Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in the town of Tuskegee on February 4, 1913 (Badertscher) She received a good education despite the discrimination against African Americans in that era. Her mother was a schoolteacher and home-schooled Rosa until she was 11 years old. Rosa then lived with her aunt in Montgomery, attending the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls. She was forced to drop out of Booker T. Washington High School because of her family illness, but received her high school diploma in 1934 (Badertscher) Rosa Parks was later married to Raymond Parks. He was a barber and supported Rosa through thick and thin and they were both members of the NAACP.
Her father was a social worker and executive secretary of the YMCA and her mother was a teacher. When she was young her parents would read to her the works of the great black writers. She grew up in Cleveland and attended Ohio State University where she experienced her first taste of racial strife, but still received a bachelor's degree in education in 1953. She began writing novels, short stories, and poems while still in college and a month after graduation she was married. The family moved to New York City so Kennedy could attend graduate school at Columbia University.
Melba Pattillo was born on December 7, 1941, in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Beals grew up surrounded by family members who knew the importance of an education. Her mother, Lois Marie Pattillo, PhD, was one of the first black graduates of the University Of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1954 and was a high school English teacher at the time of the crisis. Her father, Howell Pattillo, worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. She had one brother, Conrad, who served as a U.S. marshal in Little Rock, and they all lived with her grandmother, India Peyton.
Reese H. One of the most inspiring women to me is Oprah Gail Winfrey. She was born on January 29, 1954 at 7:51 P.M. EST in Kosciusko, Mississippi, USA. Oprah was the daughter of two unwed teens, Vernita Lee and Vernon Winfrey. Oprah had two siblings, one half brother and one half sister, that both died. Oprah was originally named “Orpah” after the Biblical character in the book of Ruth, but there was a typo on her birth certificate.
Or, rather, it did have, but “Our mother died when I was two,” says Scout, “so I never felt her Absence”. (Charles J. Shields 42) Moving out of Monroeville, Harper attended Huntington College for Women. After one year she’d had all of the proper etiquette she could take and moved to the the University of Alabama, where she became the editor of the “politically satirical student newspaper”(George Marotous). Harper’s father and sister, Alice, were lawyers, and with her drive for civil rights, she tried to follow suit, but dropped out 6 months before graduation. Numerous unrewarding jobs kept her writing confined to weekends until a friend who believed in her work leant her the money to be able to write full time.
Throughout the play there are a host of different characters who each have different motives and personalities. Blanche Dubois, a Southern Belle, used to live in Laurel, Mississippi where she went on to lose the family home where her and her sister, Stella, were brought up. Before the loss of the family home Belle Reve, Stella left to go and live with her husband, Stanley in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where after the loosing the house, Blanche went to move in with them. Blanche used to be an English teacher at the local school where she met her young husband. After a heated confrontation about his homosexuality, he shot himself and ever since Blanche has been haunted by the events of that night.
Parks “was then elected the first secretary of the state conference” (Theoharis 27). This later allowed her to travel up to a two week workshop at the Highlander Folk School and help her refresh and see how the rest of the world treats African Americans. From returning from the workshop Mrs. Parks would perform the act that made her famous today. It has been told in a verity of ways by different authors but I think Jeanne Theoharis explains it very well.
However in 1980 she rededicated herself to raising funds for civil rights and educational organisations. She co-founded the Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation for high school students who wished to attend college. In 1987 she also co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development which runs bus tours to introduce teenagers to civil rights and Underground railroad sites across America. Although her health began to fail her as she was in her seventies, Parks continued to make many public appearances to tell her story and of the civil rights
in History, but the passing of one of her biggest inspirations, her grandmother Louvenia Watson, caused her great suffering. This tragedy led to the production of powerful poems and essays, which essentially became her most significant outlet and by 1968, Giovanni published the first volume of her book of poems, Black Feeling Black Talk. This volume includes the poem Nikki-Rosa, one that gives a first hand account of the life of a young African American girl growing up in the heat of racism and violence. Immediately, the title Nikki-Rosa indicates that the poem will discuss Giovanni’s childhood, seeing as how the poem is given the title of the nickname Giovanni was given in the early years of her adolescence. In addition, the first shift directly comments on an area known as “Woodlawn,” (line 3) a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio where Giovanni briefly resided.
Zora Neale Hurston, a woman commonly referred to as an African American black writer that paved the way for generations of other black female writers. Hurston was very intelligent and was educated at Morgan Academy in Baltimore as well as Howard University in Washington D.C (national Endowment). Hurston was raised as one of eight children by her mother a former school teacher and father who was a renowned Baptist preacher. According to national arts, although Hurston’s mother died when she young, her influence over her daughter became the driving force that propelled Hurston to move to New York with only $1.50 in her pocket. Hurston became very well known as a black scholar in New York, her love life was affected and she was married and divorced three times until the age of foury-four when she fell in love with a man half her own