Notable Black Women:
Links to Internet Resources

Notable Black Women

Specific Black Women

• Marian Anderson - her exclusion by the DAR led to a huge outdoor concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a testimony to freedom
• Josephine Baker - a singer and entertainer, she was also involved in intelligence work and was targeted in the McCarthy era
• Mary McLeod Bethune - African American educator
• Shirley Chisholm - ground-breaking black woman politician
• Angela Davis - radical black philosopher
• Althea Gibson - she broke barriers in tennis
• Fannie Lou Hamer - singer and organizer who galvanized Mississippi civil rights activists
• Lorraine Hansberry - a pioneer black woman playwright, author of Raisin in the Sun
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper - 19th century antislavery and women's rights activist
• Dorothy Height - 20th century icon of civil rights
• Sally Hemings - mistress of Thomas Jefferson, mother of his children (at least, according to the best evidence, that's the most likely story)
• Lena Horne - singer who came up against many racial barriers
• Zora Neale Hurston - almost forgotten African American woman writer
• Mae Jemison - first black woman astronaut
• Barbara Jordan - Texas Congresswoman who fired up the Democratic National Convention
• Wangari Maathai - Nobel Peace Prize winner, sometime professor, and environmentalist
• Toni Morrison - Nobel Prize for Literature and many books depicting the challenges facing black women
• Rosa Parks - she helped get the Montgomery bus boycott going
• Lucy Parsons - anarchist, radical, socialist, a founder of the IWW ("wobblies")
• Leontyne Price - marvelous singer, ground-breaking opera performer
• Wilma Rudoph - she ran like the wind, even though it had been thought she'd never walk again
• Mary Seacole - black nurse
• Ntozake Shange - black writer, 1960s figure
• Nina Simone - priestess of soul, she sang her heart and her mind
• Mary Church Terrell - African American activist and organizer of an earlier generation
• Harriet Tubman - not just an Underground Railroad figure who helped 300+ escape, but also a soldier, spy, philanthropist, and women's rights advocate
• Sojourner Truth - preacher, lecturer, abolitionist, women's rights organizer
• Alice Walker - her The Color Purple has already become a classic
• Madam C.J. Walker - first African American millionaire, she taught the women who operated beauty parlors under her direction to give generously to their communities and people
• Faye Wattleton - Planned Parenthood head
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett - anti-lynching advocate
• Phillis Wheatley - "slave poet" who demonstrated that slaves could not only learn to read and write, they could write poetry that impressed the leaders of the nation, including George Washington
• Oprah Winfrey - first black woman billionaire, Oprah Winfrey continues to change the lives of millions, including through generous philanthropy

White Women Working for Racial Justice

• Women Abolitionists - an outline of some of the more famous women abolitionists
• Lydia Maria Child - today she's best remembered as the writer of "Over the River and Through the Woods" or of some housekeeping manuals, but she was a noted abolitionist and women's rights worker. Her Anti-Slavery Tracts were influential in shifting public opinion against slavery.
• Julia Ward Howe - known as the author of Battle Hymn of the Republic but also a worker for abolition, women's rights, and peace
• Lucretia Mott - a Quaker; when her rights to speak on antislavery were denied because she was a woman, she helped get the women's rights movement started
• Mary White Ovington - she brought together the founders of the NAACP, black and white to help change the conditions under which African Americans suffered
• Lucy Stone - after the Civil War, she didn't want to put women's rights ahead of or above rights for the newly emancipated slaves
• Harriet Beecher Stowe - Her Uncle Tom's Cabin helped solidify public opinion in the North; her objective was to show that slavery is a sin
• Two Suffrage Movements - Martha Gruening - a white woman writing for the NAACP's the Crisis in 1912, details how the women's movement in America grew out of the struggle for black equality

Women's history

Women writers