Black Women in History

Black Women in History Preserving Black women’s history through research, photographs, and storytelling
Every post shared here is based on real people and real events.

We research historical records, verify facts, and source authentic photographs to tell these stories honestly

Drusilla Dunjee Houston researched ancient Africa while the Ku Klux Klan held enormous power in 1920s Oklahoma. Her answ...
08/28/2026

Drusilla Dunjee Houston researched ancient Africa while the Ku Klux Klan held enormous power in 1920s Oklahoma. Her answer was a 1926 book insisting that Black people had an ancient civilizational past worth studying.

That was not an abstract argument where Houston lived.

By September 1921, the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma City claimed roughly 2,500 members. Across the state, Klan influence reached politics, civic leadership and, in some communities, law enforcement.

That same year, white violence destroyed much of Tulsa's Greenwood District, one of the most prosperous Black communities in the country.

Houston responded in the Black Dispatch, the Oklahoma City newspaper founded by her brother Roscoe Dunjee. Days after the Tulsa destruction, she wrote about what had happened and challenged Black people not to answer racial terror with submission.

She was already accustomed to treating the printed word as a place of struggle.

Born in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1876, Houston moved with her family to Oklahoma Territory as a young woman. She became an educator, opened schools for Black girls and women, worked in religious and civic organizations, and became a contributing editor to the Black Dispatch.

But another project was consuming years of her life.

Houston wanted to investigate a question that white supremacist scholarship had often answered before Black researchers were even allowed into the room: What had African peoples contributed to the ancient world?

She searched for evidence in histories, archaeological reports, accounts of Egypt and Nubia, religious texts, ethnology and the writings of earlier scholars.

The work was slow enough that Houston eventually gave its conditions a name.

In the preface to Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cush*te Empire, she wrote, “The average book has its dozen helpers and advisors, this work has been done in hermitage.”

Hermitage.

Houston was not describing a peaceful retreat from the world. She meant research carried out inside a life already crowded with teaching, journalism, church work, community service and the responsibilities expected of a Black woman of her generation.

She wrote that the work had taken the spare moments that ordinarily would have belonged to rest.

That detail changes the book.

Wonderful Ethiopians was not produced by a university department with research assistants moving between archives. It came from a largely self-trained Black historian in Oklahoma trying to assemble a sweeping account of ancient African civilization with the sources she could reach.

Her intellectual relationship with W. E. B. Du Bois belongs in that story, but it is often told too simply.

Du Bois published The Negro in 1915, arguing directly that racial prejudice had made a fair assessment of African peoples difficult. His book placed Africa and people of African descent inside world history at a time when popular and scholarly writing regularly pushed them toward its margins.

Houston was influenced by Du Bois.

But he did not start the clock on her research.

Biographical work preserved by the Oklahoma Historical Society describes Houston's project as a labor of roughly twenty-five years. If that chronology is correct, she had been pursuing African history long before The Negro appeared.

Du Bois helped sharpen a road she was already traveling.

In 1926, Houston finally published Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cush*te Empire in Oklahoma City. The title page identified it as Book I, making clear that she imagined something much larger than a single volume.

Her canvas was enormous.

Houston explored ancient Kush and Ethiopia, Egypt, Arabia, Babylonia, India and Persia, arguing that African and Cush*te peoples had exerted a far greater influence on ancient civilization than conventional historians acknowledged.

She was trying to reverse a wound made by scholarship itself.

Generations of Black Americans had encountered histories that treated Africa as primitive, static or almost irrelevant until slavery and European colonization brought the continent into someone else's story. Houston wanted Black readers to meet Africa before the slave ship.

That purpose did not make her conclusions automatically correct.

It made the question urgent.

Houston believed the influence of ancient Cush*te peoples extended across vast portions of Asia, Europe and elsewhere. Some of those arguments depended on racial classifications, migration theories and interpretations of ancient sources that modern archaeology and historical scholarship do not support.

