Someone on Facebook today reminded me that today marks two years since George Floyd was murdered.

I probably didn’t remember because I am still trying to figure out how to process the killing of more elementary school children yesterday in a place where they were supposed to feel safe. And, if I’m telling the truth, I’m still trying to stop seeing the faces of — in particular — the little old ladies killed last week in Buffalo, and also trying to balance the fact that the victims of the Buffalo massacre have already fallen out of the news cycle, even if not out of my mind.

But that’s how it goes, right? The news cycles march on. People forget. Nothing changes. Even the “thoughts and prayers” cease. Last fall, a month after Mr. Floyd’s birthday, I wrote about how he’d had another birthday and nothing had changed.

George Floyd has missed another birthday, and we still haven’t effected any real changes.

As we prepare to make our return to the States (the original plan was one year), I’ve been a mixed bag of emotions: excited to see and be closer to my family and friends, anxious because all of the things we “just needed a break” from that were the reasons we left the United States are still things. COVID is still running rampant, though now there’s no funding for testing and everyone is choosing to ignore it, despite the pleading of medical professionals. Schools are still in a state of crisis — and then we add additional emotional crises like shootings that compound the academic one. And there have been 212 mass shootings in 144 days of 2022, according to Public Citizen.

Community is a huge thing. So is college readiness. These are the sole reasons we decided to come back after this year in paradise. But safety is just as real. And the U.S. isn’t safe — hasn’t ever been for Black folks. And what good is community and college readiness if babies studying in their middle school seats don’t even get to grow up to enjoy them? Or if their surviving classmates have to carry the burden and trauma of tragedy with them along the way?

I joke about the Lord starting the rapture at least weekly, but this morning it really feels like the country is descending into hell already, because Republican Jesus is too focused on condemning abortion to save the children who are already here.

And that’s not an endorsement of a political party, either. “Republican Jesus” is a jab at how the GOP manipulates the Bible to create some false morality it uses to oppress others. (I promise you, “thou shalt not abort a fetus” is not in the Bible. And even if we go with “thou shalt not kill,” you either believe Jesus came to free us from the bondage of the law, or you observe all of the laws.) But the Democrats aren’t absolved from blame in this either. They could choose to end the filibuster and enact policies that could literally save lives, but then what would they campaign on in an election year, if they couldn’t rely on “Republicans bad, vote for us”?

The truth is the entire system is broken. Do we need to vote? Absolutely, but we also need to hold elected officials accountable. Because when the whole country did nothing after Sandy Hook, many say they knew that was the end of the gun reform debate, but the truth is, the United States is the only wealthy nation with this issue, so there’s a solution out there to be found. And neither political party has found it.

But we would also be remiss to not recognize these issues as related to the debate about critical race theory and book bans and protection for LGBTQ+ kids. Because the whole underpinning theory of CRT is the idea that the whole system is broken, and that the broken system has continued to cause harm to people in the United States, Black people in particular.

Buffalo was a racially motivated attack, based on systemic lies that have pervaded the U.S. philosophy since the beginning. Uvalde was a gun issue and a mental health issue (the shooter allegedly purchased the gun just a few days before, on his 18th birthday), but maybe it was also an issue of affirming one’s identity; it has been said the shooter was teased about wearing eyeliner.

(I have to pause at this last part to acknowledge: If there’s one thing Black people will do, it’s roast you. I roast my children daily, and they get me back, too. I know it may sound counterintuitive to non-Black people, but it’s good for self-esteem. Debate your bald-headed granny. But it’s also rooted in love. And no one is not accepting you because they tell you your forehead is as big as Peyton Manning’s. That’s not a good reason to go shoot up a school. That’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying is if the perp was teased about wearing eyeliner because “that’s gay,” why is gay — an identity characteristic — framed as such a bad thing in our society in the first place?)

My point is, all of these conversations are related. And the thing they have in common is that when we continue to center a white, cis-gendered male, heterosexual norm as right, and everything else as varying degrees of wrong by default, we will continue to have these issues pop up. And when you break it down by demographics, Black folks are the most likely to say gun violence is a very big problem — more than both white and Hispanic people. And even among Democrats, recent research from the Pew Research Center shows white and Hispanic Democrats have a less decisive stance on the issue than Black Democrats.

You see what I’m saying now about it not being a political party issue? And how race probably is a really big factor in why we haven’t figured out how to solve this problem — or anything else in America?

