Ellen Craft

William and Ellen Craft were an enslaved couple from Macon who gained celebrity after a daring, novel, and very public escape in December 1848.

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Barbara Earl Thomas

The former Executive Director of Seattle’s Northwest African American Museum, Barbara Earl Thomas is far more than an institutional administrator. She is also an inspiring lecturer on the topics of art and culture and — as the University of Washington Press notes — a “painter and writer of prodigious talent and remarkable visionary sensibility.”

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Zaida Ben-Yusuf

Ben-Yúsuf was one of the “New Women” who joined the paid labor force in the 1890s. She was in the vanguard of women who became professional photographers as magazines reached massive circulation figures, and photographs supplanted drawn illustration art.

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Alice Ballard

Alice Ballard was the youngest of seven children born to John and Amanda Ballard, the first African Americans to own a home above the Malibu coastline.

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