black women's participation in medicine increased after the 1964 
Civil Rights Act empowered the government to withhold federal funds 
from programs that discriminated on the basis of sex or race.  
Although they still face great obstacles, dedicated black women are 
making significant medical contributions.

    
    Focus: Jane Wright
    
    
Jane Wright
"There's a lot of fun in exploring the unknown," observed Jane C. 
Wright (b. 1919), "in having an experiment turn out in such a way that 
you make a positive contribution."  Although she considered becoming 
an artist, Wright chose to follow her father, a surgeon and cancer 
researcher.

Wright, who is a professor of internal medicine in the department of 
surgery at NY medical College, has made important contributions to 
cancer chemotherapy research.  She directed the Cancer Research 
Foundation at Harlem Hospital, which is now the Cancer Chemotherapy 
Research Service at NYU's Bellevue Medical Center.

Wright's own work has been primarily clinical.  She has treated 
hundreds of patients stricken with terminal cancer.  In 1951, her 
research group was the first to report remissions in patients with 
breast cancer, they also noted remissions in patients with terminal 
skin cancer.

Wright and her associates initiated the important research practice of 
taking tissues cultures from individual cancer patients (rather than 
laboratory mice) to determine the appropriate drug therapy.  Now 
widely adopted, this technique offers promise in the development of a 
cancer cure. 

    Others:
    

In 1890 Ida Gray (1867-1953) was the first black woman in the country 
to receive a formal doctorate in dental surgery (D.D.S).  When she 
graduated from the University of Michigan's School of Dentistry, only 
22 women had matriculated there.  Gray practiced in Ohio and then 
moved to Chicago, where she was the first black woman dentist in the 
city.

Susan McKinney Steward ()1848-1918) graduated as valedictorian from 
the New York Medical College for Women in 1870, specializing in 
obstetrics and gynecology as an intern.  She was the third black woman 
in the country and the first in the state of New York to become a 
doctor.  Steward was one of the founders of the Women's and 
Children's Hospital in Brooklyn.  In 1898 she became resident 
physician and faculty member at Wilberforce University in Ohio.  She 
was also an active suffragist and civil rights leader.

The first black woman to graduate from School of Pharmacy at Pittsburgh 
University, Ella Nora Phillips Stewart (b 1893) combined a long, 
active professional career in pharmacy with outstanding civic 
leadership.  In 1948 she was elected president of the National 
Association of Colored Women, and she wrote a history of the 
association, Lifting As They Climb.  Stewart held numerous public 
posts, toured the Far East lecturing on women's affairs, and was 
appointed to the executive board of the US Commission of UNESCO.

Childhood interest and her family's support encouraged Dorothy Boulding 
Ferebee (1897-1980) to pursue a lengthy and distinguished career in 
medicine. After graduating with honors from Tufts Medical School in 
1927 she established her own practice, taught, and was active in civic 
and social affairs.  Ferebee was a full professor at Howard 
University's School of Medicine and head of student health services 
there.  She directed a health care project for black sharecroppers in 
Mississippi, was founder of a settlement house in Washington DC, and 
was Mary McLeod Bethune's successor as president of National Council 
of Negro Women.

Dorothy L. Brown (b 1919), who was raised in an orphanage until age 
12, became the first black female surgeon general in the South and the 
first black woman to serve in the Tennessee state legislature.  Brown 
is a clinical professor of surgery at Meharry Medical College, the 
chief of surgery at Riverside Hospital in Nashville, and a fellow to 
the American College of Surgeons.  Brown has served on the State Youth 
Guidance Commission and been involved in many public interest groups.

Described in a 1930 Columbia, South Carolina, newspaper as a 'noted 
physician and surgeon, humanitarian, and outstanding citizen," 
Mathilda A. Evans (1874-1935) was the first black woman to practice 
medicine in South Carolina.  An 1897 graduate of the Woman's Medical 
College of Pennsylvania, Evans founded two hospitals, three clinics, 
and the Negro Health Association of South Carolina.

Edith Irby Jones (b 1927) is clinical assistant professor of medicine 
at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and serves on the 
board of directors of the Mercy Hospital Comprehensive health Care 
Group.  IN 1948, Jones was the first black enrolled in a Southern 
all-white medical program at the University of Arkansas Medical School. 
 In 1982, Jones traveled to China to study health care and lecture as 
a representative of the American Internal Medicine Society.

    

Though denied citizenship and legal training, black women presented 
their own cases in court as early as 1708, and numbers sued for their 
freedom up to the Civil War.

In 1872, Charlotte Ray was the first black woman to earn a formal law 
degree and admission to the Dist of Columbia bar, and as late as 1920 
there were only four black women lawyers in the country, yet black 
women continued to work for change through litigation.

In 1924, Gertude Rush helped found the National Bar Association for 
black lawyers who were denied membership in other bar associations.  
In 1939, the NAACP formed its Legal Defense and Education Fund.  
Constance Baker Motley's briefs and Pauli Murray's research on state 
racial laws helped serve as a catalysts for the Civil Rights Movement in 
1954.

The National Association of Black Women Attorneys was founded in 1972, 
and by 1977, the number of black women lawyers in the country had 
reached 2,000.  Today black women are active in all ranks of the legal 
profession.


Focus: Sadie T.M. Alexander

Sadie T.M. Alexander

	"My concern is that you and I be prepared to live in a highly 
	competitive world in which we will find ourselves as the walls 
	of segregation come tumbling down... Will we remember that our 
	apparent security is dependent upon  the degree of security enjoyed 
	by all citizens of this country and the world, and thus concern 
	ourselves with foreign affairs, world disarmament, or the plight 
	of the deprived at home, in South America, Asia, and the world?"
				-Sadie T.M. Alexander, Founders Day 
				 Address at Spelman College, 
				 Atlanta Georgia, 1963
			

"Only by achieving the equality of opportunity for the lowest... on 
the totem pole, do we secure the rights of our people," Sadie T.M. 
Alexander (b. 1898) asserted.  In 1921 Alexander was the first black 
woman to earn a PhD. [economics] and in 1927 the first to earn a law 
degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Applying her training to social issues, Alexander served as the 
chairman of the Pennsylvania Commission on Human Relations and as a 
member of the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights, The National 
Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the board of the 
Urban League.  President Truman appointed her to his commission on 
Civil rights in 1946.


Others:

In 1924 Gertrude Rush (1880-1962) was one of the founders of the 
National Bar Association.  Rush, who began studying law under her 
husband's instruction in 1908, passed the Iowa bar examination in 1918 
to become the first black woman to practice in the state.  Active in 
community service work, Rush established a charity league for women 
and girls in Des Moines.

In 1982 M. Ashley Dickerson (b 1912) was the first black to be elected 
president of the National Association of Women Lawyers, the oldest 
national group of women lawyers in the country.  Dickerson, who became 
Alaska's first black attorney in 1959, has tried many lawsuits in the 
state dealing with the rights of minorities and women.

Knows as a judge who placed human rights above property rights, Edith 
Spurlock Sampson (1898 - 1979) was appointed by President Truman as 
alternate delegate to the United Nations in 1950.  She was also a 
member of the United States Citizens Committee for NATO.  When Sampson 
became a circuit court judge in Cook County, Illinois, in the 19602, 
she was the second black women to be elected to the bench in the Unites 
States.

The first black woman to preside in a federal court, Constance Baker 
Motley (b 1921) was appointed by President Johnson in 1966 to the 
Federal District Court in New York City.  After receiving her law 
degree from Columbia University in 1946, she served as an NAACP 
attorney, becoming involved with most of the major cases of the Civil 
Rights Movement.  Motley won 9 of the 10 cases she presented before the 
US. Supreme Court between 1961 and 1964.  In 1964 she became the first 
black woman elected to the New York Senate; and she was later elected 
president of the Borough of Manhattan.

Marian Wright Edelman (b 1939) has been active in civil rights and 
public interest affairs since her graduation from Yale Law School in 
1963.  She was the first director (1964-1968) of the NAACP's Legal 
Defense and Education Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi.  Edelman 
founded the Children's Defense Fund in 1968 and as director is an 
active leader in defending and expanding children's legal rights.
    