I’m in the middle of writing a second book, the thesis of which is essentially, “if y’all had listened to Black folks a century ago, there wouldn’t be an achievement gap.” It seems the same could be said more broadly: If folks would start listening to Black people on ANY of these issues, we could probably get somewhere.

Black Folks are About Tired of Having to Continue Saving the Rest of America from Itself.

I went on to liken White Jesus in Daddy King’s (Mr. Williams’) church to Black people’s worship of whiteness more broadly, but specifically in the stock we put into white “experts,” and even more specifically white experts on Blackness. A decade ago, I questioned how the most cited scholar on HBCU culture and governance was a white woman at an Ivy League institution who had neither attended nor ever worked at a Black college. Today, perhaps fittingly, I sit aghast at the Twitter chatter this week about a white woman authoring a book on “trap feminist” theology.

Lord Jesus, please start the rapture, because I’m tired…

The main thesis a decade ago was that White Jesus was fine — even important and necessary — for white people, but that Black people needed for themselves a Jesus who looks like them to worship and adore. It was essentially the same thesis Thurgood Marshall presented with the babydolls to show the impact of Jim Crow and segregation on the psyches of young Black children.

But a decade later, two things have happened. First, I moved to Texas and encountered a Christianity that was so far from anything that remotely resembled what I know to be Christianity that I couldn’t process it. It was an oppressive, not liberating doctrine. Used to keep Black people in their place and underscore the moral superiority of white people. It was a Christianity I’d read about — the same one that is the foundation of the present-day Republican party — but not one I’d ever seen up close. Even in brief, distant encounters, it left my spirit unsettled. I went off looking for something to make sense of how the same Bible could be interpreted so vastly differently (and anyway, couldn’t people read the Bible for themselves? How did folks get so far into these interpretations? Because most of that stuff y’all be saying is in there ain’t in there, but I digress).

I landed on James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, which was originally published in 1969 and draws parallels between the Black Power movement and the teachings of Christ. And his main premise was that White Jesus can’t exist, because Jesus would have always identified with the most oppressed, most persecuted people, and in America in 1969 — and 2022 — that was Black people.

He wrote:

“It is a sad fact that the white church’s involvement in slavery and racism in America simply cannot be overstated. It not only failed to preach the kerygmatic word but maliciously contributed to the doctrine of white supremacy. … Racism has been a part of the Church so long that it is virtually impossible for even the ‘good’ members to recognize the bigotry perpetuated by the Church.”

The book gave words to all of the things I was feeling, and helped me reconcile the different versions of Christianity. (He also called out the Black church for descending into a perpetuation of respectability politics doctrine, focusing on attacking all forms of pleasure, rather than the real systems of oppression as intended by Christ himself. Cone said the descent started as a means of survival — white churches would give money to Black churches they felt weren’t too radical — and later became proximate to what I’ve called out as a worshipping of and desire to be proximate to whiteness.)

The second thing that happened was I recently took a solo trip to Portugal. In Lisbon, there is a replica of the famed Christ the Redeemer statue that welcomes visitors to Rio de Janeiro (the latter of which was erected on the centennial celebration of Brazil’s liberation from Portuguese colonization). As I sailed past the statue, I couldn’t help thinking: If Portugal started colonization and the modern-day slave trade, then White Jesus and Portuguese Jesus are the same, right? Everywhere I went for a week, I couldn’t stop thinking about the role (white) Christianity had played throughout history in the atrocities committed against Black and Brown people. People the colonizers saw as savages needing to be civilized, which was really just an excuse to pillage their lands for natural resources — because after all, it was Black and Brown people who introduced spices and bathing customs, invented mathematics and architecture and the most accurate calendar the world has ever seen and originated countless other marks of “civilized society.”

Last week, I read about a white church in Illinois that had given up whiteness for Lent, which really just translated to giving up white music during the worship service and centering the music of Black and Indigenous groups. And I thought, what a waste. If they had used this season of repentance and reflection to really examine the ways they have either perpetuated or benefited from violence against Black people, if they had chosen just one policy cause to take up for 40 days and one social cause to raise money for, not only could they have made a real difference in their community, they would have sowed seeds of change in their hearts.

But that would have been too much like right. People are not really ready to grapple with concepts of privilege or antiracism. I know this from the work I do, trying to get schools at all levels to make just incremental changes for the benefit of Black and Brown students. They just want to check a box that makes them feel good for trying.

