Harriet Tubman

1. Famous African American Women Harriet Tubman

2. birth Harriet Tubman was born was born in 1820 at Edward Brodas plantation near Bucktown, Dorchester County, Maryland. Because she was a slave, and owners did not record their slaves' birthdates, the exact date of Harriet's birth is unknown.

3. Childhood Because of her indentured status, Harriet was denied the opportunity for education -- leaving her illiterate her entire life. Slave owners did not want their slaves to know how to read or write.

4. Background Born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Harriet's ancestors had been brought to America in shackles from Africa during the first half of the 18th Century. Harriet was the 11th child born to Benjamin Ross and Harriet Greene (slaves of Edward Brodas), her given name was Araminta and she was often called "Minty" as a child. But by the time she was an adult, she was calling herself Harriet.

5. Acomplishments • Harriet had bravely won her freedom, but realizing how alone she was, she made a vow that she would help her family and friends win their freedom as well. She went to Philadelphia, found work cooking, laundering and scrubbing, and saved money to finance rescue trips. She became involved with the city's large and active abolitionist (anti-slavery) organizations and with organizers of the Underground Railroad, a secret network through which slaves were helped in escaping from bondage in the South to freedom in the North and Canada.

6. Famous African American Women Bessie Coleman

7. birth Bessie Coleman was born on January 26, 1892. -- There is confusion about her birthdate because when Bessie became well-known, she claimed to be about four years younger, saying she was born in 1896.

8. life • On September 3, 1922, Bessie gave her first performance at an air show at Curtiss Field, near New York City. The show was sponsored by Robert Abbott and the Chicago Defender. Bessie was proclaimed "the world's greatest woman flyer." She was a success -- praised in both white and black newspapers. In interviews, she had poise, self-assurance and an eloquence that belied her childhood. And she performed in successful shows in Memphis and Chicago. • Bessie briefly began a movie career, and moved to southern California, but broke her contract with the black movie company when she learned she was to play an ignorant black country girl who goes to the big city. She felt the role was demeaning to women. A year later, she gave flying lessons to an advertising executive who offered to buy her an airplane in exchange for airdropping ad leaflets. She got a war surplus JN-4 ("Jenny") army trainer plane, but it stalled on the first flight and crashed. Bessie spent four months recuperating from a broken leg and other injuries. She gave a series of lectures at the Los Angeles YMCA, inspiring others to pursue their dreams and revealing her determination to open a black aviation school. • Her career was stalled at this point, and Bessie returned to Chicago with no job or plane. She did perform in Columbus, Ohio, but it was a year before she found backing for a series of performances in Texas, in the summer of 1925. Successful again, she followed this up with shows in Houston, Dallas, Wharton, Richmond, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Waxahachie -- insisting at the last one that there be a non-segregated main gate. She also began lecturing in black theaters, churches and schools, not only in Texas, but also Georgia.

9. She became famous; her fans called her Queen Bess or Brave Bessie. But she still endured countless obstacles -- from both whites and blacks. Many black men resented her doing what they could not. And many black women, despite activism for civil liberties and better schools, were often too socially conservative to accept Bessie's vibrant persona. Black newspapers gave her publicity, but they were smaller in circulation. White newspapers often either ignored her altogether, or belittled her. • Early in 1926, Bessie gave exhibitions in Florida. A Baptist minister and his wife invited her to spend two months with them in Orlando. Here, she opened a beauty shop to raise more money for her aviation school. She wrote to a sister that she was nearing enough capital to open the school. She also had began making payments on another plane.With the help of a wealthy Orlando businessman, Bessie made the final payment on the plane, another "Jenny." She arranged to have it flown to her next performance, in Jacksonville, Florida, on May 1, 1926. The mechanic-pilot had to make three forced landings enroute. • On the evening of April 30, Bessie and her mechanic-pilot took the airplane for a test run. It malfunctioned and the mechanic lost control. Too short to see over the cockpit's edge, Bessie was not wearing a seatbelt so she could lean over to check out the field. The plane suddenly accelerated and flipped over. She plummeted 1,500 feet. Upon impact, every bone in her body was crushed and she died. The plane crashed nearby, killing the pilot.