    Black creativity has had a tremendous impact on American life. And 
    since 1821 woman have played a part in the black theater companies 
    that performed comedies, musicals, serious dramas, and even operas to 
    black audiences.

    During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, independent theater 
    companies flourished, freeing playwrights and actresses from the 
    limitations of white theaters.  The 1920s also marked a period of 
    improved opportunities for black performers on Broadway.

    Blacks appeared in Hollywood films in the 1920s, although independent 
    black filmmakers were active as early as 1914.  For black actresses 
    however, Hollywood offered mostly servants' roles until the 1940s and 
    1950s when black stars, notably Dorothy Dandridge and Ethel Waters, 
    emerged in leading roles.  In the 1950s, Janet Collins and Mary 
    Hinkson were the first blacks to present solo ballet and modern dance 
    performances in major opera houses; Lorraine Hansberry's play "Raisin 
    In The Sun" was the first work of a black female playwright to be 
    staged on Broadway.

    In the 1960s and 1970s, women helped found small grassroots theater 
    groups as well as major black companies.  Today black women enjoy 
    responsibilities as choreographers, directors, and writers.

Focus:  Katherine Dunham

		"...the music...followed her and struck so far down into a 
		substance that has never stirred or made itself known before 
		that now, at this moment, began a possession by the blues, a 
		total immersion in the baptismal font of the Race...Single 
		road to freedom."
					-From "A Touch of Innocence," 1959

    Katherine Dunham (b. 1912) gave the world a new, black dance art, a 
    combination of African, Caribbean, Central European, and classical 
    ballet dance elements in a modern style.  The "Dunham Technique" 
    became the model for Broadway dancing.  As an anthropologist 
    interested in discovering the black American-African dance heritage, 
    Dunham conducted research in Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and Cuba in 
    1937.  The dance technique she later developed as an artist-performer, 
    choreographer, and teacher was based on her field studies.  Dunham's 
    "Tropics and Le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem," performed in NY's 
    Windsor Theater in 1940, was widely acclaimed.  She subsequently 
    appeared on Broadway and in films, work with financed the Katherine 
    Dunham Dance Theater Company, the largest nonsubsidized dance group in 
    the country, which toured internationally for 25 years.

    Dunham also established a school of dance in NYC and has choreographed 
    performances for television, film, stage, the Metropolitan Opera, and 
    the National Ballet of Senegal.  She currently directs a performing 
    arts center devoted to developing talented, underprivileged black 
    youth, and has published a number of books, short stories, and 
    articles since the mid-1930s.


Others:
    
    Josephine Baker (1906-1975) ran away from home at age 13 and by age 16 
    appeared on Broadway in "Shuffle Along" and at the famous Plantation 
    Club.  She traveled to France with "La Revue Negre" in 1925 where she 
    joined the "Folies Bergere" and became the first black to star in a 
    solo revue on the Paris stage.  For the next 40 years Baker - a dancer, 
    song stylist, and comedienne - was a symbol of "everything 
    spontaneous, madcap, and full of driving energy that was associated 
    with jazz." She received the highest French military honors for her 
    work for the Resistance during WW II.

    A versatile performer on stage and in recordings, nightclubs, and 
    television, Lena Horne (b 1917) began her career at age 16 as a chorus 
    girl at the Cotton Club.  Her first Broadway feature was "Blackbirds" 
    in 1939 and she appeared in films during the 1940s.  Horne tried to 
    change Hollywood's portrayal of blacks and was critical of the 
    industry's attempt to make her a "butterfly pinned to a column" by 
    casting her in shallow roles.  Her 1981 Broadway show "Lena Horne: The 
    Lady and Her Music" enjoyed 1.5 years of sell out performances.

    "The black woman has never been shown on screen this way before...," 
    Cicely Tyson (b 1939) has remarked about her role as a southern 
    sharecropper's wife in the movie "Sounder." Tyson has appeared on 
    television as Harriet Tubman in "A Woman Names Moses," and as the lead 
    in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," for which she won an  Emmy
    Award in 1973.

    Ruby Dee (b 1924) began working in radio and at Harlem's American 
    Negro Theatre while still a college student.  She first appeared on 
    Broadway in "Jab" in 1946, had a part in "Raisin In The Sun" in 1959, 
    appeared in a number of films during the 1950s and 1960s, and in the 
    1970s performed in the play, "A Wedding Band." Dee and husband, Ossie 
    Davis, helped form the Coordinating Council for Negro Performers and 
    the Association of Artists for Freedom.

    Pearl Primus (b 1919) worked to awaken black people to their cultural 
    heritage through dance.  She joined the National Youth Administration 
    dance group in the 1930s and studied indigenous African and 
    Afro-American dances.  Her repertoire included "social concept" dances 
    which protested discrimination against blacks.  Primus performed on 
    Broadway and toured the country in 1940s. She started her own troupe, 
    and in 1947 opened a school of dance in NYC.

    Sissieretta Jones' (1869-1933) career as a soprano spanned three 
    decades.  Following her 1988 public debut in NY, Jones, who included 
    operatic excerpts in her performances, appeared in concert in the US, 
    Canada, the West Indies, Europe, and at the command performance for 
    the Prince of Wales.  Jones was the star of her touring company, the 
    "Black Patti Troubadours."
    

    Fear of rebellions caused most southern states to pass laws forbidding 
    the education of slaves.  However, systems were devised to defy this 
    prohibition: some slaves secretly taught others to read and write.

    After the Civil War, freedman's associations raised thousands of 
    dollars to build schools.  Many gains made during the Reconstruction 
    were lost though when freedmen schools became part of the public 
    systems: the whites wanted black labor for sharecropping and tenant 
    farming.  Consequently, black schools were underfinanced and open only 
    a few months each year. 

    Several black women were, however, able to found privately-funded 
    black institutions.

    In 1954, Thurgood Marshall, a NAACP lawyer, argued the case for 
    desegregating public schools, one of the central concerns for the 
    early Civil Rights Movement.  As a result, the Supreme Court declared 
    segregation in public schools unconstitutional.  Since the 1950s, 
    black women have entered university teaching and administrative 
    positions and assumed leadership roles in education policy-making 
    groups. 


    Focus: Fanny Jackson Coppin

    
		"Slavery made us poor, and its gloomy, malicious
		shadow tends to keep us so... it is a matter of 
		serious concern to us to see our youth with just as
		decided diversity of talent as any other people, all
		herded together into but three or four occupations...
		we should strive to make known...  the justice of our 
		claims to the same employments as other men, under 
		the same conditions."
				-Fanny Jackson Coppin, 1896
				 Report to the Board of Managers


    A dedicated educator, Fanny Jackson Coppin (1837-1913) worked to 
    prepare black youth for roles in newly industrialized cities.  After 
    graduating from Oberlin College in 1865, Coppin, a former slave, went 
    to Philadelphia which had a large urban black population.  She taught 
    and in 1869 became head principal of the Institute for Colored Youth, 
    a Quaker-supported alternative school.

    In 1871 Coppin established a teacher's training program at the 
    Institute which included a popular and unprecedented practice teaching 
    course.  Later, after attending the Philadelphia Centennial 
    Exposition, she became interested in industrial education and 
    persuaded the school's board of managers to establish the first 
    industrial education department in the area to teach trades to black 
    youth.  She helped raise funds for the building that housed the 
    department and opened in 1888.  The Institute for Colored Youth 
    eventually moved to Cheyney, Pennsylvania, where it evolved into 
    Cheyney State College.


    Others:

    
    A professor in the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, 
    author and lecturer, Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (b 1944) has studied and 
    stimulated interest in the relationship between families and schools, 
    the status structure of the classroom, social and cognitive 
    development in children, cultural perception, and race relations.   She
    is a member of the board of directors of the Institute for  Educational
    Leadership, and is a leader among educational  policy-makers.