My original thesis was that the Bible specifically didn’t tell us his race (people in North Africa, the lands of the Bible, come in all sorts of colors and flavors), and that we were all free to craft a Jesus in our minds who looked like us, but that for Black people and specifically my Black children, I wanted a Jesus — and experts and ideas of moral superiority and greatness and genius — who looks like us.

Cone’s thesis is that not only does everyone’s Jesus have to be Black, but the “White liberal preference for a raceless Christ serves only to make official and orthodox the centuries-old portrayal of Christ as white [because] the ‘raceless’ American Christ has light skin, wavy brown hair, and sometimes — wonder of wonders — blue eyes. … Christ is black, baby, with all of the features that are so detestable to white society.”

Anyway, if you follow me on social media, you’ve perhaps heard me joke that my Jesus, in my head, looks like Marvin Gaye on the cover of the “Here, My Dear” album, but about 6'2,” 220 lbs. (My daughter argues that Jesus can NOT be fine, but what I look like worshipping an unattractive Jesus?! Her daddy says that maybe Jesus’ “final form” is 6'2,” 220 lbs, but regular every day Jesus is probably more like 5'10,” 185. They both need to mind their business.)

Y’all do what you want with your Jesus in your heads. But one thing’s for certain, two things’ for sure: I am not sitting here on this Saturday between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday waiting on no White Jesus to get up out of the grave to save me. Because the White Jesus I’ve encountered wouldn’t have died for me. Actually, he might have tried to kill me.

Last summer, there was another moment. My children, now old enough to consume news on their own (thanks, Apple News alerts), are generally aware of what’s happening in the world, but only at a sort of intellectual level. By the time we were driving through Houston the evening of May 29, 2020 they knew George Floyd had been killed by Officer Derek Chauvin, who had knelt on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. We’d talked about why the police don’t seem to understand that Black lives matter (because institutions in this country weren’t created to protect or serve Black people). They’re my children. They read and question and research and interrogate. They know.

But no amount of reading and interrogating and discussing could have prepared them for the drive through George Floyd’s hometown four days after his murder. The demonstration was still taking shape, but it wasn’t long before the car was surrounded and citizens and police were engaged in a tensing stand-off. My almost-ten-year-old son, incredibly observant and deeply empathetic, burst into tears. “Mommy, why are all the police officers standing with their hands on their guns?” “Mommy, I’m scared.” And then: “Mommy, what if one of these men gets killed tonight? What if they die fighting for people who look like me to be able to live?” Then, through his tears as he sobbed quietly in the backseat: “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t be crying. I should be brave enough to be out there with them. Mommy, I wish I was brave.” My 12-year-old is usually “tough.” She’s even more observant than her brother, and usually gives him a hard time for being so “soft.” I glanced up in the rearview mirror to see tears slowly sliding down her cheek. She’d been quiet the whole time, but when she met my gaze in the mirror, she said calmly, “Mommy. Can we go to Uncle G’s? Please? Call him.”

We hadn’t planned to see their “uncle” this trip. He’s a doctor and had been alternating weeks on hospital duty. It was his on week, and he was apprehensive about being around the children, because we were still in the middle of a global pandemic. But when he answered the phone, he must have heard the urgency in my voice and told us to come on. By this point, our car — and the cars of all of the other drivers who had been diverted from the highway which, at this point, had been shut down by protestors — was surrounded. The standoff between protestors, most of who looked like us, and police was getting more tense. A brother who probably wasn’t in charge, but whose size and presence commanded attention and respect glanced into our car and he must have seen the children’s faces, because he started instructing the crowd to let us through and personally walked us through. I noticed ours was the only vehicle they were making provisions for, and as I reached back to squeeze my son’s hand, I made eye contact with my daughter in the mirror.

“See? We got us. See how he’s protecting us and making sure we’re good?” Both children relaxed, just a little, just enough for it to sink in. We got us.

We made it to their uncle, and he greeted us with hugs, ordered pizza for the kids and sent me to the roof to watch the sunset, because everyone knows sunsets are my favorite thing. The children laughed, and I smiled. And for about an hour and a half, everything was normal. We got us.

But it’s not normal. The children know that, and I know it. I had been having conversations with their superintendent about equity and the importance of realizing the weight of the moment and taking the opportunity to think more intentionally about hiring decisions and the way students are(n’t) reflected in their curriculum. I ultimately made the decision to fully homeschool my children, because there were too many unknowns in Texas, between the way they approached educating children who look like mine and the ongoing debate about masks in the midst of a pandemic that has disproportionately claimed Black lives.

