Embrace Black girl magic and learn about the Black historical figures who made their impact on society as we know it. Female, Gifted and Black, the follow-up to The Book of Awesome Black Women, celebrates the power of the women in black history who shaped and revolutionized the past.

Contents Preface – MJ Fievre Introduction – Becca Anderson Chapter One – Amazing Artists: Musicians, Actors and Other Creators of Color Chapter Two – Penning the Future One Word at a Time: Awesome Black Women Writers Chapter Three – Rhythms and Rhymes: Poets & Literary Pioneers Chapter Four – What the Eyes See: Black Women in Visual Arts Chapter Five – Beyond the Catwalk & the Stage: Black Models and Dancers Conclusion

"A powerful resource for young Black girls to empower themselves with the stories of their foremothers. The Black women in this book will guide and lead future generations to recognize that they have the love, strength, and ferocity to change their world.”—Karen Arrington, author of Your Next Level Life: 7 Rules of Power, Confidence, and Opportunity for Black Women in America“No matter how much you think you know about the awesomeness of Black women, this book will give you more reasons to celebrate what Black women have done and are destined to do. This book is a balm and a healing for all who will read it.”—Marita Golden, author of The Strong Black Woman: How A Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women"Black women trailblazers who have paved the way for future generations of Black girls to build their own achievements, successes, and triumphs. Here are the foremothers whose stories and lives will help teach young Black girls the power they hold within to change and redefine social boundaries.”—Varla Ventura, author of Sheroes: Bold, Brash, and Absolutely Unabashed Superwomen“A celebration of indomitable black women who scaled centuries of oppression to reach the mountaintop. The encapsulated biographies prove that the impossible can be possible.”—Marlene Wagman-Geller, author of Women of Means: The Fascinating Biographies of Royals, Heiresses, Eccentrics and Other Poor Little Rich Girls“We are honored by their lives, their stories, their grace and the inspirational precedent set for all to follow in their footsteps.”—Bridgitte Jackson-Buckley, interviewer, memoirist, and author of The Gift of Crisis: How I Used Meditation to Go From Financial Failure to a Life of Purpose“The world needs more works celebrating the excellence of strong, accomplished Black women! This is an excellent introduction to those who’ve earned their places in history.”—Chrisanne Beckner, architectural historian, writer, and author of 100 African Americans Who Shaped American History

Anderson Becca’s books have sold upwards of 60,000 copies and counting, including Badass Affirmations that has been selling over 2,000 copies weekly!Becca Anderson contributed to several bestselling personal growth books including the million-selling Attitudes of Gratitude, and is co-author of The Gratitude Power Workbook.She runs a Silicon Valley book club that meets regularly at East West Bookstore in Mountain View.In addition to her popular Blogging Your Blessings blog, Anderson runs the Every Day Thankful Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Across all her platforms, she has over 100k followers and counting.She also blogs daily on The Blog of Awesome Women and The Daily Inspo.She has been featured on national tv as well as Bay Area's NBC and ABC afiliates. Anderson has been featured on NPR including KQED's FORUM, KPFA, KALX and also spirituality radio such as Coast-to-Coast.Anderson will be doing events in the great SF Bay Area, Los Angeles and speaking at a Unity Churches on the West Coast on gratitude, the power of prayer and women's spirituality. Fievre The author of the bestselling series Badass Black Girl, M.J. Fievre is a long-time educator and writer who has been praised as a model of efficiency and effectiveness in Scott J. Millerʼs Master Mentors. Both MJ’s Badass Black Girl and Empowered Black Girl have sold more than 22,000 copies.As the ReadCaribbean program coordinator for the prestigious Miami Book Fair, M.J. also directs and produces the childrenʼs cultural show Taptap Krik? Krak! MJ has been featured on PBS, NPR, and WLRN; the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Sun Sentinel, and the New Times; and South Florida’s Channel 6, among others. M.J. is the collaborative editor behind several bestselling personal growth books, including The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Guided Journal, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: Guided Journal, and The 7 Habits Habit Tracker.She runs a Winter Garden book club that meets regularly in Orlando.

