Born in 1855 in Trenton, Kentucky, Josephine Leavell was an accomplished pianist, organist and music teacher. She attended Roger Williams University in Nashville, Tennessee where she met prominent Baptist minister, Lieutenant Colonel Allen Allensworth, the first African American to reach the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. The couple married in 1877. They had two daughters, Eva and Nella.
Upon Rev. Allenwsorth’s retirement from the military in 1906, the family settled in Los Angeles, California. During that time, they became inspired by the idea of establishing a self-sufficient, all-Black California community where African Americans could live free of the racial discrimination that pervaded post-Reconstruction America. Their dream was to build a community where Black people might live and create “sentiment favorable to intellectual and industrial liberty.”
On June 30, 1908, the Allensworths and their business partner Professor William Alexander Payne established the California Colony and Home Promoting Association. The Association purchased 20 acres of land from the Pacific Farming Company with the goal of establishing a town for Black soldiers. The land, situated in Tulare County, about 40 miles north of Bakersfield, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, was divided into individual parcels, forming “a colony of orderly and industrious African Americans who could control their own destiny.”
Allensworth's reputation drew people from all over the country, causing some to buy property sight-unseen in order to support the efforts. California's first African American school district was established there in 1910. Soontherafter, residents elected the first African-American Justice of the Peace in post-Mexican California. By 1914, the Allensworth community had grown to 900 acres of deeded land.
An activist and leader in her own right, Josephine founded the town’s Women’s Improvement League, sat on the school board, and donated the property for the Mary Dickinson Memorial Library, the town’s public library which was named for her mother.
Allensworth’s prosperity peaked in 1925, after which time the lack of water available for irrigation began to plague the town. The water needed for irrigation was never supplied in the amount promised by the Pacific Farming Company, the land development firm that handled the original purchase. As a result, town leaders became engrossed in lengthy and expensive legal battles with the company, expending scarce financial resources on a battle they would not win.
By 1930 the town’s population had dropped below 300 people, as residents and nearby farmers began to leave in search of other employment. The deficient water supply would no longer sustain the town’s agricultural and ranching enterprises. By 1966, the town was scheduled for demolition when arsenic was found in the water supply. The state of California eventually stepped in and preserved the land and the buildings, designating the area as the “Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park.”
To this day, Allensworth remains the only California community to be founded, financed and governed by African Americans. One historian described Allensworth as “a planned experiment in civic power that had significant impact around the state and meaning for all…Just as the town touched diverse peoples and places around California, today Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park attracts a wide array of visitors of all ethnic groups—drawn to this symbol of the universal dream of freedom.”
This text is excerpted from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Leavell_Allensworth, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/allensworth-josephine-leavell-1855-1938/, https://www.quinlanmuseum.com/resources/AllensworthExhibitionbooklet.pdf and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Allensworth.
Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997 in the Swat District of Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, to parents Ziauddin Yousafzai and Toor Pekai Yousafzai.
She was given her first name Malala (meaning "grief-stricken") after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan.
Fluent in Pashto, Urdu and English, Yousafzai was educated mostly by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, a poet, educational activist and director of a girls’ school. In an interview, Yousafzai once said that she aspired to become a doctor, though later her father encouraged her to become a politician instead. Ziauddin referred to his daughter as “something entirely special.”
When the Islamic Taliban movement took control of the area where Yousafzai and her family lived in 2008, girls’ schools were burned down. Yousafzai kept a diary of the events where she spoke out against the Taliban’s terrorist regime.
On January 3, 2009, her first entry was posted to the BBC Urdu blog. She hand-wrote notes and passed them to a reporter who scanned and emailed them. The blog recorded Yousafzai's thoughts during the First Battle of Swat as military operations took place. The following is excerpted from one of her early entries:
I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools. Only 11 out of 27 pupils attended the class because the number decreased because of the Pakistani Taliban's edict. My three friends have shifted to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families after this edict.
The Pakistani Taliban issued an edict that no girls could attend school after January 15, 2009, and Yousafzai's school was shut down. By that time, more than 100 girls’ schools had been destroyed. The night before the ban took effect was filled with the noise of artillery fire, waking Yousafzai several times. The following day, she also read for the first time excerpts from her blog that had been published in a local newspaper. Soon thereafter, an American documentary film was made featuring Yousafzai, making her internationally famous.
As Yousafzai became more recognized, the dangers facing her increased. Death threats against her were published in newspapers, slipped under her door and posted via social media. Eventually, a Pakistani Taliban spokesman said they were “forced” to act. In a meeting held in the summer of 2012, Taliban leaders unanimously agreed to kill her.
Yousafzai envisioned a confrontation with the Taliban, writing, “I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.”
