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 …
Ella Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist who worked with the NAACP and co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Baker was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia and grew up in North Carolina. Her grandmother would tell her stories about …
Viola Desmond was a Black Nova Scotian businesswoman who challenged racial segregation at a film theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia in 1946. Her actions sparked the modern civil rights movement in Canada. Desmond was born Viola Davis in 1914 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her parents, James Albert and Gwendolin Irene were active in the …
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, …
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 …
Sojourner Truth was an African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Truth was born Isabella Baumfree around 1797 to James and Elizabeth Baumfree in the town of Swartekill, in Ulster County, New York. Her father was a slave who had been captured in modern-day Ghana and her mother was the daughter of slaves from Guinea. The …