10. Thousands of people mourned Bessie's death -- from Jacksonville and Orlando to Chicago, where her body was transported by train. Three funerals were held; one in each of those cities. An estimated 10,000 people paid their last respects at the memorial service at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago. She was buried at Lincoln Cemetery. It wasn't until after her death that Bessie received the recognition she deserved: • In 1929, Lt. William J. Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club, the aviation school she'd longed to establish, in Los Angeles. In 1931, the Challenger Pilots' Association of Chicago did their first annual flyover above Lincoln Cemetery, in honor of her. In 1934, Powell dedicated his book Black Wings to her memory. And in 1977, women pilots in the Chicago region founded the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club. • In 1990, a road near Chicago's O'Hare Airport was re-named Bessie Coleman Drive, and two years later, Chicago declared May 2, 1992, Bessie Coleman Day. In 1995, the U.S. Postal Department issued the Bessie Coleman stamp. And finally, in 2000, Bessie Coleman was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame. • DATE OF DEATH: April 30, 1926 • PLACE OF DEATH: Jacksonville, Florida

11. Famous African American Women Harriet Beecher Stowe

12. Birth • (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American abolitionist and author. Stowe's novelUncle Tom's Cabin (1852) depicted life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the U.S. and Britain and made the political issues of the 1850s regarding slavery tangible to millions, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. Upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln allegedly remarked, "So you're the little lady who started this great war!"[1]

13. LIFE • Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 14, 1811. She was the daughter of outspoken religious leader Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote, a deeply religious woman who died when Stowe was four years old. She was the sister of the educator and author, Catharine Beecher, clergymen Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Beecher, and Edward Beecher. • Harriet enrolled in the seminary run by her eldest sister Catharine, where she received a traditionally "male" education. At the age of 21, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to join her father, who had become the president of Lane Theological Seminary, and in 1836 she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at the seminary and an ardent critic of slavery. The Stowes supported the Underground Railroad and housed several fugitive slaves in their home. They eventually moved to Brunswick, Maine, where Calvin taught at Bowdoin College. • In 1850 Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law prohibiting assistance to fugitives. Stowe was moved to present her objections on paper, and in June 1851 the first installment of Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in the antislavery journal National Era. The forty-year-old mother of seven children sparked a national debate and, as Abraham Lincoln is said to have noted, a war. Stowe died on July 1, 1896, at age eighty-five, in Hartford, Connecticut.

14. Famous African American Women JANE ADDAMS

15. Birth • (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) was a founder of the U.S.Settlement House movement, and the second woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

16. LIFE • Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was the youngest of six children born into a prosperous, loving family.[1] Although she was the eighth child, two of her siblings died in infancy, leaving only six to mature.[2] Her mother, Sarah Addams (née Weber), died from tuberculosis during pregnancy when Jane was two years old. • Jane's father, John H. Addams, was the President of The Second National Bank of Freeport, an Illinois State Senator from 1854 to 1870, and owner of the local grain mill. He remarried when Jane was eight. Her father also was a founding member of the Republican Party and supported Abraham Lincoln. Jane was a first cousin twice removed to Charles Addams, noted cartoonist for The New Yorker.[3] She was born African-Americanbusinesswoman, hair careentrepreneur and philanthropist. She made her fortune by developing and marketing a hugely successful line of beauty and hair products for black women under the company she founded, Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. • with Pott's disease, which caused a curvature of her spine and lifelong health problems. • Addams's father encouraged her to pursue a higher education, but not at the expense of losing her femininity and the prospect of marriage and motherhood, as expected of upper class young women. She was educated in the United States and Europe, graduating from the Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) in Rockford, Illinois. After Rockford, she spent seven months at the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia, but dropped out. Her parents felt that she should not forget the common path of upper class young women. After her father's sudden death, Addams inherited $50,000. (December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919) was an

17. In 1885, she set off for a two-year tour of Europe with her stepmother. Upon her return home, she felt bored and restless, indifferent about marriage, and wanting more than just the conventional life expected of well-to-do ladies. After painful spinal surgery, she returned to Europe for a second tour in 1887, this time with her best friend Ellen Starr and a teacher friend. During her second tour, Addams visited London's Toynbee Hall, which was a settlement house for boys based on the new philosophy of charity. Toynbee Hall was Addams's main inspiration for Hull House. • Throughout her life Addams was close to many women and was very good at eliciting the involvement of women from different classes in Hull House's programs. Her closest adult companion and friend was Mary Rozet Smith, who supported Addams's work at Hull House, and with whom she shared a romantic friendship. Together they owned a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine[4][5][6][7][8] • According to one biographer Addams was raised as a Quaker but joined a Presbyterian church in Chicago and maintained her membership there as an adult.