That distinction has to remain visible.

Modern scholarship firmly confirms that Kush was a major African civilization centered in Nubia, largely in what is now Sudan. Kush*te rulers conquered Egypt and governed it as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty during the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.

The archaeological evidence for Kush is substantial.

Temples, inscriptions, royal burials, sculpture, cities and other material remains document an African state with its own long political, religious and artistic history. None of that requires claiming that one Cush*te civilization created or directly ruled every ancient culture Houston tried to connect to it.

Respecting her work means being able to hold both truths.

Houston challenged a historical world that underestimated Africa, and some of the answers she proposed went beyond what the evidence can sustain.

Black scholars deserve that kind of seriousness.

Their work should not have to be declared flawless before it can be called important. Houston was a thinker, which means her arguments belong in the same place as other serious historical arguments: open to evidence, criticism, revision and further discovery.

Her contemporaries were already doing that.

In 1927, Black labor leader and writer Frank R. Crosswaith reviewed Wonderful Ethiopians in The Messenger. He criticized aspects of Houston's approach, particularly the religious framework running through the book, while still describing her research as a remarkable act of historical and literary excavation.

Other Black intellectuals recognized the scale of the labor even when they did not accept every conclusion.

Arthur Schomburg, whose collecting helped build one of the world's great archives of Black history, praised the depth of research behind Houston's work. A 1927 profile in The Messenger reported that she had three more volumes of Wonderful Ethiopians ready for publication, along with additional manuscripts.

The woman had not run out of questions.

Then there was Du Bois.

A surviving letter from Houston to Du Bois is preserved among his papers and dated January 5, 1927. Later biographical accounts of the correspondence quote Houston making clear that she was not trying to “reach the white race.”

That statement becomes more revealing beside the preface of her book.

There Houston described her work as offered “in love to all races,” yet her correspondence suggests that white approval was not the audience she needed in order for the project to matter.

Those ideas do not have to contradict each other.

Houston could believe historical truth had meaning for everyone while understanding that Black readers had a particular need for a past that had not been filtered through assumptions of Black inferiority.

Think about what that meant in Oklahoma.

Black children were being educated under segregation. Black newspapers were documenting lynching, disfranchisement, unequal schooling and racial violence while the Klan claimed the authority to police who belonged, who could speak and how much equality Black citizens should expect.

Houston went backward thousands of years to confront something happening directly outside her door.

If white supremacy depended partly on the idea that Black people had always been beneath other civilizations, then African antiquity became more than an argument about old kingdoms.

It became a battle over what Black people had been taught to imagine about themselves.

Houston understood education that way throughout her life.

She taught children, created educational opportunities for Black girls and women, participated in civic organizations, wrote newspaper columns and pursued historical research without separating knowledge from the conditions in which Black people were forced to live.

Her ancient history and her community work belonged to the same mind.

That is why the word “hermitage” carries so much weight.

It describes not just solitude, but the unequal machinery behind scholarship. Some historians receive institutions, salaries, assistants, libraries and professional networks; others have to build their intellectual lives in whatever hours remain after service.

Houston kept working anyway.

Only the first volume of Wonderful Ethiopians was published during her lifetime. She died in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1941 after years of illness, leaving much of the larger project unfinished or unpublished.

More than sixty years later, another portion of that work returned.

In 2007, scholar Peggy Brooks-Bertram edited and published material identified as Book II, Origin of Civilization from the Cush*tes. A project Houston had been unable to complete in print during her lifetime had crossed into another century.

That survival should not tempt us to turn her into a prophet who had every answer.

Her significance is harder and more useful than that.

Drusilla Dunjee Houston looked at a body of historical writing shaped by racism and decided Black people did not have to accept its boundaries. She searched for Africa where other historians had minimized it, demanded attention to Black antiquity, and produced work substantial enough that people are still reading, challenging and revisiting it a century later.

