Laverne Brackens

A textile artist from Fairfield, Texas, Laverne Brackens represents a long tradition of improvisational quiltmaking among African-American women.

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Linda Goss

Linda Goss has blazed a trail in the Black Storytelling Tradition. She is called “Mama Linda” in honor of her mastery as a tradition bearer and premier contributor to the art of storytelling.

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Lucille Preston

Lucille “Sweets” Preston rose to prominence in the 1930s as a vaudeville dancer at the Cotton Club and member of the Slim & Sweets comedy duo.

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Dr Intan Paramaditha

Intan Paramaditha, Indonesian of Sumatran-Sundanese heritage, anticolonial feminist academic and writer based in Australia, is one of the co-founders of Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (The School of Women’s Thought).

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Major Marcelite Jordan Harris

Maj. Gen. Marcelite Jordan Harris retired in 1997 as the highest-ranking female officer in the U.S. Air Force and the highest ranking African American woman in the Department of Defense.

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Colonel Ruth Lucas

During World War II, Ruth Lucas enlisted in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) and became one of the few Black women to attend what is now the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. She transferred from the Army to the Air Force in 1947, where she stayed for the remainder of her military career.

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Namahoyke Curtis

Namahyoke Curtis, known as Namah, was a prominent African American nurse in late-19th-century Washington, D.C. During the Spanish-American War (1898), the Surgeon General assigned her to recruit other Black women to serve as U.S. Army contract nurses.

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Annette Gordon-Reed

No historian has done more to recover the stories of enslaved African-Americans than Annette Gordon-Reed, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as wide acclaim.

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