Nina Simone was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. She was born in 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, the sixth of eight children in a poor family. She began playing piano at the age of three or four and performed at her local church. She performed at her first concert recital when she was twelve years old. Her music teacher helped Simone by setting up a fund to help pay for her education, and she was able to attend the Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina. After she graduated from high school as class valedictorian, her family moved to Philadelphia because she planned to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.Simone spent some time studying at Juilliard in New York City before applying to the Curtis Institute, but her hopes for an education in the arts were dashed when that estimable music school rejected her application. She found work as a photographer’s assistant and taught piano from her home to help fund private piano lessons with one of the professors from the Curtis Institute, and also began playing at nightclubs to help to further defray expenses. Word soon spread about Simone’s talent, and she developed a fan base. She scored a hit in 1958 with her rendition of “I Loves You, Porgy” from the musical Porgy and Bess. She then recorded her debut album Little Girl Blue in 1959. Following its success, she recorded a number of records over the next few years and began playing in clubs in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Eventually, Nina Simone played her music all over the world. In 1964, she began recording and performing protest songs to address racial inequality. She also spoke and performed at civil rights protests and marches throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1993, Simone settled in southern France, where she died in 2003. As she said, “There’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.” “You’ve got to learn to leave the table when love’s no longer being served.”—Nina Simone, civil rights activist as well as famed American singer, songwriter, musician, and arranger who could play anything by ear. After the Alabama church bombing in 1963, she realized she could use her music to protest in a way that couldn’t go unseen or unheard. ***Although Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in Berkeley, California, she was raised in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received a BA in 1999, followed in 2000 by an MA in media studies, both from Stanford University. Soon after she received an MFA in creative writing in 2005 from the University of Michigan, she and her family had their home in DeLisle severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina. While working at the University of New Orleans, Ward had to commute daily through neighborhoods that had been destroyed by the hurricane. Continually reminded of the tragedy, she was unable to write creatively for three years; in 2008, just when she was about to give up on writing and enroll in a nursing program, her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds, was accepted for publication. It was quickly recognized as significant, and in 2009, it received a Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) Honor Award. Both her fiction and nonfiction are largely centered around the experience and struggles of Black individuals living in the rural Gulf Coast.Her two later novels, Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), both won National Book awards for fiction. Between the publication of these two fiction works, her 2013 memoir Men We Reaped won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. Other recognition followed, including a MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Prize, among other accolades. Ward also edited The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (2016), a modern analysis that carries into the present the concerns and observations of James Baldwin’s classic 1993 examination of racism in America. Ward is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi. ***Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an African American journalist and advocate of women’s rights, including the right to vote. Though she was born a slave in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, only six months later the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves. Even though they were legally free citizens, her family faced racial prejudice and discrimination while living in Mississippi. Her father helped start Shaw University, and Ida received schooling there, but when she was sixteen, her parents and one of her siblings died of yellow fever. This meant that as the eldest, Ida had to stop going to school and start taking care of her eight sisters and brothers. Since the family desperately needed money, Ida ingeniously convinced a county school official that she was eighteen and managed to obtain a job as a teacher. In 1882, she moved to her aunt’s in Nashville, living there with several siblings, and at last was able to continue her education at Fisk University.A direct experience of prejudice in 1884 electrifyingly catalyzed Wells’s sense of the need to advocate for justice. While traveling from Memphis to Nashville, she bought a first-class train ticket, but was outraged when the crew told her to move to the car for African Americans. Refusing, Wells was forced off the train bodily; rather than giving in and giving up, she sued the railroad in circuit court and gained a judgment forcing them to pay her $500. Sadly, the state Supreme Court later overturned the decision; but this experience motivated her to write about Southern racial politics and prejudice. Various Black publications published her articles, written under the nom-de-plume “Iola.” Wells later became an owner of two papers, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and Free Speech.Besides her journalistic and publishing work, she also worked as a teacher at one of Memphis’s Black-only public schools. She became a vocal critic of the condition of these segregated schools. This advocacy caused her to be fired from her job in 1891. The next year, three African Americans who were partners in owning a store clashed with the white owner of a store nearby who felt they were competing too successfully for local business; when the white store owner showed up with several allies