African Descent Archives - Page 50 of 51

Touria Chaoui

Touria Chaoui was Morocco’s first female pilot. When she was 14, her father enrolled her in the only available flying school, in Tit Mellil – the resistance was swift and significant. The school was reserved for the French forces occupying Morocco, making it inhospitable for any native Moroccan, particularly women. Although the school tried to refuse her entry, there was no legal grounds for them to do so. The school adminisrators reluctantly accepted her, hoping she would drop out. Instead, she obtained her pilots licence on 17 October 1951, at the age of 15. She became the first Moroccan and Maghrebi female pilot. Her career was short-lived, as she was murdered on March 1, 1956, at the age of 19, by Ahmed Touil, the leader of a secret organisation who assassinated several Moroccan political personalities.

Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander

Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander was the first African-American to receive a doctorate in economics in the United States (1921), and the first woman to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Zelia N. Breaux

Zelia N. Breaux was an American music teacher and musician who played the trumpet, violin and piano. She organized the first music department at Oklahoma’s Langston University, as well as the school’s first orchestra. As the Supervisor of Music for segregated African-American schools in Oklahoma City, Breaux organized bands, choral groups and orchestras, establishing a music teacher in each of the district’s schools. She had a significant influence on many musicians including Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing, as well as novelist Ralph Ellison. Breaux was the first woman president of the Oklahoma Association of Negro Teachers and was posthumously inducted into the Oklahoma YWCA Hall of Fame, Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Bandmasters Association Hall of Fame.

Lula Parrish

Lula Parrish risked her job and her life by marching for civil rights with more than 100 other African-American teachers in the Selma Teachers March on January 22 1965. Her daughter Joyce O’Neal, described her mother’s bravery and her own fear when her mother left for the march: “She hugged us and didn’t say much. But she was thinking ‘will I have a job when I get back?’ and “will I get back?’” Her other daughter, Phyllis Parrish Alston, published a book about Lula, Lessons From The Front Porch Swing. Both of her daughters also participated, marching with the students.

Adah Thoms

Adah Belle Samuels Thoms was an African-American nurse who co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses and served as president from 1916 to1923. She was the acting director of the Lincoln School for Nurses (New York) and fought for African-Americans to serve as American Red Cross nurses during World War I and later as U.S. Army Nurse Corps nurses starting with the flu epidemic in December 1918. She was one of the first nurses inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame when it was established in 1976.

Safi Faye

Safi Faye is a Senegalese film director and ethnologist who has directed several documentary and fiction films focusing on rural life in Senegal. She was the first woman from sub-Saharan Africa to direct a commercially distributed feature film, Kaddu Beykat (1975).

Myra Davis Hemmings

Delta Sigma Theta, a service sorority for black women, was founded at Howard University in Washington, DC in 1912, with Myra Davis Hemmings of San Antonio elected as its first president. At the time she was also president of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-named sorority for African American women.
Hemmings was active in amateur theater and directed productions for the San Antonio Negro Little Theater. She and her husband helped to organize the city’s Phyllis Wheatley Dramatic Guild Players. In addition to acting on stage, she appeared in three films: 1941 tragic drama film Go Down Death: The Story of Jesus and the Devil, starring as the martyr Sister Caroline (she also co-produced and co-directed the film), Marching On (1943) and In Girl in Room 20 (1946).
As a drama teacher, Hemmings directed plays from the 1920s through the 1950s at San Antonio’s Carver Community Cultural Center. She taught in San Antonio for more than 50 years. Hemmings was elected as the national vice-president of Delta Sigma Theta in 1933 and became the organization’s historian in 1948. She was also a member of the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women[13] and the Alpha Phi Literary Society.

Queen Labotsibeni Mdluli

Nicknamed Gwamile for her strength of character, Labotsibeni was Swaziland’s queen mother from 1894 to 1899 and then regent from 1899 to 1921. Growing up in the royal court under the tutelage of Queen Mother Thandile, she married King Mbandzeni in 1874. Noted for being a remarkably intelligent, articulate, and astute spokesperson for the Swazi nation, she opposed domination of the kingdom by outside forces.
For most of the three-year South African War, Labotsibeni was, with the support of a co-regent and her council, the last independent ruler in Africa south of the Zambezi. During this time she adopted the habitual stance of a Swazi monarch and sought to preserve Swaziland as a neutral region and maintained a diplomatic relationship with the South African Republic. She largely succeeded in keeping Swaziland out of the war. Ever pragmatic, Labotsibeni encouraged her people to accept Western education as the path to financial success, seeing it as the source of much of the power held by white people.

Pat Parker

Pat Parker was an American poet and activist who drew from her experiences as an African-American lesbian feminist. Her poetry spoke to her difficult childhood growing up in poverty, coping with sexual assault, and the murder of her sister.

Keisha Lance Bottoms

Keisha Lance Bottoms was elected the 60th Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia in 2017. She had previously served in the Atlanta City Council for eight years representing District 11 in southwest Atlanta and won a highly competitive election to become the second black woman ever to be elected mayor of Atlanta. Prior to that, Bottoms was a prosecutor, and also represented children in juvenile court. In 2002, she became a magistrate judge. As mayor, Bottoms she signed an executive order forbidding the city jail to hold ICE detainees. In February 2020, Bottoms released Atlanta’s first LGBTQ Affairs report, focusing on how various policies, initiatives, and programs could improve the lives of LGBTQ Atlantans. In 2018 she had created the city’s LGBTQ advisory board and in December 2020, Bottoms appointed the city’s first director of LGBTQ Affairs, and announced the continued LGBTQ advisory board leadership.