Celebrating Black History Month

"It's not just changing ourselves anymore, it's about deciding what kind of world we want to live in."

-Aileen Hernandez, former NOW president

February, 2007

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1. Aileen Hernandez

After serving for three years as Executive Vice President, Aileen Hernandez was elected the second president of NOW in March 1970. Months later, under her leadership, NOW organized the "Women's Strike for Equality" to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the suffrage amendment and draw attention to the importance of women's labor.

After her election, Hernandez embarked on a campaign to secure women's rights in the paid workforce, establishing a Federal Compliance Committee to press for enforcement of federal equal opportunity laws for women. Under Hernandez's leadership in 1971, NOW protested the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's handling of sex discrimination complaints against universities and kept up the pressure on newspapers to end segregation of their "Help Wanted" ads by gender.

In May 1971, Hernandez told 300 corporate personnel executives that NOW planned to file suit against the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of the OFCCP for not enforcing Executive Order 11246, unless they met the deadline for issuing regulations on sex discrimination and guidelines for affirmative action goals and timetables for federal contractors. The campaign to achieve these goals met with success in December 1971. Hernandez has founded several Black women's organizations, including Black Women Stirring the Waters. She has been Chair of the California Women's Agenda since its founding in 1996 and has won national and local recognition for her work as a civil rights and women's rights leader.

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2. Hon. Shirley Chisholm

The Honorable Shirley Chisholm was a founder of New York NOW, the organization's first chapter, and she spoke fearlessly for women and people of color throughout her life.

Chisholm was the first African American woman elected to Congress; she took her seat in the U.S. House in 1969 representing New York's Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and served until her retirement in 1983. She was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, a fierce advocate for women's rights and democracy, and a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War.

When Chisholm became the first African American person to seek a major political party's nomination for U.S. president in 1972, NOW made its first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate.

Chisholm began her career as a teacher and became a well-known expert on early education and child welfare; in 1970, Chisolm co-authored a child care bill that was more forward-thinking than any such legislation before or since. A major priority of the fledgling National Organization for Women, the bill was ushered through the House by Chisolm and her legendary colleague Bella Abzug, while ally Walter Mondale led Senate passage, only to have President Richard Nixon veto it – calling it "the Sovietization of American children."

Chisolm took on the hallowed halls of Congress in Unbought and Unbossed, saying: "Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men."

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3. Lateefah Simon

Lateefah Simon, the executive director of the Center for Young Women's Development in San Francisco, was a 2004 recipient of NOW's Intrepid Award – the youngest ever. She has spent the last decade of her life advocating on behalf of young women who are or have been confined to juvenile detention centers, group homes, jails, and adult prisons.

Believing that the growing number of young women in the criminal justice system — largely overlooked by research, policies and services that focus primarily on men — reflects deeper social issues that demand caring, creative responses, Simon and her team have developed one of the nation's first peer-run education, employment and community reintegration programs for post-adjudicated and currently incarcerated girls. The Center's education program is run entirely by formerly incarcerated young women.

Under Ms. Simon's leadership, the Center's work has included: a demonstration against arbitrary police sweeps organized by young Latinas who were being harassed and picked up by the police as suspected gang members; a group of multicultural former young sex workers who joined a mayor's committee to research alternatives to incarceration for young women who are former prostitutes; and a group of previously jailed young women who developed "how to stay out of the system" training for their peers and then fought to be allowed in the San Francisco Juvenile Hall to offer the workshops.

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4. Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King was the widow of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a force in her own right in the civil rights movement. Scott King was also an advocate of women's rights and was a former member of the National Board of Directors of NOW. She campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, advocated for gay and lesbian rights, and led opposition to the death penalty and the war.

As her husband came to national attention with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Scott King organized and performed in "Freedom Concerts" to raise money for and awareness of the civil rights movement. Scott King founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change after Dr. King's assassination. In the years after her husband's death, Scott King was a defender of a broad array of human rights issues.

In 1974 she formed the Full Employment Action Council, a coalition of organizations of which NOW was a part, dedicated to achieving full employment and equal economic opportunity. She was a strong advocate for women working together across lines of race and class and was equally committed to gay/lesbian rights, often likening homophobia to racism in her speeches, and worked tirelessly for AIDS/HIV prevention in her later years.

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5. Dr. Mae C. Jemison

Dr. Mae C. Jemison blasted into orbit aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, September 12, 1992 — the first woman of color to go into space. As a founder and president of two technology companies, the space flight was just one of a series of accomplishments for this dynamic woman.

Prior to joining NASA in 1987, Dr. Jemison worked in both engineering and medicine. Following two and a half years as a Peace Corps medical officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa, she worked as a general practitioner in Los Angeles.

