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.
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.
The autobiography is now frequently read as a complement to non fictional works that delve into the subject of racism. The autobiography tells that the strength of character and a love of literature helped Maya Angelou overcoming racism and trauma. The autobiography begins with three years old Maya and her older brother Bailey, they both are sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya becomes a mother at the age of 16. Angelou was challenged by her friend, author James Baldwin, and her editor, Robert Loomis, to write an autobiography that was also a piece of literature. Reviewers often categorize I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as autobiographical fiction because Angelou uses thematic development and other techniques common to fiction, but some critical view
Roberta Flack Roberta Flack was born February 10, 1940, in the small town of Black Mountain, NC, but she grew up in Arlington, VA. She was the daughter of Loran and Irene Flack, who were both skilled musicians. Her father taught himself to play the piano and her mother had formal piano lessons, which had Roberta around music all the time. She started taking formal piano lessons at the age of nine. At the age of 13 she had won second place in a state-wide piano competition between the black students. By the age of 15 she had already graduated from high school and earned a piano scholarship to Howard University.
Louise Erdrich, the prominent and prolific contemporary Native American writer “of American Indian heritage” is crown as “one of a very few American Indian writers who have found a large leadership”among the reading field. Louise Erdrich was born on June7, in Little Falls, Minnesota, and grew up in Wahpeton, the small town in North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Reservation, where her parents taught in a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She is of Chippewa and German-American descent. She grew up in a family of storytellers. Erdrich's interest in writing can be traced to her childhood and her heritage.
Shomoi K. Francis March 3, 2011 Ms. Wright Chemistry 1 Patricia Bath Patricia Bath was born on November 4, 1942, and the daughter of Rupert and Gladys Bath. Her father an immigrant from Trinidad was a newspaper columnist, a merchant seaman and the first black man to work for the New York City Subway as a motorman. She was raised in Harlem; Bath was motivated academically by her parents. Inspired by Albert Schweitzer, she applied for and won a National Science Foundation Scholarship while attending Charles Evans Hughes High School; this led her to a research project at Yeshiva University and Harlem Hospital Center on cancer that irritated her interest in medicine. I n 1960, still a teenager, Bath won the "Merit Award" of Mademoiselle Magazine for her contribution to the project.
Mourning Dove was the pen name of Christine Quintasket, an Interior Salish woman who collected tribal stories among Northern Plateau peoples in the early twentieth century. She described centuries-old traditions with the authority of first-hand knowledge, and also wrote a novel based on her experiences. Like her African-American contemporary Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Mourning Dove’s reputation as a female ethnographer and writer has grown steadily over the past few decades. Her novel, Cogewea, is the first known published novel by a Native American woman. Growing up at Kettle Falls One day between 1884 and 1888, according to family lore, a woman of Lakes and Colville ancestry named Lucy Stukin (d. 1902) was canoeing across the Kootenai River in north Idaho when she went into labor.
It was originally built as a women's residence hall and remained so until 1980 when it became co-ed. Named after Dr. Elizabeth Peet who practically grew up in the Deaf Community. Her mother was deaf and her father was an educator of the Deaf. Her grandfather and father were successive principals of the New York School for the Deaf. After passing the Harvard entrance examinations, she stayed with her father until his death in 1889 and her mother passed on in 1891.
Victoria Woodhull Victoria Claflin Woodhull was born on September 23, 1838 in Homer, Ohio. She was born as Victoria Claflin and was said to have inherited a lot of her mother’s fiery personality and was imitating preachers when she was young. Victoria spent much of her childhood traveling with her family because when she was ten years old, Victoria and her sister, Tennessee, had visions and their father took this as an opportunity and took them on the road as psychic healers. When Victoria was fifteen years old she married Dr. Canning Woodhull who was a Cincinnati doctor and a patent medicine salesman. They had two children together.