Ava DuVernay is an American director, screenwriter, film marketer, and film distributor. She is best known for ‘Selma’, which chronicles Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership in the struggle for voting rights. She is the first African-American woman to win the Best Director Prize at Sundance, the first female director to receive a Golden Globe …
Gloria Richardson is best known as the the leader of the Cambridge Movement, a struggle for civil rights and economic opportunities in Cambridge, Maryland. Richardson was born in Gloria St. Clair Hayes in 1922 in Baltimore, Maryland. At the age of six, Richardson’s family moved to Cambridge, Maryland where her grandfather, Herbert M. St. Clair, …
Shirley Chisholm was an educator, author and politician. She was the first African-American woman elected to the United States Congress, the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States, and the first woman ever to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Chisholm was born Shirley St. Hill in 1924 in Brooklyn, New York …
Audre Lorde described herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. She was a pioneer of intersectional feminism and her work focused on confronting and addressing the injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Lorde was born in 1934 in New York City to West Indian parents. She grew up hearing her mother’s stories about the West …
Katherine G. Johnson is an American physicist, space scientist, and mathematician who contributed to America’s aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. Johnson was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She showed an interest in mathematics from a young age, and was eager to go …
Missy “misdemeanor” Elliott is a Grammy Award-winning singer, rapper, songwriter and producer who has achieved great success while breaking boundaries in the male-dominated world of hip-hop. Missy Elliott was born Melissa Arnette Elliott in 1971 in Portsmouth, Virginia. She was the only child of Patricia, a power-company dispatcher, and father Ronnie, a U.S. Marine. She …
Maya Angelou was an American award-winning author, poet, and civil rights activist. She is best known for her acclaimed memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and her numerous poetry and essay collections. Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. She was briefly raised in St. Louis until her parents …
Misty Copeland is an American ballet dancer and the first African-American performer to be appointed as a principal dancer for American Ballet Theatre. Copland was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1982 and raised in San Pedro, California. When she was seven, Copeland saw Nadia on the Lifetime network and Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci became …
Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, blogger, and commentator. She is a 2015 winner of PEN USA’s Freedom to Write award for her demonstration of exceptional courage in the defence of free expression. Gay was born in Nebraska to Haitian parents. Her family moved several times during her childhood and as Gay was …
Janet Mock is an American best-selling author, transgender rights activist, sought-after speaker and the founder of #GirlsLikeUs, a social media project that empowers trans women. Mock was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1983. She grew up in Hawaii and Oakland, California. Mock knew at an early age that she wanted to become a writer, and …