As the science mission specialist on the STS-47 Spacelab J flight, a U.S./Japan joint mission, she conducted experiments in life sciences, material sciences, and co-investigated the Bone Cell Research experiment. After serving six years as a NASA astronaut, Dr. Jemison resigned from NASA in March 1993 to start The Jemison Group, Inc., to focus on the beneficial integration of science and technology into daily life.

Her first book, "Find Where the Wind Goes: Moments from My Life," autobiographical anecdotes about growing up, was written for teenagers and was published in spring 2001 and released as a paperback in Jan. 2003.

Dr. Jemison's latest business venture, BioSentient Corporation, was created in July 1999 by The Jemison Group, Inc., which holds the exclusive license from NASA to commercialize exciting new technology. Originally designed to control motion sickness, BioSentient's technology presents significant opportunities across a wide spectrum of health and human performance areas.

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6. Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was born a slave in 1797, she was bought and sold a number of times before gaining her freedom when New York emancipated slaves in 1827. Throughout her life, Truth was a dedicated abolitionist and suffragist.

In 1851, women's rights activists gathered in Akron, Ohio. When none of the women could quiet the clergy who had come to heckle, Sojourner Truth came forward. Despite hissing opposition, the chair, Frances Gage, rose to present Truth as the next speaker. Truth turned her attention to a clergyman who had just mocked women as too helpless to be entrusted with the vote. "The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place — and ain't I a woman?" By the time she was finished, the disrespect had turned to a roar of approval, with many in the audience in tears. Truth would go on to become one of the well-known and best-loved champions of the rights of women.

NOW had long supported adding Truth to a statue depicting Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton by participating in press conferences and rallies spearheaded by the late Dr. C. DeLores Tucker, a civil rights and women's rights leader who was chair of the National Congress of Black Women. Finally, in 2006, the House and Senate passed a bill directing that a statue of Sojourner Truth be displayed in the U.S. Capitol building, the first African-American woman to be so honored.

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7. C. DeLores Tucker

In 1965 Dr. C. DeLores Tucker marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., side by side with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and soon became the first African-American to serve as a Secretary of State, in Pennsylvania from 1971 to 1977.

Her campaign was heavily supported by Pennsylvania NOW, and Dr. Tucker's efforts helped make Pennsylvania one of the first states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. As a member of the Democratic National Committee, Dr. Tucker was instrumental in efforts to ensure equal representation of women in the party.

She was the founding convener in 1984 of the National Political Congress of Black Women, and in 1992 succeeded the late Hon. Shirley Chisholm as national chair of that organization, now called the National Congress of Black Women. NOW worked with Dr. Tucker on a multitude of issues, including the fight to include suffrage leader Sojourner Truth in the unfinished "portrait monument" at the Capitol, which depicts three white suffrage leaders. She also led a public campaign against "gangsta rap" and misogynistic lyrics, which brought the wrath of record producers and performers like Tupac Shakur — but, as always, she was not deterred.

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8. Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in 1849 and became active in the Underground Railroad and the women's suffrage movement. Over the course of 10 years, Tubman made 19 trips and aided over 300 blacks to freedom. She prided herself that she "never lost a single passenger." During the Civil War, she worked for the Union army as a scout and spy, believing that she was fighting for other blacks' freedom. She created networks to gather information and convinced southern blacks to join various Union regiments. In 1863, Tubman led a mission that freed 750 slaves and disrupted southern supply lines. This was the first time a woman – black or white – reportedly led a military mission.

She became friends with Susan B. Anthony and worked with her on the suffragist movement. In 1896, Tubman spoke at the first meeting of the National Association of Colored Women.

With money earned from her two biographies, Tubman financed programs to assist black families. Even late in her life, she continued to be a steward to those in need, establishing the John Brown Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People (later named after her).

In NOW's 1999 reader survey, Harriet Tubman was one the top five answers given to the question "what woman in history is your 'shero'?"

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9. Hon. Carol Moseley Braun

The Honorable Carol Moseley Braun has served her country as a United States Senator (1992-98) and U.S. Ambassador (1999-2001), as well as County Executive, State Representative, and Assistant U.S. Attorney.

In 1992, Moseley Braun became the first female senator from Illinois, the first female African-American senator and the first African-American Democratic senator. In the Senate, Moseley Braun was a consistent and strong voice for equal opportunity, the prevention of discrimination on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation, reproductive freedom, and social and economic justice.

Most recently, in her historic bid for this nation's highest office, she stood tall among the presidential candidates, pressing for fairness, pay equity, family security, equal opportunity and retirement dignity for women and communities of color.

Her candidacy was a prime example of what feminists strive for — women moving up through all levels of political office — and it served as an inspiration to women and girls of all ages who believe that a woman of courage truly can become President of the United States.

Highlights from NOW's History of Working to End Racism