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- Beyoncé. How we know her: Singer, actress, filmmaker, entrepreneur. Why she's praiseworthy: They don't call Beyoncé the Queen Bee for nothing. For starters, the Houstonian has made audiences say her name since the '90s.
- Issa Rae. How we know her: Writer, director, actress, producer, entrepreneur. Why she's praiseworthy: Rae personifies the multi-hyphenate title. There's seemingly nothing she can't do.
- Michelle Obama. How we know her: Former First Lady, author, philanthropist and entrepreneur. Why she's praiseworthy: Obama became the first Black First Lady when her husband Barack Obama was sworn into office in 2008.
- Sha'Carri Richardson. How we know her: Track and field athlete. Why she's praiseworthy: Richardson has given other track and field athletes a run for their money.
- Amber Scott
- Angela Rye
- April Ryan
- Ava Duvernay
- Ayanna Howard
- Carla Williams
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Hadiyah-Nicole Green
- Janet Mock
- Joy Buolamwini
Recognizing the power of education to lift families out of poverty, she founded Leap Year, an Atlanta-based nonprofit with the mission of helping low-income and first-generation college students succeed. As executive director, she oversees the program—which had three fellows in its pilot year and four in its current cohort—which puts high school gr...
She’s built a career of putting her law degree to work for social change through legislative advocacy, having handled legislative affairs for HBCU umbrella organization NAFEO and the Congressional Black Caucus. She’s also the principal and CEO of political advocacy firm IMPACT Strategies, though she’s probably best known to audiences at home for he...
A veteran journalist, the White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks and a political analyst for CNN has been covering the U.S. presidency for 21 years, since the Clinton administration. The National Association of Black Journalists 2017 “Journalist of the Year,” she’s the only black woman reporting on urban issues from the White H...
Working to reshape Hollywood from behind the camera, this director founded a film collective dedicated to independent women and minority filmmakers and just partnered with Los Angeles on a $500,000 diversity initiative. She’s making history with her film as well, as the first black woman to win the directing award at Sundance, the first to be nomin...
She’s pushing innovation in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer vision, and robotics, for applications that span from melting ice in Antarctica to missions to Mars. After spending 12 years at NASA as a senior robotics researcher, she’s now the chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She also founded Zyrobotics L.L....
She was named the athletic director of the University of Virginia last fall, breaking barriers in sports as the first African American woman ever to lead the athletic department at any of the NCAA’s Power Five conferences—and shining a positive light on Charlottesville, Virginia, after last year’s racial unrest. A former student-athlete and assista...
The award-winning Nigerian author is changing the conversation about feminism, especially as it relates to African women. Her 2012 TED talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” was later turned into a book (and some Beyoncé lyrics), and her most recent book,Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions,continues her exploration of the subj...
After losing both the aunt and uncle who raised her to cancer, she’s working to change the way the disease is treated and reduce the suffering of patients by making care more accessible, affordable, and effective. The physicist, who specializes in targeted cancer therapeutics, was awarded a $1.1 million grant in 2016 to develop her patent-pending p...
This transgender advocate uses her platform and the skills she’s cultivated as a journalist to bring marginalized stories to the forefront. She has written two memoirs about her own experience; her first, a best-seller, was the first biography from the perspective of a young trans person. And she started the hashtag #GirlsLikeUs to foster a sense o...
A self-proclaimed Poet of Code, this tech activist is fighting her battles on a field many of us don’t even understand: algorithmic bias. The founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, who researches social impact technology at the MIT Media Lab, is working to make sure the technologies that power our world, such as facial recognition software and ...
- Alisa Gumbs
Feb 12, 2024 · 1. Sojourner Truth, Abolitionist. National Portrait Gallery, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Once enslaved, Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist and women’s rights activist well-known for her powerful oratory and unwavering commitment to justice.
- Rosa Parks. Best known for her refusal to leave her seat for a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks sparked a citywide boycott of buses that led to a law desegregating buses across the nation.
- Marjorie Joyner. Marjorie was a beauty salon owner, who changed the game of hair styling when she invented the “permanent wave machine.” Her perm machine simplified the process of straightening and curling hair for all women; it allowed women to achieve a long-lasting style without the hassle of heating up numerous rods in an oven.
- Mary Kenner. Mary received five patents in her lifetime for household items including the sanitary belt (maxi pads), the bathroom tissue holder, a back washer that mounted on the wall of the shower and the carrier attachment on walkers for disabled people.
- Ruane Jeter. Ruane was most notably the inventor of the toaster, but along with the help of Sheila Lynn Jeter, they created many items of stationery. This included sheathed scissors, the stapler, a staple remover and many multi-purpose office supplies.
- Daisy Bates: A Civil Rights Hero. Daisy Bates was a complex, unconventional and largely forgotten heroine of the civil rights movement who led the charge to desegregate the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957.
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock & Roll. Despite not being a household name today, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
- Harriet Tubman. "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
- Maya Angelou. Learn how Dr. Maya Angelou began writing and reading poetry as a child.
Oct 14, 2021 · One long-standing cultural narrative, often fueled by reality TV, is the “angry Black woman” caricature — one of the earliest and most famous reality TV examples being former Trump ...
Jun 9, 2020 · George Rinhart / Getty. June 9, 2020. In cities across the United States, black activists are denouncing state-sanctioned violence and demanding radical changes to American policing. Black...