and attacked their store, the Black store owners ended up shooting several white men while defending their business. The three Black men were taken to jail, but never had their day in court—a lynch mob dragged them out and murdered all three men. Moved to action by this horrible tragedy, Wells started writing about the lynchings of a friend and others and went on to do in-depth investigative reporting of lynching in America, risking her life to do so.While away in New York, Wells was told that her office had been trashed by a mob, and that if she ever came back to Memphis, she would be killed. She remained in the North and published an in-depth article on lynching for the New York Age, a paper owned by a former slave; she then toured abroad, lecturing on the issue in the hope of enlisting the support of pro-reform whites. When she found out that Black exhibitors were banned at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, she published a pamphlet with the support and backing of famed freed slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, as well as “A Red Record,” a personal report on lynchings in America.In 1896, Wells founded the National Association of Colored Women; and in 1898, she took her anti-lynching campaign to the White House and led a protest in Washington, DC, to urge President McKinley to act. She was a founding member of the NAACP, but later cut ties with the organization, feeling that it wasn’t sufficiently focused on taking action. Wells also worked on behalf of all women and was a part of the National Equal Rights League; she continuously fought for women’s suffrage. She even ran for the state senate in 1930, but her health failed the next year, and she died of kidney disease at the age of sixty-eight. Well’s life is a testament to courage in the face of danger.“I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit.”—Ida B. Wells*** Lauren Anderson (born 1965) was a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet. Having been told as a young adult that her body was too muscular for ballet and that she would be better suited to musical theater, Anderson adopted a meatless diet to slim down and began taking Pilates classes to lengthen her muscles. Her sacrifices paid off. It was a historic milestone in American ballet when she emerged as the first Black principal dancer for a major company in 1990. She was also one of the few Black ballerinas ever to take the helm of a major ballet company anywhere in the world. Her ballet roles included Don Quixote, Cleopatra, and The Nutcracker. After retiring from the Houston Ballet in 2006, she retired completely from the dance industry in 2009. Anderson revealed that she had been an alcoholic until July 2009. After being pulled over for speeding, she soon found herself in county jail. Anderson was given a wake-up call by the judge after winding up in court. Since then, Anderson has been living sober and attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every day, no matter where she is. In the spring of 2016, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture recognized her with a permanent exhibit on her groundbreaking life. She was recently inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame.*** Mary Ann Carroll was the first woman among the Florida Highwaymen, a group of twenty-six artists who painted Florida landscapes between the 1950s and 1980s, as well as the first woman to become the group’s president. At the time, the painters were trying to make a living with their art rather than working on farms or in Florida citrus groves. They were shut out of traditional art galleries because they were Black and had no formal training. To sell their paintings, they’d put them in the trunk of one of their cars and go door-to-door, or else sell them along Florida’s coastal highways, which is how their group got its name.To make enough money to support themselves, the Highwaymen had to paint a little differently than gallery artists. Instead of canvases and frames, they used construction materials both to paint on and to frame their paintings. They also learned to paint quickly, producing as many as twenty-five paintings per artist per day, which they’d sell for about $25 apiece. It is estimated that between 1955 and the 1980s, they created more than 200,000 paintings. Carroll called herself “Queen of the Road” for her role in the Florida Highwaymen. The only woman in a group that was overwhelmingly male, her paintings had a practical purpose: They kept her seven children fed and clothed. She served as the first president of the Florida Highwaymen Artist and History Center, Inc., and presented one of her paintings to Michelle Obama when she visited the White House in 2011 for the White House First Lady’s Luncheon. On Sundays, Carroll could be found singing and preaching in her ministry. She first picked up a brush in 1957 when she met Harold Newton, who helped her learn how to paint. She took pride in keeping her Buick pristine as she traveled the state, selling her paintings on roadsides and at restaurants and hotels that wouldn’t serve her because of Jim Crow laws.In the mid-1990s, the St. Petersburg Times ran a couple of newspaper articles and called the group the Florida Highwaymen for the first time. The name stuck, and the articles sparked an interest in their work, which began to sell for higher prices. Nowadays their paintings are valued at thousands of dollars each and are exhibited in galleries like the Museum of Florida History and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.