Herstory Revisited

"I leave you to love. I leave you to hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you a thirst for education. I leave you a respect for the use of power. I leave your faith. I leave you racial dignity. I leave you a desire to live harmoniously with your fellow men. I leave you a responsibility to our young people.” Mary Jane McLeod Bethune  (born  Mary Jane McLeod ; July 10, 1875 – May 18, 1955) was an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian,  womanist , and  civil rights activist . McLeod was born in 1875 in a small log cabin near  Mayesville, South Carolina , on a rice and cotton farm in  Sumter County . She was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to Sam and Patsy (McIntosh) McLeod, both former slaves. Most of her siblings had been born into slavery. Her mother worked for her former master, and her father farmed cotton near a large house they called "The Homestead." Her parents wante...

 “I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.” Today I am celebrating one of – if not the most – famous black author of all time, Maya Aneglou This is a VERY brief history – to get her full story you should read her series of SEVEN autobiographies. Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson; 1928 – 2014) was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. The several volumes of autobiography explore the themes of economic, racial, and sexual oppression. Evidence suggests that Angelou was partially descended from the Mende people of West Africa. A 2008 documentary found that Angelou's maternal great-grandmother Mary Lee, who had been emancipated after the Civil War, became pregnant by her white former owner, John ...

  Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita ,  Kimpa Mvita ,  Tsimpa Vita  or  Tchimpa Vita  (1684 – 2 July 1706), was a  Kongo Empire  prophet and leader of her own Christian movement,  Antonianism ;, which taught that Jesus and other early Christian figures were from the Kongo Empire. The name "Dona" indicates that she was born into a family of high Kongolese nobility; she was later given the name "Beatriz" after the Catholic Saint. Her teaching grew out of the traditions of the  Roman Catholic Church in Kongo , and caused her to reproach the Catholic priests for refuting her beliefs. Dona Beatriz believed the teachings of  St. Anthony  and used this claim to attempt to restore the ideal of Kongo as a unified Christian Kingdom. Kimpa Vita is seen as an antislavery figure and is known as a prefigure to modern African democracy movements. While the role of Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita is widely overlooked, the years of her movement are some of the be...

C laudia Jones ,  née   Claudia Vera Cumberbatch  (1915 – 1964), was a  Trinidad and Tobago -born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the US, where she became a  Communist  political activist,  feminist  and  black nationalist . Due to the political  persecution of Communists in the US , she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. She then founded Britain's first major black newspaper, the  West Indian Gazette , in 1958 and played a central role in founding the  Notting Hill Carnival , the second-largest annual carnival in the world. Claudia Vera Cumberbatch was born in  Trinidad , then a colony of the British Empire, on 21 February 1915. When she was eight years old, her family emigrated to New York City following the post-war  cocoa  price crash in Trinidad. Her mother died five years later, and her father eventually found work to support the f...