Category: Women’s History Month 2023

Janie Crawford…or Zora Neale Hurston, for that matter. Born in rural Georgia in 1944, long before she earned acclaim for The Color Purple, Alice Walker was a lover of Black women…her mother, who planted daffodils and toiled in the red earth as a sharecropper, her grandmother who saved Alice from chores and nurtured her writing, Ms. Hurston – who had been buried in an unmarked grave in Eatonville, Florida…her work fading into obscurity, Mississippi women with thick arms and gold teeth whose hearts held righteous and valiant war stories against white-supremacy.

Deeply inspired by the work of courageous Black women journalists before her, especially Ida B. Wells, Nikole Hannah Jones has committed her work and life to truth-telling. She founded the Ida B. Wells Society and reports on racial Injustice for the New York Times Magazine.

Chloe Wofford was born in Ohio on February 18, 1931. Her parents called her Toni after Saint Anthony, a Patron of lost and stolen articles, who is often portrayed with a book, lily, or baby Jesus in his arms. Her married name was Morrison, and she kept both names for eternity.