If Black lives matter the way all the marches in the city and silly yellow paint on the roads have declared, we are still missing the mark to show it and prove it. Not in trite symbolism, but in changed policy and thought processes. I wrote a whole Black history month curriculum in response to my son politely challenging why there’s no Black history month content or research subjects who look like him. (His principal pushed me off on the only Black counselor — who didn’t even serve my son’s grade — when I brought his concerns to her office.) The curriculum was adopted by several schools and districts across the country — but not the one my children would have gone to, if I hadn’t withdrawn them.

We are well into another school year, and haven’t addressed why the discipline disparities between Black and brown children and their white counterparts are so staggeringly high, or why Black children displaying indicators that could either be labeled as gifted or labeled as deficient end up in special education. The voices of Black community members are still being silenced as district leaders superficially invite “comment” without real partnership.

George Floyd would have celebrated another birthday last month, and we still haven’t made any progress on policies that would actually positively impact Black people — and especially Black students — in this country. Many of the cities have painted over their performative shows of solidarity mainfested as “Black Lives Matter” murals on streets. And many have dropped the conversation around effecting any real systemic change.

My children are enrolled in an international school this year. It’s a private, internationally accredited (U.S. and U.K.) bilingual school with small class sizes — under 20. The children and teachers all wear masks, and no parents are fighting over mask mandates. It’s glorious.

The children like it for different reasons: They don’t really get homework. The culture really values working during work time, and not working when it’s not work time. And there aren’t really a lot of rules , or at least not a lot of punishment for broken rules. There also aren’t really major behavior problems from students. And it got me to thinking again about this thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about: American schools overwhelmingly exist to teach children how to obey and follow, more than to teach reading and arithmetic.

We know this is true. Test scores for Black students in the U.S. have remained mostly stagnant for over 50 years, while much praise is generated for schools that enforce an almost militaristic rigidity in their discipline, boasting of how well students stand silent in single-file line. Black children are still suspended at significantly higher rates, and for mostly nonviolent offenses, like tardiness or dress code violations.

American education is set up to perpetuate the existence of a worker class versus a thinker class, and the overwhelming majority are to be workers. Only those who are white and wealthy are to be thinkers, the rest are to fall in line as workers; just look at who college was originally designed for and its original purpose. As soon as we started promoting college as a right for all to access, the conversation became tied to jobs outcomes and workforce development, as opposed to philosophy and the luxury and leisure and freedom of learning how to think. The public K-12 system feeds this, and only those who can afford the best private schools — or who are beneficiaries of benevolent scholarships, which often remind them just how little they belong in a place by making obvious their glaring differences as scholarship kids — are encouraged to explore freely their ability to think and lead. Everyone else is taught to comply, and if they’re lucky, they might learn some literature along the way.

Education leaders give great lip service to the issue of the so-called achievement gap, bit do little to address the issue through addressing discipline and gifted and talented disparities, or implementing culturally relevant curriculum — even though they will tell you that students’ ability to make text-to-self connections has a direct correlation to their ability to comprehend materials and thus score well on the tests.

But anyway, my children have escaped the contradictions of an inequitable system that purports to want equity, for now. And it’s so cool to realize that in an environment with very few rules, the kids still mostly do the right thing. They cuss in class sometimes in the high school, but not at the teacher. No one is cussing anyone out, they just like to try out cuss words (you remember high school, right?). I cringed when my daughter first told me. But it doesn’t disrupt their learning, or other students’ learning, so there’s no disciplinary action. And the more she tells me stories, the more my cringes become amused laughs. Because the thing I realize is she’s learning — they all are. They’re doing their work. No one is missing valuable instruction time over things that don’t disrupt the learning.

But the realization that has impressed me most is that when trusted to be responsible and govern themselves, the students mostly do the right thing. And while they’re mostly doing the right thing behaviorally, it’s also translating to them mostly doing the right thing academically. They’re getting their work done and turning things in. They’re learning math and science and reading and civics and social studies and Spanish and French and English — and they’re learning how to conduct themselves as young adults and members of a community who look out for themselves and each other. And isn’t that what we say we want to teach students in the States? Not to mention they’re doing it in the time that’s designated as learning time, and encouraging work-life balance outside of school by not sending them home with hours and hours worth of homework.

