NIKAVIKA SISTERHOOD + BLACK WOMEN LEAD
Profiles of 212 honorees from 2023
(followed by free "sisterhood coaching" activities)
Adelaide M. Cromwell, Ph.D. Author and professor Adelaide Cromwell, born in 1919, was the first Black instructor first at Hunter College and then at Smith College, her alma mater. As a professor of sociology at Boston University, she taught from 1951 to 1985, leading the committee that established the university's African Studies program, appointed in 1953 as its administrator and research associate. She was then appointed to the university's graduate Afro-American Studies program in 1969. She convened the first conference of West African social workers in 1960 as the only Black or female appointed to the Methodist Church in America's five-member committee to assess higher education in the Belgian Congo. She has been appointed to executive councils of many organizations including the American Society of African Culture, the American Negro Leadership Conference in Africa and the advisory council on Voluntary Foreign Aid. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and honors which include a citation from the National Order of Cote d’Ivoire, the Smith College Medal, and the Carter G. Woodson Medal from ASALH
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/adelaide-cromwell-40
Adrienne R. Benton Though many Black women have served and raced in long-distance running, it was only recently that the Boston Athletic Association appointed its first Black woman to its board: Adrienne Benton. Involved with the marathon for many years, Benton is actively working at eliminating racial and other disparities within the distance running sport while acting as an ambassador. After a sibling ran a 5K in 2014, Benton became interested in running and has since completed six marathons which include four Abbot World Marathon Majors, as well as numerous shorter races. She has served as the Boston Marathon's finish line announcer in the past. She also hopes that the Boston Athletic Association will address disparities using collaboration and outreach through the Boston Running Collaborative, to improve access to year-round training facilities along with health and wellness options that benefit the community, and track-and-field career development. A graduate of Rutgers University, she founded Onyx Spectrum Technology, recognized in the 2020 Inner City 100 by the Competitive Inner City, which she started after working as a hospital administrator at Boston Medical Center, which later became one of her clients.
https://www.boston.com/news/boston-marathon/2022/04/15/adrienne-benton-boston-athletic-association-board/
Adrienne Smith When Adrienne Smith's father gave her a football when she was seven, she learned to throw, but accepted at the time that there was no place for women in professional tackle football. In discovering a women's professional tackle football league as an adult, she was able to revive her childhood dream. As the star receiver for the Boston Renegades, Smith is determined to help young girls learn about the possibilities that lie ahead. With 14 professional seasons behind her, she's gained an outstanding list of accomplishments as a Black female athlete, including two gold medals for the U.S. Women's Football National Team, nine Women's Football Alliance (WFA) All-Star appearances, four WFA championships, and an amazing touchdown. At the International Federation of American Football Women's World Championship in Stockholm in 2010, Smith received a catch and run that stretched out 52 long yards. As an athletic ambassador, she promotes it every way she can, including brand partnerships, speaking events, and Gridiron Queendom, an international organization she started to support females who want to play football. This has led to major enterprises such as the NFL and Nike investing millions of dollars into girls' high school football opportunities.
https://www.si.com/more-sports/2022/06/02/adrienne-smith-boston-renegades-womens-football
Alfreda Harris: Raised in a strong community in Roxbury in the 1940s and 1950s, Alfreda Harris always had a strong interest in sports and coaching. Using her coaching abilities, she helped countless Black teens gain college scholarships, helping them to get the education they needed to succeed in life and break the chains of poverty. As the founder of the Shelburne Recreation Center, she moved up through the organization as its Administrative Coordinator, which provided her with the opportunity to impact many young lives in the Roxbury community. A life-long athlete, she also served as the women's basketball coach at several Boston colleges, including the University of Massachusetts Boston, Roxbury Community College, and Emerson College. Harris also served on the Boston School Committee, becoming its longest-serving member over the course of her life. Her strong impact on the lives of youth, recreation, and community is outstanding, and her experiences in mentoring Roxbury youth has helped change the life of hundreds of individuals over the past decades.
https://roxbury.library.northeastern.edu/harris/
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m039rx707?datastream_id=content
Alice A. Casneau Born after the Civil War, Alice Caseneau was an active professional dressmaker and author with a passion for community service at the beginning of the 20th century. Born in Virginia, she was living in Boston with her husband Elmer and daughter Pearl in 1900. She had already made a name for herself as a professional dressmaker and as a vocal member of the Black community. Casneau had joined the Women's Era Club in the early 1890s, an organization for Black women encouraging community work and self-improvement. She contributed to the First National Conference of Colored Women of America in 1895, serving on the Committee on Special Work. She published a book on artistic dress cutting and making, and spoke on the topic at the first meeting of the National Negro Business League in 1900. Casneau joined the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and gave talks when sessions were held in Boston. She worked in the Soldiers' Comfort Unit during World War I and took an active interest in politics at that time, and remained engaged in community service and other organizations for the rest of her life, passing in 1953.
https://www.nps.gov/people/alice-casneau.htm
Andrea Bradford: At age five, opera singer Andrea Bradford began her musical training with the study of piano. Born in 1949, her vocal training began while attending St. Francis De Sales High School under Sister Mary Elise, who was the co-founder of Opera Ebony in New York. Though the Black boarding school had taken her far from home, her career would take her even further. She returned to her Huntsville roots to attend Oakwood College, then continued to her bachelor's degree at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, followed by a Master's degree at Boston University College of Fine Arts in 1973. She joined the Opera Company of Boston in 1975, touring with founder and conductor Sarah Caldwell in New England and Europe. She also performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops Orchestra as a soloist. She appeared in La Traviata, Madame Butterfly, The Barber of Seville, Three Willies, The Negro Burial Ground, The Balcony, and Lost in the Stars, among others. She also worked as manager of college recruiting for Bain & Company, then moved on to become the vice president and executive recruiter for Isaacson, Miller before moving on to many other prestigious positions.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/andrea-bradford
Andrea Campbell, J.D. Dedicated to fighting for equity and opportunity, Andrea Campbell is the Attorney General of Massachusetts. Growing up in an unstable living environment with her father in prison and losing her mother to a car accident at eight months of age, Campbell and her brothers lived with relatives and foster care until her father was released from prison when she was eight. Relying on public housing and assistance, her grandmother struggled with alcoholism as her brothers cycled into and out of the prison system, causing her to lose her twin Andre when he died in state custody. Through this hardship, she persevered, turning painful experiences into purpose. She graduated from Boston Latin School, then Princeton University and UCLA. She worked as a legal services attorney at EdLaw to defend children and families, especially those with disabilities, as well as at Proskauer LLP, but chose to move to General Counsel at the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission. She served as legal counsel to Governor Patrick, then ran successfully for Boston City Council, becoming the first woman to represent District 4. She was elected unanimously as the first Black woman to the City Council President position, then was elected Attorney General in 2022. https://www.andreacampbell.org/
Andrea H. Major: Shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, Andrea Major made hers a reality. Opening the Roxbury Center for the Performing Arts, originally known as Andrea's School of Dance, in 1967, this accomplished dancer, teacher, and choreographer began her dance education at age three. Graduating from the Boston Conservatory of Music with a bachelor's degree, Major continued her education in the Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York City. Starting with an experimental program at the Roxbury YMCA, she began offering classes, realizing at the time that young children in the inner city didn't have any real exposure to the performing arts, prompting her to open her own school and center to meet that need. Having received a wide range of awards, citations, and honors from religious groups, corporations, and civic organizations, Major's contributions to exposing inner-city youth to the performing arts are uncontested. With a strong passion for dance, she has a strong commitment to giving her students a strong appreciation for the performing arts.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/andrea-herbert-majors-work-mentoring-city-kids-has-inspired-them-to-dream-big/22680172
https://www.rcpaboston.org/
Andrea J. Cabral, J.D.: With a long history of public service, Andrea Cabral grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and graduated from Boston College and then Suffolk University Law School in 1986. With an impressive thirty-year career including being the first woman serving as Suffolk County sheriff, Cabral's other accomplishments include public safety secretary under former Governor Patrick, which oversaw 14 public safety organizations within the state, reforming prisoner reentry programs, modernizing correctional facilities, serving as president of the Massachusetts Sheriff's Association, assistant state attorney general, director of Roxbury District Court Family Violence Project, Suffolk and Middlesex Counties assistant district attorney, co-founder and chief of the office's Domestic Violence Unit, senior prosecutor for civil rights cases, and chief of the District Court and Community Prosecutions. She also wrote the state's first continuing education legal manual on restraining orders in domestic violence cases. Cabral is an Eisenhower Fellow, and served as one of the 18 national experts that were appointed to the Science Advisory Board by former U.S. Attorney General Holder. She's a member of the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy Advisory Board at Boston College, the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly editorial board, and the Mass Mentoring Partnership's Governing Board.
https://www.herself360.com/articles/national-womens-history-month-loretta-ross-and-sheriff-andrea-cabral
Andrea L. Taylor: As the first and current Senior Diversity Officer at Boston University, Andrea Taylor has a long history of working for diversity, equity, and inclusion through her work in civil rights. Born in 1947, she has been the president and CEO of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, she has worked on the same issues that had arisen when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his peaceful protests against discrimination in Alabama. Operating an institute that is part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and the Smithsonian Institute, Taylor is returning to her roots as a Boston University alumnus. She is also the chairperson for the campus-wide Community Safety Advisory Group and Antiracism Working Group, a co-chair of the Task Force on Workplace Culture, and has been a Boston University Trustee in the past. She has also served as Director of Citizenship and Corporate Giving at the Microsoft Corporation in North America, and is a founding director of the Media Fund at the Ford Foundation, supporting global film and broadcast documentary productions focusing on social justice and civil rights. During her philanthropy career, she was responsible for distributing over $1 billion to promote social equity.
https://www.bu.edu/diversity-officer/profile/andrea-l-taylor/
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/andrea-l-taylor
Ann H. Pilot: Though Ann Pilot retired in 2009 after a 40-year career with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, she wasn't done with her musical career. After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Music, she performed extensively as a soloist prior to becoming the substitute second harp of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and principal harp of the Washington National Symphony. She first joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1969 as the assistant principal harp while playing as principal for the Boston Pops Orchestra. She then moved up to principal harp of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1980, a position she held until her retirement from the organization in 2009. During her extensive career, she has played as a soloist with orchestras across the United States, Europe, Haiti, New Zealand, and South Africa. She has recorded several albums with Boston Records, Koch International, and Denouement record labels. In 1999, she traveled to London to record Harp Concerto by Kevin Kaska, an American composer whom she had commissioned the work through, with the London Symphony Orchestra. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including multiple honorary doctorates, the Distinguished Alumni Award, the Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Boston Musicians Association and Talent Development League, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
http://www.annhobsonpilot.com/
Anna B. Gardner Born in 1901, Anna Bobbitt Gardner lived until her late 90s, always focused on bringing musical education and performance to the Black community in Boston. As the first Black woman to earn a Bachelor's degree from the New England Conservatory in 1932, Anna Gardner paved the way for other Black musicians by opening her music school in Boston before she had even begun her post-secondary musical education. Her Academy of Musical Arts was opened in the basement of her home on Claremont Street in Boston, and for over the next sixty years, she operated no fewer than five studios under that name. At Symphony Hall, she managed Colored American Nights, featuring a range of talented Black musicians and groups, as well as producing local radio and television programs for Black audiences in the Boston area. She was appointed as State Director of Negro History Week programs in 1945 by Governor Maurice J. Tobin, a position she was reappointed to by several succeeding governors. As part of its ongoing recognition of exceptional talent, the New England Conservatory has granted one musician a year the Anna Bobbitt Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award since her death in 1997.
https://necmusic.edu/news/archives-celebration-necs-african-american-legacy-part-i
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Anna F. Jones: As one of the oldest and highest-impact community foundations, the Boston Foundation welcomed its first Black woman as CEO, Anna Faith Jones. She had worked her way up, receiving an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Massachusetts in 1986 when she was serving as director of the Foundation. The groundbreaking leadership provided by herself and another Foundation Board Chair, Frieda Garcia, inspired the organization to develop the Anna Faith Jones and Frieda Garcia Women of Color Leadership Circle. Her leadership helped steer the Boston Foundation towards its mission today of closing disparities in the region to improve opportunities, prosperity, and equitable outcomes. To further these goals, Jones also spoke publicly, including as the 4th James A. Joseph Lecture on Philanthropy honoree in 1994. During her lecture, she brought up the sweeping changes that were happening in social welfare programs, Boston's role as a city of immigrants, and the prejudice that the many waves of immigration have seen over the years, referencing Boston's Puritan roots and John Winthrop's "City on a Hill". After stepping down from the Boston Foundation in 2001, her leadership and example to that organization have continued in its activities exponentially.
https://www.tbf.org/news-and-insights/press-releases/2022/january/2022-woclc-announcement-20220119
https://www.abfe.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1994_Anna-Faith-Jones.pdf
https://www.pionline.com/article/20001002/ONLINE/10020771/anna-faith-jones-will-step-down-as-president-and-ceo-of-the-boston
Audrea F.J. Dunham, Ph.D.: Born and raised in the Roxbury neighborhood in Boston, Audrea Dunham was a civil rights activist, author, and educator whose interests focus on the role of women in social movements, a passion she attributed to the early influences she had with many Boston civil rights activists, her own activism in the Stay-Out for Freedom campaigns as a student, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. March, and during the 1960s, as a leader for the Massachusetts State Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Having earned a Ph.D. in African American Studies at Temple University, she has taught African American Studies courses at both Delaware State University and Georgia State University. She has also served as a board member on the National Council for Black Studies, and as a Journal of Black Studies associate editor. She has also published articles on a number of organizations, including Mothers for Adequate Welfare, Fight for a Change!, and The Evolution of the Welfare Rights Movement as it relates to Boston in the International Journal of Africana Studies, and is working on a book-length manuscript for publication in the future.
https://openvault.wgbh.org/exhibits/boston_civil_rights/authors
Rep. Ayanna Pressley: Born in Cincinnati in 1974 and raised in Chicago, Ayanna Pressley moved to Boston for college, then worked with Congressional Representative Joseph P. Kenedy II and Senator John Kerry. Representing Massachusetts Seventh Congressional District, Representative Ayanna Pressley is the first Black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She's also an activist, advocate, and legislator, fighting to ensure that those who are closest to the issues facing minority communities today are those who are informing and driving policymaking. Pressley is a champion for justice, encouraging healing while promoting reproductive freedom, as well as justice for the elderly, immigrants, survivors of sexual assault, formerly and currently imprisoned, workers, and those who have been through trauma. As an individual with alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes rapid hair loss and impacts disproportionately black women and children, she advocates for others who have the disease, serving as a public role model to raise awareness and support. Prior to her work in the U.S. House of Representatives, she was the first Black woman elected to the Boston City Council, where she served for eight years.
https://pressley.house.gov/about/
https://www.biography.com/political-figures/ayanna-pressley
Barbara Gomes-Beach: Though some may recognize Barbara Gomes-Beach as the mother of Hollywood actor Michael Beach, she was actually a powerhouse in her own right, speaking out about the continuing AIDS epidemic both at home and abroad. With a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Masters degree in City Planning from MIT, Gomes-Beach raised her four children using her wages as a city planner while pursuing her dream of singing. Born in the late 1930s, she recalled a cousin dying of the disease in the mid-1980s, and mentioned during a 1996 interview that not enough had been done in communities of color to fight the spread of the disease. Passing in 2017, she had at that point 10 grandchildren and numerous unnamed great-grandchildren, which was the drive for her activism and advocacy for individuals with HIV and AIDS, including her work as the executive director of the Multicultural AIDS Coalition, which was started in 1989 and is still working to provide equity and equality to AIDS treatments in minority communities, many of which are separated by boundaries of language, cultural beliefs, and poverty, preventing a single approach to the issue.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/barbara-gomes-beach-obituary?id=6712250
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFNgaLXHOuP/
https://lucykingdom.com/barbara-gomez-beach/
https://bostonphoenix.com/archive/1in10/96/11/BARBARA_GOMES_BEACH.html
https://www.mac-boston.org/about
Barbara Smith As a pioneer in Black feminism, Barbara Smith is an activist, author, lecturer, publisher, and lesbian. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she and her twin sister participated in the 1960s civil rights protests. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1969 with a major in sociology and English, and received a Doctor of Humane Letters in 2019. As a co-founder of the Combahee River Collective in Boston in 1974, Smith and other Black feminist pioneers co-authored the Combahee River Collective Statement with Beverly and Demita Frazier. Considered by many to be the first example of intersectionality in oppression and prejudice, it's an example that is used in many social justice campaigns today. She taught her first course on Black women's literature at Emerson College in 1973, and has been an educator and lecturer at several other colleges and universities over the years. She also co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, the first publisher in the United States specifically for books by women of color. She was elected to the Common Council in Albany, NY in 2005, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the same year. Her writings have been in numerous national and international publications.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/directory/alum/barbara-smith
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-1974-1980/
Judge Barbara A. Dortch-OkaraAs the first Black and woman to become a Chief Justice for Administration and Management of the Massachusetts Trial Court, Barbara Dortch-Okara graduated from Brandeis University in 1971, then went on to receive her Boston College Law School JD in 1974. She received her first judicial appointment to the Boston Municipal Court in 1984, then to the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1984, and oversaw the management of the Trial Court in 1998. She has received multiple awards, including the 2000 Boston Bar Association Citation of Judicial Excellence, the 2007 Judicial Excellence Award from the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys, and the 2011 Trailblazer Award of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association. She was appointed to chair the State Ethics Commission in 2013 by Governor Deval Patrick. After retiring from her duties, she became a professor at New England Law Boston until 2018. She was elected in 2019 as a member of the Committee on Judicial Performance Evaluation, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court committee tasked with reviewing and revising the performance evaluation process trial judges are required by statute to undergo. She holds honorary Doctor of Law degrees from both New England Law Boston and Southern New England School of Law.
https://www.brandeis.edu/trustees/members/dortch-okara.html
Barbara C. Elam Born in 1929, Barbara Elam was a community activist, children's advocate, and librarian, working on social justice issues such as literacy, educational reform, and mental health. She received her Bachelors in Library Science from Simmons College, choosing this path to help children learn to love reading and education. She worked briefly in the New York Public Library, before returning to Boston as the children's librarian at the Boston Public Library. She raised her children but dedicated her excess time and energy to addressing racial inequalities in the Boston Public School system and the desperate need for mental health services in the Black community. She joined and eventually became president of the Massachusetts Mental Health Association Fort Hill chapter, lobbying to establish the Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller Center. After her children were at school, she returned to the school library system, enhancing the school system with books written by and about people of color. She made libraries the schools' focal points, while developing a program to train low-income mothers without diplomas as library aides. Many continued their interrupted schooling to become librarians. Elam continued her education with a Masters in Education from Boston University and Masters in Library Science from Simmons.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/obituary/barbara-clark-elam/
Bishop Barbara C. HarrisBorn in Philadelphia, Barbara Harris was a civil rights movement supporter, advocate, and feminist minister in the Episcopal Church. Choosing to move to the Church of the Advocate along with her voter registration efforts and participating in the Selma march in the 1960s, she moved from public relations executive career to support Episcopal Bishops defying the ban on ordaining women in 1974. She entered the ministry, being ordained as a deacon in 1979 and a priest in 1980, serving as priest-in-charge at St. Augustine of Hippo. She was a chaplain at Philadelphia County Prisons and counseled industrial corporations on public policy and social concerns. She wrote monthly columns for The Witness, elevating her in the international Anglican community. After the 1988 Lambeth Conference determined that each province of the Communion could choose to ordain women as bishops, Harris was ordained as the first female bishop in the Episcopal Church. She was active in many organizations, including membership in the Union of Black Episcopalians and past president of the Episcopal Urban Caucus. She served on several vital local, state, national, and international boards, committees, and ministries to help serve underserved minorities in the Boston area.
https://episcopalarchives.org/church-awakens/exhibits/show/leadership/clergy/harris
Belinda SuttonAs the author of one of the earliest slave narratives written by a Black woman in the American colonies, Belinda Sutton was born around 1712 in or near Ghana in western Africa. Captured by slave raiders at around the age of 12, she was marched to the coast and then placed on a ship with approximately 300 other Blacks bound for the Caribbean plantations. Purchased by the Royall family in Antigua, she was moved with the family to Boston when they moved from one plantation to another location. In Massachusetts, Royall was the state's largest slaveholder. However, as the American Revolution began, Sutton's Loyalist owner fled to England, which allowed her to live in unofficial freedom in the Massachusetts colony. At the end of the war, when slavery was being abolished, Sutton petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1783 for reparations for her unpaid labor from the Royall estate. She was granted 15 pounds, 12 shillings annually, which she was required to petition for on an annual basis. She did so until 1793, at which point she slips from history, believed to have perished by 1799 at a ripe old age for the time of well over 80 years.
https://enslaved.org/fullStory/16-23-106154/
Benaree P. Wiley Born in Washington, D.C. in 1946, Benaree "Bennie" Pratt Wiley was a corporate chief executive who graduated from Howard University with a Bachelor's degree in Marketing in 1968. She entered Harvard's Business School, receiving her MBA in 1972 and working as a consultant for corporations and nonprofits to build capacity and refine program delivery. She launched a high-end toy store to combine her business and child development passions. She became The Partnership's president and CEO in 1991, an organization to help over 200 Boston-area businesses to develop, attract, and retain over 1,300 professionals of color, increasing leadership of people of color in the city's corporate sector. At the same time, the organization helped professionals of color navigate Boston's complex corporate structure to achieve success and improve diversity within the city's corporate professional population. Wiley was a past chair of directors of the Children's Museum, a trustee of Boston College, an overseer of the WGBH Educational Foundation, a former director of the Crispus Attucks Children's Center, a director at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and at the Boston Foundation. Selected as one of Boston's most powerful women in 2003 by Boston Magazine, she retired in 2005 from The Partnership.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/benaree-p-wiley-40
Berthé M. GainesA strong library advocate, Berthé M. Gaines met then-future Mayor Raymond Flynn in the early 1980s as she was protesting library budget cuts while working as a typesetter and proofreader at the Globe and running the Dudley Square Friends of the Library group. When Flynn was elected in 1983, one of his first acts was to ask her to serve as the Boston Public Library board's first Black woman and the first female president. Gaines' strong-held belief that nobody, especially children, should have to travel out of their neighborhood for a library led her to the founding of Save Our Libraries. She was known for saying, "You don't have to go to Harvard to be a scholar," believing that with a library at their disposal, everyone has the same educational resources. She was involved both with the main Copley Square location and the branch libraries, with a keen understanding of the branches within the entire system. From her efforts, no branches were closed and service hours were increased, so people of all ages, cultures, and races feel at home at any library branch. For her efforts, she received an honorary doctorate in library science from Simmons College in 1999.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/07/04/berthe-gaines-boston-first-african-american-woman-serve-boston-public-library-board/F4XYyuAUCHhYYYlgkTlDnJ/story.html
Betty L. Wornum Betty Wornum started her professional career as a caseworker at Grove Hall's transitional assistance office. Driven to provide services to those within the community who were unable to otherwise find appropriate accommodation, she founded the Roxbury Community Health Center, also known as Rox Comp, in 1968. Her dedication to the community allowed many individuals who would otherwise be unable to pay for services to receive quality healthcare and related services for four and a half decades before the organization closed its doors in 2013. In addition to being a mother of nine, her activities in the community advanced her actions to receive the Sojourner Truth award as well as awards from several other awards for her long-standing community action and volunteer work.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Betty-Wornum
https://carelistings.com/federally-qualified-health-centers/roxbury-ma/roxbury-comprehensive-community-health-center/5ace885893efd2372f981eff
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2013/03/20/roxcomps-closing-leaves-employees-out-in-the-cold-2/
Beulah S. HesterBorn as the daughter of a minister in Oxford, North Carolina, Beulah Hester, often referred to as Sister Beulah, served the community in and around Boston for over 40 years at the Twelfth Baptist Sanctuary in Roxbury alongside her husband, also a minister. She pursued higher education actively throughout her life, first at Hartshorn College, then later at Boston University's School of Religious Education and Simmons College School of Social Work. Her dedication to the community included acting as President of the Queen Esther Club and Missionary Society, organizer of The Roxbury Goldenaires, one of the area's first senior groups, as well as the Philathea Class and Chapel Choir. She supervised Neighborhood Services at the Robert Gould Shaw House, and was a member of the Board of Overseers for the Boston Welfare Department. Upon returning to North Carolina after her retirement, she assisted with the Central Orphanage Music Department, organized the Oxford AARP chapter, was a member of the North Carolina Council of the National Association of Social Workers, and served as a pianist at the Belton Creek Baptist Church prior to the illness that took her life in 1981.
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m044zp376?datastream_id=content
Beulah Providence Coming to the United States from Dominica in 1960 to better herself, Beulah Providence started out her life in the United States as a housekeeper. However, her drive to become a more productive person and make strong, positive changes in her community. With very little formal education, she was able to leverage scholarships and other resources to educate herself by enrolling at Northeastern University that was offered following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Working with professor Rosemary Whiting, she began working on an assignment to develop a project to provide services within a local community. Providence's project was the beginning of what would become the Caribbean Foundation of Boston and the Urban Community Homemaking, Home Health Aide, and Chore Services, of which Providence is now the executive director.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/beulah-providence-32ab981b/
Beverley Johnson Beverley Johnson decided early on in her career that she would do two things in her career: work in a field she was passionate about and never spend all day in the office, but instead would be in the field, working with clients. Starting out working in Washington D.C. in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, she moved to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, Johnson knew that she had a passion for doing work to help stabilize neighborhoods by investing in physical and economic revitalization. By operating in the sub-sector of real estate development that ensures that neighborhoods impacted by big project developers don't lose their sense of community, Johnson began Bevco Associates in July 1994 as president to ensure projects have a positive impact on neighborhoods surrounding the development. Bevco consults on urban planning, project management, public land conveyance, zoning, permitting, and community engagement. The company's portfolio includes Crosstown Center, the development of the Mattapan Boston State Hospital site, and MBTA public engagement efforts. The integrity she brings to every project builds trust in the community that she has their best interests at heart. She's also been president and chair of the Massachusetts Minority Contractors Association board.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2015/03/09/beverley-johnsons-consulting-firm-builds-bridges-between-developers-and-community/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverley-johnson-a6170942/
Blanche E. Braxton: As the first Black woman admitted to the Massachusetts Bar as a lawyer, Blanche Braxton graduated from the Portia School of Law, which evolved into New England Law Boston, in 1921, in an age when many women of any race were not encouraged to attend higher education institutions. Following her graduation, she prepared for the Bar exam and was admitted to the Bar in Massachusetts two years later on March 16, 1923. A decade later, she became the first Black woman to practice law in the U.S. District Court in the District of Massachusetts, and was admitted on March 21, 1933. Living in Roxbury, she had a private practice at 412 Massachusetts Avenue, and her memory is honored with a scholarship every year by the Massachusetts Black Women Attorneys Foundation named in her honor, which is awarded to law students of color who have been shown to have demonstrated commitment to public service, dedication to the advancement of minorities through the legal process, and outstanding academic achievement.
https://massblackwomenattys.org/scholarship.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_E._Braxton
Carmen Fields Journalist Carmen Fields has won Emmy awards for her work as a local news anchor and is a familiar face to Bostonians. After completing her journalism degree at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri and reporting at the city's CBS station, she moved to Boston, graduating from COM with her Masters degree in 1973. She was a Boston Globe reporter who was first to interview Ted Landsmark, the attorney attacked when he wandered into a protest against school integration. Growing up in segregated Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fields was determined to break barriers as one of the Globe's two black women in the newsroom. She quickly moved from a rookie reporter and up through the ranks, becoming a part of the team at the paper that won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for their coverage of school desegregation and became an assistant metro editor and a columnist after a walkout to desegregate the paper's editorial ranks. She undertook several positions at Channels Four and Seven and was producer of a public affairs show Higher Ground. She was honored alongside Liz Walker and Sarah-Ann Shaw, the first Black female reporters in the area, by the Roxbury Community College Foundation.
https://www.bu.edu/com/articles/carmen-fields-tells-her-story/
Carol Fulp: As the founder of Fulp Diversity, Carol Fulp collaborates with corporate executives to promote diversity within the corporate environment. Her book Success Through Diversity: Why the Most Inclusive Companies Will Win has received good reviews from multiple organizations. She has worked with over 100 organizations, with a long list of top-ranking companies as her clients, including Microsoft, Liberty Mutual, CVS, McKinsey, Harvard, UPS, and many more. She delivered the Inclusive Leadership Forum Series at Boston College Graduate School of Business and worked with the Institute of Politics, Policy & History to produce their Founding Fathers Symposiums: Unpacking the Truth Behind the Complex Legacies. Prior to her work at Fulp Diversity, she served in a range of high-level executive positions at The Partnership, John Hancock Financial, the Gillette Company, and a range of several media organizations. She was appointed as a Representative of the United States to the Sixty-Fifth Session of the United Nations General Assembly by President Obama. She serves the community through positions on boards of a wide range of organizations. She has received numerous awards for her service in the Boston area and is a graduate of the University of the State of New York, along with multiple honorary degrees.
https://www.fulpdiversity.com/carol-fulp
Carole C. Thomas Carole Copeland Thomas is a business owner, speaker, instructor, thought leader, and trainer. Moderating key issues impacting global economies, she has worked with experts at large organizations including Moster, Cargill, Verizon, and many others. She has spent a decade as an adjunct faculty member at Bentley University, and as a speaker, has presented in a range of national and international forums. She is a co-founder of a non-profit international humanitarian organization as a result of a 2005 trip to Kenya and now focuses on aiding women and children in southern India. Thomas is the founder of the Multicultural Symposium Series, an initiative to advance multicultural issues. As the host of Focus on Empowerment, a talk show, the program was also available on the internet and focused on current issues. An active member of local and regional social activism organizations, she's worked to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in a wide range of sectors and industries. A graduate of Emory University in 1975, she entered graduate school on a Martin Luther King, Jr. fellowship at Northeastern University and graduated with an MBA. She received the Certified Diversity Meeting Professional designation from the International Association of Hispanic Meeting Professionals in 2011.
http://www.tellcarole.com/about-carole.html
Carolyn Wilkins A current professor, pianist, composer, and vocalist in the Ensemble Department at the Berklee College of Music, Carolyn Wilkins has performed on radio and television with her group SpiritJazz. She's undertaken a concert tour in South America acting as a jazz ambassador for the U.S. Department of State, has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony and at numerous other events. She's also an author of numerous books including Tips for Singers: Rehearsing, Performing, and Auditioning, They Raised Me Up: A Black Single Mother and the Women Who Inspired Her, Damn Near White: An African American Family’s Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success, and Melody for Murder: A Bertie Bigelow Mystery. She is a former faculty member for the Tobin Community School and New England Conservatory of Music, a former lecturer at Fitchburg State College, Emmerson College and Emmanuel College, received her Bachelor's degree from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and her Masters at Eastman School of Music. Her experience in the competitive environments at Oberlin and Eastman put her in a great position to understand what her students at Berklee are working with on a daily basis.
https://college.berklee.edu/people/carolyn-wilkins
Charlene Carroll Black hair faces many challenges, which is why master hair stylist Charlene Carrroll is highly recognized for developing wrapping starting in the 1970s. A Boston native born in 1950, she was raised in the projects and turned her skill with Black hair into her success. She sees hair wrapping as a way to calm the hair and put it into a resting position, brushing or wrapping the hair to lay against the scalp, which is then secured using a silk scarf. Used to protect hair from frizzing in high humidity or moisture, it's often a technique used at home, but has begun to appear publicly more often. This allowed her clients to protect their hair while they were going from the salon to their home, work, or other location, ensuring that her clients would look just as great when they got home as they did in the salon. This dedication to excellence has made Carroll the go-to stylist in Boston as well as the rest of the East Coast, promoting hair education as well as style. She's shared the technique across the US and internationally, though she only takes a few private clients in her retirement.
https://www.theroot.com/gifted-black-hairstylist-created-the-doobie-wrap-1850337893
Charlotte F. Grimké Born into a free Black family in Philadelphia in 1837, Charlotte Grimke was an abolitionist, educator, and author of five volumes of diaries published posthumously. With her family active in the abolitionist movement, she was educated by tutors at home due to segregation in the Philadelphia school system. Attending Higginson Grammar School in the more tolerant Salem, Massachusetts as the only Black student, she began keeping the first of her diaries. She then chose to begin her career as an educator, matriculating at the Salem Normal School, now Salem State University, as a teacher. Graduating in 1856, she worked at the Epes Grammar School, an all-white school in Salem. She began writing poetry which was published in antislavery periodicals such as The Liberator. During the Civil War, she volunteered to serve as a teacher to educate formerly enslaved Blacks on South Carolina's Sea Islands. Her experiences there, including an 1864 two-part essay "Life on the Sea Islands' ' were published in Atlantic Monthly. Her passion in serving formerly enslaved individuals led her to work as the secretary at the Freedman's Union Commission Boston branch. Her dedication to abolition and women's suffrage lasted through the end of her life.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Forten-Grimke
Charlotte Matthews-Nelson Working at Northwestern University since her graduation in 1979, Charlotte Matthews Nelson is the program coordinator for Northeastern Law School's Center for Law, Equity, and Race. As one of 69 Bostonian civil rights leaders honored during the unveiling of a statue of the embrace of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King in Boston Common. Her name was engraved along with that of her late husband, Leon T. Nelson, on plaques embedded in the paving stones that surround the new statue. As a Northeastern professor, her decades of service to the university, community, and city at large include activities with the NAACP, her roles in local leadership, and her leadership within the university to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
https://crrj.org/efforts/northeastern-law-center-for-law-equity-and-race-program-co-ordinator-honored-at-mlk-statue-unveiling/
Rep. Charlotte G. Richie As an experienced public servant and activist, Charlotte Golar Richie graduated with a Bachelors from Rutgers University, a Masters in journalism from Columbia University, and an MBA from Suffolk University. She's a former Peace Corps volunteer who is dedicated to serving her community to effect positive change. She has a deep commitment to civil rights and has held a range of government positions, including Chief of Housing and Director of the Neighborhood Development Department in Boston, as well as a Commissioner in the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. She was the seventh Black woman to be elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1994, where she chaired the Housing and Urban Development Committee, making her the first Black woman to chair a committee in her first term. After campaigning for Boston mayor in 2013 as the first Black female candidate, Richie is continuing to support women's leadership and women of color into public office. She is a board member with the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus, the Interim Advisory Board Chair for the University of Massachusetts Boston Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy, and as a Co-Founder and Board Chair of MAWOCC's Advisory Board.
https://mawocc.com/who-we-are-mawocc/our-advisory-board/charlotte-golar-richie-2/
Ché Madyun Serving as the first Board President of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a nonprofit organization working to create a diverse, high-quality, and vibrant neighborhood, Che Madyun is working on building an urban village, focusing on a vision for the future that develops local cooperation, empowerment, and hard work. With 300 new affordable housing units on previously vacant lots, a town common for neighborhood events, community gardens, and a mural to celebrate the neighborhood's ethnic diversity, Madyun is focused on bringing economic stability and growth, revitalized business, enriched cultural life, and reclamation of locations that have been environmentally damaged. The neighborhood is located along the Roxbury-Dorchester line, and is focused on creating a safer, more sustainable, and flourishing environment for residents. Born in 1953, she moved to the Dudley Street neighborhood in 1976 after her graduation from Emerson College with a degree in dance.
https://www.umbrasearch.org/catalog/bb37fb3101769a46a8058f6acdb38d3a85a6086a
https://www.nps.gov/mabi/learn/historyculture/che-madyun.htm
Chloe Spear Born around 1749, Chloe Spear was a Black woman born in Africa who experienced life both as a slave and as a free woman in Boston during the Revolutionary War. She authored a memoir that was anonymously published under the name "Lady of Boston" to provide a Christian testimony of her life story alongside her spiritual development, providing commentary on both slavery and Christianity. Enslaved at approximately age 12, she arrived in Philadelphia in 1761, then was purchased as an enslaved person by a prominent Boston family. She was free to engage in several domestic avocations, and her skills were valued, but when her owner caught her learning to read, he threatened to punish her terribly. Baptized and married after the Revolutionary War, Spear and her husband, with whom she'd had seven children, opened a boarding house for workers and sailors when Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783. Following her husband's death, she opened the establishment for religious meetings and social gatherings for all races, making her beloved by the community at large before her 1815 passing. Following her death, she was featured in five obituaries and a biography was published in a Baptist missionary magazine shortly after her passing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloe_Spear
Chrystal Kornegay Serving as the Executive Director of MassHousing, an organization that lends approximately $1 billion every year to preserve or produce affordable housing, Chrystal Kornegay has helped many in the Boston area secure quality homes either as a rental or homeowner. With a Down Payment Assistance program, Workforce Housing initiative and nationally-recognized homeownership production in communities of color program. Prior to her position at MassHousing, she served under the Baker-Polito administration's Housing and Community Development undersecretary, allowing her to advocate for increased state capital dollars by 18%, increased rental subsidies for low-income families by 42% and dramatically reduced homeless families housed in motels. She has also served as President and CEO of Urban Edge, which is one of New England's largest corporations focused on community development, and is cited as the reason for the organization's $3 million increase in net asset position. Kornegay is on multiple boards, including the National Council of State Housing Agencies, National Housing Trust, Bipartisan Policy Center Advisory Council, and is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston. She has a Bachelor's degree from Hunter College and a Masters from MIT.
https://www.masshousing.com/en/about/leadership
Chaplain Clementina M. ChéryAs the CEO and co-founder of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute located in Boston, Chaplain Clementina Chery has two decades of experience serving families impacted by homicide, giving her a unique skill set for best practices in homicide response. Her focus is transforming homicide response so that families are treated with compassion and dignity. Selected as a 2017 Barr Fellow for her effective, visionary leadership, as a 2016 Social Innovator by the Social Innovation Forum in recognition of her approach to social issues, and many other awards over the years. Her groundbreaking publications for murder victim families help family members who have gone through homicide trauma to cope and heal. Her training with public health and law enforcement professionals allows her organization to better help those impacted by homicide and interrupt retaliatory violence cycles. In addition to her extensive training and many honorary degrees, she is recognized as one of the most influential leaders in Boston for her peacemaking efforts. She was ordained in 2012 as a senior chaplain under the International Fellowship of Chaplains.
https://www.chaplainchery.com/
Cleora Francis-O’Connor When working through the traumatic loss of one of her loved ones, Cleora Francis-O'Connor was seeking healing and balance, finding it through the intentional practice and meditative modes of yoga. At that point, she decided to use that experience to help others who had experienced trauma and were in need of healing. As a nonviolence activist and advocate, she has incorporated these practices into every yoga class and workshop she has taught over the past 19 years. With a strong focus on healing the heart and soul following a loss or trauma, she has practiced for over 21 years and teaches Hatha Yoga at Touch Massage, Yoga RI, and a range of other community centers. Outside of her active work in teaching and healing with yoga, she works as an IT specialist, and is a board member of the Nonviolence Institute of Rhode Island.
https://kripalu.org/presenters-programs/presenters/cleora-francis-oconnor
Colette Phillips As an active civic leader on the Board of Trustees of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Mass General Hospital President's Council, and Eastern Bank, Colette Phillips is also founder and President of Get Konnected! as well as The GK Fund and is president and CEO of Colette Phillips Communications. Phillips is a values-based leader and trusted advisor for many C-suite executives and teams in Boston. She is an advocate for her clients, leveraging public relations branding along with internal/external communications strategies. She works with many companies to improve engagement, diversity, and inclusion. Her contributions have allowed many large corporations to establish inclusive, healthy working environments. Her premier inclusive networking event Get Connected! is known for changing how the conversations of diversity take place. The GK100 that she created is considered to be the first comprehensive list of the 100 most influential people of color in Boston. With a Bachelors and Masters from Emerson College, Phillips has been honored with the Boston Business Journal's 2016/2016 Power 50 list, Boston Magazine's 2018 100 Most Influential, has been cited by Boston Magazine in its Influencer feature, and by the Boston Globe as a social connector and A-lister.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/colettephillips/
Cora R. McKerrow One long-standing cornerstone of the South End Black community in Boston was the Reid Funeral Home, which was founded by Cora Reid McKerrow and her brother Millard Fillmore Reid in 1926. At a time when women, and especially Black women, were rarely entrepreneurs, McKerrow was born in 1888 in Churchland, Virginia, as one of 15 children. Coming to Boston, the funeral home was not her first business, working as a chiropodist and as a beautician until she went into business with her brother as they opened the funeral home. Following her brother's death in the early 1940s, McKerrow operated the business on her own for an additional 30 years until she chose to close it in 1971, after 45 years of successful management and service, during two-thirds of which she operated the business entirely on her own, making her an early business star in Boston for Black female entrepreneurs.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Danielle S. Allen, Ph.D. As the director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics and a professor at James Bryant Conant University, Danielle Allen is a seasoned leader of nonprofits, advocate for democracy, distinguished author, and a professor of ethics, public policy, and political philosophy. Her focus on making the world a better place for the young has taken her through her college career and teaching, to leadership of a $60 million university division and driving change of a $6 billion foundation. She has advocated for democracy reform, civic education, and cannabis legalization. Her leadership during the COVID pandemic in 2020 rallied coalitions and developed solutions for the first Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience. She was the first Black woman to run for a statewide office in Massachusetts, and was the winner of the Library of Congress Kluge prize, recognizing scholarly achievement in disciplines outside of the Nobel Prize. She has been a chair of the Mellon Foundation and Pulitzer Prize board, focusing on the Democratic Knowledge Project and Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiatives, among many others. She has written many books on civil rights, political thought leadership, and many other topics.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/danielle-allen
DeAma BattleWith classical training in dance, DeAma Battle began focusing on dance forms with roots in Africa starting in the 1960s, helping many in the area to return to their roots with these traditional dance forms and how they have changed with European and American cultural contacts. Founding The Art of Black Dance and Music in 1975, her goal of presenting and preserving the rich history of African folklore, music, and dance has been ever present in her work. Studying the dance movements and steps with masters from Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, and West Africa, she probed deeper into the field while abroad, on dance-study tours to the Caribbean, Africa, and other countries with a strong African heritage. She considers herself to also be a dance archivist, recording the history of dance before it's lost. Among her goals is unifying individuals of African descent by illustrating cultural similarities throughout the African Diaspora. Finding similarities in traditional movement in today's West Africa, Traditional Capoeira in Brazil and break dancing in America, she has chosen to record her heritage in motion.
https://www.bostondancealliance.org/bda_staff/deama-battle/
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol22/iss1/8/
Deborah B. Prothrow-Stith, M.D. Appointed as the first female Commissioner of Public Health for Massachusetts in 1987 by Governor Dukakis, Deborah Prothrow-Stith has an impressive record of leading healthcare, life sciences, non-for-profit institutions and academic organizations on their executive talent and leadership. A public health leader, she broke new ground while a physician in inner-city Boston, and is now dean and Professor of Medicine for Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science College of Medicine. She has authored several books focused on preventing violence and a range of additional public health issues. Founding the first Office of Violence Prevention in a state health department in the country, she also expanded HIV/AIDS prevention programs while increasing programs for drug treatment and rehabilitation. During her husband's tenure as US Ambassador to Tanzania, she worked with numerous organizations, including the Muhimbili National Hospital and the NGO operating the country's first HIV clinic. Graduating from Spelman College and Harvard Medical, she completed her residency at Boston City Hospital, and has received ten honorary doctorate degrees, and was inducted into the honor roll of women physicians in 2015 by the Massachusetts Medical Society.
https://www.cdrewu.edu/people/deborah-b-prothrow-stith-md
Deborah C. Jackson With a strong commitment to social justice in higher education, Deborah Jackson became the fourth President of Cambridge College in 2011, but with her came over three decades of leadership across numerous educational institutions in Boston. Her goal was to move the College's mission forward of providing time-efficient, academically exceptional, and affordable higher education for those who have had limited or no access. Named as one of America's Top 100 Graduate Degree Producers by Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine, Cambridge now ranks third in awarding business or commercial Masters degrees to Black students. Prior to this role, Jackson served as CEO of the American Red Cross of Eastern Massachusetts, Vice President of the Boston Foundation, Senior VP of Boston Children's Hospital, and CEO of Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries. She has also served on numerous boards, task forces, and commissions focused on eliminating racial and ethnic disparities, diversity, student assistance, college and university steering and operational boards, and as the Vice Chair of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts Board of Directors and board member of the New England Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors, among many others.
https://www.cambridgecollege.edu/office-president/presidents-biography
Dianne Walker Born in Boston in 1951, Dianne Walker is a jazz tap dancer with an elegant, fluid dancing style that is rhythmically complex, yet delicate. Overcoming adversity in a childhood polio infection, she was sent to dance classes to get appropriate leg exercise as therapy. Working with instructors who had successfully performed in a range of New England and New York vaudeville circuits, Walker learned quickly. However, she put her dancing dreams on hold, first when her family moved due to her new stepfather's military career, and then again when she married at age 18. However, a chance social affair at Prince Hall Masonic Temple led to new lessons and teaching Saturday children's classes as Leon Collins' protege in 1978. After seeing how the art was declining in Boston in the early 1980s, she began recruiting new young talent for films and live performances, some of whom would go on to full-length tap musicals and Broadway productions. Attending the 1985 International Tip Tap Festival, she performed her first tap soloist work. Determined to bring tap back to the next generation of young Black dancers over creating the perfect art, she's considered by many as the top transitional figure between generations.
Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, J.D. As the first Black woman elected to the Massachusetts State Senate, Dianne Wilkerson was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1955. Her family fled north to Springfield to escape Ku Klux Klan harassment, and she graduated from the High School of Commerce in 1973, followed by a Bachelors at the American International College and her JD at the Boston College Law School in 1981. She clerked at the Massachusetts Appeals Court until the next year when she became deputy counsel to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Continuing her career in a range of organizations, she became the first Black woman in Boston to become a partner at a major law firm at Roche, Carnes, & DeGiacomo, where she remained until she was elected to the State Senate in 1992, becoming the highest-ranking black official in Massachusetts when serving her sixth term in 2005. Focusing on bills that protect Black, minority, and low-income Massachusetts residents, including collecting data related to racial profiling in traffic stops and curbing high-interest rates on bank loans, her focus on championing policies that improve the lives of individuals who have traditionally been underserved by government is second to none.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/honorable-dianne-wilkerson
Doris Bland With the Massachusetts' welfare system in detestable shape, it took a group of poor Black mothers, led by Doris Bland, to create change within the system. women in the Dudley Street Area Planning Action Council started Mothers for Adequate Welfare in 1964, electing Doris Bland as their first president. Begun as an interracial membership list of 1,000 members, or roughly 1 out of every 13 women on welfare in the City of Boston, by discovering the challenges facing mothers, creating a system that an experienced mother would go to the required intake interview with a new recipient, researching the welfare system for Massachusetts, and taking collective action on issues that impacted the members, such as visiting public officials, sit-ins, and protests. Bland's statement following a serious altercation and riot around Grove Hill Welfare Office showcased the disrespectful and rude behavior the mothers were being regularly treated to, including being treated with suspicion and insulting behavior. Their actions, led by Doris Bland, led to a completely new welfare system for the state, with a board that Bland was given a seat on to oversee the system.
https://masscommons.wordpress.com/2022/05/04/a-peoples-history-of-the-new-boston-mothers-for-adequate-welfare/
Rep. Doris Bunte As the first Black woman to serve in the Massachusetts Legislature, Doris Bunte has always focused on the most vulnerable individuals in the state as well as in the city of Boston. Moving from New York City to Boston with three children in 1953, she moved into the Orchard Park Housing Projects, where she soon joined the management council as well as co-founding the Boston Public Housing Tenants Policy Council in 1968. She followed this action in 1969 with her nomination to the Boston Housing Authority Board, which made her the first public housing tenant to serve on the board. She was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representative in 1973, where she founded the Massachusetts Legislative Black Caucus as well as the Massachusetts Caucus of Women Legislators. She also enrolled in Harvard in 1978, where she earned her Masters degree in 1982. Following 12 years in the state legislature, she became the director of the Boston Housing Authority, where she moved public housing integration forward. She then moved to work at Northeastern and Boston Universities in 1992, where she enjoyed 18 successful years prior to her retirement in 2010.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-doris-bunte
Dorothy Haskins Concerned about the state of the welfare system in the 1960s, Dorothy Haskins started an ad hoc group of mothers to agitate around welfare issues. The group eventually linked up with Mothers for Adequate Welfare in 1965, followed by the National Welfare Rights Organization in 1966. With nobody to work on the issues in Columbia Point, the organization was designed to bring information to the community residents who were on welfare. A few mothers initially got together outside of the nearest supermarket with a table and buttons on welfare rights. Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., the organization saw racism from the side of the welfare office and wanted the disrespect and related issues to stop. Organizing peaceful demonstrations based out of the projects where Blacks and other minorities lived, other groups began to see how they could band together to create a stronger community and make sure that peoples' needs were being met. The actions of individuals such as Dorothy Haskins and Mothers for Adequate Welfare have inspired a new generation of Black women leaders focused on diversity, equity, and inclusiveness across all races and classes.
https://economichardship.org/2019/11/peoples-history-episode-2-grove-hall/
Dorothy West In the Harlem Renaissance, Dorothy West, a Bostonian born in 1907, was referred to as "the kid" due to her status as the youngest of the artists and writers when she moved there in 1925. A talented writer, West had her first story published in the Boston Post when she was only 14. In a 1926 contest that was sponsored by the Urban League's magazine Opportunity, she tied with Zora Neale Hurston for second place. Taking on a small part in the play Porgy in 1927, she toured with it for a couple of years, before traveling to Russia in 1932 with a group of 20 other Black artist to make a film on racism in America. Though the film was never made, she remained in Russia for a year. West took a position with the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression, and earned money from 1940 into the 1960s writing two short stories every month for the New York Daily News. Moving to Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard in the 1940s, she wrote a regular column in the Vineyard Gazette. She published her first novel in 1948, and her second novel was published in 1995.
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collections/dorothy-west
Detective Dorothy E. Harrison Serving from 1944 to 1972, Dorthy Harrison was the first Black woman detective in Boston. Though she was originally trained as an opera singer, the graduate from Boston University felt that she was born a generation early to be successful at music, feeling that the world was not yet ready for a black opera singer, and felt that police work would provide her with a better future than music would. Within her first week of service, she disarmed a man who was distraught, flagging down a passing patrol vehicle and retrieving the gun so that the suspect could be taken to the station. She was in demand regularly as a speaker, sharing her experiences with the world. She inspired the next generation of Black women in police work, with others joining her many years into her career.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B8MGNRfguG8/
https://www.facebook.com/roxsafetynet/posts/1247347581969352/
https://100clubmass.org/massachusetts-female-police-officers-a-138-year-history/
E. Alice Taylor Teachers touch the lives of all they teach, and E. Alice Taylor, a community organizer and educator from Boston, was no exception. Born in 1892 in Alexander, Arkansas, she earned her degree from Arkansas Baptist College in 1913, moving to Boston between that time and 1927, when she founded a branch of the Annie Malone's Poro Beauty School and Beauty Shop, a vocational school she managed for 15 years until World War 2 forced the school to close. At the time of closing, Taylor was employing 15 teachers to serve 150 students annually and was one of the largest minority-owned businesses in New England. She also founded and was president of the Professional Hairdressers Association of Massachusetts and was an officer and board member of the NAACP for half a century. She also served with many other community service organizations, such as the League of Women for Community Service, the Massachusetts State Union of Women's Clubs, the Charitable Health Association of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Human Relations Committee. Passing away at the age of 94, she left a lasting impression on the community.
https://chalkboardchampions.org/e-alice-taylor-educator-social-reformer-and-community-organizer/
Edmonia Lewis Born in New York in 1844, Edmonia Lewis was the first sculptor of multi-racial Black and Indigenous from America who received international recognition. Growing up with her mother's tribe after being orphaned at a young age, she attended Ohio's Oberlin College, which was one of the first post-secondary institutions to accept Black female students. She had a strong interest in fine arts but was forced to leave the school prior to graduation due to false accusations of poisoning. Traveling to Boston, she established herself as an artist while studying under a local sculptor and creating portraits of abolitionist heroes. She became involved with a group of American women sculptors and moved to Rome at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. Beginning to work in marble, she did all of her own sculpting work, a different approach as most sculptors would hire workmen local to the area to carve final pieces. This may have been done from fear that if she didn't, her work would not be accepted as her own. She sculpted figure works based on her Indigenous heritage, the oppression of Black persons, and Biblical scenes.
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/edmonia-lewis-2914
Edna R. BrownAs the first Black woman to perform dentistry in Cambridge, Edna Brown was a dentist who graduated from Columbia University and was a very early member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Psi Omega chapter. Though not much is known about her life, being able to attend Columbia as a Black woman means that she probably attended after 1923, as Columbia University recognizes Elizabeth Delaney as the University's College of Dental Medicine's first Black female graduate.
https://www.akaboston.org/chapter-history
https://thelowdown.alumni.columbia.edu/history_of_women_at_columbia
Edna V. Bynoe As a strong community activist, Edna Bynoe was one of the moving forces to change Orchard Park to Orchard Gardens Community. As the Orchard Park Projects declined in the 1960s and 1970s, it was necessary for community leaders like Bynoe to step forward and push for change. In addition to leading the push to update the Orchard Park Projects to a more modern, safe housing environment, Bynoe also headed the design team that opened the Orchard Gardens Pilot School in the community, providing opportunities for better education for children in the community. She also served on many boards and committees to help steer the direction that the community was taking throughout these changes, acting as a vital voice within the organizations shaping the new community by representing the residents of the existing community.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/edna-bynoe-obituary?id=23410460
Ekua Holmes A collage artist who focuses on the power of faith, hope, and self-determination, Ekua Holmes investigates family relationship dynamics, histories, and impressions that come out in her artwork. Growing up in Roxbury, she completed her Bachelors from MassArt in 1977 and has become an educator on collage workshops, been a visiting artist and lecturer, and held a range of public and private institution artist residencies in New England. Holmes is also an illustrator, focusing on children's books and receiving numerous awards for her work. She also serves as the Boston Art Commission's Commissioner and Vice-Chair, overseeing public artworks in and on properties of the City of Boston. She serves MassArt as the Associate Director of the Center for Art and Community Partnerships, allowing her to coordinate “sparc!” the ArtMobile that contributes to multidisciplinary and community-based arts programs.
https://www.ekuaholmes.com/about
Elaine W. Steward As a senior Vice President and Assistant General Counsel for the Boston Red Sox, Elaine Steward has worked on a wide range of legal issues with the franchise since she joined in 1988. As a recipient of a Jackie Robinson Foundation scholarship, she graduated with honors from St. John's University, receiving her JD from the University's School of Law. She interned at the New York Mets public relations department as well as the Officer of the Commissioner of Baseball in its Executive Development program. She was selected as a top Ten Outstanding Young Leaders of Boston, was elected into the Academy of Women Achievers for the YWCA, and received the St. John's University President's Medal, among many other honors that she has received over the years. She was also featured in the Red Sox' Women in Baseball exhibit in Fenway Park, the National Baseball Hall of Fame Women in Baseball exhibit located in Cooperstown, New York, and Massachusetts Senate President Karen Spilka's State House Herstory Exhibit.
https://www.mlb.com/redsox/team/front-office/elaine-steward
Eliza A. Gardner Acting as a community activist and religious leader, Eliza Gardner was born in New York City in 1831, moving to Boston's West End with her family while still young. Growing up in Beacon Hill's abolition center, she grew up in one of the Underground Railroad stations, during which time she also knew abolitionist leaders including Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, Lewis & Harriet Hayden, and Fredrick Douglass. Active in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, she began teaching Sunday school and became Boston's superintendent of Sunday schools in the 1880s. She also assumed a range of leadership roles in the church, raising money to raise churches and support ministers. She also organized the church's Woman's Home and Foreign Missionary Society, which was a women-operated group that supported missionary work. This allowed her to push for equality for women in religious organizations, as she had grown frustrated with male leadership who opposed women stepping into the same roles. She was also a founding member of the Woman's Era Club and helped organize the first National Conference for Colored Women in America, serving as the chaplain in 1895. She continued promoting temperance, anti-lynching, and women's rights movements over the years, continuing to address groups until 1917, five years before her passing in 1922.
https://www.nps.gov/people/eliza-ann-gardner.htm
Elizabeth Blakeley For many enslaved persons seeking freedom, Boston was a common destination and hub on the Underground Railroad, including for Elizabeth Blakeley, who was born into slavery in North Carolina. After receiving awful treatment at the hands of her enslaver, Blakeley ran away at age 15 in December 1849, and hid on a vessel that was bound for Boston, preventing local authorities from finding her. After surviving a four-week-long journey, she was able to arrive in Boston, living as a free individual. After a few weeks spent recovering from her bid for freedom, during which she was welcomed and given sanctuary by the free Black community in Boston, she shared her story at an abolitionist meeting that was held in Faneuil Hall, during which times Thomas Jones, who had seen her treatment at the hands of her enslavers, stated that if he repeated what he had seen, those present would hardly be able to bear it. Following the meeting, she was able to choose the path her life took, marrying and living briefly in Connecticut and Toronto before returning to Boston for the rest of her life, living to the age of 84 and remaining active in the community.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/elizabeth-blakeley-s-escape-to-freedom.htm
Elizabeth Freeman Elizabeth Freeman, a brave woman who was enslaved, challenged the principles of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution as the first Black woman to file a successful lawsuit for freedom which would lead to the outlawing of slavery by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Born in New York, she was born around 1744, growing up and given to her enslaver's daughter upon her marriage. Freeman overheard her enslaver, a judge, discussing the language used in the Sheffield Declaration, including a statement “mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” The same language was used in the Declaration of Independence and the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, so Freman received help from an attorney who drafted the Sheffield Declaration to fight for her freedom, who took the case as a test case to decide if slavery was constitutional under the state Constitution. She, along with another enslaved person, was granted freedom, 30 shillings, and trial expenses. Following her freedom, she became a prominent healer, midwife, and nurse, buying her own home where she could live with her children, passing at approximately age 85 in 1829.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/elizabeth-freeman
Elizabeth Riley Deeply involved in the Massachusetts abolitionist movement, Elizabeth Riley was known for harboring Shadrach Minkins, a fugitive enslaved person, in the attic of her home at 70 Southac Street, where she lived until her death in 1855 at the age of 64. Born in Boston in 1791, her strongly-held beliefs backed up her actions. She involved herself with numerous progressive political organizations, including the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the African-American Female Intelligence Society, and fundraising for creating The Liberator, the nation's first significant abolitionist newspaper. She was also part of the Colored Citizens of Boston which called for the abolition of slavery. She worked as a nurse later in her life but never learned to read or write, living an exemplary and courageous life despite this issue.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/riley-elizabeth-1791-1855/
Elizabeth Williams As president and CEO of Roxbury Technology, Beth Williams is the owner of the largest Black female-owned Boston business, routinely giving back to the community. Working at Freedom Electronics following her graduation from Brown University, she decided to grow her experience at Raytheon Company in their Missile Systems division. After five years, she decided to move into a more impactful role where she could help women and minority entrepreneurs, she joined Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, eventually becoming the Director of Business Diversity for the organization. She then succeeded her father as the CEO and President of Roxbury Technology in 2002. She has used her position to be a socially responsible entrepreneur, providing quality, wage-earning jobs for those who are often passed by for employment. A strong supporter of CORI reform, over 15% of her workforce includes ex-gang members, ex-offenders, and similar disadvantaged persons. Focused on environmental sustainability, job creation, and social responsibility, Williams' leadership has led to many achievements and awards, including WPO's 50 fastest growing women businesses, WBENC's Shining Star award, GNEMSDC's President's award, President and Community Leadership awards from the Eastern Ma Urban League, and the Ernst & Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year award for New England.
https://www.mssconnect.com/about-keynote-speaker-beth-williams.html
Ella Little-Collins Though Black History Month often mentions Malcolm X, his half-sister Ella Little-Colins is often overlooked. His autobiography brings parts of her influence and life to living color. Born in Butler, Georgia in 1914, she worked as a secretary for Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., partnered with her sisters in store ownership, and invested in real estate. During that time, Malcolm came to live with Ella after being shuttled between foster homes when his mother was no longer able to care for her children. She helped him to secure his first serious job as a train cook. Though she was very concerned when he was arrested, tried, and convicted, she stayed loyal and welcomed home when he'd finished his sentence. Like her famous brother, she joined the Nation of Islam and helped establish the Boston mosque in the 1950s, but was beginning to have her doubts about the organization. When her brother was assassinated, she became the president of the Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Muslim Mosque, but even as the organizations foundered, she continued speaking out on a wide range of issues, passing in 1996 following a long struggle with diabetes.
https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2020/02/27/ella-little-collins-malcolm-xs-resourceful-half-si/
Ellen Banks With a strong love of art and music, Ellen Banks has combined her passion in her artwork. Deciding that she had to choose one or the other, she went with visual arts. The joy of painting led to her unique art style, with her passion for piano being worked into her art. The scores she has collected over the years has been the foundation for her music paintings. Now based in Brooklyn, Banks has changed written musical scores into vivid color patterns. This unique approach transforms the notations into abstract patterns, often geometric circles, oblongs, and squares, with different keys represented by different colors that the paintings are saturated with.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2011/artist-combines-two-loves-color-and-music
Ellen S. Craft Born in Georgia in 1826, Ellen Craft was an escaped enslaved person who began lecturing on the abolitionist movement circuit. With very pale skin, she helped her husband, William, and herself escape slavery by posing as a white gentleman traveling to Philadelphia for medical treatment with her husband acting as her slave. To cover her inability to write, she kept her arm in a sling with a bandage wrapped around her head to hide that she did not have a beard. Traveling initially by train and then by sea, the couple traveled to Maryland, after which the couple moved on to Boston. They worked in cabinetmaking and sewing to support themselves, and then became famous on the lecture circuit, with stories published in the Georgia Journal, Macon Telegraph, Boston Globe, and New York Herald. When the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was passed, Ellen and William were protected by the League of Freedom, but the couple fled to England, where they lived for 18 years and had five children. They returned to the US in 1869 to open a cooperative farm for former enslaved persons, with plans for a school. Slander and Ku Klux Klan activity burned their first plantation and then forced the second plantation and school into bankruptcy.
https://www.georgiawomen.org/ellen-smith-craft
Ellen S. Jackson An educator and activist, Ellen Jackson was known for her activity in founding Operation Exodus, which was a program designed to bus students from overcrowded, mostly Black Boston schools to less crowded, mostly white schools in the 1960s, creating a path for desegregation of the schools in Boston. A Roxbury native, she was born in 1935, belonged to the NAACP Youth Council as a teen and graduated from Boston State College in 1958, followed by a Masters in education from Harvard in 1971. From 1962 to 1964, she was the parent coordinator for the Northern Student Movement that organized Black parents and pushed for student equal rights. She worked in voter registration drives and pushed for better representation on the Action for Boston Community Development board of directors. Because local schools pushed Black children to enter vocational training instead of college, she formed the Roxbury-North Dorchester Parents' Council in 1965. She received a document that showed how many students and seats were in each classroom and school in Boston, founding the program Operation Exodus, with Jackson as the executive director. Over a four-year period, the program transported over 1,000 students to less-crowded schools. She worked with many other initiatives and organizations over the years, until her death from stroke in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Swepson_Jackson
Elma LewisA Boston cultural icon, Elma Lewis was born in 1921 and as a child, she was inspired by the call for racial pride and civic activism. She attended Emerson College, where she completed her Bachelors in 1943. She still taught fine arts at Harriet Tubman House, as well as dance and drama at other locations, and staged operas with the Robert Gould Shaw House Chorus. She founded the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1950, the Playhouse in the Park in Franklin Park in 1966, and the National Center for Afro-American Artists, which formed performing companies that toured worldwide in 1968. These educational institutions provided professional-level programs for Blacks focusing on both visual and performing arts. Designed with divisions that paralleled each other, she began the organizations with the goal of combining the best teaching and professional performance while affirming arts accessibility and ethnic heritage. Over 6,000 students received arts education due to her efforts, vision, and commitment. Not only did students at her school learn the arts, but learned to embrace the positive in black life while rejecting anything that was negative. She received many honors and served the community through numerous arts organizations.
https://bwht.org/elma-lewis/
Elva L. Abdal-Khallaq Elva Lee Abdal-Khallaq was born in Baldwin, Louisiana, then moved to Houston, Texas at a young age, where she met her husband. The couple moved to Boston with their children, where she played a vital role in the family's business and community activities and activism. Her passion was for children, not only her ten, but many others, a passion she lived out through work at the UMCA Clarendon Street Day Care, the Crispus Attucks Children's Center, and the St. Joseph's Community Center, she touched many lives in her Boston community. She had a strong belief in the power of education and community service, she received an Early Education Teaching Certificate from Harvard, was a valued member of the Roxbury Tai-Chi Academy, a treasurer for the Goldenaires at the Freedom House, and attended the Million Women March along with four generations of women in her family. She passed away at the age of 96 in 2010.
Estella L. Crosby Born in 1890 in Alexandria, Virginia, Estella Lee Crosby came to Boston as a social young woman to find her life's path. Finding it in community activism and her marriage of 50 years, Based out of a row house in the South End neighborhood of Greenwich Park, she ran not only a successful beauty salon where she informed women in the neighborhood about community activism organizations including the National Organization of Colored Women's Clubs and the Housewives League. Seeing the opportunity for stylish but affordable women's clothing, she opened a very popular retail store located on Columbus Avenue close to the family's home. Investing decades of her time into breaking down the obstacles to Black advancement in the city, she was a strong member of the Ebinezer Baptist Church, which was founded by freed slaves following the Civil War, and was never too tired to help anyone in need.
https://www.facebook.com/foresthillscemetery/posts/for-our-notable-resident-this-week-forest-hills-cemetery-honors-the-memory-of-es/3980133368685108/
Estelle A. Forster An early Black graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, Estelle Foster was dedicated to promoting musical education for Blacks in Boston. Over a period of three decades in the early 1900s, she started and directed the Ancrum School of Music, offering a wide range of lessons and courses including piano, organ, viola, voice, brass, wind, flute, harmony, and solfeggio. She also taught musical theory and a range of musical subjects, all operated out of the 74 W. Rutland Square location which included two dormitories, a cafeteria, and exceptional student facilities. Through this school, she brought musical education into the lives of thousands of Black students in the Boston area.
https://blackfacts.com/fact/ancrum-school-of-music
Eva Mitchell Working in a range of executive roles in education and career development, Eva Mitchell is a community activist and professional working to improve the lives of Black individuals through better educational and career development opportunities. An alumnus of Harvard, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania, Mitchell began her career as a co-founder, assistant principal, and teacher at a pilot school in the Boston Public School system. She moved into the position of Senior Director of Educational Quality and Accountability for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, then as a senior leadership coach for school turnaround at the Center of Collaborative Education. After several years between state and city educational organizations, she moved into the C-suite at Boston Public Schools as Chief Accountability Officer, then as the Chief Program Officer and Chief Executive Officer at the Coalition for Career Development Center, and has volunteered in a range of roles at numerous community educational and activism organizations, including the Blue Hill Avenue Task Force, Roxbury Community College, The Calculus Project, the Boston Community Leadership Academy, and many others.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eva-mitchell-b316486/
Evelynn M. Hammonds, Ph.D. As the founding director of MIT's Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine, Evelynn Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies, the Chair of the Department of the History of Science, and a Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard University, which she joined as Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2002. She's also an author with a wide range of scholarly articles to her experience. She received her Bachelors from Spelman College, with another Bachelors from Georgia Institute of Technology, her Masters from MIT, and a PhD from Harvard. She received a postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Social Science in Princeton, New Jersey's Institute of Advanced Study and has been a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer. She is also a current associate member of MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute. She has also served on numerous boards including the Museum of Science, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and Spelman College. She is a fellow of the Association of Women in Science and serves on the Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering.
https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/evelynn-m-hammonds
Fannie B. Williams As an educator, women's rights advocate, and political activist, Fannie Williams advanced opportunities for Blacks, focusing on social and educational reforms for Black women in the southern United States. Born in 1855 in Brockport, New York to a well-respected family, Williams aspired to become a teacher, becoming the first Black graduate from Brockport State Normal School in 1870, which is now SUNY Brockport. Fifteen years old at the time of her graduation, she moved to Washington, D.C. to educate freed blacks migrating to the city in the 1870s. She married and moved to Chicago where her husband started a successful law practice. She served as the first woman on the Board of the Chicago Public Library, then spoke at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition voicing concern over the lack of Black representation at the event, after which she helped found the National League of Colored Women and the National Association of Colored Women, as well as Provident Hospital and the NAACP. She was the only Black woman selected to eulogize Susan B Anthony at the National American Women Suffrage Association convention in 1907. She wrote extensively to progress Blacks in religion, education, and employment.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/williams-fannie-barrier-1855-1944/
Fern L. Cunningham-Terry Born in 1949 to a doctor and artist in Jackson Heights, New York, Fern Cunningham-Terry grew up in a home filled with pride in Black culture, art, and song. Living in Sitka, Alaska in a very diverse community from an early age, she had a passion for art that remained for her entire life. She moved to Boston following her high school graduation to attend Boston University's fine arts program, from which she traveled to France for additional art studies and then to Kenya to visit her sister. These two experiences formed her style. She began teaching at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1970, a commitment to teaching and the creative process that lasted throughout her life. She also taught in the Boston Public School system and the Park School in Brookline. She was a mentor to countless students over the years and created amazing public works of art that are found throughout the City of Boston. With a focus that honored Black history, communities, and history, she celebrated relationships and families. The first public sculpture she completed, Save the Children, was completed in 1973.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Fern-Cunningham-Terry
Florence Hagins As a black woman and single mother, Florence Hagins was the first enrollee in the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, following her denied application despite a decades-long work history. This program allowed her to purchase her new home, but she was not satisfied with renovating it and filling it with beautiful Black art. The next 15 years saw her volunteering with the Affordable Housing Alliance, then moving into an employee position where she counseled thousands of first-time homebuyers, encouraging them to clean up their credit and save money in case a home inspector or lawyer might be needed. She helped them determine if home ownership was right for them, and ran a post-purchase class to cover home ownership basics with over 9,000 students graduating. When Mayor Menino saw her coming, he would often jest, "Here comes trouble!" understanding the force of her personality.
https://www.wbur.org/the-remembrance-project/2015/05/27/the-remembrance-project-florence-hagins
Florence B. Price As the first Black woman recognized as a symphonic composer and the first to have her composition played by a major orchestra, Florence Beatrice Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas to a Black dentist and his music instructor wife. She continued her education at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, double majoring in organ and piano teaching. Moving to Atlanta to teach music, she met her husband there, and the couple returned to Little Rock. However, racial violence in the city forced the couple to move to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Price flourished in the city, studying composition, orchestration and organ from leading teachers, publishing four piano pieces in 1929. Financial issues during the Great Depression led to divorce, and to take care of her two daughters, she played at silent film screenings and composed radio ad songs under a pen name. She won a 1932 Wanamaker Foundation Award with first prize for her Symphony in E Minor and third for her Piano Sonata, earning $500. Her Symphony was played the next year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and several of her other works were played over the years by other symphonies.
https://www.pricefest.org/florence-price
Florence R. LeSueur
A Black activist, civic leader, and the first female president of an NAACP chapter, Florence LeSuer was born in 1898 in Pennsylvania. After attending Wilberforce University, she moved to Boston's South End in 1935 and was the first to head Boston's NAACP's educational committee, a passion she retained all her life as a champion of employment and educational rights for Blacks. She assisted with founding the Metropolitan Council for Education Opportunity to bus Black inner city students to suburban schools, to promote desegregation, as well as the push for equal education with college prep classes. Her time in the NAACP resulted in six Black men being hired as Boston Elevated Railway (now Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) drivers following demonstrations near the Dudley Square station. She served as president of Harriet Tubman House in 1959. A mother of 11 and grandmother of 52, she passed away at age 93.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_LeSueur
Florida R. Ridley
Born to a distinguished family in Boston in 1861, Florida Ridley was a Black civil rights activist, teacher, suffragist, writer, and editor, and was the first Black public school teacher in Boston, and was the editor of The Woman's Era, the first newspaper in country published for and by Black women, and she was also noted for her writing on Black history and New England race relations. . She came from a family of firsts, with her father being the first Black graduate of Harvard Law School, and the United States' first Black judge. Graduating from Boston Teachers' College in 1882, she taught at the Grant School until her marriage. She was one of the founders of the Second Unitarian Church in Brookline, and was active in the anti-lynching and early women's suffrage movement. With other women, she helped co-found several non-profit groups, including the Woman's Era Club and the League of Women for Community Service, as well as the predecessor of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. She passed in 1943.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Ruffin_Ridley
Frances E.W. Harper
Born free in Baltimore in 1825, Frances Harper was a poet, author, and lecturer who was the first Black woman to publish a short story, and was an influential reformer, abolitionist, and suffragist. She co-founded the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs based in Boston, and was educated at her uncle's school, then at Watkins Academy. Her first small poetry volume, Forest Leaves, was written at age 21. Five years later, she became the first female instructor at Union Seminary in Ohio. Shortly after, she became a vehement abolitionist, and wrote poetry for antislavery publications. Her second poetry volume was completed in 1854, as she left home to travel the U.S. and Canada lecturing for several state anti-slavery societies. She also promoted women's suffrage and rights as well as the temperance movement. Her experiences in travel began to appear in her novels, poetry, and short stories. Following the Civil War she took up the banner of women's rights more completely, pushing for suffrage for not only women, but Blacks as well. She spent the remainder of her career furthering the cause of equal rights, career opportunities, and education for Black women. She passed away in 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/frances-ellen-watkins-harper
Frederica M. Williams
As President and CEO of Whittier Street Health Care Center since 2002, Frederica Williams is a strong leader in transforming basic community healthcare into a model of urban healthcare in disadvantaged communities. Dedicated to social justice as well as health and economic equity and equality, Serving and embracing Boston's multicultural wealth, she has developed programs to support improvements in diverse population health while eliminating health and social inequity among low-income, minority, immigrant, and refugee populations. She advocates with exceptional compassion to improve the lives of Boston's most vulnerable residents. Through many outreach campaigns, she has directed programs bringing high-quality healthcare to patients. By engaging the community, she encourages healthy lifestyles and better outcomes for those in need. This proactive approach includes financial stewardship and visionary leadership for the healthcare organization, ensuring services and resources will be available long into the future, with a goal of increasing the number of persons served from 5,000 to 40,000 while delivering up to 220,000 annual clinic visits, as well as a mobile health van program, dental care, second location, and full-service pharmacy. Her vision has extended through the COVID-19 pandemic to the Whittier's Center Health Equity Research Center to facilitate health outcomes.
https://www.wshc.org/biography-of-frederica-m-williams/
Gail Snowden
Following her graduation from Harvard in 1967 with a Masters, Gail Snowden spent over 30 years at the Bank of Boston, moving up to a position of Executive Vice President. Continuing to make strong strides in the financial industry, Snowden has worked through multiple organizations as managing director of both Fleet Bank and Bank of America, but has returned to a strong focus on the community to help lift up those in need who have been disadvantaged, especially Black and minority individuals. She served as CFO of The Boston Foundation for three years, allowing her to advocate for those in need, then moved on to Freedom House as the CEO, a position she retired from. However, her dedication to serving the community continued to drive her, and she began Gail Snowden Consulting Services five years after her retirement to help organizations better serve the community.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gail-snowden-243b9710/
https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/gail-snowden-from-banking-to-foundation
Georgette Watson
Born in Philadelphia during World War Two, Georgette Watson was an anti-drug activist in Boston. After receiving a Bachelors and paralegal certifications from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Masters in education from Antioch University, she was a single mother as violence reigned with drug gangs from both Detroit and New York tried to expand into the city. She occupied apartments in locations with significant drug activity to engage with the community, draw police and press attention, and discourage drug dealing. She co-founded Drop-a-Dime, an organization focused on preventing crime by delivering tips from citizens confidentially to the Boston police and related federal agencies. Handling over 600 calls per month, the organization's process led to hundreds of arrests, including the imprisonment of Capsule Boys gang members and other large drug gangs active in Boston, as well as the shuttering of businesses and buildings that were nests of drug activity. Appointed in 1991 to lead the Massachusetts Governor's Alliance Against Drugs, she focused efforts on crime prevention programs over enforcement. Following a bout of breast cancer and kidney problems, she worked with the Maryland Transit Administration to improve transit access for individuals with disabilities before passing in 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgette_Watson
Geraldine P. Trotter
As an early Black civil rights activist and editor following the Civil War, Geraldine Trotter was born in Massachusetts in 1873. She was an associate editor of the Boston Guardian. After finishing her education at a local business college, she met W.E.B. Du Bois while he attended Harvard. She entertained elite guests and encouraged philanthropy through her efforts, aiding the City of Boston and other regional municipalities through community aid centers to support Black women and children in need. She also worked with the Public School Association, Boston Literary and Historical Society, Women's Anti Lynching League, and Equal Rights Association. When her husband was arrested following the 1903 Boston Riot, she went to work at The Boston Guardian in his place, eventually becoming a key driver in the paper's direction while writing columns on household management and fashion to drive female readership. Overall, the couple pursued a more militant promotion of civil rights, encouraging those who had been privileged with education to raise up those in need. During World War One, she dedicated herself to Soldiers' Comfort Units and the welfare of Black soldiers, but she passed shortly after during the Spanish flu pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Pindell_Trotter
Justice Geraldine S. Hines
Born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, Geraldine Hines graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1971. Becoming a staff attorney at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, she fought for prisoner's rights litigation, then moved to become a criminal law attorney in the Roxbury Defenders' Committee, working up through the organization until she became the Director of the Committee. She then served as co-counsel in Commonwealth v. Willie Sanders, addressing the issue of police misconduct in Black communities, which began the shift of her move to civil rights law, focusing on discrimination in education and special education as staff attorney at Harvard University Center for Law and Education. After several years of private practice from 1982, she began her career as a justice in 2001, prior to her appointment into the state court system by Governor Deval Patrick, she served as an associate justice until 2014, when she was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/associate-justice-geraldine-s-hines
Gladys Holmes
Born in 1892, Gladys Holmes was an author, educator, and social worker who was one of the former presidents of the League of Women for Community Service, one of the oldest organizations for Black women in the city of Boston. Providing many opportunities in Boston for women of color, the League was focused on advancing the position of Black women in the community through community service and collective action. By Holmes' time, the League was a strong social center for the Black community in Boston, providing a location for social dances, social services during the Great Depression, lodging for female college students due to segregation, and similar activities to support the community as a whole. It became a bastion of literacy and education for Boston's Black community.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Women_for_Community_Service
https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/02/24/boston-history-league-of-women-for-community-service
Gladys A.M. Perdue
A noted pianist and organist, Gladys Perdue was born in 1898 and attended the New England Conservatory of Music, receiving her Diploma in Pianoforte in 1924. Teaching music at the Tuskegee Institute from 1925 to 1931, she then returned to Boston, where she served as the organist at the Albanian Church in South Boston for over three decades. Her many performances in the South End included being musical accompaniment for the Women's Service Club's 464 Follies. With a strong dedication to the musical arts in the Black community of Boston, she was entertained shortly before her death in 1998 by a jazz sextet made up of New England Conservatory students known as the Back Bay Stompers at Goddard House.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Glendora M. Putnam, J.D.
Determined to promote civil rights and stop discrimination, Glendora Putnam was born in 1923 and graduated from Boston University School of Law in 1948, at a time when few women were practicing law, much less Black women. Growing up prior to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, she was determined to end segregation and discrimination, acting as a fighter for equality and justice. She served as the national board president of the YWCA, despite having been barred from entering her high school's chapter due to discrimination and segregation, determined to open the YWCA's doors to everyone. She was admitted to the bar in 1949 while facing the double discrimination of race and sex. She worked on Edward Brooke's campaign for office, joining him when he became Massachusetts Attorney General as the assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1964. She passed on a higher-paying Equal Opportunity Employment Commission opportunity to head the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination where she could enforce the new civil rights laws. She was nominated by President Ford as deputy assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity at HUD, making her the highest-ranking Black woman at the agency. She passed away in 2016.
https://www.bu.edu/law/record/articles/2016/celebrating-glendora-putnam-48-distinguished-alumna-and-civil-rights-pioneer/
Gloria Smith
Fostering sportsmanship and wellness, Gloria Smith helped found The Sportsmen's Tennis Club in 1961 as a nonprofit for tennis aficionados who wanted to share their love of the game with Boston children of all races, sexes, and backgrounds. Seeing the lack of opportunities for urban youth, her initial drive has become the organization's daily mission for the past 25 years, starting out in playgrounds in the South End as well as a Roxbury gym, but has grown to its own facility, becoming a vital part of the athletic community in Boston. Over time, over 500 youths have attended college on either partial or full tennis scholarships while over 400 youths have attained tennis association rankings on the local, regional, and national levels.
https://bostonsportsclubsouthendhere.blogspot.com/2012/09/after-few-lost-serves-dorchester-tennis.html
Rev. Gloria E. White-Hammond, M.D.
As the current co-pastor of Bethel AME Church in Boston, Gloria White-Hammond is a Swartz Resident Practitioner in Ministry Studies and the founder and executive director of My Sister's Keeper, a humanitarian and human rights organization partnering with diverse women in Sudan to reconcile and reconstruct their communities. As an organization led by women, it provides a unique insight into the needs of women of color in need in foreign countries. In the past, she graduated from Boston University, Tufts University School of Medicine, and Harvard Divinity School. She worked at the South End Community Health Center for over 27 years as a pediatrician, dedicating herself to serving the community through the health of its children, retiring in 2008 before moving on to new opportunities.
https://hds.harvard.edu/people/gloria-white-hammond
Rep. Gloria L. Fox
Born in 1942 and raised as a foster child, Gloria Fox has completed the MIT Community Fellows program, raised two sons in Roxbury's Whittier Street Housing Development, and served as a community organizer prior to entering politics. She was an essential element in stopping the Southwest Expressway project. She ran as a write-in candidate for the 7th Suffolk District in 1984, then won the seat in 1986, serving the 7th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts Legislature from 1987 until she retired in 2016. She served on multiple committees, including the House Committee on Steering, Policy, and Scheduling, the House Committee on Ways and Means, the Joint Committee on Ways and Means, and the Joint Committee on Housing, serving as the vice chair. She has taken a strong approach to child welfare, foster care, eliminating health disparities, criminal justice reform, and similar areas of interest to the minority community. She was the longest-serving woman in the Legislature at the time of her retirement. She also served on the boards of a wide range of organizations for women and people of color. She received the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators for her activism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Fox
Gwen Ifill
As both the moderator and the managing editor of Washington Week and both a co-anchor and the managing editor of The PBS Newshour, Gwen Ifill is a bestselling author, moderator, and anchor known for her work in the 2004 and 2008 elections. As the author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, Ifill rolled her experience covering eight Presidential campaigns into success in the 2008 campaign season, winning the George Foster Peabody Award after bringing Washington Week to live audiences in a 10-city tour. With a near-50-year history, the prime-time public affairs and news program on television is considered to be the longest-running program of its type, which brought together Washington's best journalists to discuss the week's major stories. With a career starting as a chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, White House correspondent for the New York Times, and acting as a political reporter on both local and national issues for The Washington Post, she also worked with Baltimore and Boston reporting organizations. She then moved to Washington Week and PBS NewsHour in 1999, where the Boston Simmons College graduate has received many honorary doctorates and awards.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/author/gwen-ifill
Harriet A. Jacobs
An early abolitionist and autobiographer, Harriet Jacobs was born into enslavement in 1813 in North Carolina but was taught to read at an early age. After suffering much abuse at the hands of her enslaver and bearing two children to a white neighbor, Jacobs chose to stand up against her treatment and refused to become her enslaver's concubine. Sent to work on a nearby plantation, she fled in an effort to remove her children from her enslaver's control. She escaped north in 1842, working first as a nursemaid in New York City and moving to Rochester to work at the antislavery reading room located above Frederick Douglass' The North Star newspaper. During the course of an abolitionist lecture tour, she was encouraged by Quaker reformer Amy Post to write the story of her enslavement. Her story, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1861 and is considered to be the most comprehensive slave narrative written by a woman, enumerating details to convey the harsh and emotionally-torn treatment enslaved women in the South experienced. She passed away in 1897, having relocated through Boston and several other cities before settling in Washington, D.C. following the Civil War.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harriet-Jacobs
Harriet B. Hayden
As a well-known activist and abolitionist, Harriet Hayden was born into slavery in 1816 in Kentucky. After marrying her husband in 1842 and bearing the couple's son, Jo, the family fled north with the aid of abolitionists Delia Webster and Calvin Fairbanks. They eventually traveled on to Canada in 1844. Drawn to help others flee slavery, the family returned to the United States in 1845 and settled in Boston's Beacon Hill area the next year, placing them in the center of the abolitionist movement in Boston. The family, now including a young daughter, worked with the Vigilance Committee of 1850 to aid and protect those escaping from slavery. Sheltering freedom seekers in their home for over a decade, which had been converted into a boarding house for the Underground Railroad, Harriet Hayden oversaw the daily operation of the boarding house as her husband tended his shop. Providing them with food, shelter, and protection on their voyage to freedom, she also provided a meeting and organizing space, becoming a more public figure later in life as she advocated for equal rights for all, moving from abolition to suffrage and temperance. Until her death in 1893, she tirelessly advocated for equal rights.
https://www.nps.gov/people/harriet-hayden.htm
Isabella Holmes
The Boston Vigilance Committee was linked hand-in-fist with the Underground Railroad and the anti-slavery movement, and at the center of the Boston abolitionist movement were Reverend Samuel Snowden and his daughter, Isabella Holmes. Assisting fugitives who came to or through Boston on the Underground Railroad, Holmes provided boarding to numerous fugitive slaves following the Fugitive Slave Law's enactment in 1850. Living with her husband on Holmes Alley, the family's boarding house was a central location for abolitionist activities in Boston. She passed away in relative obscurity some years later.
https://www.nps.gov/places/the-holmes-alley-house.htm
Isaura Mendes Dealing with loss due to street guidance is an issue that has plagued the Black community for many decades, and Isaura Mendes knew that when she lost her son Bobby to murder in 1995 that she needed to find an answer to this issue. As the founder of The Bobby Mendes Peace Legacy, she was further resolved to bring peace to violent streets after losing another son, Matthew, in 2006 in a drive-by shooting. Designed to provide support and programming for victims and survivors of street violence, the organization has focused on making a difference in the community for over 20 years, providing scholarships to schoolchildren in the community. Annual events to promote community unity and peace include holiday gift-giving celebrations, back-to-school barbecues, and peace walks that honor all those impacted by street violence. She incorporates her seven principles of peace into the organization, being unity, justice, forgiveness, courage, hope, faith, and love. She spreads her message at state prisons, community outreach, and healing trauma in the community.