Some of her conclusions have not survived the evidence.

The question that drove her has.

How much of the human story was distorted because the people authorized to write history had already decided who was capable of civilization?

Houston spent years trying to answer that question while racial hierarchy was not merely an old theory in a book. It was operating in Oklahoma schools, politics, newspapers, neighborhoods and organized white supremacy around her.

The Klan had uniforms, meetings, political connections and thousands of followers.

Houston had pages.

She filled them.

Wonderful Ethiopians does not need protection from correction. It deserves protection from disappearance.

The least the record can return to Drusilla Dunjee Houston is the serious reading she spent so much of her life demanding for Africa.

I invest a lot of time researching and sharing these important stories. If you’d like to support the work behind them, here’s the link:
https://buymeacoffee.com/blackwomenhistory

Every coffee truly helps.

Violette Neatley Anderson spent fifteen years recording lawyers before she became one herself. The Chicago court reporte...
08/28/2026

Violette Neatley Anderson spent fifteen years recording lawyers before she became one herself. The Chicago court reporter earned her law degree in 1920, became an assistant prosecutor, and six years later entered the Supreme Court Bar as its first Black woman.

That journey sounds almost orderly when reduced to a few dates. In Anderson's Chicago, even Black lawyers who had already earned their licenses were building their own professional institutions because they were not accepted into the city's established bar association.

Anderson had been born in London, England, on July 16, 1882, and came to Chicago with her family while she was young. She graduated from high school in 1899 and continued studying at the Chicago Athenaeum and the Chicago Seminar of Sciences.

Her road toward law began with a different profession.

From 1905 until 1920, Anderson worked as a court reporter. For fifteen years, her work placed her inside a legal system whose proceedings she was responsible for preserving in the record.

Somewhere during those years, the person recording the work of attorneys decided she wanted to become one.

Anderson entered Chicago Law School and graduated in 1920 with a Bachelor of Laws degree. The Illinois State Bar Association's account of her life says she was the only woman in her graduating class.

She passed the bar and entered private practice.

Two years later, Anderson successfully defended a woman accused of killing her husband. Historical accounts from the Illinois State Bar Association say the courtroom victory was followed by her appointment as an assistant prosecutor in Chicago.

That appointment carried another barrier with it.

The same account identifies Anderson as both the first woman and the first African American appointed to that position. A Black woman who had spent years making the courtroom record was now appearing in court as one of the lawyers whose work became part of that record.

Her career was unfolding inside a larger Black legal world that Chicago had forced to build space for itself.

The Cook County Bar Association had been organized by Black attorneys in 1914. Its own history says Black lawyers in Chicago were not accepted for membership in the Chicago Bar Association, so they joined together to protect their professional interests and serve a Black community confronting discrimination in courts, housing, public accommodations, and public life.

Anderson became part of that institution.

She served as a vice president of the Cook County Bar Association from 1920 to 1926, placing her in leadership among Black attorneys at a moment when their presence in the profession was still small enough to be counted.

Then came Friday, January 29, 1926.

The official Journal of the Supreme Court of the United States recorded six justices present that day. On printed page 173, among the Court's routine business, appeared Violette Anderson's name.

The journal did not call her a pioneer.

It did not stop to explain that a racial and gender barrier had been crossed. It simply recorded that Violette N. Anderson of Chicago and another attorney, O. E. Swan of Muskogee, Oklahoma, were admitted to practice.

That plain sentence carried far more history than its wording suggested.

The Supreme Court Historical Society identifies Anderson as the first African American woman admitted to the Bar of the United States Supreme Court. She had earned the professional standing required to practice before the highest court in the country.

There is an important distinction here.

Anderson was not the first Black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and there is no record of her ever presenting an oral argument there. Constance Baker Motley would later become the first Black woman to argue before the Court.

That does not make Anderson's achievement smaller.

She broke the barrier of admission itself.

