Alice Walker, best known perhaps as the author of The Color Purple, was the eighth child of Georgia sharecroppers. After a childhood accident blinded her in one eye, she went on to become valedictorian of her local school, and attend Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College on scholarships, graduating in 1965. Alice Walker volunteered in the voter registration drives of the 1960s in Georgia, and went to work after college in the Welfare Department in New York City. Alice Walker married in 1967 (and divorced in 1976). Her first book of poems came out in 1968 and her first novel just after her daughter's birth in 1970.
Alice Maldenior Walker, a female American Author, poet, and activist who was born in February 9, 1944 in a small city in Georgia. She lost sight of one eye at the age of eight years because of an accidental act of her brother playing with a BB gun. In her early high school days, she was a valedictorian which made her to win a “rehabilitation scholarship” made her to go to a college for black women called Spellman in Atlanta, Georgia. She spent two years at Spellman and was transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She then travelled to Africa as an exchange student in her junior year.
Edmonia Lewis and her brother became orphaned at the age of ten. Edmonia original name was Wildfire and her brother name was Sunrise. When their two aunts adopted and took them to northern New York, that’s when their name changed to Edmonia Lewis and Samuel W. Lewis. A bright education for her future, Edmonia went to prep school and Oberlin College in 1859. Not being able to finish College because of two white girls accused her of poisoning them and was not able to finish her last year.
When Angelou was 12 years old an educated black woman from Stamps by the name of Bertha Flowers helped her to break this silence. Angelou graduated at the top of her Morrison 2 eighth grade class in Stamps, Arkansas. Because of the racial issues in Stamps, their grandmother thought it was in the best interest of the children to move them to California. Angelou attended George Washington High School where she studied dance, music and drama. At the age of seventeen Angelou graduated from high school and gave birth to a son Guy Bailey Johnson.
At the age of 11 she was enrolled at the Montgomery Industrial School for girls once graduated, she went on to Alabama State Teacher's College High School. She, however, was unable to graduate with her class, because of the illness of her grandmother Rose Edwards and later her death. After this Rosa once again tries to return to Alabama State Teacher's College, which she did but then her mother also became ill, she then had to care for her mother and also their home. What made Rosa’s life special and also famous was her courageous act of activism. On December 1st, 1955, Rosa was asked to give her seat to a white man, she was extremely tired but she also knew that she had paid the bus fair just like everyone else and felt that she had the right to remain seated therefore, refused to grant her seat to the white man, reason why she then was arrested.
In 1967, the family moved to Jakarta, where Obama’s half-sister Maya Soetoro was born. From ages six to ten, Obama was being raised in Jakarta then until his mother sent him back to Honolulu. Afraid for his safety and his education, she sent him to live in Hawaii with his grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. Barack’s mother finally returned to Hawaii in 1994 and lived there for one year before dying of ovarian cancer. 1979 - 1994 Following his high school graduation, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College but transferred just 2 years later to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science in 1983.
I know my mother probably told her I was going back to school to finish my degree.” (Tan 27) As the chapter is coming to an end and the night is at its peak, Jing-Mei starts to get up to leave but when the women stop her and tell June that her mother had left behind two infant twin daughters in China, she was shocked. “My sisters, I repeat to myself, saying these two words together for first time” (Tan
At the tender age of nine, Horney developed a crush on her brother but was rejected and shunned of reciprocated feelings from him. This is the event that began the downward spiral into the depression that would follow Horney throughout her life (Britannica encyclopedia, 2012). In 1906 Horney decided that if she could not be attractive then she would be smart and enrolled into medical school against both of her parents’ wishes. Horney was one of the first women to enter medical school. Little did anyone know that the events that would soon occur dramatically would change Horney’s life in many ways.
Karen Horney was born in Blankenese, a German city outside of Hamburg, on September 16, 1885. As a young child Horney felt ignored by her father and she began to battle depression as earlier as the age of nine. She decided at a young age to concentrate her attention on developing her intellectual and academic skills. She used her academic abilities to compensate for the fact she felt she was an unattractive girl. When Karen was 21, and against her parents wishes, she enrolled in the University of Freiburg Medical School in Germany.
(Ewell) Kate experienced much loss at a young age, three of her family members died by the time she was thirteen. The first death was of her father on November 1st, 1855 from a train accident leaving her mother to raise the children with the help of Kate’s grandmother and great grandmother. When she was thirteen, her great grandmother and half brother passed away a month apart. Her great grandmother was rumored to be a great influence on her from her story telling and encouragement. (Ewell) During her school years Chopin attended St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, there she was encouraged to write and express herself.