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/promoting-hope-after-trauma-isaura-mendes-marks-20-years-pushing-peace
Jackie Jenkins-Scott As an innovative leader, Jackie Jenkins-Scott is an accomplished executive with three decades in leadership at mission-driven institutions, moving them from vulnerable positions to high levels of performance. Acting with vision and determination, she is a strategic leader who has worked with a wide range of organizations including the Boston Women's Fund, JJS Advising, Century Bank, Wheelock College, and The Dimock Center. With honorary doctorates in law, education, and humanities from University of Massachusetts Boston, Northeastern University, Suffolk University, Wheelock College, Bentley University, and Mt. Ida College, as well as her Masters degree from Boston University in 1973 and her Bachelors degree from Eastern Michigan University in 1971.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-jenkins-scott-136679101/
Jane C. Putnam As a prominent Boston abolitionist and a founder of an early temperance society in the city in the 1830s, Jane Clark Putnam was born to an educated Black family and married George Putnam in 1825. She was one of the earliest Black female entrepreneurs in the city, operating a hair salon in partnership with her brother. She and her husband worked together as some of the first community organizers to address Black grievances. Putnam was elected president of the women's auxiliary for the organization, fighting growing segregationist influences in the city. She also worked to petition the state legislature for school integration and was a prominent temperance activist, co-founding a Black women's temperance society in the city in 1833. She also founded the Garrison Juvenile Society in 1837.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Putnam
Jane Johnson Born at some point between 1814 and 1830 in Washington, D.C., Jane Johnson was an enslaved person who married and had three sons, but was then sold with two of her sons in early 1854, splitting the family up. She was enslaved by the assistant secretary of President Franklin Pierce, Mr. John Hill Wheeler. While on travel with Wheeler in Philadelphia in July 1855, Johnson was able to reach out to local abolitionists to arrange her escape with her two children, boys about age six and ten. She spoke to individuals at the hotel the group was staying at, and passed details to the abolitionists, who followed them to the boat the group would be leaving on. Despite Wheeler's protests, abolitionists met Johnson and her sons on a docked boat and escorted them off. At the time, the abolitionists told Johnson what her rights were under Pennsylvania law. She then moved to Boston after a summer of travel to clear up remaining legal issues surrounding her being freed. She had a strong personality and continued to speak out in support of abolition for many years. She remarried, and she sheltered fugitives on a minimum of two occasions, passing in 1872.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-story-of-jane-johnson.htm
Jean McGuire Growing up in and around Boston, Jean McGuire was often one of the only Black students in her classes, which exposed her to racism in the years prior to desegregation. Following her grandmother's death, she moved to Washington, D.C., attending an all-Black high school and finding many role models among the teachers who pushed her to excel. She finished her college degree at Boston State College in 1961, beginning her teaching career at the Louisa May Alcott School for two years before working at the Boston Public Schools as the district's first Black Pupil Adjustment Counselor, helping Black students in the recently desegregated schools handle the difficulties they were facing. She helped found the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity in 1966, a voluntary bussing program for students of color, becoming the organization's executive director in 1973 and serving in that role until 2016, acting as a strong advocate for Black students. She was also the first Black woman on the Boston City School Committee, where she showcased her tireless commitment to her students.
https://www.northeastern.edu/aai/services/special-collections/jean-mcguire/
Jessie G. Garnett, D.D.M. Born in 1897, Jessie Garnett was 11 when her family moved to Boston, where she attended Girl's High School, then Tufts College. When she was enrolled at the college's dental school, a dean argued that a mistake had been made. Overcoming both racism and sexism, she graduated from the Tufts School of Dental Medicine in 1920. She was the first Black woman to graduate from the school as well as the first Black dentist in Boston. Though business started out slow, it eventually picked up, with her office moving with her home several times over the years. Garnet was a charter member, along with six other college-educated Black women, who started the Psi Omega Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the oldest mostly-Black national sorority in the United States. She practiced in a range of locations around Boston for nearly 50 years, retiring in 1969. She also served with several organizations, including being a member of the NAACP and a board member at Freedom House, Boston YMCA, and St. Mark's Congregational Church. She passed away in 1976.
https://perspectivesofchange.hms.harvard.edu/node/170
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2016/05/19/dr-jessie-k-garnett-the-first-black-woman-to-practice-dentistry-in-the-hub/
Joan Wallace-Benjamin, Ph.D. In a long career as a leader and senior executive stretching back several decades, Joan Wallace-Benjamin has served in a range of organizations. Beyond acting in leadership roles, she has a strong focus on bringing out the best in people and generating leaders in the organizations she serves. She has worked with the Boys and Girls Club of Boston, ABCD Head Start, ABT Associates, The Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, Whitehead Mann, The Home for Little Wanderers, Governor-Elect Deval Patrick's transition team, and similar organizations. She has received numerous awards from Bostonian and Massachusetts organizations, as well as several honorary Doctorates from universities and colleges in the area. She has also served on several Boards, including Bridgewater State University, City Fresh Foods, The Heller School for Social Policy & Management, Chase Corporation, Scholar Athletes, and is a co-chair for the Families and Children Requiring Assistance Advisory Board and Advisory Board Chair for Wellesley Centers for Women.
https://www.jwallace-benjaminconsulting.com/bio
Josephine S. Ruffin Born to Beacon Hill's Black community in 1842, Josephine Ruffin was surrounded by the heart of Boston's abolitionist community and the ideals of equality, political representation, and justice. A community leader, organizer, and publisher, her activism in abolition and women's suffrage reflected her fighting spirit. Her first efforts focused on recruiting Black men for the Massachusetts 54th and 55th infantry regiments during the Civil War, representing the first two Black regiments for the state. Following the war, she worked with several charities to help Blacks in the South following emancipation, and participated in many service organizations in Boston. Considered to be one of her highest achievements, she established the Women's Era Club in 1893 to promote activism in Black women, including publishing The Woman's Era and organizing the first National Conference of Colored Women in America in 1895, during which the National Federation of Afro-American Women was formed. Seeing women's suffrage as an extension for the fight for equality, she was active in many state and national suffrage organizations, breaking racial barriers in many cases.
https://www.nps.gov/people/josephine-st-pierre-ruffin.htm
Judge Joyce L. Alexander As the first Black woman appointed as a Chief Magistrate judge in the U.S., Joyce Alexander was born in 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Attending Cambridge High, she was the first Black president of the student council. Moving to Howard University, she worked as a legislative assistant, which created a thirst for justice. After graduating in 1969, she earned her J.D. from New England Law School in 1972. Starting her career as a staff attorney for the Greater Boston Legal Assistance Project, she worked for many years as legal counsel for Boston's Youth Activities Commission and as an assistant professor of urban law and Black politics at Tufts University. She co-founded the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, serving as its first female president and increasing its budget ten times over. She served as the first Black woman nationwide as an on-camera legal editor for a national network. She was appointed to the U.S. District Court as a magistrate judge, the first Black woman to do so, and was made Chief Justice in 1996. She served on the board of multiple organizations, has received multiple honorary law degrees from universities and colleges, and has received multiple awards for her work.
http://cambridgeblackhistoryproject.org/project/joyce-london-alexander/
Juanita B. Wade As an experienced community organizer and strong business professional, Juanita Wade graduated from Mount Holyoke University in 1971, followed by a degree from Simmons University in 1973. Following over a decade of work in education, she was elected to two terms as a member of the Boston School Committee in 1986, during which time she moved into the CEO position at Freedom House. After several years there, she moved into the Chief of Human Services position at the City of Boston. Following this work in public affairs, she moved into Washington, D.C.'s DC Education Compact, as its executive director, serving women, children, veterans, families, and homeless on a wide range of social, housing, and economic issues. She then shifted into the corporate world, working as the program director of Fannie Mae's Office of Community and Charitable Giving, then moving into the manager lead of the Making Home Affordable Ground Campaign for the organization, managing outreach efforts. She then worked in community relations as the Making Home Affordable Director prior to her retirement. She then operated Wade Cruise and Travel Services, which closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juanita-brooks-wade-47328038/
Judge Judith N. Dilday As the first person of Color appointed as a judge to the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court, Judith Dilday was born in 1943 and grew up in Pennsylvania, graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. After teaching French language in Pittsburgh for four years, she moved to Boston to study at the Boston University School of Law, where she met her husband and graduated in 1972. She began her career working in both government service and private practice, including Stern and Shapiro and the Department of the Interior. She was the first Black president of the Women's Bar Association in 1990 and 1991, and was a founding partner of Burnham, Hines & Dilday, New England's first law firm owned by Black women, and was the first Black woman working in the Suffolk County District Attorney's office. She was appointed in 1993 as a circuit judge to the Probate and Family Court, being one of four Black women on the Massachusetts bench at the time, and was appointed to be an associate judge in 1998 to the Middlesex Probate and Family Court, retiring in 2009 to teach English in Qiqihar, China, as well as running mock trials for students.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Nelson_Dilday
JudyAnn Bigby, M.D. A former Commonwealth of Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services with her MD from Harvard, JudyAnn Bigby implemented many parts of the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law. These actions caused Massachusetts to lead national health insurance coverage rates of 99.8% for children and 98% for adults. She worked to achieve higher healthcare quality while addressing high healthcare costs, making Massachusetts a leading state in reforming health care delivery systems for a strong primary care foundation, integrated delivery of services, and payment reform, including vulnerable populations. She made significant improvements in mental health service deliver for children, community-based services for individuals with disabilities, veteran suicide prevention, improved foster care outcomes, reduced smoking rates, and reduced cancer and HIV deaths in the state. Prior to her work with the state, she served at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston as the Director of Community Health Programs, and as Director of Harvard Medical School's Center of Excellence in Women's Health. Her work as a pioneer to eliminate health disparities in underserved populations led to national recognition. She has worked as a physician for over 25 years, and is active in multiple organizations, advisory groups, and boards.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ecpe/faculty/judyann-bigby/
Karen H. Ward As Director of Public Affairs and Community Services and host and executive producer of award-winning weekly magazine program CityLine, Karen Ward is a familiar face at WCVB, addressing issues facing people of color in Boston. With the magazine being a recipient of the Associated Press Massachusetts/Rhode Island's "Best Public Affairs Program" and several Emmy nominations, her interviews with Black actors and film industry greats has been just one part of her four-decade career in broadcasting. Her work with the station's public service and community outreach program has included the Five Fixer Upper to refurbish community nonprofit common spaces, while Extreme Makeover: My Hometown has raised awareness about the need for Boston area affordable housing. She launched Commonwealth 5, the station's initiative that matched viewer-donors with non-profits using a web-based initiative that was first of its kind. She was the Executive Producer for Return to Glory, a documentary focused on Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first Black Civil-War-era regiment in the state, and featuring Emmy Award-winning actor Andre Braugher, and was part of the team honored with the "Service to Community in Television" award from the National Association of Broadcasters for efforts during and after the Boston Marathon attack, among others.
https://www.wcvb.com/news-team/95853608-ad1c-4cbf-a155-99daa7da7606
Karilyn Crockett, Ph.D. Author and Assistant Professor Karilyn Crocket has the distinction of serving as the first Chief of Equity for the City of Boston. After receiving a Masters in Geography at the London School of Economics and a Masters from Yale Divinity School, she went on to receive her PhD in American Studies at Yale University. With extensive research on large-scale changes in the use of land in 20th century American urban areas, she also studies the impact of social and geographical considerations on structural poverty. Forming the basis of her book under the same name, she investigated the 1960s grassroots movement to stop urban expansion of the interstate highway system as part of her dissertation, "People Before Highways: Reconsidering Routes to and from the Boston Anti-Highway Movement". Following this work, she worked as both the Director of Small Business Development and the Director of Economic Policy for the City of Boston. Crockett is currently working as an Assistant Professor of Urban History, Public Policy and Planning at DUSP.
https://dusp.mit.edu/people/karilyn-crockett
Katherine T. Knox As a pioneer bicycle racer, Katherine Knox, better known as Kittie, was born in Cambridgeport in 1874. Following her father's death, her family moved to Boston's West End, which at the time was home to a range of impoverished Blacks and recent immigrants, making it very progressive in successfully integrating a wide range of cultures. She found work to create a better life for their family, saving money to purchase a bicycle. She participated alongside the Riverside Cycle Club, though there was some question as to whether she was a member, with women not allowed to participate in the sport at the time. She began participating in meets, winning many of the competitions she participated in. She was accepted as a member of the League of American Wheelmen in 1893, but a 1894 constitution change to include the word "white" caused numerous members to question her membership. She faced discrimination, being barred from entering an annual meeting in 1895 and denied service at restaurants and hotels. Coverage of these issues led to a strong battle being waged over her membership rights, allowing her to be the first Black accepted to the League.
https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2020/05/26/breaking-the-cycle-the-kittie-knox-story/
Kem Danner Working in a range of investment and banking businesses, Kem Danner is an active community volunteer and activist, promoting children, health, and career development. She began her career in Charlotte, North Carolina following her graduation with her Bachelors and Masters from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Appalachian State University, at Bank of America's management associate program, serving a wide range of business roles, including numerous merger and acquisition roles that required living abroad in Europe, through the 17 years she worked with the organization. She then moved to State Street Global Advisors in 2015, working as the head of diversity and inclusion, then moving through the organization as the head of human resources and senior vice president and a member of the State Street Global Advisors Executive Management Group. Working with a range of charitable organizations focused on childhood development and education as well as cancer research, she also works with numerous employee network groups at State Street, including being a mentor at the Professional Women's Network, executive advisor of the Black Professionals Group, and a steering committee member for the organization's Global Diversity and Inclusion Council.
https://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/kem-danner/
Mayor Kim M. Janey As Boston's first female and first Black mayor, Kim Janey is used to being on the front lines in equality. At age 11, she faced rocks and racial slurs during the busing era of desegregation of Boston schools in the 1970s. This focus on education, equity, justice, and community organization led to 25 years focused on nonprofits, first as a community organizer improving access to high-quality, affordable child care, then as a champion for policy reforms improving access, opportunity, excellence, and equity at Boston Public Schools. She began her work in government as the first woman elected to represent District 7 on the Boston City Council in 2017, where she was elected in 2020 by her peers as President of Boston's most diverse City Council. A recipient of multiple awards, she was elected as Boston's 55th Mayor, and has successfully led the city through unprecedented challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic. With a focus on recovery, reopening, and renewal that addressed systemic inequalities, she prioritized health and wellness as well as equity in reopening the city's economy and public school system while curbing displacement with improved access to affordable housing and reducing homicide through her safety plan.
https://www.boston.gov/departments/mayors-office/kim-janey
Justice Kimberly S. Budd As the 38th Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in 2020 sworn in by Governor Charlie Baker., Kimberly Budd was sworn in as an Associate Judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court by then-Governor Deval Patrick in 2009, served as the Regional Administrative Justice for Middlesex Criminal Business, then appointed as an Associate Judge to the Court in 2016. She earned her Bachelors from Georgetown University and her law degree from Harvard Law School, then began her career serving as a law clerk to Chief Justice Joseph Warner at the Massachusetts Appeals Court, then served as a litigation associate at Mintz Levin. Following this, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's Office in their Major Crimes and Drug Units, then worked as a University Attorney for Harvard University's General Counsel Office, moving to the Director of the Community Values program at Harvard Business School. She also teaches in MCLE and Bar Association programs, has been an adjunct instructor at New England Law and taught trial advocacy at Harvard Law School.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/supreme-judicial-court-justices#chief-justice-kimberly-s.-budd-
Lani Guinier, J.D. As the first Black woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law School in 1998, Lani Guninier was a larger-than-life presence, pushing her many students to push harder and further. She often encouraged them to think deeper into problems they were facing by saying, "My problem is, if you stop there . . . " Born in New York CIty to a civil rights activist mother and lawyer and union organizer father who became the first chair of Harvard's Department of Afro-American Studies, she earned her Bachelor's from Radcliffe in 1971 and her JD from Yale Law School in 1974. After clerking for the U.S. Court of Appeals, she served in the Civil Rights Division with Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days while leading the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's voting rights project. Prior to teaching at Harvard in 1996, she taught at University of Pennsylvania Law School starting in 1988 as a highly-regarded teacher, and also taught at Columbia Law School as a professor of law and social responsibility prior to her death in 2022. Devoting her life to equality, empowerment, democracy, and justice, Guinier was well-known for her scholarship and determination, receiving multiple awards and authoring numerous documents.
https://hls.harvard.edu/today/in-memoriam-lani-guinier-1950-2022/
Laura YoungerA strong voice against modern gentrification, Laura Younger is noted for speaking out against the displacement of Blacks, persons of color, and lower-income people in Boston. As part of the Holborn, Gannet, Gaston, Otisfield Betterment Association, her focus is on the plight faced by individuals and families in Grove Hall in remaining in the community where they have established themselves and called home for many years. With a solid focus on affordable rental housing and homeownership for those who are not eligible for the CDC and city projects that are under development, she champions those who have been priced out of buying a home in the neighborhoods that they grew up in. She encourages those in the neighborhoods to undertake creative solutions, such as building on vacant or condemned properties, while leveraging her voice to push the city into passing zoning variances and issuing building permits. She helps others find their voice and their place in neighborhood associations to help move neighborhoods in the Boston area facing gentrification to fight the process and participate in the responsible development of planning and development for these areas. She is expected to continue being a strong voice for neighborhoods for years to come.
https://binjonline.com/2018/11/21/less-building-moratorium/
Leah RandolphAs an active voice in Black addiction services, Leah Randolph uses her Bachelor's from University of Massachusetts Boston and Master's from Cambridge College to benefit the minority community. She began her career at the Human Resources Development Institute of Massachusetts as the state director, feeling drawn to the four substance abuse programs offered by the Institute. This was due to the organization's parallel work with the Massachusetts Black Alcoholism & Addiction Council in the greater Boston area, an advocacy group that she has worked with for over 20 years and currently serves as the president of the chapter. To further alight with her work with the advocacy group, she moved into the Kitty Dukakis Treatment Center for Women as a program manager, then onto the Boston Medical Center to assess emergency room patients for substance abuse disorder and determine placement, helping the patients find the right treatment for their needs. She is currently at the Commonwealth Mental Health & Wellness Center, which she co-founded and serves as the executive director of, providing mental health and substance abuse counseling, along with a wide range of therapy, mentoring, coaching, mentoring, case management, and other healing modalities from a culturally sensitive approach.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-randolph-cadc-ii-ladc-i-03024513
Lilla G. FrederickServing for many years as the President and Chair of Project RIGHT (Rebuild and Improve Grove Hall Together), Lilla Frederick was a strong positive influence to improving life for countless minorities in the greater Boston area. She also serves as the Chair of the Boston Caribbean Foundation, Secretary of the Grove Hall Elder Housing Advocacy Group, and has been a member and volunteer with the Blue Hill Avenue Initiative Task Force and New Boston Pilot Middle School, which she was instrumental in helping design. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she had a strong belief in the role of education in life, earning a Bachelor's from Northeastern University and a Master's from Lesley University. Her contributions to the community caused her to be recognized from multiple government organizations and award groups. Her passion for the community led to her work as a board member at Environmental Partnerships, where she formed partnerships with churches for landscaping of newly-constructed affordable housing structures, as well as large flower pots for beautifying Devon Street. She leveraged considerable organizational skills and social graces to create inviting spaces throughout the Grove Hill area and organized annual Thanksgiving meals for downtown Boston homeless individuals.
https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/domain/1561
Lillian A. LewisAs the first Black woman journalist in Boston, Lillian Lewis was a Boston native born in 1869 in Beacon Hill. Growing up in the abolitionist home of Lewis Hayden, who ran Boston's Underground Railroad, she attended Bowdoin Grammar School, Girls' High School, and Boston Normal School. With a strong literary gift, she wrote and lectured on temperance, often including a thread of humor in her work, as well as being a stenographer and novelist. She used the pen name Bert Islew to disguise her gender when she started writing for the Boston Advocate in 1889, the same year she was admitted to the New England Woman's Press Association. Her popular society column is credited with saving the paper, as its sales had been failing prior to that point. She contributed to the Richmond Planet, as well as monthly magazine Our Women and Children, as well as working for the Boston Herald as one of the first Black women writing for a white-run newspaper. She became the first Black woman clerk at Boston City Hall's Collector's office in 1920, retiring in 1934.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_A._Lewis
Lisa SimmonsAs the director of the Roxbury International Film Festival, or RoxFilm as it's known in the industry, Lisa Simmons has made great strides in helping Black artists present themselves as they are, rather than in more traditional film roles and characters. With the development of new technology in areas such as distribution, cinematography, and editing, she sees opportunities for more people of color to share their stories without Hollywood backing, allowing them to compete across the film industry and more easily be seen at larger film festivals. Simmons also adjusted the festival's format to a hybrid model, making it easier for more individuals to see the incredible stories that are being produced while shaking up the traditional question-and-answer format of panel discussions. She has also created specific divisions to cover a range of submitted films, as well as the strong selection of local feature and short films that the festival has become known for. Her focus on this direction for the festival is helping new Black artists enter the industry without compromising their identity or integrity.
https://artsfuse.org/230811/film-interview-roxfilms-lisa-simmons-embracing-cinematic-independence/
L'Merchie FrazierAn artist, educator, poet, public historian, and activist, L'Merchie Frazier is the current Executive Director of Creative/Strategic Planning for SPOKE Arts. Coming from a strong background that includes twenty years of serving the artistic community and featuring a range of international residencies, she is known for work that reflects the community in an authentic and genuine fashion. Her artwork is featured in the White House, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. As a State of Massachusetts Art Commissioner and a prior City of Boston Artist in Residence, she has received many awards for her reparative aesthetic approach to expanding historical narrative and responding to crisis, violence and trauma throughout her career. She has served as a former Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, with a focus on supporting social justice and the movement for civil rights seen through five hundred years of Indigenous and Black history, providing a viewpoint that more accurately showcases the experience of people of color during that time.
https://www.boston.gov/government/cabinets/equity-and-inclusion-cabinet/lmerchie-frazier
Louise W. Corbin Acting as an advocate for improved foster care, Louise Wells was an educator who took in over 50 children over the course of four decades, providing them with a strong, stable home life in which they could heal and build a foundation for success. Whenever there was a crisis, the Department of Social Services knew that they could count on her to take on children removed from homes in an emergency. A graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Education, she taught early childhood education at Wheelock College and Roxbury Community College. Working with foster children and education led to an interest in theories about how children develop, which encouraged her to take childhood development courses at local colleges until a Harvard scholarship allowed her to pursue a Master's, which she attained in 1969. Going on to direct numerous Boston-region daycare centers, she also worked with the state in the Office for Children until 1975, when she began pursuing a teaching degree. She continued teaching after her retirement in 2000 up until shortly before her death, and is recognized by many in the community for improving the foster care system in the area.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/201835394/louise-corbin
Lucy M. Mitchell Born in Florida in 1899, Lucy Mitchell was an instructor, activist, and advocate for training daycare workers in Boston for many years. After seeing a confrontation between Daytona School's founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, and a hate group, she moved to Roxbury with her husband, earning a Master's from Boston University in 1935. Prior to earning her degree, she operated the Nursery School at Robert Gould Shaw House starting in 1932, a position she continued for 21 years. She co-founded the Associated Day Care Services of Metropolitan Boston, eventually serving as its executive director. After spending nine years in research and activism, she supported the 1962 law that established state daycare licensing laws, followed by working for the Massachusetts Department of Education in developing affordable daycare worker training courses. She also trained Peace Corps volunteers in working with children, consulted for the nationally-based Head Start program, helping with its implementation in Boston, and worked with numerous other organizations and agencies to improve the lives of children in daycare across the region.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-lucy-miller-mitchell
Lucy T. Prince Known best for her fame as the first Black poetess in the United States, Lucy Price had many other accomplishments, including arguing a court case in front of the Supreme Court. Taken from Africa as an infant, she was sold into slavery, baptized during the Great Awakening, and at the age of 20, was admitted to the church fellowship. She married in 1756, and her husband purchased her freedom, with six children born to the couple by 1769. An exceptional speaker, she argued in a number of situations, some successful and others not. She spent three hours in an earnest, eloquent speech before Williams College trustees arguing for the admission of her son, received protection when a neighboring family threatened her family, and faced off against two of the state's leading lawyers at the Supreme Court and won when Colonel Eli Bronson tried to steal their land, with the additional compliment from the presiding justice, Samuel Chase, stated that her argument was the best he'd ever heard. She passed away at age 97 in 1821.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2p15.html
Lula Christopher A pioneer in healing circles and self-empowerment in Boston, Lula Christopher, known to many in the community as Mama Lula, focused on reintroducing Black women to ancient medicine while creating access for other treatment modalities including acupuncture, massage, and reflexology. By providing opportunities for Black men, women, and children to explore their ancestry and spirituality, her role as a community service specialist of over four decades has allowed her to not only heal herself, but others as well. Serving as a community advocate, activist, program developer, mentor, teacher, and administrator, Christopher uses Dagara medicine to help others connect with their often discordant roots and ancestors, helping them to heal from trauma, abuse, and generational patterns that cause harm, helping people today move forward in an empowered, healthy, and strong way.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/lulaeldership
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/07/metro/black-history-i-carry-with-me-marlene-boyette/
Mallika Marshall, M.D. As an award-winning physician and journalist, Mallika Marshal serves as the Medical Director of WBZ-TV, located in Boston. This career path includes being a Board Certified physician in pediatrics and internal medicine, serving on Harvard Medical School's staff while she practices at the Chelsea Urgent Care Clinic for Massachusetts General and at the MGH Revere Health Center. She's a contributing editor for the publishing sector of Harvard Medical School, Harvard Health Publishing, and hosts the publishing sector's e-learning coursework. With over 15 years of media coverage expertise and over 10 years serving as the HealthWatch anchor at WBZ-TV starting in 2000, she combines her journalistic expertise with her medical knowledge to help promote better health for many within the Boston viewing area, while serving on various Boards over the years and maintaining a range of honor societies, medical organizations, and journalistic organizations.
https://hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/mallika-marshall
Margaret A. Burnham, LL.B. Professor, author, and director Margaret Burnham graduated with her Bachelor's in 1966 from Tougaloo College, and her legal Bachelor's from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. Recognized on the international stage as an expert in civil and human rights, she is the Director of Reparations and Restorative Justice Initiatives, the Director of Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, and is the Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Law, Equity, and Race. She headed outside counsel and law students during a landmark federal case that was settled involving Jim Crow laws and racially-based violence. She is a current member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board after her appointment by President Joe Biden, involving Civil Rights Era criminal cold cases that were racially motivated. She started her career by representing civil rights and political activists in the 1970s, becoming the first Black woman to serve in the Massachusetts judiciary. She was appointed to an international human rights commission in 1993 by South African President Nelson Mandela, which developed into the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her book By Hands Now Known was published in 2022 and has received numerous awards for its approach to investigating Jim Crow violations.
https://law.northeastern.edu/faculty/burnham/
Maria L. Baldwin As an activist and educator, Marie Baldwin was born in 1856 and graduated from the Cambridge Training School for Teachers in 1881. She taught in the Cambridge school district after some resistance, then in 1887 at the Agassiz Grammar School, becoming the principal two years later. Choosing to remain an educator rather than marrying in an era where married women were not employed as teachers, she kept this position for many decades while joining Black civil rights groups, giving her a platform to speak on both civil and women's rights movements. She was a member and secretary of the Banneker Society, a local Black debate club, where she read many literature and history pages. She opened her home in 1880 to Black social activists and intellectuals while offering weekly readings and discussions for Black students attending Harvard but not welcome in the University's study spaces. She co-founded the Woman's Era Club, which focused on the anti-lynching movement, women's suffrage, and improving educational and career opportunities, and served as the first President of the League of Women for Community Service, providing comfort to returning soldiers and new widows during WWI. She remained active until her death in 1922.
https://www.nps.gov/people/maria-l-baldwin.htm
Maria W. Stewart As an advocate for women's rights and an abolitionist, Maria Stewart was born in Connecticut in 1803, moving to Boston to support herself as a domestic servant while educating herself. Marrying in 1826, the couple was part of the small community of free Blacks around Beacon Hill. They shared the community's thirst to free those still enslaved, and despite losing her husband a few years later, she continued to speak out regarding racism and segregation in Boston. She became one of the first women to speak publicly in the US, a practice considered improper or immoral at the time, and was the first Black woman to write and publish a political manifesto calling for Black people to resist exploitation, oppression, and slavery, with her manuscript delivered to The Liberator's office, a white abolitionist newspaper. Her success helped her build a short but very significant public speaking career, giving four public lectures from 1831 and 1833 that were on the record. She had a unique approach using Biblical imagery and language to condemn racism and slavery. She encouraged audiences to pursue any educational opportunities available to them and demand their political rights.She passed away in 1879.
https://www.nps.gov/people/maria-w-stewart.htm
Marian L. Heard As the current President and CEO of Oxen Hill Partners, Marian Heard has a range of both privately-held and Fortune 500 companies in her client list while promoting brand enhancement and leadership development programs. She is also retired from the position of President and CEO of Boston United Way and the CEO of United Ways of New England, Heard has a long history in volunteer service, including being the founding President and CEO of Points of Light Foundation, a founding board member of the MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, a current board member on Liberty Mutual, CVS Caremark, and Sovereign Bank. Serving as a board member and trustee for numerous organizations, she has received numerous honorary doctorates and awards for her contributions to business, leadership, and children, while moving the Black community as a whole farther in the business world.
https://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/marian-heard/
Marilyn A. Chase Raised in Detroit, Marilyn Chase was spending her time counseling poor Black teenage girls in the deeply divided and racially segregated city in 1967 prior to her move to Boston in 1970. Continuing to work with Black youths to encourage them to reach their full potential and avoid the tension, trauma, and violence caused by issues with racism and lack of equity such as were seen in the race riots and violence that arose across the country in those turbulent times. She served as the assistant secretary for Health and Human Services under Governor Patrick while trying to promote peace, equality, and equity between races.
https://www.wgbh.org/lifestyle/2017-09-08/detroit-boston-and-the-searing-memories-of-the-summer-of-1967
Marita Rivero Born in 1943 in Pennsylvania, Marita Rivero is a media and nonprofit executive who earned her Bachelor's at Tufts University in 1964. She became a WGBH producer, which is a National Public Radio station in Boston. She moved to Washington, D.C. in 1976 to consult for several organizations including the National Science Foundation, PBS, and the United States Congressional Black Caucus' Communications Task Force. In 1981, she returned to radio production at WPFW Pacifica, a position she eventually promoted through to vice president. Returning to Boston in 1988 as the general manager of WGBH radio, she spent a decade at the station prior to being hired as executive-in-charge of Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery, then moving into the same position in This Far By Faith, airing in 2003. She was promoted to WGBH's general manager in 2005, which was a position she held until 2013. After volunteering since the late 1980s for the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket, she was named executive director in 2015. For her work in media, she has received a wide range of awards from diverse organizations and serves on numerous boards, three of which she serves as chair.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/marita-rivero
Mary C. Thompson, D.D.M. As the third Black woman to graduate from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, Mary Thompson was a volunteer once day a week while operating a private practice and practicing at the Children's Dental Clinic. Starting by treating patients in her home, she was able to avoid the cost of office rent and was able to serve the public during the Great Depression, a time that demanded having a spirit of great generosity. She regularly helped patients who had no ability to pay for her services. However, she still faced racial and gender discrimination. She was only allowed for many years to practice as a dental assistant for a local school because of sexist advertising that excluded women, even after she passed the entrance exam with flying colors. She volunteered with the Mississippi Health Project as a dentist, visiting schools and churches that sometimes wouldn't even have a table. Seeing the terrible poverty in the state committed her to racial justice, working with her husband to battle housing discrimination around Boston, receiving an NAACP award for their work during the 1970s. However, she never lost her dedication to her dentistry work and helping those in need.
https://dental150.tufts.edu/posts/2
Mary E. Mahoney A Boston native, Mary Mahoney was born in 1845 and was the first Black licensed nurse in the US, working at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in a range of roles for 15 years. She entered the Hospital's nursing school when it opened in 1878 and graduated as one of only four graduates out of 42. However, she faced overwhelming discrimination in public nursing, so instead became a private nurse so that she could focus her care on the needs of individuals, gaining a reputation for efficiency, patience, and a caring bedside manner. She joined national and international nursing associations in 1896, but finding some members of the group less than welcoming, she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908 and elected as the organization's national chaplain with a lifetime membership. Shortly after, she served as the director for the Howard Orphanage Asylum for Black children, where she served for two years prior to her retirement. However, she still championed women's rights, and was among the first women to register to vote in Boston following the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1820. She passed in 1926.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-mahoney
Mary E. Wilson As a leading civil rights activist and a founding member of Boston's branch of the NAACP and Women's Service Club, Mary Wilson was born in Ohio in 1866, graduating from Oberlin College. Coming from an activist family, she moved to Washington, D.C. to teach in public school for 10 years while writing a health and beauty column for Black woman's newspaper The Woman's Era. She married prominent Boston civil rights attorney Butler Wilson, then moved to the South End, where they raised their six children. She was a keynote speaker at a women's anti-lynching demonstration in May 1899, calling for federal intervention. The couple were among the founders of Boston's NAACP branch, and were the most prominent Black leaders in the organization at the time. She frequently volunteered as a traveling organizer, bringing thousands of members to the group from New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. She worked to end discrimination at the New England Sanitarium, in the school system and at department stores in Boston. During World War I, she organized a knitting circle 350 women and girls strong to manufacture scarves and gloves for Boston's Black soldiers, growing into the Women's Service Club. She passed away in 1928.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Evans_Wilson
Rep. Mary H. Goode Born in 1927 in Georgia, Mary Goode and her family moved to Boston before her high school years. After raising three children, she began attending Tufts University, graduating in 1974. Determined to bring change to the Black community in Boston, she represented the 10th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1975 to 1978 as the second Black female legislator in the state. She ran under the Democratic Party and defeated two other contenders, Emanuel Eaves and Leon Rock, by 19 and 43 votes respectively. She retired after her 21-year-old son lost his life in a drowning accident in 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_H._Goode
Mary L. Johnson Together with her husband, Mary Johnson were owners and operators of one of the 200 Black-owned Boston businesses at the beginning of the 20th century. Selling hair goods at the storefront, Johnson's Hair Store was only a small part of their professional empire, with Johnson Hair Food being sold across the entire United States by 1900. With an entrepreneurial eye, Mary opened the Johnson's School of Beauty Culture, where she offered a range of salon and spa services that included massage, hairdressing, shampooing, scalp treatments, and manicures. This school provided young Black women in the Boston area with technical education and skills in an environment that was otherwise very limited at the time.
https://buildingsofnewengland.com/tag/madam-mary-l-johnson-boston/
Mattie B. Powell Born in upstate New York in 1921, Mattie Powell grew up in South Carolina, but accompanied her sister in a move to Boston. Meeting her husband there, the couple opened the Powell Barbershop and Hollywood Barbershop, opening up a total of three barbershops in the next few years. While operating the businesses, Mattie became Massachusetts first Black female Master Barber. With their shops becoming a strong fixture of Black neighborhoods in Boston for decades, and they were the first Black family to own a home on their street in Dorchester. Once the barber shops were established, she returned to teaching for Boston Public Schools, teaching kindergarten for 25 years, and received her Master's from Boston State College. Her love of children and reading exposed her children to the importance of reading and writing. She also wrote her own music and sang, performing at special events with her son accompanying her on the piano.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Mattie-Powell
Mattie L. Washington As Massachusetts' first Black businesswoman working as a licensed hair stylist, Mattie Washington was born in Georgia in 1923 before moving to Boston in her early 20s. With a long history as an entrepreneur, she received her master's license in barbering, operating two Corner Barber Shops in the city in the time during and following World War II. After spending many happy years operating her barbershops, she retired from the industry, but her entrepreneurial spirit wouldn't let her rest. She owned and operated a local daycare while volunteering at both the American Indian Council and the Orchard Park Community Center in Boston during her later years. She passed in 2011.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/mattie-washington-obituary?id=22189415
Mattie M. Adams As the eldest daughter in a family of 17 children, Mattie Adams was born in 1923 in Boston's South End. As an active leader in the United Methodist Church of All Nations, Adams worked hard to develop a number of successful ministries for the church, including her Saturdays and Sundays Bread program, developed to feed countless homeless people and families. With a strong entrepreneurial spirit, she was a graduate of the New England School of Art & Design, after which she opened Adams Interiors in the Back Bay area, where she was the first licensed Black interior designer in New England. Enjoying great success in the area, she catered to numerous corporate and celebrity clients, including the White House. As a former member of the New England Minority Purchasing Council Board of Directors and President Carter's Small Business Advisory Council, she opened doors to other people of color in the design industry. She passed away in 2016.
https://www.currentobituary.com/member/obit/197377
Maud C. HareMaude Hare was a Black pianist, writer, musician, scholar and activist. Born in 1874, she grew up in a Texas home filled with music and politics. She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, as well as Harvard's Lowell Institute of Literature, becoming an accomplished pianist. However, she and another Black woman faced struggles living on campus. She refused to move and insisted on proper treatment, and her issue was taken up by numerous organizations. Hare became a part of Boston's vibrant Black community, joining the Charles Street Circle and became a close friend of W.E.B. DuBois. She taught at the Texas Deaf and Blind Institute for Colored Youths and spoke up against the Austin Opera House that wanted Blacks in the audience to be segregated during her performances. Along with William Howard Richardson, she was the first Black musician performing in Boston Public Library's Concert-Lecture series. Hare founded the Allied Arts Center in Boston to encourage arts education and performance. She collected music from across the South and the Caribbean as a musicologist studying folklore, and was the first person to study Creole music. She also wrote extensively, contributing topics on music to a variety of publications. Her book, Negro Musicians and Their Music, published in 1836, the year she died, documented the development of Black music from its African roots and its influences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maud_Cuney_Hare
Maude Hurd A political activist, leader, and community organizer, Maude Hurt was born in 1944. Best known for her role as the President of ACORN for 20 years, she started with the organization in 1982 first as a speaker and then as the Boston chapter's chairwoman. She led demonstration at Boston City Hall over vacant lots that had trash left there with no cleanup by government agencies. After holding a variety of leadership positions with the organizations over the next seven years, she was elected as ACORN's president. She was also a member of the socialist New Party and Democratic socialists of America, and was recognized as one of the top 100 individuals building the New Party by then-organizer Barack Obama. She led efforts to oppose scaling back of the Community Reinvestment Act, a law requiring moneylenders to maximize mortgages approved for undercapitalized and minority loan applicants that did not meet traditional borrowing standards, and was arrested at the scene of a protest at the U.S. Capitol Building. She promoted living wage laws and other policies that would allow Democrats to ally with progressives. When ACORN disbanded, Hurd became president of New England United For Justice, participating in "Take Back Boston" rallies.
https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/maude-hurd/
Maude T. Steward As the sister of William Monroe Trotter, owner of The Guardian, Maude Steward worked as the assistant editor of the newspaper, then continued publishing it herself for two decades following his death. Born in 1874, she attended Wellesley College, giving her the tools she needed to successfully edit and later operate the newspaper following her brother's death. In addition to her writing and editing skills, she also participated in a number of local civic organizations, was one of the founders of St. Mark's Musical and Literary Union, and also worked with the Boston Equal Rights League and the Women's League. The newspaper gave her a strong outlet to promote equal rights both for blacks and for women. She passed away in 1955.
https://bwht.org/roxbury-womens-history-trail/#:~:text=Maude%20Trotter%20Steward%20(1874%2D1955,in%20many%20local%20civic%20organizations.
Melnea A. Cass A community and civil rights activist on the local, state, and national levels, Melnea Cass was born in 1896 in Richmond, Virginia. Her family moved to Boston when she was five years old, and after graduating as valedictorian in 1914, she sought work in retail, but found that limited opportunities in Boston forced her to do domestic work until her marriage. She became involved in community projects, including registering Black women to vote following ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. She continued fighting for the rights of Black women for the rest of her life. She founded Kindergarten Mothers, and worked with the Harriet Tubman Mother's Club, Sojourner Truth Club, the Northeastern Region of the National Association of Colored Women's Club as secretary, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Women in Community Service, and many others. She was the only female charter member to Action for Boston Community Development, and a founder and charter member of Freedom House. She was president of Boston's NAACP chapter from 1962 to 1964, and chaired the Massachusetts Advisory Committee for the Elderly from 1975 to 1976. She passed in 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melnea_Cass
Mildred Davenport As the first Black woman to appear with the Boston Pops orchestra, Mildred Davenport was born in Roxbury in 1900. After finishing high school, she studied at the Sargent School for Physical Culture at Boston University and studied dance. She opened the Davenport School of Dance in the 1920s, then opened her second school, the Silver Box Studio, in Boston. During a time when it was unusual for Black and white performers to appear on stage together, she appeared in numerous Broadway musicals and reviews, alongside performers such as Clifton Webb and Imogene Coca. She provided dance interpretations of Black spiritual music with the Boston Pops orchestra in 1938, then toured the East Coast in a show called Chocolate Review for five years. She was among the first Black women to enlist in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps during World War II, moving from first lieutenant to captain. She then worked for two decades with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination from 1947 to 1968, also serving on the Boston NAACP board of directors. She received the Sojourner Truth Award from the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs for Boston in 1973. She passed away in 1990, while still living in Boston.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Davenport
Mildred F. Jefferson, M.D. Not only was Mildred Jefferson the first Black woman graduate from Harvard Medical in 1951, she also was the first woman who was employed as a general surgeon at Boston University Medical Center. Active in the right-to-life movement, she was born in Texas in 1927, daughter to a schoolteacher and a minister, but was known for following the local doctor around on his rounds. After finishing her secondary education, she went on to attend Texas College, then Tufts University, as she was considered too young at the time that she finished her Bachelors to attend medical school. Once she finished her medical degree, she was the first woman to undertake a surgical internship at Boston Hospital, as well as being the first female doctor at Boston University Medical Center. She received her board certification in surgery in 1972, and by 1984, was a general surgeon at Boston University, while also becoming a professor of surgery at Boston University School of Medicine. She was the first woman member of the Boston Surgical Society. She helped found Massachusetts Citizens for Life and the National Right to Life Committee, becoming active in many roles in the 1970s. She passed away in 1990.
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collections/mildred-jefferson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Fay_Jefferson
Miriam Manning Miriam Manning retired from foster grandparent work at 95 years of age in 2019, putting the cap on many years of volunteering with over 27 years in that specific role. Providing a solid role model and caring individual in thousands of children's lives, she has dedicated these many years to caring for children at the Dorchester Headstart, crediting the activity with being what kept her moving for so many years. Operated by ABCD, the program has brought older adults and children into close contact for over 54 years, providing children with a level of care in their lives that may otherwise be difficult to accomplish, while allowing the older adults to share their knowledge with children and making a difference in their lives.
https://www.boston25news.com/news/-it-s-why-i-m-still-moving-95-year-old-finally-retires-from-foster-role/952224040/
Mukiya Baker-Gomez With a reputation of putting all of her effort behind every endeavor, Mukiya Baker-Gomez was a strong advocate for community empowerment and politics. Heading the State Office of Minority and Women Business Assistance from 1985 until 1991, she worked hard to advocate for minority and women entrepreneurs in the community and state, then worked with Governor Patrick's Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance division for University of Massachusetts Boston Science Center's construction. She also worked on election campaigns for countless individuals, including Chuck Turner, Ayanna Pressley, Gloria Fox, Diane Wilkerson, and Mel King gain public office. Considered to be a hero to many in the Black community, she was born in Boston in 1948, she followed her aunt's example as a Republican activist during the Civil Rights era, registering to vote after her 18th birthday and remaining active in political life. She spent her life in and out of public service, working with elected officials while volunteering with community organizations. She worked and volunteered with the Black United Front in ht e1970s, as well as the Contractors Association of Boston representing Black construction firms, and the Opportunities Industrialization Center, a program training community residents to work in high-tech careers.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2023/06/14/mukiya-baker-gomez-community-leader-74/
Muriel S. Snowden A MacArthur Fellow, Muriel Snowden was a community organizer who co-founded Freedom House in 1949, an organization empowering the local community and spent 35 years directing the organization. Prior to her work with Freedom House, she received her A.B. degree from Radcliffe College in 1938 and pursued additional education at the New York School of Social Work from 1943 to 1945. She then served as executive director of the Cambridge Civic Unity Committee as well as an investigator for the Essex County, New Jersey Welfare Board. A lecturer and educator at Simmons College School of Social Work, she served on several boards beyond Freedom House, including Harvard University, Tufts University, Babson College, the Boston Museum of Science, the New England Aquarium, and the Radcliffe Black Women's Oral History Project. Her actions allowed Freedom House to develop programs addressing poverty, housing, segregation, hiring discrimination, and unemployment issues in the Black community. Following her retirement in 1984, Snowden remained an active community leader, encouraging international relations and foreign language study through computer-based programs. She passed away in 1988.
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-1987/muriel-s-snowden#searchresults
Myechia Minter-Jordan, M.D. With strong experience in nonprofit and healthcare management, Myechia Minter-Jordan has worked to improve healthcare access for marginalized populations in the greater Boston area. She is the current President and CEO of CareQuest Institute for Oral Health, which is focused on improving health outcomes through better medical/dental collaboration. She has also worked in executive positions at DentalQuest to improve dental and oral health, and at The Dimock Center where she oversaw a $45 million budget and programs for healthcare, behavioral health, and early education. These opportunities have allowed her to serve the community through improved healthcare access, especially in aspects of healthcare that have been historically underserved. Minter-Jordan received her doctorate at Brown Medical School in 1998, and an MBA at John Hopkins Carey School of Business in 2007.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/myechia-minter-jordan-md-mba-099bb02/
Nancy G. Prince Born in 1799, Nancy Prince was a biographer who moved to Boston after the War of 1812. She became very active within the early anti-slavery societies, especially William Lloyd Garrison's society. She undertook two different missions to support recently freed Black people in Jamaica, hoping to educate the people there so that they could better support themselves and avoid being taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals. Returning to Boston, she worked for Emancipation, thwarting agents who were enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, and was an early proponent of women's rights. Her autobiography, which included her father's story as a Nantucket whaler, and her grandfather's story as a captured slave from Africa, was published from Garrison's office. She became a speaker at women's rights conventions, telling audiences at an 1854 conference that she understood women's wrongs better than rights. Following this, she disappeared from history.
https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/nancy-gardner-prince-daughter-of-a-black-nantucket-whaler/
Nellie B. Mitchell Born in the 1840s, Nellie Mitchell became one of the most successful Black soprano singers in America. Spending decades in her career as a singer in churches and at a range of events, she was known for having a very versatile voice for a range of music, including classical, opera, and folk music. Though no known recordings were made of her voice, it was believed to be a lyric soprano, with a richness to it that may have been lacking in other sopranos in that age. Traveling extensively, she toured and performed all over the East Coast and Midwest, delighting audiences at both Black and white churches as well as New York City's Steinway Hall. However, her race denied her opportunities given to white contemporaries, such as recording her voice. She performed at abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's funeral and at meetings of an organization that grew into the NAACP. She was also known for inventing the phoneterion, a device that helped singers learn proper tongue positions.
https://www.nhpr.org/all-things-considered/2021-06-18/this-juneteenth-a-tribute-to-dovers-nellie-brown-mitchell
Olive L. Benson Recognized as a premier hair stylist and an expert in straightening and relaxing hair, Olivia Benson was born in Cambridge in 1932. Studying at the Wilfred Academy following high school, she received her certification in hairdressing, continuing her education and professional training at Pivot Point, Vidal Sasson, Jingles, Clairol, and Wella. Opening a small beauty shop in north Cambridge in 1959, she provided the most advanced treatment and styling techniques. Moving her business to Boston in the 1960s, she realized strong success, moving to two different larger locations in Boston's upscale retail districts over the following years. Women from many ethnic and racial makeups came to Olive's Beauty Salon to have their hair styled and straightened. She also designed and coordinated several industry publications for both ethnic and non-ethnic hair styles. In 1996, she created and marketed her own hair product line, including universal relaxers, protein conditioners, shampoo, and leave-in conditioners under the brand Universal Textures. She was honored as the first Black person inducted into the Hall of Renown for the National Cosmetology Association in 1991, and was the first Black to receive a North American Hairstyle Award in 1996. She passed away in 2005.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/olive-lee-benson-40
Patricia A. Raynor Named for her birthday on St. Patrick's Day, Patricia Raynor was born in 1927. Struggling to support her family while on AFDC, she took on any jobs she could, which led her to work as a community organizer for the Whittier Street Housing Projects. In this role, she coordinated the Low Cost Food Cooperative. She helped found the Roxbury Comprehensive Community Health Center as well as the New Professionals Program. She also worked with the Lower Roxbury Community Council, the Roxbury Action Program, and the Third World Women's Conference. She was selected as an Associate Researcher under MIT's Fellowship program. She was instrumental in starting the University of Massachusetts' School Without Walls program, providing college credit for adult life experience. She had received the NAACP Community Service Award, and Greyhound Bus named her Woman of the Year for her work in mentoring and encouraging many young community activists. A scholarship has been established in her name.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=102273618666065&id=102212338672193&paipv=0&eav=AfaTYqFCythydNjKM5e2KilrImeq6wSjzIgeuGLr_3uyKU3BSZZ9yK1mM3l8OEH4ock&_rdr
Paula A. Johnson, M.D. Serving as the 14th president of Wellesley College, Harvard University graduate Paula Johnson is a medical doctor who has focused on bringing excellence to decades of work in higher education, public health, and academic medicine. She has moved the college to the forefront of women's STEM education. She has led the creation process of the school's new strategy, placing inclusive excellence at the heart of the educational experience. Having held several leadership roles during her career, she has been Harvard Medical School's Grayce A. Young Family Professor of Medicine in Women's Health, professor of epidemiology at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Health, and was a founder of Brigham and Women's Hospital's Connors Center for Women's Health and Gender Biology, the hospital where she trained in internal and cardiovascular medicine. She is the member of numerous national and international boards, and is the recipient of several awards and honors, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Medicine.
https://www.wellesley.edu/about/president
Pauline E. HopkinsBorn in Maine in 1859, Pauline Hopkins was a writer known for her novels and short stories that were written while living in Cambridge and Boston, most of which were published from 1900 to 1903. She regularly wrote and acted as an editor for Colored American Magazine as well as writing for the Voice of the Negro, with her work regularly addressing Black history, economic justice, racial discrimination, and women's rights. This allowed her to emerge as a leading public intellectual for the era. She also wrote a musical focused on The Underground Railroad, which was produced in 1879. She also performed with her family's musical ensemble, the Hopkins Colored Troubadours. She worked as an orator and stenographer in the 1890s, staying active in women's clubs and similar civic organizations to promote women's rights. She represented the Women's Era Club in the 1898 Annual Convention of New England Federation of Women's Clubs. She was a founding member of the Boston Literary and Historical Association in 1901. She remained a prominent activist intellectual, though her public appearances and writing efforts were focused on other areas following the last of her major writings in 1905. She died in 1930 from burns received during a fire at her home.
https://www.paulinehopkinssociety.org/biography/
Phillis Wheatley Though an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatly was educated and considered to be one of the best poets prior to the 19th century in the United States. Seized in western Africa at around age seven, she was transported to Boston in a group of enslaved persons unsuited for rigorous labor. She was brought into the Wheatly household in 1761 as a domestic servant and educated in the Bible, geography, history, astronomy, British literature, and the Latin and Greek classics. In a letter to the University of Cambridge, she yearned for intellectual challenges of more academic atmospheres. She was often used as an illustration by abolitionists that Blacks could be intellectual and artistic, making her a catalyst for the early antislavery movement. Her works, encompassing approximately 145 works, were published beginning in 1767. Reaching great renown in both Boston and Great Britain, she was known for applying Biblical symbols to both comment on slavery and evangelize. Though she was freed before the Revolutionary War, the harsh conditions experienced by many free blacks during and after the war caused her to live in poverty with her husband and up to three children. This caused significant health issues, and she passed away in 1784.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/phillis-wheatley
Priscilla H. Douglas, Ed.D. As the current Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Boston Public Library, Priscilla Douglas has brought over three decades of experience in leadership across academics, business, and government to the table. As an executive coach to Fortune 500 businesses, her guidance has helped thousands of leaders both in workshops and individually, addressing change in the business landscape with insight, understanding, and energy. Working as an executive at Xerox, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and General Motors, she introduced and led a range of innovations. She served as special assistant to William Webster, FBI director, and has been a White House fellow, a Barbara Bush Adult Literacy Project senior advisor, and a National Institute of Justice Presidential appointee. She served as the Secretary of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulations in Massachusetts, and was the first Black woman to hold a Cabinet position in the Commonwealth's history. She created the Hate Crimes Task Force and Domestic Violence Commission as the Assistant Secretary for Public Safety. She was the 2015 International Women's Forum Conference co-chair and now chairs the Ideas Remaking the World Committee. She has authored multiple books on leadership.
https://www.bpl.org/about-the-bpl/board-of-trustees/
Rachael S. Rollins, J.D. As the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Rachael Rollins was sworn into office in 2022 at 50 years of age. With a strong dedication to keeping neighborhoods safe and healthy, she is the top federal law enforcement official in Massachusetts. Her 20 years of legal experience provide her experience to lead 250 federal prosecutors and related staff across three offices in the state. Prior to her appointment, she was elected in 2019 as the first woman of color serving as a district attorney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and is now the first Black woman serving as a U.S. Attorney in the district. She previously worked as the Chief Legal Counsel for the Massachusetts Port Authority as well as the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. She also served as the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District, handling both Criminal and Civil divisions. She previously worked as a field attorney for the National Labor Relations Board and at the Bingham McCutchen LLP law firm, with her career starting as a clerk in the Massachusetts Appeals Court. She received her law degree from Northeastern.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/rachael-s-rollins-sworn-united-states-attorney-district-massachusetts
Rachel M. Washington As the first Black person to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1876, Rachel Washington was a leading educator in music in the Black community in Boston, helping many of Boston's talented musicians develop their skills to greatness. She also served as the choir director and organist at the Twelfth Baptist Church. She also performed on the piano, and was known for educating many of Boston's best musicians. She was noted in many public testimonials and complimentary writings in the press of New England, and was noted as being a woman of fine culture and character, humble in her personality while wielding an outstanding dedication to her art. She saw her musical talent and ability to teach and bring out the best in her students as her way of elevating the Black race.
https://www.musicbywomen.org/theorist/rachel-m-washington/
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/147940787/rachel-m-washington
Rebecca L. Crumpler, M.D. As the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in 1864, Rebecca Crumpler was born in 1831 and was the author of Book of Medical Discourses in 1883, which was the one of the first medical publications by a Black person. Born in Delaware, she learned much of her medical knowledge from her aunt, a local healer in Pennsylvania. She worked as a nurse in Charleston, Massachusetts in 1852, and by 1860, she had been admitted to the New England Female Medical College. Her book was focused on medicine for women and children, as an outreach of her passion for relieving the suffering of others. Practicing in Boston for a short period of time, she moved to Richmond, Virginia following the end of the Civil War, using it as a field for missionary work to become better acquainted with diseases impacting women and children. By caring for freed slaves who would have otherwise had no medical care access, she eventually returned to Boston to take up her work again with renewed vigor, treating people no matter their ability to pay for her services. Her book was based on journals kept during years of medical practice. She passed in 1895.
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_73.html
Rebecca P. Clarke During a time when elder care was extremely limited, Rebecca Clarke founded The Home for Aged Colored Women, the first home founded for elderly Black women in Boston. Enlisting assistance from both Black and white community leadership, she founded the home with Reverend Leonard Grimes, Governor John Andrew, and many others. An 1860 fundraising campaign allowed the organization to rent a house on Phillips Street as its first base of operations, then moved to Myrtle Street in 1864, before moving to Hancock Street in 1900. Residents were recommended through word of mouth and were often members of Black churches in Beacon Hill. With a commitment to maintaining a strong relationship between community and home residents, Clarke earned the community's strong support throughout the home's existence. The women in the home were provided with social activities and work that benefited the community. Two of the women from the home, ages 92 and 88, wrote The Women's Era publication to support women's suffrage.
https://www.nps.gov/places/home-for-aged-colored-women.htm
Rubina A. Guscott Born in Jamaica around 1900 and coming to Boston in 1920 at age 20, Rubina Guscott was a strong community activist and organizer who dedicated her life to the fight for equality and justice. She started as a domestic worker in Boston, but marched with the Black Star Nurses division each Saturday. Though she was widowed at 30, she raised her five sons and her daughter with a strong sense of community service and dedication to the common good. She was a charter member of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, and was active in almost every club group within the church and outside organizations pursuing social issues. She was a founder of Boston Progressive Credit, which pooled community resources to those in need. She lost one son in World War II, which drove her to become a member of Massachusetts Gold Star Mothers, eventually serving as its president. Despite being in her 60s during the Civil Rights era, she regularly took NAACP bus rides to Washington to participate in marches. She was described as a lady of great dignity and commitment, working hard towards a mutual goal of equality and justice. She died in 2002.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.obituaries/c/nrHguqFKkdc?pli=1
Ruth E. Hamilton Moving to Boston shortly following World War II, Ruth Hamilton was an Atlanta native with a big heart for serving her church community. A member of the Charles Street A.M.E. Church, she spent over 50 years as one of the top contraltos of the East Coast, often giving benefit concerts to support the church's ministries. With a strong Christ-centered focus, her ecumenical spirit made her a regular soloist at many churches in the area and served as a guest cantor in several Jewish synagogues during high holy days. She performed on many top world stages, toured Europe with both the New England Spiritual Ensemble and the Donnell Patterson Chorale. Performing as a soloist with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Arthur Fielder, she was also among the stars of CMAC's Annual Gospel Martin Luther King Jr. tribute and sang at several memorial services for President Kennedy. The recipient of many awards, her stirring performances have inspired many positive reviews, and she appeared on the first collection of art songs and spirituals by Black female composers. Her mission was preserving her rich legacy of music, and helped found the Hamilton Garrett Center for Music and Arts prior to her death in 2001.
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/copy-of-ruth-hamilton
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/about-us
Ruth E. Hill Born in Pittsfield in 1925, Ruth Hill was a dedicated librarian and educator, receiving her Bachelors from Massachusetts State College in 1946 and her Bachelors from Simmons College in 1949. Working at the Berkshire Athenaeum in 1943 followed by Massachusetts State College catalog department in 1947, she also worked as a cataloger at Bennington College and the Baker Library at Harvard Business School. Hired later as a reference librarian for the New York Academy of Medicine and serving in the catalog department of Yale University, she lent her talents to many post-secondary institutions large and small. These also included Berkshire Community College, the Widener Library at Harvard, the Louis Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and finally at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, where she served for 42 years as the audiovisual and oral history coordinator. Oral history projects she oversaw during this time include those focused on Black women, women in federal government, women of courage, Cambodian American women, Latina women, Tully Crenshaw feminism, Chinese American women, and Radcliffe College history. She passed in 2023.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/ruth-edmonds-hill
Ruth M. Batson A Roxbury native, Ruth Batson was a champion of desegregation in education. Born in 1921, she was a daughter of Jamaican immigrants. She graduated from Girl's Latin School in 1939 and Nursery Training School of Boston, affiliated with Boston University. Her mother had a strong interest in civil rights, which inspired Batson to become the Chairman for the NAACP's Public Education Sub-Committee in 1953. Within four years, she became the NAACP New England Regional Conference Chairwoman, allowing her to lobby for civil rights. She was the first Black woman to serve on the Democratic National Committee and the first woman to be elected president of the New England Regional Conference of the NAACP. When the Boston School Committee refused to take action in the early 1960s to end segregation, she challenged them with the highly-segregated Boston Public Schools and the fact that schools that had highly Black enrollment typically had inadequate school facilities. From 1963 to 1966, she served as the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination's Chairwoman, then launched the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, a voluntary desegregation program that transported 225 Black urban children to suburban schools at the start, growing to 1,125 children across 28 communities, serving until 1969.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-ruth-batson
Sandra B. Henriquez As the first Black woman appointed to Assistant Secretary of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 2009 to 2014 by President Obama, Sandra Henriquez is a graduate of both Boston University and the Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Her extensive background in public service and housing has prepared her well for the role, including being the longest-tenured Boston Housing Authority CEO from 1996 to 2009. Currently working as CEO of the Detroit Housing Commission since 2019, Henriquez has dedicated her life to fair housing, acting as an advocate for those in need. She has also worked with Rebuilding Together, SCBH Associates, Maloney Properties, other realty firms, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in positions stretching back to 1977. Henriquez has also been noted for her philanthropy and service to boards on several organizations, including the Board of Directors including chair positions for YWCA Boston, Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, and serving on various boards for the Citizens' Housing and Planning Association, National Housing Conference, and the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation. She is also a trustee of New England Baptist Hospital.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-b-henriquez-7166446/
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Ed.D. As an Emily Hargroves Research Professor of Education, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot received her Doctorate degree from Harvard in 1972. As a sociologist, she has spent her life dedicated to examining educational culture and the relationships between human development and social change, authoring 10 books on the topic from 1978 to 2012. As a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Bunting Institute, she received the MacArthur Prize in 1984, and Harvard University's George Ledlie Prize in 1993 for research that makes the most valuable benefits to mankind and contributions to science. She was accepted as a Spencer Senior Scholar in 1995 and was named the Margaret Mead Fellow through the Academy of Political and Social Science in 2008. She was the recipient of 28 honorary degrees from a variety of institutions in North America, and Swarthmore College established the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair in 1995, while Harvard awarded her with the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair, which will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair upon her retirement. This makes her the first Black woman in Harvard history to have an endowed professorship in her honor.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/sara-lawrence-lightfoot
Sarah Martin An active part of Boston's abolitionist movement, Sarah and her husband lived in Boston and helped fugitive slaves in the area. Her husband, having been born enslaved in North Carolina, escaped in 1856 and by 1859, had moved to Boston, becoming African Meeting House's preacher. The couple helped bolster the church's membership, with her husband's experience in enslavement and the horrors of slavery to move the abolitionist message forward. However, in a time when women were often in the background of society, Martin undertook her own work. This included founding the Fugitive Aid Society in Boston, an organization of Black women who collected food, money, and clothing donations for enslaved persons seeking their freedom during the Civil War, helping them to establish themselves in the North and work through the trauma that slavery had imparted on them.
https://www.nps.gov/places/sarah-and-john-sella-martin-house.htm
Sarah P. Remond As a lecturer, anti-slavery activist, and abolitionist campaigner, Sarah Redmond was born free in Salem, Massachusetts in 1826 and gave her first public speech against slavery at age 16 in 1842. Her mother was one of the founders of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, teaching her daughters not only household skills but also how to seek liberty within society. Becoming known for her speeches, she soon toured the northeastern United States, finding prominence in 1853 when she refused to sit in a segregated section in a theater. She often toured with her brother Charles Lenox Redmond. In 1856, as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, she toured in a range of northern and northern Midwestern states. Two years later, Redmond traveled to Britain to gather more support for the growing abolitionist movement in the U.S. She appealed to the British public to support the Union blockade of the Confederacy, then following the war, appealed for funds to support millions of newly emancipated freedmen in the South. She then went on to Italy in 1867 to receive medical training in Florence, receiving her degree and practicing medicine for almost two decades in Italy, passing in 1894 in Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Parker_Remond
Sarah-Ann Shaw As an American-born journalist, Sarah-Ann Shaw is a Roxbury native, born to a family active in the community, including the Roxbury Democratic Club and civil rights activities. An active part of the NAACP Youth Movement, she graduated in 1952, then attended Boston University. She joined the Boston Action Group in the early 1960s, and was then recruited as the director of the Boston Northern Student Movement, where she led projects such as voter education and registration, supporting welfare programs, and advocacy. She oversaw Neighborhood Operations for ABCD and the Community Health Education Program at the Ecumenical Center. She made her first TV appearance on Say Brother, which has become Basic Black, in 1968, then went on to work at WBZ-TV as the first Black female reporter in Boston in 1969, a position she held until 2000. She was the recipient of several awards over the years, including Lifetime Achievement Awards in 1998 from the National Association of Black Journalists and in 2000 from Emerson College's Radio Television News Direction Association, as well as multiple community service, unsung heroes, and other awards over the years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah-Ann_Shaw
Rep. Saundra Graham As an independent politician and community activist, Saundra Graham was born in 1941 and has been an active participant in the Cambridge and Middlesex areas for many decades. She became a member of the board of directors for the Cambridge Community Center in 1968, then became president of the Riverside Planning Team, a housing activism organization in Cambridge. The organization interrupted Harvard's graduation ceremony in 1970, with Graham taking the stage to demand that land be dedicated by the university as low-income housing rather than the planned dorm that the university was considering. Meeting for several hours, the university agreed to build low-income housing on a different site. This led to Graham's election as the first Black woman on the Cambridge City Council in 1971, and she became the first Black woman representing Cambridge in the state legislature. She passed away in 2023 at the age of 81.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saundra_Graham
Savina J. Martin As an author, community organizer, advocate, activist, and educator, Savina Martin represents poor and marginalized populations across the country. With a lifelong passion for educating and empowering marginalized individuals from the ground up, she received her Masters in 2001 from San Diego State University and her Doctorate in 2019 at College of Our Lady of the Elms Honoris Causa. Martin champions those who have had lived experiences with urban unrest, racism, systemic poverty, healthcare inequalities, addiction, homelessness, and addiction. She has served as President of the Greater Boston Union of the Homeless, including sit-ins, protests and vacant housing takeovers in the mid-1980s. She is a founder of WINGS Incorporated, a home for women, where she raised funds to refurbish the location as a place for women in need. She has contributed to We Cry Justice published in 2021 by Broadleaf Books, providing unique perspectives on scripture passages. She has spoken at many events, and is currently a statewide tri-chair for the Poor People's Campaign.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/savina-june-martin-m-s-doctorate-in-humane-letters-2a0b44230/
Shaumba-Yandje Dibinga Performing arts organization OrigiNation was founded in 194 by Shaumba-Yandje Dibinga in Roxbury, who still serves as the Founding Executive and Artistic Director. With an extensive background in training, teaching, and performing in all aspects of theater and dance, she has been producing plays and writing poetry for over 20 years. By providing a safe haven for young people, she understands the importance of teaching them health, education, self-respect, public speaking, self-confidence, career training, and the impact of African influence on a range of contemporary art forms. As the home to four professional youth dance companies, the organization implements initiatives to raise awareness in students of related social issues while facilitating the students' development into well-rounded individuals. Serving 400 youth on location and another 5,000 through artist-in-residence initiatives, the organization and Shaumba-Yandhe's work has captured many awards over the years.
https://www.barrfoundation.org/bios/shaumba-yandje-dibinga
Rep. Shirley Owens-Hicks With a long history of public service stretching over two decades, Shirley Owens-Hicks began her political career in the Democratic Party as a Boston School Committee member from 1984 to 1988, working to bring equity and quality education to children in the school system. Following this, she represented the 6th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1987 until 2006, following the example of her brother, Bill Owens, who served in the Massachusetts Senate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Owens-Hicks
Susan Paul As an author and educator devoted to social justice, community action, and change, Susan Paul was born in 1809 in the greater Boston area. Her parents' community roles as a school headmistress and minister exposed her to local community activists, and she chose to follow her mother's example by training as a teacher. Starting at Boston Primary School No. 6 and shortly after at the Abiel Smith School, which were both intended for Black children in the area, she added civic engagement in the standard curriculum. Her students were taught about the horrors of slavery, and she took them to anti-slavery meetings where they were able to listen to abolitionists. She formed a juvenile choir in 1832 which performed at anti-slavery meetings and held concerts to fundraise for abolitionist causes. She wrote The Memoir of James Jackson, published in 1835, which incorporated religious and moral themes to educate children about living with character, and is believed to be the first Black biography published in the U.S. Paul was active in many anti-slavery and temperance organizations, before personal tragedy and illness cut her life short at the age of 31, passing away in 1841 from tuberculosis.
https://www.nps.gov/people/susan-paul.htm
Susie K. Taylor As a teacher and nurse, Susie Taylor achieved several firsts in her lifetime, overcoming adversity from her birth in enslavement in Georgia in 1848. She was able to attend two secret schools taught by Black women despite the state's harsh laws forbidding formal education of Blacks. During the Civil War, her uncle led her to a Union gunboat near Confederate-held Fort Pulaski, giving her freedom at age 14. As a refugee, she found safety behind Union lines on the South Carolina Sea Islands. She attached herself to the First South Carolina Volunteers, which was the first U.S. Army Black regiment, first as a laundress, then as a cook, but her literacy allowed her to serve as a reading instructor for the regiment. She married her husband in the regiment, remaining together with the unit until 1866. However, when her husband passed away, she moved to Boston in 1872. She devoted her life to working with the Woman's Relief Corps, an organization serving female Civil War veterans. After publishing her memoir, My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, in 1902, she passed away a decade later in 1912.
https://www.nps.gov/people/susie-king-taylor.htm
Teri Williams As President and Chief Operating Officer of OneUnited Bank, Teri Williams heads up the largest Black-owned bank in the United States. Also serving on the board of directors, she is focused on implementing strategic initiatives while overseeing daily operations. Offering a range of innovative products and services that are designed to close the racial wealth gap, she has spent over 40 years gathering financial services expertise from premier financial institutions, including American Express, where she was one of the youngest Vice Presidents in the company's history, as well as Bank of America. With a Bachelors from Brown University and an MBA with Honors from Harvard, she has served in a range of roles over the years, including Chairman of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, the board of the 79th Street Corridor in Miami, Chair of the Urban Initiative Task Force of the Miami-Dade Beacon Council, board of the CCC Intelligent Solutions, and has received a number of awards and recognition for her contribution to urban communities, including being selected by Forbes Magazine in 2022 in its 50 over 50 list of women with careers in financial services.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/teri-williams-99811029/
Terri Lyne Carrington As a jazz drummer, composer, producer and educator, Terri Carrington was born in Medford in 1965 and has performed with and toured with several top musical acts over the years. Growing up in a musical family, she was given a set of drums at age seven, and after privately studying for three years, she gave her first major performance at the Wichita Jazz Festival, earning her a full scholarship the next year to Berklee College of Music. She moved to New York in 1983 to work with a range of talented musicians, and then to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, including writing and producing her own work. 2011 saw her touring South America with several other artists. Appointed as a professor at her alma mater, Berklee College of Music, she has also won three Grammy Awards across her seven albums, including being the first female musician to win a Grammy in 2013 for the Best Jazz Instrumental Album. She is the founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice as well as The Car Center. She has also written a children's book and a book New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Lyne_Carrington
Thea L. James, M.D.With a strong life-long passion for improving health outcomes and reducing healthcare inequalities, Thea James has worked with Boston Medical Center for many years, most currently as the Vice President of Mission. Working with caregivers throughout the medical center's system, she coordinates and maximizes the medical center's strategic alliances and relationships with many national, state, and local organizations. These include a range of housing advocates, community agencies, and similar organizations that are focused on fostering innovative and effective models of care that are needed for the health center's patients and their surrounding communities to be able to thrive and reach their full potential. James' role includes a range of intersections between health, wealth, economic mobility, and similar upstream drivers that tend to predict poor health outcomes. Using these care models, she works to bring operational equality in a broader sense to Boston Medical Center patients now and long into the future.
https://www.bmc.org/about-us/directory/doctor/thea-l-james-md
Thelma D. Burns As a life-long community activist and advocate for the Black community in Boston, Thelma Burns has served in a wide range of roles in organizations across the metro area. She has served on the Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) Board of Directors for over 35 years, including Committee Chair, Vice Chair, and Board Chair. She has headed the board for the ABCD Dorchester Neighborhood Service Center for over 15 years, and has worked in leadership on a number of community boards including the Mayor's Senior Advisory Council, the Roxbury YMCA, and Central Boston Elder Services. She also served from 1980 to 2008 as the director for the Belmont Public Schools Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity. She received a Robert F. Kennedy Fellowship in 1968, and has received her Bachelors from Boston University and Masters from Harvard. Because of her extensive ongoing work serving the community, the Thelma D. Burns Building was dedicated in her honor in 2016.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-thelma-burns
Tommiejo Dixon As a fixture of Boston's food scene, Ma Dixon's, originally Ma Dixon's Diner, was founded by Tommiejo Dixon with encouragement from her husband in 1943. Born in 1914, Dixon opened the sandwich shop to provide southern-style cuisine and is now being managed by her great-nephew and -niece. As a family-owned restaurant, Dixon, together with her sisters Janie and Ruth, would provide a comfortable location that catered to the Black community in the area. Moving to its current Grove Hall location in 1968, the business weathered the loss of Dixon in 1979, with her sisters taking over the operation, then their children following in the family tradition of providing delicious food to the community.
https://bwht.org/women-feeding-boston-tour/
Tulaine Montgomery With a strong belief in creating a better world for everyone, Tulaine Montgomery serves as CEO of New Profit. Based on a coalition of social change makers and entrepreneurs, the organization is advancing a vision of an America where all people can thrive and grow. Montgomery has worked in leadership roles in launching and expanding social enterprises worldwide, providing advice to numerous nonprofits and socially-responsible companies. She has backed many of the most powerful, promising social innovations in the United States through her work with venture philanthropy organization New Profit. She believes that by advocating for a new era of philanthropy that focuses on lifting up leaders that are in the closest proximity to issues, these visionary leaders can better scale innovations and create transformation in the most inequitable systems in the country. These include strengthening the education-to-employment pathways for underserved individuals, pushing resources and support for entrepreneurs impacted directly by the U.S. legal system, and by improving diversity, equity, and inclusiveness in philanthropy. The organization also bridges the resource gap often faced by minority and underinvested social entrepreneurs.
https://tulainemontgomery.com/
Valerie Mosley Graduating in 1982 with her Bachelors from Duke University, Valerie Mosley has always focused on success. As the former Duke student body vice president and president realized moving forward with her MBA from The Wharton School, where she has served as president of Alumni Affairs, she realized that she wanted to work with companies that add value not only to investors, but to society at large. After managing billions of dollars of assets at Wellington Management for over 20 years, she realized she wanted more and created Valmo Ventures to provide advice and investment funds in businesses that made that dream a reality. Representing organizations including Fundify, Quantum Exchange, STEAMRole, TEquitable, and other companies, her business provides these companies and leaders with the financial and informational resources they need to improve their chances of success and rate of growth. She also serves on boards of a range of businesses and organizations to help them achieve their goals in the community and in business.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeriemosley/
Valerie Shelley As a long-time community activist, leader and champion for the Orchard Gardens neighborhood, Valerie Shelley had been a strong advocate for Boston Housing Authority families, especially for Orchard Gardens. Born in 1948 in the Orchard Park Public Housing Development, she left in 1966 to work initially at a law firm, and later for the Boston Public Schools system. Her sisters remained in public housing through redevelopment. She retired in 1999 and returned to the renamed Orchard Gardens, assisting her sister with advocating for people in the community. When her sister Edna Bynoe passed away in 2010, Shelley knew that she needed to step up into a leadership role to keep her sister's work alive. Taking on the role of President of the Orchard Gardens Tenant Task Force, she carried on that legacy. She also served as the Chair of the Boston Housing Authority's Resident Advisory Board, an organization that reviews Boston Housing Authority policy changes, as well as the organization's annual and five-year plans. With a focus on helping residents to realize that they have a voice, she continued that work for twelve years, advocating for the community and residents of Orchard Gardens for many years until her death in 2022.
https://www.bostonhousing.org/en/News/BHA-Statement-on-the-Passing-of-Valerie-Shelley.aspx
Vivian Male As a current jazz artist, Vivian Male is based in Boston but travels the United States to perform at jazz festivals, concerts, national conferences, corporate events, and other special events. Annual concerts at Martha's Vineyard and the Scullers Jazz Club in Boston regularly sell out. She has helped raise funds for educational scholarships through producing and performing at concerts for Berklee College of Music, as well as a range of non-profit organizations. She held a record-breaking fundraiser for The Negro Ensemble Company in New York. Featured as a vocalist for the New England Emmy Awards, inducted into the Steppin' Out Hall of Fame in Boston, and has performed the National Anthem for the New England Patriots on multiple occasions.
http://www.vivianmale.com/about.html
Sister Virginia Morrison With a strong belief in the concept that an engaged mind keeps children - and adults - out of trouble, Virginia Morrison has served as the executive director of the Grove Hall Neighborhood Development Corporation for many years and has pushed for the construction and development of a new community center in Dorchester, a dream which became a reality in 2022. A lack of standalone community centers in Dorchester and Grove Hall has led to significant area violence, and community leaders like Morrison know that the only way to reduce that violence is by creating opportunities for people to gather for collaboration, learn, play, and connect. The new building will allow for a wider range of programs, resources, education, and community space to improve the neighborhood's quality of life. She also advocates for more community policing, more involvement on the streets by both religious and civic organizations, and encourages community members to report problems when they occur so that they can be part of the solution.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-bostons-grove-hall-a-new-community-center-and-old-frustrations-around-violence/ar-AA12W29v
Wilhelmina Marguerita Crosson Moving to Boston in 1906, Wilhelmina Crosson graduated from Girls' High School and then began teaching, starting in 1920 by teaching remedial reading to children of Italian immigrants. Her experiences with the classes encouraged her to create the first remedial reading program for the City of Boston in 1935. But a decade prior to that push, she also founded The Aristo Club of Boston, an organization of professional Black woman who provided scholarships to Black students while promoting the study of Black history. The organization successfully campaigned the Boston Public School System to celebrate Negro History Week. Though she officially retired in 1966, she found that retirement didn't sit well with her, and within two years, she founded a training program for Peace Corps volunteers, while also spending significant amounts of time in her retirement years tutoring individuals in different subjects and volunteering at the city's homeless shelters.
https://www.boston.gov/news/meet-wilhelmina-marguerita-crosson-boston-teacher-who-advocated-black-history-education
Zakiya Alake After receiving her Associates at Antioch School of Law Paralegal Tech Program in 1980, Zakiya Alake undertook additional education at Fitchburg State University and University of Massachusetts Boston, but didn't find that law fed her passion for food, love, and community building. Instead, she started and operated Zakiya Alake's Abundance Catering and ZAGE Inc, focusing on serving the community while feeding her passion by feeding those around her for over 40 years. This passion for nourishing the people around her is leading Alake into developing her next steps in business while remaining focused on building community, spreading love, and providing nourishing food.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakiya-alake-62ba5a42/
Zipporah P. Atkins As the first Black person to own land in the United States, Zipporah Atkins was born in colonial Boston to enslaved parents. At that time, in the colony of Massachusetts, children of slaves were considered to be free at birth. She had inherited funds from her father which he had, in turn, received from his former enslaver, and by 1670, at age 25, she used the funds to purchase property in Boston's North End neighborhood, which is now part of the Rose Kennedy Greenway. As a single Black woman, it was very unusual that her purchase was able to go through given the social norms of the time, but even after she married, she retained full ownership of the property during a time when husbands had control over their wives and their property. She sold a portion of her land in 1693 for 100 pounds, and six years later, sold the remainder of the property for an additional 25 pounds. The deed for the property was signed with her initials, indicating that she knew how to read and write during a time when most Black, and many white, people in the colonies were still illiterate. Following this final sale, Atkins passed from history's notice.
https://wanderwomenproject.com/women/zipporah-potter-atkins/
Angela Paige CookRaised in a family of educators, Angela Cook is a co-founder of Paige Academy, an early childhood education center focused on sharing knowledge and building better brains in children. She received a Bachelors from Fisk University, followed by a Masters at Wheelock College, and served as an Urban Studies Fellow at MIT. She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 at University of Massachusetts Boston, and all of her education has been focused on early and urban education. Her dissertation entitled A Case Study of a Black Independent School: Reflections on Cultural Resonance in an Elementary and Preschool Setting was the basis for Paige Academy, which in turn was named for her great, great aunt Lucy Paige Williams, who regularly formed schools of benevolence in her home, teaching handcrafts, reading, and other skills.
www.paigeacademy.org/#history
Anna Mae ColeAnna Mae Cole was a co-founder of the Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation in the 1980s, creating a model for the nation for public housing that was tenant controlled. She was a strong community advocate and activist pushing for improved services for Jamaica Plain, promoting the idea of urban gardening throughout the public housing corporation to improve neighborhood pride and beautification, and eventually moving into vegetable production in the neighborhood. Cole has since had the Anna Mae Cole Community Center named after her, providing programs, events, sports, a multi-purpose room, and a community kitchen. It also features more green spaces, which were at the heart of Anna Cole's push for community gardens in the area while she was active.
https://www.boston.gov/news/creating-community-forming-ties-bostons-neighborhoods
https://jamaicaplaingazette.com/2012/02/17/bromley-heath-leader-retires-bha-takes-over/
https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collection/p15774coll6/id/5248
https://tcbinc.org/news/construction-starts-at-mildred-c-hailey-apartments-in-boston/
Edna J. SwanAs the first Black female police officer to serve with the Boston Police Department in 1943, Patrolman Edna J. Swan had already attended Fisk University during the Great Depression, along with volunteering with the Red Cross, which started her passion for public service.
https://blackstonian.org/2018/02/black-history-boston-police-department/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230331030735/https://bpdnews.com/news/2023/2/22/lwwczsocux2dykgza091hn0ynnfik9
https://www.newsbreak.com/boston-ma/2935374594847-bpd-and-mamleo-honor-former-police-officer-edna-swan-and-deputy-superintendent-willis-saunders
https://bpdnews.com/news/2023/2/22/lwwczsocux2dykgza091hn0ynnfik9
Ella I. GarrettA Boston native born in 1924, Ella Garnett was an active public servant, working for over 30 years in the U.S. General Services Administration at the Public Building Service Headquarters as a Senior Procurement Analyst. After attending Simmons College and marrying her former husband following World War II, she developed and wrote procurement policies for the Federal Government, impacting how federal buildings that were either owned or leased were built or maintained across the entire United States. She also provided analysis of federal projects that had been approved by the U.S. Congress for new construction, renovations, and annual designs. She passed away peacefully in 2016.
https://www.leblackphillipsholdenfuneralhome.com/obituary/Ella-Garnett
Frances Carolyn Harris Providing leadership, comfort, and joy to those in her presence at the Holy Tabernacle and other churches in the Boston area, Frances Carolyn Harris was born in the late 1930s. She was known for her presence, strong faith, and dedication to family, church, and community.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/frances-harris-obituary?id=16922765
Frances J. Bonner, M.D. A member of the Massachusetts General Psychiatry Department for over 50 years, Frances Bonner was the first Black female physician to train on the service in 1949, following her neurology training at Boston City High School. After receiving a two-year fellowship from Radcliffe College focused on hysteria, she began her research career, later undertaking neurobiological research at the institution. She received her psychoanalytic certification from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in 1975, founding the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England with other co-founders. She dedicated the bulk of her career to clinical practice, supervising residents in individual psychotherapy sessions. She was known as a pioneer in crossing gender and racial boundaries in medicine, and is the namesake of an award established in 2010 by the Massachusetts General Department of Psychiatry as well as the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, promoting diversity and inclusion in psychiatric communities.
http://history.massgeneral.org/catalog/Detail.aspx?itemId=1456&searchFor=bonner
www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/about/center-for-diversity/bonner-award
"Jacqui" Jacquelyn Jones HoardA 1990 recipient of the Henry L. Shattuck Public Service Awards, Jacqui Hoard is well known in Boston's Black community for her dedication to public service and the community at large. Sister to Clarence Jack "Jeep" Jones, Boston's first and only deputy mayor, Jacqui had the same determination and dedication to serving the community as her brother,
https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/The-loss-of-a-Lifelong-Friend-of-Minister-Louis-and-Khadijah-Farrakhan-Boston-shows-appreciation-for-the-life-of-Clarence-Jeep-Jones.shtml
thebostonsun.com/2019/07/12/sunset-concert-at-symphony-community-park/
https://bmrb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018-Shattuck-ProgramB.pdf
Joyce Ferriabough BollingWith the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, a Democratic strategist and journalist with the Boston Herald, saw the opportunity for getting more Black individuals into office in 2013. With Boston's longest-serving Mayor Menino stepping down in that year and half of the 12-person field being persons of color. Her late husband Bruce was the city's first Black council president in the 1980s, and that passion to reshape the political environment in favor of minority candidates shows up in everything she does. However, she sees strategy at the same time, noting that though there is much opportunity, having too many persons of color running for a single position means that nobody will win that political seat.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/01/08/metro/with-bidens-selection-walsh-mayors-race-heats-up
Karen MillerAs Boston's first Black female firefighter, Karen Miller was born in Roxbury, moving later to the Academy Homes apartment complex. Serving six years with the U.S. Army Reserves, she became the first Black female firefighter in Boston in August 1985. She was encouraged by her brother, a state trooper, to take the civil service exams and take the first job that came up, which happened to be the fire department. Starting out at Ladder 10 in Jamaica Plain, she was one of the few women in the department to not be started exclusively on engine duty. Facing an uphill battle that included oversize unisex equipment and no designated bathrooms, she tried to not make waves, but in meeting up with other women in the department, they began organizing for reforms, negotiating changes in employee policies such as locked bathrooms, smaller protective equipment sizes for women, and refitting the shower area for better privacy. She has since become a fire investigator, education and prevention specialist prior to retiring in 2006. She now serves as executive director of the Boston Society of Vulcans, a non-profit focused on recruiting minorities to public safety positions.
https://www.dotnews.com/2010/retired-firefighter-miller-recognized-pioneer
Letitia CampfieldIn the early 20th century, there were many areas of society and work that were inaccessible to Blacks and persons of color, as well as women. In 1929, Letitia Campfield was one of two Black women who were the first Blacks to be admitted to Boston City Hospital's School of Nursing. Historically, free Black medical practitioners were held in contempt, and finishing formal medical school was very challenging for persons of color. At the same time, discrimination was a constant threat to persons of color in medical fields. This resistance to Blacks in the medical industry was just one part of a slow, arduous integration process in the medical field..
https://www.blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaVU00cO_Fc/?utm_medium=copy_link
https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/Guide%20to%20the%20Boston%20City%20Hospital%20collection_tcm3-52281.pdf
Rev. Liz WalkerFirst arriving in Boston over 40 years ago as a rising broadcast news star, Liz Walker was the first Black anchor of a regular nightly newscast, later moving into work as an ordained minister and community leader. She started out with on-air success in San Francisco and Denver, then put down strong roots in Boston following desegregation, a pain she understood as one of the first students desegregating West Side Junior High in Little Rock. Always walking by faith throughout her life as the daughter of a preacher, she is now changing gears from preaching, which had given her a direct connection to provide a voice to those who were not being heard in the community, towards writing a book on trauma and healing, an area she explored in depth starting a decade ago when violence broke out in the neighborhood around her church. Her preaching includes a degree from Harvard Divinity School, working a sa pastor in one of Boston's poorest neighborhoods, and building a girl's school in southern Sudan in Africa.
Margaret MoseleyBorn in Dedham in 1901, Margaret Moseley found herself at odds with a segregated world, kept out of serious nursing or business work by discrimination. Instead, she was a founding member of a 1940s consumers' cooperative, served on the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union board, and was a founding member who also served on Freedom House's board in Roxbury. She served as Community Church's president, and as the Massachusetts legislative chair for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Focused on serving as a peace, community, and civil rights activist, which in 1989 started the Margaret Moseley Memorial Peace Fund. She moved to Cape Cod in 1961, continuing her dedication to community activism by founding local chapters of the NAACP and WILPF, as well as many other organizations. She served Barnstable's Unitarian Church as a founding member of its social responsibility committee and as the first woman chairing the prudential committee. She was part of the committee to meet the reverse freedom riders in 1962, part of an attempt to embarrass President Kennedy by stirring up racial problems where his family spent summers. She traveled to Selma, Alabama in 1965 with other women from WILPF to work on voting rights.
https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5527
https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/margaret-moseley/
https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:american+folklife+center&q=Moseley,+Margaret.+Papers+-+The+Civil+Rights+History+Project:+Survey+of+Collections+and+Repositories+%28The+American+Folklife+Center,+Library+of+Congress%29
https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/
Mildred C. HaileyFrom the late 1960s, when the Bromley-Health Public Housing Development began being operated by tenants, until her death, Mildred Hailey was always a guiding hand on the organization. She started the drive to gain control of the development from the Boston Housing Authority in 1968 by repairing conditions that wouldn't be tolerated to negotiating truces between rival gangs that led to a successful GED program, she considered the entire community to be her extended family. Considered to be a force of nature by many, Hailey took on a very difficult job with a combination of compassion and courage at a time when running water, heat, and electricity were fairly spotty and there were over 4,000 broken windows around the entire development when a progressive board of commissioners stepped aside to let the tenants save themselves. By building a new sense of strong community, it became a model of how to reclaim broken public housing systems. Though she retired in 2012 from her position as executive director, she still showed up at all meetings until the last couple of months of her life in 2015.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/19/mildred-hailey-tenant-activism-transformed-boston-public-housing/uMvf9iF3ozuC8lLlVOKiCN/story.html
Mamie Nell "Mimi" JonesKnown for the famous photo in 1964 that spread around the world of racial attacks in Boston, Mimi Jones was 17 at the time she participated in a swim-in to integrate a Florida pool, born in 1947 in Georgia. With her mouth open in a scream, the white motel owner behind her was dumping acid into the water. The St. Augustine incident drew international coverage, causing President Johnson to discuss the attack in the Oval Office and driving strong support for the stalled Civil Rights Act of 1964, with overwhelming approval by the U.S. Senate the day after the photo was released. She moved to Boston later in life for a college scholarship and continued her community activism, started even earlier in her life teaching poor rural Black persons in Georgia to read so that they could register to vote and joined the March on Washington in 1963. After settling in Boston, she began working for the state Education Department, wrote grants for local nonprofits, and participated with a number of organizations and committees, seeking social justice. She passed away in her Roxbury home in 2020.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/27/metro/overlooked-her-role-galvanizing-civil-rights-protest-mimi-jones-dies-73/
Nadine Fortune WrightBorn in 1893 in Illinois, Nadine Wright was born into a wealthy family with her parents being well-educated teachers. However, their wealth didn't protect the family from state-sanctioned racially-based crimes, stirring up in Nadine a strong passion for lifelong activism and achievement. A resurgence of racism and the death of her father in 1899 caused significant issues for the family, and when her mother passed away in 1906, it was decided that she and her brother would be sent to Cambridge to live with their aunt, who helped found the Niagara Movement. Growing up in a home at the center of Black political and intellectual activity, the children learned how to think for themselves, with Wright graduating from Radcliffe in 1917 while continuing her civil rights work. She then taught in the Cambridge public school system for almost 20 years, chartering the Boston Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, acting as a trustee of Robert Gould Shaw house, and serving in many organizations. After marrying, she spent teaching at colleges in North Carolina before returning to Boston to work with children with cerebral palsy. She passed away in 1994.
https://www.mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210228123150/https://mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
Bishop Nellie YarboroughWith a strong focus on making sure that everyone had somebody to lean on in hard times, Nellie Yarborough worked with a range of church parishioners and police to move the Dorchester neighborhood out of crime and poverty. Born in North Carolina to a preacher's family, she began preaching at age 12 to the congregation's youth, traveling at age 17 with Brumfield Johnson, the church's founder. Their travels led them to Boston, where the church's headquarters was established. With a passion for ministering for those in need, she was appointed as the assistant pastor of Mount Calvary Holy Church in 1962, becoming the senior pastor a decade later when Johnson passed away, and ordained as a bishop in 1994, the second woman to hold that title. An educated, adaptable pillar of the community, she was a friend to the homeless, advocating for them with politicians and serving food to those in need every Thursday night to crowds that often topped 100. She continued serving the community throughout her years, passing away in 2012.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/nellie-yarborough-obituary?id=7382565
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-boston-globe/20121224/282024734591443
Nora L. BastonAs an 18-year Boston Police Department veteran, Nora Baston serves as a pillar of the community, managing community engagement for the department and doing so very well. In addition to getting guns off of Boston streets and tracking down girls who are moving into gangs, she lives for the goodwill she gets from young students who want to share their success, in one case waiting hours to show her their report card. As deputy superintendent, she's one of four women on the command staff for Boston Police, and she takes that responsibility seriously, going out three or four nights a week to engage with kids, be a mentor, and build trust in areas where violence is prevalent to give youth an alternative from gangs and drugs. With two degrees from University of Massachusetts Lowell and having graduated from Boston Police Academy in 1996, she credits former Police Commissioner Davis with teaching her how to connect with people one-on-one. She sees education as the best police work, getting kids that would otherwise get into trouble into college or back into school.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2014/04/07/women-in-command-deputy-superintendent-nora-l-baston/
Peggy Olivia Brown Ed.D.With a strong belief that all children can learn, Peggy Brown feared that children of color were being overlooked in public schools, leading them to drop out, end up in legal trouble, or lead unfulfilled lives. Born in 1934 in Washington, D.C., she grew up in New York City, where she saw the devastating life paths of those who didn't have positive role models in her south Bronx neighborhood. She then attended multiple universities before lecturing at Northeastern University and Boston College. To make a difference, she launched initiatives to improve healthcare in Roxbury with the Mandela Town Hall Health Spot which provided weekly blood sugar and blood pressure screenings, with Dr. Brown inviting dentists, optometrists, or other health professionals to help address disparities she was seeing. At the same time, she was founding the Mandela Crew, providing youth in the area with access to a sport they wouldn't participate in traditionally. She worked with kids in groups or one-on-one, sometimes staying up with youth until 4 or 5 AM to help them write term papers to ensure they could graduate high school, steering them into the possibilities of a successful life. After many years making a strong impact on youth in the community, she passed in 2014.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/27/peggy-brown-educator-and-activist-founded-mandela-crew-first-african-american-and-latino-team-compete-head-charles/p0962cwuqrl5SLsObdjkzJ/story.html
Shirley ShillingfordWith a strong focus on food and carnival, Shirley Shillingford is the name behind Shirley's Pantry in Mattapan. As president of the Caribbean American Carnival Association of Boston (CACAB), Shillingford started with the organization in 1975 as she worked for Mayor White's administration. She served alongside Edward Harry and Sebastian Joseph who ran the organization for 16 years after founder Ivy Ponder and Ken Bonaparte Mitchell stepped back. She then took over in 1990, serving as the lead for Boston Carnival for the past 33 years. For a similar long period of time, she's been serving at what was the Healthy Baby, Health Food Pantry on River Street, which has now been renamed as Shirley's Pantry following her founding of the pantry in 1992 with no resources except asking businesses and the government for help. With a strong dedication to community and disadvantaged populations, Shillingford has often reached out to employees, elected officials, and community members to keep the pantry operating for everything from food to appliances to labor.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-08-25/bostons-carnival-celebrating-50-years-is-a-treasure-says-organizer
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/it-s-shirley-s-pantry-now-renaming-honors-longtime-manager-mattapan
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/23/mattapan-food-pantry-named-for-its-manager-a-longtime-activist/
Angela Paige Cook, Ph.D. (Active 1970s to 2010s)Raised in an educational family, Angela Paige Cook, Ph.D., is one of the co-founders of Paige Academy. After receiving a Bachelors from Fish University and a Masters at Wheelock College, she received an Urban Studies Fellowship at MIT, and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2002. Her focus on early childhood and urban education was reflected in her dissertation A Case Study of a Black Independent School: Reflections on Cultural Resonance in an Elementary and Preschool Setting, which was the foundation for the school. Paige Academy is an early childhood education center that has a primary focus on building better brains in children through shared knowledge.
www.paigeacademy.org/#history
Anna Mae Cole (Active 1980s to 1990s)As a co-founder of the Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation in the 1980s, Anna Mae Cole helped create a model for tenant-controlled public housing nationwide. As a strong community activist and advocate, she pushed for a range of improved services in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. She promoted urban gardening to help improve pride and beautification in the neighborhood, adding vegetable production in later years to help with the shortage of fresh food in the area. The Anna Mae Cole Community Center was named for her, which features green spaces as well as programming, sports, events, a community kitchen, and a multi-purpose room.
https://www.boston.gove/news/creating-community-forming-ties-bostons-neighborhoods
https://jamaicaplaingazette.com/2012/02/17/bromley-health-retires-bha-takes-over/
https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collecton/p15774coll6/id/5248
https://tcbinc.org/news/construction-starts-at-mildred-c-hailey-apartments-in-boston/
***Cleora Carter FrancisI've done a search of the entire Boston Globe site as well as in-depth internet sites - I cannot find anything on this woman. Without additional details, I will not be able to continue on this biography.
Edna C. Robinson Brown, D.D.M. (Active 1920s to 1940s)As the first Black woman to perform dentistry in Cambridge, Edna C. Robinson Brown was a dentist who graduated from Columbia University and was a very early member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Psi Omega chapter. Though not much is known about her life, being able to attend Columbia as a Black woman means that she probably attended after 1923, as Columbia University recognizes Elizabeth Delaney as the University's College of Dental Medicine's first Black female graduate.
https://www.akaboston.org/chapter-history
https://thelowdown.alumni.columbia.edu/history_of_women_at_columbia
Edna J. Swan (Active 1943 to 1960s)Serving as the first Black female police officer with the Boston Police Department, Patrolman Edna J. Swan attended Fisk University during the Great Depression. She also volunteered with the Red Cross during that time, igniting her passion for public service. She began her service with the department in 1943.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-bostons-grove-hall-a-new-community-center-and-old-frustrations-around-violence/ar-AA12W29v
Elta M. Garrett (Born 1942)As a co-founder of the Hamilton-Garrett Music & Arts Academy with Ruth Hamilton, Elta Garrett was born in 1942 and has dedicated over 50 years of her life as a music teacher within the Boston Public School System and was a noted soprano singer in the national musical community. Following her retirement, she worked as the founding director of the Academy for twelve years. She remained an active supporter as a member of the Board of the Academy and has been recognized for over two decades of service to the Historic Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church.
https://clustrmaps.com/person/Garrett-89ubff
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/whoweare
Francis Carolyn Harris (Active 1929 to 1950s)As one of the two first Black women admitted to the School of Nursing at Boston City Hospital, Francis Carolyn Harris entered the nursing program in 1929. At the time, there were very few licensed Black female nurses in the United States, Massachusetts, and Boston, and individuals in these roles often faced significant discrimination and difficulty in finishing their formal medical training. The other Black woman admitted to the School of Nursing at the time was Letitia Campfield.
https://www.blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
Frances J Bonner, M.D. (Active 1949 to 1980s)
As the first Black female physician with the Massachusetts General Psychiatry Department, Frances J. Bonner, M.D. began her training in 1949. She received her fellowship from Radcliffe College focusing on hysteria, leading to her long research career, including neurobiological research at the college. She received a psychoanalytic certification in 1975 from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She helped co-found the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England and dedicated most of her career to clinical practice while supervising residents during individual psychotherapy sessions. She had a reputation as a pioneer in crossing the boundaries in gender and racial medicine. An award was established in her name in 2010 at the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and the Massachusetts General Department of Psychiatry.
http://history.massgeneral.org/catalog/Detail.aspx?itemId+1456&searchFor=bonner
www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/about/center-for-diversity/bonner-award
Gladys HolmesI have been unable to find any details on this woman. It is a relatively common name, and despite multiple searches to track this down to the Boston region, I have been unable to locate more details. Without further information, I cannot complete this biography.
“Jacqui” Jones Hoard (Active 1980s to 1990s)Jacqui Jones Hoard was a 1990 recipient of the Henry L. Shattuck Public Service Award. Well-known throughout Boston’s Black community for her strong dedication to the community and public service, she was the sister to Clarence Jack “Jeep” Jones, Boston’s first and only Black deputy mayor, showcasing the family’s overall determination and dedication to community service.
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/The-loss-of-a-Lifelong-Friend-of-Minister-Louis-and-Khadijah-Farrakhan-Boston-shows-appreciation-for-the-life-of-Clarence-Jeep-Jones.shtml
thebostonsun.com/2019/07/12/sunset-concert-at-symphony-community-park/
https://bmrb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018-shattuck-programB.pdf
Joyce Ferriabough Bolling (Active 2013 to Present)
The growth of the Black Lives Matter Movement led Democratic strategist and journalist Joyce Ferriabough Bolling to work to get more Black individuals into public office starting in 2013. As Boston’s longest-serving mayor, Mayor Menino, stepped down, half of the 12-person primary were people of color. Using the passion she’d found when her late husband Bruce ran and served as the city’s first Black council president in the 1980s, she found that having too many people of color running for a single position ensured that nobody would get the seat, driving her to stand behind candidates that had the best potential to bring about change.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/01/08/metro/with-bidens-selection-walsh-mayors-race-heats-up
Karen Miller (Active 1985 to 2006)
Serving as Boston’s first Black female firefighter, Karen Miller is a Roxbury native who moved to the Academy Homes apartment Complex. After serving for six years with the U.S. Army Reserves, she joined the Boston Fire Department in August 1985 after being encouraged by her brother, a state trooper, to take the civil service exam and take the first job available. Starting out in Ladder 10 in Jamaica Plain, she was one of the few women in the entire department who was not started exclusively on engine duty. Meeting with other women, she realized they had all faced an uphill battle with oversized unisex equipment and no designated or locking bathroom space. She organized with these women for reforms. She has since worked as a fire investigator, educator, and prevention specialist prior to her 2006 retirement, after which she served as the executive director of the Boston Society of Vulcans, a non-profit focused on recruiting minorities to public safety positions.
https://dotnews.com/2010/retired-firefighter-miller-recognized-pioneer
Letitia Campfield (Active 1929 to 1950s)
During the early parts of the 20th century, many areas of society and employment were inaccessible to Blacks and other persons of color, as well as women. Leticia Campfield was one of two Black women who, in 1929, were the first Black women to be admitted to Boston City Hospital’s School of Nursing. Historically, free Black medical practitioners were viewed with contempt and finishing formal training was difficult at best for persons of color. Discrimination was also a constant threat to persons of color in the medical industry. This made Campfield’s admission, along with Francis Carolyn Harris the same year, a marked victory for Black medical professionals.
https://Blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaVU00cO_Fc/?utm_medium=copy_link
https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/Guide%20to%20the%20Boston%20City%20Hospital%20collection_tcm3-52281.pdf
Rev. Liz Walker (Active 1970s to 2020s)
As a rising broadcast news star, Liz Walker was the first Black anchor of a regular nightly newscast when she arrived in Boston over 40 years ago. Starting out with on-air success in Denver and San Francisco, she understood the pain of Boston Blacks during desegregation as one of the first students desegregated to West Side Junior High in Little Rock, Arkansas. As the daughter of a preacher, she always walked in faith, which led her to her own work as an ordained minister and community leader. She’s worked on a book focused on trauma and healing following an outbreak of violence near her church and neighborhood. Her experience includes her degree from Harvard Divinity School, ministering to those in Boston’s lowest-income neighborhoods, and helping build a girl’s school in Sudan, Africa.
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/liz-walker-retires-roxbury-presbyterian-church/
https://roxburypresbyterianchurch.org/our-pastor/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Walker_(journalist)
Margaret Moseley (Active 1940s to 1960s)Born in 1901 in Dedham and kept out of significant business or nursing work by discrimination, Margaret Moseley was a founding member of a 1940s consumer cooperative, served on the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union board and founded and served on the Freedom House board in Roxbury. She also served as Community Church’s president, as the Massachusetts legislative chair for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, or WILPF, and worked as a civil rights, community, and peace activist, and is the namesake of the Margaret Moseley Memorial Peace Fund. She founded local chapters of the WILPF and NAACP upon moving to Cape Cod in 1961, as well as numerous other organizations. She was a founding member of the Barnstable Unitarian Church’s Social Responsibility committee and was the first woman chair of the prudential committee. She met the reverse freedom riders in 1962, and traveled to Selma, Alabama in 1965 to work on voting rights.http://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5527http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/margaret-moseley/http://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:american+folklife+center&q=Moseley,+Margaret.+Papers+-+The +Civil+Rights+History+Project:+Survey+of+Collections+and+Repositories+%28The+American+Folklife+Center,+Library+of+Congress%29http://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/Mary Edmonia Lewis (1848 to 1907)
An American sculptor of Black and Native American descent, Mary Lewis, often known in art circles and Edmonia Lewis, was born in 1848 in upstate New York. Following her brother’s success in the California Gold Rush, she was able to attend college at Oberlin Collegiate Institute, but left the college after several incidents. She moved to Boston in 1864 to pursue a career in sculpting, despite limited experience or education in the art, telling a story about seeing a sculpture of Benjamin Franklin and deciding she could make a “stone man” on her own. She was introduced to numerous sculptors in the area, but finding an instructor was difficult until Edward Agustus Brackett began teaching her. She soon began selling some of her pieces, and she opened her own studio to the public in her first exhibit the same year. Inspired by the lives of abolitionists and civil war heroes, she also began writing. She used her artwork to fund and gain subscription to travel to Rome, Italy to expand her expertise. She spent much of her life in travel before her death in London in 1907.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonia_LewisMildred C. Hailey (Active 1960s to 2015)
From the late 1960s onward, Mildred Hailey was a guiding presence over the Bromley-Heath Public Housing Development until her death in 2015. She was part of the drive to remove control of the development from the Boston Housing Authority in 1968 through a range of activities, including negotiating truces between rival gangs that led to a GED program, repairing intolerable conditions in the community, and treating the entire neighborhood as extended family. She willingly took on an extremely difficult job using a combination of courage and compassion in an area and at a time when heat, electricity, and running water were spotty at best, and was considered a force of nature by those who knew her. When the progressive board of commissioners stepped aside, she was an active part of building a sense of community and a successful model of reclaiming broken public housing. She retired as executive director in 2012, but attended meetings until the last few months of her life.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/19/mildred-hailey-tenant-activism-transformed-boston-public-housing/uMvf9iF3ozuC8lLlVOKiCN/story.html?event=event12
Nadine Fortune Wright (1893 to 1994)
Born in Illinois in 1893, Nadine Wright was born into a wealthy, well-educated family that was not protected from racial crimes. This experience stirred up in her a lifelong passion for activism and achievement. Following the death of her father in 1899 and her mother in 1906, she was sent with her brother to Cambridge to live with her aunt, a founder of the Niagara Movement. Growing up in the center of Black political and intellectual activities, she graduated from Radcliffe in 1917 and taught in the Cambridge public school system for almost 20 years. She was also a trustee for Robert Gould Shaw house, chartered the Boston Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, and served in a range of organizations. She taught at colleges in North Carolina for many years before returning to Boston to teach children with cerebral palsy. She passed away in 1994.
https://www.mountaugurn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210228123150/https://mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
Bishop Nellie Yarborough (Active 1960s to 2010s)
Focused on ensuring everyone in her community could lean on someone during hard times, Nellie Yarborough worked with church parishioners and police to reduce crime and poverty in her Dorchester neighborhood. Born to a preacher’s family in North Carolina, She began preaching at age 12 and traveling at age 17 with Brumfield Johnson, to Boston, where she helped found the Mount Calvary Holy Church. She became the assistant pastor of the church in 1962 and was made senior pastor a decade later when Johnson passed. She became the second bishop of the church in 1994, and spent her life as an advocate and friend to the homeless while serving food to people in need every Thursday evening, often to crowds over 100. She passed away in 2012.
https://www.legacylcom/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/hellie-yarborough-obituary?id=7382565
Sister Nellie S. Harris (1884 to 1964)
Sister Nellie S. Harris was born in 1884, and passed away in 1964. This was the extent of the details I could find on this individual.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/214536641/nellie-s-harris
https://www.geni.com/people/Nellie-Harris/6000000024944257856
Nora L. Baston (Active 1996 to 2020s)
A pillar of the Boston community, Nora Baston is an 18-year veteran of the Boston Police Department. Managing community engagement, she has focused on tracking down girls who are starting to move in with gangs and getting guns off the streets. Seeing the successes of Boston youth powers her drive and work as deputy superintendent, one of four women working on the Boston Police command staff. She spends three to four nights weekly engaging with kids in Boston, whether it’s as a mentor or in other roles, building trust in areas where violence is strong. By providing youth with alternatives to gangs and drugs, she hopes to turn the community around. She has two degrees from University of Massachusetts Lowell and has graduated from the Boston Police Academy in 1996, crediting former Police Commissioner Davis with teaching her the best ways to connect with people on a one-on-one basis. https://www.bostonherald.com/2014/04/07/women-in-command-deputy-superintendent-nora-l-baston/Peggy Olivia Brown, Ed.D. (1934 to 2014)
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1934, Peggy Brown had strong concerns that children of color were being overlooked in public schools. Her strongly-held belief that all children can learn led her to undertake dramatic initiatives after seeing the devastating lives of those without education in the Bronx neighborhood she grew up in. After attending multiple universities, she lectured at Northeastern University and Boston College. Her initiatives also included improved healthcare in Roxbury at the Mandela Town Hall Health Spot, providing weekly blood pressure and blood sugar screenings. Dr. Brown invited optometrists, dentists, and other healthcare professionals to help address the many healthcare disparities she saw in the community. She mentored kids one-on-one and in groups, often staying up until 4 or 5 in the morning to finish term papers to ensure they’d graduate and have a successful life until her death in 2014.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/27/peggy-brown-educator-and-activist-founded-mandela-crew-first-african-american-and-latino-team-compete-head-charles/p0962cwuqrl5SLsObdjkzJ/story.html
Shirley Carrington (Active 1980s to 1990s)As the director of the Roxbury Multi-Service Center, Shirley Carrington helped the organization strengthen families and empower the community, especially during the turbulent crime sprees of the 1980s. Reaching out to a range of organizations to bring money and services into the community, including the United Way and New Hope Baptist, she sought to leverage the Center's resources to lower crime rates by increasing employment, improving education, and lifting the entire community up with a hand up instead of a hand out. She also provided resources for lowering infant mortality in Roxbury.
