Josephine Baker was an American-born French dancer and singer who was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture. She devoted much of her life to fighting racism and was a vital member of the Civil Rights Movement. Baker was born in 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri. At the age of eight, …
Lena Horne was an American singer, dancer, actress and civil rights activist. She was one of the most popular African American entertainers of the twentieth century and best known for films such as The Wiz and her trademark song, “Stormy Weather.” Horne was born in 1917 in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother, Edna, was an …
Alice Walker is an American novelist, story story writer, poet and civil rights activist. She is best known for her critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Walker was born in 1944 in Putnam County, Georgia. Walker lived under Jim Crow Laws, but her parents refused to …
Ethel L. Payne was an African-American journalist, publisher, civil rights leader, and educator known as the “First Lady of the Black Press”. Payne was born in 1911 in Chicago, Illinois and grew up in Englewood, which was a black community surrounded by white neighbourhoods. Payne’s father died when she was 12, and her mother was …
Dorothy Height was an American civil rights and women’s rights activist who served as president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) for four decades. She is known as the “godmother of the women’s movement.” Height was born in 1912 in Richmond Virginia. At the age of 4, her family moved to Rankin, Pa, …
Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting rights activist, civil rights leader, and philanthropist. She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi’s Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and served as vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Hamer was born in 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi. Two years later, her family moved to …
Pauli Murray was an American civil rights activist, women’s rights activist, lawyer and author. She was the first woman to be awarded a J.D.S degree from Yale and the first black woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. She also co-founded NOW, the National Organization for Women. Murray was born in 1910 in Baltimore, …
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, …
Marian Anderson was an American singer and one of the finest contraltos of her time. She became the first African American to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1955 and an important figure in the struggle for black artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States. Anderson was born in South Philadelphia …