By Rina N. Risper
The New Citizens Press
LANSING, MI — There are many women throughout history who have impacted the lives of thousands. We wanted to bring you an article that highlights a sliver of what Harriet Tubman, Marian Anderson and Eleanor Roosevelt accomplished during their lives. Unless we are in school, we hardly hear about women who have paved the way for so many. All of the women in this article have been an inspiration to me and I hope you do more research on your own. This information and the photos are compliments of the of Library of Congress.
Harriet Tubman
(c. 1820 – March 10, 1913)
Born into harsh slavery in 1820 as Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland. Tubman married a free African American at 25. Several years later, fearing she would be sold South, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia where she met William Still, the Philadelphia Stationmaster of the Underground Railroad and learned how the system worked.
In 1851 Tubman began relocating members of her family to St. Catharines (Ontario), Canada. Tubman returned to Maryland to rescue other members of her family. She is said to have operated without fear of any consequences and inspired bravery and courage in those fearful of escaping. Called "Moses" by those she helped escape on the Underground Railroad, Tubman conducted more than 300 people to freedom using the system. Her trips could take weeks at a time, all the while evading slave hunters and the authorities. During the Civil War, Tubman served the Union as a soldier, spy and nurse. She was denied payment for her wartimes services and returned to Auburn, N.Y. There, she married Nelson Davis whom she had met in South Carolina during the war. Only 12 miles from Seneca Falls, she helped Auburn remain a center for women’s activities. In 1995, the federal government honored her with a commemorative stamp.
Marian Anderson Singing,_January 14, 1940._Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964
Famed contralto Marian Anderson made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on January 7, 1955, as Ulrica in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. She was the first African American to perform with the company.
Anderson was born in Philadelphia on February 27, 1897 and began her musical training at the age of six with the Union Baptist Church choir. Rejected by a local music school because of her race, Anderson had private voice lessons funded by her family, church, and friends. She toured the United States extensively, appearing in concerts and recitals, and, in 1925, won first prize in the New York Philharmonic voice contest. The contest yielded a number of performance dates, but it was not until she traveled to Europe that she gained major recognition.
Anderson encountered racial prejudice throughout her career, but the most famous incident of discrimination took place in 1939 when she was barred by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) from performing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Several years earlier, the DAR responded to protests over mixed seating during performances of black artists by instituting a policy banning African-American artists from performing at the hall. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was the most prominent member to resign from the organization in protest. At the invitation of the federal government, Anderson performed before an audience of approximately 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939. The action of the DAR reflected the racial prejudices prevalent in the period. Prior to the abolition of legalized segregation in the 1950s, African Americans were simply barred from attending cultural events in many parts of the country. In January 1939, a writer employed by the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers’ Project mentioned Anderson to Katy Brumby, an African-American woman she was interviewing in Birmingham, Alabama. "We were listening, one day, to Marian Anderson…singing over the radio," the writer reported in "The Story of Katy Brumby," an American Life Histories, 1936-1940 interview. "After the rich…voice had stopped, I said I’d heard she was coming to Birmingham for a concert in the Spring." "I don’t guess they’ll let us hear it," Brumby replied. Marian Anderson retired from singing in 1965 after an extended farewell tour. Among the honors and rewards she received for her incomparable voice and efforts towards breaking the color barrier for African-American performers was the U.S. National Arts Medal, awarded to her in 1986. Anderson died in 1993 at the age of ninety-six.
Eleanor Roosevelt 1933. Portraits of the Presidents and
First Ladies, 1789-Present
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 11, 1884. Orphaned by the time she was ten, the young niece of President Theodore Roosevelt was raised by her grandmother. After attending finishing school in England, she returned to America and began visiting needy children in poor neighborhoods initiating lifelong work on behalf of the underprivileged. In 1905, Roosevelt married distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt. Over the next ten years she had six children one of whom died in infancy. Although her duties as mother and wife took most of her time, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to volunteer for good causes. While her husband served in Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I, she worked with the Red Cross and visited wounded troops in the Naval Hospital. Upon returning to New York City in 1920, Mrs. Roosevelt involved herself for the first time in the women’s rights movement. In 1921, Franklin Roosevelt contracted poliomyelitis (polio) and was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. In order to maintain her husband’s political career and to further her own ambitions, Eleanor Roosevelt significantly increased her political Involvement. She participated in the League of Women Voters, joined the Women’s Trade Union League, and worked for the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee. In addition, she help found a non-profit furniture factory in Hyde Park, New York. During this period she began to act as her husband’s "eyes and ears" traveling to places and talking to people her husband now found difficult to reach. When Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to serve as a liaison between the President and the people. Beginning in 1936, her daily syndicated newspaper column provided a constant means of communication with the American public. At times, the first lady surpassed the president in her commitment to the disadvantaged. She championed anti-lynching laws, for example, but President Roosevelt did not share her enthusiasm. He believed acceding to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s demands for federal anti-lynching laws would endanger congressional support for his New Deal programs. In March 1936, Eleanor wrote a "personal and confidential" letter to NAACP Executive Secretary Walter Francis White expressing dismay that the atrocity of lynching would not be addressed by the Congress or the president:
Eleanor Roosevelt to Walter White, March 19, 1936 Words and Deeds in American History
Before I received your letter today I had been in to the President, talking to him about your letter…I told him that it seemed rather terrible that one could get nothing done…and asked him if there were any possibility of getting even one step taken and he said the difficulty is that it is unconstitutional apparently for the Federal Government to step in in the lynching situation…I will talk to him again about the Van Nuys resolution and will try to talk also to Senator Byrnes and get his point of view. I am deeply troubled about the whole situation as it seems to be a terrible thing to stand by and let it continue. After Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945, President Harry Truman appointed the former first lady as a delegate to the United Nations. She chaired the Human Rights Commission during drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948. In 1953, Mrs. Roosevelt resigned her position, but maintained involvement with the United Nations and other humanitarian causes. The former first lady spent most of her later years at Val-Kill Cottage, her home in Hyde Park, New York. Eleanor Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962 in New York City.