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m0435b57h
https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/1011/agang.html
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m04358327
Shirley Shillingford (Active 1975 to 2000s)
As the name behind Shirley’s Pantry in Mattapan, Shirley Shillingford has always had a strong focus on food and carnival. She started with the Caribbean American Carnival Association of Boston in 1975, she served alongside founders Ivy Ponder and Ken Bonaparte Mitchell, who stepped back in 1990 for her to lead the organization for the past 33 years. She served for a similar long period of time at Healthy Baby, Healthy Food Pantry on Mattapan’s River Street which she founded in 1992. At the time, she had no resources except asking for government and businesses for help. Her strong dedication to disadvantaged populations and communities has led her to reach out to company employees, elected officials and the community to keep the pantry running successfully for over 20 decades.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/202-08-25/bostons-carnival-celebrating-50-years-is-a-treasure-says-organizer
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/it-s-shirly-s-pantry-now-renaming-honors-longtime-manager-mattapan
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/23/mattapan-food-pantry-named-for-its-manager-a-longtime-activist/
Adelaide M. Cromwell, Ph.D. Author and professor Adelaide Cromwell, born in 1919, was the first Black instructor first at Hunter College and then at Smith College, her alma mater. As a professor of sociology at Boston University, she taught from 1951 to 1985, leading the committee that established the university's African Studies program, appointed in 1953 as its administrator and research associate. She was then appointed to the university's graduate Afro-American Studies program in 1969. She convened the first conference of West African social workers in 1960 as the only Black or female appointed to the Methodist Church in America's five-member committee to assess higher education in the Belgian Congo. She has been appointed to executive councils of many organizations including the American Society of African Culture, the American Negro Leadership Conference in Africa and the advisory council on Voluntary Foreign Aid. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and honors which include a Citation from the National Order of Cote d’Ivoire, the Smith College Medal, and the Carter G. Woodson Medal from ASALH
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/adelaide-cromwell-40
Adrienne R. Benton Though many Black women have served and raced in long-distance running, it was only recently that the Boston Athletic Association appointed its first Black woman to its board, Adrienne Benton. Involved with the marathon for many years, Benton is actively working at eliminating racial and other disparities within the distance running sport while acting as an ambassador for it. Starting running after a sibling ran a 5K in 2014, Benton has since completed six marathons which include four Abbot World Marathon Majors, as well as numerous shorter races. She's served as the Boston Marathon's finish line announcer in the past. She hopes that the Boston Athletic Association can address disparities using collaboration and outreach through the Boston Running Collaborative, such as improving access to year-round training facilities, health and wellness options that benefit the community, and track-and-field career development. A graduate of Rutgers University, she founded Onyx Spectrum Technology, recognized in the 2020 Inner City 100 by the Competitive Inner City, which she started after working as a hospital administrator at Boston Medical Center, which later became one of her clients.
https://www.boston.com/news/boston-marathon/2022/04/15/adrienne-benton-boston-athletic-association-board/
Adrienne Smith When Adrienne Smith's father gave her a football when she was seven, she learned to throw, but accepted at the time that there was no place for women in professional tackle football. In discovering that there is a women's professional tackle football league as an adult, she was able to revive her childhood dream. As the star receiver for the Boston Renegades, Smith is determined that girls growing up today know about all the possibilities before them. With 14 professional seasons behind her, she's gained an outstanding list of accomplishments as a Black female athlete, including two gold medals for the U.S. Women's Football National Team, nine Women's Football Alliance (WFA) All-Star appearances, four WFA championships, and an amazing touchdown. At the International Federation of American Football Women's World Championship in Stockholm in 2010, Smith received a catch and run that stretched out 52 long yards. As an athletic ambassador, she promotes it every way she can, including brand partnerships, speaking events, and Gridiron Queendom, an international organization she started to support females who want to play football. This has led to major enterprises such as the NFL and Nike investing millions of dollars into girls' high school football opportunities.
https://www.si.com/more-sports/2022/06/02/adrienne-smith-boston-renegades-womens-football
Alfreda HarrisRaised in a strong community in Roxbury in the 1940s and 1950s, Alfreda Harris always had a strong interest in sports and coaching. Using her coaching abilities, she helped countless Black teens gain college scholarships, helping them to get the education they needed to succeed in life and break the chains of poverty. As the founder of the Shelburne Recreation Center, she moved up through the organization as its Administrative Coordinator, which provided her with the opportunity to impact many young lives in the Roxbury community. A life-long athlete, she also served as the women's basketball coach at several Boston colleges, including the University of Massachusetts Boston, Roxbury Community College, and Emerson College. Harris also served on the Boston School Committee, becoming its longest-serving member over the course of her life. Her strong impact on the lives of youth, recreation, and community is outstanding, and her experiences in mentoring Roxbury youth has helped change the life of hundreds of individuals over the past decades.
https://roxbury.library.northeastern.edu/harris/
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m039rx707?datastream_id=content
Alice A. Casneau Born after the Civil War, Alice Caseneau was an active professional dressmaker and author with a passion for community service at the beginning of the 20th century. Born in Virginia, she was living in Boston with her husband Elmer and daughter Pearl in 1900. She had already made a name for herself as a professional dressmaker and as a vocal member of the Black community. Casneau had joined the Women's Era Club in the early 1890s, an organization for Black women encouraging community work and self-improvement. She contributed to the First National Conference of Colored Women of America in 1895, serving on the Committee on Special Work. She published a book on artistic dress cutting and making, and spoke on the topic at the first meeting of the National Negro Business League in 1900. Casneau joined the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and gave talks when sessions were held in Boston. She worked in the Soldiers' Comfort Unit during World War I and took an active interest in politics at that time, and remained engaged in community service and other organizations for the rest of her life, passing in 1953.
https://www.nps.gov/people/alice-casneau.htm
Andrea BradfordAt age five, opera singer Andrea Bradford began her musical training with the study of piano. Born in 1949, her vocal training began while attending St. Francis De Sales High School under Sister Mary Elise, who was the co-founder of Opera Ebony in New York. Though the Black boarding school had taken her far from home, her career would take her even further. She returned to her Huntsville roots to attend Oakwood College, then continued to her bachelor's degree at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, followed by a Master's degree at Boston University College of Fine Arts in 1973. She joined the Opera Company of Boston in 1975, touring with founder and conductor Sarah Caldwell in New England and Europe. She also performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops Orchestra as a soloist. She appeared in La Traviata, Madame Butterfly, The Barber of Seville, Three Willies, The Negro Burial Ground, The Balcony, and Lost in the Stars, among others. She also worked as manager of college recruiting for Bain & Company, then moved on to become the vice president and executive recruiter for Isaacson, Miller before moving on to many other prestigious positions.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/andrea-bradford
Andrea Campbell, J.D. Dedicated to fighting for equity and opportunity, Andrea Campbell is the Attorney General of Massachusetts. Growing up in an unstable living environment with her father in prison and losing her mother to a car accident at eight months of age, Campbell and her brothers lived with relatives and foster care until her father was released from prison when she was eight. Relying on public housing and assistance, her grandmother struggled with alcoholism as her brothers cycled into and out of the prison system, causing her to lose her twin Andre when he died in state custody. Through this hardship, she persevered, turning painful experiences into purpose. She graduated from Boston Latin School, then Princeton University and UCLA. She worked as a legal services attorney at EdLaw to defend children and families, especially those with disabilities, as well as at Proskauer LLP, but chose to move to General Counsel at the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission. She served as legal counsel to Governor Patrick, then ran successfully for Boston City Council, becoming the first woman to represent District 4. She was elected unanimously as the first Black woman to the City Council President position, then was elected Attorney General in 2022.
https://www.andreacampbell.org/
Andrea H. MajorShortly after Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, Andrea Major made hers a reality. Opening the Roxbury Center for the Performing Arts, originally known as Andrea's School of Dance, in 1967, this accomplished dancer, teacher, and choreographer began her dance education at age three. Graduating from the Boston Conservatory of Music with a bachelor's degree, Major continued her education in the Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York City. Starting with an experimental program at the Roxbury YMCA, she began offering classes, realizing at the time that young children in the inner city didn't have any real exposure to the performing arts, prompting her to open her own school and center to meet that need. Having received a wide range of awards, citations, and honors from religious groups, corporations, and civic organizations, Major's contributions to exposing inner-city youth to the performing arts are uncontested. With a strong passion for dance, she has a strong commitment to giving her students a strong appreciation for the performing arts.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/andrea-herbert-majors-work-mentoring-city-kids-has-inspired-them-to-dream-big/22680172
https://www.rcpaboston.org/
Andrea J. Cabral, J.D.With a long history of public service, Andrea Cabral grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and graduated from Boston College and then Suffolk University Law School in 1986. With an impressive thirty-year career including being the first woman serving as Suffolk County sheriff, Cabral's other accomplishments include public safety secretary under former Governor Patrick, which oversaw 14 public safety organizations within the state, reforming prisoner reentry programs, modernizing correctional facilities, serving as president of the Massachusetts Sheriffs Association, assistant state attorney general, director of Roxbury District Court Family Violence Project, Suffolk and Middlesex Counties assistant district attorney, co-founder and chief of the office's Domestic Violence Unit, senior prosecutor for civil rights cases, and chief of the District Court and Community Prosecutions. She also wrote the state's first continuing education legal manual on restraining orders in domestic violence cases. Cabral is an Eisenhower Fellow, and served as one of the 18 national experts that were appointed to the Science Advisory Board by former U.S. Attorney General Holder. She's a member of the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy Advisory Board at Boston College, the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly editorial board, and the Mass Mentoring Partnership's Governing Board.
https://www.herself360.com/articles/national-womens-history-month-loretta-ross-and-sheriff-andrea-cabral
Andrea L. TaylorAs the first and current Senior Diversity Officer at Boston University, Andrea Taylor has a long history of working for diversity, equity, and inclusion through her work in civil rights. Born in 1947, she has been the president and CEO of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, she has worked on the same issues that had arisen when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his peaceful protests against discrimination in Alabama. Operating an institute that is part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and the Smithsonian Institute, Taylor is returning to her roots as a Boston University alumnus. She is also the chairperson for the campus-wide Community Safety Advisory Group and Antiracism Working Group, a co-chair of the Task Force on Workplace Culture, and has been a Boston University Trustee in the past. She has also served as Director of Citizenship and Corporate Giving at the Microsoft Corporation in North America, and is a founding director of the Media Fund at the Ford Foundation, supporting global film and broadcast documentary productions focusing on social justice and civil rights. During her philanthropy career, she was responsible for distributing over $1 billion to promote social equity.
https://www.bu.edu/diversity-officer/profile/andrea-l-taylor/
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/andrea-l-taylor
Ann H. PilotThough Ann Pilot retired in 2009 after a 40-year career with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, she wasn't done with her musical career. After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Music, she performed extensively as a soloist prior to becoming the substitute second harp of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and principal harp of the Washington National Symphony. She first joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1969 as the assistant principal harp while playing as principal for the Boston Pops Orchestra. She then moved up to principal harp of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1980, a position she held until her retirement from the organization in 2009. During her extensive career, she has played as a soloist with orchestras across the United States, Europe, Haiti, New Zealand, and South Africa. She has recorded several albums with Boston Records, Koch International, and Denouement record labels. In 1999, she traveled to London to record Harp Concerto by Kevin Kaska, an American composer whom she had commissioned the work through, with the London Symphony Orchestra. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including multiple honorary doctorates, the Distinguished Alumni Award, the Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Boston Musicians Association and Talent Development League, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
http://www.annhobsonpilot.com/
Anna B. Gardner Born in 1901, Anna Bobbitt Gardner lived until her late 90s, always focused on bringing musical education and performance to the Black community in Boston. As the first Black woman to earn a Bachelor's degree from the New England Conservatory in 1932, Anna Gardner paved the way for other Black musicians by opening her music school in Boston before she had even begun her post-secondary musical education. Her Academy of Musical Arts was opened in the basement of her home on Claremont Street in Boston, and for over the next sixty years, she operated no fewer than five studios under that name. At Symphony Hall, she managed Colored American Nights, featuring a range of talented Black musicians and groups, as well as producing local radio and television programs for Black audiences in the Boston area. She was appointed as State Director of Negro History Week programs in 1945 by Governor Maurice J. Tobin, a position she was reappointed to by several succeeding governors. As part of its ongoing recognition of exceptional talent, the New England Conservatory has granted one musician a year the Anna Bobbitt Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award since her death in 1997.
https://necmusic.edu/news/archives-celebration-necs-african-american-legacy-part-i
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Anna F. JonesAs one of the oldest and highest-impact community foundations, the Boston Foundation welcomed its first Black woman as CEO, Anna Faith Jones. She had worked her way up, receiving an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Massachusetts in 1986 when she was serving as director of the Foundation. The groundbreaking leadership provided by herself and another Foundation Board Chair, Frieda Garcia, inspired the organization to develop the Anna Faith Jones and Frieda Garcia Women of Color Leadership Circle. Her leadership helped steer the Boston Foundation towards its mission today of closing disparities in the region to improve opportunities, prosperity, and equitable outcomes. To further these goals, Jones also spoke publicly, including as the 4th James A. Joseph Lecture on Philanthropy honoree in 1994. During her lecture, she brought up the sweeping changes that were happening in social welfare programs, Boston's role as a city of immigrants, and the prejudice that the many waves of immigration have seen over the years, referencing Boston's Puritan roots and John Winthrop's "City on a Hill". After stepping down from the Boston Foundation in 2001, her leadership and example to that organization have continued in its activities exponentially.
https://www.tbf.org/news-and-insights/press-releases/2022/january/2022-woclc-announcement-20220119
https://www.abfe.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1994_Anna-Faith-Jones.pdf
https://www.pionline.com/article/20001002/ONLINE/10020771/anna-faith-jones-will-step-down-as-president-and-ceo-of-the-boston
Audrea F.J. Dunham, Ph.D.Born and raised in the Roxbury neighborhood in Boston, Audrea Dunham was a civil rights activist, author, and educator whose interests focus on the role of women in social movements, a passion she attributed to the early influences she had with many Boston civil rights activists, her own activism in the Stay-Out for Freedom campaigns as a student, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. March, and during the 1960s, as a leader for the Massachusetts State Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Having earned a Ph.D. in African American Studies at Temple University, she has taught African American Studies courses at both Delaware State University and Georgia State University. She has also served as a board member on the National Council for Black Studies, and as a Journal of Black Studies associate editor. She has also published articles on a number of organizations, including Mothers for Adequate Welfare, Fight for a Change!, and The Evolution of the Welfare Rights Movement as it relates to Boston in the International Journal of Africana Studies, and is working on a book-length manuscript for publication in the future.
https://openvault.wgbh.org/exhibits/boston_civil_rights/authors
Rep. Ayanna Pressley Born in Cincinnati in 1974 and raised in Chicago, Ayanna Pressley moved to Boston for college, then worked with Congressional Representative Joseph P. Kenedy II and Senator John Kerry. Representing Massachusetts Seventh Congressional District, Representative Ayanna Pressley is the first Black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She's also an activist, advocate, and legislator, fighting to ensure that those who are closest to the issues facing minority communities today are those who are informing and driving policymaking. Pressley is a champion for justice, encouraging healing while promoting reproductive freedom, as well as justice for the elderly, immigrants, survivors of sexual assault, formerly and currently imprisoned, workers, and those who have been through trauma. As an individual with alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes rapid hair loss and impacts disproportionately black women and children, she advocates for others who have the disease, serving as a public role model to raise awareness and support. Prior to her work in the U.S. House of Representatives, she was the first Black woman elected to the Boston City Council, where she served for eight years.
https://pressley.house.gov/about/
https://www.biography.com/political-figures/ayanna-pressley
Barbara Gomes-BeachThough some may recognize Barbara Gomes-Beach as the mother of Hollywood actor Michael Beach, she was actually a powerhouse in her own right, speaking out about the continuing AIDS epidemic both at home and abroad. With a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Masters degree in City Planning from MIT, Gomes-Beach raised her four children using her wages as a city planner while pursuing her dream of singing. Born in the late 1930s, she recalled a cousin dying of the disease in the mid-1980s, and mentioned during a 1996 interview that not enough had been done in communities of color to fight the spread of the disease. Passing in 2017, she had at that point 10 grandchildren and numerous unnamed great-grandchildren, which was the drive for her activism and advocacy for individuals with HIV and AIDS, including her work as the executive director of the Multicultural AIDS Coalition, which was started in 1989 and is still working to provide equity and equality to AIDS treatments in minority communities, many of which are separated by boundaries of language, cultural beliefs, and poverty, preventing a single approach to the issue.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/barbara-gomes-beach-obituary?id=6712250
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFNgaLXHOuP/
https://lucykingdom.com/barbara-gomez-beach/
https://bostonphoenix.com/archive/1in10/96/11/BARBARA_GOMES_BEACH.html
https://www.mac-boston.org/about
Barbara Smith As a pioneer in Black feminism, Barbara Smith is an activist, author, lecturer, publisher, and lesbian. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she and her twin sister participated in the 1960s civil rights protests. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1969 with a major in sociology and English, and received a Doctor of Humane Letters in 2019. As a co-founder of the Combahee River Collective in Boston in 1974, Smith and other Black feminist pioneers co-authored the Combahee River Collective Statement with Beverly and Demita Frazier. Considered by many to be the first example of intersectionality in oppression and prejudice, it's an example that is used in many social justice campaigns today. She taught her first course on Black women's literature at Emerson College in 1973, and has been an educator and lecturer at several other colleges and universities over the years. She also co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, the first publisher in the United States specifically for books by women of color. She was elected to the Common Council in Albany, NY in 2005, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the same year. Her writings have been in numerous national and international publications.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/directory/alum/barbara-smith
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-1974-1980/
Judge Barbara A. Dortch-OkaraAs the first Black and woman to become a Chief Justice for Administration and Management of the Massachusetts Trial Court, Barbara Dortch-Okara graduated from Brandeis University in 1971, then went on to receive her Boston College Law School JD in 1974. She received her first judicial appointment to the Boston Municipal Court in 1984, then to the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1984, and oversaw the management of the Trial Court in 1998. She has received multiple awards, including the 2000 Boston Bar Association Citation of Judicial Excellence, the 2007 Judicial Excellence Award from the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys, and the 2011 Trailblazer Award of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association. She was appointed to chair the State Ethics Commission in 2013 by Governor Deval Patrick. After retiring from her duties, she became a professor at New England Law Boston until 2018. She was elected in 2019 as a member of the Committee on Judicial Performance Evaluation, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court committee tasked with reviewing and revising the performance evaluation process trial judges are required by statute to undergo. She holds honorary Doctor of Law degrees from both New England Law Boston and Southern New England School of Law.
https://www.brandeis.edu/trustees/members/dortch-okara.html
Barbara C. Elam Born in 1929, Barbara Elam was a community activist, children's advocate, and librarian, working on social justice issues such as literacy, educational reform, and mental health. She received her Bachelors in Library Science from Simmons College, choosing this path to help children learn to love reading and education. She worked briefly in the New York Public Library, before returning to Boston as the children's librarian at the Boston Public Library. She raised her children but dedicated her excess time and energy to addressing racial inequalities in the Boston Public School system and the desperate need for mental health services in the Black community. She joined and eventually became president of the Massachusetts Mental Health Association Fort Hill chapter, lobbying to establish the Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller Center. After her children were at school, she returned to the school library system, enhancing the school system with books written by and about people of color. She made libraries the schools' focal points, while developing a program to train low-income mothers without diplomas as library aides. Many continued their interrupted schooling to become librarians. Elam continued her education with a Masters in Education from Boston University and Masters in Library Science from Simmons.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/obituary/barbara-clark-elam/
Bishop Barbara C. HarrisBorn in Philadelphia, Barbara Harris was a civil rights movement supporter, advocate, and feminist minister in the Episcopal Church. Choosing to move to the Church of the Advocate along with her voter registration efforts and participating in the Selma march in the 1960s, she moved from public relations executive career to support Episcopal Bishops defying the ban on ordaining women in 1974. She entered the ministry, being ordained as a deacon in 1979 and a priest in 1980, serving as priest-in-charge at St. Augustine of Hippo. She was a chaplain at Philadelphia County Prisons and counseled industrial corporations on public policy and social concerns. She wrote monthly columns for The Witness, elevating her in the international Anglican community. After the 1988 Lambeth Conference determined that each province of the Communion could choose to ordain women as bishops, Harris was ordained as the first female bishop in the Episcopal Church. She was active in many organizations, including membership in the Union of Black Episcopalians and past president of the Episcopal Urban Caucus. She served on several vital local, state, national, and international boards, committees, and ministries to help serve underserved minorities in the Boston area.
https://episcopalarchives.org/church-awakens/exhibits/show/leadership/clergy/harris
Belinda SuttonAs the author of one of the earliest slave narratives written by a Black woman in the American colonies, Belinda Sutton was born around 1712 in or near Ghana in western Africa. Captured by slave raiders at around the age of 12, she was marched to the coast and then placed on a ship with approximately 300 other Blacks bound for the Caribbean plantations. Purchased by the Royall family in Antigua, she was moved with the family to Boston when they moved from one plantation to another location. In Massachusetts, Royall was the state's largest slaveholder. However, as the American Revolution began, Sutton's Loyalist owner fled to England, which allowed her to live in unofficial freedom in the Massachusetts colony. At the end of the war, when slavery was being abolished, Sutton petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1783 for reparations for her unpaid labor from the Royall estate. She was granted 15 pounds, 12 shillings annually, which she was required to petition for on an annual basis. She did so until 1793, at which point she slips from history, believed to have perished by 1799 at a ripe old age for the time of well over 80 years.
https://enslaved.org/fullStory/16-23-106154/
Benaree P. Wiley Born in Washington, D.C. in 1946, Benaree "Bennie" Pratt Wiley was a corporate chief executive who graduated from Howard University with a Bachelor's degree in Marketing in 1968. She entered Harvard's Business School, receiving her MBA in 1972 and working as a consultant for corporations and nonprofits to build capacity and refine program delivery. She launched a high-end toy store to combine her business and child development passions. She became The Partnership's president and CEO in 1991, an organization to help over 200 Boston-area businesses to develop, attract, and retain over 1,300 professionals of color, increasing leadership of people of color in the city's corporate sector. At the same time, the organization helped professionals of color navigate Boston's complex corporate structure to achieve success and improve diversity within the city's corporate professional population. Wiley was a past chair of directors of the Children's Museum, a trustee of Boston College, an overseer of the WGBH Educational Foundation, a former director of the Crispus Attucks Children's Center, a director at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and at the Boston Foundation. Selected as one of Boston's most powerful women in 2003 by Boston Magazine, she retired in 2005 from The Partnership.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/benaree-p-wiley-40
Berthé M. GainesA strong library advocate, Berthé M. Gaines met then-future Mayor Raymond Flynn in the early 1980s as she was protesting library budget cuts while working as a typesetter and proofreader at the Globe and running the Dudley Square Friends of the Library group. When Flynn was elected in 1983, one of his first acts was to ask her to serve as the Boston Public Library board's first Black woman and the first female president. Gaines' strong-held belief that nobody, especially children, should have to travel out of their neighborhood for a library led her to the founding of Save Our Libraries. She was known for saying, "You don't have to go to Harvard to be a scholar," believing that with a library at their disposal, everyone has the same educational resources. She was involved both with the main Copley Square location and the branch libraries, with a keen understanding of the branches within the entire system. From her efforts, no branches were closed and service hours were increased, so people of all ages, cultures, and races feel at home at any library branch. For her efforts, she received an honorary doctorate in library science from Simmons College in 1999.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/07/04/berthe-gaines-boston-first-african-american-woman-serve-boston-public-library-board/F4XYyuAUCHhYYYlgkTlDnJ/story.html
Betty L. Wornum Betty Wornum started her professional career as a caseworker at Grove Hall's transitional assistance office. Driven to provide services to those within the community who were unable to otherwise find appropriate accommodation, she founded the Roxbury Community Health Center, also known as Rox Comp, in 1968. Her dedication to the community allowed many individuals who would otherwise be unable to pay for services to receive quality healthcare and related services for four and a half decades before the organization closed its doors in 2013. In addition to being a mother of nine, her activities in the community advanced her actions to receive the Sojourner Truth award as well as awards from several other awards for her long-standing community action and volunteer work.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Betty-Wornum
https://carelistings.com/federally-qualified-health-centers/roxbury-ma/roxbury-comprehensive-community-health-center/5ace885893efd2372f981eff
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2013/03/20/roxcomps-closing-leaves-employees-out-in-the-cold-2/
Beulah S. HesterBorn as the daughter of a minister in Oxford, North Carolina, Beulah Hester, often referred to as Sister Beulah, served the community in and around Boston for over 40 years at the Twelfth Baptist Sanctuary in Roxbury alongside her husband, also a minister. She pursued higher education actively throughout her life, first at Hartshorn College, then later at Boston University's School of Religious Education and Simmons College School of Social Work. Her dedication to the community included acting as President of the Queen Esther Club and Missionary Society, organizer of The Roxbury Goldenaires, one of the area's first senior groups, as well as the Philathea Class and Chapel Choir. She supervised Neighborhood Services at the Robert Gould Shaw House, and was a member of the Board of Overseers for the Boston Welfare Department. Upon returning to North Carolina after her retirement, she assisted with the Central Orphanage Music Department, organized the Oxford AARP chapter, was a member of the North Carolina Council of the National Association of Social Workers, and served as a pianist at the Belton Creek Baptist Church prior to the illness that took her life in 1981.
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m044zp376?datastream_id=content
Beulah Providence Coming to the United States from Dominica in 1960 to better herself, Beulah Providence started out her life in the United States as a housekeeper. However, her drive to become a more productive person and make strong, positive changes in her community. With very little formal education, she was able to leverage scholarships and other resources to educate herself by enrolling at Northeastern University that was offered following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Working with professor Rosemary Whiting, she began working on an assignment to develop a project to provide services within a local community. Providence's project was the beginning of what would become the Caribbean Foundation of Boston and the Urban Community Homemaking, Home Health Aide, and Chore Services, of which Providence is now the executive director.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/beulah-providence-32ab981b/
Beverley Johnson Beverley Johnson decided early on in her career that she would do two things in her career: work in a field she was passionate about and never spend all day in the office, but instead would be in the field, working with clients. Starting out working in Washington D.C. in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, she moved to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, Johnson knew that she had a passion for doing work to help stabilize neighborhoods by investing in physical and economic revitalization. By operating in the sub-sector of real estate development that ensures that neighborhoods impacted by big project developers don't lose their sense of community, Johnson began Bevco Associates in July 1994 as president to ensure projects have a positive impact on neighborhoods surrounding the development. Bevco consults on urban planning, project management, public land conveyance, zoning, permitting, and community engagement. The company's portfolio includes Crosstown Center, the development of the Mattapan Boston State Hospital site, and MBTA public engagement efforts. The integrity she brings to every project builds trust in the community that she has their best interests at heart. She's also been president and chair of the Massachusetts Minority Contractors Association board.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2015/03/09/beverley-johnsons-consulting-firm-builds-bridges-between-developers-and-community/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverley-johnson-a6170942/
Blanche E. BraxtonAs the first Black woman admitted to the Massachusetts Bar as a lawyer, Blanche Braxton graduated from the Portia School of Law, which evolved into New England Law Boston, in 1921, in an age when many women of any race were not encouraged to attend higher education institutions. Following her graduation, she prepared for the Bar exam and was admitted to the Bar in Massachusetts two years later on March 16, 1923. A decade later, she became the first Black woman to practice law in the U.S. District Court in the District of Massachusetts, and was admitted on March 21, 1933. Living in Roxbury, she had a private practice at 412 Massachusetts Avenue, and her memory is honored with a scholarship every year by the Massachusetts Black Women Attorneys Foundation named in her honor, which is awarded to law students of color who have been shown to have demonstrated commitment to public service, dedication to the advancement of minorities through the legal process, and outstanding academic achievement.
https://massblackwomenattys.org/scholarship.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_E._Braxton
Carmen Fields Journalist Carmen Fields has won Emmy awards for her work as a local news anchor and is a familiar face to Bostonians. After completing her journalism degree at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri and reporting at the city's CBS station, she moved to Boston, graduating from COM with her Masters degree in 1973. She was a Boston Globe reporter who was first to interview Ted Landsmark, the attorney attacked when he wandered into a protest against school integration. Growing up in segregated Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fields was determined to break barriers as one of the Globe's two black women in the newsroom. She quickly moved from a rookie reporter and up through the ranks, becoming a part of the team at the paper that won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for their coverage of school desegregation and became an assistant metro editor and a columnist after a walkout to desegregate the paper's editorial ranks. She undertook several positions at Channels Four and Seven and was producer of a public affairs show Higher Ground. She was honored alongside Liz Walker and Sarah-Ann Shaw, the first Black female reporters in the area, by the Roxbury Community College Foundation.
https://www.bu.edu/com/articles/carmen-fields-tells-her-story/
Carol FulpAs the founder of Fulp Diversity, Carol Fulp collaborates with corporate executives to promote diversity within the corporate environment. Her book Success Through Diversity: Why the Most Inclusive Companies Will Win has received good reviews from multiple organizations. She has worked with over 100 organizations, with a long list of top-ranking companies as her clients, including Microsoft, Liberty Mutual, CVS, McKinsey, Harvard, UPS, and many more. She delivered the Inclusive Leadership Forum Series at Boston College Graduate School of Business and worked with the Institute of Politics, Policy & History to produce their Founding Fathers Symposiums: Unpacking the Truth Behind the Complex Legacies. Prior to her work at Fulp Diversity, she served in a range of high-level executive positions at The Partnership, John Hancock Financial, the Gillette Company, and a range of several media organizations. She was appointed as a Representative of the United States to the Sixty-Fifth Session of the United Nations General Assembly by President Obama. She serves the community through positions on boards of a wide range of organizations. She has received numerous awards for her service in the Boston area and is a graduate of the University of the State of New York, along with multiple honorary degrees.
https://www.fulpdiversity.com/carol-fulp
Carole C. Thomas Carole Copeland Thomas is a business owner, speaker, instructor, thought leader, and trainer. Moderating key issues impacting global economies, she has worked with experts at large organizations including Moster, Cargill, Verizon, and many others. She has spent a decade as an adjunct faculty member at Bentley University, and as a speaker, has presented in a range of national and international forums. She is a co-founder of a non-profit international humanitarian organization as a result of a 2005 trip to Kenya and now focuses on aiding women and children in southern India. Thomas is the founder of the Multicultural Symposium Series, an initiative to advance multicultural issues. As the host of Focus on Empowerment, a talk show, the program was also available on the internet and focused on current issues. An active member of local and regional social activism organizations, she's worked to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in a wide range of sectors and industries. A graduate of Emory University in 1975, she entered graduate school on a Martin Luther King, Jr. fellowship at Northeastern University and graduated with an MBA. She received the Certified Diversity Meeting Professional designation from the International Association of Hispanic Meeting Professionals in 2011.
http://www.tellcarole.com/about-carole.html
Carolyn Wilkins A current professor, pianist, composer, and vocalist in the Ensemble Department at the Berklee College of Music, Carolyn Wilkins has performed on radio and television with her group SpiritJazz. She's undertaken a concert tour in South America acting as a jazz ambassador for the U.S. Department of State, has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony and at numerous other events. She's also an author of numerous books including Tips for Singers: Rehearsing, Performing, and Auditioning, They Raised Me Up: A Black Single Mother and the Women Who Inspired Her, Damn Near White: An African American Family’s Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success, and Melody for Murder: A Bertie Bigelow Mystery. She is a former faculty member for the Tobin Community School and New England Conservatory of Music, a former lecturer at Fitchburg State College, Emmerson College and Emmanuel College, received her Bachelor's degree from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and her Masters at Eastman School of Music. Her experience in the competitive environments at Oberlin and Eastman put her in a great position to understand what her students at Berklee are working with on a daily basis.
https://college.berklee.edu/people/carolyn-wilkins
Charlene Carroll Black hair faces many challenges, which is why master hair stylist Charlene Carrroll is highly recognized for developing wrapping starting in the 1970s. A Boston native born in 1950, she was raised in the projects and turned her skill with Black hair into her success. She sees hair wrapping as a way to calm the hair and put it into a resting position, brushing or wrapping the hair to lay against the scalp, which is then secured using a silk scarf. Used to protect hair from frizzing in high humidity or moisture, it's often a technique used at home, but has begun to appear publicly more often. This allowed her clients to protect their hair while they were going from the salon to their home, work, or other location, ensuring that her clients would look just as great when they got home as they did in the salon. This dedication to excellence has made Carroll the go-to stylist in Boston as well as the rest of the East Coast, promoting hair education as well as style. She's shared the technique across the US and internationally, though she only takes a few private clients in her retirement.
https://www.theroot.com/gifted-black-hairstylist-created-the-doobie-wrap-1850337893
Charlotte F. Grimké Born into a free Black family in Philadelphia in 1837, Charlotte Grimke was an abolitionist, educator, and author of five volumes of diaries published posthumously. With her family active in the abolitionist movement, she was educated by tutors at home due to segregation in the Philadelphia school system. Attending Higginson Grammar School in the more tolerant Salem, Massachusetts as the only Black student, she began keeping the first of her diaries. She then chose to begin her career as an educator, matriculating at the Salem Normal School, now Salem State University, as a teacher. Graduating in 1856, she worked at the Epes Grammar School, an all-white school in Salem. She began writing poetry which was published in antislavery periodicals such as The Liberator. During the Civil War, she volunteered to serve as a teacher to educate formerly enslaved Blacks on South Carolina's Sea Islands. Her experiences there, including an 1864 two-part essay "Life on the Sea Islands' ' were published in Atlantic Monthly. Her passion in serving formerly enslaved individuals led her to work as the secretary at the Freedman's Union Commission Boston branch. Her dedication to abolition and women's suffrage lasted through the end of her life.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Forten-Grimke
Charlotte Matthews-Nelson Working at Northwestern University since her graduation in 1979, Charlotte Matthews Nelson is the program coordinator for Northeastern Law School's Center for Law, Equity, and Race. As one of 69 Bostonian civil rights leaders honored during the unveiling of a statue of the embrace of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King in Boston Common. Her name was engraved along with that of her late husband, Leon T. Nelson, on plaques embedded in the paving stones that surround the new statue. As a Northeastern professor, her decades of service to the university, community, and city at large include activities with the NAACP, her roles in local leadership, and her leadership within the university to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
https://crrj.org/efforts/northeastern-law-center-for-law-equity-and-race-program-co-ordinator-honored-at-mlk-statue-unveiling/
Rep. Charlotte G. Richie As an experienced public servant and activist, Charlotte Golar Richie graduated with a Bachelors from Rutgers University, a Masters in journalism from Columbia University, and an MBA from Suffolk University. She's a former Peace Corps volunteer who is dedicated to serving her community to effect positive change. She has a deep commitment to civil rights and has held a range of government positions, including Chief of Housing and Director of the Neighborhood Development Department in Boston, as well as a Commissioner in the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. She was the seventh Black woman to be elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1994, where she chaired the Housing and Urban Development Committee, making her the first Black woman to chair a committee in her first term. After campaigning for Boston mayor in 2013 as the first Black female candidate, Richie is continuing to support women's leadership and women of color into public office. She is a board member with the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus, the Interim Advisory Board Chair for the University of Massachusetts Boston Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy, and as a Co-Founder and Board Chair of MAWOCC's Advisory Board.
https://mawocc.com/who-we-are-mawocc/our-advisory-board/charlotte-golar-richie-2/
Ché Madyun Serving as the first Board President of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a nonprofit organization working to create a diverse, high-quality, and vibrant neighborhood, Che Madyun is working on building an urban village, focusing on a vision for the future that develops local cooperation, empowerment, and hard work. With 300 new affordable housing units on previously vacant lots, a town common for neighborhood events, community gardens, and a mural to celebrate the neighborhood's ethnic diversity, Madyun is focused on bringing economic stability and growth, revitalized business, enriched cultural life, and reclamation of locations that have been environmentally damaged. The neighborhood is located along the Roxbury-Dorchester line, and is focused on creating a safer, more sustainable, and flourishing environment for residents. Born in 1953, she moved to the Dudley Street neighborhood in 1976 after her graduation from Emerson College with a degree in dance.
https://www.umbrasearch.org/catalog/bb37fb3101769a46a8058f6acdb38d3a85a6086a
https://www.nps.gov/mabi/learn/historyculture/che-madyun.htm
Chloe Spear Born around 1749, Chloe Spear was a Black woman born in Africa who experienced life both as a slave and as a free woman in Boston during the Revolutionary War. She authored a memoir that was anonymously published under the name "Lady of Boston" to provide a Christian testimony of her life story alongside her spiritual development, providing commentary on both slavery and Christianity. Enslaved at approximately age 12, she arrived in Philadelphia in 1761, then was purchased as an enslaved person by a prominent Boston family. She was free to engage in several domestic avocations, and her skills were valued, but when her owner caught her learning to read, he threatened to punish her terribly. Baptized and married after the Revolutionary War, Spear and her husband, with whom she'd had seven children, opened a boarding house for workers and sailors when Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783. Following her husband's death, she opened the establishment for religious meetings and social gatherings for all races, making her beloved by the community at large before her 1815 passing. Following her death, she was featured in five obituaries and a biography was published in a Baptist missionary magazine shortly after her passing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloe_Spear
Chrystal Kornegay Serving as the Executive Director of MassHousing, an organization that lends approximately $1 billion every year to preserve or produce affordable housing, Chrystal Kornegay has helped many in the Boston area secure quality homes either as a rental or homeowner. With a Down Payment Assistance program, Workforce Housing initiative and nationally-recognized homeownership production in communities of color program. Prior to her position at MassHousing, she served under the Baker-Polito administration's Housing and Community Development undersecretary, allowing her to advocate for increased state capital dollars by 18%, increased rental subsidies for low-income families by 42% and dramatically reduced homeless families housed in motels. She has also served as President and CEO of Urban Edge, which is one of New England's largest corporations focused on community development, and is cited as the reason for the organization's $3 million increase in net asset position. Kornegay is on multiple boards, including the National Council of State Housing Agencies, National Housing Trust, Bipartisan Policy Center Advisory Council, and is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston. She has a Bachelor's degree from Hunter College and a Masters from MIT.
https://www.masshousing.com/en/about/leadership
Chaplain Clementina M. ChéryAs the CEO and co-founder of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute located in Boston, Chaplain Clementina Chery has two decades of experience serving families impacted by homicide, giving her a unique skill set for best practices in homicide response. Her focus is transforming homicide response so that families are treated with compassion and dignity. Selected as a 2017 Barr Fellow for her effective, visionary leadership, as a 2016 Social Innovator by the Social Innovation Forum in recognition of her approach to social issues, and many other awards over the years. Her groundbreaking publications for murder victim families help family members who have gone through homicide trauma to cope and heal. Her training with public health and law enforcement professionals allows her organization to better help those impacted by homicide and interrupt retaliatory violence cycles. In addition to her extensive training and many honorary degrees, she is recognized as one of the most influential leaders in Boston for her peacemaking efforts. She was ordained in 2012 as a senior chaplain under the International Fellowship of Chaplains.
https://www.chaplainchery.com/
Cleora Francis-O’Connor When working through the traumatic loss of one of her loved ones, Cleora Francis-O'Connor was seeking healing and balance, finding it through the intentional practice and meditative modes of yoga. At that point, she decided to use that experience to help others who had experienced trauma and were in need of healing. As a nonviolence activist and advocate, she has incorporated these practices into every yoga class and workshop she has taught over the past 19 years. With a strong focus on healing the heart and soul following a loss or trauma, she has practiced for over 21 years and teaches Hatha Yoga at Touch Massage, Yoga RI, and a range of other community centers. Outside of her active work in teaching and healing with yoga, she works as an IT specialist, and is a board member of the Nonviolence Institute of Rhode Island.
https://kripalu.org/presenters-programs/presenters/cleora-francis-oconnor
Colette Phillips As an active civic leader on the Board of Trustees of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Mass General Hospital President's Council, and Eastern Bank, Colette Phillips is also founder and President of Get Konnected! as well as The GK Fund and is president and CEO of Colette Phillips Communications. Phillips is a values-based leader and trusted advisor for many C-suite executives and teams in Boston. She is an advocate for her clients, leveraging public relations branding along with internal/external communications strategies. She works with many companies to improve engagement, diversity, and inclusion. Her contributions have allowed many large corporations to establish inclusive, healthy working environments. Her premier inclusive networking event Get Connected! is known for changing how the conversations of diversity take place. The GK100 that she created is considered to be the first comprehensive list of the 100 most influential people of color in Boston. With a Bachelors and Masters from Emerson College, Phillips has been honored with the Boston Business Journal's 2016/2016 Power 50 list, Boston Magazine's 2018 100 Most Influential, has been cited by Boston Magazine in its Influencer feature, and by the Boston Globe as a social connector and A-lister.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/colettephillips/
Cora R. McKerrow One long-standing cornerstone of the South End Black community in Boston was the Reid Funeral Home, which was founded by Cora Reid McKerrow and her brother Millard Fillmore Reid in 1926. At a time when women, and especially Black women, were rarely entrepreneurs, McKerrow was born in 1888 in Churchland, Virginia, as one of 15 children. Coming to Boston, the funeral home was not her first business, working as a chiropodist and as a beautician until she went into business with her brother as they opened the funeral home. Following her brother's death in the early 1940s, McKerrow operated the business on her own for an additional 30 years until she chose to close it in 1971, after 45 years of successful management and service, during two-thirds of which she operated the business entirely on her own, making her an early business star in Boston for Black female entrepreneurs.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Danielle S. Allen, Ph.D. As the director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics and a professor at James Bryant Conant University, Danielle Allen is a seasoned leader of nonprofits, advocate for democracy, distinguished author, and a professor of ethics, public policy, and political philosophy. Her focus on making the world a better place for the young has taken her through her college career and teaching, to leadership of a $60 million university division and driving change of a $6 billion foundation. She has advocated for democracy reform, civic education, and cannabis legalization. Her leadership during the COVID pandemic in 2020 rallied coalitions and developed solutions for the first Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience. She was the first Black woman to run for a statewide office in Massachusetts, and was the winner of the Library of Congress Kluge prize, recognizing scholarly achievement in disciplines outside of the Nobel Prize. She has been a chair of the Mellon Foundation and Pulitzer Prize board, focusing on the Democratic Knowledge Project and Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiatives, among many others. She has written many books on civil rights, political thought leadership, and many other topics.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/danielle-allen
DeAma BattleWith classical training in dance, DeAma Battle began focusing on dance forms with roots in Africa starting in the 1960s, helping many in the area to return to their roots with these traditional dance forms and how they have changed with European and American cultural contacts. Founding The Art of Black Dance and Music in 1975, her goal of presenting and preserving the rich history of African folklore, music, and dance has been ever present in her work. Studying the dance movements and steps with masters from Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, and West Africa, she probed deeper into the field while abroad, on dance-study tours to the Caribbean, Africa, and other countries with a strong African heritage. She considers herself to also be a dance archivist, recording the history of dance before it's lost. Among her goals is unifying individuals of African descent by illustrating cultural similarities throughout the African Diaspora. Finding similarities in traditional movement in today's West Africa, Traditional Capoeira in Brazil and break dancing in America, she has chosen to record her heritage in motion.
https://www.bostondancealliance.org/bda_staff/deama-battle/
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol22/iss1/8/
Deborah B. Prothrow-Stith, M.D. Appointed as the first female Commissioner of Public Health for Massachusetts in 1987 by Governor Dukakis, Deborah Prothrow-Stith has an impressive record of leading healthcare, life sciences, non-for-profit institutions and academic organizations on their executive talent and leadership. A public health leader, she broke new ground while a physician in inner-city Boston, and is now dean and Professor of Medicine for Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science College of Medicine. She has authored several books focused on preventing violence and a range of additional public health issues. Founding the first Office of Violence Prevention in a state health department in the country, she also expanded HIV/AIDS prevention programs while increasing programs for drug treatment and rehabilitation. During her husband's tenure as US Ambassador to Tanzania, she worked with numerous organizations, including the Muhimbili National Hospital and the NGO operating the country's first HIV clinic. Graduating from Spelman College and Harvard Medical, she completed her residency at Boston City Hospital, and has received ten honorary doctorate degrees, and was inducted into the honor roll of women physicians in 2015 by the Massachusetts Medical Society.
https://www.cdrewu.edu/people/deborah-b-prothrow-stith-md
Deborah C. Jackson With a strong commitment to social justice in higher education, Deborah Jackson became the fourth President of Cambridge College in 2011, but with her came over three decades of leadership across numerous educational institutions in Boston. Her goal was to move the College's mission forward of providing time-efficient, academically exceptional, and affordable higher education for those who have had limited or no access. Named as one of America's Top 100 Graduate Degree Producers by Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine, Cambridge now ranks third in awarding business or commercial Masters degrees to Black students. Prior to this role, Jackson served as CEO of the American Red Cross of Eastern Massachusetts, Vice President of the Boston Foundation, Senior VP of Boston Children's Hospital, and CEO of Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries. She has also served on numerous boards, task forces, and commissions focused on eliminating racial and ethnic disparities, diversity, student assistance, college and university steering and operational boards, and as the Vice Chair of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts Board of Directors and board member of the New England Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors, among many others.
https://www.cambridgecollege.edu/office-president/presidents-biography
Dianne Walker Born in Boston in 1951, Dianne Walker is a jazz tap dancer with an elegant, fluid dancing style that is rhythmically complex, yet delicate. Overcoming adversity in a childhood polio infection, she was sent to dance classes to get appropriate leg exercise as therapy. Working with instructors who had successfully performed in a range of New England and New York vaudeville circuits, Walker learned quickly. However, she put her dancing dreams on hold, first when her family moved due to her new stepfather's military career, and then again when she married at age 18. However, a chance social affair at Prince Hall Masonic Temple led to new lessons and teaching Saturday children's classes as Leon Collins' protege in 1978. After seeing how the art was declining in Boston in the early 1980s, she began recruiting new young talent for films and live performances, some of whom would go on to full-length tap musicals and Broadway productions. Attending the 1985 International Tip Tap Festival, she performed her first tap soloist work. Determined to bring tap back to the next generation of young Black dancers over creating the perfect art, she's considered by many as the top transitional figure between generations.
Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, J.D. As the first Black woman elected to the Massachusetts State Senate, Dianne Wilkerson was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1955. Her family fled north to Springfield to escape Ku Klux Klan harassment, and she graduated from the High School of Commerce in 1973, followed by a Bachelors at the American International College and her JD at the Boston College Law School in 1981. She clerked at the Massachusetts Appeals Court until the next year when she became deputy counsel to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Continuing her career in a range of organizations, she became the first Black woman in Boston to become a partner at a major law firm at Roche, Carnes, & DeGiacomo, where she remained until she was elected to the State Senate in 1992, becoming the highest-ranking black official in Massachusetts when serving her sixth term in 2005. Focusing on bills that protect Black, minority, and low-income Massachusetts residents, including collecting data related to racial profiling in traffic stops and curbing high-interest rates on bank loans, her focus on championing policies that improve the lives of individuals who have traditionally been underserved by government is second to none.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/honorable-dianne-wilkerson
Doris Bland With the Massachusetts' welfare system in detestable shape, it took a group of poor Black mothers, led by Doris Bland, to create change within the system. women in the Dudley Street Area Planning Action Council started Mothers for Adequate Welfare in 1964, electing Doris Bland as their first president. Begun as an interracial membership list of 1,000 members, or roughly 1 out of every 13 women on welfare in the City of Boston, by discovering the challenges facing mothers, creating a system that an experienced mother would go to the required intake interview with a new recipient, researching the welfare system for Massachusetts, and taking collective action on issues that impacted the members, such as visiting public officials, sit-ins, and protests. Bland's statement following a serious altercation and riot around Grove Hill Welfare Office showcased the disrespectful and rude behavior the mothers were being regularly treated to, including being treated with suspicion and insulting behavior. Their actions, led by Doris Bland, led to a completely new welfare system for the state, with a board that Bland was given a seat on to oversee the system.
https://masscommons.wordpress.com/2022/05/04/a-peoples-history-of-the-new-boston-mothers-for-adequate-welfare/
Rep. Doris Bunte As the first Black woman to serve in the Massachusetts Legislature, Doris Bunte has always focused on the most vulnerable individuals in the state as well as in the city of Boston. Moving from New York City to Boston with three children in 1953, she moved into the Orchard Park Housing Projects, where she soon joined the management council as well as co-founding the Boston Public Housing Tenants Policy Council in 1968. She followed this action in 1969 with her nomination to the Boston Housing Authority Board, which made her the first public housing tenant to serve on the board. She was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representative in 1973, where she founded the Massachusetts Legislative Black Caucus as well as the Massachusetts Caucus of Women Legislators. She also enrolled in Harvard in 1978, where she earned her Masters degree in 1982. Following 12 years in the state legislature, she became the director of the Boston Housing Authority, where she moved public housing integration forward. She then moved to work at Northeastern and Boston Universities in 1992, where she enjoyed 18 successful years prior to her retirement in 2010.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-doris-bunte
Dorothy Haskins Concerned about the state of the welfare system in the 1960s, Dorothy Haskins started an ad hoc group of mothers to agitate around welfare issues. The group eventually linked up with Mothers for Adequate Welfare in 1965, followed by the National Welfare Rights Organization in 1966. With nobody to work on the issues in Columbia Point, the organization was designed to bring information to the community residents who were on welfare. A few mothers initially got together outside of the nearest supermarket with a table and buttons on welfare rights. Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., the organization saw racism from the side of the welfare office and wanted the disrespect and related issues to stop. Organizing peaceful demonstrations based out of the projects where Blacks and other minorities lived, other groups began to see how they could band together to create a stronger community and make sure that peoples' needs were being met. The actions of individuals such as Dorothy Haskins and Mothers for Adequate Welfare have inspired a new generation of Black women leaders focused on diversity, equity, and inclusiveness across all races and classes.
https://economichardship.org/2019/11/peoples-history-episode-2-grove-hall/
Dorothy West In the Harlem Renaissance, Dorothy West, a Bostonian born in 1907, was referred to as "the kid" due to her status as the youngest of the artists and writers when she moved there in 1925. A talented writer, West had her first story published in the Boston Post when she was only 14. In a 1926 contest that was sponsored by the Urban League's magazine Opportunity, she tied with Zora Neale Hurston for second place. Taking on a small part in the play Porgy in 1927, she toured with it for a couple of years, before traveling to Russia in 1932 with a group of 20 other Black artist to make a film on racism in America. Though the film was never made, she remained in Russia for a year. West took a position with the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression, and earned money from 1940 into the 1960s writing two short stories every month for the New York Daily News. Moving to Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard in the 1940s, she wrote a regular column in the Vineyard Gazette. She published her first novel in 1948, and her second novel was published in 1995.
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collections/dorothy-west
Detective Dorothy E. Harrison Serving from 1944 to 1972, Dorthy Harrison was the first Black woman detective in Boston. Though she was originally trained as an opera singer, the graduate from Boston University felt that she was born a generation early to be successful at music, feeling that the world was not yet ready for a black opera singer, and felt that police work would provide her with a better future than music would. Within her first week of service, she disarmed a man who was distraught, flagging down a passing patrol vehicle and retrieving the gun so that the suspect could be taken to the station. She was in demand regularly as a speaker, sharing her experiences with the world. She inspired the next generation of Black women in police work, with others joining her many years into her career.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B8MGNRfguG8/
https://www.facebook.com/roxsafetynet/posts/1247347581969352/
https://100clubmass.org/massachusetts-female-police-officers-a-138-year-history/
E. Alice Taylor Teachers touch the lives of all they teach, and E. Alice Taylor, a community organizer and educator from Boston, was no exception. Born in 1892 in Alexander, Arkansas, she earned her degree from Arkansas Baptist College in 1913, moving to Boston between that time and 1927, when she founded a branch of the Annie Malone's Poro Beauty School and Beauty Shop, a vocational school she managed for 15 years until World War 2 forced the school to close. At the time of closing, Taylor was employing 15 teachers to serve 150 students annually and was one of the largest minority-owned businesses in New England. She also founded and was president of the Professional Hairdressers Association of Massachusetts and was an officer and board member of the NAACP for half a century. She also served with many other community service organizations, such as the League of Women for Community Service, the Massachusetts State Union of Women's Clubs, the Charitable Health Association of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Human Relations Committee. Passing away at the age of 94, she left a lasting impression on the community.
https://chalkboardchampions.org/e-alice-taylor-educator-social-reformer-and-community-organizer/
Edmonia Lewis Born in New York in 1844, Edmonia Lewis was the first sculptor of multi-racial Black and Indigenous from America who received international recognition. Growing up with her mother's tribe after being orphaned at a young age, she attended Ohio's Oberlin College, which was one of the first post-secondary institutions to accept Black female students. She had a strong interest in fine arts but was forced to leave the school prior to graduation due to false accusations of poisoning. Traveling to Boston, she established herself as an artist while studying under a local sculptor and creating portraits of abolitionist heroes. She became involved with a group of American women sculptors and moved to Rome at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. Beginning to work in marble, she did all of her own sculpting work, a different approach as most sculptors would hire workmen local to the area to carve final pieces. This may have been done from fear that if she didn't, her work would not be accepted as her own. She sculpted figure works based on her Indigenous heritage, the oppression of Black persons, and Biblical scenes.
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/edmonia-lewis-2914
Edna R. BrownAs the first Black woman to perform dentistry in Cambridge, Edna Brown was a dentist who graduated from Columbia University and was a very early member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Psi Omega chapter. Though not much is known about her life, being able to attend Columbia as a Black woman means that she probably attended after 1923, as Columbia University recognizes Elizabeth Delaney as the University's College of Dental Medicine's first Black female graduate.
https://www.akaboston.org/chapter-history
https://thelowdown.alumni.columbia.edu/history_of_women_at_columbia
Edna V. Bynoe As a strong community activist, Edna Bynoe was one of the moving forces to change Orchard Park to Orchard Gardens Community. As the Orchard Park Projects declined in the 1960s and 1970s, it was necessary for community leaders like Bynoe to step forward and push for change. In addition to leading the push to update the Orchard Park Projects to a more modern, safe housing environment, Bynoe also headed the design team that opened the Orchard Gardens Pilot School in the community, providing opportunities for better education for children in the community. She also served on many boards and committees to help steer the direction that the community was taking throughout these changes, acting as a vital voice within the organizations shaping the new community by representing the residents of the existing community.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/edna-bynoe-obituary?id=23410460
Ekua Holmes A collage artist who focuses on the power of faith, hope, and self-determination, Ekua Holmes investigates family relationship dynamics, histories, and impressions that come out in her artwork. Growing up in Roxbury, she completed her Bachelors from MassArt in 1977 and has become an educator on collage workshops, been a visiting artist and lecturer, and held a range of public and private institution artist residencies in New England. Holmes is also an illustrator, focusing on children's books and receiving numerous awards for her work. She also serves as the Boston Art Commission's Commissioner and Vice-Chair, overseeing public artworks in and on properties of the City of Boston. She serves MassArt as the Associate Director of the Center for Art and Community Partnerships, allowing her to coordinate “sparc!” the ArtMobile that contributes to multidisciplinary and community-based arts programs.
https://www.ekuaholmes.com/about
Elaine W. Steward As a senior Vice President and Assistant General Counsel for the Boston Red Sox, Elaine Steward has worked on a wide range of legal issues with the franchise since she joined in 1988. As a recipient of a Jackie Robinson Foundation scholarship, she graduated with honors from St. John's University, receiving her JD from the University's School of Law. She interned at the New York Mets public relations department as well as the Officer of the Commissioner of Baseball in its Executive Development program. She was selected as a top Ten Outstanding Young Leaders of Boston, was elected into the Academy of Women Achievers for the YWCA, and received the St. John's University President's Medal, among many other honors that she has received over the years. She was also featured in the Red Sox' Women in Baseball exhibit in Fenway Park, the National Baseball Hall of Fame Women in Baseball exhibit located in Cooperstown, New York, and Massachusetts Senate President Karen Spilka's State House Herstory Exhibit.
https://www.mlb.com/redsox/team/front-office/elaine-steward
Eliza A. Gardner Acting as a community activist and religious leader, Eliza Gardner was born in New York City in 1831, moving to Boston's West End with her family while still young. Growing up in Beacon Hill's abolition center, she grew up in one of the Underground Railroad stations, during which time she also knew abolitionist leaders including Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, Lewis & Harriet Hayden, and Fredrick Douglass. Active in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, she began teaching Sunday school and became Boston's superintendent of Sunday schools in the 1880s. She also assumed a range of leadership roles in the church, raising money to raise churches and support ministers. She also organized the church's Woman's Home and Foreign Missionary Society, which was a women-operated group that supported missionary work. This allowed her to push for equality for women in religious organizations, as she had grown frustrated with male leadership who opposed women stepping into the same roles. She was also a founding member of the Woman's Era Club and helped organize the first National Conference for Colored Women in America, serving as the chaplain in 1895. She continued promoting temperance, anti-lynching, and women's rights movements over the years, continuing to address groups until 1917, five years before her passing in 1922.
https://www.nps.gov/people/eliza-ann-gardner.htm
Elizabeth Blakeley For many enslaved persons seeking freedom, Boston was a common destination and hub on the Underground Railroad, including for Elizabeth Blakeley, who was born into slavery in North Carolina. After receiving awful treatment at the hands of her enslaver, Blakeley ran away at age 15 in December 1849, and hid on a vessel that was bound for Boston, preventing local authorities from finding her. After surviving a four-week-long journey, she was able to arrive in Boston, living as a free individual. After a few weeks spent recovering from her bid for freedom, during which she was welcomed and given sanctuary by the free Black community in Boston, she shared her story at an abolitionist meeting that was held in Faneuil Hall, during which times Thomas Jones, who had seen her treatment at the hands of her enslavers, stated that if he repeated what he had seen, those present would hardly be able to bear it. Following the meeting, she was able to choose the path her life took, marrying and living briefly in Connecticut and Toronto before returning to Boston for the rest of her life, living to the age of 84 and remaining active in the community.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/elizabeth-blakeley-s-escape-to-freedom.htm
Elizabeth Freeman Elizabeth Freeman, a brave woman who was enslaved, challenged the principles of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution as the first Black woman to file a successful lawsuit for freedom which would lead to the outlawing of slavery by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Born in New York, she was born around 1744, growing up and given to her enslaver's daughter upon her marriage. Freeman overheard her enslaver, a judge, discussing the language used in the Sheffield Declaration, including a statement “mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” The same language was used in the Declaration of Independence and the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, so Freman received help from an attorney who drafted the Sheffield Declaration to fight for her freedom, who took the case as a test case to decide if slavery was constitutional under the state Constitution. She, along with another enslaved person, was granted freedom, 30 shillings, and trial expenses. Following her freedom, she became a prominent healer, midwife, and nurse, buying her own home where she could live with her children, passing at approximately age 85 in 1829.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/elizabeth-freeman
Elizabeth Riley Deeply involved in the Massachusetts abolitionist movement, Elizabeth Riley was known for harboring Shadrach Minkins, a fugitive enslaved person, in the attic of her home at 70 Southac Street, where she lived until her death in 1855 at the age of 64. Born in Boston in 1791, her strongly-held beliefs backed up her actions. She involved herself with numerous progressive political organizations, including the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the African-American Female Intelligence Society, and fundraising for creating The Liberator, the nation's first significant abolitionist newspaper. She was also part of the Colored Citizens of Boston which called for the abolition of slavery. She worked as a nurse later in her life but never learned to read or write, living an exemplary and courageous life despite this issue.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/riley-elizabeth-1791-1855/
Elizabeth Williams As president and CEO of Roxbury Technology, Beth Williams is the owner of the largest Black female-owned Boston business, routinely giving back to the community. Working at Freedom Electronics following her graduation from Brown University, she decided to grow her experience at Raytheon Company in their Missile Systems division. After five years, she decided to move into a more impactful role where she could help women and minority entrepreneurs, she joined Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, eventually becoming the Director of Business Diversity for the organization. She then succeeded her father as the CEO and President of Roxbury Technology in 2002. She has used her position to be a socially responsible entrepreneur, providing quality, wage-earning jobs for those who are often passed by for employment. A strong supporter of CORI reform, over 15% of her workforce includes ex-gang members, ex-offenders, and similar disadvantaged persons. Focused on environmental sustainability, job creation, and social responsibility, Williams' leadership has led to many achievements and awards, including WPO's 50 fastest growing women businesses, WBENC's Shining Star award, GNEMSDC's President's award, President and Community Leadership awards from the Eastern Ma Urban League, and the Ernst & Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year award for New England.
https://www.mssconnect.com/about-keynote-speaker-beth-williams.html
Ella Little-Collins Though Black History Month often mentions Malcolm X, his half-sister Ella Little-Colins is often overlooked. His autobiography brings parts of her influence and life to living color. Born in Butler, Georgia in 1914, she worked as a secretary for Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., partnered with her sisters in store ownership, and invested in real estate. During that time, Malcolm came to live with Ella after being shuttled between foster homes when his mother was no longer able to care for her children. She helped him to secure his first serious job as a train cook. Though she was very concerned when he was arrested, tried, and convicted, she stayed loyal and welcomed home when he'd finished his sentence. Like her famous brother, she joined the Nation of Islam and helped establish the Boston mosque in the 1950s, but was beginning to have her doubts about the organization. When her brother was assassinated, she became the president of the Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Muslim Mosque, but even as the organizations foundered, she continued speaking out on a wide range of issues, passing in 1996 following a long struggle with diabetes.
https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2020/02/27/ella-little-collins-malcolm-xs-resourceful-half-si/
Ellen Banks With a strong love of art and music, Ellen Banks has combined her passion in her artwork. Deciding that she had to choose one or the other, she went with visual arts. The joy of painting led to her unique art style, with her passion for piano being worked into her art. The scores she has collected over the years has been the foundation for her music paintings. Now based in Brooklyn, Banks has changed written musical scores into vivid color patterns. This unique approach transforms the notations into abstract patterns, often geometric circles, oblongs, and squares, with different keys represented by different colors that the paintings are saturated with.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2011/artist-combines-two-loves-color-and-music
Ellen S. Craft Born in Georgia in 1826, Ellen Craft was an escaped enslaved person who began lecturing on the abolitionist movement circuit. With very pale skin, she helped her husband, William, and herself escape slavery by posing as a white gentleman traveling to Philadelphia for medical treatment with her husband acting as her slave. To cover her inability to write, she kept her arm in a sling with a bandage wrapped around her head to hide that she did not have a beard. Traveling initially by train and then by sea, the couple traveled to Maryland, after which the couple moved on to Boston. They worked in cabinetmaking and sewing to support themselves, and then became famous on the lecture circuit, with stories published in the Georgia Journal, Macon Telegraph, Boston Globe, and New York Herald. When the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was passed, Ellen and William were protected by the League of Freedom, but the couple fled to England, where they lived for 18 years and had five children. They returned to the US in 1869 to open a cooperative farm for former enslaved persons, with plans for a school. Slander and Ku Klux Klan activity burned their first plantation and then forced the second plantation and school into bankruptcy.
https://www.georgiawomen.org/ellen-smith-craft
Ellen S. Jackson An educator and activist, Ellen Jackson was known for her activity in founding Operation Exodus, which was a program designed to bus students from overcrowded, mostly Black Boston schools to less crowded, mostly white schools in the 1960s, creating a path for desegregation of the schools in Boston. A Roxbury native, she was born in 1935, belonged to the NAACP Youth Council as a teen and graduated from Boston State College in 1958, followed by a Masters in education from Harvard in 1971. From 1962 to 1964, she was the parent coordinator for the Northern Student Movement that organized Black parents and pushed for student equal rights. She worked in voter registration drives and pushed for better representation on the Action for Boston Community Development board of directors. Because local schools pushed Black children to enter vocational training instead of college, she formed the Roxbury-North Dorchester Parents' Council in 1965. She received a document that showed how many students and seats were in each classroom and school in Boston, founding the program Operation Exodus, with Jackson as the executive director. Over a four-year period, the program transported over 1,000 students to less-crowded schools. She worked with many other initiatives and organizations over the years, until her death from stroke in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Swepson_Jackson
Elma LewisA Boston cultural icon, Elma Lewis was born in 1921 and as a child, she was inspired by the call for racial pride and civic activism. She attended Emerson College, where she completed her Bachelors in 1943. She still taught fine arts at Harriet Tubman House, as well as dance and drama at other locations, and staged operas with the Robert Gould Shaw House Chorus. She founded the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1950, the Playhouse in the Park in Franklin Park in 1966, and the National Center for Afro-American Artists, which formed performing companies that toured worldwide in 1968. These educational institutions provided professional-level programs for Blacks focusing on both visual and performing arts. Designed with divisions that paralleled each other, she began the organizations with the goal of combining the best teaching and professional performance while affirming arts accessibility and ethnic heritage. Over 6,000 students received arts education due to her efforts, vision, and commitment. Not only did students at her school learn the arts, but learned to embrace the positive in black life while rejecting anything that was negative. She received many honors and served the community through numerous arts organizations.
https://bwht.org/elma-lewis/
Elva L. Abdal-Khallaq Elva Lee Abdal-Khallaq was born in Baldwin, Louisiana, then moved to Houston, Texas at a young age, where she met her husband. The couple moved to Boston with their children, where she played a vital role in the family's business and community activities and activism. Her passion was for children, not only her ten, but many others, a passion she lived out through work at the UMCA Clarendon Street Day Care, the Crispus Attucks Children's Center, and the St. Joseph's Community Center, she touched many lives in her Boston community. She had a strong belief in the power of education and community service, she received an Early Education Teaching Certificate from Harvard, was a valued member of the Roxbury Tai-Chi Academy, a treasurer for the Goldenaires at the Freedom House, and attended the Million Women March along with four generations of women in her family. She passed away at the age of 96 in 2010.
Estella L. Crosby Born in 1890 in Alexandria, Virginia, Estella Lee Crosby came to Boston as a social young woman to find her life's path. Finding it in community activism and her marriage of 50 years, Based out of a row house in the South End neighborhood of Greenwich Park, she ran not only a successful beauty salon where she informed women in the neighborhood about community activism organizations including the National Organization of Colored Women's Clubs and the Housewives League. Seeing the opportunity for stylish but affordable women's clothing, she opened a very popular retail store located on Columbus Avenue close to the family's home. Investing decades of her time into breaking down the obstacles to Black advancement in the city, she was a strong member of the Ebinezer Baptist Church, which was founded by freed slaves following the Civil War, and was never too tired to help anyone in need.
https://www.facebook.com/foresthillscemetery/posts/for-our-notable-resident-this-week-forest-hills-cemetery-honors-the-memory-of-es/3980133368685108/
Estelle A. Forster An early Black graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, Estelle Foster was dedicated to promoting musical education for Blacks in Boston. Over a period of three decades in the early 1900s, she started and directed the Ancrum School of Music, offering a wide range of lessons and courses including piano, organ, viola, voice, brass, wind, flute, harmony, and solfeggio. She also taught musical theory and a range of musical subjects, all operated out of the 74 W. Rutland Square location which included two dormitories, a cafeteria, and exceptional student facilities. Through this school, she brought musical education into the lives of thousands of Black students in the Boston area.
https://blackfacts.com/fact/ancrum-school-of-music
Eva Mitchell Working in a range of executive roles in education and career development, Eva Mitchell is a community activist and professional working to improve the lives of Black individuals through better educational and career development opportunities. An alumnus of Harvard, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania, Mitchell began her career as a co-founder, assistant principal, and teacher at a pilot school in the Boston Public School system. She moved into the position of Senior Director of Educational Quality and Accountability for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, then as a senior leadership coach for school turnaround at the Center of Collaborative Education. After several years between state and city educational organizations, she moved into the C-suite at Boston Public Schools as Chief Accountability Officer, then as the Chief Program Officer and Chief Executive Officer at the Coalition for Career Development Center, and has volunteered in a range of roles at numerous community educational and activism organizations, including the Blue Hill Avenue Task Force, Roxbury Community College, The Calculus Project, the Boston Community Leadership Academy, and many others.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eva-mitchell-b316486/
Evelynn M. Hammonds, Ph.D. As the founding director of MIT's Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine, Evelynn Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies, the Chair of the Department of the History of Science, and a Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard University, which she joined as Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2002. She's also an author with a wide range of scholarly articles to her experience. She received her Bachelors from Spelman College, with another Bachelors from Georgia Institute of Technology, her Masters from MIT, and a PhD from Harvard. She received a postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Social Science in Princeton, New Jersey's Institute of Advanced Study and has been a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer. She is also a current associate member of MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute. She has also served on numerous boards including the Museum of Science, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and Spelman College. She is a fellow of the Association of Women in Science and serves on the Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering.
https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/evelynn-m-hammonds
Fannie B. Williams As an educator, women's rights advocate, and political activist, Fannie Williams advanced opportunities for Blacks, focusing on social and educational reforms for Black women in the southern United States. Born in 1855 in Brockport, New York to a well-respected family, Williams aspired to become a teacher, becoming the first Black graduate from Brockport State Normal School in 1870, which is now SUNY Brockport. Fifteen years old at the time of her graduation, she moved to Washington, D.C. to educate freed blacks migrating to the city in the 1870s. She married and moved to Chicago where her husband started a successful law practice. She served as the first woman on the Board of the Chicago Public Library, then spoke at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition voicing concern over the lack of Black representation at the event, after which she helped found the National League of Colored Women and the National Association of Colored Women, as well as Provident Hospital and the NAACP. She was the only Black woman selected to eulogize Susan B Anthony at the National American Women Suffrage Association convention in 1907. She wrote extensively to progress Blacks in religion, education, and employment.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/williams-fannie-barrier-1855-1944/
Fern L. Cunningham-Terry Born in 1949 to a doctor and artist in Jackson Heights, New York, Fern Cunningham-Terry grew up in a home filled with pride in Black culture, art, and song. Living in Sitka, Alaska in a very diverse community from an early age, she had a passion for art that remained for her entire life. She moved to Boston following her high school graduation to attend Boston University's fine arts program, from which she traveled to France for additional art studies and then to Kenya to visit her sister. These two experiences formed her style. She began teaching at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1970, a commitment to teaching and the creative process that lasted throughout her life. She also taught in the Boston Public School system and the Park School in Brookline. She was a mentor to countless students over the years and created amazing public works of art that are found throughout the City of Boston. With a focus that honored Black history, communities, and history, she celebrated relationships and families. The first public sculpture she completed, Save the Children, was completed in 1973.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Fern-Cunningham-Terry
Florence Hagins As a black woman and single mother, Florence Hagins was the first enrollee in the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, following her denied application despite a decades-long work history. This program allowed her to purchase her new home, but she was not satisfied with renovating it and filling it with beautiful Black art. The next 15 years saw her volunteering with the Affordable Housing Alliance, then moving into an employee position where she counseled thousands of first-time homebuyers, encouraging them to clean up their credit and save money in case a home inspector or lawyer might be needed. She helped them determine if home ownership was right for them, and ran a post-purchase class to cover home ownership basics with over 9,000 students graduating. When Mayor Menino saw her coming, he would often jest, "Here comes trouble!" understanding the force of her personality.
https://www.wbur.org/the-remembrance-project/2015/05/27/the-remembrance-project-florence-hagins
Florence B. Price As the first Black woman recognized as a symphonic composer and the first to have her composition played by a major orchestra, Florence Beatrice Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas to a Black dentist and his music instructor wife. She continued her education at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, double majoring in organ and piano teaching. Moving to Atlanta to teach music, she met her husband there, and the couple returned to Little Rock. However, racial violence in the city forced the couple to move to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Price flourished in the city, studying composition, orchestration and organ from leading teachers, publishing four piano pieces in 1929. Financial issues during the Great Depression led to divorce, and to take care of her two daughters, she played at silent film screenings and composed radio ad songs under a pen name. She won a 1932 Wanamaker Foundation Award with first prize for her Symphony in E Minor and third for her Piano Sonata, earning $500. Her Symphony was played the next year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and several of her other works were played over the years by other symphonies.
https://www.pricefest.org/florence-price
Florence R. LeSueur
A Black activist, civic leader, and the first female president of an NAACP chapter, Florence LeSuer was born in 1898 in Pennsylvania. After attending Wilberforce University, she moved to Boston's South End in 1935 and was the first to head Boston's NAACP's educational committee, a passion she retained all her life as a champion of employment and educational rights for Blacks. She assisted with founding the Metropolitan Council for Education Opportunity to bus Black inner city students to suburban schools, to promote desegregation, as well as the push for equal education with college prep classes. Her time in the NAACP resulted in six Black men being hired as Boston Elevated Railway (now Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) drivers following demonstrations near the Dudley Square station. She served as president of Harriet Tubman House in 1959. A mother of 11 and grandmother of 52, she passed away at age 93.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_LeSueur
Florida R. Ridley
Born to a distinguished family in Boston in 1861, Florida Ridley was a Black civil rights activist, teacher, suffragist, writer, and editor, and was the first Black public school teacher in Boston, and was the editor of The Woman's Era, the first newspaper in country published for and by Black women, and she was also noted for her writing on Black history and New England race relations. . She came from a family of firsts, with her father being the first Black graduate of Harvard Law School, and the United States' first Black judge. Graduating from Boston Teachers' College in 1882, she taught at the Grant School until her marriage. She was one of the founders of the Second Unitarian Church in Brookline, and was active in the anti-lynching and early women's suffrage movement. With other women, she helped co-found several non-profit groups, including the Woman's Era Club and the League of Women for Community Service, as well as the predecessor of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. She passed in 1943.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Ruffin_Ridley
Frances E.W. Harper
Born free in Baltimore in 1825, Frances Harper was a poet, author, and lecturer who was the first Black woman to publish a short story, and was an influential reformer, abolitionist, and suffragist. She co-founded the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs based in Boston, and was educated at her uncle's school, then at Watkins Academy. Her first small poetry volume, Forest Leaves, was written at age 21. Five years later, she became the first female instructor at Union Seminary in Ohio. Shortly after, she became a vehement abolitionist, and wrote poetry for antislavery publications. Her second poetry volume was completed in 1854, as she left home to travel the U.S. and Canada lecturing for several state anti-slavery societies. She also promoted women's suffrage and rights as well as the temperance movement. Her experiences in travel began to appear in her novels, poetry, and short stories. Following the Civil War she took up the banner of women's rights more completely, pushing for suffrage for not only women, but Blacks as well. She spent the remainder of her career furthering the cause of equal rights, career opportunities, and education for Black women. She passed away in 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/frances-ellen-watkins-harper
Frederica M. Williams
As President and CEO of Whittier Street Health Care Center since 2002, Frederica Williams is a strong leader in transforming basic community healthcare into a model of urban healthcare in disadvantaged communities. Dedicated to social justice as well as health and economic equity and equality, Serving and embracing Boston's multicultural wealth, she has developed programs to support improvements in diverse population health while eliminating health and social inequity among low-income, minority, immigrant, and refugee populations. She advocates with exceptional compassion to improve the lives of Boston's most vulnerable residents. Through many outreach campaigns, she has directed programs bringing high-quality healthcare to patients. By engaging the community, she encourages healthy lifestyles and better outcomes for those in need. This proactive approach includes financial stewardship and visionary leadership for the healthcare organization, ensuring services and resources will be available long into the future, with a goal of increasing the number of persons served from 5,000 to 40,000 while delivering up to 220,000 annual clinic visits, as well as a mobile health van program, dental care, second location, and full-service pharmacy. Her vision has extended through the COVID-19 pandemic to the Whittier's Center Health Equity Research Center to facilitate health outcomes.
https://www.wshc.org/biography-of-frederica-m-williams/
Gail Snowden
Following her graduation from Harvard in 1967 with a Masters, Gail Snowden spent over 30 years at the Bank of Boston, moving up to a position of Executive Vice President. Continuing to make strong strides in the financial industry, Snowden has worked through multiple organizations as managing director of both Fleet Bank and Bank of America, but has returned to a strong focus on the community to help lift up those in need who have been disadvantaged, especially Black and minority individuals. She served as CFO of The Boston Foundation for three years, allowing her to advocate for those in need, then moved on to Freedom House as the CEO, a position she retired from. However, her dedication to serving the community continued to drive her, and she began Gail Snowden Consulting Services five years after her retirement to help organizations better serve the community.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gail-snowden-243b9710/
https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/gail-snowden-from-banking-to-foundation
Georgette Watson
Born in Philadelphia during World War Two, Georgette Watson was an anti-drug activist in Boston. After receiving a Bachelors and paralegal certifications from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Masters in education from Antioch University, she was a single mother as violence reigned with drug gangs from both Detroit and New York tried to expand into the city. She occupied apartments in locations with significant drug activity to engage with the community, draw police and press attention, and discourage drug dealing. She co-founded Drop-a-Dime, an organization focused on preventing crime by delivering tips from citizens confidentially to the Boston police and related federal agencies. Handling over 600 calls per month, the organization's process led to hundreds of arrests, including the imprisonment of Capsule Boys gang members and other large drug gangs active in Boston, as well as the shuttering of businesses and buildings that were nests of drug activity. Appointed in 1991 to lead the Massachusetts Governor's Alliance Against Drugs, she focused efforts on crime prevention programs over enforcement. Following a bout of breast cancer and kidney problems, she worked with the Maryland Transit Administration to improve transit access for individuals with disabilities before passing in 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgette_Watson
Geraldine P. Trotter
As an early Black civil rights activist and editor following the Civil War, Geraldine Trotter was born in Massachusetts in 1873. She was an associate editor of the Boston Guardian. After finishing her education at a local business college, she met W.E.B. Du Bois while he attended Harvard. She entertained elite guests and encouraged philanthropy through her efforts, aiding the City of Boston and other regional municipalities through community aid centers to support Black women and children in need. She also worked with the Public School Association, Boston Literary and Historical Society, Women's Anti Lynching League, and Equal Rights Association. When her husband was arrested following the 1903 Boston Riot, she went to work at The Boston Guardian in his place, eventually becoming a key driver in the paper's direction while writing columns on household management and fashion to drive female readership. Overall, the couple pursued a more militant promotion of civil rights, encouraging those who had been privileged with education to raise up those in need. During World War One, she dedicated herself to Soldiers' Comfort Units and the welfare of Black soldiers, but she passed shortly after during the Spanish flu pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Pindell_Trotter
Justice Geraldine S. Hines
Born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, Geraldine Hines graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1971. Becoming a staff attorney at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, she fought for prisoner's rights litigation, then moved to become a criminal law attorney in the Roxbury Defenders' Committee, working up through the organization until she became the Director of the Committee. She then served as co-counsel in Commonwealth v. Willie Sanders, addressing the issue of police misconduct in Black communities, which began the shift of her move to civil rights law, focusing on discrimination in education and special education as staff attorney at Harvard University Center for Law and Education. After several years of private practice from 1982, she began her career as a justice in 2001, prior to her appointment into the state court system by Governor Deval Patrick, she served as an associate justice until 2014, when she was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/associate-justice-geraldine-s-hines
Gladys Holmes
Born in 1892, Gladys Holmes was an author, educator, and social worker who was one of the former presidents of the League of Women for Community Service, one of the oldest organizations for Black women in the city of Boston. Providing many opportunities in Boston for women of color, the League was focused on advancing the position of Black women in the community through community service and collective action. By Holmes' time, the League was a strong social center for the Black community in Boston, providing a location for social dances, social services during the Great Depression, lodging for female college students due to segregation, and similar activities to support the community as a whole. It became a bastion of literacy and education for Boston's Black community.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Women_for_Community_Service
https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/02/24/boston-history-league-of-women-for-community-service
Gladys A.M. Perdue
A noted pianist and organist, Gladys Perdue was born in 1898 and attended the New England Conservatory of Music, receiving her Diploma in Pianoforte in 1924. Teaching music at the Tuskegee Institute from 1925 to 1931, she then returned to Boston, where she served as the organist at the Albanian Church in South Boston for over three decades. Her many performances in the South End included being musical accompaniment for the Women's Service Club's 464 Follies. With a strong dedication to the musical arts in the Black community of Boston, she was entertained shortly before her death in 1998 by a jazz sextet made up of New England Conservatory students known as the Back Bay Stompers at Goddard House.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Glendora M. Putnam, J.D.
Determined to promote civil rights and stop discrimination, Glendora Putnam was born in 1923 and graduated from Boston University School of Law in 1948, at a time when few women were practicing law, much less Black women. Growing up prior to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, she was determined to end segregation and discrimination, acting as a fighter for equality and justice. She served as the national board president of the YWCA, despite having been barred from entering her high school's chapter due to discrimination and segregation, determined to open the YWCA's doors to everyone. She was admitted to the bar in 1949 while facing the double discrimination of race and sex. She worked on Edward Brooke's campaign for office, joining him when he became Massachusetts Attorney General as the assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1964. She passed on a higher-paying Equal Opportunity Employment Commission opportunity to head the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination where she could enforce the new civil rights laws. She was nominated by President Ford as deputy assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity at HUD, making her the highest-ranking Black woman at the agency. She passed away in 2016.
https://www.bu.edu/law/record/articles/2016/celebrating-glendora-putnam-48-distinguished-alumna-and-civil-rights-pioneer/
Gloria Smith
Fostering sportsmanship and wellness, Gloria Smith helped found The Sportsmen's Tennis Club in 1961 as a nonprofit for tennis aficionados who wanted to share their love of the game with Boston children of all races, sexes, and backgrounds. Seeing the lack of opportunities for urban youth, her initial drive has become the organization's daily mission for the past 25 years, starting out in playgrounds in the South End as well as a Roxbury gym, but has grown to its own facility, becoming a vital part of the athletic community in Boston. Over time, over 500 youths have attended college on either partial or full tennis scholarships while over 400 youths have attained tennis association rankings on the local, regional, and national levels.
https://bostonsportsclubsouthendhere.blogspot.com/2012/09/after-few-lost-serves-dorchester-tennis.html
Rev. Gloria E. White-Hammond, M.D.
As the current co-pastor of Bethel AME Church in Boston, Gloria White-Hammond is a Swartz Resident Practitioner in Ministry Studies and the founder and executive director of My Sister's Keeper, a humanitarian and human rights organization partnering with diverse women in Sudan to reconcile and reconstruct their communities. As an organization led by women, it provides a unique insight into the needs of women of color in need in foreign countries. In the past, she graduated from Boston University, Tufts University School of Medicine, and Harvard Divinity School. She worked at the South End Community Health Center for over 27 years as a pediatrician, dedicating herself to serving the community through the health of its children, retiring in 2008 before moving on to new opportunities.
https://hds.harvard.edu/people/gloria-white-hammond
Rep. Gloria L. Fox
Born in 1942 and raised as a foster child, Gloria Fox has completed the MIT Community Fellows program, raised two sons in Roxbury's Whittier Street Housing Development, and served as a community organizer prior to entering politics. She was an essential element in stopping the Southwest Expressway project. She ran as a write-in candidate for the 7th Suffolk District in 1984, then won the seat in 1986, serving the 7th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts Legislature from 1987 until she retired in 2016. She served on multiple committees, including the House Committee on Steering, Policy, and Scheduling, the House Committee on Ways and Means, the Joint Committee on Ways and Means, and the Joint Committee on Housing, serving as the vice chair. She has taken a strong approach to child welfare, foster care, eliminating health disparities, criminal justice reform, and similar areas of interest to the minority community. She was the longest-serving woman in the Legislature at the time of her retirement. She also served on the boards of a wide range of organizations for women and people of color. She received the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators for her activism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Fox
Gwen Ifill
As both the moderator and the managing editor of Washington Week and both a co-anchor and the managing editor of The PBS Newshour, Gwen Ifill is a bestselling author, moderator, and anchor known for her work in the 2004 and 2008 elections. As the author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, Ifill rolled her experience covering eight Presidential campaigns into success in the 2008 campaign season, winning the George Foster Peabody Award after bringing Washington Week to live audiences in a 10-city tour. With a near-50-year history, the prime-time public affairs and news program on television is considered to be the longest-running program of its type, which brought together Washington's best journalists to discuss the week's major stories. With a career starting as a chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, White House correspondent for the New York Times, and acting as a political reporter on both local and national issues for The Washington Post, she also worked with Baltimore and Boston reporting organizations. She then moved to Washington Week and PBS NewsHour in 1999, where the Boston Simmons College graduate has received many honorary doctorates and awards.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/author/gwen-ifill
Harriet A. Jacobs
An early abolitionist and autobiographer, Harriet Jacobs was born into enslavement in 1813 in North Carolina but was taught to read at an early age. After suffering much abuse at the hands of her enslaver and bearing two children to a white neighbor, Jacobs chose to stand up against her treatment and refused to become her enslaver's concubine. Sent to work on a nearby plantation, she fled in an effort to remove her children from her enslaver's control. She escaped north in 1842, working first as a nursemaid in New York City and moving to Rochester to work at the antislavery reading room located above Frederick Douglass' The North Star newspaper. During the course of an abolitionist lecture tour, she was encouraged by Quaker reformer Amy Post to write the story of her enslavement. Her story, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1861 and is considered to be the most comprehensive slave narrative written by a woman, enumerating details to convey the harsh and emotionally-torn treatment enslaved women in the South experienced. She passed away in 1897, having relocated through Boston and several other cities before settling in Washington, D.C. following the Civil War.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harriet-Jacobs
Harriet B. Hayden
As a well-known activist and abolitionist, Harriet Hayden was born into slavery in 1816 in Kentucky. After marrying her husband in 1842 and bearing the couple's son, Jo, the family fled north with the aid of abolitionists Delia Webster and Calvin Fairbanks. They eventually traveled on to Canada in 1844. Drawn to help others flee slavery, the family returned to the United States in 1845 and settled in Boston's Beacon Hill area the next year, placing them in the center of the abolitionist movement in Boston. The family, now including a young daughter, worked with the Vigilance Committee of 1850 to aid and protect those escaping from slavery. Sheltering freedom seekers in their home for over a decade, which had been converted into a boarding house for the Underground Railroad, Harriet Hayden oversaw the daily operation of the boarding house as her husband tended his shop. Providing them with food, shelter, and protection on their voyage to freedom, she also provided a meeting and organizing space, becoming a more public figure later in life as she advocated for equal rights for all, moving from abolition to suffrage and temperance. Until her death in 1893, she tirelessly advocated for equal rights.
https://www.nps.gov/people/harriet-hayden.htm
Isabella Holmes
The Boston Vigilance Committee was linked hand-in-fist with the Underground Railroad and the anti-slavery movement, and at the center of the Boston abolitionist movement were Reverend Samuel Snowden and his daughter, Isabella Holmes. Assisting fugitives who came to or through Boston on the Underground Railroad, Holmes provided boarding to numerous fugitive slaves following the Fugitive Slave Law's enactment in 1850. Living with her husband on Holmes Alley, the family's boarding house was a central location for abolitionist activities in Boston. She passed away in relative obscurity some years later.
https://www.nps.gov/places/the-holmes-alley-house.htm
Isaura Mendes Dealing with loss due to street guidance is an issue that has plagued the Black community for many decades, and Isaura Mendes knew that when she lost her son Bobby to murder in 1995 that she needed to find an answer to this issue. As the founder of The Bobby Mendes Peace Legacy, she was further resolved to bring peace to violent streets after losing another son, Matthew, in 2006 in a drive-by shooting. Designed to provide support and programming for victims and survivors of street violence, the organization has focused on making a difference in the community for over 20 years, providing scholarships to schoolchildren in the community. Annual events to promote community unity and peace include holiday gift-giving celebrations, back-to-school barbecues, and peace walks that honor all those impacted by street violence. She incorporates her seven principles of peace into the organization, being unity, justice, forgiveness, courage, hope, faith, and love. She spreads her message at state prisons, community outreach, and healing trauma in the community.