*** Yara Shahidi is an American actress, producer, model, and social activist. She was born in 2000 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father is Iranian, and her mother is mixed Black and Choctaw Indian. When she was four years old, her family moved to California for her father’s career as a photographer, which included long-term work for the performer Prince. Shahidi began her acting career when she was just six years old, starring in commercials for such clients as Ralph Lauren, Target, Guess Kids, McDonald’s, Disney, and The Children’s Place. Her first film role was in Imagine That with Eddie Murphy in 2009; the next year, she appeared in Salt with Angelina Jolie. In 2012, Shahidi joined the cast of the TV series The First Family, playing Chloe Johnson, the president’s daughter. She became well known in 2014 for portraying fourteen-year-old Zoey Johnson on the award-winning sitcom Black-ish, a role that earned her a NAACP Image Award in 2014. In 2017, Shahidi was cast as the lead in a Black-ish spinoff called Grown-ish; the next year, she began studies at Harvard University. One of her recommendation letters was written by former First Lady Michelle Obama. That same year, she also founded Eighteen x 18 with social news publisher NowThis to encourage voting in the midterm elections. She expanded her activism to efforts to increase representation of marginalized groups by forming a production company with her mother in 2020 in connection with ABC Studios. The aim of the company, called 7th Sun, is to produce and distribute content across cable and other broadcast platforms such as streaming services. Shahidi also founded Yara’s Club with the Young Women’s Leadership Network to provide online mentoring to impoverished children in the hopes of ending poverty through education. She has said, “I think the reason that I try and remain hopeful is I’m watching my peers innovate and find new ways of doing things that are even more efficient than they were before.”*** Zora Neale Hurston’s readership is much larger now than it was at the height of her career. More than half a century after her death in 1960, her body of work has been reprinted hundreds of times, ensuring her legacy in our literary heritage. A writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston spoke for the silenced—Black women. Her work, which includes five novels, more than fifty short stories and essays, a short story collection, and her autobiography, demonstrates her commitment to the culture of her people and her anthropological scholarship of Black language and history.Born in rural Florida in 1891, Hurston was very outspoken, insisting upon equality and eschewing the traditional roles of a Black woman of her day. For this, she credits her precious mother, Lucy, who urged her to “jump at de sun!” when she was nine. Despite a bumpy childhood with a stepmother she didn’t care for, Hurston thrived in the all-Black town of Eatonville, where she saw a real-life example of peaceful and good government by and for Black people. Her father, a popular Baptist preacher who was elected and served as mayor of the town several times, warned his daughter that the world outside would be vastly different. She bounced among various relatives until, at fourteen, she headed out to make her own way in the world, working as a maid for a group of Gilbert and Sullivan traveling players. Landing in New York City, Hurston made some fateful connections with leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Alan Locke, and Montgomery Gregory.With the help of financial aid, Hurston received an excellent education at Barnard College in New York City, where she was mentored by Franz Boas, the leading anthropologist of the day who also had mentored Margaret Mead. Boas saw Hurston’s endless drive and curiosity and set her to the task of gathering the cultural history of her people. After graduation, Hurston returned to Florida to record Black folklore. She married a man she met there, Herbert Sheen, but divorced not long after, one of three divorces in her lifetime. In 1934, she was the recipient of a fellowship to collect more folklore and went on a quest for knowledge about her people that took her to New Orleans, Jamaica, Haiti, and the Bahamas, where she studied voodoo in addition to her usual linguistics and tall stories. The data she aggregated on this epic trip constituted the foundations for Mules and Men and Tell My Horse. Jonah’s Gourd Vine is regarded as one of her finest works of fiction, and Their Eyes Were Watching God is hailed as her masterpiece. One of Hurston’s greatest proponents, novelist Alice Walker, offers a powerful endorsement of Hurston’s opus, “There is no book more important to me than this one.”Unfortunately, her friendship with Langston Hughes broke down over a play on which they collaborated, Mule Bone. The forties saw a further decline of Zora Neale Hurston’s career. Her essay “How it Feels to be Colored Me” drew fire for its inflammatory frankness regarding what Hurston saw as the wholly unfair system of Jim Crow injustice. In 1940s America, Hurston’s literary protests fell on unwilling ears.In 1948, she was the victim of a trumped-up charge of child molestation in New York City. The case was thrown out, but Hurston, devastated, headed back to Florida. Undaunted, she continued to act from her conscience, protesting 1954’s Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, taking the position that it smacked of a bias toward Black students and Southern schools as inferior. Hurston, one of America’s most original literary scholars, linguists, mythographers, and novelists, had to work as a librarian, a substitute teacher, and even as a maid to try to pay her bills. She was working on a book and still submitting articles to the Saturday Evening Post and American Legion Magazine even in her most desperate of circumstances.When she died of heart failure in January of 1960, she was penniless and homeless, taking shelter at the Saint Lucie Welfare Home. Hurston’s work languished, almost forgotten, until her masterful writing was “rediscovered” in the 1970s. She saw Black culture as a treasure to be celebrated and shared; she saw Caucasian culture as feeble next to the vitality of Black idiom and storytelling. Alice Walker searched out Hurston’s unmarked pauper’s grave in Fort Pierce, Florida, and wrote about her pilgrimage to find her sheroic fore-sister for Ms. Magazine in 1975. Her article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” created an avalanche of renewed interest in the writer who had been at the very epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance. The gravestone Walker had made following that visit read, “Zora Neal Hurston, A Genius of the South. Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist.”“I was not comfortable to be around. Strange things must have looked out of my eyes like Lazarus after his resurrection…I have been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots…I have stood on the peaky mountain with a harp and a sword in my hands.”—Zora Neale Hurston from Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston’s autobiography, in which she predicts her whole life in twelve visions, including her ultimate destitution