18. Famous African American Women MADAM C.J. WALKER

19. Birth • (December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919) was an African-Americanbusinesswoman, hair careentrepreneur and philanthropist. She made her fortune by developing and marketing a hugely successful line of beauty and hair products for black women under the company she founded, Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company.

20. LIFE • She was born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana. She was the first member of her family to be born free, to parents who had been slaves. At age 14, she married a man named Moses McWilliams and was widowed at age 20. She then moved to St. Louis, Missouri to join her brothers. Sarah worked as a laundress for as little as a dollar and a half a day, but she was able to save enough to help her daughter. While living in St. Louis, she joined , which helped develop her speaking, interpersonal and organizational skills. • In 1905, she worked as a sales agent for Annie Malone, another black woman entrepreneur who manufactured hair care products. Sarah also consulted with a Denver pharmacist, who analyzed Malone's formula and helped Walker formulate her own products. In addition, she often told reporters that the ingredients for her "Wonderful Hair Grower" had come to her in a dream. • In 1906 she married Charles Joseph Walker, a St. Louis newspaperman[1], and changed her name to "Madam C.J. Walker". She founded the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company to sell hair care products and cosmetics. Madam Walker divorced Walker in 1910 and moved her growing manufacturing operations from St. Louis to a new industrial complex in Indianapolis. By 1917 she had the largest business in the United States owned by an African-American.

21. “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations...I have built my own factory on my own ground.[2]”Walker saw her personal wealth not as an end in itself, but as a means to promote economic opportunities for others, especially black people. She took great pride in the profitable employment — and alternative to domestic labor — that her company afforded many thousands of black women who worked as commissioned agents. Her agents could earn from $5 to $15 per day in an era when unskilled white laborers were making about $11 per week.[3]Marjorie Joyner, who started work as one of her employees, went on to lead the next generation of African-American beauty entrepreneurs. • Walker was known for her philanthropy, leaving two-thirds of her estate to educational institutions and charities, including the NAACP, the Tuskegee Institute and Bethune-Cookman College. In 1919, her $5,000 pledge to the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign was the largest gift the organization had ever received. • Walker had a mansion called "Villa Lewaro" built in the wealthy New York suburb of Irvington on Hudson, New York, near the estates of John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould. She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on furnishings.[4] The Italianatevilla was designed by architect Vertner Tandy, the first registered black architect in the state of New York, in 1915. Walker also owned townhouses in Indianapolis and New York.

22. Madam Walker died on May 25, 1919, at age 51, at her estate Villa Lewaro. She was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. • Her daughter A'Lelia Walker carried on the tradition of hospitality, opening her mother's home and her own to writers and artists of the emergent Harlem Renaissance. She promoted important members of that movement.[5] She converted a section of her Harlem townhouse at 108-110 West 136th Street into the Dark Tower, a salon and tearoom where Harlem and Greenwich Village artists, writers and musicians gathered. Poet Langston Hughes called her "The joy goddess of Harlem's 1920s" in his autobiography The Big Sea, because of the lavish parties she hosted in Harlem and Irvington. • Ms. Walker was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1992 and in 2002, Molefi Kete Asante listed Madam C. J. Walker on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[6]. On 28 January 1998 the USPS, as part of its Black Heritage Series, issued the Madam C.J. Walker Commemorative stamp.[7]

23. Famous African American Women VICTORIA WOODHULL

24. LIFE • (September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927) was an Americansuffragist who was described by Gilded Age newspapers as a leader of the American woman's suffrage movement in the 19th century. She became a colorful and notorious symbol for women's rights, free love, and spiritualism as she fought against corruption and for labor reforms. The authorship of many of her speeches and articles is disputed. Many of her speeches on these subjects were not written by Woodhull herself alone but also by her backers and husband. Either way, her role as a representative of these movements was nonetheless powerful and controversial. She was the first woman along with her sister to operate a brokerage firm in Wall Street and then open a weekly newspaper. She is most famous for her declaration and campaign to run as the first woman for the United StatesPresidency in 1872. Many of the reforms and ideals espoused by her for the common working class against the corrupt rich business elite were extremely controversial in her time though generations later many of those implemented are now taken for granted. Other ideas and reforms still remain controversial and debated today.