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/promoting-hope-after-trauma-isaura-mendes-marks-20-years-pushing-peace
Jackie Jenkins-Scott As an innovative leader, Jackie Jenkins-Scott is an accomplished executive with three decades in leadership at mission-driven institutions, moving them from vulnerable positions to high levels of performance. Acting with vision and determination, she is a strategic leader who has worked with a wide range of organizations including the Boston Women's Fund, JJS Advising, Century Bank, Wheelock College, and The Dimock Center. With honorary doctorates in law, education, and humanities from University of Massachusetts Boston, Northeastern University, Suffolk University, Wheelock College, Bentley University, and Mt. Ida College, as well as her Masters degree from Boston University in 1973 and her Bachelors degree from Eastern Michigan University in 1971.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-jenkins-scott-136679101/
Jane C. Putnam As a prominent Boston abolitionist and a founder of an early temperance society in the city in the 1830s, Jane Clark Putnam was born to an educated Black family and married George Putnam in 1825. She was one of the earliest Black female entrepreneurs in the city, operating a hair salon in partnership with her brother. She and her husband worked together as some of the first community organizers to address Black grievances. Putnam was elected president of the women's auxiliary for the organization, fighting growing segregationist influences in the city. She also worked to petition the state legislature for school integration and was a prominent temperance activist, co-founding a Black women's temperance society in the city in 1833. She also founded the Garrison Juvenile Society in 1837.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Putnam
Jane Johnson Born at some point between 1814 and 1830 in Washington, D.C., Jane Johnson was an enslaved person who married and had three sons, but was then sold with two of her sons in early 1854, splitting the family up. She was enslaved by the assistant secretary of President Franklin Pierce, Mr. John Hill Wheeler. While on travel with Wheeler in Philadelphia in July 1855, Johnson was able to reach out to local abolitionists to arrange her escape with her two children, boys about age six and ten. She spoke to individuals at the hotel the group was staying at, and passed details to the abolitionists, who followed them to the boat the group would be leaving on. Despite Wheeler's protests, abolitionists met Johnson and her sons on a docked boat and escorted them off. At the time, the abolitionists told Johnson what her rights were under Pennsylvania law. She then moved to Boston after a summer of travel to clear up remaining legal issues surrounding her being freed. She had a strong personality and continued to speak out in support of abolition for many years. She remarried, and she sheltered fugitives on a minimum of two occasions, passing in 1872.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-story-of-jane-johnson.htm
Jean McGuire Growing up in and around Boston, Jean McGuire was often one of the only Black students in her classes, which exposed her to racism in the years prior to desegregation. Following her grandmother's death, she moved to Washington, D.C., attending an all-Black high school and finding many role models among the teachers who pushed her to excel. She finished her college degree at Boston State College in 1961, beginning her teaching career at the Louisa May Alcott School for two years before working at the Boston Public Schools as the district's first Black Pupil Adjustment Counselor, helping Black students in the recently desegregated schools handle the difficulties they were facing. She helped found the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity in 1966, a voluntary bussing program for students of color, becoming the organization's executive director in 1973 and serving in that role until 2016, acting as a strong advocate for Black students. She was also the first Black woman on the Boston City School Committee, where she showcased her tireless commitment to her students.
https://www.northeastern.edu/aai/services/special-collections/jean-mcguire/
Jessie G. Garnett, D.D.M. Born in 1897, Jessie Garnett was 11 when her family moved to Boston, where she attended Girl's High School, then Tufts College. When she was enrolled at the college's dental school, a dean argued that a mistake had been made. Overcoming both racism and sexism, she graduated from the Tufts School of Dental Medicine in 1920. She was the first Black woman to graduate from the school as well as the first Black dentist in Boston. Though business started out slow, it eventually picked up, with her office moving with her home several times over the years. Garnet was a charter member, along with six other college-educated Black women, who started the Psi Omega Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the oldest mostly-Black national sorority in the United States. She practiced in a range of locations around Boston for nearly 50 years, retiring in 1969. She also served with several organizations, including being a member of the NAACP and a board member at Freedom House, Boston YMCA, and St. Mark's Congregational Church. She passed away in 1976.
https://perspectivesofchange.hms.harvard.edu/node/170
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2016/05/19/dr-jessie-k-garnett-the-first-black-woman-to-practice-dentistry-in-the-hub/
Joan Wallace-Benjamin, Ph.D. In a long career as a leader and senior executive stretching back several decades, Joan Wallace-Benjamin has served in a range of organizations. Beyond acting in leadership roles, she has a strong focus on bringing out the best in people and generating leaders in the organizations she serves. She has worked with the Boys and Girls Club of Boston, ABCD Head Start, ABT Associates, The Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, Whitehead Mann, The Home for Little Wanderers, Governor-Elect Deval Patrick's transition team, and similar organizations. She has received numerous awards from Bostonian and Massachusetts organizations, as well as several honorary Doctorates from universities and colleges in the area. She has also served on several Boards, including Bridgewater State University, City Fresh Foods, The Heller School for Social Policy & Management, Chase Corporation, Scholar Athletes, and is a co-chair for the Families and Children Requiring Assistance Advisory Board and Advisory Board Chair for Wellesley Centers for Women.
https://www.jwallace-benjaminconsulting.com/bio
Josephine S. Ruffin Born to Beacon Hill's Black community in 1842, Josephine Ruffin was surrounded by the heart of Boston's abolitionist community and the ideals of equality, political representation, and justice. A community leader, organizer, and publisher, her activism in abolition and women's suffrage reflected her fighting spirit. Her first efforts focused on recruiting Black men for the Massachusetts 54th and 55th infantry regiments during the Civil War, representing the first two Black regiments for the state. Following the war, she worked with several charities to help Blacks in the South following emancipation, and participated in many service organizations in Boston. Considered to be one of her highest achievements, she established the Women's Era Club in 1893 to promote activism in Black women, including publishing The Woman's Era and organizing the first National Conference of Colored Women in America in 1895, during which the National Federation of Afro-American Women was formed. Seeing women's suffrage as an extension for the fight for equality, she was active in many state and national suffrage organizations, breaking racial barriers in many cases.
https://www.nps.gov/people/josephine-st-pierre-ruffin.htm
Judge Joyce L. Alexander As the first Black woman appointed as a Chief Magistrate judge in the U.S., Joyce Alexander was born in 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Attending Cambridge High, she was the first Black president of the student council. Moving to Howard University, she worked as a legislative assistant, which created a thirst for justice. After graduating in 1969, she earned her J.D. from New England Law School in 1972. Starting her career as a staff attorney for the Greater Boston Legal Assistance Project, she worked for many years as legal counsel for Boston's Youth Activities Commission and as an assistant professor of urban law and Black politics at Tufts University. She co-founded the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, serving as its first female president and increasing its budget ten times over. She served as the first Black woman nationwide as an on-camera legal editor for a national network. She was appointed to the U.S. District Court as a magistrate judge, the first Black woman to do so, and was made Chief Justice in 1996. She served on the board of multiple organizations, has received multiple honorary law degrees from universities and colleges, and has received multiple awards for her work.
http://cambridgeblackhistoryproject.org/project/joyce-london-alexander/
Juanita B. Wade As an experienced community organizer and strong business professional, Juanita Wade graduated from Mount Holyoke University in 1971, followed by a degree from Simmons University in 1973. Following over a decade of work in education, she was elected to two terms as a member of the Boston School Committee in 1986, during which time she moved into the CEO position at Freedom House. After several years there, she moved into the Chief of Human Services position at the City of Boston. Following this work in public affairs, she moved into Washington, D.C.'s DC Education Compact, as its executive director, serving women, children, veterans, families, and homeless on a wide range of social, housing, and economic issues. She then shifted into the corporate world, working as the program director of Fannie Mae's Office of Community and Charitable Giving, then moving into the manager lead of the Making Home Affordable Ground Campaign for the organization, managing outreach efforts. She then worked in community relations as the Making Home Affordable Director prior to her retirement. She then operated Wade Cruise and Travel Services, which closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juanita-brooks-wade-47328038/
Judge Judith N. Dilday As the first person of Color appointed as a judge to the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court, Judith Dilday was born in 1943 and grew up in Pennsylvania, graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. After teaching French language in Pittsburgh for four years, she moved to Boston to study at the Boston University School of Law, where she met her husband and graduated in 1972. She began her career working in both government service and private practice, including Stern and Shapiro and the Department of the Interior. She was the first Black president of the Women's Bar Association in 1990 and 1991, and was a founding partner of Burnham, Hines & Dilday, New England's first law firm owned by Black women, and was the first Black woman working in the Suffolk County District Attorney's office. She was appointed in 1993 as a circuit judge to the Probate and Family Court, being one of four Black women on the Massachusetts bench at the time, and was appointed to be an associate judge in 1998 to the Middlesex Probate and Family Court, retiring in 2009 to teach English in Qiqihar, China, as well as running mock trials for students.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Nelson_Dilday
JudyAnn Bigby, M.D. A former Commonwealth of Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services with her MD from Harvard, JudyAnn Bigby implemented many parts of the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law. These actions caused Massachusetts to lead national health insurance coverage rates of 99.8% for children and 98% for adults. She worked to achieve higher healthcare quality while addressing high healthcare costs, making Massachusetts a leading state in reforming health care delivery systems for a strong primary care foundation, integrated delivery of services, and payment reform, including vulnerable populations. She made significant improvements in mental health service deliver for children, community-based services for individuals with disabilities, veteran suicide prevention, improved foster care outcomes, reduced smoking rates, and reduced cancer and HIV deaths in the state. Prior to her work with the state, she served at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston as the Director of Community Health Programs, and as Director of Harvard Medical School's Center of Excellence in Women's Health. Her work as a pioneer to eliminate health disparities in underserved populations led to national recognition. She has worked as a physician for over 25 years, and is active in multiple organizations, advisory groups, and boards.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ecpe/faculty/judyann-bigby/
Karen H. Ward As Director of Public Affairs and Community Services and host and executive producer of award-winning weekly magazine program CityLine, Karen Ward is a familiar face at WCVB, addressing issues facing people of color in Boston. With the magazine being a recipient of the Associated Press Massachusetts/Rhode Island's "Best Public Affairs Program" and several Emmy nominations, her interviews with Black actors and film industry greats has been just one part of her four-decade career in broadcasting. Her work with the station's public service and community outreach program has included the Five Fixer Upper to refurbish community nonprofit common spaces, while Extreme Makeover: My Hometown has raised awareness about the need for Boston area affordable housing. She launched Commonwealth 5, the station's initiative that matched viewer-donors with non-profits using a web-based initiative that was first of its kind. She was the Executive Producer for Return to Glory, a documentary focused on Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first Black Civil-War-era regiment in the state, and featuring Emmy Award-winning actor Andre Braugher, and was part of the team honored with the "Service to Community in Television" award from the National Association of Broadcasters for efforts during and after the Boston Marathon attack, among others.
https://www.wcvb.com/news-team/95853608-ad1c-4cbf-a155-99daa7da7606
Karilyn Crockett, Ph.D. Author and Assistant Professor Karilyn Crocket has the distinction of serving as the first Chief of Equity for the City of Boston. After receiving a Masters in Geography at the London School of Economics and a Masters from Yale Divinity School, she went on to receive her PhD in American Studies at Yale University. With extensive research on large-scale changes in the use of land in 20th century American urban areas, she also studies the impact of social and geographical considerations on structural poverty. Forming the basis of her book under the same name, she investigated the 1960s grassroots movement to stop urban expansion of the interstate highway system as part of her dissertation, "People Before Highways: Reconsidering Routes to and from the Boston Anti-Highway Movement". Following this work, she worked as both the Director of Small Business Development and the Director of Economic Policy for the City of Boston. Crockett is currently working as an Assistant Professor of Urban History, Public Policy and Planning at DUSP.
https://dusp.mit.edu/people/karilyn-crockett
Katherine T. Knox As a pioneer bicycle racer, Katherine Knox, better known as Kittie, was born in Cambridgeport in 1874. Following her father's death, her family moved to Boston's West End, which at the time was home to a range of impoverished Blacks and recent immigrants, making it very progressive in successfully integrating a wide range of cultures. She found work to create a better life for their family, saving money to purchase a bicycle. She participated alongside the Riverside Cycle Club, though there was some question as to whether she was a member, with women not allowed to participate in the sport at the time. She began participating in meets, winning many of the competitions she participated in. She was accepted as a member of the League of American Wheelmen in 1893, but a 1894 constitution change to include the word "white" caused numerous members to question her membership. She faced discrimination, being barred from entering an annual meeting in 1895 and denied service at restaurants and hotels. Coverage of these issues led to a strong battle being waged over her membership rights, allowing her to be the first Black accepted to the League.
https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2020/05/26/breaking-the-cycle-the-kittie-knox-story/
Kem Danner Working in a range of investment and banking businesses, Kem Danner is an active community volunteer and activist, promoting children, health, and career development. She began her career in Charlotte, North Carolina following her graduation with her Bachelors and Masters from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Appalachian State University, at Bank of America's management associate program, serving a wide range of business roles, including numerous merger and acquisition roles that required living abroad in Europe, through the 17 years she worked with the organization. She then moved to State Street Global Advisors in 2015, working as the head of diversity and inclusion, then moving through the organization as the head of human resources and senior vice president and a member of the State Street Global Advisors Executive Management Group. Working with a range of charitable organizations focused on childhood development and education as well as cancer research, she also works with numerous employee network groups at State Street, including being a mentor at the Professional Women's Network, executive advisor of the Black Professionals Group, and a steering committee member for the organization's Global Diversity and Inclusion Council.
https://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/kem-danner/
Mayor Kim M. Janey As Boston's first female and first Black mayor, Kim Janey is used to being on the front lines in equality. At age 11, she faced rocks and racial slurs during the busing era of desegregation of Boston schools in the 1970s. This focus on education, equity, justice, and community organization led to 25 years focused on nonprofits, first as a community organizer improving access to high-quality, affordable child care, then as a champion for policy reforms improving access, opportunity, excellence, and equity at Boston Public Schools. She began her work in government as the first woman elected to represent District 7 on the Boston City Council in 2017, where she was elected in 2020 by her peers as President of Boston's most diverse City Council. A recipient of multiple awards, she was elected as Boston's 55th Mayor, and has successfully led the city through unprecedented challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic. With a focus on recovery, reopening, and renewal that addressed systemic inequalities, she prioritized health and wellness as well as equity in reopening the city's economy and public school system while curbing displacement with improved access to affordable housing and reducing homicide through her safety plan.
https://www.boston.gov/departments/mayors-office/kim-janey
Justice Kimberly S. Budd As the 38th Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in 2020 sworn in by Governor Charlie Baker., Kimberly Budd was sworn in as an Associate Judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court by then-Governor Deval Patrick in 2009, served as the Regional Administrative Justice for Middlesex Criminal Business, then appointed as an Associate Judge to the Court in 2016. She earned her Bachelors from Georgetown University and her law degree from Harvard Law School, then began her career serving as a law clerk to Chief Justice Joseph Warner at the Massachusetts Appeals Court, then served as a litigation associate at Mintz Levin. Following this, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's Office in their Major Crimes and Drug Units, then worked as a University Attorney for Harvard University's General Counsel Office, moving to the Director of the Community Values program at Harvard Business School. She also teaches in MCLE and Bar Association programs, has been an adjunct instructor at New England Law and taught trial advocacy at Harvard Law School.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/supreme-judicial-court-justices#chief-justice-kimberly-s.-budd-
Lani Guinier, J.D. As the first Black woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law School in 1998, Lani Guninier was a larger-than-life presence, pushing her many students to push harder and further. She often encouraged them to think deeper into problems they were facing by saying, "My problem is, if you stop there . . . " Born in New York CIty to a civil rights activist mother and lawyer and union organizer father who became the first chair of Harvard's Department of Afro-American Studies, she earned her Bachelor's from Radcliffe in 1971 and her JD from Yale Law School in 1974. After clerking for the U.S. Court of Appeals, she served in the Civil Rights Division with Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days while leading the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's voting rights project. Prior to teaching at Harvard in 1996, she taught at University of Pennsylvania Law School starting in 1988 as a highly-regarded teacher, and also taught at Columbia Law School as a professor of law and social responsibility prior to her death in 2022. Devoting her life to equality, empowerment, democracy, and justice, Guinier was well-known for her scholarship and determination, receiving multiple awards and authoring numerous documents.
https://hls.harvard.edu/today/in-memoriam-lani-guinier-1950-2022/
Laura YoungerA strong voice against modern gentrification, Laura Younger is noted for speaking out against the displacement of Blacks, persons of color, and lower-income people in Boston. As part of the Holborn, Gannet, Gaston, Otisfield Betterment Association, her focus is on the plight faced by individuals and families in Grove Hall in remaining in the community where they have established themselves and called home for many years. With a solid focus on affordable rental housing and homeownership for those who are not eligible for the CDC and city projects that are under development, she champions those who have been priced out of buying a home in the neighborhoods that they grew up in. She encourages those in the neighborhoods to undertake creative solutions, such as building on vacant or condemned properties, while leveraging her voice to push the city into passing zoning variances and issuing building permits. She helps others find their voice and their place in neighborhood associations to help move neighborhoods in the Boston area facing gentrification to fight the process and participate in the responsible development of planning and development for these areas. She is expected to continue being a strong voice for neighborhoods for years to come.
https://binjonline.com/2018/11/21/less-building-moratorium/
Leah RandolphAs an active voice in Black addiction services, Leah Randolph uses her Bachelor's from University of Massachusetts Boston and Master's from Cambridge College to benefit the minority community. She began her career at the Human Resources Development Institute of Massachusetts as the state director, feeling drawn to the four substance abuse programs offered by the Institute. This was due to the organization's parallel work with the Massachusetts Black Alcoholism & Addiction Council in the greater Boston area, an advocacy group that she has worked with for over 20 years and currently serves as the president of the chapter. To further alight with her work with the advocacy group, she moved into the Kitty Dukakis Treatment Center for Women as a program manager, then onto the Boston Medical Center to assess emergency room patients for substance abuse disorder and determine placement, helping the patients find the right treatment for their needs. She is currently at the Commonwealth Mental Health & Wellness Center, which she co-founded and serves as the executive director of, providing mental health and substance abuse counseling, along with a wide range of therapy, mentoring, coaching, mentoring, case management, and other healing modalities from a culturally sensitive approach.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-randolph-cadc-ii-ladc-i-03024513
Lilla G. FrederickServing for many years as the President and Chair of Project RIGHT (Rebuild and Improve Grove Hall Together), Lilla Frederick was a strong positive influence to improving life for countless minorities in the greater Boston area. She also serves as the Chair of the Boston Caribbean Foundation, Secretary of the Grove Hall Elder Housing Advocacy Group, and has been a member and volunteer with the Blue Hill Avenue Initiative Task Force and New Boston Pilot Middle School, which she was instrumental in helping design. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she had a strong belief in the role of education in life, earning a Bachelor's from Northeastern University and a Master's from Lesley University. Her contributions to the community caused her to be recognized from multiple government organizations and award groups. Her passion for the community led to her work as a board member at Environmental Partnerships, where she formed partnerships with churches for landscaping of newly-constructed affordable housing structures, as well as large flower pots for beautifying Devon Street. She leveraged considerable organizational skills and social graces to create inviting spaces throughout the Grove Hill area and organized annual Thanksgiving meals for downtown Boston homeless individuals.
https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/domain/1561
Lillian A. LewisAs the first Black woman journalist in Boston, Lillian Lewis was a Boston native born in 1869 in Beacon Hill. Growing up in the abolitionist home of Lewis Hayden, who ran Boston's Underground Railroad, she attended Bowdoin Grammar School, Girls' High School, and Boston Normal School. With a strong literary gift, she wrote and lectured on temperance, often including a thread of humor in her work, as well as being a stenographer and novelist. She used the pen name Bert Islew to disguise her gender when she started writing for the Boston Advocate in 1889, the same year she was admitted to the New England Woman's Press Association. Her popular society column is credited with saving the paper, as its sales had been failing prior to that point. She contributed to the Richmond Planet, as well as monthly magazine Our Women and Children, as well as working for the Boston Herald as one of the first Black women writing for a white-run newspaper. She became the first Black woman clerk at Boston City Hall's Collector's office in 1920, retiring in 1934.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_A._Lewis
Lisa SimmonsAs the director of the Roxbury International Film Festival, or RoxFilm as it's known in the industry, Lisa Simmons has made great strides in helping Black artists present themselves as they are, rather than in more traditional film roles and characters. With the development of new technology in areas such as distribution, cinematography, and editing, she sees opportunities for more people of color to share their stories without Hollywood backing, allowing them to compete across the film industry and more easily be seen at larger film festivals. Simmons also adjusted the festival's format to a hybrid model, making it easier for more individuals to see the incredible stories that are being produced while shaking up the traditional question-and-answer format of panel discussions. She has also created specific divisions to cover a range of submitted films, as well as the strong selection of local feature and short films that the festival has become known for. Her focus on this direction for the festival is helping new Black artists enter the industry without compromising their identity or integrity.
https://artsfuse.org/230811/film-interview-roxfilms-lisa-simmons-embracing-cinematic-independence/
L'Merchie FrazierAn artist, educator, poet, public historian, and activist, L'Merchie Frazier is the current Executive Director of Creative/Strategic Planning for SPOKE Arts. Coming from a strong background that includes twenty years of serving the artistic community and featuring a range of international residencies, she is known for work that reflects the community in an authentic and genuine fashion. Her artwork is featured in the White House, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. As a State of Massachusetts Art Commissioner and a prior City of Boston Artist in Residence, she has received many awards for her reparative aesthetic approach to expanding historical narrative and responding to crisis, violence and trauma throughout her career. She has served as a former Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, with a focus on supporting social justice and the movement for civil rights seen through five hundred years of Indigenous and Black history, providing a viewpoint that more accurately showcases the experience of people of color during that time.
https://www.boston.gov/government/cabinets/equity-and-inclusion-cabinet/lmerchie-frazier
Louise W. Corbin Acting as an advocate for improved foster care, Louise Wells was an educator who took in over 50 children over the course of four decades, providing them with a strong, stable home life in which they could heal and build a foundation for success. Whenever there was a crisis, the Department of Social Services knew that they could count on her to take on children removed from homes in an emergency. A graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Education, she taught early childhood education at Wheelock College and Roxbury Community College. Working with foster children and education led to an interest in theories about how children develop, which encouraged her to take childhood development courses at local colleges until a Harvard scholarship allowed her to pursue a Master's, which she attained in 1969. Going on to direct numerous Boston-region daycare centers, she also worked with the state in the Office for Children until 1975, when she began pursuing a teaching degree. She continued teaching after her retirement in 2000 up until shortly before her death, and is recognized by many in the community for improving the foster care system in the area.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/201835394/louise-corbin
Lucy M. Mitchell Born in Florida in 1899, Lucy Mitchell was an instructor, activist, and advocate for training daycare workers in Boston for many years. After seeing a confrontation between Daytona School's founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, and a hate group, she moved to Roxbury with her husband, earning a Master's from Boston University in 1935. Prior to earning her degree, she operated the Nursery School at Robert Gould Shaw House starting in 1932, a position she continued for 21 years. She co-founded the Associated Day Care Services of Metropolitan Boston, eventually serving as its executive director. After spending nine years in research and activism, she supported the 1962 law that established state daycare licensing laws, followed by working for the Massachusetts Department of Education in developing affordable daycare worker training courses. She also trained Peace Corps volunteers in working with children, consulted for the nationally-based Head Start program, helping with its implementation in Boston, and worked with numerous other organizations and agencies to improve the lives of children in daycare across the region.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-lucy-miller-mitchell
Lucy T. Prince Known best for her fame as the first Black poetess in the United States, Lucy Price had many other accomplishments, including arguing a court case in front of the Supreme Court. Taken from Africa as an infant, she was sold into slavery, baptized during the Great Awakening, and at the age of 20, was admitted to the church fellowship. She married in 1756, and her husband purchased her freedom, with six children born to the couple by 1769. An exceptional speaker, she argued in a number of situations, some successful and others not. She spent three hours in an earnest, eloquent speech before Williams College trustees arguing for the admission of her son, received protection when a neighboring family threatened her family, and faced off against two of the state's leading lawyers at the Supreme Court and won when Colonel Eli Bronson tried to steal their land, with the additional compliment from the presiding justice, Samuel Chase, stated that her argument was the best he'd ever heard. She passed away at age 97 in 1821.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2p15.html
Lula Christopher A pioneer in healing circles and self-empowerment in Boston, Lula Christopher, known to many in the community as Mama Lula, focused on reintroducing Black women to ancient medicine while creating access for other treatment modalities including acupuncture, massage, and reflexology. By providing opportunities for Black men, women, and children to explore their ancestry and spirituality, her role as a community service specialist of over four decades has allowed her to not only heal herself, but others as well. Serving as a community advocate, activist, program developer, mentor, teacher, and administrator, Christopher uses Dagara medicine to help others connect with their often discordant roots and ancestors, helping them to heal from trauma, abuse, and generational patterns that cause harm, helping people today move forward in an empowered, healthy, and strong way.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/lulaeldership
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/07/metro/black-history-i-carry-with-me-marlene-boyette/
Mallika Marshall, M.D. As an award-winning physician and journalist, Mallika Marshal serves as the Medical Director of WBZ-TV, located in Boston. This career path includes being a Board Certified physician in pediatrics and internal medicine, serving on Harvard Medical School's staff while she practices at the Chelsea Urgent Care Clinic for Massachusetts General and at the MGH Revere Health Center. She's a contributing editor for the publishing sector of Harvard Medical School, Harvard Health Publishing, and hosts the publishing sector's e-learning coursework. With over 15 years of media coverage expertise and over 10 years serving as the HealthWatch anchor at WBZ-TV starting in 2000, she combines her journalistic expertise with her medical knowledge to help promote better health for many within the Boston viewing area, while serving on various Boards over the years and maintaining a range of honor societies, medical organizations, and journalistic organizations.
https://hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/mallika-marshall
Margaret A. Burnham, LL.B. Professor, author, and director Margaret Burnham graduated with her Bachelor's in 1966 from Tougaloo College, and her legal Bachelor's from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. Recognized on the international stage as an expert in civil and human rights, she is the Director of Reparations and Restorative Justice Initiatives, the Director of Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, and is the Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Law, Equity, and Race. She headed outside counsel and law students during a landmark federal case that was settled involving Jim Crow laws and racially-based violence. She is a current member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board after her appointment by President Joe Biden, involving Civil Rights Era criminal cold cases that were racially motivated. She started her career by representing civil rights and political activists in the 1970s, becoming the first Black woman to serve in the Massachusetts judiciary. She was appointed to an international human rights commission in 1993 by South African President Nelson Mandela, which developed into the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her book By Hands Now Known was published in 2022 and has received numerous awards for its approach to investigating Jim Crow violations.
https://law.northeastern.edu/faculty/burnham/
Maria L. Baldwin As an activist and educator, Marie Baldwin was born in 1856 and graduated from the Cambridge Training School for Teachers in 1881. She taught in the Cambridge school district after some resistance, then in 1887 at the Agassiz Grammar School, becoming the principal two years later. Choosing to remain an educator rather than marrying in an era where married women were not employed as teachers, she kept this position for many decades while joining Black civil rights groups, giving her a platform to speak on both civil and women's rights movements. She was a member and secretary of the Banneker Society, a local Black debate club, where she read many literature and history pages. She opened her home in 1880 to Black social activists and intellectuals while offering weekly readings and discussions for Black students attending Harvard but not welcome in the University's study spaces. She co-founded the Woman's Era Club, which focused on the anti-lynching movement, women's suffrage, and improving educational and career opportunities, and served as the first President of the League of Women for Community Service, providing comfort to returning soldiers and new widows during WWI. She remained active until her death in 1922.
https://www.nps.gov/people/maria-l-baldwin.htm
Maria W. Stewart As an advocate for women's rights and an abolitionist, Maria Stewart was born in Connecticut in 1803, moving to Boston to support herself as a domestic servant while educating herself. Marrying in 1826, the couple was part of the small community of free Blacks around Beacon Hill. They shared the community's thirst to free those still enslaved, and despite losing her husband a few years later, she continued to speak out regarding racism and segregation in Boston. She became one of the first women to speak publicly in the US, a practice considered improper or immoral at the time, and was the first Black woman to write and publish a political manifesto calling for Black people to resist exploitation, oppression, and slavery, with her manuscript delivered to The Liberator's office, a white abolitionist newspaper. Her success helped her build a short but very significant public speaking career, giving four public lectures from 1831 and 1833 that were on the record. She had a unique approach using Biblical imagery and language to condemn racism and slavery. She encouraged audiences to pursue any educational opportunities available to them and demand their political rights.She passed away in 1879.
https://www.nps.gov/people/maria-w-stewart.htm
Marian L. Heard As the current President and CEO of Oxen Hill Partners, Marian Heard has a range of both privately-held and Fortune 500 companies in her client list while promoting brand enhancement and leadership development programs. She is also retired from the position of President and CEO of Boston United Way and the CEO of United Ways of New England, Heard has a long history in volunteer service, including being the founding President and CEO of Points of Light Foundation, a founding board member of the MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, a current board member on Liberty Mutual, CVS Caremark, and Sovereign Bank. Serving as a board member and trustee for numerous organizations, she has received numerous honorary doctorates and awards for her contributions to business, leadership, and children, while moving the Black community as a whole farther in the business world.
https://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/marian-heard/
Marilyn A. Chase Raised in Detroit, Marilyn Chase was spending her time counseling poor Black teenage girls in the deeply divided and racially segregated city in 1967 prior to her move to Boston in 1970. Continuing to work with Black youths to encourage them to reach their full potential and avoid the tension, trauma, and violence caused by issues with racism and lack of equity such as were seen in the race riots and violence that arose across the country in those turbulent times. She served as the assistant secretary for Health and Human Services under Governor Patrick while trying to promote peace, equality, and equity between races.
https://www.wgbh.org/lifestyle/2017-09-08/detroit-boston-and-the-searing-memories-of-the-summer-of-1967
Marita Rivero Born in 1943 in Pennsylvania, Marita Rivero is a media and nonprofit executive who earned her Bachelor's at Tufts University in 1964. She became a WGBH producer, which is a National Public Radio station in Boston. She moved to Washington, D.C. in 1976 to consult for several organizations including the National Science Foundation, PBS, and the United States Congressional Black Caucus' Communications Task Force. In 1981, she returned to radio production at WPFW Pacifica, a position she eventually promoted through to vice president. Returning to Boston in 1988 as the general manager of WGBH radio, she spent a decade at the station prior to being hired as executive-in-charge of Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery, then moving into the same position in This Far By Faith, airing in 2003. She was promoted to WGBH's general manager in 2005, which was a position she held until 2013. After volunteering since the late 1980s for the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket, she was named executive director in 2015. For her work in media, she has received a wide range of awards from diverse organizations and serves on numerous boards, three of which she serves as chair.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/marita-rivero
Mary C. Thompson, D.D.M. As the third Black woman to graduate from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, Mary Thompson was a volunteer once day a week while operating a private practice and practicing at the Children's Dental Clinic. Starting by treating patients in her home, she was able to avoid the cost of office rent and was able to serve the public during the Great Depression, a time that demanded having a spirit of great generosity. She regularly helped patients who had no ability to pay for her services. However, she still faced racial and gender discrimination. She was only allowed for many years to practice as a dental assistant for a local school because of sexist advertising that excluded women, even after she passed the entrance exam with flying colors. She volunteered with the Mississippi Health Project as a dentist, visiting schools and churches that sometimes wouldn't even have a table. Seeing the terrible poverty in the state committed her to racial justice, working with her husband to battle housing discrimination around Boston, receiving an NAACP award for their work during the 1970s. However, she never lost her dedication to her dentistry work and helping those in need.
https://dental150.tufts.edu/posts/2
Mary E. Mahoney A Boston native, Mary Mahoney was born in 1845 and was the first Black licensed nurse in the US, working at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in a range of roles for 15 years. She entered the Hospital's nursing school when it opened in 1878 and graduated as one of only four graduates out of 42. However, she faced overwhelming discrimination in public nursing, so instead became a private nurse so that she could focus her care on the needs of individuals, gaining a reputation for efficiency, patience, and a caring bedside manner. She joined national and international nursing associations in 1896, but finding some members of the group less than welcoming, she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908 and elected as the organization's national chaplain with a lifetime membership. Shortly after, she served as the director for the Howard Orphanage Asylum for Black children, where she served for two years prior to her retirement. However, she still championed women's rights, and was among the first women to register to vote in Boston following the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1820. She passed in 1926.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-mahoney
Mary E. Wilson As a leading civil rights activist and a founding member of Boston's branch of the NAACP and Women's Service Club, Mary Wilson was born in Ohio in 1866, graduating from Oberlin College. Coming from an activist family, she moved to Washington, D.C. to teach in public school for 10 years while writing a health and beauty column for Black woman's newspaper The Woman's Era. She married prominent Boston civil rights attorney Butler Wilson, then moved to the South End, where they raised their six children. She was a keynote speaker at a women's anti-lynching demonstration in May 1899, calling for federal intervention. The couple were among the founders of Boston's NAACP branch, and were the most prominent Black leaders in the organization at the time. She frequently volunteered as a traveling organizer, bringing thousands of members to the group from New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. She worked to end discrimination at the New England Sanitarium, in the school system and at department stores in Boston. During World War I, she organized a knitting circle 350 women and girls strong to manufacture scarves and gloves for Boston's Black soldiers, growing into the Women's Service Club. She passed away in 1928.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Evans_Wilson
Rep. Mary H. Goode Born in 1927 in Georgia, Mary Goode and her family moved to Boston before her high school years. After raising three children, she began attending Tufts University, graduating in 1974. Determined to bring change to the Black community in Boston, she represented the 10th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1975 to 1978 as the second Black female legislator in the state. She ran under the Democratic Party and defeated two other contenders, Emanuel Eaves and Leon Rock, by 19 and 43 votes respectively. She retired after her 21-year-old son lost his life in a drowning accident in 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_H._Goode
Mary L. Johnson Together with her husband, Mary Johnson were owners and operators of one of the 200 Black-owned Boston businesses at the beginning of the 20th century. Selling hair goods at the storefront, Johnson's Hair Store was only a small part of their professional empire, with Johnson Hair Food being sold across the entire United States by 1900. With an entrepreneurial eye, Mary opened the Johnson's School of Beauty Culture, where she offered a range of salon and spa services that included massage, hairdressing, shampooing, scalp treatments, and manicures. This school provided young Black women in the Boston area with technical education and skills in an environment that was otherwise very limited at the time.
https://buildingsofnewengland.com/tag/madam-mary-l-johnson-boston/
Mattie B. Powell Born in upstate New York in 1921, Mattie Powell grew up in South Carolina, but accompanied her sister in a move to Boston. Meeting her husband there, the couple opened the Powell Barbershop and Hollywood Barbershop, opening up a total of three barbershops in the next few years. While operating the businesses, Mattie became Massachusetts first Black female Master Barber. With their shops becoming a strong fixture of Black neighborhoods in Boston for decades, and they were the first Black family to own a home on their street in Dorchester. Once the barber shops were established, she returned to teaching for Boston Public Schools, teaching kindergarten for 25 years, and received her Master's from Boston State College. Her love of children and reading exposed her children to the importance of reading and writing. She also wrote her own music and sang, performing at special events with her son accompanying her on the piano.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Mattie-Powell
Mattie L. Washington As Massachusetts' first Black businesswoman working as a licensed hair stylist, Mattie Washington was born in Georgia in 1923 before moving to Boston in her early 20s. With a long history as an entrepreneur, she received her master's license in barbering, operating two Corner Barber Shops in the city in the time during and following World War II. After spending many happy years operating her barbershops, she retired from the industry, but her entrepreneurial spirit wouldn't let her rest. She owned and operated a local daycare while volunteering at both the American Indian Council and the Orchard Park Community Center in Boston during her later years. She passed in 2011.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/mattie-washington-obituary?id=22189415
Mattie M. Adams As the eldest daughter in a family of 17 children, Mattie Adams was born in 1923 in Boston's South End. As an active leader in the United Methodist Church of All Nations, Adams worked hard to develop a number of successful ministries for the church, including her Saturdays and Sundays Bread program, developed to feed countless homeless people and families. With a strong entrepreneurial spirit, she was a graduate of the New England School of Art & Design, after which she opened Adams Interiors in the Back Bay area, where she was the first licensed Black interior designer in New England. Enjoying great success in the area, she catered to numerous corporate and celebrity clients, including the White House. As a former member of the New England Minority Purchasing Council Board of Directors and President Carter's Small Business Advisory Council, she opened doors to other people of color in the design industry. She passed away in 2016.
https://www.currentobituary.com/member/obit/197377
Maud C. HareMaude Hare was a Black pianist, writer, musician, scholar and activist. Born in 1874, she grew up in a Texas home filled with music and politics. She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, as well as Harvard's Lowell Institute of Literature, becoming an accomplished pianist. However, she and another Black woman faced struggles living on campus. She refused to move and insisted on proper treatment, and her issue was taken up by numerous organizations. Hare became a part of Boston's vibrant Black community, joining the Charles Street Circle and became a close friend of W.E.B. DuBois. She taught at the Texas Deaf and Blind Institute for Colored Youths and spoke up against the Austin Opera House that wanted Blacks in the audience to be segregated during her performances. Along with William Howard Richardson, she was the first Black musician performing in Boston Public Library's Concert-Lecture series. Hare founded the Allied Arts Center in Boston to encourage arts education and performance. She collected music from across the South and the Caribbean as a musicologist studying folklore, and was the first person to study Creole music. She also wrote extensively, contributing topics on music to a variety of publications. Her book, Negro Musicians and Their Music, published in 1836, the year she died, documented the development of Black music from its African roots and its influences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maud_Cuney_Hare
Maude Hurd A political activist, leader, and community organizer, Maude Hurt was born in 1944. Best known for her role as the President of ACORN for 20 years, she started with the organization in 1982 first as a speaker and then as the Boston chapter's chairwoman. She led demonstration at Boston City Hall over vacant lots that had trash left there with no cleanup by government agencies. After holding a variety of leadership positions with the organizations over the next seven years, she was elected as ACORN's president. She was also a member of the socialist New Party and Democratic socialists of America, and was recognized as one of the top 100 individuals building the New Party by then-organizer Barack Obama. She led efforts to oppose scaling back of the Community Reinvestment Act, a law requiring moneylenders to maximize mortgages approved for undercapitalized and minority loan applicants that did not meet traditional borrowing standards, and was arrested at the scene of a protest at the U.S. Capitol Building. She promoted living wage laws and other policies that would allow Democrats to ally with progressives. When ACORN disbanded, Hurd became president of New England United For Justice, participating in "Take Back Boston" rallies.
https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/maude-hurd/
Maude T. Steward As the sister of William Monroe Trotter, owner of The Guardian, Maude Steward worked as the assistant editor of the newspaper, then continued publishing it herself for two decades following his death. Born in 1874, she attended Wellesley College, giving her the tools she needed to successfully edit and later operate the newspaper following her brother's death. In addition to her writing and editing skills, she also participated in a number of local civic organizations, was one of the founders of St. Mark's Musical and Literary Union, and also worked with the Boston Equal Rights League and the Women's League. The newspaper gave her a strong outlet to promote equal rights both for blacks and for women. She passed away in 1955.
https://bwht.org/roxbury-womens-history-trail/#:~:text=Maude%20Trotter%20Steward%20(1874%2D1955,in%20many%20local%20civic%20organizations.
Melnea A. Cass A community and civil rights activist on the local, state, and national levels, Melnea Cass was born in 1896 in Richmond, Virginia. Her family moved to Boston when she was five years old, and after graduating as valedictorian in 1914, she sought work in retail, but found that limited opportunities in Boston forced her to do domestic work until her marriage. She became involved in community projects, including registering Black women to vote following ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. She continued fighting for the rights of Black women for the rest of her life. She founded Kindergarten Mothers, and worked with the Harriet Tubman Mother's Club, Sojourner Truth Club, the Northeastern Region of the National Association of Colored Women's Club as secretary, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Women in Community Service, and many others. She was the only female charter member to Action for Boston Community Development, and a founder and charter member of Freedom House. She was president of Boston's NAACP chapter from 1962 to 1964, and chaired the Massachusetts Advisory Committee for the Elderly from 1975 to 1976. She passed in 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melnea_Cass
Mildred Davenport As the first Black woman to appear with the Boston Pops orchestra, Mildred Davenport was born in Roxbury in 1900. After finishing high school, she studied at the Sargent School for Physical Culture at Boston University and studied dance. She opened the Davenport School of Dance in the 1920s, then opened her second school, the Silver Box Studio, in Boston. During a time when it was unusual for Black and white performers to appear on stage together, she appeared in numerous Broadway musicals and reviews, alongside performers such as Clifton Webb and Imogene Coca. She provided dance interpretations of Black spiritual music with the Boston Pops orchestra in 1938, then toured the East Coast in a show called Chocolate Review for five years. She was among the first Black women to enlist in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps during World War II, moving from first lieutenant to captain. She then worked for two decades with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination from 1947 to 1968, also serving on the Boston NAACP board of directors. She received the Sojourner Truth Award from the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs for Boston in 1973. She passed away in 1990, while still living in Boston.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Davenport
Mildred F. Jefferson, M.D. Not only was Mildred Jefferson the first Black woman graduate from Harvard Medical in 1951, she also was the first woman who was employed as a general surgeon at Boston University Medical Center. Active in the right-to-life movement, she was born in Texas in 1927, daughter to a schoolteacher and a minister, but was known for following the local doctor around on his rounds. After finishing her secondary education, she went on to attend Texas College, then Tufts University, as she was considered too young at the time that she finished her Bachelors to attend medical school. Once she finished her medical degree, she was the first woman to undertake a surgical internship at Boston Hospital, as well as being the first female doctor at Boston University Medical Center. She received her board certification in surgery in 1972, and by 1984, was a general surgeon at Boston University, while also becoming a professor of surgery at Boston University School of Medicine. She was the first woman member of the Boston Surgical Society. She helped found Massachusetts Citizens for Life and the National Right to Life Committee, becoming active in many roles in the 1970s. She passed away in 1990.
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collections/mildred-jefferson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Fay_Jefferson
Miriam Manning Miriam Manning retired from foster grandparent work at 95 years of age in 2019, putting the cap on many years of volunteering with over 27 years in that specific role. Providing a solid role model and caring individual in thousands of children's lives, she has dedicated these many years to caring for children at the Dorchester Headstart, crediting the activity with being what kept her moving for so many years. Operated by ABCD, the program has brought older adults and children into close contact for over 54 years, providing children with a level of care in their lives that may otherwise be difficult to accomplish, while allowing the older adults to share their knowledge with children and making a difference in their lives.
https://www.boston25news.com/news/-it-s-why-i-m-still-moving-95-year-old-finally-retires-from-foster-role/952224040/
Mukiya Baker-Gomez With a reputation of putting all of her effort behind every endeavor, Mukiya Baker-Gomez was a strong advocate for community empowerment and politics. Heading the State Office of Minority and Women Business Assistance from 1985 until 1991, she worked hard to advocate for minority and women entrepreneurs in the community and state, then worked with Governor Patrick's Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance division for University of Massachusetts Boston Science Center's construction. She also worked on election campaigns for countless individuals, including Chuck Turner, Ayanna Pressley, Gloria Fox, Diane Wilkerson, and Mel King gain public office. Considered to be a hero to many in the Black community, she was born in Boston in 1948, she followed her aunt's example as a Republican activist during the Civil Rights era, registering to vote after her 18th birthday and remaining active in political life. She spent her life in and out of public service, working with elected officials while volunteering with community organizations. She worked and volunteered with the Black United Front in ht e1970s, as well as the Contractors Association of Boston representing Black construction firms, and the Opportunities Industrialization Center, a program training community residents to work in high-tech careers.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2023/06/14/mukiya-baker-gomez-community-leader-74/
Muriel S. Snowden A MacArthur Fellow, Muriel Snowden was a community organizer who co-founded Freedom House in 1949, an organization empowering the local community and spent 35 years directing the organization. Prior to her work with Freedom House, she received her A.B. degree from Radcliffe College in 1938 and pursued additional education at the New York School of Social Work from 1943 to 1945. She then served as executive director of the Cambridge Civic Unity Committee as well as an investigator for the Essex County, New Jersey Welfare Board. A lecturer and educator at Simmons College School of Social Work, she served on several boards beyond Freedom House, including Harvard University, Tufts University, Babson College, the Boston Museum of Science, the New England Aquarium, and the Radcliffe Black Women's Oral History Project. Her actions allowed Freedom House to develop programs addressing poverty, housing, segregation, hiring discrimination, and unemployment issues in the Black community. Following her retirement in 1984, Snowden remained an active community leader, encouraging international relations and foreign language study through computer-based programs. She passed away in 1988.
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-1987/muriel-s-snowden#searchresults
Myechia Minter-Jordan, M.D. With strong experience in nonprofit and healthcare management, Myechia Minter-Jordan has worked to improve healthcare access for marginalized populations in the greater Boston area. She is the current President and CEO of CareQuest Institute for Oral Health, which is focused on improving health outcomes through better medical/dental collaboration. She has also worked in executive positions at DentalQuest to improve dental and oral health, and at The Dimock Center where she oversaw a $45 million budget and programs for healthcare, behavioral health, and early education. These opportunities have allowed her to serve the community through improved healthcare access, especially in aspects of healthcare that have been historically underserved. Minter-Jordan received her doctorate at Brown Medical School in 1998, and an MBA at John Hopkins Carey School of Business in 2007.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/myechia-minter-jordan-md-mba-099bb02/
Nancy G. Prince Born in 1799, Nancy Prince was a biographer who moved to Boston after the War of 1812. She became very active within the early anti-slavery societies, especially William Lloyd Garrison's society. She undertook two different missions to support recently freed Black people in Jamaica, hoping to educate the people there so that they could better support themselves and avoid being taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals. Returning to Boston, she worked for Emancipation, thwarting agents who were enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, and was an early proponent of women's rights. Her autobiography, which included her father's story as a Nantucket whaler, and her grandfather's story as a captured slave from Africa, was published from Garrison's office. She became a speaker at women's rights conventions, telling audiences at an 1854 conference that she understood women's wrongs better than rights. Following this, she disappeared from history.
https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/nancy-gardner-prince-daughter-of-a-black-nantucket-whaler/
Nellie B. Mitchell Born in the 1840s, Nellie Mitchell became one of the most successful Black soprano singers in America. Spending decades in her career as a singer in churches and at a range of events, she was known for having a very versatile voice for a range of music, including classical, opera, and folk music. Though no known recordings were made of her voice, it was believed to be a lyric soprano, with a richness to it that may have been lacking in other sopranos in that age. Traveling extensively, she toured and performed all over the East Coast and Midwest, delighting audiences at both Black and white churches as well as New York City's Steinway Hall. However, her race denied her opportunities given to white contemporaries, such as recording her voice. She performed at abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's funeral and at meetings of an organization that grew into the NAACP. She was also known for inventing the phoneterion, a device that helped singers learn proper tongue positions.
https://www.nhpr.org/all-things-considered/2021-06-18/this-juneteenth-a-tribute-to-dovers-nellie-brown-mitchell
Olive L. Benson Recognized as a premier hair stylist and an expert in straightening and relaxing hair, Olivia Benson was born in Cambridge in 1932. Studying at the Wilfred Academy following high school, she received her certification in hairdressing, continuing her education and professional training at Pivot Point, Vidal Sasson, Jingles, Clairol, and Wella. Opening a small beauty shop in north Cambridge in 1959, she provided the most advanced treatment and styling techniques. Moving her business to Boston in the 1960s, she realized strong success, moving to two different larger locations in Boston's upscale retail districts over the following years. Women from many ethnic and racial makeups came to Olive's Beauty Salon to have their hair styled and straightened. She also designed and coordinated several industry publications for both ethnic and non-ethnic hair styles. In 1996, she created and marketed her own hair product line, including universal relaxers, protein conditioners, shampoo, and leave-in conditioners under the brand Universal Textures. She was honored as the first Black person inducted into the Hall of Renown for the National Cosmetology Association in 1991, and was the first Black to receive a North American Hairstyle Award in 1996. She passed away in 2005.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/olive-lee-benson-40
Patricia A. Raynor Named for her birthday on St. Patrick's Day, Patricia Raynor was born in 1927. Struggling to support her family while on AFDC, she took on any jobs she could, which led her to work as a community organizer for the Whittier Street Housing Projects. In this role, she coordinated the Low Cost Food Cooperative. She helped found the Roxbury Comprehensive Community Health Center as well as the New Professionals Program. She also worked with the Lower Roxbury Community Council, the Roxbury Action Program, and the Third World Women's Conference. She was selected as an Associate Researcher under MIT's Fellowship program. She was instrumental in starting the University of Massachusetts' School Without Walls program, providing college credit for adult life experience. She had received the NAACP Community Service Award, and Greyhound Bus named her Woman of the Year for her work in mentoring and encouraging many young community activists. A scholarship has been established in her name.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=102273618666065&id=102212338672193&paipv=0&eav=AfaTYqFCythydNjKM5e2KilrImeq6wSjzIgeuGLr_3uyKU3BSZZ9yK1mM3l8OEH4ock&_rdr
Paula A. Johnson, M.D. Serving as the 14th president of Wellesley College, Harvard University graduate Paula Johnson is a medical doctor who has focused on bringing excellence to decades of work in higher education, public health, and academic medicine. She has moved the college to the forefront of women's STEM education. She has led the creation process of the school's new strategy, placing inclusive excellence at the heart of the educational experience. Having held several leadership roles during her career, she has been Harvard Medical School's Grayce A. Young Family Professor of Medicine in Women's Health, professor of epidemiology at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Health, and was a founder of Brigham and Women's Hospital's Connors Center for Women's Health and Gender Biology, the hospital where she trained in internal and cardiovascular medicine. She is the member of numerous national and international boards, and is the recipient of several awards and honors, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Medicine.
https://www.wellesley.edu/about/president
Pauline E. HopkinsBorn in Maine in 1859, Pauline Hopkins was a writer known for her novels and short stories that were written while living in Cambridge and Boston, most of which were published from 1900 to 1903. She regularly wrote and acted as an editor for Colored American Magazine as well as writing for the Voice of the Negro, with her work regularly addressing Black history, economic justice, racial discrimination, and women's rights. This allowed her to emerge as a leading public intellectual for the era. She also wrote a musical focused on The Underground Railroad, which was produced in 1879. She also performed with her family's musical ensemble, the Hopkins Colored Troubadours. She worked as an orator and stenographer in the 1890s, staying active in women's clubs and similar civic organizations to promote women's rights. She represented the Women's Era Club in the 1898 Annual Convention of New England Federation of Women's Clubs. She was a founding member of the Boston Literary and Historical Association in 1901. She remained a prominent activist intellectual, though her public appearances and writing efforts were focused on other areas following the last of her major writings in 1905. She died in 1930 from burns received during a fire at her home.
https://www.paulinehopkinssociety.org/biography/
Phillis Wheatley Though an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatly was educated and considered to be one of the best poets prior to the 19th century in the United States. Seized in western Africa at around age seven, she was transported to Boston in a group of enslaved persons unsuited for rigorous labor. She was brought into the Wheatly household in 1761 as a domestic servant and educated in the Bible, geography, history, astronomy, British literature, and the Latin and Greek classics. In a letter to the University of Cambridge, she yearned for intellectual challenges of more academic atmospheres. She was often used as an illustration by abolitionists that Blacks could be intellectual and artistic, making her a catalyst for the early antislavery movement. Her works, encompassing approximately 145 works, were published beginning in 1767. Reaching great renown in both Boston and Great Britain, she was known for applying Biblical symbols to both comment on slavery and evangelize. Though she was freed before the Revolutionary War, the harsh conditions experienced by many free blacks during and after the war caused her to live in poverty with her husband and up to three children. This caused significant health issues, and she passed away in 1784.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/phillis-wheatley
Priscilla H. Douglas, Ed.D. As the current Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Boston Public Library, Priscilla Douglas has brought over three decades of experience in leadership across academics, business, and government to the table. As an executive coach to Fortune 500 businesses, her guidance has helped thousands of leaders both in workshops and individually, addressing change in the business landscape with insight, understanding, and energy. Working as an executive at Xerox, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and General Motors, she introduced and led a range of innovations. She served as special assistant to William Webster, FBI director, and has been a White House fellow, a Barbara Bush Adult Literacy Project senior advisor, and a National Institute of Justice Presidential appointee. She served as the Secretary of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulations in Massachusetts, and was the first Black woman to hold a Cabinet position in the Commonwealth's history. She created the Hate Crimes Task Force and Domestic Violence Commission as the Assistant Secretary for Public Safety. She was the 2015 International Women's Forum Conference co-chair and now chairs the Ideas Remaking the World Committee. She has authored multiple books on leadership.
https://www.bpl.org/about-the-bpl/board-of-trustees/
Rachael S. Rollins, J.D. As the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Rachael Rollins was sworn into office in 2022 at 50 years of age. With a strong dedication to keeping neighborhoods safe and healthy, she is the top federal law enforcement official in Massachusetts. Her 20 years of legal experience provide her experience to lead 250 federal prosecutors and related staff across three offices in the state. Prior to her appointment, she was elected in 2019 as the first woman of color serving as a district attorney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and is now the first Black woman serving as a U.S. Attorney in the district. She previously worked as the Chief Legal Counsel for the Massachusetts Port Authority as well as the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. She also served as the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District, handling both Criminal and Civil divisions. She previously worked as a field attorney for the National Labor Relations Board and at the Bingham McCutchen LLP law firm, with her career starting as a clerk in the Massachusetts Appeals Court. She received her law degree from Northeastern.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/rachael-s-rollins-sworn-united-states-attorney-district-massachusetts
Rachel M. Washington As the first Black person to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1876, Rachel Washington was a leading educator in music in the Black community in Boston, helping many of Boston's talented musicians develop their skills to greatness. She also served as the choir director and organist at the Twelfth Baptist Church. She also performed on the piano, and was known for educating many of Boston's best musicians. She was noted in many public testimonials and complimentary writings in the press of New England, and was noted as being a woman of fine culture and character, humble in her personality while wielding an outstanding dedication to her art. She saw her musical talent and ability to teach and bring out the best in her students as her way of elevating the Black race.
https://www.musicbywomen.org/theorist/rachel-m-washington/
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/147940787/rachel-m-washington
Rebecca L. Crumpler, M.D. As the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in 1864, Rebecca Crumpler was born in 1831 and was the author of Book of Medical Discourses in 1883, which was the one of the first medical publications by a Black person. Born in Delaware, she learned much of her medical knowledge from her aunt, a local healer in Pennsylvania. She worked as a nurse in Charleston, Massachusetts in 1852, and by 1860, she had been admitted to the New England Female Medical College. Her book was focused on medicine for women and children, as an outreach of her passion for relieving the suffering of others. Practicing in Boston for a short period of time, she moved to Richmond, Virginia following the end of the Civil War, using it as a field for missionary work to become better acquainted with diseases impacting women and children. By caring for freed slaves who would have otherwise had no medical care access, she eventually returned to Boston to take up her work again with renewed vigor, treating people no matter their ability to pay for her services. Her book was based on journals kept during years of medical practice. She passed in 1895.
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_73.html
Rebecca P. Clarke During a time when elder care was extremely limited, Rebecca Clarke founded The Home for Aged Colored Women, the first home founded for elderly Black women in Boston. Enlisting assistance from both Black and white community leadership, she founded the home with Reverend Leonard Grimes, Governor John Andrew, and many others. An 1860 fundraising campaign allowed the organization to rent a house on Phillips Street as its first base of operations, then moved to Myrtle Street in 1864, before moving to Hancock Street in 1900. Residents were recommended through word of mouth and were often members of Black churches in Beacon Hill. With a commitment to maintaining a strong relationship between community and home residents, Clarke earned the community's strong support throughout the home's existence. The women in the home were provided with social activities and work that benefited the community. Two of the women from the home, ages 92 and 88, wrote The Women's Era publication to support women's suffrage.
https://www.nps.gov/places/home-for-aged-colored-women.htm
Rubina A. Guscott Born in Jamaica around 1900 and coming to Boston in 1920 at age 20, Rubina Guscott was a strong community activist and organizer who dedicated her life to the fight for equality and justice. She started as a domestic worker in Boston, but marched with the Black Star Nurses division each Saturday. Though she was widowed at 30, she raised her five sons and her daughter with a strong sense of community service and dedication to the common good. She was a charter member of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, and was active in almost every club group within the church and outside organizations pursuing social issues. She was a founder of Boston Progressive Credit, which pooled community resources to those in need. She lost one son in World War II, which drove her to become a member of Massachusetts Gold Star Mothers, eventually serving as its president. Despite being in her 60s during the Civil Rights era, she regularly took NAACP bus rides to Washington to participate in marches. She was described as a lady of great dignity and commitment, working hard towards a mutual goal of equality and justice. She died in 2002.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.obituaries/c/nrHguqFKkdc?pli=1
Ruth E. Hamilton Moving to Boston shortly following World War II, Ruth Hamilton was an Atlanta native with a big heart for serving her church community. A member of the Charles Street A.M.E. Church, she spent over 50 years as one of the top contraltos of the East Coast, often giving benefit concerts to support the church's ministries. With a strong Christ-centered focus, her ecumenical spirit made her a regular soloist at many churches in the area and served as a guest cantor in several Jewish synagogues during high holy days. She performed on many top world stages, toured Europe with both the New England Spiritual Ensemble and the Donnell Patterson Chorale. Performing as a soloist with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Arthur Fielder, she was also among the stars of CMAC's Annual Gospel Martin Luther King Jr. tribute and sang at several memorial services for President Kennedy. The recipient of many awards, her stirring performances have inspired many positive reviews, and she appeared on the first collection of art songs and spirituals by Black female composers. Her mission was preserving her rich legacy of music, and helped found the Hamilton Garrett Center for Music and Arts prior to her death in 2001.
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/copy-of-ruth-hamilton
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/about-us
Ruth E. Hill Born in Pittsfield in 1925, Ruth Hill was a dedicated librarian and educator, receiving her Bachelors from Massachusetts State College in 1946 and her Bachelors from Simmons College in 1949. Working at the Berkshire Athenaeum in 1943 followed by Massachusetts State College catalog department in 1947, she also worked as a cataloger at Bennington College and the Baker Library at Harvard Business School. Hired later as a reference librarian for the New York Academy of Medicine and serving in the catalog department of Yale University, she lent her talents to many post-secondary institutions large and small. These also included Berkshire Community College, the Widener Library at Harvard, the Louis Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and finally at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, where she served for 42 years as the audiovisual and oral history coordinator. Oral history projects she oversaw during this time include those focused on Black women, women in federal government, women of courage, Cambodian American women, Latina women, Tully Crenshaw feminism, Chinese American women, and Radcliffe College history. She passed in 2023.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/ruth-edmonds-hill
Ruth M. Batson A Roxbury native, Ruth Batson was a champion of desegregation in education. Born in 1921, she was a daughter of Jamaican immigrants. She graduated from Girl's Latin School in 1939 and Nursery Training School of Boston, affiliated with Boston University. Her mother had a strong interest in civil rights, which inspired Batson to become the Chairman for the NAACP's Public Education Sub-Committee in 1953. Within four years, she became the NAACP New England Regional Conference Chairwoman, allowing her to lobby for civil rights. She was the first Black woman to serve on the Democratic National Committee and the first woman to be elected president of the New England Regional Conference of the NAACP. When the Boston School Committee refused to take action in the early 1960s to end segregation, she challenged them with the highly-segregated Boston Public Schools and the fact that schools that had highly Black enrollment typically had inadequate school facilities. From 1963 to 1966, she served as the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination's Chairwoman, then launched the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, a voluntary desegregation program that transported 225 Black urban children to suburban schools at the start, growing to 1,125 children across 28 communities, serving until 1969.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-ruth-batson
Sandra B. Henriquez As the first Black woman appointed to Assistant Secretary of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 2009 to 2014 by President Obama, Sandra Henriquez is a graduate of both Boston University and the Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Her extensive background in public service and housing has prepared her well for the role, including being the longest-tenured Boston Housing Authority CEO from 1996 to 2009. Currently working as CEO of the Detroit Housing Commission since 2019, Henriquez has dedicated her life to fair housing, acting as an advocate for those in need. She has also worked with Rebuilding Together, SCBH Associates, Maloney Properties, other realty firms, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in positions stretching back to 1977. Henriquez has also been noted for her philanthropy and service to boards on several organizations, including the Board of Directors including chair positions for YWCA Boston, Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, and serving on various boards for the Citizens' Housing and Planning Association, National Housing Conference, and the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation. She is also a trustee of New England Baptist Hospital.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-b-henriquez-7166446/
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Ed.D. As an Emily Hargroves Research Professor of Education, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot received her Doctorate degree from Harvard in 1972. As a sociologist, she has spent her life dedicated to examining educational culture and the relationships between human development and social change, authoring 10 books on the topic from 1978 to 2012. As a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Bunting Institute, she received the MacArthur Prize in 1984, and Harvard University's George Ledlie Prize in 1993 for research that makes the most valuable benefits to mankind and contributions to science. She was accepted as a Spencer Senior Scholar in 1995 and was named the Margaret Mead Fellow through the Academy of Political and Social Science in 2008. She was the recipient of 28 honorary degrees from a variety of institutions in North America, and Swarthmore College established the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair in 1995, while Harvard awarded her with the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair, which will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair upon her retirement. This makes her the first Black woman in Harvard history to have an endowed professorship in her honor.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/sara-lawrence-lightfoot
Sarah Martin An active part of Boston's abolitionist movement, Sarah and her husband lived in Boston and helped fugitive slaves in the area. Her husband, having been born enslaved in North Carolina, escaped in 1856 and by 1859, had moved to Boston, becoming African Meeting House's preacher. The couple helped bolster the church's membership, with her husband's experience in enslavement and the horrors of slavery to move the abolitionist message forward. However, in a time when women were often in the background of society, Martin undertook her own work. This included founding the Fugitive Aid Society in Boston, an organization of Black women who collected food, money, and clothing donations for enslaved persons seeking their freedom during the Civil War, helping them to establish themselves in the North and work through the trauma that slavery had imparted on them.
https://www.nps.gov/places/sarah-and-john-sella-martin-house.htm
Sarah P. Remond As a lecturer, anti-slavery activist, and abolitionist campaigner, Sarah Redmond was born free in Salem, Massachusetts in 1826 and gave her first public speech against slavery at age 16 in 1842. Her mother was one of the founders of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, teaching her daughters not only household skills but also how to seek liberty within society. Becoming known for her speeches, she soon toured the northeastern United States, finding prominence in 1853 when she refused to sit in a segregated section in a theater. She often toured with her brother Charles Lenox Redmond. In 1856, as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, she toured in a range of northern and northern Midwestern states. Two years later, Redmond traveled to Britain to gather more support for the growing abolitionist movement in the U.S. She appealed to the British public to support the Union blockade of the Confederacy, then following the war, appealed for funds to support millions of newly emancipated freedmen in the South. She then went on to Italy in 1867 to receive medical training in Florence, receiving her degree and practicing medicine for almost two decades in Italy, passing in 1894 in Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Parker_Remond
Sarah-Ann Shaw As an American-born journalist, Sarah-Ann Shaw is a Roxbury native, born to a family active in the community, including the Roxbury Democratic Club and civil rights activities. An active part of the NAACP Youth Movement, she graduated in 1952, then attended Boston University. She joined the Boston Action Group in the early 1960s, and was then recruited as the director of the Boston Northern Student Movement, where she led projects such as voter education and registration, supporting welfare programs, and advocacy. She oversaw Neighborhood Operations for ABCD and the Community Health Education Program at the Ecumenical Center. She made her first TV appearance on Say Brother, which has become Basic Black, in 1968, then went on to work at WBZ-TV as the first Black female reporter in Boston in 1969, a position she held until 2000. She was the recipient of several awards over the years, including Lifetime Achievement Awards in 1998 from the National Association of Black Journalists and in 2000 from Emerson College's Radio Television News Direction Association, as well as multiple community service, unsung heroes, and other awards over the years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah-Ann_Shaw
Rep. Saundra Graham As an independent politician and community activist, Saundra Graham was born in 1941 and has been an active participant in the Cambridge and Middlesex areas for many decades. She became a member of the board of directors for the Cambridge Community Center in 1968, then became president of the Riverside Planning Team, a housing activism organization in Cambridge. The organization interrupted Harvard's graduation ceremony in 1970, with Graham taking the stage to demand that land be dedicated by the university as low-income housing rather than the planned dorm that the university was considering. Meeting for several hours, the university agreed to build low-income housing on a different site. This led to Graham's election as the first Black woman on the Cambridge City Council in 1971, and she became the first Black woman representing Cambridge in the state legislature. She passed away in 2023 at the age of 81.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saundra_Graham
Savina J. Martin As an author, community organizer, advocate, activist, and educator, Savina Martin represents poor and marginalized populations across the country. With a lifelong passion for educating and empowering marginalized individuals from the ground up, she received her Masters in 2001 from San Diego State University and her Doctorate in 2019 at College of Our Lady of the Elms Honoris Causa. Martin champions those who have had lived experiences with urban unrest, racism, systemic poverty, healthcare inequalities, addiction, homelessness, and addiction. She has served as President of the Greater Boston Union of the Homeless, including sit-ins, protests and vacant housing takeovers in the mid-1980s. She is a founder of WINGS Incorporated, a home for women, where she raised funds to refurbish the location as a place for women in need. She has contributed to We Cry Justice published in 2021 by Broadleaf Books, providing unique perspectives on scripture passages. She has spoken at many events, and is currently a statewide tri-chair for the Poor People's Campaign.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/savina-june-martin-m-s-doctorate-in-humane-letters-2a0b44230/
Shaumba-Yandje Dibinga Performing arts organization OrigiNation was founded in 194 by Shaumba-Yandje Dibinga in Roxbury, who still serves as the Founding Executive and Artistic Director. With an extensive background in training, teaching, and performing in all aspects of theater and dance, she has been producing plays and writing poetry for over 20 years. By providing a safe haven for young people, she understands the importance of teaching them health, education, self-respect, public speaking, self-confidence, career training, and the impact of African influence on a range of contemporary art forms. As the home to four professional youth dance companies, the organization implements initiatives to raise awareness in students of related social issues while facilitating the students' development into well-rounded individuals. Serving 400 youth on location and another 5,000 through artist-in-residence initiatives, the organization and Shaumba-Yandhe's work has captured many awards over the years.
https://www.barrfoundation.org/bios/shaumba-yandje-dibinga
Rep. Shirley Owens-Hicks With a long history of public service stretching over two decades, Shirley Owens-Hicks began her political career in the Democratic Party as a Boston School Committee member from 1984 to 1988, working to bring equity and quality education to children in the school system. Following this, she represented the 6th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1987 until 2006, following the example of her brother, Bill Owens, who served in the Massachusetts Senate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Owens-Hicks
Susan Paul As an author and educator devoted to social justice, community action, and change, Susan Paul was born in 1809 in the greater Boston area. Her parents' community roles as a school headmistress and minister exposed her to local community activists, and she chose to follow her mother's example by training as a teacher. Starting at Boston Primary School No. 6 and shortly after at the Abiel Smith School, which were both intended for Black children in the area, she added civic engagement in the standard curriculum. Her students were taught about the horrors of slavery, and she took them to anti-slavery meetings where they were able to listen to abolitionists. She formed a juvenile choir in 1832 which performed at anti-slavery meetings and held concerts to fundraise for abolitionist causes. She wrote The Memoir of James Jackson, published in 1835, which incorporated religious and moral themes to educate children about living with character, and is believed to be the first Black biography published in the U.S. Paul was active in many anti-slavery and temperance organizations, before personal tragedy and illness cut her life short at the age of 31, passing away in 1841 from tuberculosis.
https://www.nps.gov/people/susan-paul.htm
Susie K. Taylor As a teacher and nurse, Susie Taylor achieved several firsts in her lifetime, overcoming adversity from her birth in enslavement in Georgia in 1848. She was able to attend two secret schools taught by Black women despite the state's harsh laws forbidding formal education of Blacks. During the Civil War, her uncle led her to a Union gunboat near Confederate-held Fort Pulaski, giving her freedom at age 14. As a refugee, she found safety behind Union lines on the South Carolina Sea Islands. She attached herself to the First South Carolina Volunteers, which was the first U.S. Army Black regiment, first as a laundress, then as a cook, but her literacy allowed her to serve as a reading instructor for the regiment. She married her husband in the regiment, remaining together with the unit until 1866. However, when her husband passed away, she moved to Boston in 1872. She devoted her life to working with the Woman's Relief Corps, an organization serving female Civil War veterans. After publishing her memoir, My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, in 1902, she passed away a decade later in 1912.
https://www.nps.gov/people/susie-king-taylor.htm
Teri Williams As President and Chief Operating Officer of OneUnited Bank, Teri Williams heads up the largest Black-owned bank in the United States. Also serving on the board of directors, she is focused on implementing strategic initiatives while overseeing daily operations. Offering a range of innovative products and services that are designed to close the racial wealth gap, she has spent over 40 years gathering financial services expertise from premier financial institutions, including American Express, where she was one of the youngest Vice Presidents in the company's history, as well as Bank of America. With a Bachelors from Brown University and an MBA with Honors from Harvard, she has served in a range of roles over the years, including Chairman of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, the board of the 79th Street Corridor in Miami, Chair of the Urban Initiative Task Force of the Miami-Dade Beacon Council, board of the CCC Intelligent Solutions, and has received a number of awards and recognition for her contribution to urban communities, including being selected by Forbes Magazine in 2022 in its 50 over 50 list of women with careers in financial services.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/teri-williams-99811029/
Terri Lyne Carrington As a jazz drummer, composer, producer and educator, Terri Carrington was born in Medford in 1965 and has performed with and toured with several top musical acts over the years. Growing up in a musical family, she was given a set of drums at age seven, and after privately studying for three years, she gave her first major performance at the Wichita Jazz Festival, earning her a full scholarship the next year to Berklee College of Music. She moved to New York in 1983 to work with a range of talented musicians, and then to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, including writing and producing her own work. 2011 saw her touring South America with several other artists. Appointed as a professor at her alma mater, Berklee College of Music, she has also won three Grammy Awards across her seven albums, including being the first female musician to win a Grammy in 2013 for the Best Jazz Instrumental Album. She is the founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice as well as The Car Center. She has also written a children's book and a book New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Lyne_Carrington
Thea L. James, M.D.With a strong life-long passion for improving health outcomes and reducing healthcare inequalities, Thea James has worked with Boston Medical Center for many years, most currently as the Vice President of Mission. Working with caregivers throughout the medical center's system, she coordinates and maximizes the medical center's strategic alliances and relationships with many national, state, and local organizations. These include a range of housing advocates, community agencies, and similar organizations that are focused on fostering innovative and effective models of care that are needed for the health center's patients and their surrounding communities to be able to thrive and reach their full potential. James' role includes a range of intersections between health, wealth, economic mobility, and similar upstream drivers that tend to predict poor health outcomes. Using these care models, she works to bring operational equality in a broader sense to Boston Medical Center patients now and long into the future.
https://www.bmc.org/about-us/directory/doctor/thea-l-james-md
Thelma D. Burns As a life-long community activist and advocate for the Black community in Boston, Thelma Burns has served in a wide range of roles in organizations across the metro area. She has served on the Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) Board of Directors for over 35 years, including Committee Chair, Vice Chair, and Board Chair. She has headed the board for the ABCD Dorchester Neighborhood Service Center for over 15 years, and has worked in leadership on a number of community boards including the Mayor's Senior Advisory Council, the Roxbury YMCA, and Central Boston Elder Services. She also served from 1980 to 2008 as the director for the Belmont Public Schools Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity. She received a Robert F. Kennedy Fellowship in 1968, and has received her Bachelors from Boston University and Masters from Harvard. Because of her extensive ongoing work serving the community, the Thelma D. Burns Building was dedicated in her honor in 2016.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-thelma-burns
Tommiejo Dixon As a fixture of Boston's food scene, Ma Dixon's, originally Ma Dixon's Diner, was founded by Tommiejo Dixon with encouragement from her husband in 1943. Born in 1914, Dixon opened the sandwich shop to provide southern-style cuisine and is now being managed by her great-nephew and -niece. As a family-owned restaurant, Dixon, together with her sisters Janie and Ruth, would provide a comfortable location that catered to the Black community in the area. Moving to its current Grove Hall location in 1968, the business weathered the loss of Dixon in 1979, with her sisters taking over the operation, then their children following in the family tradition of providing delicious food to the community.
https://bwht.org/women-feeding-boston-tour/
Tulaine Montgomery With a strong belief in creating a better world for everyone, Tulaine Montgomery serves as CEO of New Profit. Based on a coalition of social change makers and entrepreneurs, the organization is advancing a vision of an America where all people can thrive and grow. Montgomery has worked in leadership roles in launching and expanding social enterprises worldwide, providing advice to numerous nonprofits and socially-responsible companies. She has backed many of the most powerful, promising social innovations in the United States through her work with venture philanthropy organization New Profit. She believes that by advocating for a new era of philanthropy that focuses on lifting up leaders that are in the closest proximity to issues, these visionary leaders can better scale innovations and create transformation in the most inequitable systems in the country. These include strengthening the education-to-employment pathways for underserved individuals, pushing resources and support for entrepreneurs impacted directly by the U.S. legal system, and by improving diversity, equity, and inclusiveness in philanthropy. The organization also bridges the resource gap often faced by minority and underinvested social entrepreneurs.
https://tulainemontgomery.com/
Valerie Mosley Graduating in 1982 with her Bachelors from Duke University, Valerie Mosley has always focused on success. As the former Duke student body vice president and president realized moving forward with her MBA from The Wharton School, where she has served as president of Alumni Affairs, she realized that she wanted to work with companies that add value not only to investors, but to society at large. After managing billions of dollars of assets at Wellington Management for over 20 years, she realized she wanted more and created Valmo Ventures to provide advice and investment funds in businesses that made that dream a reality. Representing organizations including Fundify, Quantum Exchange, STEAMRole, TEquitable, and other companies, her business provides these companies and leaders with the financial and informational resources they need to improve their chances of success and rate of growth. She also serves on boards of a range of businesses and organizations to help them achieve their goals in the community and in business.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeriemosley/
Valerie Shelley As a long-time community activist, leader and champion for the Orchard Gardens neighborhood, Valerie Shelley had been a strong advocate for Boston Housing Authority families, especially for Orchard Gardens. Born in 1948 in the Orchard Park Public Housing Development, she left in 1966 to work initially at a law firm, and later for the Boston Public Schools system. Her sisters remained in public housing through redevelopment. She retired in 1999 and returned to the renamed Orchard Gardens, assisting her sister with advocating for people in the community. When her sister Edna Bynoe passed away in 2010, Shelley knew that she needed to step up into a leadership role to keep her sister's work alive. Taking on the role of President of the Orchard Gardens Tenant Task Force, she carried on that legacy. She also served as the Chair of the Boston Housing Authority's Resident Advisory Board, an organization that reviews Boston Housing Authority policy changes, as well as the organization's annual and five-year plans. With a focus on helping residents to realize that they have a voice, she continued that work for twelve years, advocating for the community and residents of Orchard Gardens for many years until her death in 2022.
https://www.bostonhousing.org/en/News/BHA-Statement-on-the-Passing-of-Valerie-Shelley.aspx
Vivian Male As a current jazz artist, Vivian Male is based in Boston but travels the United States to perform at jazz festivals, concerts, national conferences, corporate events, and other special events. Annual concerts at Martha's Vineyard and the Scullers Jazz Club in Boston regularly sell out. She has helped raise funds for educational scholarships through producing and performing at concerts for Berklee College of Music, as well as a range of non-profit organizations. She held a record-breaking fundraiser for The Negro Ensemble Company in New York. Featured as a vocalist for the New England Emmy Awards, inducted into the Steppin' Out Hall of Fame in Boston, and has performed the National Anthem for the New England Patriots on multiple occasions.
http://www.vivianmale.com/about.html
Sister Virginia Morrison With a strong belief in the concept that an engaged mind keeps children - and adults - out of trouble, Virginia Morrison has served as the executive director of the Grove Hall Neighborhood Development Corporation for many years and has pushed for the construction and development of a new community center in Dorchester, a dream which became a reality in 2022. A lack of standalone community centers in Dorchester and Grove Hall has led to significant area violence, and community leaders like Morrison know that the only way to reduce that violence is by creating opportunities for people to gather for collaboration, learn, play, and connect. The new building will allow for a wider range of programs, resources, education, and community space to improve the neighborhood's quality of life. She also advocates for more community policing, more involvement on the streets by both religious and civic organizations, and encourages community members to report problems when they occur so that they can be part of the solution.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-bostons-grove-hall-a-new-community-center-and-old-frustrations-around-violence/ar-AA12W29v
Wilhelmina Marguerita Crosson Moving to Boston in 1906, Wilhelmina Crosson graduated from Girls' High School and then began teaching, starting in 1920 by teaching remedial reading to children of Italian immigrants. Her experiences with the classes encouraged her to create the first remedial reading program for the City of Boston in 1935. But a decade prior to that push, she also founded The Aristo Club of Boston, an organization of professional Black woman who provided scholarships to Black students while promoting the study of Black history. The organization successfully campaigned the Boston Public School System to celebrate Negro History Week. Though she officially retired in 1966, she found that retirement didn't sit well with her, and within two years, she founded a training program for Peace Corps volunteers, while also spending significant amounts of time in her retirement years tutoring individuals in different subjects and volunteering at the city's homeless shelters.
https://www.boston.gov/news/meet-wilhelmina-marguerita-crosson-boston-teacher-who-advocated-black-history-education
Zakiya Alake After receiving her Associates at Antioch School of Law Paralegal Tech Program in 1980, Zakiya Alake undertook additional education at Fitchburg State University and University of Massachusetts Boston, but didn't find that law fed her passion for food, love, and community building. Instead, she started and operated Zakiya Alake's Abundance Catering and ZAGE Inc, focusing on serving the community while feeding her passion by feeding those around her for over 40 years. This passion for nourishing the people around her is leading Alake into developing her next steps in business while remaining focused on building community, spreading love, and providing nourishing food.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakiya-alake-62ba5a42/
Zipporah P. Atkins As the first Black person to own land in the United States, Zipporah Atkins was born in colonial Boston to enslaved parents. At that time, in the colony of Massachusetts, children of slaves were considered to be free at birth. She had inherited funds from her father which he had, in turn, received from his former enslaver, and by 1670, at age 25, she used the funds to purchase property in Boston's North End neighborhood, which is now part of the Rose Kennedy Greenway. As a single Black woman, it was very unusual that her purchase was able to go through given the social norms of the time, but even after she married, she retained full ownership of the property during a time when husbands had control over their wives and their property. She sold a portion of her land in 1693 for 100 pounds, and six years later, sold the remainder of the property for an additional 25 pounds. The deed for the property was signed with her initials, indicating that she knew how to read and write during a time when most Black, and many white, people in the colonies were still illiterate. Following this final sale, Atkins passed from history's notice.
https://wanderwomenproject.com/women/zipporah-potter-atkins/
Angela Paige CookRaised in a family of educators, Angela Cook is a co-founder of Paige Academy, an early childhood education center focused on sharing knowledge and building better brains in children. She received a Bachelors from Fisk University, followed by a Masters at Wheelock College, and served as an Urban Studies Fellow at MIT. She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 at University of Massachusetts Boston, and all of her education has been focused on early and urban education. Her dissertation entitled A Case Study of a Black Independent School: Reflections on Cultural Resonance in an Elementary and Preschool Setting was the basis for Paige Academy, which in turn was named for her great, great aunt Lucy Paige Williams, who regularly formed schools of benevolence in her home, teaching handcrafts, reading, and other skills.
www.paigeacademy.org/#history
Anna Mae ColeAnna Mae Cole was a co-founder of the Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation in the 1980s, creating a model for the nation for public housing that was tenant controlled. She was a strong community advocate and activist pushing for improved services for Jamaica Plain, promoting the idea of urban gardening throughout the public housing corporation to improve neighborhood pride and beautification, and eventually moving into vegetable production in the neighborhood. Cole has since had the Anna Mae Cole Community Center named after her, providing programs, events, sports, a multi-purpose room, and a community kitchen. It also features more green spaces, which were at the heart of Anna Cole's push for community gardens in the area while she was active.
https://www.boston.gov/news/creating-community-forming-ties-bostons-neighborhoods
https://jamaicaplaingazette.com/2012/02/17/bromley-heath-leader-retires-bha-takes-over/
https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collection/p15774coll6/id/5248
https://tcbinc.org/news/construction-starts-at-mildred-c-hailey-apartments-in-boston/
Edna J. SwanAs the first Black female police officer to serve with the Boston Police Department in 1943, Patrolman Edna J. Swan had already attended Fisk University during the Great Depression, along with volunteering with the Red Cross, which started her passion for public service.
https://blackstonian.org/2018/02/black-history-boston-police-department/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230331030735/https://bpdnews.com/news/2023/2/22/lwwczsocux2dykgza091hn0ynnfik9
https://www.newsbreak.com/boston-ma/2935374594847-bpd-and-mamleo-honor-former-police-officer-edna-swan-and-deputy-superintendent-willis-saunders
https://bpdnews.com/news/2023/2/22/lwwczsocux2dykgza091hn0ynnfik9
Ella I. GarrettA Boston native born in 1924, Ella Garnett was an active public servant, working for over 30 years in the U.S. General Services Administration at the Public Building Service Headquarters as a Senior Procurement Analyst. After attending Simmons College and marrying her former husband following World War II, she developed and wrote procurement policies for the Federal Government, impacting how federal buildings that were either owned or leased were built or maintained across the entire United States. She also provided analysis of federal projects that had been approved by the U.S. Congress for new construction, renovations, and annual designs. She passed away peacefully in 2016.
https://www.leblackphillipsholdenfuneralhome.com/obituary/Ella-Garnett
Frances Carolyn Harris Providing leadership, comfort, and joy to those in her presence at the Holy Tabernacle and other churches in the Boston area, Frances Carolyn Harris was born in the late 1930s. She was known for her presence, strong faith, and dedication to family, church, and community.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/frances-harris-obituary?id=16922765
Frances J. Bonner, M.D. A member of the Massachusetts General Psychiatry Department for over 50 years, Frances Bonner was the first Black female physician to train on the service in 1949, following her neurology training at Boston City High School. After receiving a two-year fellowship from Radcliffe College focused on hysteria, she began her research career, later undertaking neurobiological research at the institution. She received her psychoanalytic certification from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in 1975, founding the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England with other co-founders. She dedicated the bulk of her career to clinical practice, supervising residents in individual psychotherapy sessions. She was known as a pioneer in crossing gender and racial boundaries in medicine, and is the namesake of an award established in 2010 by the Massachusetts General Department of Psychiatry as well as the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, promoting diversity and inclusion in psychiatric communities.
http://history.massgeneral.org/catalog/Detail.aspx?itemId=1456&searchFor=bonner
www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/about/center-for-diversity/bonner-award
"Jacqui" Jacquelyn Jones HoardA 1990 recipient of the Henry L. Shattuck Public Service Awards, Jacqui Hoard is well known in Boston's Black community for her dedication to public service and the community at large. Sister to Clarence Jack "Jeep" Jones, Boston's first and only deputy mayor, Jacqui had the same determination and dedication to serving the community as her brother,
https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/The-loss-of-a-Lifelong-Friend-of-Minister-Louis-and-Khadijah-Farrakhan-Boston-shows-appreciation-for-the-life-of-Clarence-Jeep-Jones.shtml
thebostonsun.com/2019/07/12/sunset-concert-at-symphony-community-park/
https://bmrb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018-Shattuck-ProgramB.pdf
Joyce Ferriabough BollingWith the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, a Democratic strategist and journalist with the Boston Herald, saw the opportunity for getting more Black individuals into office in 2013. With Boston's longest-serving Mayor Menino stepping down in that year and half of the 12-person field being persons of color. Her late husband Bruce was the city's first Black council president in the 1980s, and that passion to reshape the political environment in favor of minority candidates shows up in everything she does. However, she sees strategy at the same time, noting that though there is much opportunity, having too many persons of color running for a single position means that nobody will win that political seat.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/01/08/metro/with-bidens-selection-walsh-mayors-race-heats-up
Karen MillerAs Boston's first Black female firefighter, Karen Miller was born in Roxbury, moving later to the Academy Homes apartment complex. Serving six years with the U.S. Army Reserves, she became the first Black female firefighter in Boston in August 1985. She was encouraged by her brother, a state trooper, to take the civil service exams and take the first job that came up, which happened to be the fire department. Starting out at Ladder 10 in Jamaica Plain, she was one of the few women in the department to not be started exclusively on engine duty. Facing an uphill battle that included oversize unisex equipment and no designated bathrooms, she tried to not make waves, but in meeting up with other women in the department, they began organizing for reforms, negotiating changes in employee policies such as locked bathrooms, smaller protective equipment sizes for women, and refitting the shower area for better privacy. She has since become a fire investigator, education and prevention specialist prior to retiring in 2006. She now serves as executive director of the Boston Society of Vulcans, a non-profit focused on recruiting minorities to public safety positions.
https://www.dotnews.com/2010/retired-firefighter-miller-recognized-pioneer
Letitia CampfieldIn the early 20th century, there were many areas of society and work that were inaccessible to Blacks and persons of color, as well as women. In 1929, Letitia Campfield was one of two Black women who were the first Blacks to be admitted to Boston City Hospital's School of Nursing. Historically, free Black medical practitioners were held in contempt, and finishing formal medical school was very challenging for persons of color. At the same time, discrimination was a constant threat to persons of color in medical fields. This resistance to Blacks in the medical industry was just one part of a slow, arduous integration process in the medical field..
https://www.blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaVU00cO_Fc/?utm_medium=copy_link
https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/Guide%20to%20the%20Boston%20City%20Hospital%20collection_tcm3-52281.pdf
Rev. Liz WalkerFirst arriving in Boston over 40 years ago as a rising broadcast news star, Liz Walker was the first Black anchor of a regular nightly newscast, later moving into work as an ordained minister and community leader. She started out with on-air success in San Francisco and Denver, then put down strong roots in Boston following desegregation, a pain she understood as one of the first students desegregating West Side Junior High in Little Rock. Always walking by faith throughout her life as the daughter of a preacher, she is now changing gears from preaching, which had given her a direct connection to provide a voice to those who were not being heard in the community, towards writing a book on trauma and healing, an area she explored in depth starting a decade ago when violence broke out in the neighborhood around her church. Her preaching includes a degree from Harvard Divinity School, working a sa pastor in one of Boston's poorest neighborhoods, and building a girl's school in southern Sudan in Africa.
Margaret MoseleyBorn in Dedham in 1901, Margaret Moseley found herself at odds with a segregated world, kept out of serious nursing or business work by discrimination. Instead, she was a founding member of a 1940s consumers' cooperative, served on the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union board, and was a founding member who also served on Freedom House's board in Roxbury. She served as Community Church's president, and as the Massachusetts legislative chair for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Focused on serving as a peace, community, and civil rights activist, which in 1989 started the Margaret Moseley Memorial Peace Fund. She moved to Cape Cod in 1961, continuing her dedication to community activism by founding local chapters of the NAACP and WILPF, as well as many other organizations. She served Barnstable's Unitarian Church as a founding member of its social responsibility committee and as the first woman chairing the prudential committee. She was part of the committee to meet the reverse freedom riders in 1962, part of an attempt to embarrass President Kennedy by stirring up racial problems where his family spent summers. She traveled to Selma, Alabama in 1965 with other women from WILPF to work on voting rights.
https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5527
https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/margaret-moseley/
https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:american+folklife+center&q=Moseley,+Margaret.+Papers+-+The+Civil+Rights+History+Project:+Survey+of+Collections+and+Repositories+%28The+American+Folklife+Center,+Library+of+Congress%29
https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/
Mildred C. HaileyFrom the late 1960s, when the Bromley-Health Public Housing Development began being operated by tenants, until her death, Mildred Hailey was always a guiding hand on the organization. She started the drive to gain control of the development from the Boston Housing Authority in 1968 by repairing conditions that wouldn't be tolerated to negotiating truces between rival gangs that led to a successful GED program, she considered the entire community to be her extended family. Considered to be a force of nature by many, Hailey took on a very difficult job with a combination of compassion and courage at a time when running water, heat, and electricity were fairly spotty and there were over 4,000 broken windows around the entire development when a progressive board of commissioners stepped aside to let the tenants save themselves. By building a new sense of strong community, it became a model of how to reclaim broken public housing systems. Though she retired in 2012 from her position as executive director, she still showed up at all meetings until the last couple of months of her life in 2015.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/19/mildred-hailey-tenant-activism-transformed-boston-public-housing/uMvf9iF3ozuC8lLlVOKiCN/story.html
Mamie Nell "Mimi" JonesKnown for the famous photo in 1964 that spread around the world of racial attacks in Boston, Mimi Jones was 17 at the time she participated in a swim-in to integrate a Florida pool, born in 1947 in Georgia. With her mouth open in a scream, the white motel owner behind her was dumping acid into the water. The St. Augustine incident drew international coverage, causing President Johnson to discuss the attack in the Oval Office and driving strong support for the stalled Civil Rights Act of 1964, with overwhelming approval by the U.S. Senate the day after the photo was released. She moved to Boston later in life for a college scholarship and continued her community activism, started even earlier in her life teaching poor rural Black persons in Georgia to read so that they could register to vote and joined the March on Washington in 1963. After settling in Boston, she began working for the state Education Department, wrote grants for local nonprofits, and participated with a number of organizations and committees, seeking social justice. She passed away in her Roxbury home in 2020.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/27/metro/overlooked-her-role-galvanizing-civil-rights-protest-mimi-jones-dies-73/
Nadine Fortune WrightBorn in 1893 in Illinois, Nadine Wright was born into a wealthy family with her parents being well-educated teachers. However, their wealth didn't protect the family from state-sanctioned racially-based crimes, stirring up in Nadine a strong passion for lifelong activism and achievement. A resurgence of racism and the death of her father in 1899 caused significant issues for the family, and when her mother passed away in 1906, it was decided that she and her brother would be sent to Cambridge to live with their aunt, who helped found the Niagara Movement. Growing up in a home at the center of Black political and intellectual activity, the children learned how to think for themselves, with Wright graduating from Radcliffe in 1917 while continuing her civil rights work. She then taught in the Cambridge public school system for almost 20 years, chartering the Boston Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, acting as a trustee of Robert Gould Shaw house, and serving in many organizations. After marrying, she spent teaching at colleges in North Carolina before returning to Boston to work with children with cerebral palsy. She passed away in 1994.
https://www.mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210228123150/https://mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
Bishop Nellie YarboroughWith a strong focus on making sure that everyone had somebody to lean on in hard times, Nellie Yarborough worked with a range of church parishioners and police to move the Dorchester neighborhood out of crime and poverty. Born in North Carolina to a preacher's family, she began preaching at age 12 to the congregation's youth, traveling at age 17 with Brumfield Johnson, the church's founder. Their travels led them to Boston, where the church's headquarters was established. With a passion for ministering for those in need, she was appointed as the assistant pastor of Mount Calvary Holy Church in 1962, becoming the senior pastor a decade later when Johnson passed away, and ordained as a bishop in 1994, the second woman to hold that title. An educated, adaptable pillar of the community, she was a friend to the homeless, advocating for them with politicians and serving food to those in need every Thursday night to crowds that often topped 100. She continued serving the community throughout her years, passing away in 2012.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/nellie-yarborough-obituary?id=7382565
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-boston-globe/20121224/282024734591443
Nora L. BastonAs an 18-year Boston Police Department veteran, Nora Baston serves as a pillar of the community, managing community engagement for the department and doing so very well. In addition to getting guns off of Boston streets and tracking down girls who are moving into gangs, she lives for the goodwill she gets from young students who want to share their success, in one case waiting hours to show her their report card. As deputy superintendent, she's one of four women on the command staff for Boston Police, and she takes that responsibility seriously, going out three or four nights a week to engage with kids, be a mentor, and build trust in areas where violence is prevalent to give youth an alternative from gangs and drugs. With two degrees from University of Massachusetts Lowell and having graduated from Boston Police Academy in 1996, she credits former Police Commissioner Davis with teaching her how to connect with people one-on-one. She sees education as the best police work, getting kids that would otherwise get into trouble into college or back into school.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2014/04/07/women-in-command-deputy-superintendent-nora-l-baston/
Peggy Olivia Brown Ed.D.With a strong belief that all children can learn, Peggy Brown feared that children of color were being overlooked in public schools, leading them to drop out, end up in legal trouble, or lead unfulfilled lives. Born in 1934 in Washington, D.C., she grew up in New York City, where she saw the devastating life paths of those who didn't have positive role models in her south Bronx neighborhood. She then attended multiple universities before lecturing at Northeastern University and Boston College. To make a difference, she launched initiatives to improve healthcare in Roxbury with the Mandela Town Hall Health Spot which provided weekly blood sugar and blood pressure screenings, with Dr. Brown inviting dentists, optometrists, or other health professionals to help address disparities she was seeing. At the same time, she was founding the Mandela Crew, providing youth in the area with access to a sport they wouldn't participate in traditionally. She worked with kids in groups or one-on-one, sometimes staying up with youth until 4 or 5 AM to help them write term papers to ensure they could graduate high school, steering them into the possibilities of a successful life. After many years making a strong impact on youth in the community, she passed in 2014.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/27/peggy-brown-educator-and-activist-founded-mandela-crew-first-african-american-and-latino-team-compete-head-charles/p0962cwuqrl5SLsObdjkzJ/story.html
Shirley ShillingfordWith a strong focus on food and carnival, Shirley Shillingford is the name behind Shirley's Pantry in Mattapan. As president of the Caribbean American Carnival Association of Boston (CACAB), Shillingford started with the organization in 1975 as she worked for Mayor White's administration. She served alongside Edward Harry and Sebastian Joseph who ran the organization for 16 years after founder Ivy Ponder and Ken Bonaparte Mitchell stepped back. She then took over in 1990, serving as the lead for Boston Carnival for the past 33 years. For a similar long period of time, she's been serving at what was the Healthy Baby, Health Food Pantry on River Street, which has now been renamed as Shirley's Pantry following her founding of the pantry in 1992 with no resources except asking businesses and the government for help. With a strong dedication to community and disadvantaged populations, Shillingford has often reached out to employees, elected officials, and community members to keep the pantry operating for everything from food to appliances to labor.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-08-25/bostons-carnival-celebrating-50-years-is-a-treasure-says-organizer
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/it-s-shirley-s-pantry-now-renaming-honors-longtime-manager-mattapan
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/23/mattapan-food-pantry-named-for-its-manager-a-longtime-activist/
Angela Paige Cook, Ph.D. (Active 1970s to 2010s)Raised in an educational family, Angela Paige Cook, Ph.D., is one of the co-founders of Paige Academy. After receiving a Bachelors from Fish University and a Masters at Wheelock College, she received an Urban Studies Fellowship at MIT, and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2002. Her focus on early childhood and urban education was reflected in her dissertation A Case Study of a Black Independent School: Reflections on Cultural Resonance in an Elementary and Preschool Setting, which was the foundation for the school. Paige Academy is an early childhood education center that has a primary focus on building better brains in children through shared knowledge.
www.paigeacademy.org/#history
Anna Mae Cole (Active 1980s to 1990s)As a co-founder of the Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation in the 1980s, Anna Mae Cole helped create a model for tenant-controlled public housing nationwide. As a strong community activist and advocate, she pushed for a range of improved services in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. She promoted urban gardening to help improve pride and beautification in the neighborhood, adding vegetable production in later years to help with the shortage of fresh food in the area. The Anna Mae Cole Community Center was named for her, which features green spaces as well as programming, sports, events, a community kitchen, and a multi-purpose room.
https://www.boston.gove/news/creating-community-forming-ties-bostons-neighborhoods
https://jamaicaplaingazette.com/2012/02/17/bromley-health-retires-bha-takes-over/
https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collecton/p15774coll6/id/5248
https://tcbinc.org/news/construction-starts-at-mildred-c-hailey-apartments-in-boston/
***Cleora Carter FrancisI've done a search of the entire Boston Globe site as well as in-depth internet sites - I cannot find anything on this woman. Without additional details, I will not be able to continue on this biography.
Edna C. Robinson Brown, D.D.M. (Active 1920s to 1940s)As the first Black woman to perform dentistry in Cambridge, Edna C. Robinson Brown was a dentist who graduated from Columbia University and was a very early member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Psi Omega chapter. Though not much is known about her life, being able to attend Columbia as a Black woman means that she probably attended after 1923, as Columbia University recognizes Elizabeth Delaney as the University's College of Dental Medicine's first Black female graduate.
https://www.akaboston.org/chapter-history
https://thelowdown.alumni.columbia.edu/history_of_women_at_columbia
Edna J. Swan (Active 1943 to 1960s)Serving as the first Black female police officer with the Boston Police Department, Patrolman Edna J. Swan attended Fisk University during the Great Depression. She also volunteered with the Red Cross during that time, igniting her passion for public service. She began her service with the department in 1943.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-bostons-grove-hall-a-new-community-center-and-old-frustrations-around-violence/ar-AA12W29v
Elta M. Garrett (Born 1942)As a co-founder of the Hamilton-Garrett Music & Arts Academy with Ruth Hamilton, Elta Garrett was born in 1942 and has dedicated over 50 years of her life as a music teacher within the Boston Public School System and was a noted soprano singer in the national musical community. Following her retirement, she worked as the founding director of the Academy for twelve years. She remained an active supporter as a member of the Board of the Academy and has been recognized for over two decades of service to the Historic Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church.
https://clustrmaps.com/person/Garrett-89ubff
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/whoweare
Francis Carolyn Harris (Active 1929 to 1950s)As one of the two first Black women admitted to the School of Nursing at Boston City Hospital, Francis Carolyn Harris entered the nursing program in 1929. At the time, there were very few licensed Black female nurses in the United States, Massachusetts, and Boston, and individuals in these roles often faced significant discrimination and difficulty in finishing their formal medical training. The other Black woman admitted to the School of Nursing at the time was Letitia Campfield.
https://www.blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
Frances J Bonner, M.D. (Active 1949 to 1980s)
As the first Black female physician with the Massachusetts General Psychiatry Department, Frances J. Bonner, M.D. began her training in 1949. She received her fellowship from Radcliffe College focusing on hysteria, leading to her long research career, including neurobiological research at the college. She received a psychoanalytic certification in 1975 from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She helped co-found the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England and dedicated most of her career to clinical practice while supervising residents during individual psychotherapy sessions. She had a reputation as a pioneer in crossing the boundaries in gender and racial medicine. An award was established in her name in 2010 at the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and the Massachusetts General Department of Psychiatry.
http://history.massgeneral.org/catalog/Detail.aspx?itemId+1456&searchFor=bonner
www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/about/center-for-diversity/bonner-award
Gladys HolmesI have been unable to find any details on this woman. It is a relatively common name, and despite multiple searches to track this down to the Boston region, I have been unable to locate more details. Without further information, I cannot complete this biography.
“Jacqui” Jones Hoard (Active 1980s to 1990s)Jacqui Jones Hoard was a 1990 recipient of the Henry L. Shattuck Public Service Award. Well-known throughout Boston’s Black community for her strong dedication to the community and public service, she was the sister to Clarence Jack “Jeep” Jones, Boston’s first and only Black deputy mayor, showcasing the family’s overall determination and dedication to community service.
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/The-loss-of-a-Lifelong-Friend-of-Minister-Louis-and-Khadijah-Farrakhan-Boston-shows-appreciation-for-the-life-of-Clarence-Jeep-Jones.shtml
thebostonsun.com/2019/07/12/sunset-concert-at-symphony-community-park/
https://bmrb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018-shattuck-programB.pdf
Joyce Ferriabough Bolling (Active 2013 to Present)
The growth of the Black Lives Matter Movement led Democratic strategist and journalist Joyce Ferriabough Bolling to work to get more Black individuals into public office starting in 2013. As Boston’s longest-serving mayor, Mayor Menino, stepped down, half of the 12-person primary were people of color. Using the passion she’d found when her late husband Bruce ran and served as the city’s first Black council president in the 1980s, she found that having too many people of color running for a single position ensured that nobody would get the seat, driving her to stand behind candidates that had the best potential to bring about change.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/01/08/metro/with-bidens-selection-walsh-mayors-race-heats-up
Karen Miller (Active 1985 to 2006)
Serving as Boston’s first Black female firefighter, Karen Miller is a Roxbury native who moved to the Academy Homes apartment Complex. After serving for six years with the U.S. Army Reserves, she joined the Boston Fire Department in August 1985 after being encouraged by her brother, a state trooper, to take the civil service exam and take the first job available. Starting out in Ladder 10 in Jamaica Plain, she was one of the few women in the entire department who was not started exclusively on engine duty. Meeting with other women, she realized they had all faced an uphill battle with oversized unisex equipment and no designated or locking bathroom space. She organized with these women for reforms. She has since worked as a fire investigator, educator, and prevention specialist prior to her 2006 retirement, after which she served as the executive director of the Boston Society of Vulcans, a non-profit focused on recruiting minorities to public safety positions.
https://dotnews.com/2010/retired-firefighter-miller-recognized-pioneer
Letitia Campfield (Active 1929 to 1950s)
During the early parts of the 20th century, many areas of society and employment were inaccessible to Blacks and other persons of color, as well as women. Leticia Campfield was one of two Black women who, in 1929, were the first Black women to be admitted to Boston City Hospital’s School of Nursing. Historically, free Black medical practitioners were viewed with contempt and finishing formal training was difficult at best for persons of color. Discrimination was also a constant threat to persons of color in the medical industry. This made Campfield’s admission, along with Francis Carolyn Harris the same year, a marked victory for Black medical professionals.
https://Blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaVU00cO_Fc/?utm_medium=copy_link
https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/Guide%20to%20the%20Boston%20City%20Hospital%20collection_tcm3-52281.pdf
Rev. Liz Walker (Active 1970s to 2020s)
As a rising broadcast news star, Liz Walker was the first Black anchor of a regular nightly newscast when she arrived in Boston over 40 years ago. Starting out with on-air success in Denver and San Francisco, she understood the pain of Boston Blacks during desegregation as one of the first students desegregated to West Side Junior High in Little Rock, Arkansas. As the daughter of a preacher, she always walked in faith, which led her to her own work as an ordained minister and community leader. She’s worked on a book focused on trauma and healing following an outbreak of violence near her church and neighborhood. Her experience includes her degree from Harvard Divinity School, ministering to those in Boston’s lowest-income neighborhoods, and helping build a girl’s school in Sudan, Africa.
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/liz-walker-retires-roxbury-presbyterian-church/
https://roxburypresbyterianchurch.org/our-pastor/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Walker_(journalist)
Margaret Moseley (Active 1940s to 1960s)Born in 1901 in Dedham and kept out of significant business or nursing work by discrimination, Margaret Moseley was a founding member of a 1940s consumer cooperative, served on the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union board and founded and served on the Freedom House board in Roxbury. She also served as Community Church’s president, as the Massachusetts legislative chair for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, or WILPF, and worked as a civil rights, community, and peace activist, and is the namesake of the Margaret Moseley Memorial Peace Fund. She founded local chapters of the WILPF and NAACP upon moving to Cape Cod in 1961, as well as numerous other organizations. She was a founding member of the Barnstable Unitarian Church’s Social Responsibility committee and was the first woman chair of the prudential committee. She met the reverse freedom riders in 1962, and traveled to Selma, Alabama in 1965 to work on voting rights.http://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5527http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/margaret-moseley/http://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:american+folklife+center&q=Moseley,+Margaret.+Papers+-+The +Civil+Rights+History+Project:+Survey+of+Collections+and+Repositories+%28The+American+Folklife+Center,+Library+of+Congress%29http://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/Mary Edmonia Lewis (1848 to 1907)
An American sculptor of Black and Native American descent, Mary Lewis, often known in art circles and Edmonia Lewis, was born in 1848 in upstate New York. Following her brother’s success in the California Gold Rush, she was able to attend college at Oberlin Collegiate Institute, but left the college after several incidents. She moved to Boston in 1864 to pursue a career in sculpting, despite limited experience or education in the art, telling a story about seeing a sculpture of Benjamin Franklin and deciding she could make a “stone man” on her own. She was introduced to numerous sculptors in the area, but finding an instructor was difficult until Edward Agustus Brackett began teaching her. She soon began selling some of her pieces, and she opened her own studio to the public in her first exhibit the same year. Inspired by the lives of abolitionists and civil war heroes, she also began writing. She used her artwork to fund and gain subscription to travel to Rome, Italy to expand her expertise. She spent much of her life in travel before her death in London in 1907.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonia_LewisMildred C. Hailey (Active 1960s to 2015)
From the late 1960s onward, Mildred Hailey was a guiding presence over the Bromley-Heath Public Housing Development until her death in 2015. She was part of the drive to remove control of the development from the Boston Housing Authority in 1968 through a range of activities, including negotiating truces between rival gangs that led to a GED program, repairing intolerable conditions in the community, and treating the entire neighborhood as extended family. She willingly took on an extremely difficult job using a combination of courage and compassion in an area and at a time when heat, electricity, and running water were spotty at best, and was considered a force of nature by those who knew her. When the progressive board of commissioners stepped aside, she was an active part of building a sense of community and a successful model of reclaiming broken public housing. She retired as executive director in 2012, but attended meetings until the last few months of her life.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/19/mildred-hailey-tenant-activism-transformed-boston-public-housing/uMvf9iF3ozuC8lLlVOKiCN/story.html?event=event12
Nadine Fortune Wright (1893 to 1994)
Born in Illinois in 1893, Nadine Wright was born into a wealthy, well-educated family that was not protected from racial crimes. This experience stirred up in her a lifelong passion for activism and achievement. Following the death of her father in 1899 and her mother in 1906, she was sent with her brother to Cambridge to live with her aunt, a founder of the Niagara Movement. Growing up in the center of Black political and intellectual activities, she graduated from Radcliffe in 1917 and taught in the Cambridge public school system for almost 20 years. She was also a trustee for Robert Gould Shaw house, chartered the Boston Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, and served in a range of organizations. She taught at colleges in North Carolina for many years before returning to Boston to teach children with cerebral palsy. She passed away in 1994.
https://www.mountaugurn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210228123150/https://mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
Bishop Nellie Yarborough (Active 1960s to 2010s)
Focused on ensuring everyone in her community could lean on someone during hard times, Nellie Yarborough worked with church parishioners and police to reduce crime and poverty in her Dorchester neighborhood. Born to a preacher’s family in North Carolina, She began preaching at age 12 and traveling at age 17 with Brumfield Johnson, to Boston, where she helped found the Mount Calvary Holy Church. She became the assistant pastor of the church in 1962 and was made senior pastor a decade later when Johnson passed. She became the second bishop of the church in 1994, and spent her life as an advocate and friend to the homeless while serving food to people in need every Thursday evening, often to crowds over 100. She passed away in 2012.
https://www.legacylcom/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/hellie-yarborough-obituary?id=7382565
Sister Nellie S. Harris (1884 to 1964)
Sister Nellie S. Harris was born in 1884, and passed away in 1964. This was the extent of the details I could find on this individual.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/214536641/nellie-s-harris
https://www.geni.com/people/Nellie-Harris/6000000024944257856
Nora L. Baston (Active 1996 to 2020s)
A pillar of the Boston community, Nora Baston is an 18-year veteran of the Boston Police Department. Managing community engagement, she has focused on tracking down girls who are starting to move in with gangs and getting guns off the streets. Seeing the successes of Boston youth powers her drive and work as deputy superintendent, one of four women working on the Boston Police command staff. She spends three to four nights weekly engaging with kids in Boston, whether it’s as a mentor or in other roles, building trust in areas where violence is strong. By providing youth with alternatives to gangs and drugs, she hopes to turn the community around. She has two degrees from University of Massachusetts Lowell and has graduated from the Boston Police Academy in 1996, crediting former Police Commissioner Davis with teaching her the best ways to connect with people on a one-on-one basis. https://www.bostonherald.com/2014/04/07/women-in-command-deputy-superintendent-nora-l-baston/Peggy Olivia Brown, Ed.D. (1934 to 2014)
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1934, Peggy Brown had strong concerns that children of color were being overlooked in public schools. Her strongly-held belief that all children can learn led her to undertake dramatic initiatives after seeing the devastating lives of those without education in the Bronx neighborhood she grew up in. After attending multiple universities, she lectured at Northeastern University and Boston College. Her initiatives also included improved healthcare in Roxbury at the Mandela Town Hall Health Spot, providing weekly blood pressure and blood sugar screenings. Dr. Brown invited optometrists, dentists, and other healthcare professionals to help address the many healthcare disparities she saw in the community. She mentored kids one-on-one and in groups, often staying up until 4 or 5 in the morning to finish term papers to ensure they’d graduate and have a successful life until her death in 2014.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/27/peggy-brown-educator-and-activist-founded-mandela-crew-first-african-american-and-latino-team-compete-head-charles/p0962cwuqrl5SLsObdjkzJ/story.html
Shirley Carrington (Active 1980s to 1990s)As the director of the Roxbury Multi-Service Center, Shirley Carrington helped the organization strengthen families and empower the community, especially during the turbulent crime sprees of the 1980s. Reaching out to a range of organizations to bring money and services into the community, including the United Way and New Hope Baptist, she sought to leverage the Center's resources to lower crime rates by increasing employment, improving education, and lifting the entire community up with a hand up instead of a hand out. She also provided resources for lowering infant mortality in Roxbury.
