African American Women who are a part of Black History

largebillsonlyplease

Large
BGOL Legend
frances-ellen-watkins-harper.jpg


Born September 24, 1825 Died February 20, 1911

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was orphaned by the age of three, and was raised by an aunt and uncle. She studied Bible, literature, and public speaking at a school founded by her uncle, William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. At 14, she needed to work, but could only find jobs in domestic service and as a seamstress. She published her first volume of poetry in Baltimore about 1845, Forest Leaves or Autumn Leaves, but no copies are now known to exist.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper moved from Maryland, a slave state, to Ohio, a free state in 1850, the year of the Fugitive Slave Act. In Ohio she taught domestic science as the first woman faculty member at Union Seminary, an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) school which later was merged into Wilberforce University.

A new law in 1853 prohibited any free black persons from re-entering Maryland. In 1854, she moved to Pennsylvania for a teaching job in Little York. The next year she moved to Philadelphia. During these years, she became involved in the anti-slavery movement and with the Underground Railroad.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper visited the South and saw the appalling conditions, especially of black women, of Reconstruction. She lectured on the need for equal rights for "the Colored Race" and also on rights for women. She founded YMCA Sunday Schools, and she was a leader in the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). She joined the American Equal Rights Association and the American Women's Suffrage Association, working with the branch of the women's movement that worked for both racial and women's equality.

In 1893, a group of women gathered in connection with the World's Fair as the World's Congress of Representative Women. Harper joined with others including Fannie Barrier Williams to charge those organizing the gathering with excluding African American women. Harper's address at the Columbian Exposition was on "Women's Political Future."

Realizing the virtual exclusion of black women from the suffrage movement, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper joined with others to form the National Association of Colored Women. She became the first vice-president of the organization.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper died in Philadelphia in 1911.

In an obituary, W.E.B. duBois said that it was "for her attempts to forward literature among colored people that Frances Harper deserves to be remembered.... She took her writing soberly and earnestly, she gave her life to it."

HTML:
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/francesewharper/p/frances_harper.htm
 
One women that really impressed me was the avation success story of Bessie C. She managed to become the first interational female aviator within three years. She studied french, sailed to France, took her classes there and returned to the States with an international permit to fly since women werent allowed licenses in their day. She probably inspired Earhart.
 
Wwii's Black Women Vets -- African-American Wacs Unsung Role In The Military Is Remembered


Bertie Edwards may have been the only World War II soldier to have her own PX.

It was that kind of war for African Americans.

Edwards, now 77 and living in Tacoma, joined the WACs (Women's Army Corps), out of a sense of patriotism and because the pay was good. The indignities - and the absurdities - she encountered were part of being African American back then, she says.

You'd hardly know black women had a part in the war, looking at the history books. The recruiting posters featured white women.

And later, when newspapers showed photographs of women in uniform marching triumphantly through the liberated cities of Europe, the women were white.

"Well, we were there during the war," Edwards told a group yesterday at the VA Medical Center. They were invited by the African American Veterans of America to honor the black women who served in segregated units as nurses, clerks, trainers and recruiters.

Edwards, Florence Ray, 70, and Loretta Banks, 76, both of Seattle, were introduced as symbols of the black women veterans kept in the background during the war and largely forgotten after it, said Arthur Wright, chairman of the veterans-group commemoration committee.

Congress began creating women's services in 1942, not for combat, but to free men in stateside jobs to go to war. African-American women weren't admitted until 1943.

All three women joined the WACs (Women's Army Corps) because it was the only service available to them. The Navy didn't accept black women into its WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Services) until 1944.

Edwards became a lieutenant and was stationed in England with a unit assigned to get mail out to the men in European battlefields. Ray remained stateside, teaching new recruits to drive Jeeps and trucks. Banks ran a recruiting office in Des Moines.

Edwards, the only one of the women to speak to the gathering, said she signed on out of a sense of patriotism and because the pay was good - $50 a month, room, board and clothes.

The WACs sent her by troop train from New York, where she'd joined, to Des Moines. "There was a huge trainload of women. I remember stepping off the train to see on one side the black officers and on the other side the white officers, saying you go here and you go there, splitting us up. That was the way it was then."

After six weeks training with her black unit, Edwards was promoted to captain and sent to Georgia for officers training. She was the only African-American WAC there.

"They didn't know what to do with me," she said, so they assigned her to a barracks with the rest of the women. She spent off-duty hours with them, eating ice cream in the PX (Post Exchange) as if segregation didn't exist.

"It never occurred to me the white women who were waitresses wouldn't want to serve me," she said. "But I wasn't there 2 1/2 weeks before they were building a PX just for me. They never ever said one word to me about going there, but they called it PX No. 2, and that meant it was for blacks. I never ever went there."

Edwards did take advantage of one privilege of being African American - a driver was dispatched every week to take her to a black section of Chattanooga, where she had her hair done and shopped.

After the invasion of Europe in June 1944, Edwards was one of about 800 black servicewomen assigned to Birmingham, England.

"(Gen. George) Patton was moving through Europe so fast they couldn't get the mail to the men. When we got there, there were several rooms with mail and old Christmas presents stacked to the ceiling. We sorted it out and got it to them."

After the war, Edwards left the service and married a soldier she met in England. Cyril Edwards, a technical writer for Boeing, died about four years ago.

Ray was discharged in 1945, studied nursing and joined the Air Force in 1956. She served in Vietnam and retired from the service in 1974. Banks was discharged in 1944 after a year in service.

Published Correction Date: 02/22/95 - Loretta Banks, A Veteran Of World War Ii Honored Last Week At The Va Medical Center, Was A First Sergeant Who Trained Recruits In A Training Center For African-American Women In Des Moines. This Article Was Unclear As To Her Duties.



HTML:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19950218&slug=2105672
 
Back
Top