Elizabeth Austin Taylor was born in Kansas in 1874 to William Austin and Ellen Frye Washington, both recently freed from slavery. By 1891, she had moved to the Utah Territory, and married William Wesley Taylor. The couple began a family and by 1895 also began a newspaper, the Utah Plain Dealer. This weekly newspaper existed to serve and inform the small Black community of the territory. From the outset, Ms. Taylor worked as compositor, setting type for the newspaper, and her husband served as the editor.
Mrs. Taylor established the Western Federation of Colored Women, an organization she developed to address the economic, social, and family concerns plaguing Black women in America. Its membership drew from women across 13 states. Mrs. Taylor said that the goal of the Federation was to “bring and bind our women together in a helpful way.” As its president, she led the Federation in supporting Black women and their families through social opportunities, charitable work, and The Western Women’s Advocate newspaper.
In July 1904, Mrs. Taylor organized a conference at the Salt Lake City Council Chamber for the Federation's members that drew Black women together from throughout Utah and the American West. The Federation received acclaim from the Utah governor Heber M. Wells and Salt Lake City mayor Richard P. Morris. In response, Mrs. Taylor said: “I am truly proud of this movement; being a race woman I have looked with sorrow upon the condition of our women for many years and I believe that the colored women should stand together more than any other class of civilized women in the world..”
Mrs. Taylor and her husband were early members of the mainstream Utah Press Association (UPA) and the Western Negro Press Association (WNPA). The couple traveled widely throughout the western United States in an effort to gain social and political equality in Utah for African-Americans.
When her husband became ill and died in 1907, Mrs. Taylor shouldered his duties as editor and publisher of the Plain Dealer. She continued to put the paper out through 1909 or 1910, while caring for her household and children William, Myrtle, Leonard, Thelma, and Booker T. During that time frame, she also cared for her mother and sister-in-law during their final illnesses, and her infant child, Leonard, who died as an infant.
Mrs. Taylor continued with her activism after her husband’s death, traveling to annual conferences and speaking regularly. In 1909, she delivered a speech at the WNPA conference titled, “Is There a Future in Journalism for Negro Women?”
Mrs. Taylor and her family also helped establish the two major Black churches in Salt Lake City in the 1890s: Trinity African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and Calvary Baptist Church. Both are still in existence. Mrs. Taylor led children’s groups, participated in the literary society, and was a member of the Queen Esther Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star.
Mrs. Taylor’s energy and charisma brought, bound together and elevated Black women in the Western part of the United States during a time when they were plagued with state-sanctioned discrimination.
One of her greatest triumphs was seeing her daughters graduate from college and work as teachers. Mrs. Taylor died at her daughter’s home in Owensboro, Kentucky, on March 22, 1932.
This text is excerpted from:
https://www.utahwomenshistory.org/bios/elizabeth-taylor/, https://www.utahwomenshistory.org/bios/elizabeth-taylor/ and https://womenarise.lib.byu.edu/panel/7-learn-more/.
We often don’t know what to do, but we don’t give up."
― St. Paul the Apostle
Life is tough sometimes. Sometimes the unexpected happens and it feels as if the earth has fallen from beneath our feet. When those “take your breath away moments” happen, they can be scary, anxiety-ridden and perplexing.They can cause us to call everything into question.
The “what if” has come to pass. What if all of the other “what ifs” come to pass? Then what?
I have had to face this question recently and my response to myself has been: we keep going.
Please understand that I do not mean to imply that what it will take to keep going will be easy or pretty or comfortable. It almost assuredly will not.
What I do mean to say is that while we give all respect to the gravity of the difficult moment in which we find ourselves, we must soldier on. Those moments, no matter how gritty, ugly, hard and gut-wrenching they may be, do not exist in vain. They do not exist to wreck us emotionally and leave us eternally in ruins.
They will pass, and we will be better.
The real tragedy would be if we refused to let our hardest moments make us stronger, wiser and more resilient.
If we make it through to the other side of the seemingly insurmountable trials that we thought we couldn't, imagine what else we can do.
Briana Scurry was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Ernest and Robbie Scurry. She was the youngest of nine children born into the working class family. She started playing sports at age 10 and started soccer at 12. When she joined the soccer team, her coach put her in the position of goalkeeper to “protect” her. She was the only African-American and the only girl on the team.
Scurry played soccer competitively throughout high school and was recruited by over 70 colleges, but eventually accepted a full scholarship to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she continued to dominate in soccer and other sports. In 1993, while she was still in college, the U.S. women’s national team coach recruited Scurry to play goalkeeper for the team.
Scurry was a goalkeeper for the United States women’s national soccer team for most of the years between 1994–2008, earning a record 173 caps for the United States. She started in all 159 of the games played during her time on the team and finished her international career with a record of 133–12–14. She also earned 71 shutouts. Scurry was the starting goalkeeper for the United States women’s national soccer team at the 1995 World Cup (3rd place), 1996 Summer Olympics (gold medal), 1999 World Cup (champions), 2003 World Cup (3rd place), and the 2004 Summer Olympic Games (gold medal). She played in the semi-final and playoff for third place in the 2007 Women's World Cup (3rd place).