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m0435b57h
https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/1011/agang.html
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m04358327
Shirley Shillingford (Active 1975 to 2000s)
As the name behind Shirley’s Pantry in Mattapan, Shirley Shillingford has always had a strong focus on food and carnival. She started with the Caribbean American Carnival Association of Boston in 1975, she served alongside founders Ivy Ponder and Ken Bonaparte Mitchell, who stepped back in 1990 for her to lead the organization for the past 33 years. She served for a similar long period of time at Healthy Baby, Healthy Food Pantry on Mattapan’s River Street which she founded in 1992. At the time, she had no resources except asking for government and businesses for help. Her strong dedication to disadvantaged populations and communities has led her to reach out to company employees, elected officials and the community to keep the pantry running successfully for over 20 decades.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/202-08-25/bostons-carnival-celebrating-50-years-is-a-treasure-says-organizer
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/it-s-shirly-s-pantry-now-renaming-honors-longtime-manager-mattapan
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/23/mattapan-food-pantry-named-for-its-manager-a-longtime-activist/
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/adelaide-cromwell-40
Adrienne R. Benton Though many Black women have served and raced in long-distance running, it was only recently that the Boston Athletic Association appointed its first Black woman to its board: Adrienne Benton. Involved with the marathon for many years, Benton is actively working at eliminating racial and other disparities within the distance running sport while acting as an ambassador. After a sibling ran a 5K in 2014, Benton became interested in running and has since completed six marathons which include four Abbot World Marathon Majors, as well as numerous shorter races. She has served as the Boston Marathon's finish line announcer in the past. She also hopes that the Boston Athletic Association will address disparities using collaboration and outreach through the Boston Running Collaborative, to improve access to year-round training facilities along with health and wellness options that benefit the community, and track-and-field career development. A graduate of Rutgers University, she founded Onyx Spectrum Technology, recognized in the 2020 Inner City 100 by the Competitive Inner City, which she started after working as a hospital administrator at Boston Medical Center, which later became one of her clients.
https://www.boston.com/news/boston-marathon/2022/04/15/adrienne-benton-boston-athletic-association-board/
Adrienne Smith When Adrienne Smith's father gave her a football when she was seven, she learned to throw, but accepted at the time that there was no place for women in professional tackle football. In discovering a women's professional tackle football league as an adult, she was able to revive her childhood dream. As the star receiver for the Boston Renegades, Smith is determined to help young girls learn about the possibilities that lie ahead. With 14 professional seasons behind her, she's gained an outstanding list of accomplishments as a Black female athlete, including two gold medals for the U.S. Women's Football National Team, nine Women's Football Alliance (WFA) All-Star appearances, four WFA championships, and an amazing touchdown. At the International Federation of American Football Women's World Championship in Stockholm in 2010, Smith received a catch and run that stretched out 52 long yards. As an athletic ambassador, she promotes it every way she can, including brand partnerships, speaking events, and Gridiron Queendom, an international organization she started to support females who want to play football. This has led to major enterprises such as the NFL and Nike investing millions of dollars into girls' high school football opportunities.
https://www.si.com/more-sports/2022/06/02/adrienne-smith-boston-renegades-womens-football
Alfreda Harris: Raised in a strong community in Roxbury in the 1940s and 1950s, Alfreda Harris always had a strong interest in sports and coaching. Using her coaching abilities, she helped countless Black teens gain college scholarships, helping them to get the education they needed to succeed in life and break the chains of poverty. As the founder of the Shelburne Recreation Center, she moved up through the organization as its Administrative Coordinator, which provided her with the opportunity to impact many young lives in the Roxbury community. A life-long athlete, she also served as the women's basketball coach at several Boston colleges, including the University of Massachusetts Boston, Roxbury Community College, and Emerson College. Harris also served on the Boston School Committee, becoming its longest-serving member over the course of her life. Her strong impact on the lives of youth, recreation, and community is outstanding, and her experiences in mentoring Roxbury youth has helped change the life of hundreds of individuals over the past decades.
https://roxbury.library.northeastern.edu/harris/
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m039rx707?datastream_id=content
Alice A. Casneau Born after the Civil War, Alice Caseneau was an active professional dressmaker and author with a passion for community service at the beginning of the 20th century. Born in Virginia, she was living in Boston with her husband Elmer and daughter Pearl in 1900. She had already made a name for herself as a professional dressmaker and as a vocal member of the Black community. Casneau had joined the Women's Era Club in the early 1890s, an organization for Black women encouraging community work and self-improvement. She contributed to the First National Conference of Colored Women of America in 1895, serving on the Committee on Special Work. She published a book on artistic dress cutting and making, and spoke on the topic at the first meeting of the National Negro Business League in 1900. Casneau joined the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and gave talks when sessions were held in Boston. She worked in the Soldiers' Comfort Unit during World War I and took an active interest in politics at that time, and remained engaged in community service and other organizations for the rest of her life, passing in 1953.
https://www.nps.gov/people/alice-casneau.htm
Andrea Bradford: At age five, opera singer Andrea Bradford began her musical training with the study of piano. Born in 1949, her vocal training began while attending St. Francis De Sales High School under Sister Mary Elise, who was the co-founder of Opera Ebony in New York. Though the Black boarding school had taken her far from home, her career would take her even further. She returned to her Huntsville roots to attend Oakwood College, then continued to her bachelor's degree at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, followed by a Master's degree at Boston University College of Fine Arts in 1973. She joined the Opera Company of Boston in 1975, touring with founder and conductor Sarah Caldwell in New England and Europe. She also performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops Orchestra as a soloist. She appeared in La Traviata, Madame Butterfly, The Barber of Seville, Three Willies, The Negro Burial Ground, The Balcony, and Lost in the Stars, among others. She also worked as manager of college recruiting for Bain & Company, then moved on to become the vice president and executive recruiter for Isaacson, Miller before moving on to many other prestigious positions.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/andrea-bradford
Andrea Campbell, J.D. Dedicated to fighting for equity and opportunity, Andrea Campbell is the Attorney General of Massachusetts. Growing up in an unstable living environment with her father in prison and losing her mother to a car accident at eight months of age, Campbell and her brothers lived with relatives and foster care until her father was released from prison when she was eight. Relying on public housing and assistance, her grandmother struggled with alcoholism as her brothers cycled into and out of the prison system, causing her to lose her twin Andre when he died in state custody. Through this hardship, she persevered, turning painful experiences into purpose. She graduated from Boston Latin School, then Princeton University and UCLA. She worked as a legal services attorney at EdLaw to defend children and families, especially those with disabilities, as well as at Proskauer LLP, but chose to move to General Counsel at the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission. She served as legal counsel to Governor Patrick, then ran successfully for Boston City Council, becoming the first woman to represent District 4. She was elected unanimously as the first Black woman to the City Council President position, then was elected Attorney General in 2022. https://www.andreacampbell.org/
Andrea H. Major: Shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, Andrea Major made hers a reality. Opening the Roxbury Center for the Performing Arts, originally known as Andrea's School of Dance, in 1967, this accomplished dancer, teacher, and choreographer began her dance education at age three. Graduating from the Boston Conservatory of Music with a bachelor's degree, Major continued her education in the Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York City. Starting with an experimental program at the Roxbury YMCA, she began offering classes, realizing at the time that young children in the inner city didn't have any real exposure to the performing arts, prompting her to open her own school and center to meet that need. Having received a wide range of awards, citations, and honors from religious groups, corporations, and civic organizations, Major's contributions to exposing inner-city youth to the performing arts are uncontested. With a strong passion for dance, she has a strong commitment to giving her students a strong appreciation for the performing arts.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/andrea-herbert-majors-work-mentoring-city-kids-has-inspired-them-to-dream-big/22680172
https://www.rcpaboston.org/
Andrea J. Cabral, J.D.: With a long history of public service, Andrea Cabral grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and graduated from Boston College and then Suffolk University Law School in 1986. With an impressive thirty-year career including being the first woman serving as Suffolk County sheriff, Cabral's other accomplishments include public safety secretary under former Governor Patrick, which oversaw 14 public safety organizations within the state, reforming prisoner reentry programs, modernizing correctional facilities, serving as president of the Massachusetts Sheriff's Association, assistant state attorney general, director of Roxbury District Court Family Violence Project, Suffolk and Middlesex Counties assistant district attorney, co-founder and chief of the office's Domestic Violence Unit, senior prosecutor for civil rights cases, and chief of the District Court and Community Prosecutions. She also wrote the state's first continuing education legal manual on restraining orders in domestic violence cases. Cabral is an Eisenhower Fellow, and served as one of the 18 national experts that were appointed to the Science Advisory Board by former U.S. Attorney General Holder. She's a member of the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy Advisory Board at Boston College, the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly editorial board, and the Mass Mentoring Partnership's Governing Board.
https://www.herself360.com/articles/national-womens-history-month-loretta-ross-and-sheriff-andrea-cabral
Andrea L. Taylor: As the first and current Senior Diversity Officer at Boston University, Andrea Taylor has a long history of working for diversity, equity, and inclusion through her work in civil rights. Born in 1947, she has been the president and CEO of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, she has worked on the same issues that had arisen when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his peaceful protests against discrimination in Alabama. Operating an institute that is part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and the Smithsonian Institute, Taylor is returning to her roots as a Boston University alumnus. She is also the chairperson for the campus-wide Community Safety Advisory Group and Antiracism Working Group, a co-chair of the Task Force on Workplace Culture, and has been a Boston University Trustee in the past. She has also served as Director of Citizenship and Corporate Giving at the Microsoft Corporation in North America, and is a founding director of the Media Fund at the Ford Foundation, supporting global film and broadcast documentary productions focusing on social justice and civil rights. During her philanthropy career, she was responsible for distributing over $1 billion to promote social equity.
https://www.bu.edu/diversity-officer/profile/andrea-l-taylor/
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/andrea-l-taylor
Ann H. Pilot: Though Ann Pilot retired in 2009 after a 40-year career with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, she wasn't done with her musical career. After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Music, she performed extensively as a soloist prior to becoming the substitute second harp of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and principal harp of the Washington National Symphony. She first joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1969 as the assistant principal harp while playing as principal for the Boston Pops Orchestra. She then moved up to principal harp of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1980, a position she held until her retirement from the organization in 2009. During her extensive career, she has played as a soloist with orchestras across the United States, Europe, Haiti, New Zealand, and South Africa. She has recorded several albums with Boston Records, Koch International, and Denouement record labels. In 1999, she traveled to London to record Harp Concerto by Kevin Kaska, an American composer whom she had commissioned the work through, with the London Symphony Orchestra. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including multiple honorary doctorates, the Distinguished Alumni Award, the Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Boston Musicians Association and Talent Development League, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
http://www.annhobsonpilot.com/
Anna B. Gardner Born in 1901, Anna Bobbitt Gardner lived until her late 90s, always focused on bringing musical education and performance to the Black community in Boston. As the first Black woman to earn a Bachelor's degree from the New England Conservatory in 1932, Anna Gardner paved the way for other Black musicians by opening her music school in Boston before she had even begun her post-secondary musical education. Her Academy of Musical Arts was opened in the basement of her home on Claremont Street in Boston, and for over the next sixty years, she operated no fewer than five studios under that name. At Symphony Hall, she managed Colored American Nights, featuring a range of talented Black musicians and groups, as well as producing local radio and television programs for Black audiences in the Boston area. She was appointed as State Director of Negro History Week programs in 1945 by Governor Maurice J. Tobin, a position she was reappointed to by several succeeding governors. As part of its ongoing recognition of exceptional talent, the New England Conservatory has granted one musician a year the Anna Bobbitt Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award since her death in 1997.
https://necmusic.edu/news/archives-celebration-necs-african-american-legacy-part-i
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Anna F. Jones: As one of the oldest and highest-impact community foundations, the Boston Foundation welcomed its first Black woman as CEO, Anna Faith Jones. She had worked her way up, receiving an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Massachusetts in 1986 when she was serving as director of the Foundation. The groundbreaking leadership provided by herself and another Foundation Board Chair, Frieda Garcia, inspired the organization to develop the Anna Faith Jones and Frieda Garcia Women of Color Leadership Circle. Her leadership helped steer the Boston Foundation towards its mission today of closing disparities in the region to improve opportunities, prosperity, and equitable outcomes. To further these goals, Jones also spoke publicly, including as the 4th James A. Joseph Lecture on Philanthropy honoree in 1994. During her lecture, she brought up the sweeping changes that were happening in social welfare programs, Boston's role as a city of immigrants, and the prejudice that the many waves of immigration have seen over the years, referencing Boston's Puritan roots and John Winthrop's "City on a Hill". After stepping down from the Boston Foundation in 2001, her leadership and example to that organization have continued in its activities exponentially.
https://www.tbf.org/news-and-insights/press-releases/2022/january/2022-woclc-announcement-20220119
https://www.abfe.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1994_Anna-Faith-Jones.pdf
https://www.pionline.com/article/20001002/ONLINE/10020771/anna-faith-jones-will-step-down-as-president-and-ceo-of-the-boston
Audrea F.J. Dunham, Ph.D.: Born and raised in the Roxbury neighborhood in Boston, Audrea Dunham was a civil rights activist, author, and educator whose interests focus on the role of women in social movements, a passion she attributed to the early influences she had with many Boston civil rights activists, her own activism in the Stay-Out for Freedom campaigns as a student, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. March, and during the 1960s, as a leader for the Massachusetts State Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Having earned a Ph.D. in African American Studies at Temple University, she has taught African American Studies courses at both Delaware State University and Georgia State University. She has also served as a board member on the National Council for Black Studies, and as a Journal of Black Studies associate editor. She has also published articles on a number of organizations, including Mothers for Adequate Welfare, Fight for a Change!, and The Evolution of the Welfare Rights Movement as it relates to Boston in the International Journal of Africana Studies, and is working on a book-length manuscript for publication in the future.
https://openvault.wgbh.org/exhibits/boston_civil_rights/authors
Rep. Ayanna Pressley: Born in Cincinnati in 1974 and raised in Chicago, Ayanna Pressley moved to Boston for college, then worked with Congressional Representative Joseph P. Kenedy II and Senator John Kerry. Representing Massachusetts Seventh Congressional District, Representative Ayanna Pressley is the first Black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She's also an activist, advocate, and legislator, fighting to ensure that those who are closest to the issues facing minority communities today are those who are informing and driving policymaking. Pressley is a champion for justice, encouraging healing while promoting reproductive freedom, as well as justice for the elderly, immigrants, survivors of sexual assault, formerly and currently imprisoned, workers, and those who have been through trauma. As an individual with alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes rapid hair loss and impacts disproportionately black women and children, she advocates for others who have the disease, serving as a public role model to raise awareness and support. Prior to her work in the U.S. House of Representatives, she was the first Black woman elected to the Boston City Council, where she served for eight years.
https://pressley.house.gov/about/
https://www.biography.com/political-figures/ayanna-pressley
Barbara Gomes-Beach: Though some may recognize Barbara Gomes-Beach as the mother of Hollywood actor Michael Beach, she was actually a powerhouse in her own right, speaking out about the continuing AIDS epidemic both at home and abroad. With a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Masters degree in City Planning from MIT, Gomes-Beach raised her four children using her wages as a city planner while pursuing her dream of singing. Born in the late 1930s, she recalled a cousin dying of the disease in the mid-1980s, and mentioned during a 1996 interview that not enough had been done in communities of color to fight the spread of the disease. Passing in 2017, she had at that point 10 grandchildren and numerous unnamed great-grandchildren, which was the drive for her activism and advocacy for individuals with HIV and AIDS, including her work as the executive director of the Multicultural AIDS Coalition, which was started in 1989 and is still working to provide equity and equality to AIDS treatments in minority communities, many of which are separated by boundaries of language, cultural beliefs, and poverty, preventing a single approach to the issue.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/barbara-gomes-beach-obituary?id=6712250
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFNgaLXHOuP/
https://lucykingdom.com/barbara-gomez-beach/
https://bostonphoenix.com/archive/1in10/96/11/BARBARA_GOMES_BEACH.html
https://www.mac-boston.org/about
Barbara Smith As a pioneer in Black feminism, Barbara Smith is an activist, author, lecturer, publisher, and lesbian. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she and her twin sister participated in the 1960s civil rights protests. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1969 with a major in sociology and English, and received a Doctor of Humane Letters in 2019. As a co-founder of the Combahee River Collective in Boston in 1974, Smith and other Black feminist pioneers co-authored the Combahee River Collective Statement with Beverly and Demita Frazier. Considered by many to be the first example of intersectionality in oppression and prejudice, it's an example that is used in many social justice campaigns today. She taught her first course on Black women's literature at Emerson College in 1973, and has been an educator and lecturer at several other colleges and universities over the years. She also co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, the first publisher in the United States specifically for books by women of color. She was elected to the Common Council in Albany, NY in 2005, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the same year. Her writings have been in numerous national and international publications.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/directory/alum/barbara-smith
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-1974-1980/
Judge Barbara A. Dortch-OkaraAs the first Black and woman to become a Chief Justice for Administration and Management of the Massachusetts Trial Court, Barbara Dortch-Okara graduated from Brandeis University in 1971, then went on to receive her Boston College Law School JD in 1974. She received her first judicial appointment to the Boston Municipal Court in 1984, then to the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1984, and oversaw the management of the Trial Court in 1998. She has received multiple awards, including the 2000 Boston Bar Association Citation of Judicial Excellence, the 2007 Judicial Excellence Award from the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys, and the 2011 Trailblazer Award of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association. She was appointed to chair the State Ethics Commission in 2013 by Governor Deval Patrick. After retiring from her duties, she became a professor at New England Law Boston until 2018. She was elected in 2019 as a member of the Committee on Judicial Performance Evaluation, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court committee tasked with reviewing and revising the performance evaluation process trial judges are required by statute to undergo. She holds honorary Doctor of Law degrees from both New England Law Boston and Southern New England School of Law.
https://www.brandeis.edu/trustees/members/dortch-okara.html
Barbara C. Elam Born in 1929, Barbara Elam was a community activist, children's advocate, and librarian, working on social justice issues such as literacy, educational reform, and mental health. She received her Bachelors in Library Science from Simmons College, choosing this path to help children learn to love reading and education. She worked briefly in the New York Public Library, before returning to Boston as the children's librarian at the Boston Public Library. She raised her children but dedicated her excess time and energy to addressing racial inequalities in the Boston Public School system and the desperate need for mental health services in the Black community. She joined and eventually became president of the Massachusetts Mental Health Association Fort Hill chapter, lobbying to establish the Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller Center. After her children were at school, she returned to the school library system, enhancing the school system with books written by and about people of color. She made libraries the schools' focal points, while developing a program to train low-income mothers without diplomas as library aides. Many continued their interrupted schooling to become librarians. Elam continued her education with a Masters in Education from Boston University and Masters in Library Science from Simmons.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/obituary/barbara-clark-elam/
Bishop Barbara C. HarrisBorn in Philadelphia, Barbara Harris was a civil rights movement supporter, advocate, and feminist minister in the Episcopal Church. Choosing to move to the Church of the Advocate along with her voter registration efforts and participating in the Selma march in the 1960s, she moved from public relations executive career to support Episcopal Bishops defying the ban on ordaining women in 1974. She entered the ministry, being ordained as a deacon in 1979 and a priest in 1980, serving as priest-in-charge at St. Augustine of Hippo. She was a chaplain at Philadelphia County Prisons and counseled industrial corporations on public policy and social concerns. She wrote monthly columns for The Witness, elevating her in the international Anglican community. After the 1988 Lambeth Conference determined that each province of the Communion could choose to ordain women as bishops, Harris was ordained as the first female bishop in the Episcopal Church. She was active in many organizations, including membership in the Union of Black Episcopalians and past president of the Episcopal Urban Caucus. She served on several vital local, state, national, and international boards, committees, and ministries to help serve underserved minorities in the Boston area.
https://episcopalarchives.org/church-awakens/exhibits/show/leadership/clergy/harris
Belinda SuttonAs the author of one of the earliest slave narratives written by a Black woman in the American colonies, Belinda Sutton was born around 1712 in or near Ghana in western Africa. Captured by slave raiders at around the age of 12, she was marched to the coast and then placed on a ship with approximately 300 other Blacks bound for the Caribbean plantations. Purchased by the Royall family in Antigua, she was moved with the family to Boston when they moved from one plantation to another location. In Massachusetts, Royall was the state's largest slaveholder. However, as the American Revolution began, Sutton's Loyalist owner fled to England, which allowed her to live in unofficial freedom in the Massachusetts colony. At the end of the war, when slavery was being abolished, Sutton petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1783 for reparations for her unpaid labor from the Royall estate. She was granted 15 pounds, 12 shillings annually, which she was required to petition for on an annual basis. She did so until 1793, at which point she slips from history, believed to have perished by 1799 at a ripe old age for the time of well over 80 years.
https://enslaved.org/fullStory/16-23-106154/
Benaree P. Wiley Born in Washington, D.C. in 1946, Benaree "Bennie" Pratt Wiley was a corporate chief executive who graduated from Howard University with a Bachelor's degree in Marketing in 1968. She entered Harvard's Business School, receiving her MBA in 1972 and working as a consultant for corporations and nonprofits to build capacity and refine program delivery. She launched a high-end toy store to combine her business and child development passions. She became The Partnership's president and CEO in 1991, an organization to help over 200 Boston-area businesses to develop, attract, and retain over 1,300 professionals of color, increasing leadership of people of color in the city's corporate sector. At the same time, the organization helped professionals of color navigate Boston's complex corporate structure to achieve success and improve diversity within the city's corporate professional population. Wiley was a past chair of directors of the Children's Museum, a trustee of Boston College, an overseer of the WGBH Educational Foundation, a former director of the Crispus Attucks Children's Center, a director at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and at the Boston Foundation. Selected as one of Boston's most powerful women in 2003 by Boston Magazine, she retired in 2005 from The Partnership.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/benaree-p-wiley-40
Berthé M. GainesA strong library advocate, Berthé M. Gaines met then-future Mayor Raymond Flynn in the early 1980s as she was protesting library budget cuts while working as a typesetter and proofreader at the Globe and running the Dudley Square Friends of the Library group. When Flynn was elected in 1983, one of his first acts was to ask her to serve as the Boston Public Library board's first Black woman and the first female president. Gaines' strong-held belief that nobody, especially children, should have to travel out of their neighborhood for a library led her to the founding of Save Our Libraries. She was known for saying, "You don't have to go to Harvard to be a scholar," believing that with a library at their disposal, everyone has the same educational resources. She was involved both with the main Copley Square location and the branch libraries, with a keen understanding of the branches within the entire system. From her efforts, no branches were closed and service hours were increased, so people of all ages, cultures, and races feel at home at any library branch. For her efforts, she received an honorary doctorate in library science from Simmons College in 1999.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/07/04/berthe-gaines-boston-first-african-american-woman-serve-boston-public-library-board/F4XYyuAUCHhYYYlgkTlDnJ/story.html
Betty L. Wornum Betty Wornum started her professional career as a caseworker at Grove Hall's transitional assistance office. Driven to provide services to those within the community who were unable to otherwise find appropriate accommodation, she founded the Roxbury Community Health Center, also known as Rox Comp, in 1968. Her dedication to the community allowed many individuals who would otherwise be unable to pay for services to receive quality healthcare and related services for four and a half decades before the organization closed its doors in 2013. In addition to being a mother of nine, her activities in the community advanced her actions to receive the Sojourner Truth award as well as awards from several other awards for her long-standing community action and volunteer work.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Betty-Wornum
https://carelistings.com/federally-qualified-health-centers/roxbury-ma/roxbury-comprehensive-community-health-center/5ace885893efd2372f981eff
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2013/03/20/roxcomps-closing-leaves-employees-out-in-the-cold-2/
Beulah S. HesterBorn as the daughter of a minister in Oxford, North Carolina, Beulah Hester, often referred to as Sister Beulah, served the community in and around Boston for over 40 years at the Twelfth Baptist Sanctuary in Roxbury alongside her husband, also a minister. She pursued higher education actively throughout her life, first at Hartshorn College, then later at Boston University's School of Religious Education and Simmons College School of Social Work. Her dedication to the community included acting as President of the Queen Esther Club and Missionary Society, organizer of The Roxbury Goldenaires, one of the area's first senior groups, as well as the Philathea Class and Chapel Choir. She supervised Neighborhood Services at the Robert Gould Shaw House, and was a member of the Board of Overseers for the Boston Welfare Department. Upon returning to North Carolina after her retirement, she assisted with the Central Orphanage Music Department, organized the Oxford AARP chapter, was a member of the North Carolina Council of the National Association of Social Workers, and served as a pianist at the Belton Creek Baptist Church prior to the illness that took her life in 1981.
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m044zp376?datastream_id=content
Beulah Providence Coming to the United States from Dominica in 1960 to better herself, Beulah Providence started out her life in the United States as a housekeeper. However, her drive to become a more productive person and make strong, positive changes in her community. With very little formal education, she was able to leverage scholarships and other resources to educate herself by enrolling at Northeastern University that was offered following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Working with professor Rosemary Whiting, she began working on an assignment to develop a project to provide services within a local community. Providence's project was the beginning of what would become the Caribbean Foundation of Boston and the Urban Community Homemaking, Home Health Aide, and Chore Services, of which Providence is now the executive director.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/beulah-providence-32ab981b/
Beverley Johnson Beverley Johnson decided early on in her career that she would do two things in her career: work in a field she was passionate about and never spend all day in the office, but instead would be in the field, working with clients. Starting out working in Washington D.C. in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, she moved to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, Johnson knew that she had a passion for doing work to help stabilize neighborhoods by investing in physical and economic revitalization. By operating in the sub-sector of real estate development that ensures that neighborhoods impacted by big project developers don't lose their sense of community, Johnson began Bevco Associates in July 1994 as president to ensure projects have a positive impact on neighborhoods surrounding the development. Bevco consults on urban planning, project management, public land conveyance, zoning, permitting, and community engagement. The company's portfolio includes Crosstown Center, the development of the Mattapan Boston State Hospital site, and MBTA public engagement efforts. The integrity she brings to every project builds trust in the community that she has their best interests at heart. She's also been president and chair of the Massachusetts Minority Contractors Association board.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2015/03/09/beverley-johnsons-consulting-firm-builds-bridges-between-developers-and-community/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverley-johnson-a6170942/
Blanche E. Braxton: As the first Black woman admitted to the Massachusetts Bar as a lawyer, Blanche Braxton graduated from the Portia School of Law, which evolved into New England Law Boston, in 1921, in an age when many women of any race were not encouraged to attend higher education institutions. Following her graduation, she prepared for the Bar exam and was admitted to the Bar in Massachusetts two years later on March 16, 1923. A decade later, she became the first Black woman to practice law in the U.S. District Court in the District of Massachusetts, and was admitted on March 21, 1933. Living in Roxbury, she had a private practice at 412 Massachusetts Avenue, and her memory is honored with a scholarship every year by the Massachusetts Black Women Attorneys Foundation named in her honor, which is awarded to law students of color who have been shown to have demonstrated commitment to public service, dedication to the advancement of minorities through the legal process, and outstanding academic achievement.
https://massblackwomenattys.org/scholarship.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_E._Braxton
Carmen Fields Journalist Carmen Fields has won Emmy awards for her work as a local news anchor and is a familiar face to Bostonians. After completing her journalism degree at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri and reporting at the city's CBS station, she moved to Boston, graduating from COM with her Masters degree in 1973. She was a Boston Globe reporter who was first to interview Ted Landsmark, the attorney attacked when he wandered into a protest against school integration. Growing up in segregated Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fields was determined to break barriers as one of the Globe's two black women in the newsroom. She quickly moved from a rookie reporter and up through the ranks, becoming a part of the team at the paper that won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for their coverage of school desegregation and became an assistant metro editor and a columnist after a walkout to desegregate the paper's editorial ranks. She undertook several positions at Channels Four and Seven and was producer of a public affairs show Higher Ground. She was honored alongside Liz Walker and Sarah-Ann Shaw, the first Black female reporters in the area, by the Roxbury Community College Foundation.
https://www.bu.edu/com/articles/carmen-fields-tells-her-story/
Carol Fulp: As the founder of Fulp Diversity, Carol Fulp collaborates with corporate executives to promote diversity within the corporate environment. Her book Success Through Diversity: Why the Most Inclusive Companies Will Win has received good reviews from multiple organizations. She has worked with over 100 organizations, with a long list of top-ranking companies as her clients, including Microsoft, Liberty Mutual, CVS, McKinsey, Harvard, UPS, and many more. She delivered the Inclusive Leadership Forum Series at Boston College Graduate School of Business and worked with the Institute of Politics, Policy & History to produce their Founding Fathers Symposiums: Unpacking the Truth Behind the Complex Legacies. Prior to her work at Fulp Diversity, she served in a range of high-level executive positions at The Partnership, John Hancock Financial, the Gillette Company, and a range of several media organizations. She was appointed as a Representative of the United States to the Sixty-Fifth Session of the United Nations General Assembly by President Obama. She serves the community through positions on boards of a wide range of organizations. She has received numerous awards for her service in the Boston area and is a graduate of the University of the State of New York, along with multiple honorary degrees.
https://www.fulpdiversity.com/carol-fulp
Carole C. Thomas Carole Copeland Thomas is a business owner, speaker, instructor, thought leader, and trainer. Moderating key issues impacting global economies, she has worked with experts at large organizations including Moster, Cargill, Verizon, and many others. She has spent a decade as an adjunct faculty member at Bentley University, and as a speaker, has presented in a range of national and international forums. She is a co-founder of a non-profit international humanitarian organization as a result of a 2005 trip to Kenya and now focuses on aiding women and children in southern India. Thomas is the founder of the Multicultural Symposium Series, an initiative to advance multicultural issues. As the host of Focus on Empowerment, a talk show, the program was also available on the internet and focused on current issues. An active member of local and regional social activism organizations, she's worked to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in a wide range of sectors and industries. A graduate of Emory University in 1975, she entered graduate school on a Martin Luther King, Jr. fellowship at Northeastern University and graduated with an MBA. She received the Certified Diversity Meeting Professional designation from the International Association of Hispanic Meeting Professionals in 2011.
http://www.tellcarole.com/about-carole.html
Carolyn Wilkins A current professor, pianist, composer, and vocalist in the Ensemble Department at the Berklee College of Music, Carolyn Wilkins has performed on radio and television with her group SpiritJazz. She's undertaken a concert tour in South America acting as a jazz ambassador for the U.S. Department of State, has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony and at numerous other events. She's also an author of numerous books including Tips for Singers: Rehearsing, Performing, and Auditioning, They Raised Me Up: A Black Single Mother and the Women Who Inspired Her, Damn Near White: An African American Family’s Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success, and Melody for Murder: A Bertie Bigelow Mystery. She is a former faculty member for the Tobin Community School and New England Conservatory of Music, a former lecturer at Fitchburg State College, Emmerson College and Emmanuel College, received her Bachelor's degree from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and her Masters at Eastman School of Music. Her experience in the competitive environments at Oberlin and Eastman put her in a great position to understand what her students at Berklee are working with on a daily basis.
https://college.berklee.edu/people/carolyn-wilkins
Charlene Carroll Black hair faces many challenges, which is why master hair stylist Charlene Carrroll is highly recognized for developing wrapping starting in the 1970s. A Boston native born in 1950, she was raised in the projects and turned her skill with Black hair into her success. She sees hair wrapping as a way to calm the hair and put it into a resting position, brushing or wrapping the hair to lay against the scalp, which is then secured using a silk scarf. Used to protect hair from frizzing in high humidity or moisture, it's often a technique used at home, but has begun to appear publicly more often. This allowed her clients to protect their hair while they were going from the salon to their home, work, or other location, ensuring that her clients would look just as great when they got home as they did in the salon. This dedication to excellence has made Carroll the go-to stylist in Boston as well as the rest of the East Coast, promoting hair education as well as style. She's shared the technique across the US and internationally, though she only takes a few private clients in her retirement.
https://www.theroot.com/gifted-black-hairstylist-created-the-doobie-wrap-1850337893
Charlotte F. Grimké Born into a free Black family in Philadelphia in 1837, Charlotte Grimke was an abolitionist, educator, and author of five volumes of diaries published posthumously. With her family active in the abolitionist movement, she was educated by tutors at home due to segregation in the Philadelphia school system. Attending Higginson Grammar School in the more tolerant Salem, Massachusetts as the only Black student, she began keeping the first of her diaries. She then chose to begin her career as an educator, matriculating at the Salem Normal School, now Salem State University, as a teacher. Graduating in 1856, she worked at the Epes Grammar School, an all-white school in Salem. She began writing poetry which was published in antislavery periodicals such as The Liberator. During the Civil War, she volunteered to serve as a teacher to educate formerly enslaved Blacks on South Carolina's Sea Islands. Her experiences there, including an 1864 two-part essay "Life on the Sea Islands' ' were published in Atlantic Monthly. Her passion in serving formerly enslaved individuals led her to work as the secretary at the Freedman's Union Commission Boston branch. Her dedication to abolition and women's suffrage lasted through the end of her life.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Forten-Grimke
Charlotte Matthews-Nelson Working at Northwestern University since her graduation in 1979, Charlotte Matthews Nelson is the program coordinator for Northeastern Law School's Center for Law, Equity, and Race. As one of 69 Bostonian civil rights leaders honored during the unveiling of a statue of the embrace of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King in Boston Common. Her name was engraved along with that of her late husband, Leon T. Nelson, on plaques embedded in the paving stones that surround the new statue. As a Northeastern professor, her decades of service to the university, community, and city at large include activities with the NAACP, her roles in local leadership, and her leadership within the university to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
https://crrj.org/efforts/northeastern-law-center-for-law-equity-and-race-program-co-ordinator-honored-at-mlk-statue-unveiling/
Rep. Charlotte G. Richie As an experienced public servant and activist, Charlotte Golar Richie graduated with a Bachelors from Rutgers University, a Masters in journalism from Columbia University, and an MBA from Suffolk University. She's a former Peace Corps volunteer who is dedicated to serving her community to effect positive change. She has a deep commitment to civil rights and has held a range of government positions, including Chief of Housing and Director of the Neighborhood Development Department in Boston, as well as a Commissioner in the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. She was the seventh Black woman to be elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1994, where she chaired the Housing and Urban Development Committee, making her the first Black woman to chair a committee in her first term. After campaigning for Boston mayor in 2013 as the first Black female candidate, Richie is continuing to support women's leadership and women of color into public office. She is a board member with the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus, the Interim Advisory Board Chair for the University of Massachusetts Boston Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy, and as a Co-Founder and Board Chair of MAWOCC's Advisory Board.
https://mawocc.com/who-we-are-mawocc/our-advisory-board/charlotte-golar-richie-2/
Ché Madyun Serving as the first Board President of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a nonprofit organization working to create a diverse, high-quality, and vibrant neighborhood, Che Madyun is working on building an urban village, focusing on a vision for the future that develops local cooperation, empowerment, and hard work. With 300 new affordable housing units on previously vacant lots, a town common for neighborhood events, community gardens, and a mural to celebrate the neighborhood's ethnic diversity, Madyun is focused on bringing economic stability and growth, revitalized business, enriched cultural life, and reclamation of locations that have been environmentally damaged. The neighborhood is located along the Roxbury-Dorchester line, and is focused on creating a safer, more sustainable, and flourishing environment for residents. Born in 1953, she moved to the Dudley Street neighborhood in 1976 after her graduation from Emerson College with a degree in dance.
https://www.umbrasearch.org/catalog/bb37fb3101769a46a8058f6acdb38d3a85a6086a
https://www.nps.gov/mabi/learn/historyculture/che-madyun.htm
Chloe Spear Born around 1749, Chloe Spear was a Black woman born in Africa who experienced life both as a slave and as a free woman in Boston during the Revolutionary War. She authored a memoir that was anonymously published under the name "Lady of Boston" to provide a Christian testimony of her life story alongside her spiritual development, providing commentary on both slavery and Christianity. Enslaved at approximately age 12, she arrived in Philadelphia in 1761, then was purchased as an enslaved person by a prominent Boston family. She was free to engage in several domestic avocations, and her skills were valued, but when her owner caught her learning to read, he threatened to punish her terribly. Baptized and married after the Revolutionary War, Spear and her husband, with whom she'd had seven children, opened a boarding house for workers and sailors when Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783. Following her husband's death, she opened the establishment for religious meetings and social gatherings for all races, making her beloved by the community at large before her 1815 passing. Following her death, she was featured in five obituaries and a biography was published in a Baptist missionary magazine shortly after her passing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloe_Spear
Chrystal Kornegay Serving as the Executive Director of MassHousing, an organization that lends approximately $1 billion every year to preserve or produce affordable housing, Chrystal Kornegay has helped many in the Boston area secure quality homes either as a rental or homeowner. With a Down Payment Assistance program, Workforce Housing initiative and nationally-recognized homeownership production in communities of color program. Prior to her position at MassHousing, she served under the Baker-Polito administration's Housing and Community Development undersecretary, allowing her to advocate for increased state capital dollars by 18%, increased rental subsidies for low-income families by 42% and dramatically reduced homeless families housed in motels. She has also served as President and CEO of Urban Edge, which is one of New England's largest corporations focused on community development, and is cited as the reason for the organization's $3 million increase in net asset position. Kornegay is on multiple boards, including the National Council of State Housing Agencies, National Housing Trust, Bipartisan Policy Center Advisory Council, and is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston. She has a Bachelor's degree from Hunter College and a Masters from MIT.
https://www.masshousing.com/en/about/leadership
Chaplain Clementina M. ChéryAs the CEO and co-founder of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute located in Boston, Chaplain Clementina Chery has two decades of experience serving families impacted by homicide, giving her a unique skill set for best practices in homicide response. Her focus is transforming homicide response so that families are treated with compassion and dignity. Selected as a 2017 Barr Fellow for her effective, visionary leadership, as a 2016 Social Innovator by the Social Innovation Forum in recognition of her approach to social issues, and many other awards over the years. Her groundbreaking publications for murder victim families help family members who have gone through homicide trauma to cope and heal. Her training with public health and law enforcement professionals allows her organization to better help those impacted by homicide and interrupt retaliatory violence cycles. In addition to her extensive training and many honorary degrees, she is recognized as one of the most influential leaders in Boston for her peacemaking efforts. She was ordained in 2012 as a senior chaplain under the International Fellowship of Chaplains.
https://www.chaplainchery.com/
Cleora Francis-O’Connor When working through the traumatic loss of one of her loved ones, Cleora Francis-O'Connor was seeking healing and balance, finding it through the intentional practice and meditative modes of yoga. At that point, she decided to use that experience to help others who had experienced trauma and were in need of healing. As a nonviolence activist and advocate, she has incorporated these practices into every yoga class and workshop she has taught over the past 19 years. With a strong focus on healing the heart and soul following a loss or trauma, she has practiced for over 21 years and teaches Hatha Yoga at Touch Massage, Yoga RI, and a range of other community centers. Outside of her active work in teaching and healing with yoga, she works as an IT specialist, and is a board member of the Nonviolence Institute of Rhode Island.
https://kripalu.org/presenters-programs/presenters/cleora-francis-oconnor
Colette Phillips As an active civic leader on the Board of Trustees of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Mass General Hospital President's Council, and Eastern Bank, Colette Phillips is also founder and President of Get Konnected! as well as The GK Fund and is president and CEO of Colette Phillips Communications. Phillips is a values-based leader and trusted advisor for many C-suite executives and teams in Boston. She is an advocate for her clients, leveraging public relations branding along with internal/external communications strategies. She works with many companies to improve engagement, diversity, and inclusion. Her contributions have allowed many large corporations to establish inclusive, healthy working environments. Her premier inclusive networking event Get Connected! is known for changing how the conversations of diversity take place. The GK100 that she created is considered to be the first comprehensive list of the 100 most influential people of color in Boston. With a Bachelors and Masters from Emerson College, Phillips has been honored with the Boston Business Journal's 2016/2016 Power 50 list, Boston Magazine's 2018 100 Most Influential, has been cited by Boston Magazine in its Influencer feature, and by the Boston Globe as a social connector and A-lister.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/colettephillips/
Cora R. McKerrow One long-standing cornerstone of the South End Black community in Boston was the Reid Funeral Home, which was founded by Cora Reid McKerrow and her brother Millard Fillmore Reid in 1926. At a time when women, and especially Black women, were rarely entrepreneurs, McKerrow was born in 1888 in Churchland, Virginia, as one of 15 children. Coming to Boston, the funeral home was not her first business, working as a chiropodist and as a beautician until she went into business with her brother as they opened the funeral home. Following her brother's death in the early 1940s, McKerrow operated the business on her own for an additional 30 years until she chose to close it in 1971, after 45 years of successful management and service, during two-thirds of which she operated the business entirely on her own, making her an early business star in Boston for Black female entrepreneurs.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Danielle S. Allen, Ph.D. As the director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics and a professor at James Bryant Conant University, Danielle Allen is a seasoned leader of nonprofits, advocate for democracy, distinguished author, and a professor of ethics, public policy, and political philosophy. Her focus on making the world a better place for the young has taken her through her college career and teaching, to leadership of a $60 million university division and driving change of a $6 billion foundation. She has advocated for democracy reform, civic education, and cannabis legalization. Her leadership during the COVID pandemic in 2020 rallied coalitions and developed solutions for the first Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience. She was the first Black woman to run for a statewide office in Massachusetts, and was the winner of the Library of Congress Kluge prize, recognizing scholarly achievement in disciplines outside of the Nobel Prize. She has been a chair of the Mellon Foundation and Pulitzer Prize board, focusing on the Democratic Knowledge Project and Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiatives, among many others. She has written many books on civil rights, political thought leadership, and many other topics.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/danielle-allen
DeAma BattleWith classical training in dance, DeAma Battle began focusing on dance forms with roots in Africa starting in the 1960s, helping many in the area to return to their roots with these traditional dance forms and how they have changed with European and American cultural contacts. Founding The Art of Black Dance and Music in 1975, her goal of presenting and preserving the rich history of African folklore, music, and dance has been ever present in her work. Studying the dance movements and steps with masters from Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, and West Africa, she probed deeper into the field while abroad, on dance-study tours to the Caribbean, Africa, and other countries with a strong African heritage. She considers herself to also be a dance archivist, recording the history of dance before it's lost. Among her goals is unifying individuals of African descent by illustrating cultural similarities throughout the African Diaspora. Finding similarities in traditional movement in today's West Africa, Traditional Capoeira in Brazil and break dancing in America, she has chosen to record her heritage in motion.
https://www.bostondancealliance.org/bda_staff/deama-battle/
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol22/iss1/8/
Deborah B. Prothrow-Stith, M.D. Appointed as the first female Commissioner of Public Health for Massachusetts in 1987 by Governor Dukakis, Deborah Prothrow-Stith has an impressive record of leading healthcare, life sciences, non-for-profit institutions and academic organizations on their executive talent and leadership. A public health leader, she broke new ground while a physician in inner-city Boston, and is now dean and Professor of Medicine for Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science College of Medicine. She has authored several books focused on preventing violence and a range of additional public health issues. Founding the first Office of Violence Prevention in a state health department in the country, she also expanded HIV/AIDS prevention programs while increasing programs for drug treatment and rehabilitation. During her husband's tenure as US Ambassador to Tanzania, she worked with numerous organizations, including the Muhimbili National Hospital and the NGO operating the country's first HIV clinic. Graduating from Spelman College and Harvard Medical, she completed her residency at Boston City Hospital, and has received ten honorary doctorate degrees, and was inducted into the honor roll of women physicians in 2015 by the Massachusetts Medical Society.
https://www.cdrewu.edu/people/deborah-b-prothrow-stith-md
Deborah C. Jackson With a strong commitment to social justice in higher education, Deborah Jackson became the fourth President of Cambridge College in 2011, but with her came over three decades of leadership across numerous educational institutions in Boston. Her goal was to move the College's mission forward of providing time-efficient, academically exceptional, and affordable higher education for those who have had limited or no access. Named as one of America's Top 100 Graduate Degree Producers by Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine, Cambridge now ranks third in awarding business or commercial Masters degrees to Black students. Prior to this role, Jackson served as CEO of the American Red Cross of Eastern Massachusetts, Vice President of the Boston Foundation, Senior VP of Boston Children's Hospital, and CEO of Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries. She has also served on numerous boards, task forces, and commissions focused on eliminating racial and ethnic disparities, diversity, student assistance, college and university steering and operational boards, and as the Vice Chair of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts Board of Directors and board member of the New England Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors, among many others.
https://www.cambridgecollege.edu/office-president/presidents-biography
Dianne Walker Born in Boston in 1951, Dianne Walker is a jazz tap dancer with an elegant, fluid dancing style that is rhythmically complex, yet delicate. Overcoming adversity in a childhood polio infection, she was sent to dance classes to get appropriate leg exercise as therapy. Working with instructors who had successfully performed in a range of New England and New York vaudeville circuits, Walker learned quickly. However, she put her dancing dreams on hold, first when her family moved due to her new stepfather's military career, and then again when she married at age 18. However, a chance social affair at Prince Hall Masonic Temple led to new lessons and teaching Saturday children's classes as Leon Collins' protege in 1978. After seeing how the art was declining in Boston in the early 1980s, she began recruiting new young talent for films and live performances, some of whom would go on to full-length tap musicals and Broadway productions. Attending the 1985 International Tip Tap Festival, she performed her first tap soloist work. Determined to bring tap back to the next generation of young Black dancers over creating the perfect art, she's considered by many as the top transitional figure between generations.
Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, J.D. As the first Black woman elected to the Massachusetts State Senate, Dianne Wilkerson was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1955. Her family fled north to Springfield to escape Ku Klux Klan harassment, and she graduated from the High School of Commerce in 1973, followed by a Bachelors at the American International College and her JD at the Boston College Law School in 1981. She clerked at the Massachusetts Appeals Court until the next year when she became deputy counsel to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Continuing her career in a range of organizations, she became the first Black woman in Boston to become a partner at a major law firm at Roche, Carnes, & DeGiacomo, where she remained until she was elected to the State Senate in 1992, becoming the highest-ranking black official in Massachusetts when serving her sixth term in 2005. Focusing on bills that protect Black, minority, and low-income Massachusetts residents, including collecting data related to racial profiling in traffic stops and curbing high-interest rates on bank loans, her focus on championing policies that improve the lives of individuals who have traditionally been underserved by government is second to none.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/honorable-dianne-wilkerson
Doris Bland With the Massachusetts' welfare system in detestable shape, it took a group of poor Black mothers, led by Doris Bland, to create change within the system. women in the Dudley Street Area Planning Action Council started Mothers for Adequate Welfare in 1964, electing Doris Bland as their first president. Begun as an interracial membership list of 1,000 members, or roughly 1 out of every 13 women on welfare in the City of Boston, by discovering the challenges facing mothers, creating a system that an experienced mother would go to the required intake interview with a new recipient, researching the welfare system for Massachusetts, and taking collective action on issues that impacted the members, such as visiting public officials, sit-ins, and protests. Bland's statement following a serious altercation and riot around Grove Hill Welfare Office showcased the disrespectful and rude behavior the mothers were being regularly treated to, including being treated with suspicion and insulting behavior. Their actions, led by Doris Bland, led to a completely new welfare system for the state, with a board that Bland was given a seat on to oversee the system.
https://masscommons.wordpress.com/2022/05/04/a-peoples-history-of-the-new-boston-mothers-for-adequate-welfare/
Rep. Doris Bunte As the first Black woman to serve in the Massachusetts Legislature, Doris Bunte has always focused on the most vulnerable individuals in the state as well as in the city of Boston. Moving from New York City to Boston with three children in 1953, she moved into the Orchard Park Housing Projects, where she soon joined the management council as well as co-founding the Boston Public Housing Tenants Policy Council in 1968. She followed this action in 1969 with her nomination to the Boston Housing Authority Board, which made her the first public housing tenant to serve on the board. She was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representative in 1973, where she founded the Massachusetts Legislative Black Caucus as well as the Massachusetts Caucus of Women Legislators. She also enrolled in Harvard in 1978, where she earned her Masters degree in 1982. Following 12 years in the state legislature, she became the director of the Boston Housing Authority, where she moved public housing integration forward. She then moved to work at Northeastern and Boston Universities in 1992, where she enjoyed 18 successful years prior to her retirement in 2010.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-doris-bunte
Dorothy Haskins Concerned about the state of the welfare system in the 1960s, Dorothy Haskins started an ad hoc group of mothers to agitate around welfare issues. The group eventually linked up with Mothers for Adequate Welfare in 1965, followed by the National Welfare Rights Organization in 1966. With nobody to work on the issues in Columbia Point, the organization was designed to bring information to the community residents who were on welfare. A few mothers initially got together outside of the nearest supermarket with a table and buttons on welfare rights. Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., the organization saw racism from the side of the welfare office and wanted the disrespect and related issues to stop. Organizing peaceful demonstrations based out of the projects where Blacks and other minorities lived, other groups began to see how they could band together to create a stronger community and make sure that peoples' needs were being met. The actions of individuals such as Dorothy Haskins and Mothers for Adequate Welfare have inspired a new generation of Black women leaders focused on diversity, equity, and inclusiveness across all races and classes.
https://economichardship.org/2019/11/peoples-history-episode-2-grove-hall/
Dorothy West In the Harlem Renaissance, Dorothy West, a Bostonian born in 1907, was referred to as "the kid" due to her status as the youngest of the artists and writers when she moved there in 1925. A talented writer, West had her first story published in the Boston Post when she was only 14. In a 1926 contest that was sponsored by the Urban League's magazine Opportunity, she tied with Zora Neale Hurston for second place. Taking on a small part in the play Porgy in 1927, she toured with it for a couple of years, before traveling to Russia in 1932 with a group of 20 other Black artist to make a film on racism in America. Though the film was never made, she remained in Russia for a year. West took a position with the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression, and earned money from 1940 into the 1960s writing two short stories every month for the New York Daily News. Moving to Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard in the 1940s, she wrote a regular column in the Vineyard Gazette. She published her first novel in 1948, and her second novel was published in 1995.
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collections/dorothy-west
Detective Dorothy E. Harrison Serving from 1944 to 1972, Dorthy Harrison was the first Black woman detective in Boston. Though she was originally trained as an opera singer, the graduate from Boston University felt that she was born a generation early to be successful at music, feeling that the world was not yet ready for a black opera singer, and felt that police work would provide her with a better future than music would. Within her first week of service, she disarmed a man who was distraught, flagging down a passing patrol vehicle and retrieving the gun so that the suspect could be taken to the station. She was in demand regularly as a speaker, sharing her experiences with the world. She inspired the next generation of Black women in police work, with others joining her many years into her career.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B8MGNRfguG8/
https://www.facebook.com/roxsafetynet/posts/1247347581969352/
https://100clubmass.org/massachusetts-female-police-officers-a-138-year-history/
E. Alice Taylor Teachers touch the lives of all they teach, and E. Alice Taylor, a community organizer and educator from Boston, was no exception. Born in 1892 in Alexander, Arkansas, she earned her degree from Arkansas Baptist College in 1913, moving to Boston between that time and 1927, when she founded a branch of the Annie Malone's Poro Beauty School and Beauty Shop, a vocational school she managed for 15 years until World War 2 forced the school to close. At the time of closing, Taylor was employing 15 teachers to serve 150 students annually and was one of the largest minority-owned businesses in New England. She also founded and was president of the Professional Hairdressers Association of Massachusetts and was an officer and board member of the NAACP for half a century. She also served with many other community service organizations, such as the League of Women for Community Service, the Massachusetts State Union of Women's Clubs, the Charitable Health Association of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Human Relations Committee. Passing away at the age of 94, she left a lasting impression on the community.
https://chalkboardchampions.org/e-alice-taylor-educator-social-reformer-and-community-organizer/
Edmonia Lewis Born in New York in 1844, Edmonia Lewis was the first sculptor of multi-racial Black and Indigenous from America who received international recognition. Growing up with her mother's tribe after being orphaned at a young age, she attended Ohio's Oberlin College, which was one of the first post-secondary institutions to accept Black female students. She had a strong interest in fine arts but was forced to leave the school prior to graduation due to false accusations of poisoning. Traveling to Boston, she established herself as an artist while studying under a local sculptor and creating portraits of abolitionist heroes. She became involved with a group of American women sculptors and moved to Rome at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. Beginning to work in marble, she did all of her own sculpting work, a different approach as most sculptors would hire workmen local to the area to carve final pieces. This may have been done from fear that if she didn't, her work would not be accepted as her own. She sculpted figure works based on her Indigenous heritage, the oppression of Black persons, and Biblical scenes.
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/edmonia-lewis-2914
Edna R. BrownAs the first Black woman to perform dentistry in Cambridge, Edna Brown was a dentist who graduated from Columbia University and was a very early member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Psi Omega chapter. Though not much is known about her life, being able to attend Columbia as a Black woman means that she probably attended after 1923, as Columbia University recognizes Elizabeth Delaney as the University's College of Dental Medicine's first Black female graduate.
https://www.akaboston.org/chapter-history
https://thelowdown.alumni.columbia.edu/history_of_women_at_columbia
Edna V. Bynoe As a strong community activist, Edna Bynoe was one of the moving forces to change Orchard Park to Orchard Gardens Community. As the Orchard Park Projects declined in the 1960s and 1970s, it was necessary for community leaders like Bynoe to step forward and push for change. In addition to leading the push to update the Orchard Park Projects to a more modern, safe housing environment, Bynoe also headed the design team that opened the Orchard Gardens Pilot School in the community, providing opportunities for better education for children in the community. She also served on many boards and committees to help steer the direction that the community was taking throughout these changes, acting as a vital voice within the organizations shaping the new community by representing the residents of the existing community.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/edna-bynoe-obituary?id=23410460
Ekua Holmes A collage artist who focuses on the power of faith, hope, and self-determination, Ekua Holmes investigates family relationship dynamics, histories, and impressions that come out in her artwork. Growing up in Roxbury, she completed her Bachelors from MassArt in 1977 and has become an educator on collage workshops, been a visiting artist and lecturer, and held a range of public and private institution artist residencies in New England. Holmes is also an illustrator, focusing on children's books and receiving numerous awards for her work. She also serves as the Boston Art Commission's Commissioner and Vice-Chair, overseeing public artworks in and on properties of the City of Boston. She serves MassArt as the Associate Director of the Center for Art and Community Partnerships, allowing her to coordinate “sparc!” the ArtMobile that contributes to multidisciplinary and community-based arts programs.
https://www.ekuaholmes.com/about
Elaine W. Steward As a senior Vice President and Assistant General Counsel for the Boston Red Sox, Elaine Steward has worked on a wide range of legal issues with the franchise since she joined in 1988. As a recipient of a Jackie Robinson Foundation scholarship, she graduated with honors from St. John's University, receiving her JD from the University's School of Law. She interned at the New York Mets public relations department as well as the Officer of the Commissioner of Baseball in its Executive Development program. She was selected as a top Ten Outstanding Young Leaders of Boston, was elected into the Academy of Women Achievers for the YWCA, and received the St. John's University President's Medal, among many other honors that she has received over the years. She was also featured in the Red Sox' Women in Baseball exhibit in Fenway Park, the National Baseball Hall of Fame Women in Baseball exhibit located in Cooperstown, New York, and Massachusetts Senate President Karen Spilka's State House Herstory Exhibit.
https://www.mlb.com/redsox/team/front-office/elaine-steward
Eliza A. Gardner Acting as a community activist and religious leader, Eliza Gardner was born in New York City in 1831, moving to Boston's West End with her family while still young. Growing up in Beacon Hill's abolition center, she grew up in one of the Underground Railroad stations, during which time she also knew abolitionist leaders including Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, Lewis & Harriet Hayden, and Fredrick Douglass. Active in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, she began teaching Sunday school and became Boston's superintendent of Sunday schools in the 1880s. She also assumed a range of leadership roles in the church, raising money to raise churches and support ministers. She also organized the church's Woman's Home and Foreign Missionary Society, which was a women-operated group that supported missionary work. This allowed her to push for equality for women in religious organizations, as she had grown frustrated with male leadership who opposed women stepping into the same roles. She was also a founding member of the Woman's Era Club and helped organize the first National Conference for Colored Women in America, serving as the chaplain in 1895. She continued promoting temperance, anti-lynching, and women's rights movements over the years, continuing to address groups until 1917, five years before her passing in 1922.
https://www.nps.gov/people/eliza-ann-gardner.htm
Elizabeth Blakeley For many enslaved persons seeking freedom, Boston was a common destination and hub on the Underground Railroad, including for Elizabeth Blakeley, who was born into slavery in North Carolina. After receiving awful treatment at the hands of her enslaver, Blakeley ran away at age 15 in December 1849, and hid on a vessel that was bound for Boston, preventing local authorities from finding her. After surviving a four-week-long journey, she was able to arrive in Boston, living as a free individual. After a few weeks spent recovering from her bid for freedom, during which she was welcomed and given sanctuary by the free Black community in Boston, she shared her story at an abolitionist meeting that was held in Faneuil Hall, during which times Thomas Jones, who had seen her treatment at the hands of her enslavers, stated that if he repeated what he had seen, those present would hardly be able to bear it. Following the meeting, she was able to choose the path her life took, marrying and living briefly in Connecticut and Toronto before returning to Boston for the rest of her life, living to the age of 84 and remaining active in the community.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/elizabeth-blakeley-s-escape-to-freedom.htm
Elizabeth Freeman Elizabeth Freeman, a brave woman who was enslaved, challenged the principles of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution as the first Black woman to file a successful lawsuit for freedom which would lead to the outlawing of slavery by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Born in New York, she was born around 1744, growing up and given to her enslaver's daughter upon her marriage. Freeman overheard her enslaver, a judge, discussing the language used in the Sheffield Declaration, including a statement “mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” The same language was used in the Declaration of Independence and the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, so Freman received help from an attorney who drafted the Sheffield Declaration to fight for her freedom, who took the case as a test case to decide if slavery was constitutional under the state Constitution. She, along with another enslaved person, was granted freedom, 30 shillings, and trial expenses. Following her freedom, she became a prominent healer, midwife, and nurse, buying her own home where she could live with her children, passing at approximately age 85 in 1829.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/elizabeth-freeman
Elizabeth Riley Deeply involved in the Massachusetts abolitionist movement, Elizabeth Riley was known for harboring Shadrach Minkins, a fugitive enslaved person, in the attic of her home at 70 Southac Street, where she lived until her death in 1855 at the age of 64. Born in Boston in 1791, her strongly-held beliefs backed up her actions. She involved herself with numerous progressive political organizations, including the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the African-American Female Intelligence Society, and fundraising for creating The Liberator, the nation's first significant abolitionist newspaper. She was also part of the Colored Citizens of Boston which called for the abolition of slavery. She worked as a nurse later in her life but never learned to read or write, living an exemplary and courageous life despite this issue.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/riley-elizabeth-1791-1855/
Elizabeth Williams As president and CEO of Roxbury Technology, Beth Williams is the owner of the largest Black female-owned Boston business, routinely giving back to the community. Working at Freedom Electronics following her graduation from Brown University, she decided to grow her experience at Raytheon Company in their Missile Systems division. After five years, she decided to move into a more impactful role where she could help women and minority entrepreneurs, she joined Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, eventually becoming the Director of Business Diversity for the organization. She then succeeded her father as the CEO and President of Roxbury Technology in 2002. She has used her position to be a socially responsible entrepreneur, providing quality, wage-earning jobs for those who are often passed by for employment. A strong supporter of CORI reform, over 15% of her workforce includes ex-gang members, ex-offenders, and similar disadvantaged persons. Focused on environmental sustainability, job creation, and social responsibility, Williams' leadership has led to many achievements and awards, including WPO's 50 fastest growing women businesses, WBENC's Shining Star award, GNEMSDC's President's award, President and Community Leadership awards from the Eastern Ma Urban League, and the Ernst & Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year award for New England.
https://www.mssconnect.com/about-keynote-speaker-beth-williams.html
Ella Little-Collins Though Black History Month often mentions Malcolm X, his half-sister Ella Little-Colins is often overlooked. His autobiography brings parts of her influence and life to living color. Born in Butler, Georgia in 1914, she worked as a secretary for Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., partnered with her sisters in store ownership, and invested in real estate. During that time, Malcolm came to live with Ella after being shuttled between foster homes when his mother was no longer able to care for her children. She helped him to secure his first serious job as a train cook. Though she was very concerned when he was arrested, tried, and convicted, she stayed loyal and welcomed home when he'd finished his sentence. Like her famous brother, she joined the Nation of Islam and helped establish the Boston mosque in the 1950s, but was beginning to have her doubts about the organization. When her brother was assassinated, she became the president of the Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Muslim Mosque, but even as the organizations foundered, she continued speaking out on a wide range of issues, passing in 1996 following a long struggle with diabetes.
https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2020/02/27/ella-little-collins-malcolm-xs-resourceful-half-si/
Ellen Banks With a strong love of art and music, Ellen Banks has combined her passion in her artwork. Deciding that she had to choose one or the other, she went with visual arts. The joy of painting led to her unique art style, with her passion for piano being worked into her art. The scores she has collected over the years has been the foundation for her music paintings. Now based in Brooklyn, Banks has changed written musical scores into vivid color patterns. This unique approach transforms the notations into abstract patterns, often geometric circles, oblongs, and squares, with different keys represented by different colors that the paintings are saturated with.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2011/artist-combines-two-loves-color-and-music
Ellen S. Craft Born in Georgia in 1826, Ellen Craft was an escaped enslaved person who began lecturing on the abolitionist movement circuit. With very pale skin, she helped her husband, William, and herself escape slavery by posing as a white gentleman traveling to Philadelphia for medical treatment with her husband acting as her slave. To cover her inability to write, she kept her arm in a sling with a bandage wrapped around her head to hide that she did not have a beard. Traveling initially by train and then by sea, the couple traveled to Maryland, after which the couple moved on to Boston. They worked in cabinetmaking and sewing to support themselves, and then became famous on the lecture circuit, with stories published in the Georgia Journal, Macon Telegraph, Boston Globe, and New York Herald. When the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was passed, Ellen and William were protected by the League of Freedom, but the couple fled to England, where they lived for 18 years and had five children. They returned to the US in 1869 to open a cooperative farm for former enslaved persons, with plans for a school. Slander and Ku Klux Klan activity burned their first plantation and then forced the second plantation and school into bankruptcy.
https://www.georgiawomen.org/ellen-smith-craft
Ellen S. Jackson An educator and activist, Ellen Jackson was known for her activity in founding Operation Exodus, which was a program designed to bus students from overcrowded, mostly Black Boston schools to less crowded, mostly white schools in the 1960s, creating a path for desegregation of the schools in Boston. A Roxbury native, she was born in 1935, belonged to the NAACP Youth Council as a teen and graduated from Boston State College in 1958, followed by a Masters in education from Harvard in 1971. From 1962 to 1964, she was the parent coordinator for the Northern Student Movement that organized Black parents and pushed for student equal rights. She worked in voter registration drives and pushed for better representation on the Action for Boston Community Development board of directors. Because local schools pushed Black children to enter vocational training instead of college, she formed the Roxbury-North Dorchester Parents' Council in 1965. She received a document that showed how many students and seats were in each classroom and school in Boston, founding the program Operation Exodus, with Jackson as the executive director. Over a four-year period, the program transported over 1,000 students to less-crowded schools. She worked with many other initiatives and organizations over the years, until her death from stroke in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Swepson_Jackson
Elma LewisA Boston cultural icon, Elma Lewis was born in 1921 and as a child, she was inspired by the call for racial pride and civic activism. She attended Emerson College, where she completed her Bachelors in 1943. She still taught fine arts at Harriet Tubman House, as well as dance and drama at other locations, and staged operas with the Robert Gould Shaw House Chorus. She founded the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1950, the Playhouse in the Park in Franklin Park in 1966, and the National Center for Afro-American Artists, which formed performing companies that toured worldwide in 1968. These educational institutions provided professional-level programs for Blacks focusing on both visual and performing arts. Designed with divisions that paralleled each other, she began the organizations with the goal of combining the best teaching and professional performance while affirming arts accessibility and ethnic heritage. Over 6,000 students received arts education due to her efforts, vision, and commitment. Not only did students at her school learn the arts, but learned to embrace the positive in black life while rejecting anything that was negative. She received many honors and served the community through numerous arts organizations.
https://bwht.org/elma-lewis/
Elva L. Abdal-Khallaq Elva Lee Abdal-Khallaq was born in Baldwin, Louisiana, then moved to Houston, Texas at a young age, where she met her husband. The couple moved to Boston with their children, where she played a vital role in the family's business and community activities and activism. Her passion was for children, not only her ten, but many others, a passion she lived out through work at the UMCA Clarendon Street Day Care, the Crispus Attucks Children's Center, and the St. Joseph's Community Center, she touched many lives in her Boston community. She had a strong belief in the power of education and community service, she received an Early Education Teaching Certificate from Harvard, was a valued member of the Roxbury Tai-Chi Academy, a treasurer for the Goldenaires at the Freedom House, and attended the Million Women March along with four generations of women in her family. She passed away at the age of 96 in 2010.
Estella L. Crosby Born in 1890 in Alexandria, Virginia, Estella Lee Crosby came to Boston as a social young woman to find her life's path. Finding it in community activism and her marriage of 50 years, Based out of a row house in the South End neighborhood of Greenwich Park, she ran not only a successful beauty salon where she informed women in the neighborhood about community activism organizations including the National Organization of Colored Women's Clubs and the Housewives League. Seeing the opportunity for stylish but affordable women's clothing, she opened a very popular retail store located on Columbus Avenue close to the family's home. Investing decades of her time into breaking down the obstacles to Black advancement in the city, she was a strong member of the Ebinezer Baptist Church, which was founded by freed slaves following the Civil War, and was never too tired to help anyone in need.
https://www.facebook.com/foresthillscemetery/posts/for-our-notable-resident-this-week-forest-hills-cemetery-honors-the-memory-of-es/3980133368685108/
Estelle A. Forster An early Black graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, Estelle Foster was dedicated to promoting musical education for Blacks in Boston. Over a period of three decades in the early 1900s, she started and directed the Ancrum School of Music, offering a wide range of lessons and courses including piano, organ, viola, voice, brass, wind, flute, harmony, and solfeggio. She also taught musical theory and a range of musical subjects, all operated out of the 74 W. Rutland Square location which included two dormitories, a cafeteria, and exceptional student facilities. Through this school, she brought musical education into the lives of thousands of Black students in the Boston area.
https://blackfacts.com/fact/ancrum-school-of-music
Eva Mitchell Working in a range of executive roles in education and career development, Eva Mitchell is a community activist and professional working to improve the lives of Black individuals through better educational and career development opportunities. An alumnus of Harvard, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania, Mitchell began her career as a co-founder, assistant principal, and teacher at a pilot school in the Boston Public School system. She moved into the position of Senior Director of Educational Quality and Accountability for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, then as a senior leadership coach for school turnaround at the Center of Collaborative Education. After several years between state and city educational organizations, she moved into the C-suite at Boston Public Schools as Chief Accountability Officer, then as the Chief Program Officer and Chief Executive Officer at the Coalition for Career Development Center, and has volunteered in a range of roles at numerous community educational and activism organizations, including the Blue Hill Avenue Task Force, Roxbury Community College, The Calculus Project, the Boston Community Leadership Academy, and many others.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eva-mitchell-b316486/
Evelynn M. Hammonds, Ph.D. As the founding director of MIT's Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine, Evelynn Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies, the Chair of the Department of the History of Science, and a Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard University, which she joined as Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2002. She's also an author with a wide range of scholarly articles to her experience. She received her Bachelors from Spelman College, with another Bachelors from Georgia Institute of Technology, her Masters from MIT, and a PhD from Harvard. She received a postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Social Science in Princeton, New Jersey's Institute of Advanced Study and has been a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer. She is also a current associate member of MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute. She has also served on numerous boards including the Museum of Science, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and Spelman College. She is a fellow of the Association of Women in Science and serves on the Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering.
https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/evelynn-m-hammonds
Fannie B. Williams As an educator, women's rights advocate, and political activist, Fannie Williams advanced opportunities for Blacks, focusing on social and educational reforms for Black women in the southern United States. Born in 1855 in Brockport, New York to a well-respected family, Williams aspired to become a teacher, becoming the first Black graduate from Brockport State Normal School in 1870, which is now SUNY Brockport. Fifteen years old at the time of her graduation, she moved to Washington, D.C. to educate freed blacks migrating to the city in the 1870s. She married and moved to Chicago where her husband started a successful law practice. She served as the first woman on the Board of the Chicago Public Library, then spoke at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition voicing concern over the lack of Black representation at the event, after which she helped found the National League of Colored Women and the National Association of Colored Women, as well as Provident Hospital and the NAACP. She was the only Black woman selected to eulogize Susan B Anthony at the National American Women Suffrage Association convention in 1907. She wrote extensively to progress Blacks in religion, education, and employment.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/williams-fannie-barrier-1855-1944/
Fern L. Cunningham-Terry Born in 1949 to a doctor and artist in Jackson Heights, New York, Fern Cunningham-Terry grew up in a home filled with pride in Black culture, art, and song. Living in Sitka, Alaska in a very diverse community from an early age, she had a passion for art that remained for her entire life. She moved to Boston following her high school graduation to attend Boston University's fine arts program, from which she traveled to France for additional art studies and then to Kenya to visit her sister. These two experiences formed her style. She began teaching at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1970, a commitment to teaching and the creative process that lasted throughout her life. She also taught in the Boston Public School system and the Park School in Brookline. She was a mentor to countless students over the years and created amazing public works of art that are found throughout the City of Boston. With a focus that honored Black history, communities, and history, she celebrated relationships and families. The first public sculpture she completed, Save the Children, was completed in 1973.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Fern-Cunningham-Terry
Florence Hagins As a black woman and single mother, Florence Hagins was the first enrollee in the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, following her denied application despite a decades-long work history. This program allowed her to purchase her new home, but she was not satisfied with renovating it and filling it with beautiful Black art. The next 15 years saw her volunteering with the Affordable Housing Alliance, then moving into an employee position where she counseled thousands of first-time homebuyers, encouraging them to clean up their credit and save money in case a home inspector or lawyer might be needed. She helped them determine if home ownership was right for them, and ran a post-purchase class to cover home ownership basics with over 9,000 students graduating. When Mayor Menino saw her coming, he would often jest, "Here comes trouble!" understanding the force of her personality.
https://www.wbur.org/the-remembrance-project/2015/05/27/the-remembrance-project-florence-hagins
Florence B. Price As the first Black woman recognized as a symphonic composer and the first to have her composition played by a major orchestra, Florence Beatrice Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas to a Black dentist and his music instructor wife. She continued her education at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, double majoring in organ and piano teaching. Moving to Atlanta to teach music, she met her husband there, and the couple returned to Little Rock. However, racial violence in the city forced the couple to move to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Price flourished in the city, studying composition, orchestration and organ from leading teachers, publishing four piano pieces in 1929. Financial issues during the Great Depression led to divorce, and to take care of her two daughters, she played at silent film screenings and composed radio ad songs under a pen name. She won a 1932 Wanamaker Foundation Award with first prize for her Symphony in E Minor and third for her Piano Sonata, earning $500. Her Symphony was played the next year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and several of her other works were played over the years by other symphonies.
https://www.pricefest.org/florence-price
Florence R. LeSueur
A Black activist, civic leader, and the first female president of an NAACP chapter, Florence LeSuer was born in 1898 in Pennsylvania. After attending Wilberforce University, she moved to Boston's South End in 1935 and was the first to head Boston's NAACP's educational committee, a passion she retained all her life as a champion of employment and educational rights for Blacks. She assisted with founding the Metropolitan Council for Education Opportunity to bus Black inner city students to suburban schools, to promote desegregation, as well as the push for equal education with college prep classes. Her time in the NAACP resulted in six Black men being hired as Boston Elevated Railway (now Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) drivers following demonstrations near the Dudley Square station. She served as president of Harriet Tubman House in 1959. A mother of 11 and grandmother of 52, she passed away at age 93.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_LeSueur
Florida R. Ridley
Born to a distinguished family in Boston in 1861, Florida Ridley was a Black civil rights activist, teacher, suffragist, writer, and editor, and was the first Black public school teacher in Boston, and was the editor of The Woman's Era, the first newspaper in country published for and by Black women, and she was also noted for her writing on Black history and New England race relations. . She came from a family of firsts, with her father being the first Black graduate of Harvard Law School, and the United States' first Black judge. Graduating from Boston Teachers' College in 1882, she taught at the Grant School until her marriage. She was one of the founders of the Second Unitarian Church in Brookline, and was active in the anti-lynching and early women's suffrage movement. With other women, she helped co-found several non-profit groups, including the Woman's Era Club and the League of Women for Community Service, as well as the predecessor of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. She passed in 1943.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Ruffin_Ridley
Frances E.W. Harper
Born free in Baltimore in 1825, Frances Harper was a poet, author, and lecturer who was the first Black woman to publish a short story, and was an influential reformer, abolitionist, and suffragist. She co-founded the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs based in Boston, and was educated at her uncle's school, then at Watkins Academy. Her first small poetry volume, Forest Leaves, was written at age 21. Five years later, she became the first female instructor at Union Seminary in Ohio. Shortly after, she became a vehement abolitionist, and wrote poetry for antislavery publications. Her second poetry volume was completed in 1854, as she left home to travel the U.S. and Canada lecturing for several state anti-slavery societies. She also promoted women's suffrage and rights as well as the temperance movement. Her experiences in travel began to appear in her novels, poetry, and short stories. Following the Civil War she took up the banner of women's rights more completely, pushing for suffrage for not only women, but Blacks as well. She spent the remainder of her career furthering the cause of equal rights, career opportunities, and education for Black women. She passed away in 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/frances-ellen-watkins-harper
Frederica M. Williams
As President and CEO of Whittier Street Health Care Center since 2002, Frederica Williams is a strong leader in transforming basic community healthcare into a model of urban healthcare in disadvantaged communities. Dedicated to social justice as well as health and economic equity and equality, Serving and embracing Boston's multicultural wealth, she has developed programs to support improvements in diverse population health while eliminating health and social inequity among low-income, minority, immigrant, and refugee populations. She advocates with exceptional compassion to improve the lives of Boston's most vulnerable residents. Through many outreach campaigns, she has directed programs bringing high-quality healthcare to patients. By engaging the community, she encourages healthy lifestyles and better outcomes for those in need. This proactive approach includes financial stewardship and visionary leadership for the healthcare organization, ensuring services and resources will be available long into the future, with a goal of increasing the number of persons served from 5,000 to 40,000 while delivering up to 220,000 annual clinic visits, as well as a mobile health van program, dental care, second location, and full-service pharmacy. Her vision has extended through the COVID-19 pandemic to the Whittier's Center Health Equity Research Center to facilitate health outcomes.
https://www.wshc.org/biography-of-frederica-m-williams/
Gail Snowden
Following her graduation from Harvard in 1967 with a Masters, Gail Snowden spent over 30 years at the Bank of Boston, moving up to a position of Executive Vice President. Continuing to make strong strides in the financial industry, Snowden has worked through multiple organizations as managing director of both Fleet Bank and Bank of America, but has returned to a strong focus on the community to help lift up those in need who have been disadvantaged, especially Black and minority individuals. She served as CFO of The Boston Foundation for three years, allowing her to advocate for those in need, then moved on to Freedom House as the CEO, a position she retired from. However, her dedication to serving the community continued to drive her, and she began Gail Snowden Consulting Services five years after her retirement to help organizations better serve the community.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gail-snowden-243b9710/
https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/gail-snowden-from-banking-to-foundation
Georgette Watson
Born in Philadelphia during World War Two, Georgette Watson was an anti-drug activist in Boston. After receiving a Bachelors and paralegal certifications from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Masters in education from Antioch University, she was a single mother as violence reigned with drug gangs from both Detroit and New York tried to expand into the city. She occupied apartments in locations with significant drug activity to engage with the community, draw police and press attention, and discourage drug dealing. She co-founded Drop-a-Dime, an organization focused on preventing crime by delivering tips from citizens confidentially to the Boston police and related federal agencies. Handling over 600 calls per month, the organization's process led to hundreds of arrests, including the imprisonment of Capsule Boys gang members and other large drug gangs active in Boston, as well as the shuttering of businesses and buildings that were nests of drug activity. Appointed in 1991 to lead the Massachusetts Governor's Alliance Against Drugs, she focused efforts on crime prevention programs over enforcement. Following a bout of breast cancer and kidney problems, she worked with the Maryland Transit Administration to improve transit access for individuals with disabilities before passing in 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgette_Watson
Geraldine P. Trotter
As an early Black civil rights activist and editor following the Civil War, Geraldine Trotter was born in Massachusetts in 1873. She was an associate editor of the Boston Guardian. After finishing her education at a local business college, she met W.E.B. Du Bois while he attended Harvard. She entertained elite guests and encouraged philanthropy through her efforts, aiding the City of Boston and other regional municipalities through community aid centers to support Black women and children in need. She also worked with the Public School Association, Boston Literary and Historical Society, Women's Anti Lynching League, and Equal Rights Association. When her husband was arrested following the 1903 Boston Riot, she went to work at The Boston Guardian in his place, eventually becoming a key driver in the paper's direction while writing columns on household management and fashion to drive female readership. Overall, the couple pursued a more militant promotion of civil rights, encouraging those who had been privileged with education to raise up those in need. During World War One, she dedicated herself to Soldiers' Comfort Units and the welfare of Black soldiers, but she passed shortly after during the Spanish flu pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Pindell_Trotter
Justice Geraldine S. Hines
Born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, Geraldine Hines graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1971. Becoming a staff attorney at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, she fought for prisoner's rights litigation, then moved to become a criminal law attorney in the Roxbury Defenders' Committee, working up through the organization until she became the Director of the Committee. She then served as co-counsel in Commonwealth v. Willie Sanders, addressing the issue of police misconduct in Black communities, which began the shift of her move to civil rights law, focusing on discrimination in education and special education as staff attorney at Harvard University Center for Law and Education. After several years of private practice from 1982, she began her career as a justice in 2001, prior to her appointment into the state court system by Governor Deval Patrick, she served as an associate justice until 2014, when she was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/associate-justice-geraldine-s-hines
Gladys Holmes
Born in 1892, Gladys Holmes was an author, educator, and social worker who was one of the former presidents of the League of Women for Community Service, one of the oldest organizations for Black women in the city of Boston. Providing many opportunities in Boston for women of color, the League was focused on advancing the position of Black women in the community through community service and collective action. By Holmes' time, the League was a strong social center for the Black community in Boston, providing a location for social dances, social services during the Great Depression, lodging for female college students due to segregation, and similar activities to support the community as a whole. It became a bastion of literacy and education for Boston's Black community.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Women_for_Community_Service
https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/02/24/boston-history-league-of-women-for-community-service
Gladys A.M. Perdue
A noted pianist and organist, Gladys Perdue was born in 1898 and attended the New England Conservatory of Music, receiving her Diploma in Pianoforte in 1924. Teaching music at the Tuskegee Institute from 1925 to 1931, she then returned to Boston, where she served as the organist at the Albanian Church in South Boston for over three decades. Her many performances in the South End included being musical accompaniment for the Women's Service Club's 464 Follies. With a strong dedication to the musical arts in the Black community of Boston, she was entertained shortly before her death in 1998 by a jazz sextet made up of New England Conservatory students known as the Back Bay Stompers at Goddard House.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Glendora M. Putnam, J.D.
Determined to promote civil rights and stop discrimination, Glendora Putnam was born in 1923 and graduated from Boston University School of Law in 1948, at a time when few women were practicing law, much less Black women. Growing up prior to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, she was determined to end segregation and discrimination, acting as a fighter for equality and justice. She served as the national board president of the YWCA, despite having been barred from entering her high school's chapter due to discrimination and segregation, determined to open the YWCA's doors to everyone. She was admitted to the bar in 1949 while facing the double discrimination of race and sex. She worked on Edward Brooke's campaign for office, joining him when he became Massachusetts Attorney General as the assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1964. She passed on a higher-paying Equal Opportunity Employment Commission opportunity to head the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination where she could enforce the new civil rights laws. She was nominated by President Ford as deputy assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity at HUD, making her the highest-ranking Black woman at the agency. She passed away in 2016.
https://www.bu.edu/law/record/articles/2016/celebrating-glendora-putnam-48-distinguished-alumna-and-civil-rights-pioneer/
Gloria Smith
Fostering sportsmanship and wellness, Gloria Smith helped found The Sportsmen's Tennis Club in 1961 as a nonprofit for tennis aficionados who wanted to share their love of the game with Boston children of all races, sexes, and backgrounds. Seeing the lack of opportunities for urban youth, her initial drive has become the organization's daily mission for the past 25 years, starting out in playgrounds in the South End as well as a Roxbury gym, but has grown to its own facility, becoming a vital part of the athletic community in Boston. Over time, over 500 youths have attended college on either partial or full tennis scholarships while over 400 youths have attained tennis association rankings on the local, regional, and national levels.
https://bostonsportsclubsouthendhere.blogspot.com/2012/09/after-few-lost-serves-dorchester-tennis.html
Rev. Gloria E. White-Hammond, M.D.
As the current co-pastor of Bethel AME Church in Boston, Gloria White-Hammond is a Swartz Resident Practitioner in Ministry Studies and the founder and executive director of My Sister's Keeper, a humanitarian and human rights organization partnering with diverse women in Sudan to reconcile and reconstruct their communities. As an organization led by women, it provides a unique insight into the needs of women of color in need in foreign countries. In the past, she graduated from Boston University, Tufts University School of Medicine, and Harvard Divinity School. She worked at the South End Community Health Center for over 27 years as a pediatrician, dedicating herself to serving the community through the health of its children, retiring in 2008 before moving on to new opportunities.
https://hds.harvard.edu/people/gloria-white-hammond
Rep. Gloria L. Fox
Born in 1942 and raised as a foster child, Gloria Fox has completed the MIT Community Fellows program, raised two sons in Roxbury's Whittier Street Housing Development, and served as a community organizer prior to entering politics. She was an essential element in stopping the Southwest Expressway project. She ran as a write-in candidate for the 7th Suffolk District in 1984, then won the seat in 1986, serving the 7th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts Legislature from 1987 until she retired in 2016. She served on multiple committees, including the House Committee on Steering, Policy, and Scheduling, the House Committee on Ways and Means, the Joint Committee on Ways and Means, and the Joint Committee on Housing, serving as the vice chair. She has taken a strong approach to child welfare, foster care, eliminating health disparities, criminal justice reform, and similar areas of interest to the minority community. She was the longest-serving woman in the Legislature at the time of her retirement. She also served on the boards of a wide range of organizations for women and people of color. She received the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators for her activism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Fox
Gwen Ifill
As both the moderator and the managing editor of Washington Week and both a co-anchor and the managing editor of The PBS Newshour, Gwen Ifill is a bestselling author, moderator, and anchor known for her work in the 2004 and 2008 elections. As the author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, Ifill rolled her experience covering eight Presidential campaigns into success in the 2008 campaign season, winning the George Foster Peabody Award after bringing Washington Week to live audiences in a 10-city tour. With a near-50-year history, the prime-time public affairs and news program on television is considered to be the longest-running program of its type, which brought together Washington's best journalists to discuss the week's major stories. With a career starting as a chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, White House correspondent for the New York Times, and acting as a political reporter on both local and national issues for The Washington Post, she also worked with Baltimore and Boston reporting organizations. She then moved to Washington Week and PBS NewsHour in 1999, where the Boston Simmons College graduate has received many honorary doctorates and awards.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/author/gwen-ifill
Harriet A. Jacobs
An early abolitionist and autobiographer, Harriet Jacobs was born into enslavement in 1813 in North Carolina but was taught to read at an early age. After suffering much abuse at the hands of her enslaver and bearing two children to a white neighbor, Jacobs chose to stand up against her treatment and refused to become her enslaver's concubine. Sent to work on a nearby plantation, she fled in an effort to remove her children from her enslaver's control. She escaped north in 1842, working first as a nursemaid in New York City and moving to Rochester to work at the antislavery reading room located above Frederick Douglass' The North Star newspaper. During the course of an abolitionist lecture tour, she was encouraged by Quaker reformer Amy Post to write the story of her enslavement. Her story, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1861 and is considered to be the most comprehensive slave narrative written by a woman, enumerating details to convey the harsh and emotionally-torn treatment enslaved women in the South experienced. She passed away in 1897, having relocated through Boston and several other cities before settling in Washington, D.C. following the Civil War.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harriet-Jacobs
Harriet B. Hayden
As a well-known activist and abolitionist, Harriet Hayden was born into slavery in 1816 in Kentucky. After marrying her husband in 1842 and bearing the couple's son, Jo, the family fled north with the aid of abolitionists Delia Webster and Calvin Fairbanks. They eventually traveled on to Canada in 1844. Drawn to help others flee slavery, the family returned to the United States in 1845 and settled in Boston's Beacon Hill area the next year, placing them in the center of the abolitionist movement in Boston. The family, now including a young daughter, worked with the Vigilance Committee of 1850 to aid and protect those escaping from slavery. Sheltering freedom seekers in their home for over a decade, which had been converted into a boarding house for the Underground Railroad, Harriet Hayden oversaw the daily operation of the boarding house as her husband tended his shop. Providing them with food, shelter, and protection on their voyage to freedom, she also provided a meeting and organizing space, becoming a more public figure later in life as she advocated for equal rights for all, moving from abolition to suffrage and temperance. Until her death in 1893, she tirelessly advocated for equal rights.
https://www.nps.gov/people/harriet-hayden.htm
Isabella Holmes
The Boston Vigilance Committee was linked hand-in-fist with the Underground Railroad and the anti-slavery movement, and at the center of the Boston abolitionist movement were Reverend Samuel Snowden and his daughter, Isabella Holmes. Assisting fugitives who came to or through Boston on the Underground Railroad, Holmes provided boarding to numerous fugitive slaves following the Fugitive Slave Law's enactment in 1850. Living with her husband on Holmes Alley, the family's boarding house was a central location for abolitionist activities in Boston. She passed away in relative obscurity some years later.
https://www.nps.gov/places/the-holmes-alley-house.htm
Isaura Mendes Dealing with loss due to street guidance is an issue that has plagued the Black community for many decades, and Isaura Mendes knew that when she lost her son Bobby to murder in 1995 that she needed to find an answer to this issue. As the founder of The Bobby Mendes Peace Legacy, she was further resolved to bring peace to violent streets after losing another son, Matthew, in 2006 in a drive-by shooting. Designed to provide support and programming for victims and survivors of street violence, the organization has focused on making a difference in the community for over 20 years, providing scholarships to schoolchildren in the community. Annual events to promote community unity and peace include holiday gift-giving celebrations, back-to-school barbecues, and peace walks that honor all those impacted by street violence. She incorporates her seven principles of peace into the organization, being unity, justice, forgiveness, courage, hope, faith, and love. She spreads her message at state prisons, community outreach, and healing trauma in the community.