I woke up this morning and texted both of my children, who are back home in D.C. visiting their dad and grandparents today. I put on my Morehouse sweatshirt, and every one of my personal and professional social media networks got a variation of the same message I sent my children in a screenshot tweet. A Morehouse Man is on his way to the U.S. Senate, thanks largely to the efforts of his Spelman sister. Morehouse Man. Pastor of Daddy King’s church. John Lewis’s former pastor. Is the first Black Senator from Georgia. Pushed over the top by Lewis’s former district. (Word to Fisk, too.)

A few months ago, just before the General Election, my daughter asked me if only the best and brightest Black kids get to go to HBCUs. Without hesitation, I told her that, in fact, yes they do. In reality, thought, I remember my dad and others trying to talk me out of my decision to attend CAU, because they thought I was too smart, and my test scores were too high. So to hear my daughter ask this question because all of her “aunties” and “uncles” are HBCU alumni, and they’re all out here killing it in every area of work and society, was the sweetest form of vindication.

My 2021 planner has daily self-care and gratitude prompts; as I sat down to start working this morning, I scribbled on the “I’m grateful for…” lines: “HBCUs. Especially, specifically, the AUC.” And then I got to work, even more empowered (and probably even more obnoxious) about my ability to accomplish anything, to “find a way or make one,” to change the world. Or at least make it a little bit better for people who look like me in a country that has continued to deny our humanity.

Right after the election, I wrote an article for The Grio about how it felt to be a Black woman and an HBCU alumna in the time Kamala Harris was ascending to the vice presidency with a boost from Stacey Abrams.

“Black women have been saving U.S. politics, specifically the Democratic Party, for years with little more than empty promises to show for it. And while I know one woman can’t save the world, I couldn’t be more proud to be raising a Black daughter who was born the year we elected our first Black president and who, with her brother, is going to grow up in a world where it’s normal to see Black women and men who attended Black colleges and universities in the highest positions in the land.”

A Black woman is going to the White House and we're about to act a fool

But as with a lot of things in this country, Black folks’ jubilee is almost always cut short by a reminder that this country and its systems — including its democracy — are founded on white supremacy. And even as progress is made and celebrated, the need for some to preserve whiteness above all else resounds loud and wrong — today reverberating through the halls of a U.S. Capitol building that is newly home to a historically diverse and representative 117th Congress.

Most Americans were not even aware that Congress must certify the votes they cast in the election before the new president-elect can actually be sworn in. Many are getting a front row seat to all of the civic processes that actually go into an election, which were never taught in our high school social studies classes. Today, though, we’re all suddenly aware this step in the process exists, as we watch white supremacists who were ACTIVATED AND ARE SUPPORTED BY THE CURRENT SITTING U.S. PRESIDENT (!!) storm the U.S. Capitol in a terrorist insurrection.

I’ve seen every single person I know, across every single platform, express outrage over how differently these events would have unfolded if Black or Brown people had taken to the Capitol to protest their continued mistreatment in this country. But when the assailants who literally forced an evacuation of the U.S. Capitol building by sitting Members of Congress (!!) are white, and protesting the unseating of their president, there’s a glaring lack of action from federal law enforcement. The president used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear the street in front of the White House during Black Lives Matter protests over the summer so that he could take a photo in front of a church. But when the structures of democracy are under siege, the Department of Defense denied D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s request for more National Guardsmen.

I said it in November, and I’ll say it again: America is exactly who and what Black people have been saying it is. And we’re tired of having to save the rest of the country from itself. Especially since we’re still in the streets, literally, begging for our lives.

As some of you know, I left U.S. News and World Report in May. I spent the summer and early fall consulting for a handful of clients in the educator preparation and education equity spaces, while managing a cross-country move from Maryland to Austin, Texas. (If you’ve ever tried to move across the country with children, you know it’s been quite an eventful summer, getting registered for schools and settled in our new house and managing the emotions of a 9-year-old struggling on and off with bouts of home sickness.)

Though I’ve kept a relatively low profile throughout the summer, I’ve been working hard and keeping busy — surprise, surprise :). In addition to consulting, I’ve joined a local equity, diversity and empowerment commission; am helping to lead a research team to examine the impact of childhood criminalization and make policy recommendations for educators to adopt to help combat the trend; and am co-leading efforts to launch a district-wide network of advocates who will fight for equity in education in our district and hold district leaders accountable, while serving as liaisons to families who may need additional advocacy support. As part of this effort, I’m working to develop digital guides for parents to help educate them on the issues and tactics they need to know to properly advocate for their children. I’ve joined two national, foundation-backed committees on equity and civil discourse, and I’m humbled and excited about the impact I have the opportunity to make on both the local and national landscapes.

