Calendar

Opera - Soprano

Owner and Publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier.

Bibliotherapy advocate

Opera

Hale (1881-1930) and her husband, John Henry Hale, converted their home into a hospital for black patients.

Artist Scultptor

First Black woman to become a tactical jet pilot and second black woman to receive her wings of gold.

Prison and civil rights activist and the first woman to lead the Black Panther Party as chairwoman (1974-1977).

Bonds (1913-1972) was an incomparable composer, pianist, and educator. She profoundly influenced 20th-century classical music by infusing her orchestral and chamber works with elements of spirituals, calypso rhythms, and other musical traditions from the African diaspora.

Cloaked in a desire for the right to vote, for women......

Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born near Johannesburg, South Africa on March 4, 1932. She was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, vocal apartheid opponent, civil rights activist, and UN Goodwill Ambassador. She was also known as the Empress of African Song. She became the first African artist to globally popularize African music.

First African American woman to become a dentist.

Lyric Soprano - Opera

Ballet

Robinson (1936-2011) was a Singer, Songwriter, Record Producer, the Mother of Hip Hop, and founder and CEO of Sugar Hill Records.

First prima ballerina?

1965, March

Jacobs (1815-1897) escaped slavery, became an abolitionist, and wrote an autobiography that became one of the most significant American slave narratives - the first authored by a Black woman. Published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl provides a rare female perspective on slavery and demonstrates how enslaved women faced unique forms of oppression. Although she was very close to her first mistress who taught her to read and write - advantages denied to most enslaved people - Jacobs's narrative exposes slavery's fundamental inescapable violence. Her account, corroborated by her brother John S. Jacobs and George W. Lowther (a civil rights activist and Massachusetts state representative who knew her from childhood), focuses on her personal story of enslavement and surviving physical violence and sexual harassment from one of her enslavers, Dr. Flint. While Jacobs does not dramatize slavery's brutality, the system's horrors emerge through brief, matter-of-fact mentions throughout her narrative: a mother driven to madness after all seven of her children were sold away; a man bound to a cotton gin and left to be eaten by vermin, and enslavers fathering and selling their many children from enslaved women. Her narrative also documents the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced her and other fugitives in the North to live in constant fear of capture and re-enslavement. These scattered references, delivered without embellishment, serve to underscore the everyday inhumanity of the "peculiar institution."

The first black woman to hold an executive position in a labor union.

Educator

Community leader

Quadruple threat: Actress, Singer, Dancer, Director....well known for her character, Whitley Gilbert, A Different World.

Playwright

First Black woman to publish a novel in the US (1859), "Our Nig or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black".

Activist

Cook/Chef

Sculptor, Educator

Outstanding cast, based on a novel by Gloria Naylor.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - the progenitor of rock-n-roll. Tharpe is known for her signature musical style which fused the worlds of gospel and secular music with a sprinkling of her electric guitar.

Educator and Flight Instructor

Soprano - Opera