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/promoting-hope-after-trauma-isaura-mendes-marks-20-years-pushing-peace
Jackie Jenkins-Scott As an innovative leader, Jackie Jenkins-Scott is an accomplished executive with three decades in leadership at mission-driven institutions, moving them from vulnerable positions to high levels of performance. Acting with vision and determination, she is a strategic leader who has worked with a wide range of organizations including the Boston Women's Fund, JJS Advising, Century Bank, Wheelock College, and The Dimock Center. With honorary doctorates in law, education, and humanities from University of Massachusetts Boston, Northeastern University, Suffolk University, Wheelock College, Bentley University, and Mt. Ida College, as well as her Masters degree from Boston University in 1973 and her Bachelors degree from Eastern Michigan University in 1971.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-jenkins-scott-136679101/
Jane C. Putnam As a prominent Boston abolitionist and a founder of an early temperance society in the city in the 1830s, Jane Clark Putnam was born to an educated Black family and married George Putnam in 1825. She was one of the earliest Black female entrepreneurs in the city, operating a hair salon in partnership with her brother. She and her husband worked together as some of the first community organizers to address Black grievances. Putnam was elected president of the women's auxiliary for the organization, fighting growing segregationist influences in the city. She also worked to petition the state legislature for school integration and was a prominent temperance activist, co-founding a Black women's temperance society in the city in 1833. She also founded the Garrison Juvenile Society in 1837.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Putnam
Jane Johnson Born at some point between 1814 and 1830 in Washington, D.C., Jane Johnson was an enslaved person who married and had three sons, but was then sold with two of her sons in early 1854, splitting the family up. She was enslaved by the assistant secretary of President Franklin Pierce, Mr. John Hill Wheeler. While on travel with Wheeler in Philadelphia in July 1855, Johnson was able to reach out to local abolitionists to arrange her escape with her two children, boys about age six and ten. She spoke to individuals at the hotel the group was staying at, and passed details to the abolitionists, who followed them to the boat the group would be leaving on. Despite Wheeler's protests, abolitionists met Johnson and her sons on a docked boat and escorted them off. At the time, the abolitionists told Johnson what her rights were under Pennsylvania law. She then moved to Boston after a summer of travel to clear up remaining legal issues surrounding her being freed. She had a strong personality and continued to speak out in support of abolition for many years. She remarried, and she sheltered fugitives on a minimum of two occasions, passing in 1872.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-story-of-jane-johnson.htm
Jean McGuire Growing up in and around Boston, Jean McGuire was often one of the only Black students in her classes, which exposed her to racism in the years prior to desegregation. Following her grandmother's death, she moved to Washington, D.C., attending an all-Black high school and finding many role models among the teachers who pushed her to excel. She finished her college degree at Boston State College in 1961, beginning her teaching career at the Louisa May Alcott School for two years before working at the Boston Public Schools as the district's first Black Pupil Adjustment Counselor, helping Black students in the recently desegregated schools handle the difficulties they were facing. She helped found the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity in 1966, a voluntary bussing program for students of color, becoming the organization's executive director in 1973 and serving in that role until 2016, acting as a strong advocate for Black students. She was also the first Black woman on the Boston City School Committee, where she showcased her tireless commitment to her students.
https://www.northeastern.edu/aai/services/special-collections/jean-mcguire/
Jessie G. Garnett, D.D.M. Born in 1897, Jessie Garnett was 11 when her family moved to Boston, where she attended Girl's High School, then Tufts College. When she was enrolled at the college's dental school, a dean argued that a mistake had been made. Overcoming both racism and sexism, she graduated from the Tufts School of Dental Medicine in 1920. She was the first Black woman to graduate from the school as well as the first Black dentist in Boston. Though business started out slow, it eventually picked up, with her office moving with her home several times over the years. Garnet was a charter member, along with six other college-educated Black women, who started the Psi Omega Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the oldest mostly-Black national sorority in the United States. She practiced in a range of locations around Boston for nearly 50 years, retiring in 1969. She also served with several organizations, including being a member of the NAACP and a board member at Freedom House, Boston YMCA, and St. Mark's Congregational Church. She passed away in 1976.
https://perspectivesofchange.hms.harvard.edu/node/170
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2016/05/19/dr-jessie-k-garnett-the-first-black-woman-to-practice-dentistry-in-the-hub/
Joan Wallace-Benjamin, Ph.D. In a long career as a leader and senior executive stretching back several decades, Joan Wallace-Benjamin has served in a range of organizations. Beyond acting in leadership roles, she has a strong focus on bringing out the best in people and generating leaders in the organizations she serves. She has worked with the Boys and Girls Club of Boston, ABCD Head Start, ABT Associates, The Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, Whitehead Mann, The Home for Little Wanderers, Governor-Elect Deval Patrick's transition team, and similar organizations. She has received numerous awards from Bostonian and Massachusetts organizations, as well as several honorary Doctorates from universities and colleges in the area. She has also served on several Boards, including Bridgewater State University, City Fresh Foods, The Heller School for Social Policy & Management, Chase Corporation, Scholar Athletes, and is a co-chair for the Families and Children Requiring Assistance Advisory Board and Advisory Board Chair for Wellesley Centers for Women.
https://www.jwallace-benjaminconsulting.com/bio
Josephine S. Ruffin Born to Beacon Hill's Black community in 1842, Josephine Ruffin was surrounded by the heart of Boston's abolitionist community and the ideals of equality, political representation, and justice. A community leader, organizer, and publisher, her activism in abolition and women's suffrage reflected her fighting spirit. Her first efforts focused on recruiting Black men for the Massachusetts 54th and 55th infantry regiments during the Civil War, representing the first two Black regiments for the state. Following the war, she worked with several charities to help Blacks in the South following emancipation, and participated in many service organizations in Boston. Considered to be one of her highest achievements, she established the Women's Era Club in 1893 to promote activism in Black women, including publishing The Woman's Era and organizing the first National Conference of Colored Women in America in 1895, during which the National Federation of Afro-American Women was formed. Seeing women's suffrage as an extension for the fight for equality, she was active in many state and national suffrage organizations, breaking racial barriers in many cases.
https://www.nps.gov/people/josephine-st-pierre-ruffin.htm
Judge Joyce L. Alexander As the first Black woman appointed as a Chief Magistrate judge in the U.S., Joyce Alexander was born in 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Attending Cambridge High, she was the first Black president of the student council. Moving to Howard University, she worked as a legislative assistant, which created a thirst for justice. After graduating in 1969, she earned her J.D. from New England Law School in 1972. Starting her career as a staff attorney for the Greater Boston Legal Assistance Project, she worked for many years as legal counsel for Boston's Youth Activities Commission and as an assistant professor of urban law and Black politics at Tufts University. She co-founded the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, serving as its first female president and increasing its budget ten times over. She served as the first Black woman nationwide as an on-camera legal editor for a national network. She was appointed to the U.S. District Court as a magistrate judge, the first Black woman to do so, and was made Chief Justice in 1996. She served on the board of multiple organizations, has received multiple honorary law degrees from universities and colleges, and has received multiple awards for her work.
http://cambridgeblackhistoryproject.org/project/joyce-london-alexander/
Juanita B. Wade As an experienced community organizer and strong business professional, Juanita Wade graduated from Mount Holyoke University in 1971, followed by a degree from Simmons University in 1973. Following over a decade of work in education, she was elected to two terms as a member of the Boston School Committee in 1986, during which time she moved into the CEO position at Freedom House. After several years there, she moved into the Chief of Human Services position at the City of Boston. Following this work in public affairs, she moved into Washington, D.C.'s DC Education Compact, as its executive director, serving women, children, veterans, families, and homeless on a wide range of social, housing, and economic issues. She then shifted into the corporate world, working as the program director of Fannie Mae's Office of Community and Charitable Giving, then moving into the manager lead of the Making Home Affordable Ground Campaign for the organization, managing outreach efforts. She then worked in community relations as the Making Home Affordable Director prior to her retirement. She then operated Wade Cruise and Travel Services, which closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juanita-brooks-wade-47328038/
Judge Judith N. Dilday As the first person of Color appointed as a judge to the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court, Judith Dilday was born in 1943 and grew up in Pennsylvania, graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. After teaching French language in Pittsburgh for four years, she moved to Boston to study at the Boston University School of Law, where she met her husband and graduated in 1972. She began her career working in both government service and private practice, including Stern and Shapiro and the Department of the Interior. She was the first Black president of the Women's Bar Association in 1990 and 1991, and was a founding partner of Burnham, Hines & Dilday, New England's first law firm owned by Black women, and was the first Black woman working in the Suffolk County District Attorney's office. She was appointed in 1993 as a circuit judge to the Probate and Family Court, being one of four Black women on the Massachusetts bench at the time, and was appointed to be an associate judge in 1998 to the Middlesex Probate and Family Court, retiring in 2009 to teach English in Qiqihar, China, as well as running mock trials for students.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Nelson_Dilday
JudyAnn Bigby, M.D. A former Commonwealth of Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services with her MD from Harvard, JudyAnn Bigby implemented many parts of the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law. These actions caused Massachusetts to lead national health insurance coverage rates of 99.8% for children and 98% for adults. She worked to achieve higher healthcare quality while addressing high healthcare costs, making Massachusetts a leading state in reforming health care delivery systems for a strong primary care foundation, integrated delivery of services, and payment reform, including vulnerable populations. She made significant improvements in mental health service deliver for children, community-based services for individuals with disabilities, veteran suicide prevention, improved foster care outcomes, reduced smoking rates, and reduced cancer and HIV deaths in the state. Prior to her work with the state, she served at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston as the Director of Community Health Programs, and as Director of Harvard Medical School's Center of Excellence in Women's Health. Her work as a pioneer to eliminate health disparities in underserved populations led to national recognition. She has worked as a physician for over 25 years, and is active in multiple organizations, advisory groups, and boards.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ecpe/faculty/judyann-bigby/
Karen H. Ward As Director of Public Affairs and Community Services and host and executive producer of award-winning weekly magazine program CityLine, Karen Ward is a familiar face at WCVB, addressing issues facing people of color in Boston. With the magazine being a recipient of the Associated Press Massachusetts/Rhode Island's "Best Public Affairs Program" and several Emmy nominations, her interviews with Black actors and film industry greats has been just one part of her four-decade career in broadcasting. Her work with the station's public service and community outreach program has included the Five Fixer Upper to refurbish community nonprofit common spaces, while Extreme Makeover: My Hometown has raised awareness about the need for Boston area affordable housing. She launched Commonwealth 5, the station's initiative that matched viewer-donors with non-profits using a web-based initiative that was first of its kind. She was the Executive Producer for Return to Glory, a documentary focused on Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first Black Civil-War-era regiment in the state, and featuring Emmy Award-winning actor Andre Braugher, and was part of the team honored with the "Service to Community in Television" award from the National Association of Broadcasters for efforts during and after the Boston Marathon attack, among others.
https://www.wcvb.com/news-team/95853608-ad1c-4cbf-a155-99daa7da7606
Karilyn Crockett, Ph.D. Author and Assistant Professor Karilyn Crocket has the distinction of serving as the first Chief of Equity for the City of Boston. After receiving a Masters in Geography at the London School of Economics and a Masters from Yale Divinity School, she went on to receive her PhD in American Studies at Yale University. With extensive research on large-scale changes in the use of land in 20th century American urban areas, she also studies the impact of social and geographical considerations on structural poverty. Forming the basis of her book under the same name, she investigated the 1960s grassroots movement to stop urban expansion of the interstate highway system as part of her dissertation, "People Before Highways: Reconsidering Routes to and from the Boston Anti-Highway Movement". Following this work, she worked as both the Director of Small Business Development and the Director of Economic Policy for the City of Boston. Crockett is currently working as an Assistant Professor of Urban History, Public Policy and Planning at DUSP.
https://dusp.mit.edu/people/karilyn-crockett
Katherine T. Knox As a pioneer bicycle racer, Katherine Knox, better known as Kittie, was born in Cambridgeport in 1874. Following her father's death, her family moved to Boston's West End, which at the time was home to a range of impoverished Blacks and recent immigrants, making it very progressive in successfully integrating a wide range of cultures. She found work to create a better life for their family, saving money to purchase a bicycle. She participated alongside the Riverside Cycle Club, though there was some question as to whether she was a member, with women not allowed to participate in the sport at the time. She began participating in meets, winning many of the competitions she participated in. She was accepted as a member of the League of American Wheelmen in 1893, but a 1894 constitution change to include the word "white" caused numerous members to question her membership. She faced discrimination, being barred from entering an annual meeting in 1895 and denied service at restaurants and hotels. Coverage of these issues led to a strong battle being waged over her membership rights, allowing her to be the first Black accepted to the League.
https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2020/05/26/breaking-the-cycle-the-kittie-knox-story/
Kem Danner Working in a range of investment and banking businesses, Kem Danner is an active community volunteer and activist, promoting children, health, and career development. She began her career in Charlotte, North Carolina following her graduation with her Bachelors and Masters from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Appalachian State University, at Bank of America's management associate program, serving a wide range of business roles, including numerous merger and acquisition roles that required living abroad in Europe, through the 17 years she worked with the organization. She then moved to State Street Global Advisors in 2015, working as the head of diversity and inclusion, then moving through the organization as the head of human resources and senior vice president and a member of the State Street Global Advisors Executive Management Group. Working with a range of charitable organizations focused on childhood development and education as well as cancer research, she also works with numerous employee network groups at State Street, including being a mentor at the Professional Women's Network, executive advisor of the Black Professionals Group, and a steering committee member for the organization's Global Diversity and Inclusion Council.
https://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/kem-danner/
Mayor Kim M. Janey As Boston's first female and first Black mayor, Kim Janey is used to being on the front lines in equality. At age 11, she faced rocks and racial slurs during the busing era of desegregation of Boston schools in the 1970s. This focus on education, equity, justice, and community organization led to 25 years focused on nonprofits, first as a community organizer improving access to high-quality, affordable child care, then as a champion for policy reforms improving access, opportunity, excellence, and equity at Boston Public Schools. She began her work in government as the first woman elected to represent District 7 on the Boston City Council in 2017, where she was elected in 2020 by her peers as President of Boston's most diverse City Council. A recipient of multiple awards, she was elected as Boston's 55th Mayor, and has successfully led the city through unprecedented challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic. With a focus on recovery, reopening, and renewal that addressed systemic inequalities, she prioritized health and wellness as well as equity in reopening the city's economy and public school system while curbing displacement with improved access to affordable housing and reducing homicide through her safety plan.
https://www.boston.gov/departments/mayors-office/kim-janey
Justice Kimberly S. Budd As the 38th Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in 2020 sworn in by Governor Charlie Baker., Kimberly Budd was sworn in as an Associate Judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court by then-Governor Deval Patrick in 2009, served as the Regional Administrative Justice for Middlesex Criminal Business, then appointed as an Associate Judge to the Court in 2016. She earned her Bachelors from Georgetown University and her law degree from Harvard Law School, then began her career serving as a law clerk to Chief Justice Joseph Warner at the Massachusetts Appeals Court, then served as a litigation associate at Mintz Levin. Following this, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's Office in their Major Crimes and Drug Units, then worked as a University Attorney for Harvard University's General Counsel Office, moving to the Director of the Community Values program at Harvard Business School. She also teaches in MCLE and Bar Association programs, has been an adjunct instructor at New England Law and taught trial advocacy at Harvard Law School.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/supreme-judicial-court-justices#chief-justice-kimberly-s.-budd-
Lani Guinier, J.D. As the first Black woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law School in 1998, Lani Guninier was a larger-than-life presence, pushing her many students to push harder and further. She often encouraged them to think deeper into problems they were facing by saying, "My problem is, if you stop there . . . " Born in New York CIty to a civil rights activist mother and lawyer and union organizer father who became the first chair of Harvard's Department of Afro-American Studies, she earned her Bachelor's from Radcliffe in 1971 and her JD from Yale Law School in 1974. After clerking for the U.S. Court of Appeals, she served in the Civil Rights Division with Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days while leading the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's voting rights project. Prior to teaching at Harvard in 1996, she taught at University of Pennsylvania Law School starting in 1988 as a highly-regarded teacher, and also taught at Columbia Law School as a professor of law and social responsibility prior to her death in 2022. Devoting her life to equality, empowerment, democracy, and justice, Guinier was well-known for her scholarship and determination, receiving multiple awards and authoring numerous documents.
https://hls.harvard.edu/today/in-memoriam-lani-guinier-1950-2022/
Laura YoungerA strong voice against modern gentrification, Laura Younger is noted for speaking out against the displacement of Blacks, persons of color, and lower-income people in Boston. As part of the Holborn, Gannet, Gaston, Otisfield Betterment Association, her focus is on the plight faced by individuals and families in Grove Hall in remaining in the community where they have established themselves and called home for many years. With a solid focus on affordable rental housing and homeownership for those who are not eligible for the CDC and city projects that are under development, she champions those who have been priced out of buying a home in the neighborhoods that they grew up in. She encourages those in the neighborhoods to undertake creative solutions, such as building on vacant or condemned properties, while leveraging her voice to push the city into passing zoning variances and issuing building permits. She helps others find their voice and their place in neighborhood associations to help move neighborhoods in the Boston area facing gentrification to fight the process and participate in the responsible development of planning and development for these areas. She is expected to continue being a strong voice for neighborhoods for years to come.
https://binjonline.com/2018/11/21/less-building-moratorium/
Leah RandolphAs an active voice in Black addiction services, Leah Randolph uses her Bachelor's from University of Massachusetts Boston and Master's from Cambridge College to benefit the minority community. She began her career at the Human Resources Development Institute of Massachusetts as the state director, feeling drawn to the four substance abuse programs offered by the Institute. This was due to the organization's parallel work with the Massachusetts Black Alcoholism & Addiction Council in the greater Boston area, an advocacy group that she has worked with for over 20 years and currently serves as the president of the chapter. To further alight with her work with the advocacy group, she moved into the Kitty Dukakis Treatment Center for Women as a program manager, then onto the Boston Medical Center to assess emergency room patients for substance abuse disorder and determine placement, helping the patients find the right treatment for their needs. She is currently at the Commonwealth Mental Health & Wellness Center, which she co-founded and serves as the executive director of, providing mental health and substance abuse counseling, along with a wide range of therapy, mentoring, coaching, mentoring, case management, and other healing modalities from a culturally sensitive approach.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-randolph-cadc-ii-ladc-i-03024513
Lilla G. FrederickServing for many years as the President and Chair of Project RIGHT (Rebuild and Improve Grove Hall Together), Lilla Frederick was a strong positive influence to improving life for countless minorities in the greater Boston area. She also serves as the Chair of the Boston Caribbean Foundation, Secretary of the Grove Hall Elder Housing Advocacy Group, and has been a member and volunteer with the Blue Hill Avenue Initiative Task Force and New Boston Pilot Middle School, which she was instrumental in helping design. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she had a strong belief in the role of education in life, earning a Bachelor's from Northeastern University and a Master's from Lesley University. Her contributions to the community caused her to be recognized from multiple government organizations and award groups. Her passion for the community led to her work as a board member at Environmental Partnerships, where she formed partnerships with churches for landscaping of newly-constructed affordable housing structures, as well as large flower pots for beautifying Devon Street. She leveraged considerable organizational skills and social graces to create inviting spaces throughout the Grove Hill area and organized annual Thanksgiving meals for downtown Boston homeless individuals.
https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/domain/1561
Lillian A. LewisAs the first Black woman journalist in Boston, Lillian Lewis was a Boston native born in 1869 in Beacon Hill. Growing up in the abolitionist home of Lewis Hayden, who ran Boston's Underground Railroad, she attended Bowdoin Grammar School, Girls' High School, and Boston Normal School. With a strong literary gift, she wrote and lectured on temperance, often including a thread of humor in her work, as well as being a stenographer and novelist. She used the pen name Bert Islew to disguise her gender when she started writing for the Boston Advocate in 1889, the same year she was admitted to the New England Woman's Press Association. Her popular society column is credited with saving the paper, as its sales had been failing prior to that point. She contributed to the Richmond Planet, as well as monthly magazine Our Women and Children, as well as working for the Boston Herald as one of the first Black women writing for a white-run newspaper. She became the first Black woman clerk at Boston City Hall's Collector's office in 1920, retiring in 1934.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_A._Lewis
Lisa SimmonsAs the director of the Roxbury International Film Festival, or RoxFilm as it's known in the industry, Lisa Simmons has made great strides in helping Black artists present themselves as they are, rather than in more traditional film roles and characters. With the development of new technology in areas such as distribution, cinematography, and editing, she sees opportunities for more people of color to share their stories without Hollywood backing, allowing them to compete across the film industry and more easily be seen at larger film festivals. Simmons also adjusted the festival's format to a hybrid model, making it easier for more individuals to see the incredible stories that are being produced while shaking up the traditional question-and-answer format of panel discussions. She has also created specific divisions to cover a range of submitted films, as well as the strong selection of local feature and short films that the festival has become known for. Her focus on this direction for the festival is helping new Black artists enter the industry without compromising their identity or integrity.
https://artsfuse.org/230811/film-interview-roxfilms-lisa-simmons-embracing-cinematic-independence/
L'Merchie FrazierAn artist, educator, poet, public historian, and activist, L'Merchie Frazier is the current Executive Director of Creative/Strategic Planning for SPOKE Arts. Coming from a strong background that includes twenty years of serving the artistic community and featuring a range of international residencies, she is known for work that reflects the community in an authentic and genuine fashion. Her artwork is featured in the White House, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. As a State of Massachusetts Art Commissioner and a prior City of Boston Artist in Residence, she has received many awards for her reparative aesthetic approach to expanding historical narrative and responding to crisis, violence and trauma throughout her career. She has served as a former Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, with a focus on supporting social justice and the movement for civil rights seen through five hundred years of Indigenous and Black history, providing a viewpoint that more accurately showcases the experience of people of color during that time.
https://www.boston.gov/government/cabinets/equity-and-inclusion-cabinet/lmerchie-frazier
Louise W. Corbin Acting as an advocate for improved foster care, Louise Wells was an educator who took in over 50 children over the course of four decades, providing them with a strong, stable home life in which they could heal and build a foundation for success. Whenever there was a crisis, the Department of Social Services knew that they could count on her to take on children removed from homes in an emergency. A graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Education, she taught early childhood education at Wheelock College and Roxbury Community College. Working with foster children and education led to an interest in theories about how children develop, which encouraged her to take childhood development courses at local colleges until a Harvard scholarship allowed her to pursue a Master's, which she attained in 1969. Going on to direct numerous Boston-region daycare centers, she also worked with the state in the Office for Children until 1975, when she began pursuing a teaching degree. She continued teaching after her retirement in 2000 up until shortly before her death, and is recognized by many in the community for improving the foster care system in the area.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/201835394/louise-corbin
Lucy M. Mitchell Born in Florida in 1899, Lucy Mitchell was an instructor, activist, and advocate for training daycare workers in Boston for many years. After seeing a confrontation between Daytona School's founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, and a hate group, she moved to Roxbury with her husband, earning a Master's from Boston University in 1935. Prior to earning her degree, she operated the Nursery School at Robert Gould Shaw House starting in 1932, a position she continued for 21 years. She co-founded the Associated Day Care Services of Metropolitan Boston, eventually serving as its executive director. After spending nine years in research and activism, she supported the 1962 law that established state daycare licensing laws, followed by working for the Massachusetts Department of Education in developing affordable daycare worker training courses. She also trained Peace Corps volunteers in working with children, consulted for the nationally-based Head Start program, helping with its implementation in Boston, and worked with numerous other organizations and agencies to improve the lives of children in daycare across the region.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-lucy-miller-mitchell
Lucy T. Prince Known best for her fame as the first Black poetess in the United States, Lucy Price had many other accomplishments, including arguing a court case in front of the Supreme Court. Taken from Africa as an infant, she was sold into slavery, baptized during the Great Awakening, and at the age of 20, was admitted to the church fellowship. She married in 1756, and her husband purchased her freedom, with six children born to the couple by 1769. An exceptional speaker, she argued in a number of situations, some successful and others not. She spent three hours in an earnest, eloquent speech before Williams College trustees arguing for the admission of her son, received protection when a neighboring family threatened her family, and faced off against two of the state's leading lawyers at the Supreme Court and won when Colonel Eli Bronson tried to steal their land, with the additional compliment from the presiding justice, Samuel Chase, stated that her argument was the best he'd ever heard. She passed away at age 97 in 1821.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2p15.html
Lula Christopher A pioneer in healing circles and self-empowerment in Boston, Lula Christopher, known to many in the community as Mama Lula, focused on reintroducing Black women to ancient medicine while creating access for other treatment modalities including acupuncture, massage, and reflexology. By providing opportunities for Black men, women, and children to explore their ancestry and spirituality, her role as a community service specialist of over four decades has allowed her to not only heal herself, but others as well. Serving as a community advocate, activist, program developer, mentor, teacher, and administrator, Christopher uses Dagara medicine to help others connect with their often discordant roots and ancestors, helping them to heal from trauma, abuse, and generational patterns that cause harm, helping people today move forward in an empowered, healthy, and strong way.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/lulaeldership
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/07/metro/black-history-i-carry-with-me-marlene-boyette/
Mallika Marshall, M.D. As an award-winning physician and journalist, Mallika Marshal serves as the Medical Director of WBZ-TV, located in Boston. This career path includes being a Board Certified physician in pediatrics and internal medicine, serving on Harvard Medical School's staff while she practices at the Chelsea Urgent Care Clinic for Massachusetts General and at the MGH Revere Health Center. She's a contributing editor for the publishing sector of Harvard Medical School, Harvard Health Publishing, and hosts the publishing sector's e-learning coursework. With over 15 years of media coverage expertise and over 10 years serving as the HealthWatch anchor at WBZ-TV starting in 2000, she combines her journalistic expertise with her medical knowledge to help promote better health for many within the Boston viewing area, while serving on various Boards over the years and maintaining a range of honor societies, medical organizations, and journalistic organizations.
https://hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/mallika-marshall
Margaret A. Burnham, LL.B. Professor, author, and director Margaret Burnham graduated with her Bachelor's in 1966 from Tougaloo College, and her legal Bachelor's from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. Recognized on the international stage as an expert in civil and human rights, she is the Director of Reparations and Restorative Justice Initiatives, the Director of Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, and is the Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Law, Equity, and Race. She headed outside counsel and law students during a landmark federal case that was settled involving Jim Crow laws and racially-based violence. She is a current member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board after her appointment by President Joe Biden, involving Civil Rights Era criminal cold cases that were racially motivated. She started her career by representing civil rights and political activists in the 1970s, becoming the first Black woman to serve in the Massachusetts judiciary. She was appointed to an international human rights commission in 1993 by South African President Nelson Mandela, which developed into the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her book By Hands Now Known was published in 2022 and has received numerous awards for its approach to investigating Jim Crow violations.
https://law.northeastern.edu/faculty/burnham/
Maria L. Baldwin As an activist and educator, Marie Baldwin was born in 1856 and graduated from the Cambridge Training School for Teachers in 1881. She taught in the Cambridge school district after some resistance, then in 1887 at the Agassiz Grammar School, becoming the principal two years later. Choosing to remain an educator rather than marrying in an era where married women were not employed as teachers, she kept this position for many decades while joining Black civil rights groups, giving her a platform to speak on both civil and women's rights movements. She was a member and secretary of the Banneker Society, a local Black debate club, where she read many literature and history pages. She opened her home in 1880 to Black social activists and intellectuals while offering weekly readings and discussions for Black students attending Harvard but not welcome in the University's study spaces. She co-founded the Woman's Era Club, which focused on the anti-lynching movement, women's suffrage, and improving educational and career opportunities, and served as the first President of the League of Women for Community Service, providing comfort to returning soldiers and new widows during WWI. She remained active until her death in 1922.
https://www.nps.gov/people/maria-l-baldwin.htm
Maria W. Stewart As an advocate for women's rights and an abolitionist, Maria Stewart was born in Connecticut in 1803, moving to Boston to support herself as a domestic servant while educating herself. Marrying in 1826, the couple was part of the small community of free Blacks around Beacon Hill. They shared the community's thirst to free those still enslaved, and despite losing her husband a few years later, she continued to speak out regarding racism and segregation in Boston. She became one of the first women to speak publicly in the US, a practice considered improper or immoral at the time, and was the first Black woman to write and publish a political manifesto calling for Black people to resist exploitation, oppression, and slavery, with her manuscript delivered to The Liberator's office, a white abolitionist newspaper. Her success helped her build a short but very significant public speaking career, giving four public lectures from 1831 and 1833 that were on the record. She had a unique approach using Biblical imagery and language to condemn racism and slavery. She encouraged audiences to pursue any educational opportunities available to them and demand their political rights.She passed away in 1879.
https://www.nps.gov/people/maria-w-stewart.htm
Marian L. Heard As the current President and CEO of Oxen Hill Partners, Marian Heard has a range of both privately-held and Fortune 500 companies in her client list while promoting brand enhancement and leadership development programs. She is also retired from the position of President and CEO of Boston United Way and the CEO of United Ways of New England, Heard has a long history in volunteer service, including being the founding President and CEO of Points of Light Foundation, a founding board member of the MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, a current board member on Liberty Mutual, CVS Caremark, and Sovereign Bank. Serving as a board member and trustee for numerous organizations, she has received numerous honorary doctorates and awards for her contributions to business, leadership, and children, while moving the Black community as a whole farther in the business world.
https://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/marian-heard/
Marilyn A. Chase Raised in Detroit, Marilyn Chase was spending her time counseling poor Black teenage girls in the deeply divided and racially segregated city in 1967 prior to her move to Boston in 1970. Continuing to work with Black youths to encourage them to reach their full potential and avoid the tension, trauma, and violence caused by issues with racism and lack of equity such as were seen in the race riots and violence that arose across the country in those turbulent times. She served as the assistant secretary for Health and Human Services under Governor Patrick while trying to promote peace, equality, and equity between races.
https://www.wgbh.org/lifestyle/2017-09-08/detroit-boston-and-the-searing-memories-of-the-summer-of-1967
Marita Rivero Born in 1943 in Pennsylvania, Marita Rivero is a media and nonprofit executive who earned her Bachelor's at Tufts University in 1964. She became a WGBH producer, which is a National Public Radio station in Boston. She moved to Washington, D.C. in 1976 to consult for several organizations including the National Science Foundation, PBS, and the United States Congressional Black Caucus' Communications Task Force. In 1981, she returned to radio production at WPFW Pacifica, a position she eventually promoted through to vice president. Returning to Boston in 1988 as the general manager of WGBH radio, she spent a decade at the station prior to being hired as executive-in-charge of Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery, then moving into the same position in This Far By Faith, airing in 2003. She was promoted to WGBH's general manager in 2005, which was a position she held until 2013. After volunteering since the late 1980s for the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket, she was named executive director in 2015. For her work in media, she has received a wide range of awards from diverse organizations and serves on numerous boards, three of which she serves as chair.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/marita-rivero
Mary C. Thompson, D.D.M. As the third Black woman to graduate from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, Mary Thompson was a volunteer once day a week while operating a private practice and practicing at the Children's Dental Clinic. Starting by treating patients in her home, she was able to avoid the cost of office rent and was able to serve the public during the Great Depression, a time that demanded having a spirit of great generosity. She regularly helped patients who had no ability to pay for her services. However, she still faced racial and gender discrimination. She was only allowed for many years to practice as a dental assistant for a local school because of sexist advertising that excluded women, even after she passed the entrance exam with flying colors. She volunteered with the Mississippi Health Project as a dentist, visiting schools and churches that sometimes wouldn't even have a table. Seeing the terrible poverty in the state committed her to racial justice, working with her husband to battle housing discrimination around Boston, receiving an NAACP award for their work during the 1970s. However, she never lost her dedication to her dentistry work and helping those in need.
https://dental150.tufts.edu/posts/2
Mary E. Mahoney A Boston native, Mary Mahoney was born in 1845 and was the first Black licensed nurse in the US, working at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in a range of roles for 15 years. She entered the Hospital's nursing school when it opened in 1878 and graduated as one of only four graduates out of 42. However, she faced overwhelming discrimination in public nursing, so instead became a private nurse so that she could focus her care on the needs of individuals, gaining a reputation for efficiency, patience, and a caring bedside manner. She joined national and international nursing associations in 1896, but finding some members of the group less than welcoming, she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908 and elected as the organization's national chaplain with a lifetime membership. Shortly after, she served as the director for the Howard Orphanage Asylum for Black children, where she served for two years prior to her retirement. However, she still championed women's rights, and was among the first women to register to vote in Boston following the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1820. She passed in 1926.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-mahoney
Mary E. Wilson As a leading civil rights activist and a founding member of Boston's branch of the NAACP and Women's Service Club, Mary Wilson was born in Ohio in 1866, graduating from Oberlin College. Coming from an activist family, she moved to Washington, D.C. to teach in public school for 10 years while writing a health and beauty column for Black woman's newspaper The Woman's Era. She married prominent Boston civil rights attorney Butler Wilson, then moved to the South End, where they raised their six children. She was a keynote speaker at a women's anti-lynching demonstration in May 1899, calling for federal intervention. The couple were among the founders of Boston's NAACP branch, and were the most prominent Black leaders in the organization at the time. She frequently volunteered as a traveling organizer, bringing thousands of members to the group from New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. She worked to end discrimination at the New England Sanitarium, in the school system and at department stores in Boston. During World War I, she organized a knitting circle 350 women and girls strong to manufacture scarves and gloves for Boston's Black soldiers, growing into the Women's Service Club. She passed away in 1928.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Evans_Wilson
Rep. Mary H. Goode Born in 1927 in Georgia, Mary Goode and her family moved to Boston before her high school years. After raising three children, she began attending Tufts University, graduating in 1974. Determined to bring change to the Black community in Boston, she represented the 10th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1975 to 1978 as the second Black female legislator in the state. She ran under the Democratic Party and defeated two other contenders, Emanuel Eaves and Leon Rock, by 19 and 43 votes respectively. She retired after her 21-year-old son lost his life in a drowning accident in 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_H._Goode
Mary L. Johnson Together with her husband, Mary Johnson were owners and operators of one of the 200 Black-owned Boston businesses at the beginning of the 20th century. Selling hair goods at the storefront, Johnson's Hair Store was only a small part of their professional empire, with Johnson Hair Food being sold across the entire United States by 1900. With an entrepreneurial eye, Mary opened the Johnson's School of Beauty Culture, where she offered a range of salon and spa services that included massage, hairdressing, shampooing, scalp treatments, and manicures. This school provided young Black women in the Boston area with technical education and skills in an environment that was otherwise very limited at the time.
https://buildingsofnewengland.com/tag/madam-mary-l-johnson-boston/
Mattie B. Powell Born in upstate New York in 1921, Mattie Powell grew up in South Carolina, but accompanied her sister in a move to Boston. Meeting her husband there, the couple opened the Powell Barbershop and Hollywood Barbershop, opening up a total of three barbershops in the next few years. While operating the businesses, Mattie became Massachusetts first Black female Master Barber. With their shops becoming a strong fixture of Black neighborhoods in Boston for decades, and they were the first Black family to own a home on their street in Dorchester. Once the barber shops were established, she returned to teaching for Boston Public Schools, teaching kindergarten for 25 years, and received her Master's from Boston State College. Her love of children and reading exposed her children to the importance of reading and writing. She also wrote her own music and sang, performing at special events with her son accompanying her on the piano.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Mattie-Powell
Mattie L. Washington As Massachusetts' first Black businesswoman working as a licensed hair stylist, Mattie Washington was born in Georgia in 1923 before moving to Boston in her early 20s. With a long history as an entrepreneur, she received her master's license in barbering, operating two Corner Barber Shops in the city in the time during and following World War II. After spending many happy years operating her barbershops, she retired from the industry, but her entrepreneurial spirit wouldn't let her rest. She owned and operated a local daycare while volunteering at both the American Indian Council and the Orchard Park Community Center in Boston during her later years. She passed in 2011.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/mattie-washington-obituary?id=22189415
Mattie M. Adams As the eldest daughter in a family of 17 children, Mattie Adams was born in 1923 in Boston's South End. As an active leader in the United Methodist Church of All Nations, Adams worked hard to develop a number of successful ministries for the church, including her Saturdays and Sundays Bread program, developed to feed countless homeless people and families. With a strong entrepreneurial spirit, she was a graduate of the New England School of Art & Design, after which she opened Adams Interiors in the Back Bay area, where she was the first licensed Black interior designer in New England. Enjoying great success in the area, she catered to numerous corporate and celebrity clients, including the White House. As a former member of the New England Minority Purchasing Council Board of Directors and President Carter's Small Business Advisory Council, she opened doors to other people of color in the design industry. She passed away in 2016.
https://www.currentobituary.com/member/obit/197377
Maud C. HareMaude Hare was a Black pianist, writer, musician, scholar and activist. Born in 1874, she grew up in a Texas home filled with music and politics. She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, as well as Harvard's Lowell Institute of Literature, becoming an accomplished pianist. However, she and another Black woman faced struggles living on campus. She refused to move and insisted on proper treatment, and her issue was taken up by numerous organizations. Hare became a part of Boston's vibrant Black community, joining the Charles Street Circle and became a close friend of W.E.B. DuBois. She taught at the Texas Deaf and Blind Institute for Colored Youths and spoke up against the Austin Opera House that wanted Blacks in the audience to be segregated during her performances. Along with William Howard Richardson, she was the first Black musician performing in Boston Public Library's Concert-Lecture series. Hare founded the Allied Arts Center in Boston to encourage arts education and performance. She collected music from across the South and the Caribbean as a musicologist studying folklore, and was the first person to study Creole music. She also wrote extensively, contributing topics on music to a variety of publications. Her book, Negro Musicians and Their Music, published in 1836, the year she died, documented the development of Black music from its African roots and its influences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maud_Cuney_Hare
Maude Hurd A political activist, leader, and community organizer, Maude Hurt was born in 1944. Best known for her role as the President of ACORN for 20 years, she started with the organization in 1982 first as a speaker and then as the Boston chapter's chairwoman. She led demonstration at Boston City Hall over vacant lots that had trash left there with no cleanup by government agencies. After holding a variety of leadership positions with the organizations over the next seven years, she was elected as ACORN's president. She was also a member of the socialist New Party and Democratic socialists of America, and was recognized as one of the top 100 individuals building the New Party by then-organizer Barack Obama. She led efforts to oppose scaling back of the Community Reinvestment Act, a law requiring moneylenders to maximize mortgages approved for undercapitalized and minority loan applicants that did not meet traditional borrowing standards, and was arrested at the scene of a protest at the U.S. Capitol Building. She promoted living wage laws and other policies that would allow Democrats to ally with progressives. When ACORN disbanded, Hurd became president of New England United For Justice, participating in "Take Back Boston" rallies.
https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/maude-hurd/
Maude T. Steward As the sister of William Monroe Trotter, owner of The Guardian, Maude Steward worked as the assistant editor of the newspaper, then continued publishing it herself for two decades following his death. Born in 1874, she attended Wellesley College, giving her the tools she needed to successfully edit and later operate the newspaper following her brother's death. In addition to her writing and editing skills, she also participated in a number of local civic organizations, was one of the founders of St. Mark's Musical and Literary Union, and also worked with the Boston Equal Rights League and the Women's League. The newspaper gave her a strong outlet to promote equal rights both for blacks and for women. She passed away in 1955.
https://bwht.org/roxbury-womens-history-trail/#:~:text=Maude%20Trotter%20Steward%20(1874%2D1955,in%20many%20local%20civic%20organizations.
Melnea A. Cass A community and civil rights activist on the local, state, and national levels, Melnea Cass was born in 1896 in Richmond, Virginia. Her family moved to Boston when she was five years old, and after graduating as valedictorian in 1914, she sought work in retail, but found that limited opportunities in Boston forced her to do domestic work until her marriage. She became involved in community projects, including registering Black women to vote following ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. She continued fighting for the rights of Black women for the rest of her life. She founded Kindergarten Mothers, and worked with the Harriet Tubman Mother's Club, Sojourner Truth Club, the Northeastern Region of the National Association of Colored Women's Club as secretary, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Women in Community Service, and many others. She was the only female charter member to Action for Boston Community Development, and a founder and charter member of Freedom House. She was president of Boston's NAACP chapter from 1962 to 1964, and chaired the Massachusetts Advisory Committee for the Elderly from 1975 to 1976. She passed in 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melnea_Cass
Mildred Davenport As the first Black woman to appear with the Boston Pops orchestra, Mildred Davenport was born in Roxbury in 1900. After finishing high school, she studied at the Sargent School for Physical Culture at Boston University and studied dance. She opened the Davenport School of Dance in the 1920s, then opened her second school, the Silver Box Studio, in Boston. During a time when it was unusual for Black and white performers to appear on stage together, she appeared in numerous Broadway musicals and reviews, alongside performers such as Clifton Webb and Imogene Coca. She provided dance interpretations of Black spiritual music with the Boston Pops orchestra in 1938, then toured the East Coast in a show called Chocolate Review for five years. She was among the first Black women to enlist in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps during World War II, moving from first lieutenant to captain. She then worked for two decades with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination from 1947 to 1968, also serving on the Boston NAACP board of directors. She received the Sojourner Truth Award from the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs for Boston in 1973. She passed away in 1990, while still living in Boston.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Davenport
Mildred F. Jefferson, M.D. Not only was Mildred Jefferson the first Black woman graduate from Harvard Medical in 1951, she also was the first woman who was employed as a general surgeon at Boston University Medical Center. Active in the right-to-life movement, she was born in Texas in 1927, daughter to a schoolteacher and a minister, but was known for following the local doctor around on his rounds. After finishing her secondary education, she went on to attend Texas College, then Tufts University, as she was considered too young at the time that she finished her Bachelors to attend medical school. Once she finished her medical degree, she was the first woman to undertake a surgical internship at Boston Hospital, as well as being the first female doctor at Boston University Medical Center. She received her board certification in surgery in 1972, and by 1984, was a general surgeon at Boston University, while also becoming a professor of surgery at Boston University School of Medicine. She was the first woman member of the Boston Surgical Society. She helped found Massachusetts Citizens for Life and the National Right to Life Committee, becoming active in many roles in the 1970s. She passed away in 1990.
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collections/mildred-jefferson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Fay_Jefferson
Miriam Manning Miriam Manning retired from foster grandparent work at 95 years of age in 2019, putting the cap on many years of volunteering with over 27 years in that specific role. Providing a solid role model and caring individual in thousands of children's lives, she has dedicated these many years to caring for children at the Dorchester Headstart, crediting the activity with being what kept her moving for so many years. Operated by ABCD, the program has brought older adults and children into close contact for over 54 years, providing children with a level of care in their lives that may otherwise be difficult to accomplish, while allowing the older adults to share their knowledge with children and making a difference in their lives.
https://www.boston25news.com/news/-it-s-why-i-m-still-moving-95-year-old-finally-retires-from-foster-role/952224040/
Mukiya Baker-Gomez With a reputation of putting all of her effort behind every endeavor, Mukiya Baker-Gomez was a strong advocate for community empowerment and politics. Heading the State Office of Minority and Women Business Assistance from 1985 until 1991, she worked hard to advocate for minority and women entrepreneurs in the community and state, then worked with Governor Patrick's Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance division for University of Massachusetts Boston Science Center's construction. She also worked on election campaigns for countless individuals, including Chuck Turner, Ayanna Pressley, Gloria Fox, Diane Wilkerson, and Mel King gain public office. Considered to be a hero to many in the Black community, she was born in Boston in 1948, she followed her aunt's example as a Republican activist during the Civil Rights era, registering to vote after her 18th birthday and remaining active in political life. She spent her life in and out of public service, working with elected officials while volunteering with community organizations. She worked and volunteered with the Black United Front in ht e1970s, as well as the Contractors Association of Boston representing Black construction firms, and the Opportunities Industrialization Center, a program training community residents to work in high-tech careers.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2023/06/14/mukiya-baker-gomez-community-leader-74/
Muriel S. Snowden A MacArthur Fellow, Muriel Snowden was a community organizer who co-founded Freedom House in 1949, an organization empowering the local community and spent 35 years directing the organization. Prior to her work with Freedom House, she received her A.B. degree from Radcliffe College in 1938 and pursued additional education at the New York School of Social Work from 1943 to 1945. She then served as executive director of the Cambridge Civic Unity Committee as well as an investigator for the Essex County, New Jersey Welfare Board. A lecturer and educator at Simmons College School of Social Work, she served on several boards beyond Freedom House, including Harvard University, Tufts University, Babson College, the Boston Museum of Science, the New England Aquarium, and the Radcliffe Black Women's Oral History Project. Her actions allowed Freedom House to develop programs addressing poverty, housing, segregation, hiring discrimination, and unemployment issues in the Black community. Following her retirement in 1984, Snowden remained an active community leader, encouraging international relations and foreign language study through computer-based programs. She passed away in 1988.
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-1987/muriel-s-snowden#searchresults
Myechia Minter-Jordan, M.D. With strong experience in nonprofit and healthcare management, Myechia Minter-Jordan has worked to improve healthcare access for marginalized populations in the greater Boston area. She is the current President and CEO of CareQuest Institute for Oral Health, which is focused on improving health outcomes through better medical/dental collaboration. She has also worked in executive positions at DentalQuest to improve dental and oral health, and at The Dimock Center where she oversaw a $45 million budget and programs for healthcare, behavioral health, and early education. These opportunities have allowed her to serve the community through improved healthcare access, especially in aspects of healthcare that have been historically underserved. Minter-Jordan received her doctorate at Brown Medical School in 1998, and an MBA at John Hopkins Carey School of Business in 2007.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/myechia-minter-jordan-md-mba-099bb02/
Nancy G. Prince Born in 1799, Nancy Prince was a biographer who moved to Boston after the War of 1812. She became very active within the early anti-slavery societies, especially William Lloyd Garrison's society. She undertook two different missions to support recently freed Black people in Jamaica, hoping to educate the people there so that they could better support themselves and avoid being taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals. Returning to Boston, she worked for Emancipation, thwarting agents who were enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, and was an early proponent of women's rights. Her autobiography, which included her father's story as a Nantucket whaler, and her grandfather's story as a captured slave from Africa, was published from Garrison's office. She became a speaker at women's rights conventions, telling audiences at an 1854 conference that she understood women's wrongs better than rights. Following this, she disappeared from history.
https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/nancy-gardner-prince-daughter-of-a-black-nantucket-whaler/
Nellie B. Mitchell Born in the 1840s, Nellie Mitchell became one of the most successful Black soprano singers in America. Spending decades in her career as a singer in churches and at a range of events, she was known for having a very versatile voice for a range of music, including classical, opera, and folk music. Though no known recordings were made of her voice, it was believed to be a lyric soprano, with a richness to it that may have been lacking in other sopranos in that age. Traveling extensively, she toured and performed all over the East Coast and Midwest, delighting audiences at both Black and white churches as well as New York City's Steinway Hall. However, her race denied her opportunities given to white contemporaries, such as recording her voice. She performed at abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's funeral and at meetings of an organization that grew into the NAACP. She was also known for inventing the phoneterion, a device that helped singers learn proper tongue positions.
https://www.nhpr.org/all-things-considered/2021-06-18/this-juneteenth-a-tribute-to-dovers-nellie-brown-mitchell
Olive L. Benson Recognized as a premier hair stylist and an expert in straightening and relaxing hair, Olivia Benson was born in Cambridge in 1932. Studying at the Wilfred Academy following high school, she received her certification in hairdressing, continuing her education and professional training at Pivot Point, Vidal Sasson, Jingles, Clairol, and Wella. Opening a small beauty shop in north Cambridge in 1959, she provided the most advanced treatment and styling techniques. Moving her business to Boston in the 1960s, she realized strong success, moving to two different larger locations in Boston's upscale retail districts over the following years. Women from many ethnic and racial makeups came to Olive's Beauty Salon to have their hair styled and straightened. She also designed and coordinated several industry publications for both ethnic and non-ethnic hair styles. In 1996, she created and marketed her own hair product line, including universal relaxers, protein conditioners, shampoo, and leave-in conditioners under the brand Universal Textures. She was honored as the first Black person inducted into the Hall of Renown for the National Cosmetology Association in 1991, and was the first Black to receive a North American Hairstyle Award in 1996. She passed away in 2005.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/olive-lee-benson-40
Patricia A. Raynor Named for her birthday on St. Patrick's Day, Patricia Raynor was born in 1927. Struggling to support her family while on AFDC, she took on any jobs she could, which led her to work as a community organizer for the Whittier Street Housing Projects. In this role, she coordinated the Low Cost Food Cooperative. She helped found the Roxbury Comprehensive Community Health Center as well as the New Professionals Program. She also worked with the Lower Roxbury Community Council, the Roxbury Action Program, and the Third World Women's Conference. She was selected as an Associate Researcher under MIT's Fellowship program. She was instrumental in starting the University of Massachusetts' School Without Walls program, providing college credit for adult life experience. She had received the NAACP Community Service Award, and Greyhound Bus named her Woman of the Year for her work in mentoring and encouraging many young community activists. A scholarship has been established in her name.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=102273618666065&id=102212338672193&paipv=0&eav=AfaTYqFCythydNjKM5e2KilrImeq6wSjzIgeuGLr_3uyKU3BSZZ9yK1mM3l8OEH4ock&_rdr
Paula A. Johnson, M.D. Serving as the 14th president of Wellesley College, Harvard University graduate Paula Johnson is a medical doctor who has focused on bringing excellence to decades of work in higher education, public health, and academic medicine. She has moved the college to the forefront of women's STEM education. She has led the creation process of the school's new strategy, placing inclusive excellence at the heart of the educational experience. Having held several leadership roles during her career, she has been Harvard Medical School's Grayce A. Young Family Professor of Medicine in Women's Health, professor of epidemiology at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Health, and was a founder of Brigham and Women's Hospital's Connors Center for Women's Health and Gender Biology, the hospital where she trained in internal and cardiovascular medicine. She is the member of numerous national and international boards, and is the recipient of several awards and honors, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Medicine.
https://www.wellesley.edu/about/president
Pauline E. HopkinsBorn in Maine in 1859, Pauline Hopkins was a writer known for her novels and short stories that were written while living in Cambridge and Boston, most of which were published from 1900 to 1903. She regularly wrote and acted as an editor for Colored American Magazine as well as writing for the Voice of the Negro, with her work regularly addressing Black history, economic justice, racial discrimination, and women's rights. This allowed her to emerge as a leading public intellectual for the era. She also wrote a musical focused on The Underground Railroad, which was produced in 1879. She also performed with her family's musical ensemble, the Hopkins Colored Troubadours. She worked as an orator and stenographer in the 1890s, staying active in women's clubs and similar civic organizations to promote women's rights. She represented the Women's Era Club in the 1898 Annual Convention of New England Federation of Women's Clubs. She was a founding member of the Boston Literary and Historical Association in 1901. She remained a prominent activist intellectual, though her public appearances and writing efforts were focused on other areas following the last of her major writings in 1905. She died in 1930 from burns received during a fire at her home.
https://www.paulinehopkinssociety.org/biography/
Phillis Wheatley Though an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatly was educated and considered to be one of the best poets prior to the 19th century in the United States. Seized in western Africa at around age seven, she was transported to Boston in a group of enslaved persons unsuited for rigorous labor. She was brought into the Wheatly household in 1761 as a domestic servant and educated in the Bible, geography, history, astronomy, British literature, and the Latin and Greek classics. In a letter to the University of Cambridge, she yearned for intellectual challenges of more academic atmospheres. She was often used as an illustration by abolitionists that Blacks could be intellectual and artistic, making her a catalyst for the early antislavery movement. Her works, encompassing approximately 145 works, were published beginning in 1767. Reaching great renown in both Boston and Great Britain, she was known for applying Biblical symbols to both comment on slavery and evangelize. Though she was freed before the Revolutionary War, the harsh conditions experienced by many free blacks during and after the war caused her to live in poverty with her husband and up to three children. This caused significant health issues, and she passed away in 1784.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/phillis-wheatley
Priscilla H. Douglas, Ed.D. As the current Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Boston Public Library, Priscilla Douglas has brought over three decades of experience in leadership across academics, business, and government to the table. As an executive coach to Fortune 500 businesses, her guidance has helped thousands of leaders both in workshops and individually, addressing change in the business landscape with insight, understanding, and energy. Working as an executive at Xerox, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and General Motors, she introduced and led a range of innovations. She served as special assistant to William Webster, FBI director, and has been a White House fellow, a Barbara Bush Adult Literacy Project senior advisor, and a National Institute of Justice Presidential appointee. She served as the Secretary of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulations in Massachusetts, and was the first Black woman to hold a Cabinet position in the Commonwealth's history. She created the Hate Crimes Task Force and Domestic Violence Commission as the Assistant Secretary for Public Safety. She was the 2015 International Women's Forum Conference co-chair and now chairs the Ideas Remaking the World Committee. She has authored multiple books on leadership.
https://www.bpl.org/about-the-bpl/board-of-trustees/
Rachael S. Rollins, J.D. As the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Rachael Rollins was sworn into office in 2022 at 50 years of age. With a strong dedication to keeping neighborhoods safe and healthy, she is the top federal law enforcement official in Massachusetts. Her 20 years of legal experience provide her experience to lead 250 federal prosecutors and related staff across three offices in the state. Prior to her appointment, she was elected in 2019 as the first woman of color serving as a district attorney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and is now the first Black woman serving as a U.S. Attorney in the district. She previously worked as the Chief Legal Counsel for the Massachusetts Port Authority as well as the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. She also served as the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District, handling both Criminal and Civil divisions. She previously worked as a field attorney for the National Labor Relations Board and at the Bingham McCutchen LLP law firm, with her career starting as a clerk in the Massachusetts Appeals Court. She received her law degree from Northeastern.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/rachael-s-rollins-sworn-united-states-attorney-district-massachusetts
Rachel M. Washington As the first Black person to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1876, Rachel Washington was a leading educator in music in the Black community in Boston, helping many of Boston's talented musicians develop their skills to greatness. She also served as the choir director and organist at the Twelfth Baptist Church. She also performed on the piano, and was known for educating many of Boston's best musicians. She was noted in many public testimonials and complimentary writings in the press of New England, and was noted as being a woman of fine culture and character, humble in her personality while wielding an outstanding dedication to her art. She saw her musical talent and ability to teach and bring out the best in her students as her way of elevating the Black race.
https://www.musicbywomen.org/theorist/rachel-m-washington/
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/147940787/rachel-m-washington
Rebecca L. Crumpler, M.D. As the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in 1864, Rebecca Crumpler was born in 1831 and was the author of Book of Medical Discourses in 1883, which was the one of the first medical publications by a Black person. Born in Delaware, she learned much of her medical knowledge from her aunt, a local healer in Pennsylvania. She worked as a nurse in Charleston, Massachusetts in 1852, and by 1860, she had been admitted to the New England Female Medical College. Her book was focused on medicine for women and children, as an outreach of her passion for relieving the suffering of others. Practicing in Boston for a short period of time, she moved to Richmond, Virginia following the end of the Civil War, using it as a field for missionary work to become better acquainted with diseases impacting women and children. By caring for freed slaves who would have otherwise had no medical care access, she eventually returned to Boston to take up her work again with renewed vigor, treating people no matter their ability to pay for her services. Her book was based on journals kept during years of medical practice. She passed in 1895.
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_73.html
Rebecca P. Clarke During a time when elder care was extremely limited, Rebecca Clarke founded The Home for Aged Colored Women, the first home founded for elderly Black women in Boston. Enlisting assistance from both Black and white community leadership, she founded the home with Reverend Leonard Grimes, Governor John Andrew, and many others. An 1860 fundraising campaign allowed the organization to rent a house on Phillips Street as its first base of operations, then moved to Myrtle Street in 1864, before moving to Hancock Street in 1900. Residents were recommended through word of mouth and were often members of Black churches in Beacon Hill. With a commitment to maintaining a strong relationship between community and home residents, Clarke earned the community's strong support throughout the home's existence. The women in the home were provided with social activities and work that benefited the community. Two of the women from the home, ages 92 and 88, wrote The Women's Era publication to support women's suffrage.
https://www.nps.gov/places/home-for-aged-colored-women.htm
Rubina A. Guscott Born in Jamaica around 1900 and coming to Boston in 1920 at age 20, Rubina Guscott was a strong community activist and organizer who dedicated her life to the fight for equality and justice. She started as a domestic worker in Boston, but marched with the Black Star Nurses division each Saturday. Though she was widowed at 30, she raised her five sons and her daughter with a strong sense of community service and dedication to the common good. She was a charter member of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, and was active in almost every club group within the church and outside organizations pursuing social issues. She was a founder of Boston Progressive Credit, which pooled community resources to those in need. She lost one son in World War II, which drove her to become a member of Massachusetts Gold Star Mothers, eventually serving as its president. Despite being in her 60s during the Civil Rights era, she regularly took NAACP bus rides to Washington to participate in marches. She was described as a lady of great dignity and commitment, working hard towards a mutual goal of equality and justice. She died in 2002.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.obituaries/c/nrHguqFKkdc?pli=1
Ruth E. Hamilton Moving to Boston shortly following World War II, Ruth Hamilton was an Atlanta native with a big heart for serving her church community. A member of the Charles Street A.M.E. Church, she spent over 50 years as one of the top contraltos of the East Coast, often giving benefit concerts to support the church's ministries. With a strong Christ-centered focus, her ecumenical spirit made her a regular soloist at many churches in the area and served as a guest cantor in several Jewish synagogues during high holy days. She performed on many top world stages, toured Europe with both the New England Spiritual Ensemble and the Donnell Patterson Chorale. Performing as a soloist with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Arthur Fielder, she was also among the stars of CMAC's Annual Gospel Martin Luther King Jr. tribute and sang at several memorial services for President Kennedy. The recipient of many awards, her stirring performances have inspired many positive reviews, and she appeared on the first collection of art songs and spirituals by Black female composers. Her mission was preserving her rich legacy of music, and helped found the Hamilton Garrett Center for Music and Arts prior to her death in 2001.
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/copy-of-ruth-hamilton
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/about-us
Ruth E. Hill Born in Pittsfield in 1925, Ruth Hill was a dedicated librarian and educator, receiving her Bachelors from Massachusetts State College in 1946 and her Bachelors from Simmons College in 1949. Working at the Berkshire Athenaeum in 1943 followed by Massachusetts State College catalog department in 1947, she also worked as a cataloger at Bennington College and the Baker Library at Harvard Business School. Hired later as a reference librarian for the New York Academy of Medicine and serving in the catalog department of Yale University, she lent her talents to many post-secondary institutions large and small. These also included Berkshire Community College, the Widener Library at Harvard, the Louis Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and finally at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, where she served for 42 years as the audiovisual and oral history coordinator. Oral history projects she oversaw during this time include those focused on Black women, women in federal government, women of courage, Cambodian American women, Latina women, Tully Crenshaw feminism, Chinese American women, and Radcliffe College history. She passed in 2023.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/ruth-edmonds-hill
Ruth M. Batson A Roxbury native, Ruth Batson was a champion of desegregation in education. Born in 1921, she was a daughter of Jamaican immigrants. She graduated from Girl's Latin School in 1939 and Nursery Training School of Boston, affiliated with Boston University. Her mother had a strong interest in civil rights, which inspired Batson to become the Chairman for the NAACP's Public Education Sub-Committee in 1953. Within four years, she became the NAACP New England Regional Conference Chairwoman, allowing her to lobby for civil rights. She was the first Black woman to serve on the Democratic National Committee and the first woman to be elected president of the New England Regional Conference of the NAACP. When the Boston School Committee refused to take action in the early 1960s to end segregation, she challenged them with the highly-segregated Boston Public Schools and the fact that schools that had highly Black enrollment typically had inadequate school facilities. From 1963 to 1966, she served as the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination's Chairwoman, then launched the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, a voluntary desegregation program that transported 225 Black urban children to suburban schools at the start, growing to 1,125 children across 28 communities, serving until 1969.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-ruth-batson
Sandra B. Henriquez As the first Black woman appointed to Assistant Secretary of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 2009 to 2014 by President Obama, Sandra Henriquez is a graduate of both Boston University and the Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Her extensive background in public service and housing has prepared her well for the role, including being the longest-tenured Boston Housing Authority CEO from 1996 to 2009. Currently working as CEO of the Detroit Housing Commission since 2019, Henriquez has dedicated her life to fair housing, acting as an advocate for those in need. She has also worked with Rebuilding Together, SCBH Associates, Maloney Properties, other realty firms, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in positions stretching back to 1977. Henriquez has also been noted for her philanthropy and service to boards on several organizations, including the Board of Directors including chair positions for YWCA Boston, Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, and serving on various boards for the Citizens' Housing and Planning Association, National Housing Conference, and the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation. She is also a trustee of New England Baptist Hospital.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-b-henriquez-7166446/
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Ed.D. As an Emily Hargroves Research Professor of Education, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot received her Doctorate degree from Harvard in 1972. As a sociologist, she has spent her life dedicated to examining educational culture and the relationships between human development and social change, authoring 10 books on the topic from 1978 to 2012. As a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Bunting Institute, she received the MacArthur Prize in 1984, and Harvard University's George Ledlie Prize in 1993 for research that makes the most valuable benefits to mankind and contributions to science. She was accepted as a Spencer Senior Scholar in 1995 and was named the Margaret Mead Fellow through the Academy of Political and Social Science in 2008. She was the recipient of 28 honorary degrees from a variety of institutions in North America, and Swarthmore College established the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair in 1995, while Harvard awarded her with the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair, which will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair upon her retirement. This makes her the first Black woman in Harvard history to have an endowed professorship in her honor.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/sara-lawrence-lightfoot
Sarah Martin An active part of Boston's abolitionist movement, Sarah and her husband lived in Boston and helped fugitive slaves in the area. Her husband, having been born enslaved in North Carolina, escaped in 1856 and by 1859, had moved to Boston, becoming African Meeting House's preacher. The couple helped bolster the church's membership, with her husband's experience in enslavement and the horrors of slavery to move the abolitionist message forward. However, in a time when women were often in the background of society, Martin undertook her own work. This included founding the Fugitive Aid Society in Boston, an organization of Black women who collected food, money, and clothing donations for enslaved persons seeking their freedom during the Civil War, helping them to establish themselves in the North and work through the trauma that slavery had imparted on them.
https://www.nps.gov/places/sarah-and-john-sella-martin-house.htm
Sarah P. Remond As a lecturer, anti-slavery activist, and abolitionist campaigner, Sarah Redmond was born free in Salem, Massachusetts in 1826 and gave her first public speech against slavery at age 16 in 1842. Her mother was one of the founders of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, teaching her daughters not only household skills but also how to seek liberty within society. Becoming known for her speeches, she soon toured the northeastern United States, finding prominence in 1853 when she refused to sit in a segregated section in a theater. She often toured with her brother Charles Lenox Redmond. In 1856, as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, she toured in a range of northern and northern Midwestern states. Two years later, Redmond traveled to Britain to gather more support for the growing abolitionist movement in the U.S. She appealed to the British public to support the Union blockade of the Confederacy, then following the war, appealed for funds to support millions of newly emancipated freedmen in the South. She then went on to Italy in 1867 to receive medical training in Florence, receiving her degree and practicing medicine for almost two decades in Italy, passing in 1894 in Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Parker_Remond
Sarah-Ann Shaw As an American-born journalist, Sarah-Ann Shaw is a Roxbury native, born to a family active in the community, including the Roxbury Democratic Club and civil rights activities. An active part of the NAACP Youth Movement, she graduated in 1952, then attended Boston University. She joined the Boston Action Group in the early 1960s, and was then recruited as the director of the Boston Northern Student Movement, where she led projects such as voter education and registration, supporting welfare programs, and advocacy. She oversaw Neighborhood Operations for ABCD and the Community Health Education Program at the Ecumenical Center. She made her first TV appearance on Say Brother, which has become Basic Black, in 1968, then went on to work at WBZ-TV as the first Black female reporter in Boston in 1969, a position she held until 2000. She was the recipient of several awards over the years, including Lifetime Achievement Awards in 1998 from the National Association of Black Journalists and in 2000 from Emerson College's Radio Television News Direction Association, as well as multiple community service, unsung heroes, and other awards over the years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah-Ann_Shaw
Rep. Saundra Graham As an independent politician and community activist, Saundra Graham was born in 1941 and has been an active participant in the Cambridge and Middlesex areas for many decades. She became a member of the board of directors for the Cambridge Community Center in 1968, then became president of the Riverside Planning Team, a housing activism organization in Cambridge. The organization interrupted Harvard's graduation ceremony in 1970, with Graham taking the stage to demand that land be dedicated by the university as low-income housing rather than the planned dorm that the university was considering. Meeting for several hours, the university agreed to build low-income housing on a different site. This led to Graham's election as the first Black woman on the Cambridge City Council in 1971, and she became the first Black woman representing Cambridge in the state legislature. She passed away in 2023 at the age of 81.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saundra_Graham
Savina J. Martin As an author, community organizer, advocate, activist, and educator, Savina Martin represents poor and marginalized populations across the country. With a lifelong passion for educating and empowering marginalized individuals from the ground up, she received her Masters in 2001 from San Diego State University and her Doctorate in 2019 at College of Our Lady of the Elms Honoris Causa. Martin champions those who have had lived experiences with urban unrest, racism, systemic poverty, healthcare inequalities, addiction, homelessness, and addiction. She has served as President of the Greater Boston Union of the Homeless, including sit-ins, protests and vacant housing takeovers in the mid-1980s. She is a founder of WINGS Incorporated, a home for women, where she raised funds to refurbish the location as a place for women in need. She has contributed to We Cry Justice published in 2021 by Broadleaf Books, providing unique perspectives on scripture passages. She has spoken at many events, and is currently a statewide tri-chair for the Poor People's Campaign.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/savina-june-martin-m-s-doctorate-in-humane-letters-2a0b44230/
Shaumba-Yandje Dibinga Performing arts organization OrigiNation was founded in 194 by Shaumba-Yandje Dibinga in Roxbury, who still serves as the Founding Executive and Artistic Director. With an extensive background in training, teaching, and performing in all aspects of theater and dance, she has been producing plays and writing poetry for over 20 years. By providing a safe haven for young people, she understands the importance of teaching them health, education, self-respect, public speaking, self-confidence, career training, and the impact of African influence on a range of contemporary art forms. As the home to four professional youth dance companies, the organization implements initiatives to raise awareness in students of related social issues while facilitating the students' development into well-rounded individuals. Serving 400 youth on location and another 5,000 through artist-in-residence initiatives, the organization and Shaumba-Yandhe's work has captured many awards over the years.
https://www.barrfoundation.org/bios/shaumba-yandje-dibinga
Rep. Shirley Owens-Hicks With a long history of public service stretching over two decades, Shirley Owens-Hicks began her political career in the Democratic Party as a Boston School Committee member from 1984 to 1988, working to bring equity and quality education to children in the school system. Following this, she represented the 6th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1987 until 2006, following the example of her brother, Bill Owens, who served in the Massachusetts Senate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Owens-Hicks
Susan Paul As an author and educator devoted to social justice, community action, and change, Susan Paul was born in 1809 in the greater Boston area. Her parents' community roles as a school headmistress and minister exposed her to local community activists, and she chose to follow her mother's example by training as a teacher. Starting at Boston Primary School No. 6 and shortly after at the Abiel Smith School, which were both intended for Black children in the area, she added civic engagement in the standard curriculum. Her students were taught about the horrors of slavery, and she took them to anti-slavery meetings where they were able to listen to abolitionists. She formed a juvenile choir in 1832 which performed at anti-slavery meetings and held concerts to fundraise for abolitionist causes. She wrote The Memoir of James Jackson, published in 1835, which incorporated religious and moral themes to educate children about living with character, and is believed to be the first Black biography published in the U.S. Paul was active in many anti-slavery and temperance organizations, before personal tragedy and illness cut her life short at the age of 31, passing away in 1841 from tuberculosis.
https://www.nps.gov/people/susan-paul.htm
Susie K. Taylor As a teacher and nurse, Susie Taylor achieved several firsts in her lifetime, overcoming adversity from her birth in enslavement in Georgia in 1848. She was able to attend two secret schools taught by Black women despite the state's harsh laws forbidding formal education of Blacks. During the Civil War, her uncle led her to a Union gunboat near Confederate-held Fort Pulaski, giving her freedom at age 14. As a refugee, she found safety behind Union lines on the South Carolina Sea Islands. She attached herself to the First South Carolina Volunteers, which was the first U.S. Army Black regiment, first as a laundress, then as a cook, but her literacy allowed her to serve as a reading instructor for the regiment. She married her husband in the regiment, remaining together with the unit until 1866. However, when her husband passed away, she moved to Boston in 1872. She devoted her life to working with the Woman's Relief Corps, an organization serving female Civil War veterans. After publishing her memoir, My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, in 1902, she passed away a decade later in 1912.
https://www.nps.gov/people/susie-king-taylor.htm
Teri Williams As President and Chief Operating Officer of OneUnited Bank, Teri Williams heads up the largest Black-owned bank in the United States. Also serving on the board of directors, she is focused on implementing strategic initiatives while overseeing daily operations. Offering a range of innovative products and services that are designed to close the racial wealth gap, she has spent over 40 years gathering financial services expertise from premier financial institutions, including American Express, where she was one of the youngest Vice Presidents in the company's history, as well as Bank of America. With a Bachelors from Brown University and an MBA with Honors from Harvard, she has served in a range of roles over the years, including Chairman of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, the board of the 79th Street Corridor in Miami, Chair of the Urban Initiative Task Force of the Miami-Dade Beacon Council, board of the CCC Intelligent Solutions, and has received a number of awards and recognition for her contribution to urban communities, including being selected by Forbes Magazine in 2022 in its 50 over 50 list of women with careers in financial services.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/teri-williams-99811029/
Terri Lyne Carrington As a jazz drummer, composer, producer and educator, Terri Carrington was born in Medford in 1965 and has performed with and toured with several top musical acts over the years. Growing up in a musical family, she was given a set of drums at age seven, and after privately studying for three years, she gave her first major performance at the Wichita Jazz Festival, earning her a full scholarship the next year to Berklee College of Music. She moved to New York in 1983 to work with a range of talented musicians, and then to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, including writing and producing her own work. 2011 saw her touring South America with several other artists. Appointed as a professor at her alma mater, Berklee College of Music, she has also won three Grammy Awards across her seven albums, including being the first female musician to win a Grammy in 2013 for the Best Jazz Instrumental Album. She is the founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice as well as The Car Center. She has also written a children's book and a book New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Lyne_Carrington
Thea L. James, M.D.With a strong life-long passion for improving health outcomes and reducing healthcare inequalities, Thea James has worked with Boston Medical Center for many years, most currently as the Vice President of Mission. Working with caregivers throughout the medical center's system, she coordinates and maximizes the medical center's strategic alliances and relationships with many national, state, and local organizations. These include a range of housing advocates, community agencies, and similar organizations that are focused on fostering innovative and effective models of care that are needed for the health center's patients and their surrounding communities to be able to thrive and reach their full potential. James' role includes a range of intersections between health, wealth, economic mobility, and similar upstream drivers that tend to predict poor health outcomes. Using these care models, she works to bring operational equality in a broader sense to Boston Medical Center patients now and long into the future.
https://www.bmc.org/about-us/directory/doctor/thea-l-james-md
Thelma D. Burns As a life-long community activist and advocate for the Black community in Boston, Thelma Burns has served in a wide range of roles in organizations across the metro area. She has served on the Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) Board of Directors for over 35 years, including Committee Chair, Vice Chair, and Board Chair. She has headed the board for the ABCD Dorchester Neighborhood Service Center for over 15 years, and has worked in leadership on a number of community boards including the Mayor's Senior Advisory Council, the Roxbury YMCA, and Central Boston Elder Services. She also served from 1980 to 2008 as the director for the Belmont Public Schools Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity. She received a Robert F. Kennedy Fellowship in 1968, and has received her Bachelors from Boston University and Masters from Harvard. Because of her extensive ongoing work serving the community, the Thelma D. Burns Building was dedicated in her honor in 2016.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-thelma-burns
Tommiejo Dixon As a fixture of Boston's food scene, Ma Dixon's, originally Ma Dixon's Diner, was founded by Tommiejo Dixon with encouragement from her husband in 1943. Born in 1914, Dixon opened the sandwich shop to provide southern-style cuisine and is now being managed by her great-nephew and -niece. As a family-owned restaurant, Dixon, together with her sisters Janie and Ruth, would provide a comfortable location that catered to the Black community in the area. Moving to its current Grove Hall location in 1968, the business weathered the loss of Dixon in 1979, with her sisters taking over the operation, then their children following in the family tradition of providing delicious food to the community.
https://bwht.org/women-feeding-boston-tour/
Tulaine Montgomery With a strong belief in creating a better world for everyone, Tulaine Montgomery serves as CEO of New Profit. Based on a coalition of social change makers and entrepreneurs, the organization is advancing a vision of an America where all people can thrive and grow. Montgomery has worked in leadership roles in launching and expanding social enterprises worldwide, providing advice to numerous nonprofits and socially-responsible companies. She has backed many of the most powerful, promising social innovations in the United States through her work with venture philanthropy organization New Profit. She believes that by advocating for a new era of philanthropy that focuses on lifting up leaders that are in the closest proximity to issues, these visionary leaders can better scale innovations and create transformation in the most inequitable systems in the country. These include strengthening the education-to-employment pathways for underserved individuals, pushing resources and support for entrepreneurs impacted directly by the U.S. legal system, and by improving diversity, equity, and inclusiveness in philanthropy. The organization also bridges the resource gap often faced by minority and underinvested social entrepreneurs.
https://tulainemontgomery.com/
Valerie Mosley Graduating in 1982 with her Bachelors from Duke University, Valerie Mosley has always focused on success. As the former Duke student body vice president and president realized moving forward with her MBA from The Wharton School, where she has served as president of Alumni Affairs, she realized that she wanted to work with companies that add value not only to investors, but to society at large. After managing billions of dollars of assets at Wellington Management for over 20 years, she realized she wanted more and created Valmo Ventures to provide advice and investment funds in businesses that made that dream a reality. Representing organizations including Fundify, Quantum Exchange, STEAMRole, TEquitable, and other companies, her business provides these companies and leaders with the financial and informational resources they need to improve their chances of success and rate of growth. She also serves on boards of a range of businesses and organizations to help them achieve their goals in the community and in business.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeriemosley/
Valerie Shelley As a long-time community activist, leader and champion for the Orchard Gardens neighborhood, Valerie Shelley had been a strong advocate for Boston Housing Authority families, especially for Orchard Gardens. Born in 1948 in the Orchard Park Public Housing Development, she left in 1966 to work initially at a law firm, and later for the Boston Public Schools system. Her sisters remained in public housing through redevelopment. She retired in 1999 and returned to the renamed Orchard Gardens, assisting her sister with advocating for people in the community. When her sister Edna Bynoe passed away in 2010, Shelley knew that she needed to step up into a leadership role to keep her sister's work alive. Taking on the role of President of the Orchard Gardens Tenant Task Force, she carried on that legacy. She also served as the Chair of the Boston Housing Authority's Resident Advisory Board, an organization that reviews Boston Housing Authority policy changes, as well as the organization's annual and five-year plans. With a focus on helping residents to realize that they have a voice, she continued that work for twelve years, advocating for the community and residents of Orchard Gardens for many years until her death in 2022.
https://www.bostonhousing.org/en/News/BHA-Statement-on-the-Passing-of-Valerie-Shelley.aspx
Vivian Male As a current jazz artist, Vivian Male is based in Boston but travels the United States to perform at jazz festivals, concerts, national conferences, corporate events, and other special events. Annual concerts at Martha's Vineyard and the Scullers Jazz Club in Boston regularly sell out. She has helped raise funds for educational scholarships through producing and performing at concerts for Berklee College of Music, as well as a range of non-profit organizations. She held a record-breaking fundraiser for The Negro Ensemble Company in New York. Featured as a vocalist for the New England Emmy Awards, inducted into the Steppin' Out Hall of Fame in Boston, and has performed the National Anthem for the New England Patriots on multiple occasions.
http://www.vivianmale.com/about.html
Sister Virginia Morrison With a strong belief in the concept that an engaged mind keeps children - and adults - out of trouble, Virginia Morrison has served as the executive director of the Grove Hall Neighborhood Development Corporation for many years and has pushed for the construction and development of a new community center in Dorchester, a dream which became a reality in 2022. A lack of standalone community centers in Dorchester and Grove Hall has led to significant area violence, and community leaders like Morrison know that the only way to reduce that violence is by creating opportunities for people to gather for collaboration, learn, play, and connect. The new building will allow for a wider range of programs, resources, education, and community space to improve the neighborhood's quality of life. She also advocates for more community policing, more involvement on the streets by both religious and civic organizations, and encourages community members to report problems when they occur so that they can be part of the solution.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-bostons-grove-hall-a-new-community-center-and-old-frustrations-around-violence/ar-AA12W29v
Wilhelmina Marguerita Crosson Moving to Boston in 1906, Wilhelmina Crosson graduated from Girls' High School and then began teaching, starting in 1920 by teaching remedial reading to children of Italian immigrants. Her experiences with the classes encouraged her to create the first remedial reading program for the City of Boston in 1935. But a decade prior to that push, she also founded The Aristo Club of Boston, an organization of professional Black woman who provided scholarships to Black students while promoting the study of Black history. The organization successfully campaigned the Boston Public School System to celebrate Negro History Week. Though she officially retired in 1966, she found that retirement didn't sit well with her, and within two years, she founded a training program for Peace Corps volunteers, while also spending significant amounts of time in her retirement years tutoring individuals in different subjects and volunteering at the city's homeless shelters.
https://www.boston.gov/news/meet-wilhelmina-marguerita-crosson-boston-teacher-who-advocated-black-history-education
Zakiya Alake After receiving her Associates at Antioch School of Law Paralegal Tech Program in 1980, Zakiya Alake undertook additional education at Fitchburg State University and University of Massachusetts Boston, but didn't find that law fed her passion for food, love, and community building. Instead, she started and operated Zakiya Alake's Abundance Catering and ZAGE Inc, focusing on serving the community while feeding her passion by feeding those around her for over 40 years. This passion for nourishing the people around her is leading Alake into developing her next steps in business while remaining focused on building community, spreading love, and providing nourishing food.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakiya-alake-62ba5a42/
Zipporah P. Atkins As the first Black person to own land in the United States, Zipporah Atkins was born in colonial Boston to enslaved parents. At that time, in the colony of Massachusetts, children of slaves were considered to be free at birth. She had inherited funds from her father which he had, in turn, received from his former enslaver, and by 1670, at age 25, she used the funds to purchase property in Boston's North End neighborhood, which is now part of the Rose Kennedy Greenway. As a single Black woman, it was very unusual that her purchase was able to go through given the social norms of the time, but even after she married, she retained full ownership of the property during a time when husbands had control over their wives and their property. She sold a portion of her land in 1693 for 100 pounds, and six years later, sold the remainder of the property for an additional 25 pounds. The deed for the property was signed with her initials, indicating that she knew how to read and write during a time when most Black, and many white, people in the colonies were still illiterate. Following this final sale, Atkins passed from history's notice.
https://wanderwomenproject.com/women/zipporah-potter-atkins/
Angela Paige CookRaised in a family of educators, Angela Cook is a co-founder of Paige Academy, an early childhood education center focused on sharing knowledge and building better brains in children. She received a Bachelors from Fisk University, followed by a Masters at Wheelock College, and served as an Urban Studies Fellow at MIT. She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 at University of Massachusetts Boston, and all of her education has been focused on early and urban education. Her dissertation entitled A Case Study of a Black Independent School: Reflections on Cultural Resonance in an Elementary and Preschool Setting was the basis for Paige Academy, which in turn was named for her great, great aunt Lucy Paige Williams, who regularly formed schools of benevolence in her home, teaching handcrafts, reading, and other skills.
www.paigeacademy.org/#history
Anna Mae ColeAnna Mae Cole was a co-founder of the Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation in the 1980s, creating a model for the nation for public housing that was tenant controlled. She was a strong community advocate and activist pushing for improved services for Jamaica Plain, promoting the idea of urban gardening throughout the public housing corporation to improve neighborhood pride and beautification, and eventually moving into vegetable production in the neighborhood. Cole has since had the Anna Mae Cole Community Center named after her, providing programs, events, sports, a multi-purpose room, and a community kitchen. It also features more green spaces, which were at the heart of Anna Cole's push for community gardens in the area while she was active.
https://www.boston.gov/news/creating-community-forming-ties-bostons-neighborhoods
https://jamaicaplaingazette.com/2012/02/17/bromley-heath-leader-retires-bha-takes-over/
https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collection/p15774coll6/id/5248
https://tcbinc.org/news/construction-starts-at-mildred-c-hailey-apartments-in-boston/
Edna J. SwanAs the first Black female police officer to serve with the Boston Police Department in 1943, Patrolman Edna J. Swan had already attended Fisk University during the Great Depression, along with volunteering with the Red Cross, which started her passion for public service.
https://blackstonian.org/2018/02/black-history-boston-police-department/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230331030735/https://bpdnews.com/news/2023/2/22/lwwczsocux2dykgza091hn0ynnfik9
https://www.newsbreak.com/boston-ma/2935374594847-bpd-and-mamleo-honor-former-police-officer-edna-swan-and-deputy-superintendent-willis-saunders
https://bpdnews.com/news/2023/2/22/lwwczsocux2dykgza091hn0ynnfik9
Ella I. GarrettA Boston native born in 1924, Ella Garnett was an active public servant, working for over 30 years in the U.S. General Services Administration at the Public Building Service Headquarters as a Senior Procurement Analyst. After attending Simmons College and marrying her former husband following World War II, she developed and wrote procurement policies for the Federal Government, impacting how federal buildings that were either owned or leased were built or maintained across the entire United States. She also provided analysis of federal projects that had been approved by the U.S. Congress for new construction, renovations, and annual designs. She passed away peacefully in 2016.
https://www.leblackphillipsholdenfuneralhome.com/obituary/Ella-Garnett
Frances Carolyn Harris Providing leadership, comfort, and joy to those in her presence at the Holy Tabernacle and other churches in the Boston area, Frances Carolyn Harris was born in the late 1930s. She was known for her presence, strong faith, and dedication to family, church, and community.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/frances-harris-obituary?id=16922765
Frances J. Bonner, M.D. A member of the Massachusetts General Psychiatry Department for over 50 years, Frances Bonner was the first Black female physician to train on the service in 1949, following her neurology training at Boston City High School. After receiving a two-year fellowship from Radcliffe College focused on hysteria, she began her research career, later undertaking neurobiological research at the institution. She received her psychoanalytic certification from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in 1975, founding the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England with other co-founders. She dedicated the bulk of her career to clinical practice, supervising residents in individual psychotherapy sessions. She was known as a pioneer in crossing gender and racial boundaries in medicine, and is the namesake of an award established in 2010 by the Massachusetts General Department of Psychiatry as well as the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, promoting diversity and inclusion in psychiatric communities.
http://history.massgeneral.org/catalog/Detail.aspx?itemId=1456&searchFor=bonner
www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/about/center-for-diversity/bonner-award
"Jacqui" Jacquelyn Jones HoardA 1990 recipient of the Henry L. Shattuck Public Service Awards, Jacqui Hoard is well known in Boston's Black community for her dedication to public service and the community at large. Sister to Clarence Jack "Jeep" Jones, Boston's first and only deputy mayor, Jacqui had the same determination and dedication to serving the community as her brother,
https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/The-loss-of-a-Lifelong-Friend-of-Minister-Louis-and-Khadijah-Farrakhan-Boston-shows-appreciation-for-the-life-of-Clarence-Jeep-Jones.shtml
thebostonsun.com/2019/07/12/sunset-concert-at-symphony-community-park/
https://bmrb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018-Shattuck-ProgramB.pdf
Joyce Ferriabough BollingWith the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, a Democratic strategist and journalist with the Boston Herald, saw the opportunity for getting more Black individuals into office in 2013. With Boston's longest-serving Mayor Menino stepping down in that year and half of the 12-person field being persons of color. Her late husband Bruce was the city's first Black council president in the 1980s, and that passion to reshape the political environment in favor of minority candidates shows up in everything she does. However, she sees strategy at the same time, noting that though there is much opportunity, having too many persons of color running for a single position means that nobody will win that political seat.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/01/08/metro/with-bidens-selection-walsh-mayors-race-heats-up
Karen MillerAs Boston's first Black female firefighter, Karen Miller was born in Roxbury, moving later to the Academy Homes apartment complex. Serving six years with the U.S. Army Reserves, she became the first Black female firefighter in Boston in August 1985. She was encouraged by her brother, a state trooper, to take the civil service exams and take the first job that came up, which happened to be the fire department. Starting out at Ladder 10 in Jamaica Plain, she was one of the few women in the department to not be started exclusively on engine duty. Facing an uphill battle that included oversize unisex equipment and no designated bathrooms, she tried to not make waves, but in meeting up with other women in the department, they began organizing for reforms, negotiating changes in employee policies such as locked bathrooms, smaller protective equipment sizes for women, and refitting the shower area for better privacy. She has since become a fire investigator, education and prevention specialist prior to retiring in 2006. She now serves as executive director of the Boston Society of Vulcans, a non-profit focused on recruiting minorities to public safety positions.
https://www.dotnews.com/2010/retired-firefighter-miller-recognized-pioneer
Letitia CampfieldIn the early 20th century, there were many areas of society and work that were inaccessible to Blacks and persons of color, as well as women. In 1929, Letitia Campfield was one of two Black women who were the first Blacks to be admitted to Boston City Hospital's School of Nursing. Historically, free Black medical practitioners were held in contempt, and finishing formal medical school was very challenging for persons of color. At the same time, discrimination was a constant threat to persons of color in medical fields. This resistance to Blacks in the medical industry was just one part of a slow, arduous integration process in the medical field..
https://www.blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaVU00cO_Fc/?utm_medium=copy_link
https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/Guide%20to%20the%20Boston%20City%20Hospital%20collection_tcm3-52281.pdf
Rev. Liz WalkerFirst arriving in Boston over 40 years ago as a rising broadcast news star, Liz Walker was the first Black anchor of a regular nightly newscast, later moving into work as an ordained minister and community leader. She started out with on-air success in San Francisco and Denver, then put down strong roots in Boston following desegregation, a pain she understood as one of the first students desegregating West Side Junior High in Little Rock. Always walking by faith throughout her life as the daughter of a preacher, she is now changing gears from preaching, which had given her a direct connection to provide a voice to those who were not being heard in the community, towards writing a book on trauma and healing, an area she explored in depth starting a decade ago when violence broke out in the neighborhood around her church. Her preaching includes a degree from Harvard Divinity School, working a sa pastor in one of Boston's poorest neighborhoods, and building a girl's school in southern Sudan in Africa.
Margaret MoseleyBorn in Dedham in 1901, Margaret Moseley found herself at odds with a segregated world, kept out of serious nursing or business work by discrimination. Instead, she was a founding member of a 1940s consumers' cooperative, served on the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union board, and was a founding member who also served on Freedom House's board in Roxbury. She served as Community Church's president, and as the Massachusetts legislative chair for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Focused on serving as a peace, community, and civil rights activist, which in 1989 started the Margaret Moseley Memorial Peace Fund. She moved to Cape Cod in 1961, continuing her dedication to community activism by founding local chapters of the NAACP and WILPF, as well as many other organizations. She served Barnstable's Unitarian Church as a founding member of its social responsibility committee and as the first woman chairing the prudential committee. She was part of the committee to meet the reverse freedom riders in 1962, part of an attempt to embarrass President Kennedy by stirring up racial problems where his family spent summers. She traveled to Selma, Alabama in 1965 with other women from WILPF to work on voting rights.
https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5527
https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/margaret-moseley/
https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:american+folklife+center&q=Moseley,+Margaret.+Papers+-+The+Civil+Rights+History+Project:+Survey+of+Collections+and+Repositories+%28The+American+Folklife+Center,+Library+of+Congress%29
https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/
Mildred C. HaileyFrom the late 1960s, when the Bromley-Health Public Housing Development began being operated by tenants, until her death, Mildred Hailey was always a guiding hand on the organization. She started the drive to gain control of the development from the Boston Housing Authority in 1968 by repairing conditions that wouldn't be tolerated to negotiating truces between rival gangs that led to a successful GED program, she considered the entire community to be her extended family. Considered to be a force of nature by many, Hailey took on a very difficult job with a combination of compassion and courage at a time when running water, heat, and electricity were fairly spotty and there were over 4,000 broken windows around the entire development when a progressive board of commissioners stepped aside to let the tenants save themselves. By building a new sense of strong community, it became a model of how to reclaim broken public housing systems. Though she retired in 2012 from her position as executive director, she still showed up at all meetings until the last couple of months of her life in 2015.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/19/mildred-hailey-tenant-activism-transformed-boston-public-housing/uMvf9iF3ozuC8lLlVOKiCN/story.html
Mamie Nell "Mimi" JonesKnown for the famous photo in 1964 that spread around the world of racial attacks in Boston, Mimi Jones was 17 at the time she participated in a swim-in to integrate a Florida pool, born in 1947 in Georgia. With her mouth open in a scream, the white motel owner behind her was dumping acid into the water. The St. Augustine incident drew international coverage, causing President Johnson to discuss the attack in the Oval Office and driving strong support for the stalled Civil Rights Act of 1964, with overwhelming approval by the U.S. Senate the day after the photo was released. She moved to Boston later in life for a college scholarship and continued her community activism, started even earlier in her life teaching poor rural Black persons in Georgia to read so that they could register to vote and joined the March on Washington in 1963. After settling in Boston, she began working for the state Education Department, wrote grants for local nonprofits, and participated with a number of organizations and committees, seeking social justice. She passed away in her Roxbury home in 2020.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/27/metro/overlooked-her-role-galvanizing-civil-rights-protest-mimi-jones-dies-73/
Nadine Fortune WrightBorn in 1893 in Illinois, Nadine Wright was born into a wealthy family with her parents being well-educated teachers. However, their wealth didn't protect the family from state-sanctioned racially-based crimes, stirring up in Nadine a strong passion for lifelong activism and achievement. A resurgence of racism and the death of her father in 1899 caused significant issues for the family, and when her mother passed away in 1906, it was decided that she and her brother would be sent to Cambridge to live with their aunt, who helped found the Niagara Movement. Growing up in a home at the center of Black political and intellectual activity, the children learned how to think for themselves, with Wright graduating from Radcliffe in 1917 while continuing her civil rights work. She then taught in the Cambridge public school system for almost 20 years, chartering the Boston Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, acting as a trustee of Robert Gould Shaw house, and serving in many organizations. After marrying, she spent teaching at colleges in North Carolina before returning to Boston to work with children with cerebral palsy. She passed away in 1994.
https://www.mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210228123150/https://mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
Bishop Nellie YarboroughWith a strong focus on making sure that everyone had somebody to lean on in hard times, Nellie Yarborough worked with a range of church parishioners and police to move the Dorchester neighborhood out of crime and poverty. Born in North Carolina to a preacher's family, she began preaching at age 12 to the congregation's youth, traveling at age 17 with Brumfield Johnson, the church's founder. Their travels led them to Boston, where the church's headquarters was established. With a passion for ministering for those in need, she was appointed as the assistant pastor of Mount Calvary Holy Church in 1962, becoming the senior pastor a decade later when Johnson passed away, and ordained as a bishop in 1994, the second woman to hold that title. An educated, adaptable pillar of the community, she was a friend to the homeless, advocating for them with politicians and serving food to those in need every Thursday night to crowds that often topped 100. She continued serving the community throughout her years, passing away in 2012.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/nellie-yarborough-obituary?id=7382565
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-boston-globe/20121224/282024734591443
Nora L. BastonAs an 18-year Boston Police Department veteran, Nora Baston serves as a pillar of the community, managing community engagement for the department and doing so very well. In addition to getting guns off of Boston streets and tracking down girls who are moving into gangs, she lives for the goodwill she gets from young students who want to share their success, in one case waiting hours to show her their report card. As deputy superintendent, she's one of four women on the command staff for Boston Police, and she takes that responsibility seriously, going out three or four nights a week to engage with kids, be a mentor, and build trust in areas where violence is prevalent to give youth an alternative from gangs and drugs. With two degrees from University of Massachusetts Lowell and having graduated from Boston Police Academy in 1996, she credits former Police Commissioner Davis with teaching her how to connect with people one-on-one. She sees education as the best police work, getting kids that would otherwise get into trouble into college or back into school.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2014/04/07/women-in-command-deputy-superintendent-nora-l-baston/
Peggy Olivia Brown Ed.D.With a strong belief that all children can learn, Peggy Brown feared that children of color were being overlooked in public schools, leading them to drop out, end up in legal trouble, or lead unfulfilled lives. Born in 1934 in Washington, D.C., she grew up in New York City, where she saw the devastating life paths of those who didn't have positive role models in her south Bronx neighborhood. She then attended multiple universities before lecturing at Northeastern University and Boston College. To make a difference, she launched initiatives to improve healthcare in Roxbury with the Mandela Town Hall Health Spot which provided weekly blood sugar and blood pressure screenings, with Dr. Brown inviting dentists, optometrists, or other health professionals to help address disparities she was seeing. At the same time, she was founding the Mandela Crew, providing youth in the area with access to a sport they wouldn't participate in traditionally. She worked with kids in groups or one-on-one, sometimes staying up with youth until 4 or 5 AM to help them write term papers to ensure they could graduate high school, steering them into the possibilities of a successful life. After many years making a strong impact on youth in the community, she passed in 2014.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/27/peggy-brown-educator-and-activist-founded-mandela-crew-first-african-american-and-latino-team-compete-head-charles/p0962cwuqrl5SLsObdjkzJ/story.html
Shirley ShillingfordWith a strong focus on food and carnival, Shirley Shillingford is the name behind Shirley's Pantry in Mattapan. As president of the Caribbean American Carnival Association of Boston (CACAB), Shillingford started with the organization in 1975 as she worked for Mayor White's administration. She served alongside Edward Harry and Sebastian Joseph who ran the organization for 16 years after founder Ivy Ponder and Ken Bonaparte Mitchell stepped back. She then took over in 1990, serving as the lead for Boston Carnival for the past 33 years. For a similar long period of time, she's been serving at what was the Healthy Baby, Health Food Pantry on River Street, which has now been renamed as Shirley's Pantry following her founding of the pantry in 1992 with no resources except asking businesses and the government for help. With a strong dedication to community and disadvantaged populations, Shillingford has often reached out to employees, elected officials, and community members to keep the pantry operating for everything from food to appliances to labor.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-08-25/bostons-carnival-celebrating-50-years-is-a-treasure-says-organizer
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/it-s-shirley-s-pantry-now-renaming-honors-longtime-manager-mattapan
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/23/mattapan-food-pantry-named-for-its-manager-a-longtime-activist/
Angela Paige Cook, Ph.D. (Active 1970s to 2010s)Raised in an educational family, Angela Paige Cook, Ph.D., is one of the co-founders of Paige Academy. After receiving a Bachelors from Fish University and a Masters at Wheelock College, she received an Urban Studies Fellowship at MIT, and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2002. Her focus on early childhood and urban education was reflected in her dissertation A Case Study of a Black Independent School: Reflections on Cultural Resonance in an Elementary and Preschool Setting, which was the foundation for the school. Paige Academy is an early childhood education center that has a primary focus on building better brains in children through shared knowledge.
www.paigeacademy.org/#history
Anna Mae Cole (Active 1980s to 1990s)As a co-founder of the Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation in the 1980s, Anna Mae Cole helped create a model for tenant-controlled public housing nationwide. As a strong community activist and advocate, she pushed for a range of improved services in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. She promoted urban gardening to help improve pride and beautification in the neighborhood, adding vegetable production in later years to help with the shortage of fresh food in the area. The Anna Mae Cole Community Center was named for her, which features green spaces as well as programming, sports, events, a community kitchen, and a multi-purpose room.
https://www.boston.gove/news/creating-community-forming-ties-bostons-neighborhoods
https://jamaicaplaingazette.com/2012/02/17/bromley-health-retires-bha-takes-over/
https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collecton/p15774coll6/id/5248
https://tcbinc.org/news/construction-starts-at-mildred-c-hailey-apartments-in-boston/
***Cleora Carter FrancisI've done a search of the entire Boston Globe site as well as in-depth internet sites - I cannot find anything on this woman. Without additional details, I will not be able to continue on this biography.
Edna C. Robinson Brown, D.D.M. (Active 1920s to 1940s)As the first Black woman to perform dentistry in Cambridge, Edna C. Robinson Brown was a dentist who graduated from Columbia University and was a very early member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Psi Omega chapter. Though not much is known about her life, being able to attend Columbia as a Black woman means that she probably attended after 1923, as Columbia University recognizes Elizabeth Delaney as the University's College of Dental Medicine's first Black female graduate.
https://www.akaboston.org/chapter-history
https://thelowdown.alumni.columbia.edu/history_of_women_at_columbia
Edna J. Swan (Active 1943 to 1960s)Serving as the first Black female police officer with the Boston Police Department, Patrolman Edna J. Swan attended Fisk University during the Great Depression. She also volunteered with the Red Cross during that time, igniting her passion for public service. She began her service with the department in 1943.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-bostons-grove-hall-a-new-community-center-and-old-frustrations-around-violence/ar-AA12W29v
Elta M. Garrett (Born 1942)As a co-founder of the Hamilton-Garrett Music & Arts Academy with Ruth Hamilton, Elta Garrett was born in 1942 and has dedicated over 50 years of her life as a music teacher within the Boston Public School System and was a noted soprano singer in the national musical community. Following her retirement, she worked as the founding director of the Academy for twelve years. She remained an active supporter as a member of the Board of the Academy and has been recognized for over two decades of service to the Historic Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church.
https://clustrmaps.com/person/Garrett-89ubff
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/whoweare
Francis Carolyn Harris (Active 1929 to 1950s)As one of the two first Black women admitted to the School of Nursing at Boston City Hospital, Francis Carolyn Harris entered the nursing program in 1929. At the time, there were very few licensed Black female nurses in the United States, Massachusetts, and Boston, and individuals in these roles often faced significant discrimination and difficulty in finishing their formal medical training. The other Black woman admitted to the School of Nursing at the time was Letitia Campfield.
https://www.blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
Frances J Bonner, M.D. (Active 1949 to 1980s)
As the first Black female physician with the Massachusetts General Psychiatry Department, Frances J. Bonner, M.D. began her training in 1949. She received her fellowship from Radcliffe College focusing on hysteria, leading to her long research career, including neurobiological research at the college. She received a psychoanalytic certification in 1975 from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She helped co-found the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England and dedicated most of her career to clinical practice while supervising residents during individual psychotherapy sessions. She had a reputation as a pioneer in crossing the boundaries in gender and racial medicine. An award was established in her name in 2010 at the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and the Massachusetts General Department of Psychiatry.
http://history.massgeneral.org/catalog/Detail.aspx?itemId+1456&searchFor=bonner
www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/about/center-for-diversity/bonner-award
Gladys HolmesI have been unable to find any details on this woman. It is a relatively common name, and despite multiple searches to track this down to the Boston region, I have been unable to locate more details. Without further information, I cannot complete this biography.
“Jacqui” Jones Hoard (Active 1980s to 1990s)Jacqui Jones Hoard was a 1990 recipient of the Henry L. Shattuck Public Service Award. Well-known throughout Boston’s Black community for her strong dedication to the community and public service, she was the sister to Clarence Jack “Jeep” Jones, Boston’s first and only Black deputy mayor, showcasing the family’s overall determination and dedication to community service.
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/The-loss-of-a-Lifelong-Friend-of-Minister-Louis-and-Khadijah-Farrakhan-Boston-shows-appreciation-for-the-life-of-Clarence-Jeep-Jones.shtml
thebostonsun.com/2019/07/12/sunset-concert-at-symphony-community-park/
https://bmrb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018-shattuck-programB.pdf
Joyce Ferriabough Bolling (Active 2013 to Present)
The growth of the Black Lives Matter Movement led Democratic strategist and journalist Joyce Ferriabough Bolling to work to get more Black individuals into public office starting in 2013. As Boston’s longest-serving mayor, Mayor Menino, stepped down, half of the 12-person primary were people of color. Using the passion she’d found when her late husband Bruce ran and served as the city’s first Black council president in the 1980s, she found that having too many people of color running for a single position ensured that nobody would get the seat, driving her to stand behind candidates that had the best potential to bring about change.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/01/08/metro/with-bidens-selection-walsh-mayors-race-heats-up
Karen Miller (Active 1985 to 2006)
Serving as Boston’s first Black female firefighter, Karen Miller is a Roxbury native who moved to the Academy Homes apartment Complex. After serving for six years with the U.S. Army Reserves, she joined the Boston Fire Department in August 1985 after being encouraged by her brother, a state trooper, to take the civil service exam and take the first job available. Starting out in Ladder 10 in Jamaica Plain, she was one of the few women in the entire department who was not started exclusively on engine duty. Meeting with other women, she realized they had all faced an uphill battle with oversized unisex equipment and no designated or locking bathroom space. She organized with these women for reforms. She has since worked as a fire investigator, educator, and prevention specialist prior to her 2006 retirement, after which she served as the executive director of the Boston Society of Vulcans, a non-profit focused on recruiting minorities to public safety positions.
https://dotnews.com/2010/retired-firefighter-miller-recognized-pioneer
Letitia Campfield (Active 1929 to 1950s)
During the early parts of the 20th century, many areas of society and employment were inaccessible to Blacks and other persons of color, as well as women. Leticia Campfield was one of two Black women who, in 1929, were the first Black women to be admitted to Boston City Hospital’s School of Nursing. Historically, free Black medical practitioners were viewed with contempt and finishing formal training was difficult at best for persons of color. Discrimination was also a constant threat to persons of color in the medical industry. This made Campfield’s admission, along with Francis Carolyn Harris the same year, a marked victory for Black medical professionals.
https://Blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaVU00cO_Fc/?utm_medium=copy_link
https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/Guide%20to%20the%20Boston%20City%20Hospital%20collection_tcm3-52281.pdf
Rev. Liz Walker (Active 1970s to 2020s)
As a rising broadcast news star, Liz Walker was the first Black anchor of a regular nightly newscast when she arrived in Boston over 40 years ago. Starting out with on-air success in Denver and San Francisco, she understood the pain of Boston Blacks during desegregation as one of the first students desegregated to West Side Junior High in Little Rock, Arkansas. As the daughter of a preacher, she always walked in faith, which led her to her own work as an ordained minister and community leader. She’s worked on a book focused on trauma and healing following an outbreak of violence near her church and neighborhood. Her experience includes her degree from Harvard Divinity School, ministering to those in Boston’s lowest-income neighborhoods, and helping build a girl’s school in Sudan, Africa.
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/liz-walker-retires-roxbury-presbyterian-church/
https://roxburypresbyterianchurch.org/our-pastor/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Walker_(journalist)
Margaret Moseley (Active 1940s to 1960s)Born in 1901 in Dedham and kept out of significant business or nursing work by discrimination, Margaret Moseley was a founding member of a 1940s consumer cooperative, served on the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union board and founded and served on the Freedom House board in Roxbury. She also served as Community Church’s president, as the Massachusetts legislative chair for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, or WILPF, and worked as a civil rights, community, and peace activist, and is the namesake of the Margaret Moseley Memorial Peace Fund. She founded local chapters of the WILPF and NAACP upon moving to Cape Cod in 1961, as well as numerous other organizations. She was a founding member of the Barnstable Unitarian Church’s Social Responsibility committee and was the first woman chair of the prudential committee. She met the reverse freedom riders in 1962, and traveled to Selma, Alabama in 1965 to work on voting rights.http://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5527http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/margaret-moseley/http://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:american+folklife+center&q=Moseley,+Margaret.+Papers+-+The +Civil+Rights+History+Project:+Survey+of+Collections+and+Repositories+%28The+American+Folklife+Center,+Library+of+Congress%29http://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/Mary Edmonia Lewis (1848 to 1907)
An American sculptor of Black and Native American descent, Mary Lewis, often known in art circles and Edmonia Lewis, was born in 1848 in upstate New York. Following her brother’s success in the California Gold Rush, she was able to attend college at Oberlin Collegiate Institute, but left the college after several incidents. She moved to Boston in 1864 to pursue a career in sculpting, despite limited experience or education in the art, telling a story about seeing a sculpture of Benjamin Franklin and deciding she could make a “stone man” on her own. She was introduced to numerous sculptors in the area, but finding an instructor was difficult until Edward Agustus Brackett began teaching her. She soon began selling some of her pieces, and she opened her own studio to the public in her first exhibit the same year. Inspired by the lives of abolitionists and civil war heroes, she also began writing. She used her artwork to fund and gain subscription to travel to Rome, Italy to expand her expertise. She spent much of her life in travel before her death in London in 1907.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonia_LewisMildred C. Hailey (Active 1960s to 2015)
From the late 1960s onward, Mildred Hailey was a guiding presence over the Bromley-Heath Public Housing Development until her death in 2015. She was part of the drive to remove control of the development from the Boston Housing Authority in 1968 through a range of activities, including negotiating truces between rival gangs that led to a GED program, repairing intolerable conditions in the community, and treating the entire neighborhood as extended family. She willingly took on an extremely difficult job using a combination of courage and compassion in an area and at a time when heat, electricity, and running water were spotty at best, and was considered a force of nature by those who knew her. When the progressive board of commissioners stepped aside, she was an active part of building a sense of community and a successful model of reclaiming broken public housing. She retired as executive director in 2012, but attended meetings until the last few months of her life.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/19/mildred-hailey-tenant-activism-transformed-boston-public-housing/uMvf9iF3ozuC8lLlVOKiCN/story.html?event=event12
Nadine Fortune Wright (1893 to 1994)
Born in Illinois in 1893, Nadine Wright was born into a wealthy, well-educated family that was not protected from racial crimes. This experience stirred up in her a lifelong passion for activism and achievement. Following the death of her father in 1899 and her mother in 1906, she was sent with her brother to Cambridge to live with her aunt, a founder of the Niagara Movement. Growing up in the center of Black political and intellectual activities, she graduated from Radcliffe in 1917 and taught in the Cambridge public school system for almost 20 years. She was also a trustee for Robert Gould Shaw house, chartered the Boston Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, and served in a range of organizations. She taught at colleges in North Carolina for many years before returning to Boston to teach children with cerebral palsy. She passed away in 1994.
https://www.mountaugurn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210228123150/https://mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
Bishop Nellie Yarborough (Active 1960s to 2010s)
Focused on ensuring everyone in her community could lean on someone during hard times, Nellie Yarborough worked with church parishioners and police to reduce crime and poverty in her Dorchester neighborhood. Born to a preacher’s family in North Carolina, She began preaching at age 12 and traveling at age 17 with Brumfield Johnson, to Boston, where she helped found the Mount Calvary Holy Church. She became the assistant pastor of the church in 1962 and was made senior pastor a decade later when Johnson passed. She became the second bishop of the church in 1994, and spent her life as an advocate and friend to the homeless while serving food to people in need every Thursday evening, often to crowds over 100. She passed away in 2012.
https://www.legacylcom/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/hellie-yarborough-obituary?id=7382565
Sister Nellie S. Harris (1884 to 1964)
Sister Nellie S. Harris was born in 1884, and passed away in 1964. This was the extent of the details I could find on this individual.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/214536641/nellie-s-harris
https://www.geni.com/people/Nellie-Harris/6000000024944257856
Nora L. Baston (Active 1996 to 2020s)
A pillar of the Boston community, Nora Baston is an 18-year veteran of the Boston Police Department. Managing community engagement, she has focused on tracking down girls who are starting to move in with gangs and getting guns off the streets. Seeing the successes of Boston youth powers her drive and work as deputy superintendent, one of four women working on the Boston Police command staff. She spends three to four nights weekly engaging with kids in Boston, whether it’s as a mentor or in other roles, building trust in areas where violence is strong. By providing youth with alternatives to gangs and drugs, she hopes to turn the community around. She has two degrees from University of Massachusetts Lowell and has graduated from the Boston Police Academy in 1996, crediting former Police Commissioner Davis with teaching her the best ways to connect with people on a one-on-one basis. https://www.bostonherald.com/2014/04/07/women-in-command-deputy-superintendent-nora-l-baston/Peggy Olivia Brown, Ed.D. (1934 to 2014)
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1934, Peggy Brown had strong concerns that children of color were being overlooked in public schools. Her strongly-held belief that all children can learn led her to undertake dramatic initiatives after seeing the devastating lives of those without education in the Bronx neighborhood she grew up in. After attending multiple universities, she lectured at Northeastern University and Boston College. Her initiatives also included improved healthcare in Roxbury at the Mandela Town Hall Health Spot, providing weekly blood pressure and blood sugar screenings. Dr. Brown invited optometrists, dentists, and other healthcare professionals to help address the many healthcare disparities she saw in the community. She mentored kids one-on-one and in groups, often staying up until 4 or 5 in the morning to finish term papers to ensure they’d graduate and have a successful life until her death in 2014.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/27/peggy-brown-educator-and-activist-founded-mandela-crew-first-african-american-and-latino-team-compete-head-charles/p0962cwuqrl5SLsObdjkzJ/story.html
Shirley Carrington (Active 1980s to 1990s)As the director of the Roxbury Multi-Service Center, Shirley Carrington helped the organization strengthen families and empower the community, especially during the turbulent crime sprees of the 1980s. Reaching out to a range of organizations to bring money and services into the community, including the United Way and New Hope Baptist, she sought to leverage the Center's resources to lower crime rates by increasing employment, improving education, and lifting the entire community up with a hand up instead of a hand out. She also provided resources for lowering infant mortality in Roxbury.