    Committed to a belief that a classical education and an industrial 
    education should be attained simultaneously, Nannie Helen Burroughs 
    (1878? -1961) founded what became knows as the National Trade and 
    Professional School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC. Burroughs 
    required that students take a course in the black history department 
    which she established there.  She was an eloquent speaker and  frequent
    contributor to black newspapers.  During the Depression,  Burroughs
    organized Cooperative Industries, Inc.

    In her first book, "A Voice From The South By A Black Woman From The 
    South," Anna Julia Cooper (1859-1964) advocated higher education for 
    black men and women.  As principal of the M Street High School in 
    Washington, DC, she developed a college preparatory program and 
    successfully campaigned for scholarships and opportunities for her 
    students to secure university admission.  At the age of 65 she earned 
    her doctorate at Sorbonne in Paris. 

    An educator and civil rights activist, Septima Poinsette Clark (b. 
    1898) began her teaching career in a one room school on Saint John's 
    Island, South Carolina.  Clark later taught in the Charleston public 
    school system but was dismissed in 1956 because of her NAACP 
    activities and promotion of voter registration.  She led Souther 
    Christian Leadership Conference voter registration and teacher 
    training programs, and with LeGette Blyth wrote her autobiography, 
    "Echo In My Soul." 	
			
    

    Characteristics of the African oral tradition were retained by slaves 
    who told stories, composed lyrics, and contributed to a vast body of 
    slave narratives that chronicled their longing for freedom.

    Yet although blacks wrote consistently during the 1700s and 1800s, it 
    was only during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that black arts 
    began to flower.  Black magazines such as the NAACP's "Crisis" and the 
    Urban League's "Opportunity" encouraged and published new writers.

    The black American experience in the 1940s was chronicled in  important
    literary works by black women.  Then in the 1960s, black  poetry broke
    from conventions and influenced other genres.  A writers'  conference
    at Fisk University in 1966 created a dialogue between new  and
    established black writers, who looked to their African past for 
    material and attempted to reach black audiences.

    An abundance of literary works by black women appeared in the 1960s and 
    1970s.  These introspective, self-assertive, and political poets and 
    novelists have created an autobiographical literature which explores 
    their roles as black women.


Focus: Gwendolyn Brooks

		"...in all your Turnings and your Churnings,
		 remember Africa,
		 You have to call your singing and your bringing,
		 your pulse, your ultimate booming in
		 the not-so-narrow temples of your Power-
		 you have to call all that, that is your Poem, AFRICA
		
    Gwendolyn Brooks (b 1917), who emerged as a poet in the 1940s, is 
    noted for her delicate, accurate portraits of black people in urban 
    North.  Her first book, "A Street In Bronzeville," is a poetic 
    chronicle of the painful adaptation of blacks to city life.

    In 1950 Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for her volume of poems "Annie 
    Allen." Among her works during the next 20 years were "The Bean 
    Eaters," "Selected Poems," "In The Mecca," "Riot," and "Family 
    Pictures."  Influenced by her close associations with younger black 
    writers since the 1960s and by a 1971 trip to East Africa, Brooks 
    modified her style, experimenting with free and blank verse.

    In her autobiography, "Report From Part One," Brooks defines her 
    intended audience as "...all black people in alleys, black people in 
    gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate; I wish 
    to reach black people in pulpits, black people in mines, on farms on 
    thrones..."


Others:

    The first black woman to produce a play on Broadway, Lorraine 
    Hansberry (1930-1965) wrote about the strength of a black family and 
    racial pride in "Raisin In The Sun."  After winning the New York Dram 
    Critics Award for best play of the year, the play was made into a film 
    which won the Cannes Film Festival Award in 1961.  Martin Luther King 
    Jr., said that Hansberry's "commitment and spirit... her creative 
    literary ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues 
    confronting the world... will remain an inspiration to generations yet 
    unborn."

    Born in Africa, Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) arrived in Boston at age 
    seven or eight and was bought by a wealthy merchant/tailor.  She 
    learned to read and write, studied Latin, and at age 17 had her first 
    poem published.  Three years later she traveled to England where her 
    first book of verse, "Poems On Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," 
    was published.  Few American women could read and write during this 
    period, and only one other had published a volume of verse by 1773.

    "I have always tried to establish a voice in the work of a narrator 
    which worked like a chorus, like what I think is going on in the black 
    church, or in jazz, where people respond, where the reader is 
    participating," said novelist Toni Morrison (b 1931).  Morrison is a 
    master of poetic language, including black dialect.  Her works include 
    "The Bluest Eye," "Sula," "Song of Solomon," which won the National 
    Book Critics Award, and "Tar Baby". [*Karen's note - since this 
    article was penned in 1984, Toni has gone on to write "Beloved" which 
    won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 (or was it '88?).] Morrison is also 
    senior editor at Random House.

    Zora Neale Hurston (1901-1960) was urged by her mother to "jump at the 
    sun." Controversial and free-spirited, Hurston, who began writing 
    professionally during the Harlem Renaissance, produced seven books, 
    two plays, and numerous essays, short stories, and articles.  Between 
    1927 and 1932 she conducted research in folklore in Harlem and the 
    South.  Her publications include the novel "Their Eyes Were Watching 
    God;" a collection of folklore, "Mules and Men;" and an autobiography, 
    "Dust Tracks on a Road."

    Margaret Walker Alexander (b 1915), author of the moving book of 
    poetry, "For My People," believes that black poetry "comes from the 
    deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational, and the collective 
    body of our ancestral memories."  She wrote the award-winning Jubliee, 
    an historical novel about the Civil War and slavery; "Prophets for a 
    New Day," a volume of poems concerning the Civil Rights Movement; and 
    a biography, "The Daemonic Genius of Richard Wright.'

    Nikki Giovanni (b 1943), a militant poet during the 1960s evolved 
    during the 1970s into a reflective, more introspective writer. She is 
    well known for her many radio and television appearances and her 
    readings of poems to gospel music on the albums "Truth is on Its Way" 
    and "Like a Ripple on a Pond."  Giovanni's books include "Black 
    Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment;" "My House;" "The Women and the 
    Men;" and "Cotton Candy;" and two books for children, "Spin a Soft 
    Black Song" and "Vacation Time."
     

In struggling to overcome the obstacles they faced, black women have 
had a significant impact on politics and government.  Female 
abolitionist leaders and underground railroad conductors influenced the 
course of events that precipitated the Civil War.  After 
Reconstructions, crusaders against lynching raised the consciousness 
of the country and helped to defend the human and legal rights to which 
blacks were entitled.  

Working together to gain influence, black women formed numerous clubs 
in the late 19th century to address their interests.  By voicing these 
concerns, women gained experience in public speaking, organizing, 
leadership, and other skills that were valuable to them when they later 
served on boards and councils.

Radical social change caused by the political activism of the late 
1950s and 1960s made it possible for black women to become involved in 
politics and government at all levels.  Though they are still 
under represented in leadership roles, black women are active in 
electoral politics, hold public office, and are establishing their own 
networks and support organizations such as the National Women's 
Political Leadership Caucus and the National Association of Black 
Women Legislators. 


Focus: Mary McLeod Bethune

		"Yesterday, our ancestors endured the degradation
		 of slavery, yet they retained their dignity.  Today
		 we direct our economic and political strength toward
		 winning a more abundant and secure life.  Tomorrow, a
		 new Negro, unhindered by race taboos and shackles, 
		 will benefit from more than 330 years of ceaseless 
		 striving and struggle.  Theirs will be a better world.
		 This I believe with all  my heart.	
				-Mary McLeod Bethune, Last Will and 
				 Testament, "I Leave You Hope," 1955
			
Although most of her life was devoted to education, Mary McLeod 
Bethune (1875-1955) was most influential as a forceful black leader 
and orator in government.  In 1935 she was appointed by President 
Roosevelt to the National Advisory Committee to the National Youth 
Administration (NYA), and had become director of the Division of Negro 
Affairs by 1939.  Bethune used this position to influence the agency to 
adopt non-discriminatory policies and to address the special needs of 
black communities.  For example, as a result of the division's student 
aid program, 150000 young people attended high school and 60000 went 
to college and graduate school. In her effort to unite black political 
forces, she created the Federal Council of Negro Affairs, and 
organized two NYA-sponsored National Negro Conferences to make policy 
recommendations to the administration.   Bethune founded and was 
president of Bethune-Cookman College, the National Association of 
Colored Women's Clubs, and the National Council of Negro Women.  She 
was also a consultant at the conference which drafted the United 
Nations charter. 


Others:

In 1952 the Progressive Party Convention chose Charlotta Spears Bass
(1890?-1969) as its candidate for vice president of the United States.
 Bass was a founding member of the party.  She served as managing
editor of the oldest black newspaper on the West Coast, the California
Eagle, through which she fought the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, and
discrimination.  She was a militant leader in community affairs and a
member of many black organizations including the Pan-African Congress.
 Her autobiography, "Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a
Newspaper," was published in 1960. 

As the first black from the South to be elected to United States
Congress since Reconstruction, Barbara Jordan (b 1936) of Texas served
in the House of Representatives from 1972-1978.  Jordan gained
national recognition during the Watergate Judiciary Committee hearings
and as the keynote speaker at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

In 1968 Shirley Chisholm (b 1924) of Brooklyn, New York, became the
first black woman to be elected to the United States House of
Representatives.  She was the only woman and the only black to serve
on the House Rules Committee, and was secretary of the House of
Democratic Caucus.  Chisholm believes that the inclusion of domestic
workers under minimum wages was her greatest legislative achievement.
Chisholm was the first black woman to campaign for president on the
major political party ticket, and has written an autobiography,
"Unbought and Unbossed." 

Federal administrator, educator, historian, and lawyer, Mary Frances
Berry (b 1938) was in 1977 appointed assistant secretary of education
at the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.  In this
position she championed the right of minority institutions to receive
federal support.  She has been associated with the US Civil Rights
Commission, was chancellor and professor of law and history at the
University of Colorado at Boulder, and is the author of "Black
Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism." 

Angela Davis (b 1944) became a heroine to many people in the early
1970s.  Influenced by childhood experiences of racial oppression and
violence in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis later became a serious student
of political philosophies.  When she was jailed (and acquitted in
1972) for her political activities, thousands of people throughout the
country rallied to her support.  She had become a symbol of courage
and compassion.  Davis, who had been active in prison reform, helped
organized the National Alliance Against Racist and Political
Repression, authored many books including "If They Come in the
Morning" and "Women, Race, and Class," and teaches in the Women's
Studies Department at San Francisco State University. 

A social worker, sociologist, educator, and civil rights activist,
Anna Arnold Hedgeman (b 1899) was names the executive director of the
National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission,
and was appointed to assist the administrator of the Federal Security
Agency (later HEW).  She was also the only woman on the administrative
committee of the 1963 civil rights march on Washington.  Hedgeman
wrote for the New York Age and published an autobiography, "The
Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership." 
    

From slavery through the 1930s, the majority of black women activists 
struggled foremost for the rights of all black people and secondarily 
for their rights as women.

Before the Civil War, black women worked to advance the anti-slavery 
cause.  When slavery was abolished, four million people were free, but 
they were without homes, land, and education.  Women then turned their 
energies to freemen's needs for food, clothing, medical care, 
education, and voter registration.

When the industrialization of northern cities offered opportunity, 
blacks migrated in large numbers.  Women organized clubs to help 
provide schools, housing, day care centers, and other services.  The 
founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 made it 
possible for black women to speak out with a unified voice on national 
issues such as lynching and segregation.  Black women's associations 
remain viable and active today, for despite improved conditions, the 
need for collective action continues. 

Focus: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 

		"A government which has power to tax a man in peace, 
		 draft him in war, should have power to defend 
 		 his life in hour of peril.  A government which can 
		 protect and defend its citizens from wrong and outrage 
		 and does not is vicious.  A government which would 
		 do it and cannot is weak; and where human life is 
		 insecure through either weakness or viciousness in the 
		 administration of law, there must be a lack of justice, 
		 and where this is wanting, nothing can make up the 
		 deficiency.
				_Frances Ellen Watkins Harper of the 
				 National Council of Women in the 
				 United States, February 22, 1891.


Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) devoted her life to the 
principle of racial equality.  Before the Civil War she was an active 
abolitionist lecturer, poet, and journalist.  Later, during 
Reconstruction, she spoke to freedmen throughout the South about the 
value of education, temperance, and voting; she crusaded against 
lynching after Reconstruction.

Described in publications of the period as "...one of the most 
eloquent women lecturers in the country," Harper varied her 
presentations with recitations of her poems.  She recorded her 
experiences in the Reconstruction Sough in her writings including 
"Sketches of Souther Life," a collection of verse, the novel "Iola 
Leroy;" or "Shadows Uplifted," and the poem "Martyr of Alabama" 
inspired by the lynching of a black boy.

She worked for women's rights, directed the American Association of 
Colored Youth, and was a founder and vice president of the National 
Association of Colored Women.

Others:

In 1862 Charlotte Forten Grimke (1837-1914) taught former slaves withe 
the Port Royal Commission of St Helena Island.  She recorded her 
experiences there in "Life on the Sea Islands," published in the 
Atlantic Monthly, and the Journal of Charlotte Forten Grimke, a Free 
Negro in the Slave Era," which provide important historical 
documentation of the black struggle during the Civil War period.

As a public speaker, author, and activist Mary Church Terrell 
(1863-1954) fought against lynching, disenfranchisement, and 
discrimination.  She was the first president of the National 
Association of Colored Women, the first black woman to serve on the 
District of Columbia school board, and, at the age of 89, led picket 
lines to desegregate restaurants in Washington.

Because black women were barred from membership in the National 
Association of Graduate Nurses, they formed their own association led 
by Mabel Keaton Staupers (b 1890) until it was integrated into the 
American Nurses Association in 1954.  Staupers was awarded the NAACP's 
Spingarn Medal for her lifework; increasing job and educational 
opportunities for blacks in nursing.

As national director of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, a women's group, 
Mary Burnett Talbert (1866-1923) helped to raise over $45000 to 
support the NAACP in its unsuccessful campaign for the Dyer 
anti-lynching bill.  She served as a Red Cross nurse in France during 
WWI, initiated war loan drives, and was active in prison reform.

Sarah Parker Remond (1825-1887) lectured for the American Anti-Slavery 
Society.  Later, in Europe, she was instrumental in joining the 
humanitarian movement there with the reform movements in the United 
States.  She worked with the London Emancipation Society and the 
Freemen's Aid Association to collect clothing and funds, wrote "The 
Negro as Freedmen and Soldiers," and later became a physician in 
Italy.
    

The African musical tradition was kept alive by slave women who often
communicated messages between themselves that their owners did not
understand.  Harriet Tubman, for example, used "Steal Away to Jesus"
to signal the hour of escape during her work with the underground
railroad.

After the war, black music evolved into the blues.  Although female
performers found independence in traveling shows, the recording
industry did not open its doors to black musicians until after 1920.

Blues had many progeny. Jazz, which emerged from the blues and
ragtime, provided means of expression for many black women musicians
including Abbie Mitchell and Ella Fitzgerald.

By 1955, rhythm and blues had become popular.  Derived from gospel,
its secular lyrics reflect the frenzy and confusion of city life.
Rock and roll was the offspring of rhythm and blues, and many hits by
singers Etta James, Big Momma Thornton, and LaVerne Baker were later
reissued by white artists.

Soul music, whose development coincided with the  Civil Rights
Movement, synthesized earlier forms of black music and affirmed that
black "soul" was essentially love, imagination, and spirit.


Focus: Bessie Smith

	 "Mister rich man, rich man, open up your heart and mind,
	  Mister rich man, rich man, open up your heart and mind,
	  Give the poor man a chance, help stop these hard, hard 
	     times,
	  While you're living in your mansion, you don't know what 
	     hard times mean,
	  While you're living in your mansion, you don't know what 
	     hard times mean,
	  Poor working man's wife is starving, your wife is living 
   	     like a queen."
				_Bessie Smith, "Poor Man's Blues;"
			  	 recorded August 14, 1928
			

"When she was in a room her vitality flowed out like a cloud and 
stuffed the air til the walls bulged...The way she let her music 
tumble out was a perfect example of improvisation...she made up her 
won melody to fit the poetry of her story." said musician Mezz Mezzrow 
of Bessie Smith (1890?-1937).  Fellow musicians and an adoring public 
proclaimed Smith "The Empress" of classic blues because of her 
powerful voice and distinctive style.

Smith, who was reared in poverty, first performed professionally in 
1912.  A protegee of Ma Rainey, Smith worked her way from the chorus 
to soloist in traveling shows.  In 1923, her first recording, "Down 
Hearted Blues," brought her widespread fame, and subsequent recordings 
sold between five and ten million copies during the next six years.

Smith sang songs by black composers and many of her own in a style that, 
according to a reporter of the day, was "a womanly wail that somehow 
remained proud of its woe."  She also starred in the film "Saint Louis 
Blues" in 1929. Smith's records, radio shows, tours, and flamboyant 
personality made her a celebrity in both the North and South, and 
continued to influence modern musicians and vocalists.


Others:

The leading female jazz instrumentalist Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981) 
composed and arranged music for many big bands, including the Andy 
Kirk Orchestra and the Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington bands.  In 
1946 William played her composition "Zodiac Suite" with the New York 
Philharmonic Orchestra.  Williams later became involved in the 
religious jazz movement and composed a jazz hymn in 1964 to honor the 
black St. Martin de Porres.

Because of her distinctive style and the emotional depth of her 
interpretations, the jazz singer "Lady" Billie Holiday *1915?-1969) had 
a remarkable influence on her audiences and other musicians.  Holiday, 
who began her professional career in Harlem clubs during the 
Depression, made her first recording in 1933 and later appeared in 
two films.  Between 1939 and 1941 she appeared at Cafe Society 
Downtown in Greenwich Village, where two songs closely associated with 
her - the dirge about lynching, "Strange Fruit," and the tender "God 
Bless the Child" - were part of her repertoire.

Gertrude Pridgett "Ma" Rainey (1886-1939), the first black female 
blues singer, performed from the turn of the century to the Depression 
era.  Rainey and her husband traveled together throughout the South 
with black minstrel troupes, and Rainey wrote many of the lyrics to 
her won songs which she sang with a religious fervor and enthusiasm 
that endeared her to her audiences.  In 1923 she began recording, 
which extended her popularity to the North.

Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Dinah Washington (1924-1963) was one of 
few women to own her own booking agency.  Mixing elements of blues and 
jazz with rhythm and blues in songs such as "Blowtop Blues" and "I 
Love You Yes I Do," Washington helped establish a new musical style. 
She sang with Lionel Hampton and his orchestra early in her career, 
and became an important influence on Aretha Franklin.

Aretha Franklin (b 1942), whose musical style is a snythesis of 
gospel, spirituals, blues, jazz ad rhythm and blues, made her first 
recording at age 14.  Many of Franklin's songs have the emotional 
joyous quality of the gospel music she heard in her father's church in 
the Midwest.  "The Queen Of Soul" recorded four golden singles in 
1967, and toured with Harry Belafonte during the Civil Rights Movement 
to raise funds to support the Southern Christian Leadership 
Conference.

Gifted singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (b 1817-1876), known as 
"the Black Swan," began her career as a concert performer in 1851. She 
toured cities in the East and Midwest, then traveled to England in 1854 
where her performances were praised in the London press and where she 
sang at Buckingham Palace.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1921-1973) was the first individual gospel 
singer to attain national prominence.  Tharpe traveled widely and in 
the 1940s made some popular recordings of gospel songs including 
"Strange Things Happening Everyday" and "Five Loaves of Bread."  Her 
commercial success and style marked the beginning of a transition from 
gospel to soul music.
    

Although slave owners destroyed physical manifestations of African 
culture in America, slaves retained their African aesthetic 
sensibilities and preserved some of their traditions in the decoration 
of utilitarian objects.  Women artists used African motifs that were 
incorporated into early American arts and crafts tradition.

Black women sculptors of the 19th century found the artistic climate 
in Europe more conducive to their development than in this country.  
However, a black aesthetic did emerge in America in the 1920s.  Urban 
black communities of the post-war ear promoted a new sense of 
independence and a keen awareness of injustice.  The Harlem 
Renaissance, which encompassed African-inspired art, literature, music 
and theatre became a nationwide movement.

During the 1930s, the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress 
Administration (WPA) employed artists to create art in public places.  
Black women influenced by the WPA created art which conveyed a message 
and adhered to social realism.

Black women continue to create distinctive and individual works of art 
expressing a wide range of concerns about their heritage and 
themselves.



Focus: Harriet Powers

		"The falling of the stars on November 13, 1833.  
		 The people were frightened and thought the end of 
		 time had come.  God's hand staid the stars.  The 
		 varmints rushed out of their beds."
				_Harriet Powers (c 1897) reference
				 to central square of her Bible 
				 quilt, an interpretation of the 
				 Leonid meteor shower in 1833

A common and unifying theme in Harriet Powers' (1837-1911) appliqued 
quilts is God's power to rescue, in both the Christian sense of 
salvation and from the view of slaves struggling for freedom.  Powers 
was born a slave in Georgia. The date of her first quilt is unknown, 
but the only two that have been identified as her's were made after 
the Civil War when she was free.

A deeply religious woman, Powers appliqued Biblical characters and 
animals drawn from vivid sermons.  Her designs bear a strong 
resemblance to the appliqued cotton cloths of the Fon people of 
Dahomey, West Africa, and are statements of cultural survival.  These 
highly original and lively quilts are thus a special synthesis of 
African and black American motifs, techniques, meanings, and 
significance.

Others:
Achieving distinction as a painter during the Harlem Renaissance, 
Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948) worked in a realistic style with 
aspects of expressionism, which revealed a warm affection for her 
subjects.  She was commissioned in 1944 by the Harmon Foundation to 
help paint a series of portraits of "Outstanding Americans of Negro 
Origin."  She also painted still lifes, landscapes, genre scenes, and 
taught at Cheyney State College.

Lois Mailou Jones (b 1905), a painter and illustrator, studies in Paris 
and began painting in the impressionist style.  Influenced later by 
African and Haitian art, she developed a strong sense of color, 
abstract symbolism, design and structure, and some of her works have 
protest themes.  Jones taught at Howard University.

Edmonia Lewis (1843?-1911?), who was the first black American female 
to gain widespread artistic recognition, was the only black artist to 
exhibit in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.  Lewis 
studied and lived in Rome, and her marble sculpture has been described 
as neo-classical, romantic, and full of social commentary.  "Forever 
Free" (1867) expresses her feelings about abolition.

After years of working in cotton fields and cooking on a plantation 
where many artists congregated, Clementine Hunter (b 1885) began 
experimenting in the 1930s with paints left by guests.  A painter in 
the folk tradition, Hunter uses two-dimensional images, simple linear 
contours, and bright colors to depict themes from the local life of 
the Cane River area of Louisiana, where she has always lived.

The sculptor, painter and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett (b. 1919) is 
among the most significant artists to emerge from the Depression era.  
Catlett was one of the first black women to explore indigenous African 
styles in her work, though she has also been influenced by Mexican 
muralists and has lived in Mexico for more than 30 years.

Bold colors and black experience themes characterize the paintings of 
Varnette P. Honeywood (b 1950).  In 1977 Honeywood represented the 
Unites States at FESTAC, an international arts and cultures in Lagos, 
Nigeria.  She is committed to developing quality art education 
programs in public schools. 
    

The first black newspapers which emerged during the 1830s dealt with 
abolition, rights, and emigration.  Since black events were ignored in 
mainstream publications, black papers served to disseminate news and 
organize social activism.  By 1890, the number of black papers grew to 
154.

While the first women involved in newspapers were fund raisers and 
administrators, by 1942, black papers boasted approximately 100 female 
journalists. 
    
