Barbara Rose Johns Powell conceived and executed a 1951 student walkout at the all-Black Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, precipitating one of five legal cases that would be consolidated into the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned segregated public schools.
Aline E. Black was a teacher known primarily as a principal in a civil rights court case on equal pay.
She became the first Empress of Haiti after her marriage to General Jean-Jacques Dessalines who crowned himself emperor of Haiti on October 8, 1804.
Carrie Buck was the first person involuntarily sterilized under Virginia’s eugenics laws. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Virginia’s law was constitutional and that Buck should be sterilized, the first of approximately 8,300 performed under state law between 1927 and 1972.
Mary White Ovington (1865–1951), a social worker and freelance writer, was a principal NAACP founder and officer for almost forty years.
Rose Cecil O’Neill was a self-taught bohemian artist, who ascended through a male-dominated field to become a top illustrator and the first to build a merchandising empire from her work, with her invention of the Kewpie doll.
Channyn Parker works as the Manager of the TransLife Center of Chicago House.
Golde Bamber (1868–1951) led efforts to support Boston’s Jewish immigrant youth, founding the Hecht House, a vital community hub, in 1936.
Beth’s involvement in the environment movement came through defence of Western Australia’s Karri forests against woodchipping. In 1975, she became the first secretary of the activist Campaign to Save Native Forests and soon afterwards, the Co-convenor of the more science-based South-West Forests Defence Foundation.
Barbara Cherry Schwarzschild (1914-2008) worked at the Harvard Observatory from approximately 1935 to 1938.