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Sophia Bracy Harris co-founded the Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama (FOCAL). She was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1991, [1] the Rockefeller Public Service Award, [2] and Gleitsman Foundation "People who Make a Difference". She was among the first Black students to attend Wetumpka High School under a Freedom of Choice plan. [3]
When only a young girl her family home was firebombed in response to her attempts to attend school. On January 1, 1966, at around 1 a.m., homemade fire bombs were thrown at her house. They hit three different sides of the house. The flames blocked all but one exit. Despite the fact that 11 people had been inside, nine of whom had been sleeping, all escaped alive. The house was burned to the ground. [3]
Harris was one of the founders of Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama (FOCAL), now known as the Federation of Community-Controlled Centers of Alabama. This organization worked to help organize child care centers in rural Alabama and ensure compliance with new licensing laws that were being inconsistently applied. FOCAL also worked to defeat a 1974 bill that would have required child care providers to take college courses and would have been logistically challenging for many of the rural child care providers the group organized and represented. [4]
In 1984, Harris organized the Black Women's Leadership and Economic Development Project to help support black women's self-sufficiency and provide leadership training. [5]
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader and the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. from 1953 until his death. As an advocate for African-American equality, she was a leader for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King was also a singer who often incorporated music into her civil rights work. King met her husband while attending graduate school in Boston. They both became increasingly active in the American civil rights movement.
Ella Josephine Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Moses, as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Jo Ann Gibson Robinson was an activist during the Civil Rights Movement and educator in Montgomery, Alabama.
Diane Judith Nash is an American civil rights activist, and a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement.
Regina Marcia Benjamin is an American physician and a former vice admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps who served as the 18th Surgeon General of the United States. Benjamin previously directed a nonprofit primary care medical clinic in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, and served on the board of trustees for the Morehouse School of Medicine.
Margaret Murray Washington was an American educator who was the principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, which later became Tuskegee University. She also led women’s clubs. She was the third wife of Booker T. Washington. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1972.
Janie Porter Barrett was an American social reformer, educator and welfare worker. She established the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, a pioneering rehabilitation center for African-American female "delinquents". She was also the founder of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs.
Mary Carson Breckinridge was an American nurse midwife and the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), which provided comprehensive family medical care to the mountain people of rural Kentucky. FNS served remote and impoverished areas off the road and rail system but accessible by horseback. She modeled her services on European practices and sought to professionalize American nurse-midwives to practice autonomously in homes and decentralized clinics. Although Breckinridge's work demonstrated efficacy by dramatically reducing infant and maternal mortality in Appalachia, at a comparatively low cost, her model of nurse-midwifery never took root in the United States.
Maya Lakshmi Harris is an American lawyer, public policy advocate, and writer. Harris was one of three senior policy advisors for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign's policy agenda and she also served as chair of the 2020 presidential campaign of her sister, Kamala Harris.
Melissa Victoria Harris-Perry, formerly known as Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, is an American writer, professor, television host, and political commentator with a focus on African-American politics. Harris-Perry hosted the Melissa Harris-Perry weekend news and opinion television show on MSNBC from 2012 to February 27, 2016.
Merle Hoffman is an American journalist and activist.
An Alabama's Colored Women's Club refers to any member of the Alabama Federation of Colored Women's Club, including the "Ten Times One is Ten Club", the Tuskegee Women's Club, and the Anna M. Duncan Club of Montgomery. These earliest clubs united and created the Alabama Federation of Colored Women's Club in 1899. By 1904, there were more than 26 clubs throughout Alabama. The most active ones were in Birmingham, Selma, Mobile, Tuskegee, Tuscaloosa, Eufaula, Greensboro, and Mt. Megis.
Alice Harris, also known as "Sweet Alice", is a community organizer, based in Watts, Los Angeles, California, as the founder and executive director of Parents of Watts, a local youth outreach group.
Terrycina Andrea "Terri" Sewell is an American lawyer and politician. A member of the Democratic Party, she has served since 2011 as the U.S. representative for Alabama's 7th congressional district, which includes most of the Black Belt, as well as most of the predominantly black portions of Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Montgomery.
Martha Kehres Roby is an American lawyer and politician who served as the U.S. representative for Alabama's 2nd congressional district from 2011 to 2021. A member of the Republican Party, she defeated the incumbent Democratic U.S. Representative Bobby Bright in 2010. That year, Roby and Terri Sewell became the first women elected to Congress from Alabama in regular elections. On July 26, 2019, Roby announced she would retire from Congress at the end of her fifth term, which ended in 2021.
Eunice Verdell Rivers Laurie (1899–1986) was an African American nurse who worked in the state of Alabama. She is known for her work as one of the nurses of the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study in Macon County from 1932 to 1972.
Margaret Charles Smith was an African-American midwife, who became known for her extraordinary skill over a long career, spanning over thirty years. Despite working primarily in rural areas with women who were often in poor health, she lost very few of the more than 3000 babies she delivered, and none of the mothers in childbirth. In 1949, she became one of the first official midwives in Green County, Alabama, and she was still practicing in 1976, when the state passed a law outlawing traditional midwifery. In the 1990s, she cowrote a book about her career, Listen to Me Good: The Life Story of an Alabama Midwife, and in 2010 she was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame.
Bernice Robinson (1914–1994) was an American activist in the Civil Rights Movement and education proponent who helped establish adult Citizenship Schools in South Carolina. Becoming field supervisor of adult education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), she led political education workshops throughout the south, in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and other states to teach adult reading skills so that blacks would be able to pass literacy tests to vote. Between 1970 and 1975, Robinson worked for the South Carolina Commission for Farm Workers, supervising VISTA workers and directing day care centers. In both 1972 and 1974, she unsuccessfully ran for the South Carolina House of Representatives, becoming the first African American woman to run for a political office in the state.
Ida Louise Jackson was an American educator and philanthropist. She attended and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley following her family’s move to California. As one of 17 Black students that attended the university at the time, Jackson prioritized creating safe spaces for African American community members. Throughout her undergraduate career, Jackson was invested in a teaching career, specifically in Oakland, California. Despite push back from school administration, her dreams were finally realized in 1926 when she became the first African American woman to teach high school in the state of California. At the same time, her ambitions were rooted in giving back to her community back in Mississippi. Through the networks that she formed in California, Jackson returned back to her home state in 1935 to develop programs around education and health care for poor, rural Black folks. Ida Louise Jackson’s contributions were celebrated by her alma mater and the University of California, Berkeley named their first graduate apartment housing unit in her honor.
LaTosha Brown is an American community organizer, political strategist, and consultant. She is the co-founder of the voting rights group Black Voters Matter, which has been noted for its work on the 2017 U.S. Senate special election in Alabama and its influence during the 2020–21 Georgia state elections. Brown was born in Selma, Alabama and attended Selma High School and Auburn University at Montgomery. After unsuccessful bids for the Alabama State Board of Education and the Alabama House of Representatives, Brown began working and founding a series of nonprofit organizations centered around disaster relief, Black voting rights, and funding grassroots community development initiatives. In 2016, Brown and fellow activist Cliff Albright founded Black Voters Matter, an organization whose work is credited with significant voter registration and get out the vote efforts in several elections, notably that of United States Senator Doug Jones of Alabama in 2017; the 2020–21 United States Senate election in Georgia; and the 2020–21 United States Senate special election in Georgia.