In 1944, the National Negro Publishers Association persuaded President 
Roosevelt to provide press credentials to black journalists.  Black 
correspondents then confronted legislators and influenced the Civil 
rights Movement.  In turn, conditions improved for black women: to 
promote their progress, the National Association of >Media Women was 
formed.

Black women working for mainstream newspapers today are attempting to 
promote broader coverage of black community news.  Although still few 
in number, black women writers and publishers are conscious of the 
vital role they have as the voice of their people.

Focus: Ida B. Wells. 

	"The Christian and moral forces of the nation should insist
	"that misrepresentation should have no place in the discussion 
	of this important question, that the figures of lynching should
	be allowed to plead...in defense of the slandered dead...
	that truth, swift-winged and courageous, summon this nation
	to do its duty to exalt justice and preserve inviolate the
	sacredness of human life.
			-Ida B. Wells Barnett in the "Independent," 1901


A journalist, lecturer, community organizer, and club woman, Ida B. 
Wells Barnett (1862-1931) took a courageous and militant stand on 
issues central to the welfare of black people.  

While she was teaching in Memphis, a Baptist minister and leader of 
the Negro Press Association urged her to write articles for a black 
newspaper. When her criticisms of black schools were published, she 
was fired from her teaching job.

In 1892, the offices of her newspaper the "Memphis Free Speech" were 
destroyed after she investigated and published facts of a case in 
which three black businessmen were hanged.  During her ensuing battle 
against lynching, Barnett lectured extensively in the United States 
and abroad, published "A Red Record," the first in-depth study of 
lynching in America, and became chairman of the Anti-Lynching Bureau 
of the national Afro-American Council.  IN 1909 she investigated and 
argued a legal case against a sheriff who allowed a black man in his 
custody to be hanged.  Barnett's victory made that death the last 
instance of lynching in the state.

Others:
Born in Delaware, Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893) was a teacher, 
journalist and lawyer.  She became a leader and spokesperson for 
blacks who fled to Canada in the 1850s after the passage of the 
Fugitive Slave Law.  Cary was a founder, publishing agent, and 
recognized editor of the Canadian newspaper, "Provincial Freeman."  In 
1883 she received a law degree from Howard University.

In 1939, the NAACP filed suit for Lucile Bluford against the 
University of Missouri at Columbia where she was denied admission 
because of her race.  She lost the case, but it resulted in the 
establishment of the first journalism program for blacks at the 
Lincoln University, a black state school.  Bluford is one of 14 black 
female metropolitan newspaper publishers in America.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Deliah L. Beasley (1871-1934) began a career 
in journalism at age 12.  Beasley moved to California where she worked 
as a writer for the "Oakland Tribune, was a political and civil rights 
activist, and pursued a deep interest in black American history which 
resulted in her 1919 publication, "The Negro Trail Blazers of 
California." 

Alice Dunnigan (b 1906-1983) was a teacher in Kentucky before 
becoming a journalist.  She served 14 years as chief of correspondent 
of the Washington Bureau of the Association Negro Press.  In 1947 she 
became the first black female reporter with credentials to cover 
activities of Congress, the White House, and the State Department.  
Dunnigan was also the first female sorts writer in the District of 
Columbia.

While working as a correspondent in Washington for the black weekly 
newspaper the "Chicago Daily Defender," Ethel L. Payne (b 1912) 
developed a reputation for speaking out at presidential press 
conferences.   She combined activism with reporting during the 1950s 
and 1960s.  IN 1966 Payne covered the first African-Asian Conference, 
held in Indonesia; in 1967 she won the Capitol Press Award for 
coverage of the Vietnam War; and in the 1970s became the first black 
women television commentator.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault (b 1942) was the first black women to attend the 
University of Georgia.  After earning a degree in journalism Gault 
wrote for the "New Yorker," and in 1968 became chief of the New York 
Times Harlem Bureau, created to "provide stories about human beings 
rather than sociological stereotypes."  She joined the PBS new program 
"MacNeil/Lehrer Report" in 1977.
    

In 1903, the National Women's Trade Union League was formed to aid 
existing trade unions and promote new unions for women.  Yet in 
mainstream organized labor, progress for black women was slow.

Before 1910, most black women worked on farms or as maids.  When they 
entered factories, they were offered unskilled positions that made 
them ineligible to join skilled trade unions.  Labor shortages during 
WW I created jobs, but these were lost when the war ended, and black 
women were forced to return to service occupation.

Black labor activism emerged during the Depression.  The formation of 
the CIO expanded the unionization of unskilled workers and black women 
became leaders in CIO unions.

As fund raisers, and morale builders, the members of The Ladies 
Auxiliary of The International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters 
(formed during the 1930s), provided the Brotherhood with incalculable 
support. Legislation of the 1960s permitted black women to expand their 
participation in labor and they became a strong force in the 
Coalition of Labor Union Women, in 1974.


Focus: Lucy E. Parsons

		"To Tramps:
		 A word to the 35000 now 
		 tramping the streets of this 
		 great city... gazing listlessly
		 about you at the evidences of
		 wealth and pleasure of which 
		 you own no part, not 
		 sufficient even to  purchase
		 yourself a bit of food...It
		 is with you and the hundreds
		 of thousands of others
    		 similarly situated in this
		 great land of plenty,
		 that I wish to have a word."
			 	_Lucy E. Parsons, form an article
				 published in the "Alarm," 1884

She loved being in the middle of a street demonstration, to feel the 
"anger and strength of the people's movement."  At the turn of the 
century, the daring and outspoken Lucy E. Parsons (1853-1942) was a 
major figure in the predominately white, male, radical labor movement 
in Chicago. She led countless demonstrations; published underground 
newspapers, pamphlets, and book; traveled extensively; and won  
prominence as a forceful public speaker dedicated to organizing the 
working class.  Unemployment and hunger concerned her most, and she 
advocated workers' ownership and control over the means of production 
and distribution.  Parsons was a founding member of the Industrial 
Workers of the World (IWWW) and in 1927 was elected to the National 
Committee of International Labor Defense.


Others:

Mary Moultri (b 1942), a 27-year old nurses' aid at the Medical College 
Hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, led a wage strike by 400 
workers in 1969. With the support of the local 1199 of the National 
Union of Hospital Health Care Employees, the United Auto Care 
Employees, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a 
settlement was reached and the workers kept their jobs.  This spurred 
similar strikes in other cities which resulted in better wages for 
hospital orderlies, housekeepers, and dietary employees.

As a tobacco worker at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem, 
North Carolina, Moranda Smith (1915-1950) joined over 7000 black men 
and women in 1943 to organize Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, 
Agricultural, and Allied Workers of America, CIO.  AS educational 
director of the local, and as the first black woman to serve as 
regional director of the Southeast for an international union, she 
worked to improve the lives and working conditions of black and white 
workers in the South.

For almost 50 years Maida Springer-Kemp (b 1910) has been involved in 
the labor movement.  In 1948 she was the first black to become 
business agent for the Dressmakers Union, local 22, International
Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York. A member of the AFL-CIO in 
the 1960s, Kemp was the international representative for Africa.  She 
became an authority on African liberation movement working with 
leaders like Julius Nyerere and Tom Moboya.

Elizabeth Duncan Koontz (b 1919) was a school teacher in North 
Carolina for 30 years and in 1969 became the first black director of 
Women's Bureau of the Wage and Labor Standards Administration, U.S. 
Department of Labor.  Koontz was appointed to the United Nations 
commission of the Status of Women and was also the first black 
president of the National Education Association.		

As the first international secretary-treasurer of the women's 
auxillary to the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 
Rosina Tucker (b 1881) traveled to all the railroad centers in the 
U.S. and parts of Canada, secretly involving porters' wives in 
financing and organizing activities.  Tucker worked closely with 
A. Phillip Randolph to arrange the first march on Washing in 1941, 
which was cancelled when President Roosevelt promised to issue an 
executive order banning discrimianton in industries holding government 
contracts. 

