A review of the contributions of African American women testifies to the high caliber of their achievements. Both individually and as groups, they have reached out into the larger community and have affected the African American people as a race, the American people as a nation, and the international scene. Biographies of a selected few highlight the enriching contributions of African American women to all aspects of African American heritage. Many of these names will be quickly recognized. Others, it is hoped, will encourage additional study.

EDUCATION

JULIETIE DERRICOTTE (1897-1931): Raised in Athens, GA., Ms. Derricotte was educated in the public schools and at Talledega College. She was the first woman trustee of the College (appointed 1918). Ms. Derricotte was a renowned speaker, traveling across the U.S. in support of African American colleges and education. She was a delegate at the convention of the World's Student Christian Federation in 1924 and 1928, where she represented all American college students. She served the YWCA as the National Student Secretary, resigning in 1929 to become Dean of Women at Fisk University. She died in 1931 in an automobile accident.

MADELINE ROBINSON MORGAN, 0f Chicago, in 1943, worked out a curriculum to improve race relations which was integrated into the Chicago grade school system.

DR. FRANCES JONES BONNER, Greensboro, N.C., was the first winner of the Helen Putnam Fellowship for advanced research in genetics at Ratclifte College (1946). She became a neuropathology research associate at Boston City Hospital and assistant laboratory instructor at Harvard University.

DR. ANNA JULIA COOPER, (1858-1964), At age 11, Dr. Cooper was acting as a student-teacher at St. Augustine Normal School in Raleigh, NC. After marrying in 1877, she left N.C. for Oberlin where she taught and continued her education. After graduating in 1885, she taught modern languages and science at Wilberforce. For fifty years, Dr. Cooper served educational institutions in varying capacities. In 1892, she published a well-received book on the racial problem. At the age of 65, she received a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in Paris, and later served as president of Felinghuysen University, a school for unemployed African Americans, which she ran in her own home in Washington, D.C. Dr. Cooper died in 1964 at the age of 105.

DR. JEANNE NOBLE, educator and guidance expert, was appointed by President Ford to the National Advisory Council of Professional Development. The product of a poverty-stricken environment in Albany, GA., she graduated from Howard University and earned two post-graduate degrees.

ART

LOIS M. JONES, a design instructor who joined the faculty of Howard University in 1930, Ms. Jones' work as a landscape painter has been recognized by the most critical judges. Her exhibits have won numerous prizes and awards, including the Robert Woods Bliss Award in 1941.

GERALDINE McCULLOUGH, sculptor, Ms. McCullough's steel and copper abstraction, "Phoenlx", won the George D. Widener Gold Medal at the 1984 exhibhion of the PA Academy of Fine Arts. A native of Arkansas, she graduated from the Art Institute in Chicago, where she moved with her family at the age 3.

THEATRE

ETHEL WATERS, Cabin in the Sky; ETTA MOTEN - Porgy and Bess; HILDA SIMMS - Anna Lucusta; MURIEL SMITH and MURIEL RAHN - Carmen Jones; Anda Bush, singer/actress, with Williams and Walker Company 1903-1909; organized the Anita Bush Stock Company in 1909.

LENA HORNE, singer/actress - Stormy Weather, Movie; Jamaica, Broadway musical. Among the many others are: Diana Ross, actress/singer; Pearl Primus, dancer; Dorothy Dundridge, dancer; Ruby Dee, actress; Diahann Carroll and Vinette Carroll, actresses; Gail Fisher, actress; Katherine Dunham, dancer/choreographer and Judith Jumison, the leading dancer of the interracial Alvin Aily Dance Theatre; first African American superstar of American dance.

LITERATURE

FRANCES E. W. HARPER, poet (1825-1911): Ms.Harper published her first volume of poems while still in her teens, earning commercial success in 1854.

SHIRLEY GRAHAM, writer and musician, author of the biographies: "Paul Robeson. Citizen of the World", 1946; 'There was Once a Slave", the heroic story of Frederick Douglass, 1947. She was a Rosenwald Fellow at the Yale School of Drama in 1941.

THE PRESS

ALICE DUNNIGAN, Associated Negro Press Washington correspondent was admitted to three important sources of news as early us 1947: the Capitol Press Gallery, the State Department, and the White House. She was the first African American to be admitted to all three and the first African American woman to be admitted to any.

VENICE TIPTON SPRAGGS, chief of the Chicago Defender's Washington Bureau, in 1947, was initiated into Theta Sigma Phi, the national professional and honorary fraternity for women in journalism, the first African American member in the 37-year history of the organization.

THOMASINA W. JOHNSON, named Chief, Minority Groups Section, U.S. Employment Service in 1946.

OTHER

PHILLIS WHEATLEY, African-born, was an internationally known poet during the Revolutionary Period (1753-1784).

Jessie Redmon Fauset, 1882-1961, novelist, poet, short story writer, biographer, essayist, and literary critic, played a pivotal role in the Renaissance as creator of her own work and mentor to a younger group of writers.

SADIE I. M. ALEXANDER, a Philadelphia lawyer, named by President Truman to the President's Committee on Civil Rights in 1946 .

JANE BOLIN, appointed a Justice of the Court of Domeshc Relations, New York, in 1939.

CHARLOTTA A. BASS, chosen unanimously by the Progressive Party Convention in 1952 to run for the nation's second-highest political office-Vice President of the United States.

CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY, U.S. District Judge, Southern District of N.Y.

BARBARA JORDAN, U.S. Congresswoman. 18th District- Texas; elected 1973.

BARBARA HARRIS, an African American, became the first female Anglican bishop in 1989.

CYNTHIA TUCKER, became the first African American woman to edit a major daily newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution in 1992.

TONI MORRISON became the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.