Women of Black History: Quiz

Oprah Winfrey, journalist from Nashville, Tennessee, became the first African American syndicated talk show host, and the highest-earning woman in America.

Jessie Redmon Fauset promoted many writers as literary editor for the Crisis.

Learn more about the 19th century's best-selling novelist and how she came to write this influential book that influenced a generation of abolitionists: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Pearl Bailey is known for her recordings, as well, and as a humanitarian.

Also see:

• Leontyne Price Quotes
• Josephine Baker
• Josephine Baker Image Gallery
• Isadora Duncan

Phillis Wheatley, a slave in Boston who had been born in Africa, learned to read and write and published a book of poems in 1773.

From a free black family in Massachusetts, Sarah Remond was friends with Charlotte Forten and visited escaped slaves William and Ellen Craft while she and they were in London. She helped persuade the British not to support the Confederacy.

Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor of African American and Native American heritage, used the neoclassical genre to produce naturalistic images.  Most of her work is lost.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a reporter, wrote about racial injustice, and once was forcibly removed from a train becaue she would not move to the colored-only car. After an infamous lynching in Memphis in 1892, she took up the cause against lynching and had to flee to New York.

Maggie Lena Walker was the first woman bank president in the United States, founding bank in Richmond, Virginia,in 1903. She was also involved with self-help and philanthropic work, founded an African American newspaper, and promoted racial pride.

Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God and other stories, studied anthropology at Barnard. When she worked as an ethnologist, her financial supporter, Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, insisted that Hurston not publish her work.

Charlotte Ray found that there were no real opportunities in private practice in Washington DC as a "colored woman lawyer."  So she returned to New York and taught school.