Today an African American man has achieved great status in vying for the Presidency of the United States, while women have achieved no small measure by being sought for the Vice Presidency. African American women are on their way to realizing the dreams of inclusiveness in America, but many of us do not know the pioneering women, women who lacked rights not only because they were African American women but also because they were women. They remain in the back pages of history books, when they are mentioned at all.
Mary McLeod Bethune
African American women usually have had to achieve something of significance to get to the front of the line. As times change, many of these women will realize the great neights of personal, governmental and business success, as many have already achieved. This article celebrates African American women by bringing the history of some of them to readers to enjoy in every corner of the world, in celebrating not only African American achievement but the achievement of women everywhere who do great things even if they are forgotten.
Mary Elizabeth Bowser was born about 1839 on a plantation owned by a Richmond hardware merchant, but was freed upon her master’s death by the merchant’s wife who was educated by the Quakers and became an ardent abolitionist. Mary was considered to be dull witted by her later employer and other servants in the household. This characteristic, however, was likely an act as Mary served as one of the most important Union spies during the United States civil war. While working as a housekeeper for Jefferson Davis, she listened carefully to conversations about troop strategy and movement, memorized the details and passed them along to Union spies. Nothing is known about her life after the Civil War because her descendants may have been concerned about retaliation from Confederates sympathizers.
Mary Fields or Stagecoach Mary as she was called by those in the American west who knew her, was a 6ft. tall heavyset woman who was born a slave in Tennessee during the Andrew Jackson Presidency. After the Civil War work she left for Montana where she became a heavy laborer for a Catholic Church mission. There she helped the nuns by carrying freight and supplies, chopping wood, and doing stonework and carpentry. After an altercation with a hired hand at the mission, Mary was fired,then took a job carrying U.S. mail. It was during this time that she became known as Stagecoach Mary. She was independent and determined and known for her strength, courage and dependability. Mary died of liver failure in 1914 at the age of 80, and scarcely anyone knew that this elderly woman had at one time been the hard fighting, strong, stagecoach driver of earlier years.
Billie Holiday sang the blues literally and figuratively during her life. She was born in the 1920’s. It was in Baltimore, Maryland that she began her singing career. She later moved to New York in order to get a better job. There she began working in Harlem nightclubs and eventually was discovered and cut her first record at the age of eighteen as part of a studio group led by Benny Goodman before Goodman became famous. Billie continued with different bands, joining Count Basie in 1937 and Artie Shaw in 1938. She became one of the first black women to work with an all white orchestra. It was during the 1930’s that Billie Holiday recorded the song, “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching, that eventually became her best-known song and one that became especially identified with her. Drugs were Billie’s downfall, a disease she fought and lost to at the age of 44 when she died.
Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917 and achieved success as a poet. In 1949 she published a series of poems, one of which was about a black girl one and her struggles from childhood to adulthood . Brooks once said “I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it”. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1988 and died in 2000.
Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African American woman to graduate from nursing school and become a nurse. She was born in 1845 and at the age of 34 entered nursing school in Boston rather than becoming a domestic worker, which many African American women were during her generation. She practiced nursing throughout her life, and her dedication and service were known by many, leading to the recognition of African American nurses of President Warren G. Harding years later. Mary Mahoney died in 1926.