There is no need to give her someone else's accomplishment to make hers impressive. On January 29, 1926, for the first time, a Black woman stood among the lawyers formally authorized to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Anderson's life did not narrow after that achievement into a collection of legal firsts.

She remained involved in organizations serving Chicago's Black community, including the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and the Friendly Big Sisters League. She also served with the Chicago Council of Social Agencies.

Her professional leadership and community work were not separate worlds.

Black attorneys of her generation were practicing in a city where their own bar association had grown out of exclusion. Black women's organizations were doing similar work in other parts of civic life, creating networks of service, leadership, education, and mutual support when established institutions often offered little room.

One of the organizations most closely connected to Anderson's later life was Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated.

In 1933, she became the sorority's eighth Grand Basileus, its national president. She was elected to four one-year terms and served until 1937.

Zeta Phi Beta's own history says Anderson directed the organization toward social concerns during her administration. Her presidency was not simply another title added to a distinguished résumé.

There was also a house in Michigan.

Anderson owned a summer cottage called Birch Haven in Idlewild, a Black resort community that flourished during an era when segregation restricted where African Americans could vacation, stay, and purchase property.

Birch Haven was something tangible in a life filled with institutions, courtrooms, offices, and titles.

When Anderson died in Chicago on December 24, 1937, at only 55 years old, she left the cottage to Zeta Phi Beta. The sorority still includes that gift in the history of her leadership.

Her death came less than twelve years after that January morning when the Supreme Court entered her name into its journal.

She never returned to that record as the lawyer delivering a famous Supreme Court argument.

For some historical figures, that absence might tempt later storytellers to enlarge the story, attach an argument she never made, or turn admission into something it was not.

Anderson's life needs none of that.

Her real path is remarkable enough: a girl brought from London to Chicago, a woman who spent fifteen years working as a court reporter, the only woman in her law school graduating class, a practicing attorney, a prosecutor, a leader among Black lawyers, a national sorority president, and finally the first Black woman admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court.

And the setting around that achievement matters.

She reached the Supreme Court Bar in a period when Black lawyers in her own city could not count on admission to the major local bar association. She advanced through a profession in which Black women were still uncommon enough for nearly every new position to carry the possibility of another barrier being crossed.

Yet the Supreme Court's official journal recorded her arrival without ceremony.

Just her name, her city, and the fact that she had been admitted.

Maybe that is the detail worth holding onto.

Violette Neatley Anderson never argued a case before the Supreme Court. She did something earlier and necessary: she became the first Black woman the Court formally recognized as qualified to do so.

That is the barrier she actually broke, and it is large enough to stand on its own.

I invest a lot of time researching and sharing these important stories. If you’d like to support the work behind them, here’s the link:
https://buymeacoffee.com/blackwomenhistory

Every coffee truly helps.

Federal officials warned Diane Nash that continuing the Freedom Rides could get someone killed. John Seigenthaler later ...
08/28/2026

Federal officials warned Diane Nash that continuing the Freedom Rides could get someone killed. John Seigenthaler later recalled her telling him the students had already signed their wills before leaving Nashville.

Diane Nash was twenty-three years old.

She had celebrated her birthday two days before ten Nashville students boarded a Greyhound bus for Birmingham, Alabama, on May 17, 1961. The riders had been warned to expect jail, severe violence, or death.

Nash was not on that bus.

The students had elected her their coordinator, which meant that while other people traveled into Alabama, Nash stayed behind and helped keep the entire operation connected.

That distinction is easy to lose when history is reduced to photographs.

The Freedom Rides had begun on May 4, when an in*******al group organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE, left Washington, D.C., for New Orleans. They intended to test whether federal rulings against segregation in interstate bus travel were actually being obeyed across the South.

They were not.

On May 14, Mother's Day, a white mob attacked a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama. After the bus left the station, its damaged tires failed outside town and the bus burned as riders struggled to escape.

Another group of riders reached Birmingham that same day and was attacked at the Trailways station.