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m0435b57h
https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/1011/agang.html
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m04358327
Shirley Shillingford (Active 1975 to 2000s)
As the name behind Shirley’s Pantry in Mattapan, Shirley Shillingford has always had a strong focus on food and carnival. She started with the Caribbean American Carnival Association of Boston in 1975, she served alongside founders Ivy Ponder and Ken Bonaparte Mitchell, who stepped back in 1990 for her to lead the organization for the past 33 years. She served for a similar long period of time at Healthy Baby, Healthy Food Pantry on Mattapan’s River Street which she founded in 1992. At the time, she had no resources except asking for government and businesses for help. Her strong dedication to disadvantaged populations and communities has led her to reach out to company employees, elected officials and the community to keep the pantry running successfully for over 20 decades.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/202-08-25/bostons-carnival-celebrating-50-years-is-a-treasure-says-organizer
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/it-s-shirly-s-pantry-now-renaming-honors-longtime-manager-mattapan
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/23/mattapan-food-pantry-named-for-its-manager-a-longtime-activist/
Adelaide M. Cromwell, Ph.D. Author and professor Adelaide Cromwell, born in 1919, was the first Black instructor first at Hunter College and then at Smith College, her alma mater. As a professor of sociology at Boston University, she taught from 1951 to 1985, leading the committee that established the university's African Studies program, appointed in 1953 as its administrator and research associate. She was then appointed to the university's graduate Afro-American Studies program in 1969. She convened the first conference of West African social workers in 1960 as the only Black or female appointed to the Methodist Church in America's five-member committee to assess higher education in the Belgian Congo. She has been appointed to executive councils of many organizations including the American Society of African Culture, the American Negro Leadership Conference in Africa and the advisory council on Voluntary Foreign Aid. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and honors which include a Citation from the National Order of Cote d’Ivoire, the Smith College Medal, and the Carter G. Woodson Medal from ASALH
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/adelaide-cromwell-40
Adrienne R. Benton Though many Black women have served and raced in long-distance running, it was only recently that the Boston Athletic Association appointed its first Black woman to its board, Adrienne Benton. Involved with the marathon for many years, Benton is actively working at eliminating racial and other disparities within the distance running sport while acting as an ambassador for it. Starting running after a sibling ran a 5K in 2014, Benton has since completed six marathons which include four Abbot World Marathon Majors, as well as numerous shorter races. She's served as the Boston Marathon's finish line announcer in the past. She hopes that the Boston Athletic Association can address disparities using collaboration and outreach through the Boston Running Collaborative, such as improving access to year-round training facilities, health and wellness options that benefit the community, and track-and-field career development. A graduate of Rutgers University, she founded Onyx Spectrum Technology, recognized in the 2020 Inner City 100 by the Competitive Inner City, which she started after working as a hospital administrator at Boston Medical Center, which later became one of her clients.
https://www.boston.com/news/boston-marathon/2022/04/15/adrienne-benton-boston-athletic-association-board/
Adrienne Smith When Adrienne Smith's father gave her a football when she was seven, she learned to throw, but accepted at the time that there was no place for women in professional tackle football. In discovering that there is a women's professional tackle football league as an adult, she was able to revive her childhood dream. As the star receiver for the Boston Renegades, Smith is determined that girls growing up today know about all the possibilities before them. With 14 professional seasons behind her, she's gained an outstanding list of accomplishments as a Black female athlete, including two gold medals for the U.S. Women's Football National Team, nine Women's Football Alliance (WFA) All-Star appearances, four WFA championships, and an amazing touchdown. At the International Federation of American Football Women's World Championship in Stockholm in 2010, Smith received a catch and run that stretched out 52 long yards. As an athletic ambassador, she promotes it every way she can, including brand partnerships, speaking events, and Gridiron Queendom, an international organization she started to support females who want to play football. This has led to major enterprises such as the NFL and Nike investing millions of dollars into girls' high school football opportunities.
https://www.si.com/more-sports/2022/06/02/adrienne-smith-boston-renegades-womens-football
Alfreda HarrisRaised in a strong community in Roxbury in the 1940s and 1950s, Alfreda Harris always had a strong interest in sports and coaching. Using her coaching abilities, she helped countless Black teens gain college scholarships, helping them to get the education they needed to succeed in life and break the chains of poverty. As the founder of the Shelburne Recreation Center, she moved up through the organization as its Administrative Coordinator, which provided her with the opportunity to impact many young lives in the Roxbury community. A life-long athlete, she also served as the women's basketball coach at several Boston colleges, including the University of Massachusetts Boston, Roxbury Community College, and Emerson College. Harris also served on the Boston School Committee, becoming its longest-serving member over the course of her life. Her strong impact on the lives of youth, recreation, and community is outstanding, and her experiences in mentoring Roxbury youth has helped change the life of hundreds of individuals over the past decades.
https://roxbury.library.northeastern.edu/harris/
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m039rx707?datastream_id=content
Alice A. Casneau Born after the Civil War, Alice Caseneau was an active professional dressmaker and author with a passion for community service at the beginning of the 20th century. Born in Virginia, she was living in Boston with her husband Elmer and daughter Pearl in 1900. She had already made a name for herself as a professional dressmaker and as a vocal member of the Black community. Casneau had joined the Women's Era Club in the early 1890s, an organization for Black women encouraging community work and self-improvement. She contributed to the First National Conference of Colored Women of America in 1895, serving on the Committee on Special Work. She published a book on artistic dress cutting and making, and spoke on the topic at the first meeting of the National Negro Business League in 1900. Casneau joined the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and gave talks when sessions were held in Boston. She worked in the Soldiers' Comfort Unit during World War I and took an active interest in politics at that time, and remained engaged in community service and other organizations for the rest of her life, passing in 1953.
https://www.nps.gov/people/alice-casneau.htm
Andrea BradfordAt age five, opera singer Andrea Bradford began her musical training with the study of piano. Born in 1949, her vocal training began while attending St. Francis De Sales High School under Sister Mary Elise, who was the co-founder of Opera Ebony in New York. Though the Black boarding school had taken her far from home, her career would take her even further. She returned to her Huntsville roots to attend Oakwood College, then continued to her bachelor's degree at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, followed by a Master's degree at Boston University College of Fine Arts in 1973. She joined the Opera Company of Boston in 1975, touring with founder and conductor Sarah Caldwell in New England and Europe. She also performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops Orchestra as a soloist. She appeared in La Traviata, Madame Butterfly, The Barber of Seville, Three Willies, The Negro Burial Ground, The Balcony, and Lost in the Stars, among others. She also worked as manager of college recruiting for Bain & Company, then moved on to become the vice president and executive recruiter for Isaacson, Miller before moving on to many other prestigious positions.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/andrea-bradford
Andrea Campbell, J.D. Dedicated to fighting for equity and opportunity, Andrea Campbell is the Attorney General of Massachusetts. Growing up in an unstable living environment with her father in prison and losing her mother to a car accident at eight months of age, Campbell and her brothers lived with relatives and foster care until her father was released from prison when she was eight. Relying on public housing and assistance, her grandmother struggled with alcoholism as her brothers cycled into and out of the prison system, causing her to lose her twin Andre when he died in state custody. Through this hardship, she persevered, turning painful experiences into purpose. She graduated from Boston Latin School, then Princeton University and UCLA. She worked as a legal services attorney at EdLaw to defend children and families, especially those with disabilities, as well as at Proskauer LLP, but chose to move to General Counsel at the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission. She served as legal counsel to Governor Patrick, then ran successfully for Boston City Council, becoming the first woman to represent District 4. She was elected unanimously as the first Black woman to the City Council President position, then was elected Attorney General in 2022.
https://www.andreacampbell.org/
Andrea H. MajorShortly after Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, Andrea Major made hers a reality. Opening the Roxbury Center for the Performing Arts, originally known as Andrea's School of Dance, in 1967, this accomplished dancer, teacher, and choreographer began her dance education at age three. Graduating from the Boston Conservatory of Music with a bachelor's degree, Major continued her education in the Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York City. Starting with an experimental program at the Roxbury YMCA, she began offering classes, realizing at the time that young children in the inner city didn't have any real exposure to the performing arts, prompting her to open her own school and center to meet that need. Having received a wide range of awards, citations, and honors from religious groups, corporations, and civic organizations, Major's contributions to exposing inner-city youth to the performing arts are uncontested. With a strong passion for dance, she has a strong commitment to giving her students a strong appreciation for the performing arts.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/andrea-herbert-majors-work-mentoring-city-kids-has-inspired-them-to-dream-big/22680172
https://www.rcpaboston.org/
Andrea J. Cabral, J.D.With a long history of public service, Andrea Cabral grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and graduated from Boston College and then Suffolk University Law School in 1986. With an impressive thirty-year career including being the first woman serving as Suffolk County sheriff, Cabral's other accomplishments include public safety secretary under former Governor Patrick, which oversaw 14 public safety organizations within the state, reforming prisoner reentry programs, modernizing correctional facilities, serving as president of the Massachusetts Sheriffs Association, assistant state attorney general, director of Roxbury District Court Family Violence Project, Suffolk and Middlesex Counties assistant district attorney, co-founder and chief of the office's Domestic Violence Unit, senior prosecutor for civil rights cases, and chief of the District Court and Community Prosecutions. She also wrote the state's first continuing education legal manual on restraining orders in domestic violence cases. Cabral is an Eisenhower Fellow, and served as one of the 18 national experts that were appointed to the Science Advisory Board by former U.S. Attorney General Holder. She's a member of the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy Advisory Board at Boston College, the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly editorial board, and the Mass Mentoring Partnership's Governing Board.
https://www.herself360.com/articles/national-womens-history-month-loretta-ross-and-sheriff-andrea-cabral
Andrea L. TaylorAs the first and current Senior Diversity Officer at Boston University, Andrea Taylor has a long history of working for diversity, equity, and inclusion through her work in civil rights. Born in 1947, she has been the president and CEO of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, she has worked on the same issues that had arisen when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his peaceful protests against discrimination in Alabama. Operating an institute that is part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and the Smithsonian Institute, Taylor is returning to her roots as a Boston University alumnus. She is also the chairperson for the campus-wide Community Safety Advisory Group and Antiracism Working Group, a co-chair of the Task Force on Workplace Culture, and has been a Boston University Trustee in the past. She has also served as Director of Citizenship and Corporate Giving at the Microsoft Corporation in North America, and is a founding director of the Media Fund at the Ford Foundation, supporting global film and broadcast documentary productions focusing on social justice and civil rights. During her philanthropy career, she was responsible for distributing over $1 billion to promote social equity.
https://www.bu.edu/diversity-officer/profile/andrea-l-taylor/
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/andrea-l-taylor
Ann H. PilotThough Ann Pilot retired in 2009 after a 40-year career with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, she wasn't done with her musical career. After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Music, she performed extensively as a soloist prior to becoming the substitute second harp of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and principal harp of the Washington National Symphony. She first joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1969 as the assistant principal harp while playing as principal for the Boston Pops Orchestra. She then moved up to principal harp of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1980, a position she held until her retirement from the organization in 2009. During her extensive career, she has played as a soloist with orchestras across the United States, Europe, Haiti, New Zealand, and South Africa. She has recorded several albums with Boston Records, Koch International, and Denouement record labels. In 1999, she traveled to London to record Harp Concerto by Kevin Kaska, an American composer whom she had commissioned the work through, with the London Symphony Orchestra. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including multiple honorary doctorates, the Distinguished Alumni Award, the Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Boston Musicians Association and Talent Development League, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
http://www.annhobsonpilot.com/
Anna B. Gardner Born in 1901, Anna Bobbitt Gardner lived until her late 90s, always focused on bringing musical education and performance to the Black community in Boston. As the first Black woman to earn a Bachelor's degree from the New England Conservatory in 1932, Anna Gardner paved the way for other Black musicians by opening her music school in Boston before she had even begun her post-secondary musical education. Her Academy of Musical Arts was opened in the basement of her home on Claremont Street in Boston, and for over the next sixty years, she operated no fewer than five studios under that name. At Symphony Hall, she managed Colored American Nights, featuring a range of talented Black musicians and groups, as well as producing local radio and television programs for Black audiences in the Boston area. She was appointed as State Director of Negro History Week programs in 1945 by Governor Maurice J. Tobin, a position she was reappointed to by several succeeding governors. As part of its ongoing recognition of exceptional talent, the New England Conservatory has granted one musician a year the Anna Bobbitt Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award since her death in 1997.
https://necmusic.edu/news/archives-celebration-necs-african-american-legacy-part-i
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Anna F. JonesAs one of the oldest and highest-impact community foundations, the Boston Foundation welcomed its first Black woman as CEO, Anna Faith Jones. She had worked her way up, receiving an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Massachusetts in 1986 when she was serving as director of the Foundation. The groundbreaking leadership provided by herself and another Foundation Board Chair, Frieda Garcia, inspired the organization to develop the Anna Faith Jones and Frieda Garcia Women of Color Leadership Circle. Her leadership helped steer the Boston Foundation towards its mission today of closing disparities in the region to improve opportunities, prosperity, and equitable outcomes. To further these goals, Jones also spoke publicly, including as the 4th James A. Joseph Lecture on Philanthropy honoree in 1994. During her lecture, she brought up the sweeping changes that were happening in social welfare programs, Boston's role as a city of immigrants, and the prejudice that the many waves of immigration have seen over the years, referencing Boston's Puritan roots and John Winthrop's "City on a Hill". After stepping down from the Boston Foundation in 2001, her leadership and example to that organization have continued in its activities exponentially.
https://www.tbf.org/news-and-insights/press-releases/2022/january/2022-woclc-announcement-20220119
https://www.abfe.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1994_Anna-Faith-Jones.pdf
https://www.pionline.com/article/20001002/ONLINE/10020771/anna-faith-jones-will-step-down-as-president-and-ceo-of-the-boston
Audrea F.J. Dunham, Ph.D.Born and raised in the Roxbury neighborhood in Boston, Audrea Dunham was a civil rights activist, author, and educator whose interests focus on the role of women in social movements, a passion she attributed to the early influences she had with many Boston civil rights activists, her own activism in the Stay-Out for Freedom campaigns as a student, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. March, and during the 1960s, as a leader for the Massachusetts State Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Having earned a Ph.D. in African American Studies at Temple University, she has taught African American Studies courses at both Delaware State University and Georgia State University. She has also served as a board member on the National Council for Black Studies, and as a Journal of Black Studies associate editor. She has also published articles on a number of organizations, including Mothers for Adequate Welfare, Fight for a Change!, and The Evolution of the Welfare Rights Movement as it relates to Boston in the International Journal of Africana Studies, and is working on a book-length manuscript for publication in the future.
https://openvault.wgbh.org/exhibits/boston_civil_rights/authors
Rep. Ayanna Pressley Born in Cincinnati in 1974 and raised in Chicago, Ayanna Pressley moved to Boston for college, then worked with Congressional Representative Joseph P. Kenedy II and Senator John Kerry. Representing Massachusetts Seventh Congressional District, Representative Ayanna Pressley is the first Black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She's also an activist, advocate, and legislator, fighting to ensure that those who are closest to the issues facing minority communities today are those who are informing and driving policymaking. Pressley is a champion for justice, encouraging healing while promoting reproductive freedom, as well as justice for the elderly, immigrants, survivors of sexual assault, formerly and currently imprisoned, workers, and those who have been through trauma. As an individual with alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes rapid hair loss and impacts disproportionately black women and children, she advocates for others who have the disease, serving as a public role model to raise awareness and support. Prior to her work in the U.S. House of Representatives, she was the first Black woman elected to the Boston City Council, where she served for eight years.
https://pressley.house.gov/about/
https://www.biography.com/political-figures/ayanna-pressley
Barbara Gomes-BeachThough some may recognize Barbara Gomes-Beach as the mother of Hollywood actor Michael Beach, she was actually a powerhouse in her own right, speaking out about the continuing AIDS epidemic both at home and abroad. With a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Masters degree in City Planning from MIT, Gomes-Beach raised her four children using her wages as a city planner while pursuing her dream of singing. Born in the late 1930s, she recalled a cousin dying of the disease in the mid-1980s, and mentioned during a 1996 interview that not enough had been done in communities of color to fight the spread of the disease. Passing in 2017, she had at that point 10 grandchildren and numerous unnamed great-grandchildren, which was the drive for her activism and advocacy for individuals with HIV and AIDS, including her work as the executive director of the Multicultural AIDS Coalition, which was started in 1989 and is still working to provide equity and equality to AIDS treatments in minority communities, many of which are separated by boundaries of language, cultural beliefs, and poverty, preventing a single approach to the issue.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/barbara-gomes-beach-obituary?id=6712250
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFNgaLXHOuP/
https://lucykingdom.com/barbara-gomez-beach/
https://bostonphoenix.com/archive/1in10/96/11/BARBARA_GOMES_BEACH.html
https://www.mac-boston.org/about
Barbara Smith As a pioneer in Black feminism, Barbara Smith is an activist, author, lecturer, publisher, and lesbian. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she and her twin sister participated in the 1960s civil rights protests. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1969 with a major in sociology and English, and received a Doctor of Humane Letters in 2019. As a co-founder of the Combahee River Collective in Boston in 1974, Smith and other Black feminist pioneers co-authored the Combahee River Collective Statement with Beverly and Demita Frazier. Considered by many to be the first example of intersectionality in oppression and prejudice, it's an example that is used in many social justice campaigns today. She taught her first course on Black women's literature at Emerson College in 1973, and has been an educator and lecturer at several other colleges and universities over the years. She also co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, the first publisher in the United States specifically for books by women of color. She was elected to the Common Council in Albany, NY in 2005, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the same year. Her writings have been in numerous national and international publications.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/directory/alum/barbara-smith
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-1974-1980/
Judge Barbara A. Dortch-OkaraAs the first Black and woman to become a Chief Justice for Administration and Management of the Massachusetts Trial Court, Barbara Dortch-Okara graduated from Brandeis University in 1971, then went on to receive her Boston College Law School JD in 1974. She received her first judicial appointment to the Boston Municipal Court in 1984, then to the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1984, and oversaw the management of the Trial Court in 1998. She has received multiple awards, including the 2000 Boston Bar Association Citation of Judicial Excellence, the 2007 Judicial Excellence Award from the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys, and the 2011 Trailblazer Award of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association. She was appointed to chair the State Ethics Commission in 2013 by Governor Deval Patrick. After retiring from her duties, she became a professor at New England Law Boston until 2018. She was elected in 2019 as a member of the Committee on Judicial Performance Evaluation, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court committee tasked with reviewing and revising the performance evaluation process trial judges are required by statute to undergo. She holds honorary Doctor of Law degrees from both New England Law Boston and Southern New England School of Law.
https://www.brandeis.edu/trustees/members/dortch-okara.html
Barbara C. Elam Born in 1929, Barbara Elam was a community activist, children's advocate, and librarian, working on social justice issues such as literacy, educational reform, and mental health. She received her Bachelors in Library Science from Simmons College, choosing this path to help children learn to love reading and education. She worked briefly in the New York Public Library, before returning to Boston as the children's librarian at the Boston Public Library. She raised her children but dedicated her excess time and energy to addressing racial inequalities in the Boston Public School system and the desperate need for mental health services in the Black community. She joined and eventually became president of the Massachusetts Mental Health Association Fort Hill chapter, lobbying to establish the Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller Center. After her children were at school, she returned to the school library system, enhancing the school system with books written by and about people of color. She made libraries the schools' focal points, while developing a program to train low-income mothers without diplomas as library aides. Many continued their interrupted schooling to become librarians. Elam continued her education with a Masters in Education from Boston University and Masters in Library Science from Simmons.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/obituary/barbara-clark-elam/
Bishop Barbara C. HarrisBorn in Philadelphia, Barbara Harris was a civil rights movement supporter, advocate, and feminist minister in the Episcopal Church. Choosing to move to the Church of the Advocate along with her voter registration efforts and participating in the Selma march in the 1960s, she moved from public relations executive career to support Episcopal Bishops defying the ban on ordaining women in 1974. She entered the ministry, being ordained as a deacon in 1979 and a priest in 1980, serving as priest-in-charge at St. Augustine of Hippo. She was a chaplain at Philadelphia County Prisons and counseled industrial corporations on public policy and social concerns. She wrote monthly columns for The Witness, elevating her in the international Anglican community. After the 1988 Lambeth Conference determined that each province of the Communion could choose to ordain women as bishops, Harris was ordained as the first female bishop in the Episcopal Church. She was active in many organizations, including membership in the Union of Black Episcopalians and past president of the Episcopal Urban Caucus. She served on several vital local, state, national, and international boards, committees, and ministries to help serve underserved minorities in the Boston area.
https://episcopalarchives.org/church-awakens/exhibits/show/leadership/clergy/harris
Belinda SuttonAs the author of one of the earliest slave narratives written by a Black woman in the American colonies, Belinda Sutton was born around 1712 in or near Ghana in western Africa. Captured by slave raiders at around the age of 12, she was marched to the coast and then placed on a ship with approximately 300 other Blacks bound for the Caribbean plantations. Purchased by the Royall family in Antigua, she was moved with the family to Boston when they moved from one plantation to another location. In Massachusetts, Royall was the state's largest slaveholder. However, as the American Revolution began, Sutton's Loyalist owner fled to England, which allowed her to live in unofficial freedom in the Massachusetts colony. At the end of the war, when slavery was being abolished, Sutton petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1783 for reparations for her unpaid labor from the Royall estate. She was granted 15 pounds, 12 shillings annually, which she was required to petition for on an annual basis. She did so until 1793, at which point she slips from history, believed to have perished by 1799 at a ripe old age for the time of well over 80 years.
https://enslaved.org/fullStory/16-23-106154/
Benaree P. Wiley Born in Washington, D.C. in 1946, Benaree "Bennie" Pratt Wiley was a corporate chief executive who graduated from Howard University with a Bachelor's degree in Marketing in 1968. She entered Harvard's Business School, receiving her MBA in 1972 and working as a consultant for corporations and nonprofits to build capacity and refine program delivery. She launched a high-end toy store to combine her business and child development passions. She became The Partnership's president and CEO in 1991, an organization to help over 200 Boston-area businesses to develop, attract, and retain over 1,300 professionals of color, increasing leadership of people of color in the city's corporate sector. At the same time, the organization helped professionals of color navigate Boston's complex corporate structure to achieve success and improve diversity within the city's corporate professional population. Wiley was a past chair of directors of the Children's Museum, a trustee of Boston College, an overseer of the WGBH Educational Foundation, a former director of the Crispus Attucks Children's Center, a director at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and at the Boston Foundation. Selected as one of Boston's most powerful women in 2003 by Boston Magazine, she retired in 2005 from The Partnership.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/benaree-p-wiley-40
Berthé M. GainesA strong library advocate, Berthé M. Gaines met then-future Mayor Raymond Flynn in the early 1980s as she was protesting library budget cuts while working as a typesetter and proofreader at the Globe and running the Dudley Square Friends of the Library group. When Flynn was elected in 1983, one of his first acts was to ask her to serve as the Boston Public Library board's first Black woman and the first female president. Gaines' strong-held belief that nobody, especially children, should have to travel out of their neighborhood for a library led her to the founding of Save Our Libraries. She was known for saying, "You don't have to go to Harvard to be a scholar," believing that with a library at their disposal, everyone has the same educational resources. She was involved both with the main Copley Square location and the branch libraries, with a keen understanding of the branches within the entire system. From her efforts, no branches were closed and service hours were increased, so people of all ages, cultures, and races feel at home at any library branch. For her efforts, she received an honorary doctorate in library science from Simmons College in 1999.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/07/04/berthe-gaines-boston-first-african-american-woman-serve-boston-public-library-board/F4XYyuAUCHhYYYlgkTlDnJ/story.html
Betty L. Wornum Betty Wornum started her professional career as a caseworker at Grove Hall's transitional assistance office. Driven to provide services to those within the community who were unable to otherwise find appropriate accommodation, she founded the Roxbury Community Health Center, also known as Rox Comp, in 1968. Her dedication to the community allowed many individuals who would otherwise be unable to pay for services to receive quality healthcare and related services for four and a half decades before the organization closed its doors in 2013. In addition to being a mother of nine, her activities in the community advanced her actions to receive the Sojourner Truth award as well as awards from several other awards for her long-standing community action and volunteer work.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Betty-Wornum
https://carelistings.com/federally-qualified-health-centers/roxbury-ma/roxbury-comprehensive-community-health-center/5ace885893efd2372f981eff
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2013/03/20/roxcomps-closing-leaves-employees-out-in-the-cold-2/
Beulah S. HesterBorn as the daughter of a minister in Oxford, North Carolina, Beulah Hester, often referred to as Sister Beulah, served the community in and around Boston for over 40 years at the Twelfth Baptist Sanctuary in Roxbury alongside her husband, also a minister. She pursued higher education actively throughout her life, first at Hartshorn College, then later at Boston University's School of Religious Education and Simmons College School of Social Work. Her dedication to the community included acting as President of the Queen Esther Club and Missionary Society, organizer of The Roxbury Goldenaires, one of the area's first senior groups, as well as the Philathea Class and Chapel Choir. She supervised Neighborhood Services at the Robert Gould Shaw House, and was a member of the Board of Overseers for the Boston Welfare Department. Upon returning to North Carolina after her retirement, she assisted with the Central Orphanage Music Department, organized the Oxford AARP chapter, was a member of the North Carolina Council of the National Association of Social Workers, and served as a pianist at the Belton Creek Baptist Church prior to the illness that took her life in 1981.
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m044zp376?datastream_id=content
Beulah Providence Coming to the United States from Dominica in 1960 to better herself, Beulah Providence started out her life in the United States as a housekeeper. However, her drive to become a more productive person and make strong, positive changes in her community. With very little formal education, she was able to leverage scholarships and other resources to educate herself by enrolling at Northeastern University that was offered following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Working with professor Rosemary Whiting, she began working on an assignment to develop a project to provide services within a local community. Providence's project was the beginning of what would become the Caribbean Foundation of Boston and the Urban Community Homemaking, Home Health Aide, and Chore Services, of which Providence is now the executive director.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/beulah-providence-32ab981b/
Beverley Johnson Beverley Johnson decided early on in her career that she would do two things in her career: work in a field she was passionate about and never spend all day in the office, but instead would be in the field, working with clients. Starting out working in Washington D.C. in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, she moved to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, Johnson knew that she had a passion for doing work to help stabilize neighborhoods by investing in physical and economic revitalization. By operating in the sub-sector of real estate development that ensures that neighborhoods impacted by big project developers don't lose their sense of community, Johnson began Bevco Associates in July 1994 as president to ensure projects have a positive impact on neighborhoods surrounding the development. Bevco consults on urban planning, project management, public land conveyance, zoning, permitting, and community engagement. The company's portfolio includes Crosstown Center, the development of the Mattapan Boston State Hospital site, and MBTA public engagement efforts. The integrity she brings to every project builds trust in the community that she has their best interests at heart. She's also been president and chair of the Massachusetts Minority Contractors Association board.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2015/03/09/beverley-johnsons-consulting-firm-builds-bridges-between-developers-and-community/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverley-johnson-a6170942/
Blanche E. BraxtonAs the first Black woman admitted to the Massachusetts Bar as a lawyer, Blanche Braxton graduated from the Portia School of Law, which evolved into New England Law Boston, in 1921, in an age when many women of any race were not encouraged to attend higher education institutions. Following her graduation, she prepared for the Bar exam and was admitted to the Bar in Massachusetts two years later on March 16, 1923. A decade later, she became the first Black woman to practice law in the U.S. District Court in the District of Massachusetts, and was admitted on March 21, 1933. Living in Roxbury, she had a private practice at 412 Massachusetts Avenue, and her memory is honored with a scholarship every year by the Massachusetts Black Women Attorneys Foundation named in her honor, which is awarded to law students of color who have been shown to have demonstrated commitment to public service, dedication to the advancement of minorities through the legal process, and outstanding academic achievement.
https://massblackwomenattys.org/scholarship.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_E._Braxton
Carmen Fields Journalist Carmen Fields has won Emmy awards for her work as a local news anchor and is a familiar face to Bostonians. After completing her journalism degree at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri and reporting at the city's CBS station, she moved to Boston, graduating from COM with her Masters degree in 1973. She was a Boston Globe reporter who was first to interview Ted Landsmark, the attorney attacked when he wandered into a protest against school integration. Growing up in segregated Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fields was determined to break barriers as one of the Globe's two black women in the newsroom. She quickly moved from a rookie reporter and up through the ranks, becoming a part of the team at the paper that won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for their coverage of school desegregation and became an assistant metro editor and a columnist after a walkout to desegregate the paper's editorial ranks. She undertook several positions at Channels Four and Seven and was producer of a public affairs show Higher Ground. She was honored alongside Liz Walker and Sarah-Ann Shaw, the first Black female reporters in the area, by the Roxbury Community College Foundation.
https://www.bu.edu/com/articles/carmen-fields-tells-her-story/
Carol FulpAs the founder of Fulp Diversity, Carol Fulp collaborates with corporate executives to promote diversity within the corporate environment. Her book Success Through Diversity: Why the Most Inclusive Companies Will Win has received good reviews from multiple organizations. She has worked with over 100 organizations, with a long list of top-ranking companies as her clients, including Microsoft, Liberty Mutual, CVS, McKinsey, Harvard, UPS, and many more. She delivered the Inclusive Leadership Forum Series at Boston College Graduate School of Business and worked with the Institute of Politics, Policy & History to produce their Founding Fathers Symposiums: Unpacking the Truth Behind the Complex Legacies. Prior to her work at Fulp Diversity, she served in a range of high-level executive positions at The Partnership, John Hancock Financial, the Gillette Company, and a range of several media organizations. She was appointed as a Representative of the United States to the Sixty-Fifth Session of the United Nations General Assembly by President Obama. She serves the community through positions on boards of a wide range of organizations. She has received numerous awards for her service in the Boston area and is a graduate of the University of the State of New York, along with multiple honorary degrees.
https://www.fulpdiversity.com/carol-fulp
Carole C. Thomas Carole Copeland Thomas is a business owner, speaker, instructor, thought leader, and trainer. Moderating key issues impacting global economies, she has worked with experts at large organizations including Moster, Cargill, Verizon, and many others. She has spent a decade as an adjunct faculty member at Bentley University, and as a speaker, has presented in a range of national and international forums. She is a co-founder of a non-profit international humanitarian organization as a result of a 2005 trip to Kenya and now focuses on aiding women and children in southern India. Thomas is the founder of the Multicultural Symposium Series, an initiative to advance multicultural issues. As the host of Focus on Empowerment, a talk show, the program was also available on the internet and focused on current issues. An active member of local and regional social activism organizations, she's worked to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in a wide range of sectors and industries. A graduate of Emory University in 1975, she entered graduate school on a Martin Luther King, Jr. fellowship at Northeastern University and graduated with an MBA. She received the Certified Diversity Meeting Professional designation from the International Association of Hispanic Meeting Professionals in 2011.
http://www.tellcarole.com/about-carole.html
Carolyn Wilkins A current professor, pianist, composer, and vocalist in the Ensemble Department at the Berklee College of Music, Carolyn Wilkins has performed on radio and television with her group SpiritJazz. She's undertaken a concert tour in South America acting as a jazz ambassador for the U.S. Department of State, has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony and at numerous other events. She's also an author of numerous books including Tips for Singers: Rehearsing, Performing, and Auditioning, They Raised Me Up: A Black Single Mother and the Women Who Inspired Her, Damn Near White: An African American Family’s Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success, and Melody for Murder: A Bertie Bigelow Mystery. She is a former faculty member for the Tobin Community School and New England Conservatory of Music, a former lecturer at Fitchburg State College, Emmerson College and Emmanuel College, received her Bachelor's degree from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and her Masters at Eastman School of Music. Her experience in the competitive environments at Oberlin and Eastman put her in a great position to understand what her students at Berklee are working with on a daily basis.
https://college.berklee.edu/people/carolyn-wilkins
Charlene Carroll Black hair faces many challenges, which is why master hair stylist Charlene Carrroll is highly recognized for developing wrapping starting in the 1970s. A Boston native born in 1950, she was raised in the projects and turned her skill with Black hair into her success. She sees hair wrapping as a way to calm the hair and put it into a resting position, brushing or wrapping the hair to lay against the scalp, which is then secured using a silk scarf. Used to protect hair from frizzing in high humidity or moisture, it's often a technique used at home, but has begun to appear publicly more often. This allowed her clients to protect their hair while they were going from the salon to their home, work, or other location, ensuring that her clients would look just as great when they got home as they did in the salon. This dedication to excellence has made Carroll the go-to stylist in Boston as well as the rest of the East Coast, promoting hair education as well as style. She's shared the technique across the US and internationally, though she only takes a few private clients in her retirement.
https://www.theroot.com/gifted-black-hairstylist-created-the-doobie-wrap-1850337893
Charlotte F. Grimké Born into a free Black family in Philadelphia in 1837, Charlotte Grimke was an abolitionist, educator, and author of five volumes of diaries published posthumously. With her family active in the abolitionist movement, she was educated by tutors at home due to segregation in the Philadelphia school system. Attending Higginson Grammar School in the more tolerant Salem, Massachusetts as the only Black student, she began keeping the first of her diaries. She then chose to begin her career as an educator, matriculating at the Salem Normal School, now Salem State University, as a teacher. Graduating in 1856, she worked at the Epes Grammar School, an all-white school in Salem. She began writing poetry which was published in antislavery periodicals such as The Liberator. During the Civil War, she volunteered to serve as a teacher to educate formerly enslaved Blacks on South Carolina's Sea Islands. Her experiences there, including an 1864 two-part essay "Life on the Sea Islands' ' were published in Atlantic Monthly. Her passion in serving formerly enslaved individuals led her to work as the secretary at the Freedman's Union Commission Boston branch. Her dedication to abolition and women's suffrage lasted through the end of her life.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Forten-Grimke
Charlotte Matthews-Nelson Working at Northwestern University since her graduation in 1979, Charlotte Matthews Nelson is the program coordinator for Northeastern Law School's Center for Law, Equity, and Race. As one of 69 Bostonian civil rights leaders honored during the unveiling of a statue of the embrace of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King in Boston Common. Her name was engraved along with that of her late husband, Leon T. Nelson, on plaques embedded in the paving stones that surround the new statue. As a Northeastern professor, her decades of service to the university, community, and city at large include activities with the NAACP, her roles in local leadership, and her leadership within the university to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
https://crrj.org/efforts/northeastern-law-center-for-law-equity-and-race-program-co-ordinator-honored-at-mlk-statue-unveiling/
Rep. Charlotte G. Richie As an experienced public servant and activist, Charlotte Golar Richie graduated with a Bachelors from Rutgers University, a Masters in journalism from Columbia University, and an MBA from Suffolk University. She's a former Peace Corps volunteer who is dedicated to serving her community to effect positive change. She has a deep commitment to civil rights and has held a range of government positions, including Chief of Housing and Director of the Neighborhood Development Department in Boston, as well as a Commissioner in the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. She was the seventh Black woman to be elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1994, where she chaired the Housing and Urban Development Committee, making her the first Black woman to chair a committee in her first term. After campaigning for Boston mayor in 2013 as the first Black female candidate, Richie is continuing to support women's leadership and women of color into public office. She is a board member with the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus, the Interim Advisory Board Chair for the University of Massachusetts Boston Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy, and as a Co-Founder and Board Chair of MAWOCC's Advisory Board.
https://mawocc.com/who-we-are-mawocc/our-advisory-board/charlotte-golar-richie-2/
Ché Madyun Serving as the first Board President of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a nonprofit organization working to create a diverse, high-quality, and vibrant neighborhood, Che Madyun is working on building an urban village, focusing on a vision for the future that develops local cooperation, empowerment, and hard work. With 300 new affordable housing units on previously vacant lots, a town common for neighborhood events, community gardens, and a mural to celebrate the neighborhood's ethnic diversity, Madyun is focused on bringing economic stability and growth, revitalized business, enriched cultural life, and reclamation of locations that have been environmentally damaged. The neighborhood is located along the Roxbury-Dorchester line, and is focused on creating a safer, more sustainable, and flourishing environment for residents. Born in 1953, she moved to the Dudley Street neighborhood in 1976 after her graduation from Emerson College with a degree in dance.
https://www.umbrasearch.org/catalog/bb37fb3101769a46a8058f6acdb38d3a85a6086a
https://www.nps.gov/mabi/learn/historyculture/che-madyun.htm
Chloe Spear Born around 1749, Chloe Spear was a Black woman born in Africa who experienced life both as a slave and as a free woman in Boston during the Revolutionary War. She authored a memoir that was anonymously published under the name "Lady of Boston" to provide a Christian testimony of her life story alongside her spiritual development, providing commentary on both slavery and Christianity. Enslaved at approximately age 12, she arrived in Philadelphia in 1761, then was purchased as an enslaved person by a prominent Boston family. She was free to engage in several domestic avocations, and her skills were valued, but when her owner caught her learning to read, he threatened to punish her terribly. Baptized and married after the Revolutionary War, Spear and her husband, with whom she'd had seven children, opened a boarding house for workers and sailors when Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783. Following her husband's death, she opened the establishment for religious meetings and social gatherings for all races, making her beloved by the community at large before her 1815 passing. Following her death, she was featured in five obituaries and a biography was published in a Baptist missionary magazine shortly after her passing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloe_Spear
Chrystal Kornegay Serving as the Executive Director of MassHousing, an organization that lends approximately $1 billion every year to preserve or produce affordable housing, Chrystal Kornegay has helped many in the Boston area secure quality homes either as a rental or homeowner. With a Down Payment Assistance program, Workforce Housing initiative and nationally-recognized homeownership production in communities of color program. Prior to her position at MassHousing, she served under the Baker-Polito administration's Housing and Community Development undersecretary, allowing her to advocate for increased state capital dollars by 18%, increased rental subsidies for low-income families by 42% and dramatically reduced homeless families housed in motels. She has also served as President and CEO of Urban Edge, which is one of New England's largest corporations focused on community development, and is cited as the reason for the organization's $3 million increase in net asset position. Kornegay is on multiple boards, including the National Council of State Housing Agencies, National Housing Trust, Bipartisan Policy Center Advisory Council, and is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston. She has a Bachelor's degree from Hunter College and a Masters from MIT.
https://www.masshousing.com/en/about/leadership
Chaplain Clementina M. ChéryAs the CEO and co-founder of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute located in Boston, Chaplain Clementina Chery has two decades of experience serving families impacted by homicide, giving her a unique skill set for best practices in homicide response. Her focus is transforming homicide response so that families are treated with compassion and dignity. Selected as a 2017 Barr Fellow for her effective, visionary leadership, as a 2016 Social Innovator by the Social Innovation Forum in recognition of her approach to social issues, and many other awards over the years. Her groundbreaking publications for murder victim families help family members who have gone through homicide trauma to cope and heal. Her training with public health and law enforcement professionals allows her organization to better help those impacted by homicide and interrupt retaliatory violence cycles. In addition to her extensive training and many honorary degrees, she is recognized as one of the most influential leaders in Boston for her peacemaking efforts. She was ordained in 2012 as a senior chaplain under the International Fellowship of Chaplains.
https://www.chaplainchery.com/
Cleora Francis-O’Connor When working through the traumatic loss of one of her loved ones, Cleora Francis-O'Connor was seeking healing and balance, finding it through the intentional practice and meditative modes of yoga. At that point, she decided to use that experience to help others who had experienced trauma and were in need of healing. As a nonviolence activist and advocate, she has incorporated these practices into every yoga class and workshop she has taught over the past 19 years. With a strong focus on healing the heart and soul following a loss or trauma, she has practiced for over 21 years and teaches Hatha Yoga at Touch Massage, Yoga RI, and a range of other community centers. Outside of her active work in teaching and healing with yoga, she works as an IT specialist, and is a board member of the Nonviolence Institute of Rhode Island.
https://kripalu.org/presenters-programs/presenters/cleora-francis-oconnor
Colette Phillips As an active civic leader on the Board of Trustees of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Mass General Hospital President's Council, and Eastern Bank, Colette Phillips is also founder and President of Get Konnected! as well as The GK Fund and is president and CEO of Colette Phillips Communications. Phillips is a values-based leader and trusted advisor for many C-suite executives and teams in Boston. She is an advocate for her clients, leveraging public relations branding along with internal/external communications strategies. She works with many companies to improve engagement, diversity, and inclusion. Her contributions have allowed many large corporations to establish inclusive, healthy working environments. Her premier inclusive networking event Get Connected! is known for changing how the conversations of diversity take place. The GK100 that she created is considered to be the first comprehensive list of the 100 most influential people of color in Boston. With a Bachelors and Masters from Emerson College, Phillips has been honored with the Boston Business Journal's 2016/2016 Power 50 list, Boston Magazine's 2018 100 Most Influential, has been cited by Boston Magazine in its Influencer feature, and by the Boston Globe as a social connector and A-lister.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/colettephillips/
Cora R. McKerrow One long-standing cornerstone of the South End Black community in Boston was the Reid Funeral Home, which was founded by Cora Reid McKerrow and her brother Millard Fillmore Reid in 1926. At a time when women, and especially Black women, were rarely entrepreneurs, McKerrow was born in 1888 in Churchland, Virginia, as one of 15 children. Coming to Boston, the funeral home was not her first business, working as a chiropodist and as a beautician until she went into business with her brother as they opened the funeral home. Following her brother's death in the early 1940s, McKerrow operated the business on her own for an additional 30 years until she chose to close it in 1971, after 45 years of successful management and service, during two-thirds of which she operated the business entirely on her own, making her an early business star in Boston for Black female entrepreneurs.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Danielle S. Allen, Ph.D. As the director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics and a professor at James Bryant Conant University, Danielle Allen is a seasoned leader of nonprofits, advocate for democracy, distinguished author, and a professor of ethics, public policy, and political philosophy. Her focus on making the world a better place for the young has taken her through her college career and teaching, to leadership of a $60 million university division and driving change of a $6 billion foundation. She has advocated for democracy reform, civic education, and cannabis legalization. Her leadership during the COVID pandemic in 2020 rallied coalitions and developed solutions for the first Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience. She was the first Black woman to run for a statewide office in Massachusetts, and was the winner of the Library of Congress Kluge prize, recognizing scholarly achievement in disciplines outside of the Nobel Prize. She has been a chair of the Mellon Foundation and Pulitzer Prize board, focusing on the Democratic Knowledge Project and Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiatives, among many others. She has written many books on civil rights, political thought leadership, and many other topics.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/danielle-allen
DeAma BattleWith classical training in dance, DeAma Battle began focusing on dance forms with roots in Africa starting in the 1960s, helping many in the area to return to their roots with these traditional dance forms and how they have changed with European and American cultural contacts. Founding The Art of Black Dance and Music in 1975, her goal of presenting and preserving the rich history of African folklore, music, and dance has been ever present in her work. Studying the dance movements and steps with masters from Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, and West Africa, she probed deeper into the field while abroad, on dance-study tours to the Caribbean, Africa, and other countries with a strong African heritage. She considers herself to also be a dance archivist, recording the history of dance before it's lost. Among her goals is unifying individuals of African descent by illustrating cultural similarities throughout the African Diaspora. Finding similarities in traditional movement in today's West Africa, Traditional Capoeira in Brazil and break dancing in America, she has chosen to record her heritage in motion.
https://www.bostondancealliance.org/bda_staff/deama-battle/
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol22/iss1/8/
Deborah B. Prothrow-Stith, M.D. Appointed as the first female Commissioner of Public Health for Massachusetts in 1987 by Governor Dukakis, Deborah Prothrow-Stith has an impressive record of leading healthcare, life sciences, non-for-profit institutions and academic organizations on their executive talent and leadership. A public health leader, she broke new ground while a physician in inner-city Boston, and is now dean and Professor of Medicine for Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science College of Medicine. She has authored several books focused on preventing violence and a range of additional public health issues. Founding the first Office of Violence Prevention in a state health department in the country, she also expanded HIV/AIDS prevention programs while increasing programs for drug treatment and rehabilitation. During her husband's tenure as US Ambassador to Tanzania, she worked with numerous organizations, including the Muhimbili National Hospital and the NGO operating the country's first HIV clinic. Graduating from Spelman College and Harvard Medical, she completed her residency at Boston City Hospital, and has received ten honorary doctorate degrees, and was inducted into the honor roll of women physicians in 2015 by the Massachusetts Medical Society.
https://www.cdrewu.edu/people/deborah-b-prothrow-stith-md
Deborah C. Jackson With a strong commitment to social justice in higher education, Deborah Jackson became the fourth President of Cambridge College in 2011, but with her came over three decades of leadership across numerous educational institutions in Boston. Her goal was to move the College's mission forward of providing time-efficient, academically exceptional, and affordable higher education for those who have had limited or no access. Named as one of America's Top 100 Graduate Degree Producers by Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine, Cambridge now ranks third in awarding business or commercial Masters degrees to Black students. Prior to this role, Jackson served as CEO of the American Red Cross of Eastern Massachusetts, Vice President of the Boston Foundation, Senior VP of Boston Children's Hospital, and CEO of Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries. She has also served on numerous boards, task forces, and commissions focused on eliminating racial and ethnic disparities, diversity, student assistance, college and university steering and operational boards, and as the Vice Chair of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts Board of Directors and board member of the New England Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors, among many others.
https://www.cambridgecollege.edu/office-president/presidents-biography
Dianne Walker Born in Boston in 1951, Dianne Walker is a jazz tap dancer with an elegant, fluid dancing style that is rhythmically complex, yet delicate. Overcoming adversity in a childhood polio infection, she was sent to dance classes to get appropriate leg exercise as therapy. Working with instructors who had successfully performed in a range of New England and New York vaudeville circuits, Walker learned quickly. However, she put her dancing dreams on hold, first when her family moved due to her new stepfather's military career, and then again when she married at age 18. However, a chance social affair at Prince Hall Masonic Temple led to new lessons and teaching Saturday children's classes as Leon Collins' protege in 1978. After seeing how the art was declining in Boston in the early 1980s, she began recruiting new young talent for films and live performances, some of whom would go on to full-length tap musicals and Broadway productions. Attending the 1985 International Tip Tap Festival, she performed her first tap soloist work. Determined to bring tap back to the next generation of young Black dancers over creating the perfect art, she's considered by many as the top transitional figure between generations.
Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, J.D. As the first Black woman elected to the Massachusetts State Senate, Dianne Wilkerson was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1955. Her family fled north to Springfield to escape Ku Klux Klan harassment, and she graduated from the High School of Commerce in 1973, followed by a Bachelors at the American International College and her JD at the Boston College Law School in 1981. She clerked at the Massachusetts Appeals Court until the next year when she became deputy counsel to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Continuing her career in a range of organizations, she became the first Black woman in Boston to become a partner at a major law firm at Roche, Carnes, & DeGiacomo, where she remained until she was elected to the State Senate in 1992, becoming the highest-ranking black official in Massachusetts when serving her sixth term in 2005. Focusing on bills that protect Black, minority, and low-income Massachusetts residents, including collecting data related to racial profiling in traffic stops and curbing high-interest rates on bank loans, her focus on championing policies that improve the lives of individuals who have traditionally been underserved by government is second to none.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/honorable-dianne-wilkerson
Doris Bland With the Massachusetts' welfare system in detestable shape, it took a group of poor Black mothers, led by Doris Bland, to create change within the system. women in the Dudley Street Area Planning Action Council started Mothers for Adequate Welfare in 1964, electing Doris Bland as their first president. Begun as an interracial membership list of 1,000 members, or roughly 1 out of every 13 women on welfare in the City of Boston, by discovering the challenges facing mothers, creating a system that an experienced mother would go to the required intake interview with a new recipient, researching the welfare system for Massachusetts, and taking collective action on issues that impacted the members, such as visiting public officials, sit-ins, and protests. Bland's statement following a serious altercation and riot around Grove Hill Welfare Office showcased the disrespectful and rude behavior the mothers were being regularly treated to, including being treated with suspicion and insulting behavior. Their actions, led by Doris Bland, led to a completely new welfare system for the state, with a board that Bland was given a seat on to oversee the system.
https://masscommons.wordpress.com/2022/05/04/a-peoples-history-of-the-new-boston-mothers-for-adequate-welfare/
Rep. Doris Bunte As the first Black woman to serve in the Massachusetts Legislature, Doris Bunte has always focused on the most vulnerable individuals in the state as well as in the city of Boston. Moving from New York City to Boston with three children in 1953, she moved into the Orchard Park Housing Projects, where she soon joined the management council as well as co-founding the Boston Public Housing Tenants Policy Council in 1968. She followed this action in 1969 with her nomination to the Boston Housing Authority Board, which made her the first public housing tenant to serve on the board. She was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representative in 1973, where she founded the Massachusetts Legislative Black Caucus as well as the Massachusetts Caucus of Women Legislators. She also enrolled in Harvard in 1978, where she earned her Masters degree in 1982. Following 12 years in the state legislature, she became the director of the Boston Housing Authority, where she moved public housing integration forward. She then moved to work at Northeastern and Boston Universities in 1992, where she enjoyed 18 successful years prior to her retirement in 2010.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-doris-bunte
Dorothy Haskins Concerned about the state of the welfare system in the 1960s, Dorothy Haskins started an ad hoc group of mothers to agitate around welfare issues. The group eventually linked up with Mothers for Adequate Welfare in 1965, followed by the National Welfare Rights Organization in 1966. With nobody to work on the issues in Columbia Point, the organization was designed to bring information to the community residents who were on welfare. A few mothers initially got together outside of the nearest supermarket with a table and buttons on welfare rights. Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., the organization saw racism from the side of the welfare office and wanted the disrespect and related issues to stop. Organizing peaceful demonstrations based out of the projects where Blacks and other minorities lived, other groups began to see how they could band together to create a stronger community and make sure that peoples' needs were being met. The actions of individuals such as Dorothy Haskins and Mothers for Adequate Welfare have inspired a new generation of Black women leaders focused on diversity, equity, and inclusiveness across all races and classes.
https://economichardship.org/2019/11/peoples-history-episode-2-grove-hall/
Dorothy West In the Harlem Renaissance, Dorothy West, a Bostonian born in 1907, was referred to as "the kid" due to her status as the youngest of the artists and writers when she moved there in 1925. A talented writer, West had her first story published in the Boston Post when she was only 14. In a 1926 contest that was sponsored by the Urban League's magazine Opportunity, she tied with Zora Neale Hurston for second place. Taking on a small part in the play Porgy in 1927, she toured with it for a couple of years, before traveling to Russia in 1932 with a group of 20 other Black artist to make a film on racism in America. Though the film was never made, she remained in Russia for a year. West took a position with the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression, and earned money from 1940 into the 1960s writing two short stories every month for the New York Daily News. Moving to Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard in the 1940s, she wrote a regular column in the Vineyard Gazette. She published her first novel in 1948, and her second novel was published in 1995.
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collections/dorothy-west
Detective Dorothy E. Harrison Serving from 1944 to 1972, Dorthy Harrison was the first Black woman detective in Boston. Though she was originally trained as an opera singer, the graduate from Boston University felt that she was born a generation early to be successful at music, feeling that the world was not yet ready for a black opera singer, and felt that police work would provide her with a better future than music would. Within her first week of service, she disarmed a man who was distraught, flagging down a passing patrol vehicle and retrieving the gun so that the suspect could be taken to the station. She was in demand regularly as a speaker, sharing her experiences with the world. She inspired the next generation of Black women in police work, with others joining her many years into her career.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B8MGNRfguG8/
https://www.facebook.com/roxsafetynet/posts/1247347581969352/
https://100clubmass.org/massachusetts-female-police-officers-a-138-year-history/
E. Alice Taylor Teachers touch the lives of all they teach, and E. Alice Taylor, a community organizer and educator from Boston, was no exception. Born in 1892 in Alexander, Arkansas, she earned her degree from Arkansas Baptist College in 1913, moving to Boston between that time and 1927, when she founded a branch of the Annie Malone's Poro Beauty School and Beauty Shop, a vocational school she managed for 15 years until World War 2 forced the school to close. At the time of closing, Taylor was employing 15 teachers to serve 150 students annually and was one of the largest minority-owned businesses in New England. She also founded and was president of the Professional Hairdressers Association of Massachusetts and was an officer and board member of the NAACP for half a century. She also served with many other community service organizations, such as the League of Women for Community Service, the Massachusetts State Union of Women's Clubs, the Charitable Health Association of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Human Relations Committee. Passing away at the age of 94, she left a lasting impression on the community.
https://chalkboardchampions.org/e-alice-taylor-educator-social-reformer-and-community-organizer/
Edmonia Lewis Born in New York in 1844, Edmonia Lewis was the first sculptor of multi-racial Black and Indigenous from America who received international recognition. Growing up with her mother's tribe after being orphaned at a young age, she attended Ohio's Oberlin College, which was one of the first post-secondary institutions to accept Black female students. She had a strong interest in fine arts but was forced to leave the school prior to graduation due to false accusations of poisoning. Traveling to Boston, she established herself as an artist while studying under a local sculptor and creating portraits of abolitionist heroes. She became involved with a group of American women sculptors and moved to Rome at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. Beginning to work in marble, she did all of her own sculpting work, a different approach as most sculptors would hire workmen local to the area to carve final pieces. This may have been done from fear that if she didn't, her work would not be accepted as her own. She sculpted figure works based on her Indigenous heritage, the oppression of Black persons, and Biblical scenes.
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/edmonia-lewis-2914
Edna R. BrownAs the first Black woman to perform dentistry in Cambridge, Edna Brown was a dentist who graduated from Columbia University and was a very early member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Psi Omega chapter. Though not much is known about her life, being able to attend Columbia as a Black woman means that she probably attended after 1923, as Columbia University recognizes Elizabeth Delaney as the University's College of Dental Medicine's first Black female graduate.
https://www.akaboston.org/chapter-history
https://thelowdown.alumni.columbia.edu/history_of_women_at_columbia
Edna V. Bynoe As a strong community activist, Edna Bynoe was one of the moving forces to change Orchard Park to Orchard Gardens Community. As the Orchard Park Projects declined in the 1960s and 1970s, it was necessary for community leaders like Bynoe to step forward and push for change. In addition to leading the push to update the Orchard Park Projects to a more modern, safe housing environment, Bynoe also headed the design team that opened the Orchard Gardens Pilot School in the community, providing opportunities for better education for children in the community. She also served on many boards and committees to help steer the direction that the community was taking throughout these changes, acting as a vital voice within the organizations shaping the new community by representing the residents of the existing community.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/edna-bynoe-obituary?id=23410460
Ekua Holmes A collage artist who focuses on the power of faith, hope, and self-determination, Ekua Holmes investigates family relationship dynamics, histories, and impressions that come out in her artwork. Growing up in Roxbury, she completed her Bachelors from MassArt in 1977 and has become an educator on collage workshops, been a visiting artist and lecturer, and held a range of public and private institution artist residencies in New England. Holmes is also an illustrator, focusing on children's books and receiving numerous awards for her work. She also serves as the Boston Art Commission's Commissioner and Vice-Chair, overseeing public artworks in and on properties of the City of Boston. She serves MassArt as the Associate Director of the Center for Art and Community Partnerships, allowing her to coordinate “sparc!” the ArtMobile that contributes to multidisciplinary and community-based arts programs.
https://www.ekuaholmes.com/about
Elaine W. Steward As a senior Vice President and Assistant General Counsel for the Boston Red Sox, Elaine Steward has worked on a wide range of legal issues with the franchise since she joined in 1988. As a recipient of a Jackie Robinson Foundation scholarship, she graduated with honors from St. John's University, receiving her JD from the University's School of Law. She interned at the New York Mets public relations department as well as the Officer of the Commissioner of Baseball in its Executive Development program. She was selected as a top Ten Outstanding Young Leaders of Boston, was elected into the Academy of Women Achievers for the YWCA, and received the St. John's University President's Medal, among many other honors that she has received over the years. She was also featured in the Red Sox' Women in Baseball exhibit in Fenway Park, the National Baseball Hall of Fame Women in Baseball exhibit located in Cooperstown, New York, and Massachusetts Senate President Karen Spilka's State House Herstory Exhibit.
https://www.mlb.com/redsox/team/front-office/elaine-steward
Eliza A. Gardner Acting as a community activist and religious leader, Eliza Gardner was born in New York City in 1831, moving to Boston's West End with her family while still young. Growing up in Beacon Hill's abolition center, she grew up in one of the Underground Railroad stations, during which time she also knew abolitionist leaders including Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, Lewis & Harriet Hayden, and Fredrick Douglass. Active in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, she began teaching Sunday school and became Boston's superintendent of Sunday schools in the 1880s. She also assumed a range of leadership roles in the church, raising money to raise churches and support ministers. She also organized the church's Woman's Home and Foreign Missionary Society, which was a women-operated group that supported missionary work. This allowed her to push for equality for women in religious organizations, as she had grown frustrated with male leadership who opposed women stepping into the same roles. She was also a founding member of the Woman's Era Club and helped organize the first National Conference for Colored Women in America, serving as the chaplain in 1895. She continued promoting temperance, anti-lynching, and women's rights movements over the years, continuing to address groups until 1917, five years before her passing in 1922.
https://www.nps.gov/people/eliza-ann-gardner.htm
Elizabeth Blakeley For many enslaved persons seeking freedom, Boston was a common destination and hub on the Underground Railroad, including for Elizabeth Blakeley, who was born into slavery in North Carolina. After receiving awful treatment at the hands of her enslaver, Blakeley ran away at age 15 in December 1849, and hid on a vessel that was bound for Boston, preventing local authorities from finding her. After surviving a four-week-long journey, she was able to arrive in Boston, living as a free individual. After a few weeks spent recovering from her bid for freedom, during which she was welcomed and given sanctuary by the free Black community in Boston, she shared her story at an abolitionist meeting that was held in Faneuil Hall, during which times Thomas Jones, who had seen her treatment at the hands of her enslavers, stated that if he repeated what he had seen, those present would hardly be able to bear it. Following the meeting, she was able to choose the path her life took, marrying and living briefly in Connecticut and Toronto before returning to Boston for the rest of her life, living to the age of 84 and remaining active in the community.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/elizabeth-blakeley-s-escape-to-freedom.htm
Elizabeth Freeman Elizabeth Freeman, a brave woman who was enslaved, challenged the principles of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution as the first Black woman to file a successful lawsuit for freedom which would lead to the outlawing of slavery by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Born in New York, she was born around 1744, growing up and given to her enslaver's daughter upon her marriage. Freeman overheard her enslaver, a judge, discussing the language used in the Sheffield Declaration, including a statement “mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” The same language was used in the Declaration of Independence and the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, so Freman received help from an attorney who drafted the Sheffield Declaration to fight for her freedom, who took the case as a test case to decide if slavery was constitutional under the state Constitution. She, along with another enslaved person, was granted freedom, 30 shillings, and trial expenses. Following her freedom, she became a prominent healer, midwife, and nurse, buying her own home where she could live with her children, passing at approximately age 85 in 1829.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/elizabeth-freeman
Elizabeth Riley Deeply involved in the Massachusetts abolitionist movement, Elizabeth Riley was known for harboring Shadrach Minkins, a fugitive enslaved person, in the attic of her home at 70 Southac Street, where she lived until her death in 1855 at the age of 64. Born in Boston in 1791, her strongly-held beliefs backed up her actions. She involved herself with numerous progressive political organizations, including the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the African-American Female Intelligence Society, and fundraising for creating The Liberator, the nation's first significant abolitionist newspaper. She was also part of the Colored Citizens of Boston which called for the abolition of slavery. She worked as a nurse later in her life but never learned to read or write, living an exemplary and courageous life despite this issue.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/riley-elizabeth-1791-1855/
Elizabeth Williams As president and CEO of Roxbury Technology, Beth Williams is the owner of the largest Black female-owned Boston business, routinely giving back to the community. Working at Freedom Electronics following her graduation from Brown University, she decided to grow her experience at Raytheon Company in their Missile Systems division. After five years, she decided to move into a more impactful role where she could help women and minority entrepreneurs, she joined Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, eventually becoming the Director of Business Diversity for the organization. She then succeeded her father as the CEO and President of Roxbury Technology in 2002. She has used her position to be a socially responsible entrepreneur, providing quality, wage-earning jobs for those who are often passed by for employment. A strong supporter of CORI reform, over 15% of her workforce includes ex-gang members, ex-offenders, and similar disadvantaged persons. Focused on environmental sustainability, job creation, and social responsibility, Williams' leadership has led to many achievements and awards, including WPO's 50 fastest growing women businesses, WBENC's Shining Star award, GNEMSDC's President's award, President and Community Leadership awards from the Eastern Ma Urban League, and the Ernst & Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year award for New England.
https://www.mssconnect.com/about-keynote-speaker-beth-williams.html
Ella Little-Collins Though Black History Month often mentions Malcolm X, his half-sister Ella Little-Colins is often overlooked. His autobiography brings parts of her influence and life to living color. Born in Butler, Georgia in 1914, she worked as a secretary for Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., partnered with her sisters in store ownership, and invested in real estate. During that time, Malcolm came to live with Ella after being shuttled between foster homes when his mother was no longer able to care for her children. She helped him to secure his first serious job as a train cook. Though she was very concerned when he was arrested, tried, and convicted, she stayed loyal and welcomed home when he'd finished his sentence. Like her famous brother, she joined the Nation of Islam and helped establish the Boston mosque in the 1950s, but was beginning to have her doubts about the organization. When her brother was assassinated, she became the president of the Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Muslim Mosque, but even as the organizations foundered, she continued speaking out on a wide range of issues, passing in 1996 following a long struggle with diabetes.
https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2020/02/27/ella-little-collins-malcolm-xs-resourceful-half-si/
Ellen Banks With a strong love of art and music, Ellen Banks has combined her passion in her artwork. Deciding that she had to choose one or the other, she went with visual arts. The joy of painting led to her unique art style, with her passion for piano being worked into her art. The scores she has collected over the years has been the foundation for her music paintings. Now based in Brooklyn, Banks has changed written musical scores into vivid color patterns. This unique approach transforms the notations into abstract patterns, often geometric circles, oblongs, and squares, with different keys represented by different colors that the paintings are saturated with.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2011/artist-combines-two-loves-color-and-music
Ellen S. Craft Born in Georgia in 1826, Ellen Craft was an escaped enslaved person who began lecturing on the abolitionist movement circuit. With very pale skin, she helped her husband, William, and herself escape slavery by posing as a white gentleman traveling to Philadelphia for medical treatment with her husband acting as her slave. To cover her inability to write, she kept her arm in a sling with a bandage wrapped around her head to hide that she did not have a beard. Traveling initially by train and then by sea, the couple traveled to Maryland, after which the couple moved on to Boston. They worked in cabinetmaking and sewing to support themselves, and then became famous on the lecture circuit, with stories published in the Georgia Journal, Macon Telegraph, Boston Globe, and New York Herald. When the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was passed, Ellen and William were protected by the League of Freedom, but the couple fled to England, where they lived for 18 years and had five children. They returned to the US in 1869 to open a cooperative farm for former enslaved persons, with plans for a school. Slander and Ku Klux Klan activity burned their first plantation and then forced the second plantation and school into bankruptcy.
https://www.georgiawomen.org/ellen-smith-craft
Ellen S. Jackson An educator and activist, Ellen Jackson was known for her activity in founding Operation Exodus, which was a program designed to bus students from overcrowded, mostly Black Boston schools to less crowded, mostly white schools in the 1960s, creating a path for desegregation of the schools in Boston. A Roxbury native, she was born in 1935, belonged to the NAACP Youth Council as a teen and graduated from Boston State College in 1958, followed by a Masters in education from Harvard in 1971. From 1962 to 1964, she was the parent coordinator for the Northern Student Movement that organized Black parents and pushed for student equal rights. She worked in voter registration drives and pushed for better representation on the Action for Boston Community Development board of directors. Because local schools pushed Black children to enter vocational training instead of college, she formed the Roxbury-North Dorchester Parents' Council in 1965. She received a document that showed how many students and seats were in each classroom and school in Boston, founding the program Operation Exodus, with Jackson as the executive director. Over a four-year period, the program transported over 1,000 students to less-crowded schools. She worked with many other initiatives and organizations over the years, until her death from stroke in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Swepson_Jackson
Elma LewisA Boston cultural icon, Elma Lewis was born in 1921 and as a child, she was inspired by the call for racial pride and civic activism. She attended Emerson College, where she completed her Bachelors in 1943. She still taught fine arts at Harriet Tubman House, as well as dance and drama at other locations, and staged operas with the Robert Gould Shaw House Chorus. She founded the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1950, the Playhouse in the Park in Franklin Park in 1966, and the National Center for Afro-American Artists, which formed performing companies that toured worldwide in 1968. These educational institutions provided professional-level programs for Blacks focusing on both visual and performing arts. Designed with divisions that paralleled each other, she began the organizations with the goal of combining the best teaching and professional performance while affirming arts accessibility and ethnic heritage. Over 6,000 students received arts education due to her efforts, vision, and commitment. Not only did students at her school learn the arts, but learned to embrace the positive in black life while rejecting anything that was negative. She received many honors and served the community through numerous arts organizations.
https://bwht.org/elma-lewis/
Elva L. Abdal-Khallaq Elva Lee Abdal-Khallaq was born in Baldwin, Louisiana, then moved to Houston, Texas at a young age, where she met her husband. The couple moved to Boston with their children, where she played a vital role in the family's business and community activities and activism. Her passion was for children, not only her ten, but many others, a passion she lived out through work at the UMCA Clarendon Street Day Care, the Crispus Attucks Children's Center, and the St. Joseph's Community Center, she touched many lives in her Boston community. She had a strong belief in the power of education and community service, she received an Early Education Teaching Certificate from Harvard, was a valued member of the Roxbury Tai-Chi Academy, a treasurer for the Goldenaires at the Freedom House, and attended the Million Women March along with four generations of women in her family. She passed away at the age of 96 in 2010.
Estella L. Crosby Born in 1890 in Alexandria, Virginia, Estella Lee Crosby came to Boston as a social young woman to find her life's path. Finding it in community activism and her marriage of 50 years, Based out of a row house in the South End neighborhood of Greenwich Park, she ran not only a successful beauty salon where she informed women in the neighborhood about community activism organizations including the National Organization of Colored Women's Clubs and the Housewives League. Seeing the opportunity for stylish but affordable women's clothing, she opened a very popular retail store located on Columbus Avenue close to the family's home. Investing decades of her time into breaking down the obstacles to Black advancement in the city, she was a strong member of the Ebinezer Baptist Church, which was founded by freed slaves following the Civil War, and was never too tired to help anyone in need.
https://www.facebook.com/foresthillscemetery/posts/for-our-notable-resident-this-week-forest-hills-cemetery-honors-the-memory-of-es/3980133368685108/
Estelle A. Forster An early Black graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, Estelle Foster was dedicated to promoting musical education for Blacks in Boston. Over a period of three decades in the early 1900s, she started and directed the Ancrum School of Music, offering a wide range of lessons and courses including piano, organ, viola, voice, brass, wind, flute, harmony, and solfeggio. She also taught musical theory and a range of musical subjects, all operated out of the 74 W. Rutland Square location which included two dormitories, a cafeteria, and exceptional student facilities. Through this school, she brought musical education into the lives of thousands of Black students in the Boston area.
https://blackfacts.com/fact/ancrum-school-of-music
Eva Mitchell Working in a range of executive roles in education and career development, Eva Mitchell is a community activist and professional working to improve the lives of Black individuals through better educational and career development opportunities. An alumnus of Harvard, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania, Mitchell began her career as a co-founder, assistant principal, and teacher at a pilot school in the Boston Public School system. She moved into the position of Senior Director of Educational Quality and Accountability for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, then as a senior leadership coach for school turnaround at the Center of Collaborative Education. After several years between state and city educational organizations, she moved into the C-suite at Boston Public Schools as Chief Accountability Officer, then as the Chief Program Officer and Chief Executive Officer at the Coalition for Career Development Center, and has volunteered in a range of roles at numerous community educational and activism organizations, including the Blue Hill Avenue Task Force, Roxbury Community College, The Calculus Project, the Boston Community Leadership Academy, and many others.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eva-mitchell-b316486/
Evelynn M. Hammonds, Ph.D. As the founding director of MIT's Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine, Evelynn Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies, the Chair of the Department of the History of Science, and a Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard University, which she joined as Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2002. She's also an author with a wide range of scholarly articles to her experience. She received her Bachelors from Spelman College, with another Bachelors from Georgia Institute of Technology, her Masters from MIT, and a PhD from Harvard. She received a postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Social Science in Princeton, New Jersey's Institute of Advanced Study and has been a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer. She is also a current associate member of MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute. She has also served on numerous boards including the Museum of Science, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and Spelman College. She is a fellow of the Association of Women in Science and serves on the Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering.
https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/evelynn-m-hammonds
Fannie B. Williams As an educator, women's rights advocate, and political activist, Fannie Williams advanced opportunities for Blacks, focusing on social and educational reforms for Black women in the southern United States. Born in 1855 in Brockport, New York to a well-respected family, Williams aspired to become a teacher, becoming the first Black graduate from Brockport State Normal School in 1870, which is now SUNY Brockport. Fifteen years old at the time of her graduation, she moved to Washington, D.C. to educate freed blacks migrating to the city in the 1870s. She married and moved to Chicago where her husband started a successful law practice. She served as the first woman on the Board of the Chicago Public Library, then spoke at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition voicing concern over the lack of Black representation at the event, after which she helped found the National League of Colored Women and the National Association of Colored Women, as well as Provident Hospital and the NAACP. She was the only Black woman selected to eulogize Susan B Anthony at the National American Women Suffrage Association convention in 1907. She wrote extensively to progress Blacks in religion, education, and employment.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/williams-fannie-barrier-1855-1944/
Fern L. Cunningham-Terry Born in 1949 to a doctor and artist in Jackson Heights, New York, Fern Cunningham-Terry grew up in a home filled with pride in Black culture, art, and song. Living in Sitka, Alaska in a very diverse community from an early age, she had a passion for art that remained for her entire life. She moved to Boston following her high school graduation to attend Boston University's fine arts program, from which she traveled to France for additional art studies and then to Kenya to visit her sister. These two experiences formed her style. She began teaching at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1970, a commitment to teaching and the creative process that lasted throughout her life. She also taught in the Boston Public School system and the Park School in Brookline. She was a mentor to countless students over the years and created amazing public works of art that are found throughout the City of Boston. With a focus that honored Black history, communities, and history, she celebrated relationships and families. The first public sculpture she completed, Save the Children, was completed in 1973.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Fern-Cunningham-Terry
Florence Hagins As a black woman and single mother, Florence Hagins was the first enrollee in the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, following her denied application despite a decades-long work history. This program allowed her to purchase her new home, but she was not satisfied with renovating it and filling it with beautiful Black art. The next 15 years saw her volunteering with the Affordable Housing Alliance, then moving into an employee position where she counseled thousands of first-time homebuyers, encouraging them to clean up their credit and save money in case a home inspector or lawyer might be needed. She helped them determine if home ownership was right for them, and ran a post-purchase class to cover home ownership basics with over 9,000 students graduating. When Mayor Menino saw her coming, he would often jest, "Here comes trouble!" understanding the force of her personality.
https://www.wbur.org/the-remembrance-project/2015/05/27/the-remembrance-project-florence-hagins
Florence B. Price As the first Black woman recognized as a symphonic composer and the first to have her composition played by a major orchestra, Florence Beatrice Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas to a Black dentist and his music instructor wife. She continued her education at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, double majoring in organ and piano teaching. Moving to Atlanta to teach music, she met her husband there, and the couple returned to Little Rock. However, racial violence in the city forced the couple to move to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Price flourished in the city, studying composition, orchestration and organ from leading teachers, publishing four piano pieces in 1929. Financial issues during the Great Depression led to divorce, and to take care of her two daughters, she played at silent film screenings and composed radio ad songs under a pen name. She won a 1932 Wanamaker Foundation Award with first prize for her Symphony in E Minor and third for her Piano Sonata, earning $500. Her Symphony was played the next year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and several of her other works were played over the years by other symphonies.
https://www.pricefest.org/florence-price
Florence R. LeSueur
A Black activist, civic leader, and the first female president of an NAACP chapter, Florence LeSuer was born in 1898 in Pennsylvania. After attending Wilberforce University, she moved to Boston's South End in 1935 and was the first to head Boston's NAACP's educational committee, a passion she retained all her life as a champion of employment and educational rights for Blacks. She assisted with founding the Metropolitan Council for Education Opportunity to bus Black inner city students to suburban schools, to promote desegregation, as well as the push for equal education with college prep classes. Her time in the NAACP resulted in six Black men being hired as Boston Elevated Railway (now Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) drivers following demonstrations near the Dudley Square station. She served as president of Harriet Tubman House in 1959. A mother of 11 and grandmother of 52, she passed away at age 93.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_LeSueur
Florida R. Ridley
Born to a distinguished family in Boston in 1861, Florida Ridley was a Black civil rights activist, teacher, suffragist, writer, and editor, and was the first Black public school teacher in Boston, and was the editor of The Woman's Era, the first newspaper in country published for and by Black women, and she was also noted for her writing on Black history and New England race relations. . She came from a family of firsts, with her father being the first Black graduate of Harvard Law School, and the United States' first Black judge. Graduating from Boston Teachers' College in 1882, she taught at the Grant School until her marriage. She was one of the founders of the Second Unitarian Church in Brookline, and was active in the anti-lynching and early women's suffrage movement. With other women, she helped co-found several non-profit groups, including the Woman's Era Club and the League of Women for Community Service, as well as the predecessor of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. She passed in 1943.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Ruffin_Ridley
Frances E.W. Harper
Born free in Baltimore in 1825, Frances Harper was a poet, author, and lecturer who was the first Black woman to publish a short story, and was an influential reformer, abolitionist, and suffragist. She co-founded the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs based in Boston, and was educated at her uncle's school, then at Watkins Academy. Her first small poetry volume, Forest Leaves, was written at age 21. Five years later, she became the first female instructor at Union Seminary in Ohio. Shortly after, she became a vehement abolitionist, and wrote poetry for antislavery publications. Her second poetry volume was completed in 1854, as she left home to travel the U.S. and Canada lecturing for several state anti-slavery societies. She also promoted women's suffrage and rights as well as the temperance movement. Her experiences in travel began to appear in her novels, poetry, and short stories. Following the Civil War she took up the banner of women's rights more completely, pushing for suffrage for not only women, but Blacks as well. She spent the remainder of her career furthering the cause of equal rights, career opportunities, and education for Black women. She passed away in 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/frances-ellen-watkins-harper
Frederica M. Williams
As President and CEO of Whittier Street Health Care Center since 2002, Frederica Williams is a strong leader in transforming basic community healthcare into a model of urban healthcare in disadvantaged communities. Dedicated to social justice as well as health and economic equity and equality, Serving and embracing Boston's multicultural wealth, she has developed programs to support improvements in diverse population health while eliminating health and social inequity among low-income, minority, immigrant, and refugee populations. She advocates with exceptional compassion to improve the lives of Boston's most vulnerable residents. Through many outreach campaigns, she has directed programs bringing high-quality healthcare to patients. By engaging the community, she encourages healthy lifestyles and better outcomes for those in need. This proactive approach includes financial stewardship and visionary leadership for the healthcare organization, ensuring services and resources will be available long into the future, with a goal of increasing the number of persons served from 5,000 to 40,000 while delivering up to 220,000 annual clinic visits, as well as a mobile health van program, dental care, second location, and full-service pharmacy. Her vision has extended through the COVID-19 pandemic to the Whittier's Center Health Equity Research Center to facilitate health outcomes.
https://www.wshc.org/biography-of-frederica-m-williams/
Gail Snowden
Following her graduation from Harvard in 1967 with a Masters, Gail Snowden spent over 30 years at the Bank of Boston, moving up to a position of Executive Vice President. Continuing to make strong strides in the financial industry, Snowden has worked through multiple organizations as managing director of both Fleet Bank and Bank of America, but has returned to a strong focus on the community to help lift up those in need who have been disadvantaged, especially Black and minority individuals. She served as CFO of The Boston Foundation for three years, allowing her to advocate for those in need, then moved on to Freedom House as the CEO, a position she retired from. However, her dedication to serving the community continued to drive her, and she began Gail Snowden Consulting Services five years after her retirement to help organizations better serve the community.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gail-snowden-243b9710/
https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/gail-snowden-from-banking-to-foundation
Georgette Watson
Born in Philadelphia during World War Two, Georgette Watson was an anti-drug activist in Boston. After receiving a Bachelors and paralegal certifications from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Masters in education from Antioch University, she was a single mother as violence reigned with drug gangs from both Detroit and New York tried to expand into the city. She occupied apartments in locations with significant drug activity to engage with the community, draw police and press attention, and discourage drug dealing. She co-founded Drop-a-Dime, an organization focused on preventing crime by delivering tips from citizens confidentially to the Boston police and related federal agencies. Handling over 600 calls per month, the organization's process led to hundreds of arrests, including the imprisonment of Capsule Boys gang members and other large drug gangs active in Boston, as well as the shuttering of businesses and buildings that were nests of drug activity. Appointed in 1991 to lead the Massachusetts Governor's Alliance Against Drugs, she focused efforts on crime prevention programs over enforcement. Following a bout of breast cancer and kidney problems, she worked with the Maryland Transit Administration to improve transit access for individuals with disabilities before passing in 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgette_Watson
Geraldine P. Trotter
As an early Black civil rights activist and editor following the Civil War, Geraldine Trotter was born in Massachusetts in 1873. She was an associate editor of the Boston Guardian. After finishing her education at a local business college, she met W.E.B. Du Bois while he attended Harvard. She entertained elite guests and encouraged philanthropy through her efforts, aiding the City of Boston and other regional municipalities through community aid centers to support Black women and children in need. She also worked with the Public School Association, Boston Literary and Historical Society, Women's Anti Lynching League, and Equal Rights Association. When her husband was arrested following the 1903 Boston Riot, she went to work at The Boston Guardian in his place, eventually becoming a key driver in the paper's direction while writing columns on household management and fashion to drive female readership. Overall, the couple pursued a more militant promotion of civil rights, encouraging those who had been privileged with education to raise up those in need. During World War One, she dedicated herself to Soldiers' Comfort Units and the welfare of Black soldiers, but she passed shortly after during the Spanish flu pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Pindell_Trotter
Justice Geraldine S. Hines
Born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, Geraldine Hines graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1971. Becoming a staff attorney at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, she fought for prisoner's rights litigation, then moved to become a criminal law attorney in the Roxbury Defenders' Committee, working up through the organization until she became the Director of the Committee. She then served as co-counsel in Commonwealth v. Willie Sanders, addressing the issue of police misconduct in Black communities, which began the shift of her move to civil rights law, focusing on discrimination in education and special education as staff attorney at Harvard University Center for Law and Education. After several years of private practice from 1982, she began her career as a justice in 2001, prior to her appointment into the state court system by Governor Deval Patrick, she served as an associate justice until 2014, when she was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/associate-justice-geraldine-s-hines
Gladys Holmes
Born in 1892, Gladys Holmes was an author, educator, and social worker who was one of the former presidents of the League of Women for Community Service, one of the oldest organizations for Black women in the city of Boston. Providing many opportunities in Boston for women of color, the League was focused on advancing the position of Black women in the community through community service and collective action. By Holmes' time, the League was a strong social center for the Black community in Boston, providing a location for social dances, social services during the Great Depression, lodging for female college students due to segregation, and similar activities to support the community as a whole. It became a bastion of literacy and education for Boston's Black community.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Women_for_Community_Service
https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/02/24/boston-history-league-of-women-for-community-service
Gladys A.M. Perdue
A noted pianist and organist, Gladys Perdue was born in 1898 and attended the New England Conservatory of Music, receiving her Diploma in Pianoforte in 1924. Teaching music at the Tuskegee Institute from 1925 to 1931, she then returned to Boston, where she served as the organist at the Albanian Church in South Boston for over three decades. Her many performances in the South End included being musical accompaniment for the Women's Service Club's 464 Follies. With a strong dedication to the musical arts in the Black community of Boston, she was entertained shortly before her death in 1998 by a jazz sextet made up of New England Conservatory students known as the Back Bay Stompers at Goddard House.
https://bwht.org/south-end-tour/
Glendora M. Putnam, J.D.
Determined to promote civil rights and stop discrimination, Glendora Putnam was born in 1923 and graduated from Boston University School of Law in 1948, at a time when few women were practicing law, much less Black women. Growing up prior to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, she was determined to end segregation and discrimination, acting as a fighter for equality and justice. She served as the national board president of the YWCA, despite having been barred from entering her high school's chapter due to discrimination and segregation, determined to open the YWCA's doors to everyone. She was admitted to the bar in 1949 while facing the double discrimination of race and sex. She worked on Edward Brooke's campaign for office, joining him when he became Massachusetts Attorney General as the assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1964. She passed on a higher-paying Equal Opportunity Employment Commission opportunity to head the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination where she could enforce the new civil rights laws. She was nominated by President Ford as deputy assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity at HUD, making her the highest-ranking Black woman at the agency. She passed away in 2016.
https://www.bu.edu/law/record/articles/2016/celebrating-glendora-putnam-48-distinguished-alumna-and-civil-rights-pioneer/
Gloria Smith
Fostering sportsmanship and wellness, Gloria Smith helped found The Sportsmen's Tennis Club in 1961 as a nonprofit for tennis aficionados who wanted to share their love of the game with Boston children of all races, sexes, and backgrounds. Seeing the lack of opportunities for urban youth, her initial drive has become the organization's daily mission for the past 25 years, starting out in playgrounds in the South End as well as a Roxbury gym, but has grown to its own facility, becoming a vital part of the athletic community in Boston. Over time, over 500 youths have attended college on either partial or full tennis scholarships while over 400 youths have attained tennis association rankings on the local, regional, and national levels.
https://bostonsportsclubsouthendhere.blogspot.com/2012/09/after-few-lost-serves-dorchester-tennis.html
Rev. Gloria E. White-Hammond, M.D.
As the current co-pastor of Bethel AME Church in Boston, Gloria White-Hammond is a Swartz Resident Practitioner in Ministry Studies and the founder and executive director of My Sister's Keeper, a humanitarian and human rights organization partnering with diverse women in Sudan to reconcile and reconstruct their communities. As an organization led by women, it provides a unique insight into the needs of women of color in need in foreign countries. In the past, she graduated from Boston University, Tufts University School of Medicine, and Harvard Divinity School. She worked at the South End Community Health Center for over 27 years as a pediatrician, dedicating herself to serving the community through the health of its children, retiring in 2008 before moving on to new opportunities.
https://hds.harvard.edu/people/gloria-white-hammond
Rep. Gloria L. Fox
Born in 1942 and raised as a foster child, Gloria Fox has completed the MIT Community Fellows program, raised two sons in Roxbury's Whittier Street Housing Development, and served as a community organizer prior to entering politics. She was an essential element in stopping the Southwest Expressway project. She ran as a write-in candidate for the 7th Suffolk District in 1984, then won the seat in 1986, serving the 7th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts Legislature from 1987 until she retired in 2016. She served on multiple committees, including the House Committee on Steering, Policy, and Scheduling, the House Committee on Ways and Means, the Joint Committee on Ways and Means, and the Joint Committee on Housing, serving as the vice chair. She has taken a strong approach to child welfare, foster care, eliminating health disparities, criminal justice reform, and similar areas of interest to the minority community. She was the longest-serving woman in the Legislature at the time of her retirement. She also served on the boards of a wide range of organizations for women and people of color. She received the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators for her activism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Fox
Gwen Ifill
As both the moderator and the managing editor of Washington Week and both a co-anchor and the managing editor of The PBS Newshour, Gwen Ifill is a bestselling author, moderator, and anchor known for her work in the 2004 and 2008 elections. As the author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, Ifill rolled her experience covering eight Presidential campaigns into success in the 2008 campaign season, winning the George Foster Peabody Award after bringing Washington Week to live audiences in a 10-city tour. With a near-50-year history, the prime-time public affairs and news program on television is considered to be the longest-running program of its type, which brought together Washington's best journalists to discuss the week's major stories. With a career starting as a chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, White House correspondent for the New York Times, and acting as a political reporter on both local and national issues for The Washington Post, she also worked with Baltimore and Boston reporting organizations. She then moved to Washington Week and PBS NewsHour in 1999, where the Boston Simmons College graduate has received many honorary doctorates and awards.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/author/gwen-ifill
Harriet A. Jacobs
An early abolitionist and autobiographer, Harriet Jacobs was born into enslavement in 1813 in North Carolina but was taught to read at an early age. After suffering much abuse at the hands of her enslaver and bearing two children to a white neighbor, Jacobs chose to stand up against her treatment and refused to become her enslaver's concubine. Sent to work on a nearby plantation, she fled in an effort to remove her children from her enslaver's control. She escaped north in 1842, working first as a nursemaid in New York City and moving to Rochester to work at the antislavery reading room located above Frederick Douglass' The North Star newspaper. During the course of an abolitionist lecture tour, she was encouraged by Quaker reformer Amy Post to write the story of her enslavement. Her story, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1861 and is considered to be the most comprehensive slave narrative written by a woman, enumerating details to convey the harsh and emotionally-torn treatment enslaved women in the South experienced. She passed away in 1897, having relocated through Boston and several other cities before settling in Washington, D.C. following the Civil War.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harriet-Jacobs
Harriet B. Hayden
As a well-known activist and abolitionist, Harriet Hayden was born into slavery in 1816 in Kentucky. After marrying her husband in 1842 and bearing the couple's son, Jo, the family fled north with the aid of abolitionists Delia Webster and Calvin Fairbanks. They eventually traveled on to Canada in 1844. Drawn to help others flee slavery, the family returned to the United States in 1845 and settled in Boston's Beacon Hill area the next year, placing them in the center of the abolitionist movement in Boston. The family, now including a young daughter, worked with the Vigilance Committee of 1850 to aid and protect those escaping from slavery. Sheltering freedom seekers in their home for over a decade, which had been converted into a boarding house for the Underground Railroad, Harriet Hayden oversaw the daily operation of the boarding house as her husband tended his shop. Providing them with food, shelter, and protection on their voyage to freedom, she also provided a meeting and organizing space, becoming a more public figure later in life as she advocated for equal rights for all, moving from abolition to suffrage and temperance. Until her death in 1893, she tirelessly advocated for equal rights.
https://www.nps.gov/people/harriet-hayden.htm
Isabella Holmes
The Boston Vigilance Committee was linked hand-in-fist with the Underground Railroad and the anti-slavery movement, and at the center of the Boston abolitionist movement were Reverend Samuel Snowden and his daughter, Isabella Holmes. Assisting fugitives who came to or through Boston on the Underground Railroad, Holmes provided boarding to numerous fugitive slaves following the Fugitive Slave Law's enactment in 1850. Living with her husband on Holmes Alley, the family's boarding house was a central location for abolitionist activities in Boston. She passed away in relative obscurity some years later.
https://www.nps.gov/places/the-holmes-alley-house.htm
Isaura Mendes Dealing with loss due to street guidance is an issue that has plagued the Black community for many decades, and Isaura Mendes knew that when she lost her son Bobby to murder in 1995 that she needed to find an answer to this issue. As the founder of The Bobby Mendes Peace Legacy, she was further resolved to bring peace to violent streets after losing another son, Matthew, in 2006 in a drive-by shooting. Designed to provide support and programming for victims and survivors of street violence, the organization has focused on making a difference in the community for over 20 years, providing scholarships to schoolchildren in the community. Annual events to promote community unity and peace include holiday gift-giving celebrations, back-to-school barbecues, and peace walks that honor all those impacted by street violence. She incorporates her seven principles of peace into the organization, being unity, justice, forgiveness, courage, hope, faith, and love. She spreads her message at state prisons, community outreach, and healing trauma in the community.
