Dancer

Cinematographer, Director, Writer

Lowery (1925-2013) was a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford (1931-2019), “Toni” Morrison was a Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize - winning novelist, editor, and professor. Her most notable works include “The Bluest Eye” (1970), “Song of Solomon” (1977), and “Beloved” (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.

Hope (1871-1947) was a "race woman", life-long activist, community organizer, and lecturer who established programs and worked with institutions that advanced racial and social justice in the Black community. She worked tirelessly to improve the lives of Black families, women, and children in Atlanta through the Neighborhood Union, an organization she founded with either other women in 1908. During World War I, as Chair of the Women's Committee of the YWCA war work council (1917-1919), she worked with Black soldiers and their families at Camp Gordon, providing support and recreational services that they were denied by the United Services Organization (USO).

Social worker and Educator.

Jordan (1936-1996) was a lawyer, State Senator, Congresswoman, enthralling orator, educator, and civil rights leader. During President Nixon's televised impeachment hearing, Jordan delivered a powerful 15-minute opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee. Her speech has been hailed as one of the most influential in 20th-century American history, playing a "decisive" role in "swaying public opinion in favor of impeachment".

Owner and Publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier.

Bibliotherapy advocate

Hale (1881-1930) and her husband, John Henry Hale, converted their home into a hospital for black patients.

 In 2020 Swegle, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, became both the U.S. Navy's second Black woman naval aviator to earn her wings of gold when she became the U.S. Navy's first Black woman tactical jet pilot.

Brown (1943) is a prison and civil rights activist and was the first woman to lead the Black Panther Party as chairwoman (1974-1977).

Bonds (1913-1972) was an incomparable composer, pianist, and educator. She profoundly influenced 20th-century classical music by infusing her orchestral and chamber works with elements of spirituals, calypso rhythms, and other musical traditions from the African diaspora.

Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born near Johannesburg, South Africa on March 4, 1932. She was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, vocal apartheid opponent, civil rights activist, and UN Goodwill Ambassador. She was also known as the Empress of African Song. She became the first African artist to globally popularize African music.

Rollins (1867-1953) was the first Black woman to become a dentist in the United States.

Robinson (1936-2011) was a Singer, Songwriter, Record Producer, the Mother of Hip Hop, and a founder and the CEO of Sugar Hill Records.

When state trooper James Fowler shot and killed deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson during a peaceful protest in Marion, Alabama, Civil Rights leaders responded by organizing the Selma to Montgomery march for Sunday, March 7, 1965. Key organizers included Amelia Boynton Robinson, Marie Foster, Annie Lee Cooper, SNCC leaders Diane Nash and John Lewis, and SCLC's Hosea Williams. The March 7th protest aimed to challenge voter suppression tactics including literacy tests, poll taxes, police brutality, and other systematic barriers preventing Black citizens from registering to vote and voting.

Jacobs (1815-1897) escaped slavery, became an abolitionist, and wrote an autobiography that became one of the most significant American slave narratives - the first authored by a Black woman. Published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl provides a rare female perspective on slavery and demonstrates how enslaved women faced unique forms of oppression. Although she was very close to her first mistress who taught her to read and write - advantages denied to most enslaved people - Jacobs's narrative exposes slavery's fundamental inescapable violence. Her account, corroborated by her brother John S. Jacobs and George W. Lowther (a civil rights activist and Massachusetts state representative who knew her from childhood), focuses on her personal story of enslavement and surviving physical violence and sexual harassment from one of her enslavers, Dr. Flint. While Jacobs does not dramatize slavery's brutality, the system's horrors emerge through brief, matter-of-fact mentions throughout her narrative: a mother driven to madness after all seven of her children were sold away; a man bound to a cotton gin and left to be eaten by vermin, and enslavers fathering and selling their many children from enslaved women. Her narrative also documents the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced her and other fugitives in the North to live in constant fear of capture and re-enslavement. These scattered references, delivered without embellishment, serve to underscore the everyday inhumanity of the "peculiar institution."

Wyatt (1924-2012) was the first Black woman to hold an executive position in a labor union.