The violence was severe enough that the original CORE riders could not simply continue as planned. With bus drivers refusing to carry them farther, the remaining group eventually flew toward New Orleans.

The images coming out of Alabama could have marked the end of the campaign.

In Nashville, students saw something else in them.

They understood that if a nonviolent campaign stopped immediately after organized racial violence was used against it, the lesson would be dangerous. Segregationists would have learned that violence could decide when a protest ended.

Diane Nash understood that calculation because Nashville students had already spent more than a year learning what disciplined nonviolence actually required.

Nash had come south from Chicago to attend Fisk University. In Nashville, she joined workshops led by James Lawson, who trained students to prepare for insults, arrests, physical attacks, and attempts to provoke them into abandoning nonviolence.

That preparation helped shape the Nashville sit-ins of 1960.

Black students sat at segregated lunch counters where they were denied service, endured arrests and attacks, and supported a wider economic boycott of downtown businesses. Nash became chair of the Nashville Student Movement's central committee and emerged as one of its most important organizers.

The experience taught those students something that would matter enormously a year later.

A movement could not depend on spontaneous bravery.

People had to know the plan. They had to know whom to call, what to do when someone was arrested, how replacements would be recruited, how information would reach the press, and what would happen if the first group could no longer continue.

After the attacks in Alabama, eighteen Nashville activists volunteered to resume the Freedom Ride.

Ten were selected.

Seven men and three women prepared to leave.

The decision was not made because they believed nothing would happen to them. Jim Zwerg, one of the selected riders, recorded at the time that they had again been warned they might face jail, extreme violence, or death.

Nash would later explain the strategy plainly.

The original riders had not failed. They had endured more than human beings could reasonably be expected to endure, and the Nashville students saw themselves as fresh people able to continue where that first group had been forced to stop.

That is where the telephone enters the story.

Nash later recalled that the Nashville movement established an office that operated twenty-four hours a day. Reporters, community members, federal officials, and movement participants could call for accurate information about what was happening.

But one telephone had a different purpose.

Nobody was supposed to use it.

The line was kept open so that Freedom Riders in trouble could always reach someone in Nashville.

That small detail says almost everything about Nash's kind of leadership.

She was communicating with people in several cities, dealing with the Justice Department, helping recruit riders, keeping the press informed, and coordinating with movement leaders while some of her closest friends traveled toward places where mobs had already attacked others for attempting the same journey.

The federal government wanted the Nashville group stopped.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy learned that another group was heading toward Birmingham and contacted his aide John Seigenthaler, a Tennessean who had already been sent into Alabama to deal with the growing crisis.

Seigenthaler later remembered Kennedy asking him who Diane Nash was.

He called her.

At first he tried to persuade her to stop the riders. Then, as Nash remained unmoved, his warning became sharper.

He told her somebody could be killed.

According to Seigenthaler's later recollection, Nash paused and told him that the students had signed their last wills and testaments before leaving.

The power of that exchange does not come from pretending these young people wanted to die.

They did not.

It comes from understanding that they were trying to deny violence the power to make political decisions for them.

Nash herself later spoke about the emotional cost of coordinating the rides.

Some of the people traveling through Alabama were among those she loved most. She remembered knowing at night that people close to her might not be alive the next evening, and she described crying as a way of releasing the strain.

That memory matters.

It keeps courage from becoming mythology.

Nash was not fearless because she could not imagine losing anyone. She continued while understanding exactly what might be lost.

Early on May 17, the ten Nashville riders boarded their bus for Birmingham.

Among them were John Lewis, Catherine Burks, Bernard Lafayette, Jim Zwerg and other young activists trained in the Nashville movement.

Their trip did not go smoothly.

Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor had riders taken into custody after they reached the city. They spent Wednesday night and Thursday in jail and began refusing food.

Then, in the early hours of Friday, May 19, Connor tried to solve his Freedom Rider problem another way.