25. Famous African American Women SOJOURNER TRUTH

26. LIFE • 1797 – November 26, 1883) was the self-given name, from 1843, of Isabella Baumfree, an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York. Her best-known speech, Ain't I a Woman?, was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

27. Famous African American Women WILMA RUDOLPH

28. LIFE • (June 23, 1940 – November 12, 1994) was an American athlete.In the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, she became the first American woman to win three gold medals in track and field during a single Olympic Games, despite running on a sprained ankle at the time.[1] A track and field champion, she elevated women's track to a major presence in the United States. • The powerful sprinter emerged from the 1960 Rome Olympics as "The Tornado," the fastest woman on earth.[2] The Italians nicknamed her "La Gazzella Nera" (the Black Gazelle); to the French she was "La Perle Noire" (The Black Pearl).[3][4]

29. Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely at 4.5 lbs., with 19 brothers and sisters, and caught "infantile paralysis" (caused by the polio virus) as a very young child. She recovered, but wore a brace on her left leg and foot which had become twisted as a result. By the time she was twelve years old, she had also survived scarlet fever, whooping cough, chicken pox and measles. Her family drove her regularly from Clarksville, Tennessee to Nashville, Tennessee for treatments to straighten her twisted leg. • Wilma Rudolph at the finish line during 50 yard dash at track meet in Madison Square Garden, 1961 • In 1952, 12-year-old Wilma Rudolph finally achieved her dream of shedding her handicap and becoming like other children. Wilma's older sister was on a basketball team, and Wilma vowed to follow in her footsteps. While in high school, Wilma was on the basketball team when she was spotted by Tennessee Statetrack and field coach Edward S. Temple. Being discovered by Temple was a major break for a young athlete. The day he saw the tenth grader for the first time, he knew he had found a natural athlete. Wilma had already gained some track experience on Burt High School's track team two years before, mostly as a way to keep busy between basketball seasons.[5] • While attending Burt High School, Rudolph became a basketball star, setting state records for scoring and leading her team to the state championship. By the time she was 16, she earned a berth on the U.S. Olympic track and field team and came home from the 1956 Melbourne Games with an Olympic bronze medal in the 4 × 100-meter relay. • At the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome she won three Olympic titles; the 100 m, 200 m and the 4 × 100 m relay. As the temperature climbed toward 110 degrees, 80,000 spectators jammed the Stadio Olimpico. Rudolph ran the 100-meter dash in an impressive 11 seconds flat. However the time was not credited as a world record because it was wind-aided. She also won the 200-meter dash in 23.2 seconds, a new Olympic record. After these twin triumphs, she was being hailed throughout the world as "the fastest woman in history". Finally, on September 11, 1960, she combined with Tennessee State teammates Martha Hudson, Lucinda Williams and Barbara Jones to win the 400-meter relay in 44.5 seconds, setting a world record. Rudolph had a special, personal reason to hope for victory—to pay tribute to Jesse Owens, the celebrated American athlete who had been her inspiration, also the star of the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin, Germany.[6] Rudolph sprinted in the Drake Relays in Des Moines, IA and won first place. • Rudolph retired from track competition in 1962 after winning two races at a U.S.–Soviet meet.

30. Famous African American Women Oprah Gail Winfrey

31. LIFE • Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American television host, producer, and philanthropist, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history.[3] She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century[4] and beyond,[5] the greatest black philanthropist in American history,[6][7] and was once the world's only black billionaire.[8][9][10][11][12] She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.[13][14][15]

32. Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-cityMilwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, including being raped at the age of nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy.[16] Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19.[17] Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place,[9] she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated. • Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,[18] she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized[18][19][20][21] the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,[18] which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.[22][23] By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture[21] and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.[24] In 2006 she became an early supporter of Barack Obama and one analysis estimates she delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race,[25] an achievement for which the governor of Illinois considered offering her a seat in the U.S. senate.[26]

33. Famous African American Women Mary Wollstonecraft

34. LIFE • Mary Wollstonecraft (pronounced /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/; 27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and feminist. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

35. Among the general public and specifically among feminists, Wollstonecraft's life has received much more attention than her writing because of her unconventional and often tumultuous personal relationships. After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight, ten days after giving birth to her second daughter, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts. Her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Mary Shelley, would become an accomplished writer in her own right. • After Wollstonecraft's death, William Godwin published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences.