ELLA BAKER

Feeling Rebloggy

Ella Baker began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946.

Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South.

In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King's new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

• On February 1, 1960, a group of black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina where they had been denied service.
• Baker left the SCLC after the Greensboro sit-ins. She wanted to assist the new student activists because she viewed young, emerging activists as a resource and an asset to the movement. Miss Baker organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins in April 1960. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- SNCC -- was born 

• Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize the 1961 Freedom Rides. 
• In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi's racism and to register black voters.

~Ella Baker Center 

Learn More About Ella Baker:

http://ellabakercenter.org/about/who-was-ella-baker 

Janet Harmon Waterford Bragg: First Black Woman To Earn A Commercial Pilot's License

    A contemporary and colleague of Willa Brown, Janet Harmon Waterford Bragg was the first black woman to earn a commercial pilot’s license. She had to try a second time in Chicago because the examiner in Tuskegee, Alabama refused to issue a license to a “colored girl.” She was a founder and charter member of the Challenger Aero Club, which eventually led to the National Airmen’s Association of America and the Coffey School of Aeronautics.

     Bragg also promoted the field of aviation in the 1930s through a regular column in the Chicago Defender newspaper.
     Born the youngest of seven children in Georgia, Bragg moved to Illinois to live with her sister and work as a nurse after graduating from Spelman College. She decided that she wanted to learn to fly after seeing a billboard that read “Birds learn to fly. Why can’t you?” She was the only woman in a class with 24 black men at Curtiss Wright Aeronautical School in Chicago. The school was a ground school and had no means of offering flight training. She used the money she earned from working as a nurse to purchase a plane of her own and rent it out to other pilots.
     Since black pilots were restricted from using white airports, Bragg along with several of her classmates and aviation instructors formed the Challenger Aero Club and built an airfield in the all-black town of Robbins, Illinois. In 1931, the Challenger club began an annual flyover at Chicago’s Lincoln Cemetery to honor Bessie Coleman.

~The Fresh

Read More:
http://www.therefresh.co/2018/03/15/bessie-willa-and-janet-unsung-heroines-in-aviation-history/

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Proto Feminist Daisy Bates As Civil Rights Leader

Feeling  Rebloggy 

When Daisy Bates was three years old her mother was killed by three white men. Although Bates, was just a child, her biological mother’s death made an emotional and mental imprint on her. The unfortunate death forced Bates to confront racism at an early age and pushed her to dedicate her life to ending racial injustice.

Daisy Bates was born in Huttig, Arkansas in 1914 and raised in a foster home. When she was fifteen, she met her future husband and began travelling with him throughout the South. The couple settled in Little Rock, Arkansas and started their own newspaper. The Arkansas Weeklywas one of the only African Americn newspapers solely dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement. The paper was circulated state wide. Bates not only worked as an editor, but also regularly contributed articles.

Naturally, Bates also worked with local Civil Rights organizations. For many years, she served as the President of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)....

[After Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP attorney's like feminist Pauli Murray helped him win Brown v The Board Of Education, the behavior of white people didn't change. Whites didn't jump up and willingly comply with the law willingly with their superiority at stake. 

One we had won the right to have the same quality schools, books, and supplies as white children, we had to fight at the local level to make white school boards comply with the new law of the land.] 

When the national NAACP office started to focus on Arkansas’ schools, they looked to Bates to plan the strategy. She took the reins and organized The Little Rock Nine.

Bates selected nine students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. She regularly drove the students to school and worked tirelessly to ensure they were protected from violent crowds. [The newspaper she owned with her husband kept black support at their backs] She also advised the group and even joined the school’s parent organization.

Due to Bates’ role in the integration, she was often a target for intimidation. Rocks were thrown into her home several times and she received bullet shells in the mail. The threats [eventually] forced the Bates family to shut down their newspaper.

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/daisy-bates 

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JO ANN ROBINSON AND THE BLACK WOMEN INITIATED THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT

   Feeling Rebloggy

     ...Soon after arriving in Montgomery, Robinson was verbally attacked by a public bus driver for sitting in the "whites only" section of the bus. When she became the WPC's president the following year, she made desegregating the city's buses one of the organization's top priorities.
     The WPC repeatedly complained to the Montgomery city leaders about unfair seating practices and abusive driver conduct. But the group's concerns were dismissed, leading Robinson to begin laying plans for a bus boycott by the city's African American community. Following Rosa Park's arrest in December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person, Robinson and a few associates jumped into action. They copied tens of thousands of leaflets and distributed them across the city, calling for a one-day boycott.
     Following the overwhelming success of the one-day boycott, Montgomery's black citizens decided to continue the campaign, establishing the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to organize the effort and electing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the MIA's president.

Walking by Charles Henry Alston. Walking recalls the bus boycotts in the 1950s and anticipated the civil rights marches of the 1960s. The work not only depicts the spirit and conviction of the civil rights protest, it also references the significant role of women and youth in the movement. 

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, gift of Sydney Smith Gordon, © Charles Alston Estate. Object number 2007.2

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/jo-ann-robinson-heroine-montgomery-bus-boycott

FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER

Feeling Rebloggy
Frances E.W. Harper was a Black poet, writer, and lecturer, as well as an anti-slavery, women's rights, and temperance activist.

Harper was from Baltimore, MD., where she attended Baltimore's Academy for Negro Youth school. There she studied Greek, Latin, and the Bible. Writing poetry as a teenager, she started her career as a writer in 1845 by publishing the poetry collection, "Forest Leaves."

Her second career, as an activist, began almost a decade later. Harper taught school for several years at Union Seminary in Ohio, and later in Pennsylvania. But in 1853, when Maryland began prohibiting free Blacks from entering its borders, Frances Ellen Harper was moved to action. The next year, moving to Philadelphia, she became active in the anti-slavery movement. Soon, Harper became one of the few Black women to go on the anti-slavery lecture circuit. She proved to be such a popular speaker that over the next six years, the Maine and Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Societies sent her throughout New England, Ohio, and New York, and as far away as Detroit and Canada.

Harper often quoted original poetry in her lectures, and consequently her reputation as a poet spread as far as her speaking tours. Her second volume of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, sold 10,000 copies and was then enlarged and reprinted. Harper published several more volumes of poetry and reprinted new editions of her poems many times. In the process, she became the most famous Black poet of her time.

During the next few decades, she began to focus on racial uplift, moral reform, temperance, and women's rights. Many of Harper's lectures were to women's clubs and associations, and some of her most popular speeches were on the rights and roles of women in general, and Black women in particular. Harper was also active in the temperance movement. She lectured widely on the evils of alcohol, directed the Northern United States Temperance Union, and became the first Black woman to be recognized on the Red Letter Calendar of the World Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which honored prominent temperance activists.

Here again, Harper tailored her activism to reach the Black community. She directed what were then called the colored branches of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and in 1883, became national superintendent of temperance work among Blacks.

Throughout all of her political activism, Frances Harper continued to write, and in the 20th century, she is best remembered as one of the earliest Black women writers.

Harper's best-known work, is the 1892 novel Iola Leroy. Many reviewers called Iola Leroy the crowning effort of Harper's life. She continued writing until a few years before her death in 1911.

Harper provided a model for the best of what any 19th-century woman could be as a Black woman. In making a point of

writing about and speaking to other Black women, she set a high standard for a generation of Black women's activism.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/gary.perkins.7/posts/10204697435033261?

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPELMAN COLLEGE

Reported As Spelman's First Graduating Class

1881

• Founded as Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary by Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles
• School opens April 11 in basement of Friendship Baptist Church, the Rev. Frank Quarles, pastor

1882

• Two more teachers commissioned by the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society join Packard and Giles in "basement school"
• Packard and Giles introduced to John D. Rockefeller who pledges $250 to the school

1883

• Moved to present site occupying nine acres and five frame buildings
• "Model School" to train student-teachers opens

1884

• Name changes to Spelman Seminary in honor of Mrs. Laura Spelman Rockefeller and her parents Harvey Buel and Lucy Henry Spelman, longtime activists in the antislavery movement.

1885

• Spelman students print first issue of the Spelman Messenger
• Sophia Jones, M.D., first black female to join the faculty

1886

• Rockefeller Hall dedicated
• Nurse training department begins

1887

• First Spelman class graduates receiving high school diplomas

1888

• Packard Hall dedicated
• Spelman incorporated under Board of Trustees
• Charter granted by state of Georgia
• Henry L. Morehouse becomes first president of Board of Trustees..
  
  Read More: https://www.spelman.edu/about-us/history-in-brief

     Because Atlanta would not open a black public high school until 1924, the first generation of Spelman students enrolled in courses equivalent to high school instruction. In 1887, Spelman awarded its first diplomas at this level. Two women received the school’s first baccalaureate degrees in 1901.
     In Spelman’s first decades, a series of notoriously strict presidents, all friends of the Rockefeller family from the Northeast, required students to adhere to the standards of   Victorian-era feminine propriety. Women wore hats and gloves in public, and they needed special written permission to travel off campus.  Under the title “domestic training,” they learned domestic skills such as sewing, cooking, and laundry work. Two of the school’s founders, Harriet Giles and Sophia Packard,

believed that former slaves lacked correct work habits, so they demanded that Spelman students rise at four thirty each morning to wash and iron their clothes, a practice that continued into the 1920s.
      Spelman’s curriculum focused heavily on teacher training, although the school also initiated a nursing program in 1886 ...

BLACKPAST.ORG 

Read More: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/spelman-college-1881/ 

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JOAN MORGAN ON SPREADING THE F-WORD

I came out of the womb a feminist. It is my natural state. Racism made me fully aware that I'd have to demand partnership, parity, and respect from everyone, including males without having to be the same as a male. 

In other words, I expect to have to work for equality without sameness in regards to race and gender both. 

I raised myself up in a feminist mindset because of the failures I saw too close to home and inside my home.

And I became an even stronger feminist, at college, when I realized how women weren't telling their own stories, their own history -- not even within black history.  

But there was a time when I moved away from the word "feminist" because I simply stopped thinking about it in my day to day life. And the f-word was so despised in the black community that I deliberately let the f-word drift away even further when various things came up. I don't think I ever got as far as denying my feminism out loud, as Toni Morrison has. But I was very silent.  

Then Joan Morgan published a little book called "When The Chickenheads Come Home To Roost" and it brought me all the way back to my sisters for good.

JOAN MORGAN SAID:

"When I wrote 'Chickenheads...' The vast majority of my black girlfriends did not identify as feminists. A few worried that anyone would read a book about hip-hop and feminism since, as I wrote back then most Sistas I knew weren't [screwing] with the F-word.

All of them were happy for me but truth be told, many of them didn't read the book until many years later. Some of them still haven't read it.

But I must say that it gives me great joy to watch their daughters identify proudly, unabashedly, unequivocally as Black and Brown Feminists across multiple platforms in social media.

It amazes me to no end that some of them have superstar pop icons that also identify as Black Feminist. This feminist journey was slow and often hard and sometimes lonely but I am humbled and heartened by the company I keep. Y'all might not have been feminists (I think you were, you just didn't know it) but y'all raised some mighty ones. "

#LetsHearItForTheWork

https://www.facebook.com/Joan-Morgan-Writer-72604480788/?fref=nf

MY...OH MY...
HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED OVER THE CENTURIES

ALICIA GARZA  (BLACK LIVES MATTER CREATOR)  

PATRISSE CULLORS, (BLACK LIVES MATTER CREATOR)

OPAL TOMETI (BLACK LIVES MATTER CREATOR)

Aisha Tyler
KIMBERLE CRENSHAW (INTERSECTIONALITY SOCIOLOGIST)

J K Rowling,  (HARRY POTTER)

Maria W Stewart,

Gabrielle Union,

PAULI MURRAY,

Ruth Bader Ginsberg,  (SUPREME COURT JUSTICE)

Diane Nash, (CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER)

ANNA ARNOLD HEDGEMAN,  (CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER, N.O.W. FOUNDING MEMBER)

Zora Neale Hurston 
Septima Clarke (CIVIL RIGHTS TEACHER)
Aja Monet (POET, SAY HER NAME ACTIVIST)

Sonia Sotomayor, (SUPREME COURT JUSTICE)

TYRA BANKS

Salma Hayek,

Alicia Keys

Shonda Rhimes (WRITER/PRODUCER BROWNING HOLLYWOOD ONE ACTOR/ACTRESS/MUSIC ROYALTY AT A TIME 

Kerry Washington,

Viola Davis,

Margaret Cho

Tracee Ellis,

Gina Prince Bythewood (DIRECTOR)

Angela Bassett,

BARBARA SMITH,

ANNA JULIA COOPER,

Ferdinand Barnett

Jada Pinkett-Smith,

IDA B WELLS  (JOURNALIST, FIRST ANTI-LYNCHING RESEARCHING SOCIOLOGIST, NAACP FOUNDING MEMBER)

JOAN MORGAN (“WHEN THE CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST)

bell hooks

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY

Malaya Yousafzai, 

Beyonce,

Don McPherson, 

DELORES HUERTA,

ANGELA DAVIS,

Daisy Bates (?)

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE (WRITER)

Coretta Scott-King  (?)

DELORES C TUCKER, 

Ava DuVernay (DIRECTOR - Selma, Queen Sugar)
India Arie (MUSICIAN)

BEVERLY BOND (BLACK GIRLS ROCK CREATOR)
Jessica R Williams (Daily Show Comedian) John Legend (Pop Music, Producer of “Underground”)

Eva Longoria,  (Television Actor)

Maya Angelou,

AUDRE LORDE,

ALICE WALKER,

SONIA SHAH

HILLARY CLINTON,

PATRICIA HILL-COLLINS,

GLORIA STEINHEM,

DOROTHY PITTMAN HUGHES,
GLORIA ANZALDUA

SOJOURNER TRUTH
FREDERICK DOUGLASS

HARRIET TUBMAN

Claudia Jones Is More Relevant Than Ever In The Age Of Trump

“The Lady with the Lamp, the Statue of Liberty, stands in New York Harbour. Her back is squarely turned on the USA. It’s no wonder, considering what she would have to look upon. She would weep, if she had to face this way.”

     Claudia Jones wrote these words, more relevant now than ever, while incarcerated at Ellis Island in the late 1940s. As an immigrant journalist and political activist with distinctly anti-fascist, anti-imperialist views, she wouldn’t bat an eye at the current political turmoil in the U.S. Turns out Donald Trump is not the founder of political repression and xenophobia, as evidenced by how Harry Truman’s administration targeted Jones for being a leader in the Communist Party USA and an immigrant from Trinidad. In December 1955, Jones was deported from the U.S. to the United Kingdom (her native country denied her entrance) after being incarcerated four times due to her political activities and non-citizen status. She died of a heart attack nine years later, her resting place left of Karl Marx’s grave in a London cemetery...
     Claudia Jones’ story is not told nearly enough, especially during Black History Month and Women’s History Month. Bernie Sanders’ flock would have us believe socialism has always been for and by white men, but Jones’ life proves that Black women have been calling for an end to capitalism in the U.S. for a long time...
     As a blue-collar worker who never attended college, Jones believed feminism belonged to more than just white, upper class, and/or educated women. She wrote about Black women making only half the pay of white women despite being more likely to be in the workplace. She furtherv complicated this by noting that unlike white women, Black women contributed to their household as much or more than their men. Jones was one of the first to theorize that a class analysis excluding race and gender is not a liberatory one...

~BLACK GIRL DANGEROUS

Read More: https://www.bgdblog.org/2017/03/claudia-jones/ 

Learn More: Claudia Jones And The FBI Harassment Of Black Radicals  

Book

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Barbara Gardner Proctor The First Black Woman To Own An Advertising Agency

feeling rebloggy

     Despite being born to a 16-year-old single mother in North Carolina and raised by her grandparents in a dirt-floor shack that had neither running water nor electricity, Proctor was never the one to allow her circumstances to define her. She went on to earn a scholarship to Talladega College in Alabama, where she obtained a degree in English, psychology and social sciences. 

     While she made plans to return home to work as a teacher, her plans changed after she stopped in Chicago following the completion of her summer camp counseling job in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
     "I wound up spending all of my money and didn't have bus fare to get home,” Proctor told the Chicago Tribune in 1990. “And in large measure, for 30 years I've been trying to get my bus fare back to North Carolina." 

The Beatles

     In her unexpected career change, Proctor worked for the Urban League, DownBeat magazine, and Vee-Jay Records. During her time at Vee-Jay Records, she closed a deal that helped introduce the Beatles to America.
     Then, after working for a few different advertising firms, Proctor went on to secure an $80,000 Small Business Administration loan and started her own advertising business, Proctor & Gardner Advertising. It grew into the nation's largest Black-owned agency within a six-year time period, reported the Chicago Sun Times...  

 Read More: https://www.becauseofthemwecan.com/blogs/botwc-firsts/barbara-gardner-proctor-was-the-first-black-woman-to-own-an-ad-agency?

   Born in 1933, Proctor died on December 19, 2018 due to complications from hip surgery. She was 86 years old.   

    Rest In Power Barbara Gardner Proctor

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March 2 1955: CLAUDETTE COLVIN IN HER OWN WORDS

Before Rosa Parks there was Claudette Colvin

     Colvin was the first person to be arrested for challenging Montgomery's bus segregation policies, so her story made a few local papers - but nine months later, the same act of defiance by Rosa Parks was reported all over the world

 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43171799

Claudette Colvin said, 

     February was, at that time, only Negro History Week, not history month. But the faculty members at my school said we were are gonna do it the whole month because African Americans — at that time we were called "negroes" — were deliberately kept out of American history. The boys liked to talk about Jackie Robinson, breaking the baseball barrier. My instructor talked about Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. We started talking about the injustice and how we were discriminated against locally. That’s why I was so fired up and so angry when the bus driver asked me to get up. It was more than myself....

     I  was in 11th grade.
     It started out a normal day.We got out early and 13 of us students walked to downtown Montgomery and boarded a city bus on Dexter Avenue, exactly across the street from Dr. Martin Luther King’s church.
     As the bus proceeded down Court Square, more white passengers got on the bus. In order for this white lady to have a seat, four students would have to vacate because a white person wasn’t allowed to sit across from a colored person. So the bus driver asked for the four seats and three of the students got up. I remained seated.
     History had me glued to the seat. Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hand were pushing down on the other shoulder. I was paralyzed between these two women, I couldn’t move...

TV: You were dropped by the movement after the trial as a young single mother. Do you ever feel like you don’t get enough credit? For instance, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History refers to your contribution in passing as a “test case,” when in fact you played a pivotal role in the case that helped crumble segregation.

CC:I was glad that Rosa did it and that people was at last going to stand out. It was important to have Rosa as a face that they could rally around. All four of us didn't get enough credit. Mary Louise Smith...

Some people, the students, were sympathetic at first. They knew my mindset and what I was thinking, but their parents persuaded them not to be involved with me because I was a troublemaker and “this wasn’t the right thing to do.” They already thought I was crazy. Before then, in the 10th grade, I had stopped straightening my hair...

I didn't know about depression, but I became a little depressed. I lost all my friends and really needed someone. I got pregnant in July and I went back to school in September. I began showing around four months after I was pregnant. I was expelled from school around the Christmas holiday . My principal told me not to come back...

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/claudette-colvin-explains-her-role-in-the-civil-rights-movement 

      She went to Montgomery juvenile court on March 18, 1955, and was represented by Fred Gray, an African American lawyer from the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). Although she defended her innocence on the three charges, she was found guilty. The court sentenced her to indefinite probation and declared her to be a ward of the state.      The Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) looked into her case and initially raised money to appeal her conviction. On May 6, 1955, her case was moved to the Montgomery Circuit Court, where two of the three charges against Colvin were dropped. Colvin’s charge of allegedly assaulting the arresting police officers was maintained...

     [While Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council (WPC) led the Montgomery bus boycott in December of 1955,] the NAACP and MIA filed a lawsuit on behalf of Colvin, and four other women, including Mary Louise Smith, who had been involved in earlier acts of civil disobedience on the Montgomery buses. 

     Colvin served as a witness for the case, Gayle v Browder, which eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Gayle v Browder more explicitly overturned Plessy v Ferguson than Brown v Board had, because like Plessy, it was specifically about transportation...

https://blackpast.org/aah/colvin-claudette-1935 

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WILL THE REAL INVENTOR OF HAIR RELAXER PLEASE STAND UP?

continued from yesterday's post

Born 150 years ago, Madam C J Walker was many things, first black millionaire, first female millionaire, philanthropist, employer of black women, anti-racism activist, and proto-feminist. 

But one thing she was not was the inventor of the hair relaxer.

G.A. Morgan

Morgan, famous on black websites everywhere for inventing the gas mask and the traffic light, is one of the people who deserves some or most of the credit for inventing creamy crack, otherwise known as hair relaxer

In 1909, Morgan was working with sewing machines in his newly opened tailoring shop—a business he had opened with wife Mary, who had experience as a seamstress—when he encountered woolen fabric that had been scorched by a sewing-machine needle. It was a common problem at the time, since sewing-machine needles ran at such high speeds. In hopes of alleviating the problem, Morgan experimented with a chemical solution in an effort to reduce friction created by the needle, and subsequently noticed that the hairs of the cloth were straighter.

After trying his solution to good effect on a neighboring dog's fur, Morgan finally tested the concoction on himself. When that worked, he quickly established the G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Company and sold the cream to African Americans. The company was incredibly successful, bringing Morgan financial security and allowing him to pursue other interests.

https://www.biography.com/people/garrett-morgan-9414691 

Good Thing Mr. Morgan doesn't need the money from hair straightening how. Relaxer sales reportedly dropped 26% in 2014. Black women are still moving toward healthier, more natural hair styles.

 http://blackamericaweb.com/2014/09/11/creamy-crack-withdrawal-hair-relaxer-sales-drop-26/

 
ANNIE TURNBO MALONE

MALONE STARTED BY FOCUSING ON HEALTHY HAIR


BUT WITH THE HELP OF AN AUNT SHE WOULD  CREATE CHEMICAL STRAIGHTENERS FOR BLACK HAIR

While experimenting with hair and different hair care products, she developed and manufactured her own line of non-damaging hair straighteners, special oils, and hair-stimulant products for African-American women. She named her new product “Wonderful Hair Grower” To promote her new product, Turnbo sold the Wonderful Hair Grower in bottles from door-to-door. She began to revolutionize hair care methods for all African Americans....

One of her selling agents, Sarah Breedlove (who became known as Madam C. J. Walker when she set up her own business), encouraged Turnbo to copyright her products under the name "Poro" because of what she called fraudulent imitations and to discourage counterfeit versions.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Malone

http://thevillagecelebration.com/survivors-and-innovators-the-shared-legacy-of-annie-malone-and-madam-c-j-walker-2/

Malone's business thrived until she wound up in a battle for control of her business with her second husband, Aaron Eugene Malone. She'd left some of the day to day affairs in his hands as manager. And he eventually claimed he was responsible for 1/2 of the success of the business.   

She suffered another blow when a former employee also sued her, claiming credit for Annie Malone's success. This lawsuit forced her to sell property in order to pay the settlement. Eventually, the government would come after her for back taxes.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Annie_Turnbo_Malone.aspx

Walker would remain a rich and powerful woman for most of her life. And there would be some debate as to how much credit was owed to Turnbo. But there's no doubt as to who had more sense when it came to men and to money. Walker made a decision to grow her business when her husband, Mr. Walker, wanted to go in a direction that would limit her. 

Turnbo turned over the reigns of a business she created and wound up without enough money and power to fight off another challenge to her business. 

Turnbo's story makes me wonder if Oprah Winfrey didn't read both these stories, and thousands of other stories, regarding black, white, men and women who didn't remain in charge of their own businesses and their own money. Unlike the members of the now broke singing group TLC and M.C. Hammer, Oprah has always known everything about her own money signs (or used to sign) all of her own checks.

Strong minded as well as hard working, Madam C J Walker was able to sustain herself in the manner to which she had become accustomed and she was able to connect with and help others too.

I was surprised and pleased to find out that Walker knew Ida B Wells. 

Walker told her friend Ida B. Wells, the journalist and anti-lynching activist, that after working so hard all her life

• first as a farm labrorer, 

• then as a maid and a cook,

• and finally as the founder of an international hair care enterprise

She wanted a place to relax and garden and entertain her friends. She also wanted to make a statement. 

So it was no accident that she purchased four and a half acres in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York,not far from Jay Gould’s Lyndhurst and John D. Rockefeller’s Kykuit amidst America’s wealthiest families...

/

She directed....the architect— to position the 34-room mansion close to the village’s main thoroughfareso it was easily visible by travelers en route from Manhattan to Albany...

[H]er new [white] neighbors were “puzzled” and “gasped in astonishment” when they learned that a black woman was the owner.  “Impossible!” they exclaimed. “No woman of her race could afford such a place.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/national-trust-for-historic-preservation/do-big-things-madam-cj-wa_b_6029236.htm

* * * * * 
Like the light bulb and the elevator, the relaxer probably had multiple simultaneous inventors in multiple places around the world where one didn't know about the other. So I'm not sure who invented it first. 

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