Police removed several of the students from jail and told them they were being taken back toward their Nashville campuses.

Instead, Connor's officers drove them roughly 120 miles north and abandoned them near the Alabama-Tennessee state line.

John Lewis later remembered the fear of being left there.

It was dark. They did not know the area, and they understood the danger of being stranded in territory where Black travelers could not assume that law enforcement would protect them.

They began walking.

Eventually they came upon the home of an elderly Black couple.

The couple had reason to be afraid themselves, but they let the stranded riders inside. By daylight, the students were able to contact the Nashville movement and tell Nash what Connor had done.

The telephone reserved for emergencies had served its purpose.

Nash and the Nashville organizers began finding transportation.

She later recalled making calls in the middle of the night trying to locate a large enough car. Leo Lillard, vice chairman of the Nashville movement, eventually secured one and drove to retrieve the students.

Then Nash asked them what they wanted to do.

They could return to Nashville.

Or they could go back to Birmingham.

They chose Birmingham.

Think about what Bull Connor had attempted.

He had taken young protesters out of jail in the middle of the night, driven them more than a hundred miles away, and left them near another state.

Within hours, the movement was arranging to send them back.

Other Freedom Riders were already on their way.

The campaign had become larger than any one busload of people. The Nashville students had built their strategy around replacement, continuation, and the knowledge that arrests or attacks could remove individuals without necessarily stopping the movement.

On May 20, Freedom Riders finally left Birmingham for Montgomery.

When the bus reached Montgomery, another white mob attacked riders and people around them. Seigenthaler, the federal official who had warned Nash that someone might be killed, was himself seriously injured while trying to help during the assault.

Still the Freedom Rides continued.

On May 24, riders traveled from Montgomery toward Jackson, Mississippi. There, police arrested them when they challenged segregation in the bus terminal.

Then more people came.

And more after them.

During the spring and summer of 1961, the Freedom Rides expanded into a sustained campaign involving more than 400 Black and white participants.

Many were arrested.

Some were sent to Mississippi's notorious Parchman prison farm.

But the campaign had created a problem federal officials could no longer treat as an isolated dispute over a few bus stations.

The Supreme Court had already ruled against segregation in interstate transportation. The Freedom Riders forced the country to confront the gap between federal law and what Black travelers actually faced on the ground.

On September 22, 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued stronger regulations barring segregation in interstate bus travel and requiring the removal of racially segregated signs in terminals serving interstate passengers.

The rules took effect on November 1.

That victory belonged to a movement, not one person.

CORE conceived and launched the original Freedom Ride. Riders put themselves in danger on buses and inside terminals. Fred Shuttlesworth and Black communities in Alabama provided crucial assistance. James Lawson had helped train the Nashville students. Lawyers, organizers, churches, reporters, families and hundreds of later riders kept applying pressure.

Diane Nash's contribution should be understood inside that collective achievement, not enlarged until everybody else disappears.

What makes her role remarkable is precisely what she did not need to do.

She did not need to be in every photograph.

She did not need to stand at the microphone every time the story was told.

She needed to know where people were.

She needed to keep accurate information moving.

She needed to help find replacements when riders were arrested or injured.

She needed to answer federal officials who wanted the campaign stopped.

And when Bull Connor tried to remove the Nashville students from Birmingham by abandoning them near the state line, she needed to help make sure his decision was not the final one.

The burning Greyhound bus became one of the enduring images of the Freedom Rides.

But another object deserves a place in the story.

A telephone kept open for people in trouble.

Because movements are sustained not only by the people visible at the moment of confrontation.

They are also sustained by the person who answers when the call comes.

I invest a lot of time researching and sharing these important stories. If you’d like to support the work behind them, here’s the link:
https://buymeacoffee.com/blackwomenhistory

Every coffee truly helps.

Address

1374 Arkwright Place SE
New York, NY
30317

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Black Women in History posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share