"It’s not even necessary that we like them or what they stood for. By their very nature, these are bold, courageous, often controversial figures who, over the course of the last century, have stamped their names into the pages of history. What is important is that we appreciate each for accomplishing something truly monumental; for challenging the status quo; for rebelling at the perfect time; for heralding a message or an idea that perhaps the world was unprepared to hear... They are characters, icons, women of strength, beauty, conviction, determination, and nerve. Legends is not designed to serve the cause of womanhood, but describe them through the unique and human details that defined their lives."
OPRAH WINFREY, TV host
By Maya Angelou
"She was born poor and powerless in a land where power is money and money is adored. Born black in a land where might is white and white is adored. Born female in a land where decisions are masculine and masculinity controls. This burdensome luggage would seem to indicate that travel was unlikely, if not downright impossible. Yet, among the red clay hills of Mississippi the small, plain black girl with the funny name decided that she would travel and that she would do so carrying her own baggage.
"Today, even in the triumphal atmosphere that surrounds her, the keen observer can hear a shard of steely determination in her voice and catch a look of steady resolution in her amber eyes.
"She is everyone’s large-hearted would-be sister, who goes where the fearful will not tread. She is one of our Roadmakers."
BILLIE HOLIDAY, performer
By Elizabeth Hardwick
"The Shifty Jazz Club on 52nd Street... getting out of a taxi, at the White Rose Bar drinking, there were the great performers with their worn, brown faces, enigmatic in the early evening, their coughs, their broken lips and yellow eyes; their clothes, crisp and bright and hard as the bone-fibered feathers of a bird. And there she was – the ‘bizarre deity,’ Billie Holiday...
"The creamy lips, the oily eyelids, the violent perfume – and in her voice the topical l’s and r’s. Her presence, her singing created a large, swelling anxiety. Long red fingernails and the sound of electrified guitars. Here was a woman who had never been a Christian.
"Her message was otherwise. It was style.
"The spotlight shone down on the black, hushed circle in the cafe; the moon slowly skid through the clouds. Night-working, smiling, in the make-up, in long, silky dresses, singing over and over, again and again. The aim of it all was just to be drifting off to sleep when the first rays of the sun’s brightness threatened the theatrical eyelids."
ZORA NEALE HURSTON, author
By Alice Walker
"A friend of mine called one day to tell me that she and another woman had been discussing Zora Neale Hurston and had decided they wouldn’t have liked her. They wouldn’t have liked the way – when her play Color Struck! won second prize in a literary contest at the beginning of her career – Hurston walked into a room full of competitors, flung her scarf dramatically over her shoulder...
"Apparently it isn’t easy to like a person who is not humbled by second place. Zora Neale Hurston was outrageous – it appears by nature. She was quite capable of saying, writing, or doing things different from what one might have wished. Because she recognized the contradictions and complexity of her personality, Robert Hemenway, her biographer, writes that Hurston came to ‘delight’ in the chaos she sometimes left behind.
"Yet for all her contrariness, her ‘chaos,’ her ability to stir up dislike that is as strong today as it was 50 years ago many of us love Zora Neale Hurston. We do not love her for her lack of modesty... we do not love her for her unpredictable and occasionally weird politics; we do not, certainly, applaud many of the mad things she is alleged to have said and sometimes actually did say; we do not even claim never to dislike her. In reading through the 30-odd-year span of her writing, most of us, I imagine, find her alternatively winning and appalling, but rarely dull, which is worth a lot. We love Zora Neale Hurston for her work, first, and then again, ... we love her for herself.
"Reading Their Eyes Were Watching God for perhaps the eleventh time… There is enough self-love in that one book – love of community, culture and traditions – to restore a world. Or create a new one..."
JOSEPHINE BAKER,
dancer and civil rights advocate
By Meg Gohen
"In 1935, La Revue Negre opened in Paris to a sold-out theater, making Josephine Baker an overnight sensation and the most popular black entertainer in France. ‘It is necessary to say she arrived exactly at the moment we needed her,’ wrote the French theater critic Jean Prasteau. ‘With her short hair, her free body, her colored skin, and her American accent, she united the tendencies, tastes, and aspirations of that epoque.’ Credited with bringing the Charleston to Paris and making nudity acceptable evening attire, Baker bid farewell to her humble St. Louis upbringing and, at 19 until her death in 1975, Parisian life suited Baker. She loved the freedom, the clothes, the nightlife – the men. Although she married several times, she never seemed able to satisfy her voracious sexual appetite.
"Fighting for civil rights, she spoke out against segregation. She donated to charities and did intelligence work during World War II. And she adopted a ‘rainbow tribe’ of children from around the world."
MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN, children’s defense advocate
By Richette L. Haywood
"Marian Wright Edelman lived in the eye of the storm. Struggling to guide the winds of change. Struggling to make a difference. Not necessarily for herself, though that would be a fair exchange, but for the children whose voices so often go unheard by adults...
"’I would never do anything else,’ says Edelman from her eighth-floor office in the Children’s Defense Fund, the Washington, DC-based child advocacy organization she founded in 1973 and, without government aid, transformed into the nation’s No. 1 child advocacy organization...
"You can tell by the fire in her eyes. The fire is the reason she has been embraced as America’s First Mom by everyone, across the board, no matter the color, and it’s why she is considered the country’s most effective child advocate...
"…With those comments, the mother, the wife, the preacher’s daughter, and the national leader distills the essence of her appeal. Intelligent but not insolent, religious but not self-righteous. She knows the world isn’t fair… We need to struggle and we need to teach our children how to struggle… Life is about trials, struggles, learning to share, and leaving something better than what you found."
HARRIET TUBMAN, rescuer
By Darlene Clark Hine
"Harriet Ross Tubman has arrived at mythic fame as the best known conductor on the Under-ground Railroad. Her heroic exploits included at least 15 trips into the South to rescue over 200 slaves and deliver them to freedom.
"In 1844, Harriet yearned to be free, but John failed to share her mounting anxiety of being sold into the Deep South or of the possible dispersal of her family should her owner die. In 1849, upon learning that her worst fears would soon to become reality, Harriet escaped...
"After her escape, Tubman made her way to Philadelphia where she worked as a domestic, saving her meager earnings until she had the resources and contacts to rescue her sister, Mary Ann Bowley, and her two children. This was the first of many rescue missions Tubman would undertake as an agent of the Underground Railroad, a network of way stations situated along several routes from the South to the North to Canada, providing runaways with assistance in the form of shelter, food, clothing, disguises, money, or transportation. Most conductors on the Railroad who ventured South to seek prospective escapees and to guide them to freedom were black station masters. In her numerous trips South, Tubman followed various routes and used different disguises. She might appear as a hooded, apparently mentally impaired, wretchedly dressed man loitering about or talking in tongues or as an old woman chasing hens down the street. She usually chose a Saturday night for the rescue… She carried doses of paregoric to silence crying babies and a pistol to discourage any fugitive slave from thoughts of disembarking the freedom train. Within two years of her own escape, she had returned to Maryland’s sister eastern shore to lead more than a dozen slaves to freedom in the northern states."