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/promoting-hope-after-trauma-isaura-mendes-marks-20-years-pushing-peace
Jackie Jenkins-Scott As an innovative leader, Jackie Jenkins-Scott is an accomplished executive with three decades in leadership at mission-driven institutions, moving them from vulnerable positions to high levels of performance. Acting with vision and determination, she is a strategic leader who has worked with a wide range of organizations including the Boston Women's Fund, JJS Advising, Century Bank, Wheelock College, and The Dimock Center. With honorary doctorates in law, education, and humanities from University of Massachusetts Boston, Northeastern University, Suffolk University, Wheelock College, Bentley University, and Mt. Ida College, as well as her Masters degree from Boston University in 1973 and her Bachelors degree from Eastern Michigan University in 1971.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-jenkins-scott-136679101/
Jane C. Putnam As a prominent Boston abolitionist and a founder of an early temperance society in the city in the 1830s, Jane Clark Putnam was born to an educated Black family and married George Putnam in 1825. She was one of the earliest Black female entrepreneurs in the city, operating a hair salon in partnership with her brother. She and her husband worked together as some of the first community organizers to address Black grievances. Putnam was elected president of the women's auxiliary for the organization, fighting growing segregationist influences in the city. She also worked to petition the state legislature for school integration and was a prominent temperance activist, co-founding a Black women's temperance society in the city in 1833. She also founded the Garrison Juvenile Society in 1837.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Putnam
Jane Johnson Born at some point between 1814 and 1830 in Washington, D.C., Jane Johnson was an enslaved person who married and had three sons, but was then sold with two of her sons in early 1854, splitting the family up. She was enslaved by the assistant secretary of President Franklin Pierce, Mr. John Hill Wheeler. While on travel with Wheeler in Philadelphia in July 1855, Johnson was able to reach out to local abolitionists to arrange her escape with her two children, boys about age six and ten. She spoke to individuals at the hotel the group was staying at, and passed details to the abolitionists, who followed them to the boat the group would be leaving on. Despite Wheeler's protests, abolitionists met Johnson and her sons on a docked boat and escorted them off. At the time, the abolitionists told Johnson what her rights were under Pennsylvania law. She then moved to Boston after a summer of travel to clear up remaining legal issues surrounding her being freed. She had a strong personality and continued to speak out in support of abolition for many years. She remarried, and she sheltered fugitives on a minimum of two occasions, passing in 1872.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-story-of-jane-johnson.htm
Jean McGuire Growing up in and around Boston, Jean McGuire was often one of the only Black students in her classes, which exposed her to racism in the years prior to desegregation. Following her grandmother's death, she moved to Washington, D.C., attending an all-Black high school and finding many role models among the teachers who pushed her to excel. She finished her college degree at Boston State College in 1961, beginning her teaching career at the Louisa May Alcott School for two years before working at the Boston Public Schools as the district's first Black Pupil Adjustment Counselor, helping Black students in the recently desegregated schools handle the difficulties they were facing. She helped found the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity in 1966, a voluntary bussing program for students of color, becoming the organization's executive director in 1973 and serving in that role until 2016, acting as a strong advocate for Black students. She was also the first Black woman on the Boston City School Committee, where she showcased her tireless commitment to her students.
https://www.northeastern.edu/aai/services/special-collections/jean-mcguire/
Jessie G. Garnett, D.D.M. Born in 1897, Jessie Garnett was 11 when her family moved to Boston, where she attended Girl's High School, then Tufts College. When she was enrolled at the college's dental school, a dean argued that a mistake had been made. Overcoming both racism and sexism, she graduated from the Tufts School of Dental Medicine in 1920. She was the first Black woman to graduate from the school as well as the first Black dentist in Boston. Though business started out slow, it eventually picked up, with her office moving with her home several times over the years. Garnet was a charter member, along with six other college-educated Black women, who started the Psi Omega Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the oldest mostly-Black national sorority in the United States. She practiced in a range of locations around Boston for nearly 50 years, retiring in 1969. She also served with several organizations, including being a member of the NAACP and a board member at Freedom House, Boston YMCA, and St. Mark's Congregational Church. She passed away in 1976.
https://perspectivesofchange.hms.harvard.edu/node/170
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2016/05/19/dr-jessie-k-garnett-the-first-black-woman-to-practice-dentistry-in-the-hub/
Joan Wallace-Benjamin, Ph.D. In a long career as a leader and senior executive stretching back several decades, Joan Wallace-Benjamin has served in a range of organizations. Beyond acting in leadership roles, she has a strong focus on bringing out the best in people and generating leaders in the organizations she serves. She has worked with the Boys and Girls Club of Boston, ABCD Head Start, ABT Associates, The Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, Whitehead Mann, The Home for Little Wanderers, Governor-Elect Deval Patrick's transition team, and similar organizations. She has received numerous awards from Bostonian and Massachusetts organizations, as well as several honorary Doctorates from universities and colleges in the area. She has also served on several Boards, including Bridgewater State University, City Fresh Foods, The Heller School for Social Policy & Management, Chase Corporation, Scholar Athletes, and is a co-chair for the Families and Children Requiring Assistance Advisory Board and Advisory Board Chair for Wellesley Centers for Women.
https://www.jwallace-benjaminconsulting.com/bio
Josephine S. Ruffin Born to Beacon Hill's Black community in 1842, Josephine Ruffin was surrounded by the heart of Boston's abolitionist community and the ideals of equality, political representation, and justice. A community leader, organizer, and publisher, her activism in abolition and women's suffrage reflected her fighting spirit. Her first efforts focused on recruiting Black men for the Massachusetts 54th and 55th infantry regiments during the Civil War, representing the first two Black regiments for the state. Following the war, she worked with several charities to help Blacks in the South following emancipation, and participated in many service organizations in Boston. Considered to be one of her highest achievements, she established the Women's Era Club in 1893 to promote activism in Black women, including publishing The Woman's Era and organizing the first National Conference of Colored Women in America in 1895, during which the National Federation of Afro-American Women was formed. Seeing women's suffrage as an extension for the fight for equality, she was active in many state and national suffrage organizations, breaking racial barriers in many cases.
https://www.nps.gov/people/josephine-st-pierre-ruffin.htm
Judge Joyce L. Alexander As the first Black woman appointed as a Chief Magistrate judge in the U.S., Joyce Alexander was born in 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Attending Cambridge High, she was the first Black president of the student council. Moving to Howard University, she worked as a legislative assistant, which created a thirst for justice. After graduating in 1969, she earned her J.D. from New England Law School in 1972. Starting her career as a staff attorney for the Greater Boston Legal Assistance Project, she worked for many years as legal counsel for Boston's Youth Activities Commission and as an assistant professor of urban law and Black politics at Tufts University. She co-founded the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, serving as its first female president and increasing its budget ten times over. She served as the first Black woman nationwide as an on-camera legal editor for a national network. She was appointed to the U.S. District Court as a magistrate judge, the first Black woman to do so, and was made Chief Justice in 1996. She served on the board of multiple organizations, has received multiple honorary law degrees from universities and colleges, and has received multiple awards for her work.
http://cambridgeblackhistoryproject.org/project/joyce-london-alexander/
Juanita B. Wade As an experienced community organizer and strong business professional, Juanita Wade graduated from Mount Holyoke University in 1971, followed by a degree from Simmons University in 1973. Following over a decade of work in education, she was elected to two terms as a member of the Boston School Committee in 1986, during which time she moved into the CEO position at Freedom House. After several years there, she moved into the Chief of Human Services position at the City of Boston. Following this work in public affairs, she moved into Washington, D.C.'s DC Education Compact, as its executive director, serving women, children, veterans, families, and homeless on a wide range of social, housing, and economic issues. She then shifted into the corporate world, working as the program director of Fannie Mae's Office of Community and Charitable Giving, then moving into the manager lead of the Making Home Affordable Ground Campaign for the organization, managing outreach efforts. She then worked in community relations as the Making Home Affordable Director prior to her retirement. She then operated Wade Cruise and Travel Services, which closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juanita-brooks-wade-47328038/
Judge Judith N. Dilday As the first person of Color appointed as a judge to the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court, Judith Dilday was born in 1943 and grew up in Pennsylvania, graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. After teaching French language in Pittsburgh for four years, she moved to Boston to study at the Boston University School of Law, where she met her husband and graduated in 1972. She began her career working in both government service and private practice, including Stern and Shapiro and the Department of the Interior. She was the first Black president of the Women's Bar Association in 1990 and 1991, and was a founding partner of Burnham, Hines & Dilday, New England's first law firm owned by Black women, and was the first Black woman working in the Suffolk County District Attorney's office. She was appointed in 1993 as a circuit judge to the Probate and Family Court, being one of four Black women on the Massachusetts bench at the time, and was appointed to be an associate judge in 1998 to the Middlesex Probate and Family Court, retiring in 2009 to teach English in Qiqihar, China, as well as running mock trials for students.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Nelson_Dilday
JudyAnn Bigby, M.D. A former Commonwealth of Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services with her MD from Harvard, JudyAnn Bigby implemented many parts of the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law. These actions caused Massachusetts to lead national health insurance coverage rates of 99.8% for children and 98% for adults. She worked to achieve higher healthcare quality while addressing high healthcare costs, making Massachusetts a leading state in reforming health care delivery systems for a strong primary care foundation, integrated delivery of services, and payment reform, including vulnerable populations. She made significant improvements in mental health service deliver for children, community-based services for individuals with disabilities, veteran suicide prevention, improved foster care outcomes, reduced smoking rates, and reduced cancer and HIV deaths in the state. Prior to her work with the state, she served at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston as the Director of Community Health Programs, and as Director of Harvard Medical School's Center of Excellence in Women's Health. Her work as a pioneer to eliminate health disparities in underserved populations led to national recognition. She has worked as a physician for over 25 years, and is active in multiple organizations, advisory groups, and boards.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ecpe/faculty/judyann-bigby/
Karen H. Ward As Director of Public Affairs and Community Services and host and executive producer of award-winning weekly magazine program CityLine, Karen Ward is a familiar face at WCVB, addressing issues facing people of color in Boston. With the magazine being a recipient of the Associated Press Massachusetts/Rhode Island's "Best Public Affairs Program" and several Emmy nominations, her interviews with Black actors and film industry greats has been just one part of her four-decade career in broadcasting. Her work with the station's public service and community outreach program has included the Five Fixer Upper to refurbish community nonprofit common spaces, while Extreme Makeover: My Hometown has raised awareness about the need for Boston area affordable housing. She launched Commonwealth 5, the station's initiative that matched viewer-donors with non-profits using a web-based initiative that was first of its kind. She was the Executive Producer for Return to Glory, a documentary focused on Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first Black Civil-War-era regiment in the state, and featuring Emmy Award-winning actor Andre Braugher, and was part of the team honored with the "Service to Community in Television" award from the National Association of Broadcasters for efforts during and after the Boston Marathon attack, among others.
https://www.wcvb.com/news-team/95853608-ad1c-4cbf-a155-99daa7da7606
Karilyn Crockett, Ph.D. Author and Assistant Professor Karilyn Crocket has the distinction of serving as the first Chief of Equity for the City of Boston. After receiving a Masters in Geography at the London School of Economics and a Masters from Yale Divinity School, she went on to receive her PhD in American Studies at Yale University. With extensive research on large-scale changes in the use of land in 20th century American urban areas, she also studies the impact of social and geographical considerations on structural poverty. Forming the basis of her book under the same name, she investigated the 1960s grassroots movement to stop urban expansion of the interstate highway system as part of her dissertation, "People Before Highways: Reconsidering Routes to and from the Boston Anti-Highway Movement". Following this work, she worked as both the Director of Small Business Development and the Director of Economic Policy for the City of Boston. Crockett is currently working as an Assistant Professor of Urban History, Public Policy and Planning at DUSP.
https://dusp.mit.edu/people/karilyn-crockett
Katherine T. Knox As a pioneer bicycle racer, Katherine Knox, better known as Kittie, was born in Cambridgeport in 1874. Following her father's death, her family moved to Boston's West End, which at the time was home to a range of impoverished Blacks and recent immigrants, making it very progressive in successfully integrating a wide range of cultures. She found work to create a better life for their family, saving money to purchase a bicycle. She participated alongside the Riverside Cycle Club, though there was some question as to whether she was a member, with women not allowed to participate in the sport at the time. She began participating in meets, winning many of the competitions she participated in. She was accepted as a member of the League of American Wheelmen in 1893, but a 1894 constitution change to include the word "white" caused numerous members to question her membership. She faced discrimination, being barred from entering an annual meeting in 1895 and denied service at restaurants and hotels. Coverage of these issues led to a strong battle being waged over her membership rights, allowing her to be the first Black accepted to the League.
https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2020/05/26/breaking-the-cycle-the-kittie-knox-story/
Kem Danner Working in a range of investment and banking businesses, Kem Danner is an active community volunteer and activist, promoting children, health, and career development. She began her career in Charlotte, North Carolina following her graduation with her Bachelors and Masters from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Appalachian State University, at Bank of America's management associate program, serving a wide range of business roles, including numerous merger and acquisition roles that required living abroad in Europe, through the 17 years she worked with the organization. She then moved to State Street Global Advisors in 2015, working as the head of diversity and inclusion, then moving through the organization as the head of human resources and senior vice president and a member of the State Street Global Advisors Executive Management Group. Working with a range of charitable organizations focused on childhood development and education as well as cancer research, she also works with numerous employee network groups at State Street, including being a mentor at the Professional Women's Network, executive advisor of the Black Professionals Group, and a steering committee member for the organization's Global Diversity and Inclusion Council.
https://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/kem-danner/
Mayor Kim M. Janey As Boston's first female and first Black mayor, Kim Janey is used to being on the front lines in equality. At age 11, she faced rocks and racial slurs during the busing era of desegregation of Boston schools in the 1970s. This focus on education, equity, justice, and community organization led to 25 years focused on nonprofits, first as a community organizer improving access to high-quality, affordable child care, then as a champion for policy reforms improving access, opportunity, excellence, and equity at Boston Public Schools. She began her work in government as the first woman elected to represent District 7 on the Boston City Council in 2017, where she was elected in 2020 by her peers as President of Boston's most diverse City Council. A recipient of multiple awards, she was elected as Boston's 55th Mayor, and has successfully led the city through unprecedented challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic. With a focus on recovery, reopening, and renewal that addressed systemic inequalities, she prioritized health and wellness as well as equity in reopening the city's economy and public school system while curbing displacement with improved access to affordable housing and reducing homicide through her safety plan.
https://www.boston.gov/departments/mayors-office/kim-janey
Justice Kimberly S. Budd As the 38th Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in 2020 sworn in by Governor Charlie Baker., Kimberly Budd was sworn in as an Associate Judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court by then-Governor Deval Patrick in 2009, served as the Regional Administrative Justice for Middlesex Criminal Business, then appointed as an Associate Judge to the Court in 2016. She earned her Bachelors from Georgetown University and her law degree from Harvard Law School, then began her career serving as a law clerk to Chief Justice Joseph Warner at the Massachusetts Appeals Court, then served as a litigation associate at Mintz Levin. Following this, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's Office in their Major Crimes and Drug Units, then worked as a University Attorney for Harvard University's General Counsel Office, moving to the Director of the Community Values program at Harvard Business School. She also teaches in MCLE and Bar Association programs, has been an adjunct instructor at New England Law and taught trial advocacy at Harvard Law School.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/supreme-judicial-court-justices#chief-justice-kimberly-s.-budd-
Lani Guinier, J.D. As the first Black woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law School in 1998, Lani Guninier was a larger-than-life presence, pushing her many students to push harder and further. She often encouraged them to think deeper into problems they were facing by saying, "My problem is, if you stop there . . . " Born in New York CIty to a civil rights activist mother and lawyer and union organizer father who became the first chair of Harvard's Department of Afro-American Studies, she earned her Bachelor's from Radcliffe in 1971 and her JD from Yale Law School in 1974. After clerking for the U.S. Court of Appeals, she served in the Civil Rights Division with Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days while leading the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's voting rights project. Prior to teaching at Harvard in 1996, she taught at University of Pennsylvania Law School starting in 1988 as a highly-regarded teacher, and also taught at Columbia Law School as a professor of law and social responsibility prior to her death in 2022. Devoting her life to equality, empowerment, democracy, and justice, Guinier was well-known for her scholarship and determination, receiving multiple awards and authoring numerous documents.
https://hls.harvard.edu/today/in-memoriam-lani-guinier-1950-2022/
Laura YoungerA strong voice against modern gentrification, Laura Younger is noted for speaking out against the displacement of Blacks, persons of color, and lower-income people in Boston. As part of the Holborn, Gannet, Gaston, Otisfield Betterment Association, her focus is on the plight faced by individuals and families in Grove Hall in remaining in the community where they have established themselves and called home for many years. With a solid focus on affordable rental housing and homeownership for those who are not eligible for the CDC and city projects that are under development, she champions those who have been priced out of buying a home in the neighborhoods that they grew up in. She encourages those in the neighborhoods to undertake creative solutions, such as building on vacant or condemned properties, while leveraging her voice to push the city into passing zoning variances and issuing building permits. She helps others find their voice and their place in neighborhood associations to help move neighborhoods in the Boston area facing gentrification to fight the process and participate in the responsible development of planning and development for these areas. She is expected to continue being a strong voice for neighborhoods for years to come.
https://binjonline.com/2018/11/21/less-building-moratorium/
Leah RandolphAs an active voice in Black addiction services, Leah Randolph uses her Bachelor's from University of Massachusetts Boston and Master's from Cambridge College to benefit the minority community. She began her career at the Human Resources Development Institute of Massachusetts as the state director, feeling drawn to the four substance abuse programs offered by the Institute. This was due to the organization's parallel work with the Massachusetts Black Alcoholism & Addiction Council in the greater Boston area, an advocacy group that she has worked with for over 20 years and currently serves as the president of the chapter. To further alight with her work with the advocacy group, she moved into the Kitty Dukakis Treatment Center for Women as a program manager, then onto the Boston Medical Center to assess emergency room patients for substance abuse disorder and determine placement, helping the patients find the right treatment for their needs. She is currently at the Commonwealth Mental Health & Wellness Center, which she co-founded and serves as the executive director of, providing mental health and substance abuse counseling, along with a wide range of therapy, mentoring, coaching, mentoring, case management, and other healing modalities from a culturally sensitive approach.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-randolph-cadc-ii-ladc-i-03024513
Lilla G. FrederickServing for many years as the President and Chair of Project RIGHT (Rebuild and Improve Grove Hall Together), Lilla Frederick was a strong positive influence to improving life for countless minorities in the greater Boston area. She also serves as the Chair of the Boston Caribbean Foundation, Secretary of the Grove Hall Elder Housing Advocacy Group, and has been a member and volunteer with the Blue Hill Avenue Initiative Task Force and New Boston Pilot Middle School, which she was instrumental in helping design. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she had a strong belief in the role of education in life, earning a Bachelor's from Northeastern University and a Master's from Lesley University. Her contributions to the community caused her to be recognized from multiple government organizations and award groups. Her passion for the community led to her work as a board member at Environmental Partnerships, where she formed partnerships with churches for landscaping of newly-constructed affordable housing structures, as well as large flower pots for beautifying Devon Street. She leveraged considerable organizational skills and social graces to create inviting spaces throughout the Grove Hill area and organized annual Thanksgiving meals for downtown Boston homeless individuals.
https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/domain/1561
Lillian A. LewisAs the first Black woman journalist in Boston, Lillian Lewis was a Boston native born in 1869 in Beacon Hill. Growing up in the abolitionist home of Lewis Hayden, who ran Boston's Underground Railroad, she attended Bowdoin Grammar School, Girls' High School, and Boston Normal School. With a strong literary gift, she wrote and lectured on temperance, often including a thread of humor in her work, as well as being a stenographer and novelist. She used the pen name Bert Islew to disguise her gender when she started writing for the Boston Advocate in 1889, the same year she was admitted to the New England Woman's Press Association. Her popular society column is credited with saving the paper, as its sales had been failing prior to that point. She contributed to the Richmond Planet, as well as monthly magazine Our Women and Children, as well as working for the Boston Herald as one of the first Black women writing for a white-run newspaper. She became the first Black woman clerk at Boston City Hall's Collector's office in 1920, retiring in 1934.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_A._Lewis
Lisa SimmonsAs the director of the Roxbury International Film Festival, or RoxFilm as it's known in the industry, Lisa Simmons has made great strides in helping Black artists present themselves as they are, rather than in more traditional film roles and characters. With the development of new technology in areas such as distribution, cinematography, and editing, she sees opportunities for more people of color to share their stories without Hollywood backing, allowing them to compete across the film industry and more easily be seen at larger film festivals. Simmons also adjusted the festival's format to a hybrid model, making it easier for more individuals to see the incredible stories that are being produced while shaking up the traditional question-and-answer format of panel discussions. She has also created specific divisions to cover a range of submitted films, as well as the strong selection of local feature and short films that the festival has become known for. Her focus on this direction for the festival is helping new Black artists enter the industry without compromising their identity or integrity.
https://artsfuse.org/230811/film-interview-roxfilms-lisa-simmons-embracing-cinematic-independence/
L'Merchie FrazierAn artist, educator, poet, public historian, and activist, L'Merchie Frazier is the current Executive Director of Creative/Strategic Planning for SPOKE Arts. Coming from a strong background that includes twenty years of serving the artistic community and featuring a range of international residencies, she is known for work that reflects the community in an authentic and genuine fashion. Her artwork is featured in the White House, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. As a State of Massachusetts Art Commissioner and a prior City of Boston Artist in Residence, she has received many awards for her reparative aesthetic approach to expanding historical narrative and responding to crisis, violence and trauma throughout her career. She has served as a former Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, with a focus on supporting social justice and the movement for civil rights seen through five hundred years of Indigenous and Black history, providing a viewpoint that more accurately showcases the experience of people of color during that time.
https://www.boston.gov/government/cabinets/equity-and-inclusion-cabinet/lmerchie-frazier
Louise W. Corbin Acting as an advocate for improved foster care, Louise Wells was an educator who took in over 50 children over the course of four decades, providing them with a strong, stable home life in which they could heal and build a foundation for success. Whenever there was a crisis, the Department of Social Services knew that they could count on her to take on children removed from homes in an emergency. A graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Education, she taught early childhood education at Wheelock College and Roxbury Community College. Working with foster children and education led to an interest in theories about how children develop, which encouraged her to take childhood development courses at local colleges until a Harvard scholarship allowed her to pursue a Master's, which she attained in 1969. Going on to direct numerous Boston-region daycare centers, she also worked with the state in the Office for Children until 1975, when she began pursuing a teaching degree. She continued teaching after her retirement in 2000 up until shortly before her death, and is recognized by many in the community for improving the foster care system in the area.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/201835394/louise-corbin
Lucy M. Mitchell Born in Florida in 1899, Lucy Mitchell was an instructor, activist, and advocate for training daycare workers in Boston for many years. After seeing a confrontation between Daytona School's founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, and a hate group, she moved to Roxbury with her husband, earning a Master's from Boston University in 1935. Prior to earning her degree, she operated the Nursery School at Robert Gould Shaw House starting in 1932, a position she continued for 21 years. She co-founded the Associated Day Care Services of Metropolitan Boston, eventually serving as its executive director. After spending nine years in research and activism, she supported the 1962 law that established state daycare licensing laws, followed by working for the Massachusetts Department of Education in developing affordable daycare worker training courses. She also trained Peace Corps volunteers in working with children, consulted for the nationally-based Head Start program, helping with its implementation in Boston, and worked with numerous other organizations and agencies to improve the lives of children in daycare across the region.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-lucy-miller-mitchell
Lucy T. Prince Known best for her fame as the first Black poetess in the United States, Lucy Price had many other accomplishments, including arguing a court case in front of the Supreme Court. Taken from Africa as an infant, she was sold into slavery, baptized during the Great Awakening, and at the age of 20, was admitted to the church fellowship. She married in 1756, and her husband purchased her freedom, with six children born to the couple by 1769. An exceptional speaker, she argued in a number of situations, some successful and others not. She spent three hours in an earnest, eloquent speech before Williams College trustees arguing for the admission of her son, received protection when a neighboring family threatened her family, and faced off against two of the state's leading lawyers at the Supreme Court and won when Colonel Eli Bronson tried to steal their land, with the additional compliment from the presiding justice, Samuel Chase, stated that her argument was the best he'd ever heard. She passed away at age 97 in 1821.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2p15.html
Lula Christopher A pioneer in healing circles and self-empowerment in Boston, Lula Christopher, known to many in the community as Mama Lula, focused on reintroducing Black women to ancient medicine while creating access for other treatment modalities including acupuncture, massage, and reflexology. By providing opportunities for Black men, women, and children to explore their ancestry and spirituality, her role as a community service specialist of over four decades has allowed her to not only heal herself, but others as well. Serving as a community advocate, activist, program developer, mentor, teacher, and administrator, Christopher uses Dagara medicine to help others connect with their often discordant roots and ancestors, helping them to heal from trauma, abuse, and generational patterns that cause harm, helping people today move forward in an empowered, healthy, and strong way.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/lulaeldership
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/07/metro/black-history-i-carry-with-me-marlene-boyette/
Mallika Marshall, M.D. As an award-winning physician and journalist, Mallika Marshal serves as the Medical Director of WBZ-TV, located in Boston. This career path includes being a Board Certified physician in pediatrics and internal medicine, serving on Harvard Medical School's staff while she practices at the Chelsea Urgent Care Clinic for Massachusetts General and at the MGH Revere Health Center. She's a contributing editor for the publishing sector of Harvard Medical School, Harvard Health Publishing, and hosts the publishing sector's e-learning coursework. With over 15 years of media coverage expertise and over 10 years serving as the HealthWatch anchor at WBZ-TV starting in 2000, she combines her journalistic expertise with her medical knowledge to help promote better health for many within the Boston viewing area, while serving on various Boards over the years and maintaining a range of honor societies, medical organizations, and journalistic organizations.
https://hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/mallika-marshall
Margaret A. Burnham, LL.B. Professor, author, and director Margaret Burnham graduated with her Bachelor's in 1966 from Tougaloo College, and her legal Bachelor's from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. Recognized on the international stage as an expert in civil and human rights, she is the Director of Reparations and Restorative Justice Initiatives, the Director of Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, and is the Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Law, Equity, and Race. She headed outside counsel and law students during a landmark federal case that was settled involving Jim Crow laws and racially-based violence. She is a current member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board after her appointment by President Joe Biden, involving Civil Rights Era criminal cold cases that were racially motivated. She started her career by representing civil rights and political activists in the 1970s, becoming the first Black woman to serve in the Massachusetts judiciary. She was appointed to an international human rights commission in 1993 by South African President Nelson Mandela, which developed into the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her book By Hands Now Known was published in 2022 and has received numerous awards for its approach to investigating Jim Crow violations.
https://law.northeastern.edu/faculty/burnham/
Maria L. Baldwin As an activist and educator, Marie Baldwin was born in 1856 and graduated from the Cambridge Training School for Teachers in 1881. She taught in the Cambridge school district after some resistance, then in 1887 at the Agassiz Grammar School, becoming the principal two years later. Choosing to remain an educator rather than marrying in an era where married women were not employed as teachers, she kept this position for many decades while joining Black civil rights groups, giving her a platform to speak on both civil and women's rights movements. She was a member and secretary of the Banneker Society, a local Black debate club, where she read many literature and history pages. She opened her home in 1880 to Black social activists and intellectuals while offering weekly readings and discussions for Black students attending Harvard but not welcome in the University's study spaces. She co-founded the Woman's Era Club, which focused on the anti-lynching movement, women's suffrage, and improving educational and career opportunities, and served as the first President of the League of Women for Community Service, providing comfort to returning soldiers and new widows during WWI. She remained active until her death in 1922.
https://www.nps.gov/people/maria-l-baldwin.htm
Maria W. Stewart As an advocate for women's rights and an abolitionist, Maria Stewart was born in Connecticut in 1803, moving to Boston to support herself as a domestic servant while educating herself. Marrying in 1826, the couple was part of the small community of free Blacks around Beacon Hill. They shared the community's thirst to free those still enslaved, and despite losing her husband a few years later, she continued to speak out regarding racism and segregation in Boston. She became one of the first women to speak publicly in the US, a practice considered improper or immoral at the time, and was the first Black woman to write and publish a political manifesto calling for Black people to resist exploitation, oppression, and slavery, with her manuscript delivered to The Liberator's office, a white abolitionist newspaper. Her success helped her build a short but very significant public speaking career, giving four public lectures from 1831 and 1833 that were on the record. She had a unique approach using Biblical imagery and language to condemn racism and slavery. She encouraged audiences to pursue any educational opportunities available to them and demand their political rights.She passed away in 1879.
https://www.nps.gov/people/maria-w-stewart.htm
Marian L. Heard As the current President and CEO of Oxen Hill Partners, Marian Heard has a range of both privately-held and Fortune 500 companies in her client list while promoting brand enhancement and leadership development programs. She is also retired from the position of President and CEO of Boston United Way and the CEO of United Ways of New England, Heard has a long history in volunteer service, including being the founding President and CEO of Points of Light Foundation, a founding board member of the MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, a current board member on Liberty Mutual, CVS Caremark, and Sovereign Bank. Serving as a board member and trustee for numerous organizations, she has received numerous honorary doctorates and awards for her contributions to business, leadership, and children, while moving the Black community as a whole farther in the business world.
https://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/marian-heard/
Marilyn A. Chase Raised in Detroit, Marilyn Chase was spending her time counseling poor Black teenage girls in the deeply divided and racially segregated city in 1967 prior to her move to Boston in 1970. Continuing to work with Black youths to encourage them to reach their full potential and avoid the tension, trauma, and violence caused by issues with racism and lack of equity such as were seen in the race riots and violence that arose across the country in those turbulent times. She served as the assistant secretary for Health and Human Services under Governor Patrick while trying to promote peace, equality, and equity between races.
https://www.wgbh.org/lifestyle/2017-09-08/detroit-boston-and-the-searing-memories-of-the-summer-of-1967
Marita Rivero Born in 1943 in Pennsylvania, Marita Rivero is a media and nonprofit executive who earned her Bachelor's at Tufts University in 1964. She became a WGBH producer, which is a National Public Radio station in Boston. She moved to Washington, D.C. in 1976 to consult for several organizations including the National Science Foundation, PBS, and the United States Congressional Black Caucus' Communications Task Force. In 1981, she returned to radio production at WPFW Pacifica, a position she eventually promoted through to vice president. Returning to Boston in 1988 as the general manager of WGBH radio, she spent a decade at the station prior to being hired as executive-in-charge of Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery, then moving into the same position in This Far By Faith, airing in 2003. She was promoted to WGBH's general manager in 2005, which was a position she held until 2013. After volunteering since the late 1980s for the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket, she was named executive director in 2015. For her work in media, she has received a wide range of awards from diverse organizations and serves on numerous boards, three of which she serves as chair.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/marita-rivero
Mary C. Thompson, D.D.M. As the third Black woman to graduate from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, Mary Thompson was a volunteer once day a week while operating a private practice and practicing at the Children's Dental Clinic. Starting by treating patients in her home, she was able to avoid the cost of office rent and was able to serve the public during the Great Depression, a time that demanded having a spirit of great generosity. She regularly helped patients who had no ability to pay for her services. However, she still faced racial and gender discrimination. She was only allowed for many years to practice as a dental assistant for a local school because of sexist advertising that excluded women, even after she passed the entrance exam with flying colors. She volunteered with the Mississippi Health Project as a dentist, visiting schools and churches that sometimes wouldn't even have a table. Seeing the terrible poverty in the state committed her to racial justice, working with her husband to battle housing discrimination around Boston, receiving an NAACP award for their work during the 1970s. However, she never lost her dedication to her dentistry work and helping those in need.
https://dental150.tufts.edu/posts/2
Mary E. Mahoney A Boston native, Mary Mahoney was born in 1845 and was the first Black licensed nurse in the US, working at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in a range of roles for 15 years. She entered the Hospital's nursing school when it opened in 1878 and graduated as one of only four graduates out of 42. However, she faced overwhelming discrimination in public nursing, so instead became a private nurse so that she could focus her care on the needs of individuals, gaining a reputation for efficiency, patience, and a caring bedside manner. She joined national and international nursing associations in 1896, but finding some members of the group less than welcoming, she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908 and elected as the organization's national chaplain with a lifetime membership. Shortly after, she served as the director for the Howard Orphanage Asylum for Black children, where she served for two years prior to her retirement. However, she still championed women's rights, and was among the first women to register to vote in Boston following the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1820. She passed in 1926.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-mahoney
Mary E. Wilson As a leading civil rights activist and a founding member of Boston's branch of the NAACP and Women's Service Club, Mary Wilson was born in Ohio in 1866, graduating from Oberlin College. Coming from an activist family, she moved to Washington, D.C. to teach in public school for 10 years while writing a health and beauty column for Black woman's newspaper The Woman's Era. She married prominent Boston civil rights attorney Butler Wilson, then moved to the South End, where they raised their six children. She was a keynote speaker at a women's anti-lynching demonstration in May 1899, calling for federal intervention. The couple were among the founders of Boston's NAACP branch, and were the most prominent Black leaders in the organization at the time. She frequently volunteered as a traveling organizer, bringing thousands of members to the group from New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. She worked to end discrimination at the New England Sanitarium, in the school system and at department stores in Boston. During World War I, she organized a knitting circle 350 women and girls strong to manufacture scarves and gloves for Boston's Black soldiers, growing into the Women's Service Club. She passed away in 1928.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Evans_Wilson
Rep. Mary H. Goode Born in 1927 in Georgia, Mary Goode and her family moved to Boston before her high school years. After raising three children, she began attending Tufts University, graduating in 1974. Determined to bring change to the Black community in Boston, she represented the 10th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1975 to 1978 as the second Black female legislator in the state. She ran under the Democratic Party and defeated two other contenders, Emanuel Eaves and Leon Rock, by 19 and 43 votes respectively. She retired after her 21-year-old son lost his life in a drowning accident in 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_H._Goode
Mary L. Johnson Together with her husband, Mary Johnson were owners and operators of one of the 200 Black-owned Boston businesses at the beginning of the 20th century. Selling hair goods at the storefront, Johnson's Hair Store was only a small part of their professional empire, with Johnson Hair Food being sold across the entire United States by 1900. With an entrepreneurial eye, Mary opened the Johnson's School of Beauty Culture, where she offered a range of salon and spa services that included massage, hairdressing, shampooing, scalp treatments, and manicures. This school provided young Black women in the Boston area with technical education and skills in an environment that was otherwise very limited at the time.
https://buildingsofnewengland.com/tag/madam-mary-l-johnson-boston/
Mattie B. Powell Born in upstate New York in 1921, Mattie Powell grew up in South Carolina, but accompanied her sister in a move to Boston. Meeting her husband there, the couple opened the Powell Barbershop and Hollywood Barbershop, opening up a total of three barbershops in the next few years. While operating the businesses, Mattie became Massachusetts first Black female Master Barber. With their shops becoming a strong fixture of Black neighborhoods in Boston for decades, and they were the first Black family to own a home on their street in Dorchester. Once the barber shops were established, she returned to teaching for Boston Public Schools, teaching kindergarten for 25 years, and received her Master's from Boston State College. Her love of children and reading exposed her children to the importance of reading and writing. She also wrote her own music and sang, performing at special events with her son accompanying her on the piano.
https://www.davisofboston.com/obituary/Mattie-Powell
Mattie L. Washington As Massachusetts' first Black businesswoman working as a licensed hair stylist, Mattie Washington was born in Georgia in 1923 before moving to Boston in her early 20s. With a long history as an entrepreneur, she received her master's license in barbering, operating two Corner Barber Shops in the city in the time during and following World War II. After spending many happy years operating her barbershops, she retired from the industry, but her entrepreneurial spirit wouldn't let her rest. She owned and operated a local daycare while volunteering at both the American Indian Council and the Orchard Park Community Center in Boston during her later years. She passed in 2011.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/mattie-washington-obituary?id=22189415
Mattie M. Adams As the eldest daughter in a family of 17 children, Mattie Adams was born in 1923 in Boston's South End. As an active leader in the United Methodist Church of All Nations, Adams worked hard to develop a number of successful ministries for the church, including her Saturdays and Sundays Bread program, developed to feed countless homeless people and families. With a strong entrepreneurial spirit, she was a graduate of the New England School of Art & Design, after which she opened Adams Interiors in the Back Bay area, where she was the first licensed Black interior designer in New England. Enjoying great success in the area, she catered to numerous corporate and celebrity clients, including the White House. As a former member of the New England Minority Purchasing Council Board of Directors and President Carter's Small Business Advisory Council, she opened doors to other people of color in the design industry. She passed away in 2016.
https://www.currentobituary.com/member/obit/197377
Maud C. HareMaude Hare was a Black pianist, writer, musician, scholar and activist. Born in 1874, she grew up in a Texas home filled with music and politics. She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, as well as Harvard's Lowell Institute of Literature, becoming an accomplished pianist. However, she and another Black woman faced struggles living on campus. She refused to move and insisted on proper treatment, and her issue was taken up by numerous organizations. Hare became a part of Boston's vibrant Black community, joining the Charles Street Circle and became a close friend of W.E.B. DuBois. She taught at the Texas Deaf and Blind Institute for Colored Youths and spoke up against the Austin Opera House that wanted Blacks in the audience to be segregated during her performances. Along with William Howard Richardson, she was the first Black musician performing in Boston Public Library's Concert-Lecture series. Hare founded the Allied Arts Center in Boston to encourage arts education and performance. She collected music from across the South and the Caribbean as a musicologist studying folklore, and was the first person to study Creole music. She also wrote extensively, contributing topics on music to a variety of publications. Her book, Negro Musicians and Their Music, published in 1836, the year she died, documented the development of Black music from its African roots and its influences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maud_Cuney_Hare
Maude Hurd A political activist, leader, and community organizer, Maude Hurt was born in 1944. Best known for her role as the President of ACORN for 20 years, she started with the organization in 1982 first as a speaker and then as the Boston chapter's chairwoman. She led demonstration at Boston City Hall over vacant lots that had trash left there with no cleanup by government agencies. After holding a variety of leadership positions with the organizations over the next seven years, she was elected as ACORN's president. She was also a member of the socialist New Party and Democratic socialists of America, and was recognized as one of the top 100 individuals building the New Party by then-organizer Barack Obama. She led efforts to oppose scaling back of the Community Reinvestment Act, a law requiring moneylenders to maximize mortgages approved for undercapitalized and minority loan applicants that did not meet traditional borrowing standards, and was arrested at the scene of a protest at the U.S. Capitol Building. She promoted living wage laws and other policies that would allow Democrats to ally with progressives. When ACORN disbanded, Hurd became president of New England United For Justice, participating in "Take Back Boston" rallies.
https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/maude-hurd/
Maude T. Steward As the sister of William Monroe Trotter, owner of The Guardian, Maude Steward worked as the assistant editor of the newspaper, then continued publishing it herself for two decades following his death. Born in 1874, she attended Wellesley College, giving her the tools she needed to successfully edit and later operate the newspaper following her brother's death. In addition to her writing and editing skills, she also participated in a number of local civic organizations, was one of the founders of St. Mark's Musical and Literary Union, and also worked with the Boston Equal Rights League and the Women's League. The newspaper gave her a strong outlet to promote equal rights both for blacks and for women. She passed away in 1955.
https://bwht.org/roxbury-womens-history-trail/#:~:text=Maude%20Trotter%20Steward%20(1874%2D1955,in%20many%20local%20civic%20organizations.
Melnea A. Cass A community and civil rights activist on the local, state, and national levels, Melnea Cass was born in 1896 in Richmond, Virginia. Her family moved to Boston when she was five years old, and after graduating as valedictorian in 1914, she sought work in retail, but found that limited opportunities in Boston forced her to do domestic work until her marriage. She became involved in community projects, including registering Black women to vote following ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. She continued fighting for the rights of Black women for the rest of her life. She founded Kindergarten Mothers, and worked with the Harriet Tubman Mother's Club, Sojourner Truth Club, the Northeastern Region of the National Association of Colored Women's Club as secretary, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Women in Community Service, and many others. She was the only female charter member to Action for Boston Community Development, and a founder and charter member of Freedom House. She was president of Boston's NAACP chapter from 1962 to 1964, and chaired the Massachusetts Advisory Committee for the Elderly from 1975 to 1976. She passed in 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melnea_Cass
Mildred Davenport As the first Black woman to appear with the Boston Pops orchestra, Mildred Davenport was born in Roxbury in 1900. After finishing high school, she studied at the Sargent School for Physical Culture at Boston University and studied dance. She opened the Davenport School of Dance in the 1920s, then opened her second school, the Silver Box Studio, in Boston. During a time when it was unusual for Black and white performers to appear on stage together, she appeared in numerous Broadway musicals and reviews, alongside performers such as Clifton Webb and Imogene Coca. She provided dance interpretations of Black spiritual music with the Boston Pops orchestra in 1938, then toured the East Coast in a show called Chocolate Review for five years. She was among the first Black women to enlist in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps during World War II, moving from first lieutenant to captain. She then worked for two decades with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination from 1947 to 1968, also serving on the Boston NAACP board of directors. She received the Sojourner Truth Award from the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs for Boston in 1973. She passed away in 1990, while still living in Boston.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Davenport
Mildred F. Jefferson, M.D. Not only was Mildred Jefferson the first Black woman graduate from Harvard Medical in 1951, she also was the first woman who was employed as a general surgeon at Boston University Medical Center. Active in the right-to-life movement, she was born in Texas in 1927, daughter to a schoolteacher and a minister, but was known for following the local doctor around on his rounds. After finishing her secondary education, she went on to attend Texas College, then Tufts University, as she was considered too young at the time that she finished her Bachelors to attend medical school. Once she finished her medical degree, she was the first woman to undertake a surgical internship at Boston Hospital, as well as being the first female doctor at Boston University Medical Center. She received her board certification in surgery in 1972, and by 1984, was a general surgeon at Boston University, while also becoming a professor of surgery at Boston University School of Medicine. She was the first woman member of the Boston Surgical Society. She helped found Massachusetts Citizens for Life and the National Right to Life Committee, becoming active in many roles in the 1970s. She passed away in 1990.
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collections/mildred-jefferson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Fay_Jefferson
Miriam Manning Miriam Manning retired from foster grandparent work at 95 years of age in 2019, putting the cap on many years of volunteering with over 27 years in that specific role. Providing a solid role model and caring individual in thousands of children's lives, she has dedicated these many years to caring for children at the Dorchester Headstart, crediting the activity with being what kept her moving for so many years. Operated by ABCD, the program has brought older adults and children into close contact for over 54 years, providing children with a level of care in their lives that may otherwise be difficult to accomplish, while allowing the older adults to share their knowledge with children and making a difference in their lives.
https://www.boston25news.com/news/-it-s-why-i-m-still-moving-95-year-old-finally-retires-from-foster-role/952224040/
Mukiya Baker-Gomez With a reputation of putting all of her effort behind every endeavor, Mukiya Baker-Gomez was a strong advocate for community empowerment and politics. Heading the State Office of Minority and Women Business Assistance from 1985 until 1991, she worked hard to advocate for minority and women entrepreneurs in the community and state, then worked with Governor Patrick's Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance division for University of Massachusetts Boston Science Center's construction. She also worked on election campaigns for countless individuals, including Chuck Turner, Ayanna Pressley, Gloria Fox, Diane Wilkerson, and Mel King gain public office. Considered to be a hero to many in the Black community, she was born in Boston in 1948, she followed her aunt's example as a Republican activist during the Civil Rights era, registering to vote after her 18th birthday and remaining active in political life. She spent her life in and out of public service, working with elected officials while volunteering with community organizations. She worked and volunteered with the Black United Front in ht e1970s, as well as the Contractors Association of Boston representing Black construction firms, and the Opportunities Industrialization Center, a program training community residents to work in high-tech careers.
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2023/06/14/mukiya-baker-gomez-community-leader-74/
Muriel S. Snowden A MacArthur Fellow, Muriel Snowden was a community organizer who co-founded Freedom House in 1949, an organization empowering the local community and spent 35 years directing the organization. Prior to her work with Freedom House, she received her A.B. degree from Radcliffe College in 1938 and pursued additional education at the New York School of Social Work from 1943 to 1945. She then served as executive director of the Cambridge Civic Unity Committee as well as an investigator for the Essex County, New Jersey Welfare Board. A lecturer and educator at Simmons College School of Social Work, she served on several boards beyond Freedom House, including Harvard University, Tufts University, Babson College, the Boston Museum of Science, the New England Aquarium, and the Radcliffe Black Women's Oral History Project. Her actions allowed Freedom House to develop programs addressing poverty, housing, segregation, hiring discrimination, and unemployment issues in the Black community. Following her retirement in 1984, Snowden remained an active community leader, encouraging international relations and foreign language study through computer-based programs. She passed away in 1988.
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-1987/muriel-s-snowden#searchresults
Myechia Minter-Jordan, M.D. With strong experience in nonprofit and healthcare management, Myechia Minter-Jordan has worked to improve healthcare access for marginalized populations in the greater Boston area. She is the current President and CEO of CareQuest Institute for Oral Health, which is focused on improving health outcomes through better medical/dental collaboration. She has also worked in executive positions at DentalQuest to improve dental and oral health, and at The Dimock Center where she oversaw a $45 million budget and programs for healthcare, behavioral health, and early education. These opportunities have allowed her to serve the community through improved healthcare access, especially in aspects of healthcare that have been historically underserved. Minter-Jordan received her doctorate at Brown Medical School in 1998, and an MBA at John Hopkins Carey School of Business in 2007.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/myechia-minter-jordan-md-mba-099bb02/
Nancy G. Prince Born in 1799, Nancy Prince was a biographer who moved to Boston after the War of 1812. She became very active within the early anti-slavery societies, especially William Lloyd Garrison's society. She undertook two different missions to support recently freed Black people in Jamaica, hoping to educate the people there so that they could better support themselves and avoid being taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals. Returning to Boston, she worked for Emancipation, thwarting agents who were enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, and was an early proponent of women's rights. Her autobiography, which included her father's story as a Nantucket whaler, and her grandfather's story as a captured slave from Africa, was published from Garrison's office. She became a speaker at women's rights conventions, telling audiences at an 1854 conference that she understood women's wrongs better than rights. Following this, she disappeared from history.
https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/nancy-gardner-prince-daughter-of-a-black-nantucket-whaler/
Nellie B. Mitchell Born in the 1840s, Nellie Mitchell became one of the most successful Black soprano singers in America. Spending decades in her career as a singer in churches and at a range of events, she was known for having a very versatile voice for a range of music, including classical, opera, and folk music. Though no known recordings were made of her voice, it was believed to be a lyric soprano, with a richness to it that may have been lacking in other sopranos in that age. Traveling extensively, she toured and performed all over the East Coast and Midwest, delighting audiences at both Black and white churches as well as New York City's Steinway Hall. However, her race denied her opportunities given to white contemporaries, such as recording her voice. She performed at abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's funeral and at meetings of an organization that grew into the NAACP. She was also known for inventing the phoneterion, a device that helped singers learn proper tongue positions.
https://www.nhpr.org/all-things-considered/2021-06-18/this-juneteenth-a-tribute-to-dovers-nellie-brown-mitchell
Olive L. Benson Recognized as a premier hair stylist and an expert in straightening and relaxing hair, Olivia Benson was born in Cambridge in 1932. Studying at the Wilfred Academy following high school, she received her certification in hairdressing, continuing her education and professional training at Pivot Point, Vidal Sasson, Jingles, Clairol, and Wella. Opening a small beauty shop in north Cambridge in 1959, she provided the most advanced treatment and styling techniques. Moving her business to Boston in the 1960s, she realized strong success, moving to two different larger locations in Boston's upscale retail districts over the following years. Women from many ethnic and racial makeups came to Olive's Beauty Salon to have their hair styled and straightened. She also designed and coordinated several industry publications for both ethnic and non-ethnic hair styles. In 1996, she created and marketed her own hair product line, including universal relaxers, protein conditioners, shampoo, and leave-in conditioners under the brand Universal Textures. She was honored as the first Black person inducted into the Hall of Renown for the National Cosmetology Association in 1991, and was the first Black to receive a North American Hairstyle Award in 1996. She passed away in 2005.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/olive-lee-benson-40
Patricia A. Raynor Named for her birthday on St. Patrick's Day, Patricia Raynor was born in 1927. Struggling to support her family while on AFDC, she took on any jobs she could, which led her to work as a community organizer for the Whittier Street Housing Projects. In this role, she coordinated the Low Cost Food Cooperative. She helped found the Roxbury Comprehensive Community Health Center as well as the New Professionals Program. She also worked with the Lower Roxbury Community Council, the Roxbury Action Program, and the Third World Women's Conference. She was selected as an Associate Researcher under MIT's Fellowship program. She was instrumental in starting the University of Massachusetts' School Without Walls program, providing college credit for adult life experience. She had received the NAACP Community Service Award, and Greyhound Bus named her Woman of the Year for her work in mentoring and encouraging many young community activists. A scholarship has been established in her name.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=102273618666065&id=102212338672193&paipv=0&eav=AfaTYqFCythydNjKM5e2KilrImeq6wSjzIgeuGLr_3uyKU3BSZZ9yK1mM3l8OEH4ock&_rdr
Paula A. Johnson, M.D. Serving as the 14th president of Wellesley College, Harvard University graduate Paula Johnson is a medical doctor who has focused on bringing excellence to decades of work in higher education, public health, and academic medicine. She has moved the college to the forefront of women's STEM education. She has led the creation process of the school's new strategy, placing inclusive excellence at the heart of the educational experience. Having held several leadership roles during her career, she has been Harvard Medical School's Grayce A. Young Family Professor of Medicine in Women's Health, professor of epidemiology at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Health, and was a founder of Brigham and Women's Hospital's Connors Center for Women's Health and Gender Biology, the hospital where she trained in internal and cardiovascular medicine. She is the member of numerous national and international boards, and is the recipient of several awards and honors, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Medicine.
https://www.wellesley.edu/about/president
Pauline E. HopkinsBorn in Maine in 1859, Pauline Hopkins was a writer known for her novels and short stories that were written while living in Cambridge and Boston, most of which were published from 1900 to 1903. She regularly wrote and acted as an editor for Colored American Magazine as well as writing for the Voice of the Negro, with her work regularly addressing Black history, economic justice, racial discrimination, and women's rights. This allowed her to emerge as a leading public intellectual for the era. She also wrote a musical focused on The Underground Railroad, which was produced in 1879. She also performed with her family's musical ensemble, the Hopkins Colored Troubadours. She worked as an orator and stenographer in the 1890s, staying active in women's clubs and similar civic organizations to promote women's rights. She represented the Women's Era Club in the 1898 Annual Convention of New England Federation of Women's Clubs. She was a founding member of the Boston Literary and Historical Association in 1901. She remained a prominent activist intellectual, though her public appearances and writing efforts were focused on other areas following the last of her major writings in 1905. She died in 1930 from burns received during a fire at her home.
https://www.paulinehopkinssociety.org/biography/
Phillis Wheatley Though an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatly was educated and considered to be one of the best poets prior to the 19th century in the United States. Seized in western Africa at around age seven, she was transported to Boston in a group of enslaved persons unsuited for rigorous labor. She was brought into the Wheatly household in 1761 as a domestic servant and educated in the Bible, geography, history, astronomy, British literature, and the Latin and Greek classics. In a letter to the University of Cambridge, she yearned for intellectual challenges of more academic atmospheres. She was often used as an illustration by abolitionists that Blacks could be intellectual and artistic, making her a catalyst for the early antislavery movement. Her works, encompassing approximately 145 works, were published beginning in 1767. Reaching great renown in both Boston and Great Britain, she was known for applying Biblical symbols to both comment on slavery and evangelize. Though she was freed before the Revolutionary War, the harsh conditions experienced by many free blacks during and after the war caused her to live in poverty with her husband and up to three children. This caused significant health issues, and she passed away in 1784.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/phillis-wheatley
Priscilla H. Douglas, Ed.D. As the current Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Boston Public Library, Priscilla Douglas has brought over three decades of experience in leadership across academics, business, and government to the table. As an executive coach to Fortune 500 businesses, her guidance has helped thousands of leaders both in workshops and individually, addressing change in the business landscape with insight, understanding, and energy. Working as an executive at Xerox, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and General Motors, she introduced and led a range of innovations. She served as special assistant to William Webster, FBI director, and has been a White House fellow, a Barbara Bush Adult Literacy Project senior advisor, and a National Institute of Justice Presidential appointee. She served as the Secretary of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulations in Massachusetts, and was the first Black woman to hold a Cabinet position in the Commonwealth's history. She created the Hate Crimes Task Force and Domestic Violence Commission as the Assistant Secretary for Public Safety. She was the 2015 International Women's Forum Conference co-chair and now chairs the Ideas Remaking the World Committee. She has authored multiple books on leadership.
https://www.bpl.org/about-the-bpl/board-of-trustees/
Rachael S. Rollins, J.D. As the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Rachael Rollins was sworn into office in 2022 at 50 years of age. With a strong dedication to keeping neighborhoods safe and healthy, she is the top federal law enforcement official in Massachusetts. Her 20 years of legal experience provide her experience to lead 250 federal prosecutors and related staff across three offices in the state. Prior to her appointment, she was elected in 2019 as the first woman of color serving as a district attorney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and is now the first Black woman serving as a U.S. Attorney in the district. She previously worked as the Chief Legal Counsel for the Massachusetts Port Authority as well as the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. She also served as the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District, handling both Criminal and Civil divisions. She previously worked as a field attorney for the National Labor Relations Board and at the Bingham McCutchen LLP law firm, with her career starting as a clerk in the Massachusetts Appeals Court. She received her law degree from Northeastern.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/rachael-s-rollins-sworn-united-states-attorney-district-massachusetts
Rachel M. Washington As the first Black person to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1876, Rachel Washington was a leading educator in music in the Black community in Boston, helping many of Boston's talented musicians develop their skills to greatness. She also served as the choir director and organist at the Twelfth Baptist Church. She also performed on the piano, and was known for educating many of Boston's best musicians. She was noted in many public testimonials and complimentary writings in the press of New England, and was noted as being a woman of fine culture and character, humble in her personality while wielding an outstanding dedication to her art. She saw her musical talent and ability to teach and bring out the best in her students as her way of elevating the Black race.
https://www.musicbywomen.org/theorist/rachel-m-washington/
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/147940787/rachel-m-washington
Rebecca L. Crumpler, M.D. As the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in 1864, Rebecca Crumpler was born in 1831 and was the author of Book of Medical Discourses in 1883, which was the one of the first medical publications by a Black person. Born in Delaware, she learned much of her medical knowledge from her aunt, a local healer in Pennsylvania. She worked as a nurse in Charleston, Massachusetts in 1852, and by 1860, she had been admitted to the New England Female Medical College. Her book was focused on medicine for women and children, as an outreach of her passion for relieving the suffering of others. Practicing in Boston for a short period of time, she moved to Richmond, Virginia following the end of the Civil War, using it as a field for missionary work to become better acquainted with diseases impacting women and children. By caring for freed slaves who would have otherwise had no medical care access, she eventually returned to Boston to take up her work again with renewed vigor, treating people no matter their ability to pay for her services. Her book was based on journals kept during years of medical practice. She passed in 1895.
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_73.html
Rebecca P. Clarke During a time when elder care was extremely limited, Rebecca Clarke founded The Home for Aged Colored Women, the first home founded for elderly Black women in Boston. Enlisting assistance from both Black and white community leadership, she founded the home with Reverend Leonard Grimes, Governor John Andrew, and many others. An 1860 fundraising campaign allowed the organization to rent a house on Phillips Street as its first base of operations, then moved to Myrtle Street in 1864, before moving to Hancock Street in 1900. Residents were recommended through word of mouth and were often members of Black churches in Beacon Hill. With a commitment to maintaining a strong relationship between community and home residents, Clarke earned the community's strong support throughout the home's existence. The women in the home were provided with social activities and work that benefited the community. Two of the women from the home, ages 92 and 88, wrote The Women's Era publication to support women's suffrage.
https://www.nps.gov/places/home-for-aged-colored-women.htm
Rubina A. Guscott Born in Jamaica around 1900 and coming to Boston in 1920 at age 20, Rubina Guscott was a strong community activist and organizer who dedicated her life to the fight for equality and justice. She started as a domestic worker in Boston, but marched with the Black Star Nurses division each Saturday. Though she was widowed at 30, she raised her five sons and her daughter with a strong sense of community service and dedication to the common good. She was a charter member of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, and was active in almost every club group within the church and outside organizations pursuing social issues. She was a founder of Boston Progressive Credit, which pooled community resources to those in need. She lost one son in World War II, which drove her to become a member of Massachusetts Gold Star Mothers, eventually serving as its president. Despite being in her 60s during the Civil Rights era, she regularly took NAACP bus rides to Washington to participate in marches. She was described as a lady of great dignity and commitment, working hard towards a mutual goal of equality and justice. She died in 2002.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.obituaries/c/nrHguqFKkdc?pli=1
Ruth E. Hamilton Moving to Boston shortly following World War II, Ruth Hamilton was an Atlanta native with a big heart for serving her church community. A member of the Charles Street A.M.E. Church, she spent over 50 years as one of the top contraltos of the East Coast, often giving benefit concerts to support the church's ministries. With a strong Christ-centered focus, her ecumenical spirit made her a regular soloist at many churches in the area and served as a guest cantor in several Jewish synagogues during high holy days. She performed on many top world stages, toured Europe with both the New England Spiritual Ensemble and the Donnell Patterson Chorale. Performing as a soloist with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Arthur Fielder, she was also among the stars of CMAC's Annual Gospel Martin Luther King Jr. tribute and sang at several memorial services for President Kennedy. The recipient of many awards, her stirring performances have inspired many positive reviews, and she appeared on the first collection of art songs and spirituals by Black female composers. Her mission was preserving her rich legacy of music, and helped found the Hamilton Garrett Center for Music and Arts prior to her death in 2001.
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/copy-of-ruth-hamilton
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/about-us
Ruth E. Hill Born in Pittsfield in 1925, Ruth Hill was a dedicated librarian and educator, receiving her Bachelors from Massachusetts State College in 1946 and her Bachelors from Simmons College in 1949. Working at the Berkshire Athenaeum in 1943 followed by Massachusetts State College catalog department in 1947, she also worked as a cataloger at Bennington College and the Baker Library at Harvard Business School. Hired later as a reference librarian for the New York Academy of Medicine and serving in the catalog department of Yale University, she lent her talents to many post-secondary institutions large and small. These also included Berkshire Community College, the Widener Library at Harvard, the Louis Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and finally at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, where she served for 42 years as the audiovisual and oral history coordinator. Oral history projects she oversaw during this time include those focused on Black women, women in federal government, women of courage, Cambodian American women, Latina women, Tully Crenshaw feminism, Chinese American women, and Radcliffe College history. She passed in 2023.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/ruth-edmonds-hill
Ruth M. Batson A Roxbury native, Ruth Batson was a champion of desegregation in education. Born in 1921, she was a daughter of Jamaican immigrants. She graduated from Girl's Latin School in 1939 and Nursery Training School of Boston, affiliated with Boston University. Her mother had a strong interest in civil rights, which inspired Batson to become the Chairman for the NAACP's Public Education Sub-Committee in 1953. Within four years, she became the NAACP New England Regional Conference Chairwoman, allowing her to lobby for civil rights. She was the first Black woman to serve on the Democratic National Committee and the first woman to be elected president of the New England Regional Conference of the NAACP. When the Boston School Committee refused to take action in the early 1960s to end segregation, she challenged them with the highly-segregated Boston Public Schools and the fact that schools that had highly Black enrollment typically had inadequate school facilities. From 1963 to 1966, she served as the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination's Chairwoman, then launched the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, a voluntary desegregation program that transported 225 Black urban children to suburban schools at the start, growing to 1,125 children across 28 communities, serving until 1969.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-ruth-batson
Sandra B. Henriquez As the first Black woman appointed to Assistant Secretary of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 2009 to 2014 by President Obama, Sandra Henriquez is a graduate of both Boston University and the Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Her extensive background in public service and housing has prepared her well for the role, including being the longest-tenured Boston Housing Authority CEO from 1996 to 2009. Currently working as CEO of the Detroit Housing Commission since 2019, Henriquez has dedicated her life to fair housing, acting as an advocate for those in need. She has also worked with Rebuilding Together, SCBH Associates, Maloney Properties, other realty firms, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in positions stretching back to 1977. Henriquez has also been noted for her philanthropy and service to boards on several organizations, including the Board of Directors including chair positions for YWCA Boston, Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, and serving on various boards for the Citizens' Housing and Planning Association, National Housing Conference, and the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation. She is also a trustee of New England Baptist Hospital.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-b-henriquez-7166446/
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Ed.D. As an Emily Hargroves Research Professor of Education, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot received her Doctorate degree from Harvard in 1972. As a sociologist, she has spent her life dedicated to examining educational culture and the relationships between human development and social change, authoring 10 books on the topic from 1978 to 2012. As a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Bunting Institute, she received the MacArthur Prize in 1984, and Harvard University's George Ledlie Prize in 1993 for research that makes the most valuable benefits to mankind and contributions to science. She was accepted as a Spencer Senior Scholar in 1995 and was named the Margaret Mead Fellow through the Academy of Political and Social Science in 2008. She was the recipient of 28 honorary degrees from a variety of institutions in North America, and Swarthmore College established the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair in 1995, while Harvard awarded her with the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair, which will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair upon her retirement. This makes her the first Black woman in Harvard history to have an endowed professorship in her honor.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/sara-lawrence-lightfoot
Sarah Martin An active part of Boston's abolitionist movement, Sarah and her husband lived in Boston and helped fugitive slaves in the area. Her husband, having been born enslaved in North Carolina, escaped in 1856 and by 1859, had moved to Boston, becoming African Meeting House's preacher. The couple helped bolster the church's membership, with her husband's experience in enslavement and the horrors of slavery to move the abolitionist message forward. However, in a time when women were often in the background of society, Martin undertook her own work. This included founding the Fugitive Aid Society in Boston, an organization of Black women who collected food, money, and clothing donations for enslaved persons seeking their freedom during the Civil War, helping them to establish themselves in the North and work through the trauma that slavery had imparted on them.
https://www.nps.gov/places/sarah-and-john-sella-martin-house.htm
Sarah P. Remond As a lecturer, anti-slavery activist, and abolitionist campaigner, Sarah Redmond was born free in Salem, Massachusetts in 1826 and gave her first public speech against slavery at age 16 in 1842. Her mother was one of the founders of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, teaching her daughters not only household skills but also how to seek liberty within society. Becoming known for her speeches, she soon toured the northeastern United States, finding prominence in 1853 when she refused to sit in a segregated section in a theater. She often toured with her brother Charles Lenox Redmond. In 1856, as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, she toured in a range of northern and northern Midwestern states. Two years later, Redmond traveled to Britain to gather more support for the growing abolitionist movement in the U.S. She appealed to the British public to support the Union blockade of the Confederacy, then following the war, appealed for funds to support millions of newly emancipated freedmen in the South. She then went on to Italy in 1867 to receive medical training in Florence, receiving her degree and practicing medicine for almost two decades in Italy, passing in 1894 in Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Parker_Remond
Sarah-Ann Shaw As an American-born journalist, Sarah-Ann Shaw is a Roxbury native, born to a family active in the community, including the Roxbury Democratic Club and civil rights activities. An active part of the NAACP Youth Movement, she graduated in 1952, then attended Boston University. She joined the Boston Action Group in the early 1960s, and was then recruited as the director of the Boston Northern Student Movement, where she led projects such as voter education and registration, supporting welfare programs, and advocacy. She oversaw Neighborhood Operations for ABCD and the Community Health Education Program at the Ecumenical Center. She made her first TV appearance on Say Brother, which has become Basic Black, in 1968, then went on to work at WBZ-TV as the first Black female reporter in Boston in 1969, a position she held until 2000. She was the recipient of several awards over the years, including Lifetime Achievement Awards in 1998 from the National Association of Black Journalists and in 2000 from Emerson College's Radio Television News Direction Association, as well as multiple community service, unsung heroes, and other awards over the years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah-Ann_Shaw
Rep. Saundra Graham As an independent politician and community activist, Saundra Graham was born in 1941 and has been an active participant in the Cambridge and Middlesex areas for many decades. She became a member of the board of directors for the Cambridge Community Center in 1968, then became president of the Riverside Planning Team, a housing activism organization in Cambridge. The organization interrupted Harvard's graduation ceremony in 1970, with Graham taking the stage to demand that land be dedicated by the university as low-income housing rather than the planned dorm that the university was considering. Meeting for several hours, the university agreed to build low-income housing on a different site. This led to Graham's election as the first Black woman on the Cambridge City Council in 1971, and she became the first Black woman representing Cambridge in the state legislature. She passed away in 2023 at the age of 81.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saundra_Graham
Savina J. Martin As an author, community organizer, advocate, activist, and educator, Savina Martin represents poor and marginalized populations across the country. With a lifelong passion for educating and empowering marginalized individuals from the ground up, she received her Masters in 2001 from San Diego State University and her Doctorate in 2019 at College of Our Lady of the Elms Honoris Causa. Martin champions those who have had lived experiences with urban unrest, racism, systemic poverty, healthcare inequalities, addiction, homelessness, and addiction. She has served as President of the Greater Boston Union of the Homeless, including sit-ins, protests and vacant housing takeovers in the mid-1980s. She is a founder of WINGS Incorporated, a home for women, where she raised funds to refurbish the location as a place for women in need. She has contributed to We Cry Justice published in 2021 by Broadleaf Books, providing unique perspectives on scripture passages. She has spoken at many events, and is currently a statewide tri-chair for the Poor People's Campaign.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/savina-june-martin-m-s-doctorate-in-humane-letters-2a0b44230/
Shaumba-Yandje Dibinga Performing arts organization OrigiNation was founded in 194 by Shaumba-Yandje Dibinga in Roxbury, who still serves as the Founding Executive and Artistic Director. With an extensive background in training, teaching, and performing in all aspects of theater and dance, she has been producing plays and writing poetry for over 20 years. By providing a safe haven for young people, she understands the importance of teaching them health, education, self-respect, public speaking, self-confidence, career training, and the impact of African influence on a range of contemporary art forms. As the home to four professional youth dance companies, the organization implements initiatives to raise awareness in students of related social issues while facilitating the students' development into well-rounded individuals. Serving 400 youth on location and another 5,000 through artist-in-residence initiatives, the organization and Shaumba-Yandhe's work has captured many awards over the years.
https://www.barrfoundation.org/bios/shaumba-yandje-dibinga
Rep. Shirley Owens-Hicks With a long history of public service stretching over two decades, Shirley Owens-Hicks began her political career in the Democratic Party as a Boston School Committee member from 1984 to 1988, working to bring equity and quality education to children in the school system. Following this, she represented the 6th Suffolk District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1987 until 2006, following the example of her brother, Bill Owens, who served in the Massachusetts Senate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Owens-Hicks
Susan Paul As an author and educator devoted to social justice, community action, and change, Susan Paul was born in 1809 in the greater Boston area. Her parents' community roles as a school headmistress and minister exposed her to local community activists, and she chose to follow her mother's example by training as a teacher. Starting at Boston Primary School No. 6 and shortly after at the Abiel Smith School, which were both intended for Black children in the area, she added civic engagement in the standard curriculum. Her students were taught about the horrors of slavery, and she took them to anti-slavery meetings where they were able to listen to abolitionists. She formed a juvenile choir in 1832 which performed at anti-slavery meetings and held concerts to fundraise for abolitionist causes. She wrote The Memoir of James Jackson, published in 1835, which incorporated religious and moral themes to educate children about living with character, and is believed to be the first Black biography published in the U.S. Paul was active in many anti-slavery and temperance organizations, before personal tragedy and illness cut her life short at the age of 31, passing away in 1841 from tuberculosis.
https://www.nps.gov/people/susan-paul.htm
Susie K. Taylor As a teacher and nurse, Susie Taylor achieved several firsts in her lifetime, overcoming adversity from her birth in enslavement in Georgia in 1848. She was able to attend two secret schools taught by Black women despite the state's harsh laws forbidding formal education of Blacks. During the Civil War, her uncle led her to a Union gunboat near Confederate-held Fort Pulaski, giving her freedom at age 14. As a refugee, she found safety behind Union lines on the South Carolina Sea Islands. She attached herself to the First South Carolina Volunteers, which was the first U.S. Army Black regiment, first as a laundress, then as a cook, but her literacy allowed her to serve as a reading instructor for the regiment. She married her husband in the regiment, remaining together with the unit until 1866. However, when her husband passed away, she moved to Boston in 1872. She devoted her life to working with the Woman's Relief Corps, an organization serving female Civil War veterans. After publishing her memoir, My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, in 1902, she passed away a decade later in 1912.
https://www.nps.gov/people/susie-king-taylor.htm
Teri Williams As President and Chief Operating Officer of OneUnited Bank, Teri Williams heads up the largest Black-owned bank in the United States. Also serving on the board of directors, she is focused on implementing strategic initiatives while overseeing daily operations. Offering a range of innovative products and services that are designed to close the racial wealth gap, she has spent over 40 years gathering financial services expertise from premier financial institutions, including American Express, where she was one of the youngest Vice Presidents in the company's history, as well as Bank of America. With a Bachelors from Brown University and an MBA with Honors from Harvard, she has served in a range of roles over the years, including Chairman of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, the board of the 79th Street Corridor in Miami, Chair of the Urban Initiative Task Force of the Miami-Dade Beacon Council, board of the CCC Intelligent Solutions, and has received a number of awards and recognition for her contribution to urban communities, including being selected by Forbes Magazine in 2022 in its 50 over 50 list of women with careers in financial services.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/teri-williams-99811029/
Terri Lyne Carrington As a jazz drummer, composer, producer and educator, Terri Carrington was born in Medford in 1965 and has performed with and toured with several top musical acts over the years. Growing up in a musical family, she was given a set of drums at age seven, and after privately studying for three years, she gave her first major performance at the Wichita Jazz Festival, earning her a full scholarship the next year to Berklee College of Music. She moved to New York in 1983 to work with a range of talented musicians, and then to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, including writing and producing her own work. 2011 saw her touring South America with several other artists. Appointed as a professor at her alma mater, Berklee College of Music, she has also won three Grammy Awards across her seven albums, including being the first female musician to win a Grammy in 2013 for the Best Jazz Instrumental Album. She is the founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice as well as The Car Center. She has also written a children's book and a book New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Lyne_Carrington
Thea L. James, M.D.With a strong life-long passion for improving health outcomes and reducing healthcare inequalities, Thea James has worked with Boston Medical Center for many years, most currently as the Vice President of Mission. Working with caregivers throughout the medical center's system, she coordinates and maximizes the medical center's strategic alliances and relationships with many national, state, and local organizations. These include a range of housing advocates, community agencies, and similar organizations that are focused on fostering innovative and effective models of care that are needed for the health center's patients and their surrounding communities to be able to thrive and reach their full potential. James' role includes a range of intersections between health, wealth, economic mobility, and similar upstream drivers that tend to predict poor health outcomes. Using these care models, she works to bring operational equality in a broader sense to Boston Medical Center patients now and long into the future.
https://www.bmc.org/about-us/directory/doctor/thea-l-james-md
Thelma D. Burns As a life-long community activist and advocate for the Black community in Boston, Thelma Burns has served in a wide range of roles in organizations across the metro area. She has served on the Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) Board of Directors for over 35 years, including Committee Chair, Vice Chair, and Board Chair. She has headed the board for the ABCD Dorchester Neighborhood Service Center for over 15 years, and has worked in leadership on a number of community boards including the Mayor's Senior Advisory Council, the Roxbury YMCA, and Central Boston Elder Services. She also served from 1980 to 2008 as the director for the Belmont Public Schools Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity. She received a Robert F. Kennedy Fellowship in 1968, and has received her Bachelors from Boston University and Masters from Harvard. Because of her extensive ongoing work serving the community, the Thelma D. Burns Building was dedicated in her honor in 2016.
https://www.boston.gov/news/black-history-boston-thelma-burns
Tommiejo Dixon As a fixture of Boston's food scene, Ma Dixon's, originally Ma Dixon's Diner, was founded by Tommiejo Dixon with encouragement from her husband in 1943. Born in 1914, Dixon opened the sandwich shop to provide southern-style cuisine and is now being managed by her great-nephew and -niece. As a family-owned restaurant, Dixon, together with her sisters Janie and Ruth, would provide a comfortable location that catered to the Black community in the area. Moving to its current Grove Hall location in 1968, the business weathered the loss of Dixon in 1979, with her sisters taking over the operation, then their children following in the family tradition of providing delicious food to the community.
https://bwht.org/women-feeding-boston-tour/
Tulaine Montgomery With a strong belief in creating a better world for everyone, Tulaine Montgomery serves as CEO of New Profit. Based on a coalition of social change makers and entrepreneurs, the organization is advancing a vision of an America where all people can thrive and grow. Montgomery has worked in leadership roles in launching and expanding social enterprises worldwide, providing advice to numerous nonprofits and socially-responsible companies. She has backed many of the most powerful, promising social innovations in the United States through her work with venture philanthropy organization New Profit. She believes that by advocating for a new era of philanthropy that focuses on lifting up leaders that are in the closest proximity to issues, these visionary leaders can better scale innovations and create transformation in the most inequitable systems in the country. These include strengthening the education-to-employment pathways for underserved individuals, pushing resources and support for entrepreneurs impacted directly by the U.S. legal system, and by improving diversity, equity, and inclusiveness in philanthropy. The organization also bridges the resource gap often faced by minority and underinvested social entrepreneurs.
https://tulainemontgomery.com/
Valerie Mosley Graduating in 1982 with her Bachelors from Duke University, Valerie Mosley has always focused on success. As the former Duke student body vice president and president realized moving forward with her MBA from The Wharton School, where she has served as president of Alumni Affairs, she realized that she wanted to work with companies that add value not only to investors, but to society at large. After managing billions of dollars of assets at Wellington Management for over 20 years, she realized she wanted more and created Valmo Ventures to provide advice and investment funds in businesses that made that dream a reality. Representing organizations including Fundify, Quantum Exchange, STEAMRole, TEquitable, and other companies, her business provides these companies and leaders with the financial and informational resources they need to improve their chances of success and rate of growth. She also serves on boards of a range of businesses and organizations to help them achieve their goals in the community and in business.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeriemosley/
Valerie Shelley As a long-time community activist, leader and champion for the Orchard Gardens neighborhood, Valerie Shelley had been a strong advocate for Boston Housing Authority families, especially for Orchard Gardens. Born in 1948 in the Orchard Park Public Housing Development, she left in 1966 to work initially at a law firm, and later for the Boston Public Schools system. Her sisters remained in public housing through redevelopment. She retired in 1999 and returned to the renamed Orchard Gardens, assisting her sister with advocating for people in the community. When her sister Edna Bynoe passed away in 2010, Shelley knew that she needed to step up into a leadership role to keep her sister's work alive. Taking on the role of President of the Orchard Gardens Tenant Task Force, she carried on that legacy. She also served as the Chair of the Boston Housing Authority's Resident Advisory Board, an organization that reviews Boston Housing Authority policy changes, as well as the organization's annual and five-year plans. With a focus on helping residents to realize that they have a voice, she continued that work for twelve years, advocating for the community and residents of Orchard Gardens for many years until her death in 2022.
https://www.bostonhousing.org/en/News/BHA-Statement-on-the-Passing-of-Valerie-Shelley.aspx
Vivian Male As a current jazz artist, Vivian Male is based in Boston but travels the United States to perform at jazz festivals, concerts, national conferences, corporate events, and other special events. Annual concerts at Martha's Vineyard and the Scullers Jazz Club in Boston regularly sell out. She has helped raise funds for educational scholarships through producing and performing at concerts for Berklee College of Music, as well as a range of non-profit organizations. She held a record-breaking fundraiser for The Negro Ensemble Company in New York. Featured as a vocalist for the New England Emmy Awards, inducted into the Steppin' Out Hall of Fame in Boston, and has performed the National Anthem for the New England Patriots on multiple occasions.
http://www.vivianmale.com/about.html
Sister Virginia Morrison With a strong belief in the concept that an engaged mind keeps children - and adults - out of trouble, Virginia Morrison has served as the executive director of the Grove Hall Neighborhood Development Corporation for many years and has pushed for the construction and development of a new community center in Dorchester, a dream which became a reality in 2022. A lack of standalone community centers in Dorchester and Grove Hall has led to significant area violence, and community leaders like Morrison know that the only way to reduce that violence is by creating opportunities for people to gather for collaboration, learn, play, and connect. The new building will allow for a wider range of programs, resources, education, and community space to improve the neighborhood's quality of life. She also advocates for more community policing, more involvement on the streets by both religious and civic organizations, and encourages community members to report problems when they occur so that they can be part of the solution.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-bostons-grove-hall-a-new-community-center-and-old-frustrations-around-violence/ar-AA12W29v
Wilhelmina Marguerita Crosson Moving to Boston in 1906, Wilhelmina Crosson graduated from Girls' High School and then began teaching, starting in 1920 by teaching remedial reading to children of Italian immigrants. Her experiences with the classes encouraged her to create the first remedial reading program for the City of Boston in 1935. But a decade prior to that push, she also founded The Aristo Club of Boston, an organization of professional Black woman who provided scholarships to Black students while promoting the study of Black history. The organization successfully campaigned the Boston Public School System to celebrate Negro History Week. Though she officially retired in 1966, she found that retirement didn't sit well with her, and within two years, she founded a training program for Peace Corps volunteers, while also spending significant amounts of time in her retirement years tutoring individuals in different subjects and volunteering at the city's homeless shelters.
https://www.boston.gov/news/meet-wilhelmina-marguerita-crosson-boston-teacher-who-advocated-black-history-education
Zakiya Alake After receiving her Associates at Antioch School of Law Paralegal Tech Program in 1980, Zakiya Alake undertook additional education at Fitchburg State University and University of Massachusetts Boston, but didn't find that law fed her passion for food, love, and community building. Instead, she started and operated Zakiya Alake's Abundance Catering and ZAGE Inc, focusing on serving the community while feeding her passion by feeding those around her for over 40 years. This passion for nourishing the people around her is leading Alake into developing her next steps in business while remaining focused on building community, spreading love, and providing nourishing food.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakiya-alake-62ba5a42/
Zipporah P. Atkins As the first Black person to own land in the United States, Zipporah Atkins was born in colonial Boston to enslaved parents. At that time, in the colony of Massachusetts, children of slaves were considered to be free at birth. She had inherited funds from her father which he had, in turn, received from his former enslaver, and by 1670, at age 25, she used the funds to purchase property in Boston's North End neighborhood, which is now part of the Rose Kennedy Greenway. As a single Black woman, it was very unusual that her purchase was able to go through given the social norms of the time, but even after she married, she retained full ownership of the property during a time when husbands had control over their wives and their property. She sold a portion of her land in 1693 for 100 pounds, and six years later, sold the remainder of the property for an additional 25 pounds. The deed for the property was signed with her initials, indicating that she knew how to read and write during a time when most Black, and many white, people in the colonies were still illiterate. Following this final sale, Atkins passed from history's notice.
https://wanderwomenproject.com/women/zipporah-potter-atkins/
Angela Paige CookRaised in a family of educators, Angela Cook is a co-founder of Paige Academy, an early childhood education center focused on sharing knowledge and building better brains in children. She received a Bachelors from Fisk University, followed by a Masters at Wheelock College, and served as an Urban Studies Fellow at MIT. She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 at University of Massachusetts Boston, and all of her education has been focused on early and urban education. Her dissertation entitled A Case Study of a Black Independent School: Reflections on Cultural Resonance in an Elementary and Preschool Setting was the basis for Paige Academy, which in turn was named for her great, great aunt Lucy Paige Williams, who regularly formed schools of benevolence in her home, teaching handcrafts, reading, and other skills.
www.paigeacademy.org/#history
Anna Mae ColeAnna Mae Cole was a co-founder of the Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation in the 1980s, creating a model for the nation for public housing that was tenant controlled. She was a strong community advocate and activist pushing for improved services for Jamaica Plain, promoting the idea of urban gardening throughout the public housing corporation to improve neighborhood pride and beautification, and eventually moving into vegetable production in the neighborhood. Cole has since had the Anna Mae Cole Community Center named after her, providing programs, events, sports, a multi-purpose room, and a community kitchen. It also features more green spaces, which were at the heart of Anna Cole's push for community gardens in the area while she was active.
https://www.boston.gov/news/creating-community-forming-ties-bostons-neighborhoods
https://jamaicaplaingazette.com/2012/02/17/bromley-heath-leader-retires-bha-takes-over/
https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collection/p15774coll6/id/5248
https://tcbinc.org/news/construction-starts-at-mildred-c-hailey-apartments-in-boston/
Edna J. SwanAs the first Black female police officer to serve with the Boston Police Department in 1943, Patrolman Edna J. Swan had already attended Fisk University during the Great Depression, along with volunteering with the Red Cross, which started her passion for public service.
https://blackstonian.org/2018/02/black-history-boston-police-department/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230331030735/https://bpdnews.com/news/2023/2/22/lwwczsocux2dykgza091hn0ynnfik9
https://www.newsbreak.com/boston-ma/2935374594847-bpd-and-mamleo-honor-former-police-officer-edna-swan-and-deputy-superintendent-willis-saunders
https://bpdnews.com/news/2023/2/22/lwwczsocux2dykgza091hn0ynnfik9
Ella I. GarrettA Boston native born in 1924, Ella Garnett was an active public servant, working for over 30 years in the U.S. General Services Administration at the Public Building Service Headquarters as a Senior Procurement Analyst. After attending Simmons College and marrying her former husband following World War II, she developed and wrote procurement policies for the Federal Government, impacting how federal buildings that were either owned or leased were built or maintained across the entire United States. She also provided analysis of federal projects that had been approved by the U.S. Congress for new construction, renovations, and annual designs. She passed away peacefully in 2016.
https://www.leblackphillipsholdenfuneralhome.com/obituary/Ella-Garnett
Frances Carolyn Harris Providing leadership, comfort, and joy to those in her presence at the Holy Tabernacle and other churches in the Boston area, Frances Carolyn Harris was born in the late 1930s. She was known for her presence, strong faith, and dedication to family, church, and community.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/frances-harris-obituary?id=16922765
Frances J. Bonner, M.D. A member of the Massachusetts General Psychiatry Department for over 50 years, Frances Bonner was the first Black female physician to train on the service in 1949, following her neurology training at Boston City High School. After receiving a two-year fellowship from Radcliffe College focused on hysteria, she began her research career, later undertaking neurobiological research at the institution. She received her psychoanalytic certification from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in 1975, founding the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England with other co-founders. She dedicated the bulk of her career to clinical practice, supervising residents in individual psychotherapy sessions. She was known as a pioneer in crossing gender and racial boundaries in medicine, and is the namesake of an award established in 2010 by the Massachusetts General Department of Psychiatry as well as the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, promoting diversity and inclusion in psychiatric communities.
http://history.massgeneral.org/catalog/Detail.aspx?itemId=1456&searchFor=bonner
www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/about/center-for-diversity/bonner-award
"Jacqui" Jacquelyn Jones HoardA 1990 recipient of the Henry L. Shattuck Public Service Awards, Jacqui Hoard is well known in Boston's Black community for her dedication to public service and the community at large. Sister to Clarence Jack "Jeep" Jones, Boston's first and only deputy mayor, Jacqui had the same determination and dedication to serving the community as her brother,
https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/The-loss-of-a-Lifelong-Friend-of-Minister-Louis-and-Khadijah-Farrakhan-Boston-shows-appreciation-for-the-life-of-Clarence-Jeep-Jones.shtml
thebostonsun.com/2019/07/12/sunset-concert-at-symphony-community-park/
https://bmrb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018-Shattuck-ProgramB.pdf
Joyce Ferriabough BollingWith the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, a Democratic strategist and journalist with the Boston Herald, saw the opportunity for getting more Black individuals into office in 2013. With Boston's longest-serving Mayor Menino stepping down in that year and half of the 12-person field being persons of color. Her late husband Bruce was the city's first Black council president in the 1980s, and that passion to reshape the political environment in favor of minority candidates shows up in everything she does. However, she sees strategy at the same time, noting that though there is much opportunity, having too many persons of color running for a single position means that nobody will win that political seat.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/01/08/metro/with-bidens-selection-walsh-mayors-race-heats-up
Karen MillerAs Boston's first Black female firefighter, Karen Miller was born in Roxbury, moving later to the Academy Homes apartment complex. Serving six years with the U.S. Army Reserves, she became the first Black female firefighter in Boston in August 1985. She was encouraged by her brother, a state trooper, to take the civil service exams and take the first job that came up, which happened to be the fire department. Starting out at Ladder 10 in Jamaica Plain, she was one of the few women in the department to not be started exclusively on engine duty. Facing an uphill battle that included oversize unisex equipment and no designated bathrooms, she tried to not make waves, but in meeting up with other women in the department, they began organizing for reforms, negotiating changes in employee policies such as locked bathrooms, smaller protective equipment sizes for women, and refitting the shower area for better privacy. She has since become a fire investigator, education and prevention specialist prior to retiring in 2006. She now serves as executive director of the Boston Society of Vulcans, a non-profit focused on recruiting minorities to public safety positions.
https://www.dotnews.com/2010/retired-firefighter-miller-recognized-pioneer
Letitia CampfieldIn the early 20th century, there were many areas of society and work that were inaccessible to Blacks and persons of color, as well as women. In 1929, Letitia Campfield was one of two Black women who were the first Blacks to be admitted to Boston City Hospital's School of Nursing. Historically, free Black medical practitioners were held in contempt, and finishing formal medical school was very challenging for persons of color. At the same time, discrimination was a constant threat to persons of color in medical fields. This resistance to Blacks in the medical industry was just one part of a slow, arduous integration process in the medical field..
https://www.blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaVU00cO_Fc/?utm_medium=copy_link
https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/Guide%20to%20the%20Boston%20City%20Hospital%20collection_tcm3-52281.pdf
Rev. Liz WalkerFirst arriving in Boston over 40 years ago as a rising broadcast news star, Liz Walker was the first Black anchor of a regular nightly newscast, later moving into work as an ordained minister and community leader. She started out with on-air success in San Francisco and Denver, then put down strong roots in Boston following desegregation, a pain she understood as one of the first students desegregating West Side Junior High in Little Rock. Always walking by faith throughout her life as the daughter of a preacher, she is now changing gears from preaching, which had given her a direct connection to provide a voice to those who were not being heard in the community, towards writing a book on trauma and healing, an area she explored in depth starting a decade ago when violence broke out in the neighborhood around her church. Her preaching includes a degree from Harvard Divinity School, working a sa pastor in one of Boston's poorest neighborhoods, and building a girl's school in southern Sudan in Africa.
Margaret MoseleyBorn in Dedham in 1901, Margaret Moseley found herself at odds with a segregated world, kept out of serious nursing or business work by discrimination. Instead, she was a founding member of a 1940s consumers' cooperative, served on the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union board, and was a founding member who also served on Freedom House's board in Roxbury. She served as Community Church's president, and as the Massachusetts legislative chair for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Focused on serving as a peace, community, and civil rights activist, which in 1989 started the Margaret Moseley Memorial Peace Fund. She moved to Cape Cod in 1961, continuing her dedication to community activism by founding local chapters of the NAACP and WILPF, as well as many other organizations. She served Barnstable's Unitarian Church as a founding member of its social responsibility committee and as the first woman chairing the prudential committee. She was part of the committee to meet the reverse freedom riders in 1962, part of an attempt to embarrass President Kennedy by stirring up racial problems where his family spent summers. She traveled to Selma, Alabama in 1965 with other women from WILPF to work on voting rights.
https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5527
https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/margaret-moseley/
https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:american+folklife+center&q=Moseley,+Margaret.+Papers+-+The+Civil+Rights+History+Project:+Survey+of+Collections+and+Repositories+%28The+American+Folklife+Center,+Library+of+Congress%29
https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/
Mildred C. HaileyFrom the late 1960s, when the Bromley-Health Public Housing Development began being operated by tenants, until her death, Mildred Hailey was always a guiding hand on the organization. She started the drive to gain control of the development from the Boston Housing Authority in 1968 by repairing conditions that wouldn't be tolerated to negotiating truces between rival gangs that led to a successful GED program, she considered the entire community to be her extended family. Considered to be a force of nature by many, Hailey took on a very difficult job with a combination of compassion and courage at a time when running water, heat, and electricity were fairly spotty and there were over 4,000 broken windows around the entire development when a progressive board of commissioners stepped aside to let the tenants save themselves. By building a new sense of strong community, it became a model of how to reclaim broken public housing systems. Though she retired in 2012 from her position as executive director, she still showed up at all meetings until the last couple of months of her life in 2015.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/19/mildred-hailey-tenant-activism-transformed-boston-public-housing/uMvf9iF3ozuC8lLlVOKiCN/story.html
Mamie Nell "Mimi" JonesKnown for the famous photo in 1964 that spread around the world of racial attacks in Boston, Mimi Jones was 17 at the time she participated in a swim-in to integrate a Florida pool, born in 1947 in Georgia. With her mouth open in a scream, the white motel owner behind her was dumping acid into the water. The St. Augustine incident drew international coverage, causing President Johnson to discuss the attack in the Oval Office and driving strong support for the stalled Civil Rights Act of 1964, with overwhelming approval by the U.S. Senate the day after the photo was released. She moved to Boston later in life for a college scholarship and continued her community activism, started even earlier in her life teaching poor rural Black persons in Georgia to read so that they could register to vote and joined the March on Washington in 1963. After settling in Boston, she began working for the state Education Department, wrote grants for local nonprofits, and participated with a number of organizations and committees, seeking social justice. She passed away in her Roxbury home in 2020.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/27/metro/overlooked-her-role-galvanizing-civil-rights-protest-mimi-jones-dies-73/
Nadine Fortune WrightBorn in 1893 in Illinois, Nadine Wright was born into a wealthy family with her parents being well-educated teachers. However, their wealth didn't protect the family from state-sanctioned racially-based crimes, stirring up in Nadine a strong passion for lifelong activism and achievement. A resurgence of racism and the death of her father in 1899 caused significant issues for the family, and when her mother passed away in 1906, it was decided that she and her brother would be sent to Cambridge to live with their aunt, who helped found the Niagara Movement. Growing up in a home at the center of Black political and intellectual activity, the children learned how to think for themselves, with Wright graduating from Radcliffe in 1917 while continuing her civil rights work. She then taught in the Cambridge public school system for almost 20 years, chartering the Boston Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, acting as a trustee of Robert Gould Shaw house, and serving in many organizations. After marrying, she spent teaching at colleges in North Carolina before returning to Boston to work with children with cerebral palsy. She passed away in 1994.
https://www.mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210228123150/https://mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
Bishop Nellie YarboroughWith a strong focus on making sure that everyone had somebody to lean on in hard times, Nellie Yarborough worked with a range of church parishioners and police to move the Dorchester neighborhood out of crime and poverty. Born in North Carolina to a preacher's family, she began preaching at age 12 to the congregation's youth, traveling at age 17 with Brumfield Johnson, the church's founder. Their travels led them to Boston, where the church's headquarters was established. With a passion for ministering for those in need, she was appointed as the assistant pastor of Mount Calvary Holy Church in 1962, becoming the senior pastor a decade later when Johnson passed away, and ordained as a bishop in 1994, the second woman to hold that title. An educated, adaptable pillar of the community, she was a friend to the homeless, advocating for them with politicians and serving food to those in need every Thursday night to crowds that often topped 100. She continued serving the community throughout her years, passing away in 2012.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/nellie-yarborough-obituary?id=7382565
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-boston-globe/20121224/282024734591443
Nora L. BastonAs an 18-year Boston Police Department veteran, Nora Baston serves as a pillar of the community, managing community engagement for the department and doing so very well. In addition to getting guns off of Boston streets and tracking down girls who are moving into gangs, she lives for the goodwill she gets from young students who want to share their success, in one case waiting hours to show her their report card. As deputy superintendent, she's one of four women on the command staff for Boston Police, and she takes that responsibility seriously, going out three or four nights a week to engage with kids, be a mentor, and build trust in areas where violence is prevalent to give youth an alternative from gangs and drugs. With two degrees from University of Massachusetts Lowell and having graduated from Boston Police Academy in 1996, she credits former Police Commissioner Davis with teaching her how to connect with people one-on-one. She sees education as the best police work, getting kids that would otherwise get into trouble into college or back into school.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2014/04/07/women-in-command-deputy-superintendent-nora-l-baston/
Peggy Olivia Brown Ed.D.With a strong belief that all children can learn, Peggy Brown feared that children of color were being overlooked in public schools, leading them to drop out, end up in legal trouble, or lead unfulfilled lives. Born in 1934 in Washington, D.C., she grew up in New York City, where she saw the devastating life paths of those who didn't have positive role models in her south Bronx neighborhood. She then attended multiple universities before lecturing at Northeastern University and Boston College. To make a difference, she launched initiatives to improve healthcare in Roxbury with the Mandela Town Hall Health Spot which provided weekly blood sugar and blood pressure screenings, with Dr. Brown inviting dentists, optometrists, or other health professionals to help address disparities she was seeing. At the same time, she was founding the Mandela Crew, providing youth in the area with access to a sport they wouldn't participate in traditionally. She worked with kids in groups or one-on-one, sometimes staying up with youth until 4 or 5 AM to help them write term papers to ensure they could graduate high school, steering them into the possibilities of a successful life. After many years making a strong impact on youth in the community, she passed in 2014.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/27/peggy-brown-educator-and-activist-founded-mandela-crew-first-african-american-and-latino-team-compete-head-charles/p0962cwuqrl5SLsObdjkzJ/story.html
Shirley ShillingfordWith a strong focus on food and carnival, Shirley Shillingford is the name behind Shirley's Pantry in Mattapan. As president of the Caribbean American Carnival Association of Boston (CACAB), Shillingford started with the organization in 1975 as she worked for Mayor White's administration. She served alongside Edward Harry and Sebastian Joseph who ran the organization for 16 years after founder Ivy Ponder and Ken Bonaparte Mitchell stepped back. She then took over in 1990, serving as the lead for Boston Carnival for the past 33 years. For a similar long period of time, she's been serving at what was the Healthy Baby, Health Food Pantry on River Street, which has now been renamed as Shirley's Pantry following her founding of the pantry in 1992 with no resources except asking businesses and the government for help. With a strong dedication to community and disadvantaged populations, Shillingford has often reached out to employees, elected officials, and community members to keep the pantry operating for everything from food to appliances to labor.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-08-25/bostons-carnival-celebrating-50-years-is-a-treasure-says-organizer
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/it-s-shirley-s-pantry-now-renaming-honors-longtime-manager-mattapan
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/23/mattapan-food-pantry-named-for-its-manager-a-longtime-activist/
Angela Paige Cook, Ph.D. (Active 1970s to 2010s)Raised in an educational family, Angela Paige Cook, Ph.D., is one of the co-founders of Paige Academy. After receiving a Bachelors from Fish University and a Masters at Wheelock College, she received an Urban Studies Fellowship at MIT, and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2002. Her focus on early childhood and urban education was reflected in her dissertation A Case Study of a Black Independent School: Reflections on Cultural Resonance in an Elementary and Preschool Setting, which was the foundation for the school. Paige Academy is an early childhood education center that has a primary focus on building better brains in children through shared knowledge.
www.paigeacademy.org/#history
Anna Mae Cole (Active 1980s to 1990s)As a co-founder of the Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation in the 1980s, Anna Mae Cole helped create a model for tenant-controlled public housing nationwide. As a strong community activist and advocate, she pushed for a range of improved services in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. She promoted urban gardening to help improve pride and beautification in the neighborhood, adding vegetable production in later years to help with the shortage of fresh food in the area. The Anna Mae Cole Community Center was named for her, which features green spaces as well as programming, sports, events, a community kitchen, and a multi-purpose room.
https://www.boston.gove/news/creating-community-forming-ties-bostons-neighborhoods
https://jamaicaplaingazette.com/2012/02/17/bromley-health-retires-bha-takes-over/
https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collecton/p15774coll6/id/5248
https://tcbinc.org/news/construction-starts-at-mildred-c-hailey-apartments-in-boston/
***Cleora Carter FrancisI've done a search of the entire Boston Globe site as well as in-depth internet sites - I cannot find anything on this woman. Without additional details, I will not be able to continue on this biography.
Edna C. Robinson Brown, D.D.M. (Active 1920s to 1940s)As the first Black woman to perform dentistry in Cambridge, Edna C. Robinson Brown was a dentist who graduated from Columbia University and was a very early member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Psi Omega chapter. Though not much is known about her life, being able to attend Columbia as a Black woman means that she probably attended after 1923, as Columbia University recognizes Elizabeth Delaney as the University's College of Dental Medicine's first Black female graduate.
https://www.akaboston.org/chapter-history
https://thelowdown.alumni.columbia.edu/history_of_women_at_columbia
Edna J. Swan (Active 1943 to 1960s)Serving as the first Black female police officer with the Boston Police Department, Patrolman Edna J. Swan attended Fisk University during the Great Depression. She also volunteered with the Red Cross during that time, igniting her passion for public service. She began her service with the department in 1943.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-bostons-grove-hall-a-new-community-center-and-old-frustrations-around-violence/ar-AA12W29v
Elta M. Garrett (Born 1942)As a co-founder of the Hamilton-Garrett Music & Arts Academy with Ruth Hamilton, Elta Garrett was born in 1942 and has dedicated over 50 years of her life as a music teacher within the Boston Public School System and was a noted soprano singer in the national musical community. Following her retirement, she worked as the founding director of the Academy for twelve years. She remained an active supporter as a member of the Board of the Academy and has been recognized for over two decades of service to the Historic Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church.
https://clustrmaps.com/person/Garrett-89ubff
https://www.hamiltongarrett.org/whoweare
Francis Carolyn Harris (Active 1929 to 1950s)As one of the two first Black women admitted to the School of Nursing at Boston City Hospital, Francis Carolyn Harris entered the nursing program in 1929. At the time, there were very few licensed Black female nurses in the United States, Massachusetts, and Boston, and individuals in these roles often faced significant discrimination and difficulty in finishing their formal medical training. The other Black woman admitted to the School of Nursing at the time was Letitia Campfield.
https://www.blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
Frances J Bonner, M.D. (Active 1949 to 1980s)
As the first Black female physician with the Massachusetts General Psychiatry Department, Frances J. Bonner, M.D. began her training in 1949. She received her fellowship from Radcliffe College focusing on hysteria, leading to her long research career, including neurobiological research at the college. She received a psychoanalytic certification in 1975 from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She helped co-found the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England and dedicated most of her career to clinical practice while supervising residents during individual psychotherapy sessions. She had a reputation as a pioneer in crossing the boundaries in gender and racial medicine. An award was established in her name in 2010 at the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and the Massachusetts General Department of Psychiatry.
http://history.massgeneral.org/catalog/Detail.aspx?itemId+1456&searchFor=bonner
www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/about/center-for-diversity/bonner-award
Gladys HolmesI have been unable to find any details on this woman. It is a relatively common name, and despite multiple searches to track this down to the Boston region, I have been unable to locate more details. Without further information, I cannot complete this biography.
“Jacqui” Jones Hoard (Active 1980s to 1990s)Jacqui Jones Hoard was a 1990 recipient of the Henry L. Shattuck Public Service Award. Well-known throughout Boston’s Black community for her strong dedication to the community and public service, she was the sister to Clarence Jack “Jeep” Jones, Boston’s first and only Black deputy mayor, showcasing the family’s overall determination and dedication to community service.
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/The-loss-of-a-Lifelong-Friend-of-Minister-Louis-and-Khadijah-Farrakhan-Boston-shows-appreciation-for-the-life-of-Clarence-Jeep-Jones.shtml
thebostonsun.com/2019/07/12/sunset-concert-at-symphony-community-park/
https://bmrb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018-shattuck-programB.pdf
Joyce Ferriabough Bolling (Active 2013 to Present)
The growth of the Black Lives Matter Movement led Democratic strategist and journalist Joyce Ferriabough Bolling to work to get more Black individuals into public office starting in 2013. As Boston’s longest-serving mayor, Mayor Menino, stepped down, half of the 12-person primary were people of color. Using the passion she’d found when her late husband Bruce ran and served as the city’s first Black council president in the 1980s, she found that having too many people of color running for a single position ensured that nobody would get the seat, driving her to stand behind candidates that had the best potential to bring about change.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/01/08/metro/with-bidens-selection-walsh-mayors-race-heats-up
Karen Miller (Active 1985 to 2006)
Serving as Boston’s first Black female firefighter, Karen Miller is a Roxbury native who moved to the Academy Homes apartment Complex. After serving for six years with the U.S. Army Reserves, she joined the Boston Fire Department in August 1985 after being encouraged by her brother, a state trooper, to take the civil service exam and take the first job available. Starting out in Ladder 10 in Jamaica Plain, she was one of the few women in the entire department who was not started exclusively on engine duty. Meeting with other women, she realized they had all faced an uphill battle with oversized unisex equipment and no designated or locking bathroom space. She organized with these women for reforms. She has since worked as a fire investigator, educator, and prevention specialist prior to her 2006 retirement, after which she served as the executive director of the Boston Society of Vulcans, a non-profit focused on recruiting minorities to public safety positions.
https://dotnews.com/2010/retired-firefighter-miller-recognized-pioneer
Letitia Campfield (Active 1929 to 1950s)
During the early parts of the 20th century, many areas of society and employment were inaccessible to Blacks and other persons of color, as well as women. Leticia Campfield was one of two Black women who, in 1929, were the first Black women to be admitted to Boston City Hospital’s School of Nursing. Historically, free Black medical practitioners were viewed with contempt and finishing formal training was difficult at best for persons of color. Discrimination was also a constant threat to persons of color in the medical industry. This made Campfield’s admission, along with Francis Carolyn Harris the same year, a marked victory for Black medical professionals.
https://Blackfacts.com/fact/first-nurses-at-city-hospital
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaVU00cO_Fc/?utm_medium=copy_link
https://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/Guide%20to%20the%20Boston%20City%20Hospital%20collection_tcm3-52281.pdf
Rev. Liz Walker (Active 1970s to 2020s)
As a rising broadcast news star, Liz Walker was the first Black anchor of a regular nightly newscast when she arrived in Boston over 40 years ago. Starting out with on-air success in Denver and San Francisco, she understood the pain of Boston Blacks during desegregation as one of the first students desegregated to West Side Junior High in Little Rock, Arkansas. As the daughter of a preacher, she always walked in faith, which led her to her own work as an ordained minister and community leader. She’s worked on a book focused on trauma and healing following an outbreak of violence near her church and neighborhood. Her experience includes her degree from Harvard Divinity School, ministering to those in Boston’s lowest-income neighborhoods, and helping build a girl’s school in Sudan, Africa.
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/liz-walker-retires-roxbury-presbyterian-church/
https://roxburypresbyterianchurch.org/our-pastor/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Walker_(journalist)
Margaret Moseley (Active 1940s to 1960s)Born in 1901 in Dedham and kept out of significant business or nursing work by discrimination, Margaret Moseley was a founding member of a 1940s consumer cooperative, served on the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union board and founded and served on the Freedom House board in Roxbury. She also served as Community Church’s president, as the Massachusetts legislative chair for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, or WILPF, and worked as a civil rights, community, and peace activist, and is the namesake of the Margaret Moseley Memorial Peace Fund. She founded local chapters of the WILPF and NAACP upon moving to Cape Cod in 1961, as well as numerous other organizations. She was a founding member of the Barnstable Unitarian Church’s Social Responsibility committee and was the first woman chair of the prudential committee. She met the reverse freedom riders in 1962, and traveled to Selma, Alabama in 1965 to work on voting rights.http://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5527http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/margaret-moseley/http://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:american+folklife+center&q=Moseley,+Margaret.+Papers+-+The +Civil+Rights+History+Project:+Survey+of+Collections+and+Repositories+%28The+American+Folklife+Center,+Library+of+Congress%29http://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/Mary Edmonia Lewis (1848 to 1907)
An American sculptor of Black and Native American descent, Mary Lewis, often known in art circles and Edmonia Lewis, was born in 1848 in upstate New York. Following her brother’s success in the California Gold Rush, she was able to attend college at Oberlin Collegiate Institute, but left the college after several incidents. She moved to Boston in 1864 to pursue a career in sculpting, despite limited experience or education in the art, telling a story about seeing a sculpture of Benjamin Franklin and deciding she could make a “stone man” on her own. She was introduced to numerous sculptors in the area, but finding an instructor was difficult until Edward Agustus Brackett began teaching her. She soon began selling some of her pieces, and she opened her own studio to the public in her first exhibit the same year. Inspired by the lives of abolitionists and civil war heroes, she also began writing. She used her artwork to fund and gain subscription to travel to Rome, Italy to expand her expertise. She spent much of her life in travel before her death in London in 1907.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonia_LewisMildred C. Hailey (Active 1960s to 2015)
From the late 1960s onward, Mildred Hailey was a guiding presence over the Bromley-Heath Public Housing Development until her death in 2015. She was part of the drive to remove control of the development from the Boston Housing Authority in 1968 through a range of activities, including negotiating truces between rival gangs that led to a GED program, repairing intolerable conditions in the community, and treating the entire neighborhood as extended family. She willingly took on an extremely difficult job using a combination of courage and compassion in an area and at a time when heat, electricity, and running water were spotty at best, and was considered a force of nature by those who knew her. When the progressive board of commissioners stepped aside, she was an active part of building a sense of community and a successful model of reclaiming broken public housing. She retired as executive director in 2012, but attended meetings until the last few months of her life.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/19/mildred-hailey-tenant-activism-transformed-boston-public-housing/uMvf9iF3ozuC8lLlVOKiCN/story.html?event=event12
Nadine Fortune Wright (1893 to 1994)
Born in Illinois in 1893, Nadine Wright was born into a wealthy, well-educated family that was not protected from racial crimes. This experience stirred up in her a lifelong passion for activism and achievement. Following the death of her father in 1899 and her mother in 1906, she was sent with her brother to Cambridge to live with her aunt, a founder of the Niagara Movement. Growing up in the center of Black political and intellectual activities, she graduated from Radcliffe in 1917 and taught in the Cambridge public school system for almost 20 years. She was also a trustee for Robert Gould Shaw house, chartered the Boston Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, and served in a range of organizations. She taught at colleges in North Carolina for many years before returning to Boston to teach children with cerebral palsy. She passed away in 1994.
https://www.mountaugurn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210228123150/https://mountauburn.org/nadine-fortune-wright-1893-1994/
Bishop Nellie Yarborough (Active 1960s to 2010s)
Focused on ensuring everyone in her community could lean on someone during hard times, Nellie Yarborough worked with church parishioners and police to reduce crime and poverty in her Dorchester neighborhood. Born to a preacher’s family in North Carolina, She began preaching at age 12 and traveling at age 17 with Brumfield Johnson, to Boston, where she helped found the Mount Calvary Holy Church. She became the assistant pastor of the church in 1962 and was made senior pastor a decade later when Johnson passed. She became the second bishop of the church in 1994, and spent her life as an advocate and friend to the homeless while serving food to people in need every Thursday evening, often to crowds over 100. She passed away in 2012.
https://www.legacylcom/us/obituaries/bostonherald/name/hellie-yarborough-obituary?id=7382565
Sister Nellie S. Harris (1884 to 1964)
Sister Nellie S. Harris was born in 1884, and passed away in 1964. This was the extent of the details I could find on this individual.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/214536641/nellie-s-harris
https://www.geni.com/people/Nellie-Harris/6000000024944257856
Nora L. Baston (Active 1996 to 2020s)
A pillar of the Boston community, Nora Baston is an 18-year veteran of the Boston Police Department. Managing community engagement, she has focused on tracking down girls who are starting to move in with gangs and getting guns off the streets. Seeing the successes of Boston youth powers her drive and work as deputy superintendent, one of four women working on the Boston Police command staff. She spends three to four nights weekly engaging with kids in Boston, whether it’s as a mentor or in other roles, building trust in areas where violence is strong. By providing youth with alternatives to gangs and drugs, she hopes to turn the community around. She has two degrees from University of Massachusetts Lowell and has graduated from the Boston Police Academy in 1996, crediting former Police Commissioner Davis with teaching her the best ways to connect with people on a one-on-one basis. https://www.bostonherald.com/2014/04/07/women-in-command-deputy-superintendent-nora-l-baston/Peggy Olivia Brown, Ed.D. (1934 to 2014)
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1934, Peggy Brown had strong concerns that children of color were being overlooked in public schools. Her strongly-held belief that all children can learn led her to undertake dramatic initiatives after seeing the devastating lives of those without education in the Bronx neighborhood she grew up in. After attending multiple universities, she lectured at Northeastern University and Boston College. Her initiatives also included improved healthcare in Roxbury at the Mandela Town Hall Health Spot, providing weekly blood pressure and blood sugar screenings. Dr. Brown invited optometrists, dentists, and other healthcare professionals to help address the many healthcare disparities she saw in the community. She mentored kids one-on-one and in groups, often staying up until 4 or 5 in the morning to finish term papers to ensure they’d graduate and have a successful life until her death in 2014.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/27/peggy-brown-educator-and-activist-founded-mandela-crew-first-african-american-and-latino-team-compete-head-charles/p0962cwuqrl5SLsObdjkzJ/story.html
Shirley Carrington (Active 1980s to 1990s)As the director of the Roxbury Multi-Service Center, Shirley Carrington helped the organization strengthen families and empower the community, especially during the turbulent crime sprees of the 1980s. Reaching out to a range of organizations to bring money and services into the community, including the United Way and New Hope Baptist, she sought to leverage the Center's resources to lower crime rates by increasing employment, improving education, and lifting the entire community up with a hand up instead of a hand out. She also provided resources for lowering infant mortality in Roxbury.
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m0435b57h
https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/1011/agang.html
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:m04358327
Shirley Shillingford (Active 1975 to 2000s)
As the name behind Shirley’s Pantry in Mattapan, Shirley Shillingford has always had a strong focus on food and carnival. She started with the Caribbean American Carnival Association of Boston in 1975, she served alongside founders Ivy Ponder and Ken Bonaparte Mitchell, who stepped back in 1990 for her to lead the organization for the past 33 years. She served for a similar long period of time at Healthy Baby, Healthy Food Pantry on Mattapan’s River Street which she founded in 1992. At the time, she had no resources except asking for government and businesses for help. Her strong dedication to disadvantaged populations and communities has led her to reach out to company employees, elected officials and the community to keep the pantry running successfully for over 20 decades.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/202-08-25/bostons-carnival-celebrating-50-years-is-a-treasure-says-organizer
https://www.dotnews.com/2019/it-s-shirly-s-pantry-now-renaming-honors-longtime-manager-mattapan
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/23/mattapan-food-pantry-named-for-its-manager-a-longtime-activist/