    

		"Look at Me! Ain't I a woman?
		 Nobody ever helped me into
		carriages or over mud puddles,
		or gave me any best place...
		and ain't I a woman?
		Look at me! Look at my arm!
		I have ploughed, and I have 
		planted, and I have gathered
		into barns... and ain't 
		I a woman?... I have borne
		thirteen children and 
		seen them most all sold into 
		slavery and when I 
		cried out with a mother's grief,
		none but Jesus heard me.
		And ain't I a woman?"
				_Sojourner Truth,
				Women's Rights Convention, 1851


Few women in those days dared to speak in meetings.  She rose and 
walked deliberately to the front.  "...every eye was fixed on this 
almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect, 
and eye piercing the upper air like one in a dream.  At her first 
word, there was a profound hush."  The dynamic personality of 
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) captured the imagination of those who 
heard her crusade for the rights of blacks and women.  A slave in New 
York State for forty years, she escaped and took a name derived from  
the meaning she was to give her life.  She had acquired knowledge of 
the Bible and traveled as a preacher before converting most of her 
energies to the antislavery cause.  Because of her fearless 
disposition and gifts of wit and song, her lectures drew large 
crowds.  At times, she shared the platform with Federick Douglass.  
She also collected food and clothing for black soldiers during the 
Civil War and entertained the troops with songs.  She worked as 
"counselor to the freed people" for the Freedmen's relief Association 
during Reconstruction, offered her support at women's suffrage 
conventions, and was instrumental in integrating public transportation 
in the nation's capital.


    

    Excuse me for intruding on your note, Karen...but there is a news
    story I thought fit here.
    
    PORT_AU_PRINCE, HAITI-
    Scattered acts of violence kept Haiti on edge Tuesday as an apparently
    chastened army high command handed over the country's presidency to a
    justice of the Supreme Court.
    
    Investing her with presidential powers that were intrusted to him when
    military ruler Lt. Gen Prosper Avril was ousted Saturday, Maj. Gen.
    Herrard Abrahim pledged that the armed forces -long a tool of oppression
    in Haiti -will henceforth stick to military affairs and "guarantee the
    security of lives and property of all."
    
    
    Ertha Oascal Trouillot, a 42-year-old widow who has described herself
    as a nonpartisan democrat, was installed as provisional president of
    Haiti in a brief ceremony at the capital's Presidential Palace.
    
    Trouillot gave a brief graceful acceptence speech, expressing her
    belief that the military is "concious that its task is to guarantee
    public peace within the precise limits of the constitution and of the
    laws of the republic".
    
    Troullot, the youngest member of the Supreme Court, and it's only woman,
    was heavily applauded when she said "I have accepted this heavy task in
    the name of the Haitian woman."
    
    She defined her temporary role narrowly, promising to take no "profound
    initiatives" and focusing on leading the country "in the least possible
    time toward an elected government."
    
    from today's L.A. times.
    
    -roger
    
    

    re .13
    
    Thanks for the note, Roger.  BTW, I don't mind. :-) 

American athletics, always male-dominated, were racially segregated 
until the 1950s.  It was only during World War I when small clubs 
instituted athletic programs that black women participated in 
organized sports.

Black women have achieved their greatest sports successes in track and 
field.  In 1937, Tuskegee Instituted women won the national Amateur 
Athletic Union outdoor crown, their first in a long line of 
victories.  Tennessee State's Tiger-belles won their first national 
women's AAU track and field championship in 1955, and through 1968, 
won 25 of 40 American women's track and field Olympic medals.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 stipulated that any 
educational program receiving federal funds must provide equivalent 
opportunities to both sexes.  As a result, women's sports programs were 
expanded and more women have entered careers in sports.  Black women 
have gained special recognition in such sports as basketball, fencing, 
gymnastics, and rowing.


Focus:  Wilma Rudolph


	"When I broke the tape, I had my three gold medals... The 
	first American woman to win three Olympic gold medals.  I knew 
	that was something nobody could ever take way from me, ever... 
	As we got closer to Clarksville [Tenn.], I saw the crowd up 
	ahead and I figured that all 40000 people in the city had 
	shown up.  As it turned out, this particular parade had a 
	social significance far beyond the welcoming of Wilma Rudolph
	back home.  Clarksville, at the time [1960], was still a 
	segregated city, and this parade actually was the first 
	integrated event in the history of the town"
				_Wilma Rudolph, from "Wilma: The Story
				of Wilma Rudolph," by Wilam Rudolph 
				and Bud Greenspan


Known as the "World's Fastest Woman" after her performance in track 
and field events at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Wilma Rudolph (b 1940) 
was the first American woman to win three gold medals.  One of 
Tennessee State's Tigerbelles, Rudolph began training as a sprinter at 
the university's summer camp when she was sixteen.  Her remarkable 
athletic achievements are even more extraordinary considering that 
Rudolph was paralyzed in one leg as a result of an attack of double 
pneumonia and scarlet fever in early childhood.  Until the age of 
seven she was unable to walk normally.  A beautiful, long-legged woman 
with a "flowing strike that made the rest of the pack seem to be 
churning on a treadmill," Rudolph won people's affection the world 
over.  Italians called her "La Gazelle Nera" ("the Black Gazelle") and 
the French, "La Perle Noire" ("the Black Pearl") and "La Chattanooga 
Choo Choo."  A wax statue was made of her for Madame Tussaud's London 
Museum.  In 1961 Rudolph became the third woman to win the AAU's 
annual Sullivan trophy for the most outstanding contribution to 
sportsmanship.


Others:

At the 1948 Olympic games, Alice Coachman (b 1921) competing in the 
high jump, became the first black American woman to ever win a gold 
medal.  Her achievement was comparable to Jackie Robinson's when two 
years earlier he crossed the "color line" in baseball.  Coachman, who 
was a Tuskegee athlete before transferring to Albany State, had won 
the national high jump championship in 1939.

The winner of three Olympic gold medals, Wyomia Tyus (b 1945) is the 
only person, man or woman, in the history of the Olympic games to win 
gold medals for the same event [100-meter dash] in two consecutive 
Olympics (1964, 1968).  Tyus, who had been one of Tennessee State's 
Tigerbelles, was a five time world record holder in 50-, 60-, 70-, 
and 100-yard dashes and the 100 meter sprint.  She has also been ten 
times AAU National Champion and All-American Athlete in both indoor 
and outdoor competition.

Althea Gibson (b 1927) was the first black woman athlete to gain 
national and international recognition.  The story of her rise from 
the streets of Harlem to triumph in tennis, a sport traditionally 
associated with leisured elite, is testimony not only to her skill, 
hard work, and determination, but also to the devotion of many black 
people who contributed their financial and moral support to her 
development.  In 1957 Gibson became the first black woman to win the 
single's title at Wimbledon and the first to win the US Open at Forest 
Hills, NY.

As Cheyney State's woman basketball coach, Vivian Stringer (b 1948), 
led her Lady Wolves to the first-ever NCAA-Division I Tournament for 
women's basketball, where they ended their 1981-82 season as Eastern 
Regional Champions.  Although competing with many teams from much 
larger schools, Cheyney's women were second in the nation that season, 
and had been in the top ten among University Division I teams for five 
years.  Stringer, who was named the 1982 NCAA National Coach of the 
Year, has given clinics and coached nationally and internationally.

Leslie Allen (b 1957) entered the professional tennis circuit winning 
the women's singles title at the ATA National Championships in 1977, 
the same year that she was a member of the University of Southern 
California's national championship team.  Allen, who graduated from 
USC magna cum laude in speech communication, has become one of the 
top-ranked professional players in the East.
    

Following WWII black women began to enter scientific fields such as 
oceanography, biology, and engineering.  Women have generally avoided 
science fields because of the long-standing misconception that these 
are unsuitable or too difficult for females.  But in recent years, as 
the few women who have ventured into these professions have proven 
their ability, and school counseling has become less biased, black 
women have discovered and developed their scientific aptitudes.

In the past four decades, and particularly in the 1960s when the Civil 
Rights Movement and the women's movement increased opportunities, many 
black women - against the odds and with strong family and community 
support - have earned advanced degrees in fields ranging from 
mathematics to entomology and have excelled as researchers, 
professors, engineers, and mathematicians.  Although their 
accomplishments have been significant, black women remain 
underrepresented.  The Office of Opportunities in Science of the 
American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Network of 
Minority Women in Science have been established to encourage minority 
women to pursue science careers.

