Author

Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, poet, anthropologist, and folklorist who documented life across the African diaspora and stood as a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her work focused on Black cultural traditions, spirituality, and the vibrant dynamics of Black communities across the Americas. Her most well known works were Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, and Mules and Men.

Lane (1923-2008) was an educator and poet who, in 1967, became the first Black woman to receive a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. She published five books of poetry: Wind Thoughts, The Mystic Female, I Never Scream: New and Selected Poems, Girl at the Window, and Elegy for Etheridge, with The Mystic Female earning a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1979. While her contemporaries criticized her work for not explicitly focusing on Black themes or experiences, she maintained her artistic independence, writing extensively about nature, love, and universal human experiences. As the first woman to chair Southern University's English Department (1974-1986) and Louisiana's first Black Poet Laureate (1989-1992), she broke barriers in academia and literature and cemented her legacy as an influential literary voice. In recognition of her achievements and indelible mark, in 2022 LSU's Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to name its graduate school the Pinkie Lane Gordon Graduate School.

Keckley (1818) was born enslaved in Virginia. She purchased freedom for herself and her son for $1200 in 1855. In 1861 she became the dressmaker and confidant of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. In 1868, she published her memoir, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House.

Cinematographer, Director, Writer

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford (1931-2019), “Toni” Morrison was a Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize - winning novelist, editor, and professor. Her most notable works include “The Bluest Eye” (1970), “Song of Solomon” (1977), and “Beloved” (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.

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."

Wilson (1825) was the first Black woman to publish a novel in the US (1859), Our Nig or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black.

Larsen (1891-1964) was a nurse, librarian, novelist, key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and the first black woman to graduate from the New York Public Library's Library School. She is best known for her two novels, "Quicksand" (1928) and "Passing" (1929), which explored complex themes of racial identity, mixed-race heritage, and the struggle for acceptance in both black and white communities. She also made history as the first Black woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing (1930).

Librarian, Challenged and improved upon the Dewey Decimal system

On May 1, 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and became the first African American to win a Pulitzer.

Known as the "Queen Mother" and "Matriarch of Black Dance", Dunham (1909-2006) pioneered a new form of artistic expression by fusing her anthropological studies of Caribbean cultures with modern dance techniques, creating the Dunham Technique which is still widely taught today. She formed one of the first black ballet companies, the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, through which she showcased the beauty and power of the Dunham Technique's African diasporic dance movements. One of the company's celebrated works was the 1948 piece Caribbean Rhapsody, which featured a remarkable performance by the then 21-year-old Eartha Kitt. The company also achieved acclaim through Broadway and Hollywood performances that brought the Dunham Technique to global audiences.

Butler (1947-2006) was the the mother of Afrofuturism.

"To a Dark Girl" Something of old forgotten queens lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk. And something of the shackled slave sobs in the rhythm of your talk.

Alexander Lane (1916-2007) founded the Harlem Institute of Fashion in 1966 and established the Black Fashion Museum in Harlem, NY in 1979.

Attorney, educator, and author, Hill (1956) is most well known for her public testimony during the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Hill, who had worked under Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), accused him of sexual harassment.

Modernly, Cooper has been referred to as the Mother of Black Feminism after her book A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South sparked a new era of Black feminist thought, challenging the prevailing narratives of race, gender, and class.

Grimke (1837-1914) hailed from a triumvirate of intellectual and abolitionist families: born into the prestigious Forten family, she later married into the equally renowned Grimke family, and shared familial ties with the influential Purvis family. She was an activist, educator, and a diarist whose published works gave rare insight into the life and perspective of a free Black woman in the North, pre-civil war.

Smith (1930) is a retired Librarian, Archivist, and Author of over 50 publications including Notable Black American Women. In 1964, Smith became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. degree in library science from the University of Illinois.