On the afternoon of October 9, 2012, a Taliban gunman boarded the school bus that Yousafzai was riding with her schoolmates. Just 15 years old at the time, Yousafzai was on her way home after taking an exam. According to reports, the masked gunman shouted, “Which one of you is Malala? Speak up, otherwise I will shoot you all.” Upon being identified, Yousafzai was shot in the head with one bullet, which traveled 18 inches from the side of her left eye, through her neck and landed in her shoulder.
Yousafzai was rushed to the hospital for life-saving procedures. After months of surgeries and rehabilitation, Yousafzai was able to join her family in the United Kingdom. The family had to relocate to England and live in exile there due to ongoing threats to Yousafzai’s life.
In 2013, TIME magazine named Yousafzai one of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” On her 16th birthday she gave an address before the United Nations. In her speech Yousafzai called for the equal right to education for girls all over the world, and became an international symbol of this cause.
In 2014, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for the right of every child to receive an education, becoming the youngest-ever Nobel laureate.
Yousafzai and her father established the Malala Fund, a charity dedicated to giving every girl an opportunity to achieve the future she chooses. In 2017, she began studying at the University of Oxford. In 2020, she completed the Philosophy, Politics and Economy degree, one of the university’s most prestigious.
Yousafzai continues her activism. Upon her release from the hospital in 2014, she wrote: “It was then I knew I had a choice: I could live a quiet life or I could make the most of this new life I had been given. I determined to continue my fight until every girl could go to school.”
This text is excerpted from: https://malala.org/malalas-story,
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2014/yousafzai/facts/, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai. To view footage and hear her most notable speeches, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncSL5JYyHM4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hx0ajieM3M.
Elizabeth Bebe Moore Campbell was born on February 19, 1950, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Doris Edwina Carter Moore and George Linwood Peter Moore. When her parents separated in 1953, she went on to live with her mother and maternal grandmother in Philadelphia during the school year and her father in North Carolina during the summer. Her experiences growing up in both the North and South gave her a unique perspective on racial segregation in the United States.
Campbell attended Philadelphia’s Girls High School and upon graduation was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh where she was the only African American student in her dorm. She graduated with her Bachelor of Science degree in elementary education in 1972, and began teaching in the Atlanta public schools. In 1975, Campbell moved to Washington, D.C., where she continued to teach. After enrolling in a class led by Toni Cade Bambara, a renowned African American author, Campbell transitioned out of teaching to become a writer.
In the mid-1970s, Campbell was published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Essence, Ebony and Seventeen, among other publications. She also appeared as a regular commentator on National Public Radio. Campbell’s first book, a fictional work entitled Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two Career Marriage, was an analysis of the relationship between a woman’s career and her marriage. Sweet Summer: Growing up With and Without My Dad, her second book, was a memoir of her childhood in a divorced family. Her most critically acclaimed novel, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, inspired by the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, describes the impact of this senseless crime as experienced by the victim's family, and explored southern racism. It was described as one of the most influential books of 1992 by The New York Times Magazine, won an NAACP Image Award and was named a “New York Times Notable Book” for 1992. Campbell was also the author of three New York Times bestsellers: Brothers and Sisters, Singing in the Comeback Choir, and What You Owe Me, which was also a Los Angeles Times "Best Book of 2001.”
Campbell was a mental health advocate who worked tirelessly to shed light on the mental health needs of the Black community and other underrepresented communities. While navigating the mental health system in an effort to secure care for her own daughter, actress Maia Campbell, Campbell realized that there was a dearth of mental health resources in communities of color. In response, Campbell founded the Inglewood chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) to help support her daughter and others like her, who suffered from mental illness. “Stigma is one of the main reasons why people with mental health problems don't seek treatment or take their medication,” Campbell once said. “People of color, particularly African Americans, feel the stigma more keenly. In a race-conscious society, some don’t want to be perceived as having yet another deficit.”
Campbell's interest in mental health was the catalyst for her first children's book, Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry, which was published in September 2003. This book won the “NAMI Outstanding Literature Award” for 2003. The book tells the story of how a little girl copes with being reared by her mentally ill mother.
Campbell succumbed to complications from brain cancer and passed away on November 27, 2006, at age 56. Campbell’s personal archives are housed in the Bebe Moore Campbell collection at the University of Pittsburgh Archives Service Center. In May 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives announced July as Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month in recognition of her efforts to bring awareness to the unique struggles that underrepresented groups face regarding mental illness. In 2017, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors named a branch of the Los Angeles County Public Library in her honor.
This text is excerpted from:https://www.mhanational.org/black-pioneers-mental-health, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/bebe-moore-campbell-41,
https://namica.org/bebe-moore-campbell-minority-mental-health-month/#:~:text=illness%20among%20minorities.-,About%20Bebe%20Moore%20Campbell,she%20passed%20away%20in%202006, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebe_Moore_Campbell.