Focus: Jewel Plummer Cobb

		"Our most important task is the 
		 guidance and inspiration we can 
		 give to young people through 
		 the process of education.  By
		 providing theories and concepts
		 in all areas of knowledge
		 we can hope to develop the leaders
		 of tomorrow.  Hopefully they
		 can appreciate the beauty 
		 of a poem, the importance of 
		 different cultures, the logic
		 of science and the lessons of history."
				_Jewel Plummer Cobb

Cell physiologist Jewel Plummer Cobb (b 1924) is now president of 
California State University at Fullerton, following a distinguished 
career as a cancer researcher, professor, and administrator.

Cobb's primary scientific research has dealt with the growth, form and 
structure, and genetic expression of normal and cancerous pigment 
cells, and changes produced by chemotherapeutic agents, by hormones, 
and other agents knows to disrupt cell division.

She has also been a prominent figure in promoting the advancement of 
women and minorities in scientific fields and in international 
science, concerning herself primarily with the future of science in 
developing countries.  As activist in her commitment to science and 
education, Cobb has served on the boards and special committees 
including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the 
National Fund for Minority Engineering Students, and the 
African-American Institute.


Others:

Nutritional chemist Flemmie P.Kittrell (1904-1980) received a 
doctorate with honors from Cornell University in 1940, and from 1944 
to 1973 headed Howard University's Department of Home Economics.  
Kittrell became a leader in the field of child studies and gained 
recognition nationally and internationally for her contribution to the 
science of nutrition.  In 1950 she organized the College of Home 
Science in India.

Since 1979 meteorologist June Bacon-Bercey (b 1934) has directed 
television services at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration. She has worked as an aviation operations meteorologist 
for NOAA's National Weather Service; as the researcher, writer, 
producer and host of a daily NBC television consumer show; and as a 
consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission.  In 1972 she was the first 
woman to be honored by the American Meteorological Society for 
television weather forecasting excellence.

In 1949, Majorie Lee Brown (1914-1979) was one of he first two black 
American women to earn a Ph.D in mathematics.  After completing her 
studies at University of Michigan, Brown taught for 30 years at North 
Carolina Central University and for almost 20 years headed the 
mathematics department there.  Under her leadership NCCU was one of 
the first predominately black institutions to receive funds from the 
National Science Foundation to finance summer institutes for secondary 
teachers of mathematics.

In 1973 nuclear physicist Shirley Ann Jackson was the first black 
woman in the US to earn a Ph.D in physics, the first black woman to 
earn a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She 
has worked with Bell Laboratories since 1976 in theoretical solid state 
physics.  She was visiting scientist at the European Organization for 
Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, in the mid-1970s, and in 1982 
lectured at NATO International Advanced Study Institute in Antwerp, 
Belgium.

Lilia Abron-Robison (b 1945), and environmental and sanitary engineer, 
received a doctorate in chemical engineering in 1971.  Now the 
president of Peer Consultants, Inc., Abron-Robinson has taught at 
Howard University, Tennessee State, and Vanderbilt, served as a 
consultant to a number of private corporations on a wide range of 
environmental problems and, as part of a research team, developed a 
large, industrial wastes management program in Chicago.

Zoologist Geraldine Pittman Woods (b 1921) is a special consultant at 
the National Institutes of Health, developing programs that increase 
minority involvement in biomedical research and training.  Since 1969 
over 85 colleges have participated in NIH programs that Woods has 
helped develop.  She has also served on the boards and commissions of 
many academic, political, religious, and public service groups, and in 
the 1960s was head of the Delta Sigma Theta, an interracial women's 
service group with over 85000 members.
    

During the Civil Rights Movement, black people organized and faced 
violence to press their demands for social justice. Leaders of the 
movement advocated non-violent action to confront discrimination and 
compel respect for human rights.  In 1961, the year after the first 
lunch counter sit-ins, more than 50000 people demonstrated in 1000 
cities, and of these, over 3600 were jailed.

In 1963, 250000 people marched on Washington to demand the passage of 
legislation to ease black poverty.  This event and others culminated 
in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in 
public facilities, in employment on the basis of sex, religion or 
nationality, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity 
Commission.

By the end of the 1960s, blacks in the South had secured political 
rights and had registered thousands of voters.  At the same time, 
blacks increased their political representation. Women formed the 
backbone of this movement, participating in significantly higher 
numbers than men.  Though the movement's roots lay in the 
male-dominated churches, several women emerged as strong leaders and 
many more worked without recognition.

Focus:  Rosa Parks

		"... a few white people boarded the bus, and
		 they took all of the designated white seats, and 
		 there was this one white man standing...
		 The driver looked at me and asked me if I
		 was going to stand up.  I told him no, I wasn't.
		 He said, "If you don't stand up I'm going to 
		 have you arrested,"  I told him to go on and
		 have me arrested... They took me to the city 
		 hall, where I was booked, and from there
		 to the jail."
					_Rosa Parks
					Quotation from "An Interview 
					with Rosa Parks," Martin Luther 
					King Jr.: A Documentary, Montgomery 
					to Memphis."


With quiet strength and determination, Rosa Parks (b 1913), a 
seamstress and an administrator in the Alabama NAACP office, resisted 
discrimination.  In 1955 she was arrested and jailed for refusing to 
give up her seat to a white man in a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus.  
E.D. Dixon, president of the state NAACP and regional director of the 
International Brotherhod of Sleeping Car Porters, called a meeting to 
organize a bus boycott.  The Montgomery Improvement Association was 
formed with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as its president, and 
for 381 days it supported the 50000 black people who decided to walk, 
bringing public transportation in the city to a halt until buses were 
integrated.  Parks' protest was the stimulus for 12 years of mass 
non-violent protest against segregation in cities throughout the 
South.  King called Parks, "the great fuse that led the modern stride 
toward freedom."

Others:

As a result of her work for freedom for blacks in the South, Fannie 
Lou Hamer (1917-1977), a Mississippi sharecropper who began picking 
cotton at the age of six, was repeatedly jailed, threatened, and beaten. 
A popular public speaker, Hamer became a symbol of black 
determination to overcome discrimination.  Hamer helped found the 
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and was selected its vice 
chairperson.

As the only black woman to head a local civil rights group in 1963, 
Gloria Richardson (b 1922), chairperson of the Cambridge (Maryland) 
Nonviolent Action Committee, submitted a list of demands to the city 
council for desegregation of public facilities.  When these were 
rejected, a racial war erupted and martial law was declared.  US 
Attorney General Robert Kennedy called Richardson and the Cambridge 
mayor to the Justice Department like "representatives of a foreign 
power: to sign a truce.  Richardson continued to work for the 
desegregation of Cambridge's public schools and accommodations.

Without concern for personal recognition or publicity, Ella Jo Baker 
(b 1903) worked for 50 years as an organizer in the freedom movement, 
trying to awaken in people the feeling of common need and a sense of 
strength in numbers. Baker became field secretary of the NAACP in 1940, 
working first in the South, then in NYC where she organized against de 
facto segregation in public schools.  She helped form both the 
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student 
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), two key organizations in the 
movement. She was one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom 
Democratic Party in 1964.

Despite violent personal attacks on journalist and state NAACP present 
Daisy Gatson Bates (b 1922), she remained steadfast in her efforts to 
integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.  Three years 
after the US Supreme Court had declared segregation in public schools 
unconstitutional, mobs of taunting whites and the state militia 
prevented nine blacks students from entering Central High School.  
Bates secured a federal court order requiring the school to admit the 
students.

A leading figure in SNCC during the 1960s, Rubye Doris Smith Robinson 
(1942-1967) became its executive secretary in 1966 and strongly 
supported black nationalism under Stokely Carmichael. Robinson directed 
SNCC's Sojourner Motor Fleet, which carried the voter registration 
drive into rural areas of the South.  After visiting African in 1964, 
Robinson was one of the first to encourage SNCC to develop its 
connections with liberation movements there.