I’ve also started covering education for the Austin Chronicle and am looking forward to seeing my first piece — on disparities and biases in how students are identified for Gifted and Talented programs — published in the next week. I’m currently preparing for presentations in Milwaukee at the International Colloquium on Black Males in Education (November 5–7), and San Antonio at Education Trust’s Equity Matters summit (November 8), both centered around the findings from my research for “Let’s Stop Calling it an Achievement Gap.”

As if that weren’t enough (and because I believe in work-life balance, even when “life” actually means “more work”), I’ve written a couple of local profiles for SoulCiti — completely outside of my writing norm — and started a monthly whiskey education series, for which I serve as organizer and host. And I’ve put together a 12-week program for little Black girls in the Austin area that affirm their identities as Black girls while exposing them to a range of topics, from career exploration to etiquette to self-esteem and healthy relationships, which will kick off in the spring semester.

I’m also excited to announce that I recently accepted an offer to join the Texas Charter School Association as the organization’s Vice President of Communications. I’m looking forward to helping to shape the narrative around these schools and the individuals they serve and employ, and helping TCSA strategize around the way they want to present themselves to the public. I’m planning to keep doing all of the things I’ve been doing throughout the summer, with the exception of the individual consulting projects, and am looking forward to fitting all of these pieces together to continue the fight for a more equitable and just education landscape for all of America’s students, but particularly for those who look like mine.

Onward with love,

A3

Carnival Tuesday (or Fat Tuesday — “Mardi Gras”) celebrations rose out of enslaved Africans’ creating their own traditions to partake in the revelry that consumed the French plantation owners before entering the Lenten season the next day (the derivative Latin words, carne and vale mean flesh and farewell, as in giving up the desires of one’s flesh to enter the season of repentance and sacrifice). Banned from the masquerade balls hosted by the plantation owners, slaves embedded customs from their indigenous lands. Many of the Africans living in the Caribbean came from cultures that had their own strong masquerade traditions, particularly around celebrations of life, e.g. birth, death, puberty and marriage. They created costumes representing various African deities, and costumes (like devil costumes) mocking the slave owners. The stories of Mardi Gras in the United States began when French settlers brought the Carnival tradition to Mobile, Alabama (then the capital of Louisiana) in 1703. Much of the history is the same as that of the Caribbean Carnival, including the formal exclusion of slaves and the separate celebrations they created to celebrate life in their own traditions.

Upon emancipation the newly freed slaves in both regions would infuse their Creole and African cultures into a celebration that would forever signify the end of slavery and a celebration of life.

J’ouvert, or “daybreak” parties emerged at the same time, and often involve the smearing of paint and mud, which many believe pays homage to the civil disturbances in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in which people smeared themselves with mud and oil to avoid recogntion. In some places, J’ouvert is celebrated on August 1 — Emancipation Day — and in others, including Trinidad, it is celebrated the Sunday night feeding into Carnival Monday.

As we go forth into the Lenten season, which for some of us means fasting and abstaining from the revelry, it is nice to remember that the season is a continued celebration of life everlasting.

Amelia Boynton Robinson lived her whole life in pursuit of civil rights. Upon her death in 2015, her son Bruce said, “The truth of it is that was her entire life. That’s what she was completely taken with. She was a loving person, very supportive — but civil rights was her life.”

Educated first at Georgia State College (now Savannah State University) and later transferring to Tuskegee Institute (now University), she would pursue further education at Tennessee State University and Virginia State University after graduating from Tuskegee with a home economics degree.

Mrs. Robinson was the first Black woman and the first female Democratic candidate to run for a seat in Congress from Alabama. She had led voter registration drives to get Black citizens to vote in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s — a time marked by poll taxes, beatings, and lynchings for Blacks trying to vote in Alabama — and often similar fates for those trying to encourage them to do so. In 1965, she helped lead the march from Selma to Montgomery on what would become known as “Bloody Sunday” for the brutal beating issued by Alabama State Troopers when the group reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In January 2015, she was honored by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address, and two months later, she would hold hands with the nation’s first Black president as they returned to the Edmund Pettis bridge and once again crossed it in memorial of the 50th anniversary of the atrocities she’d experienced there in 1965.

She herself was brutally beaten on March 7, 1965, like many others, but it did not slow her activism, and she continued fighting for voting, property, and education rights for her people for the remainder of her life.

Valerie Thomas’ interest in science was sparked by seeing her dad work on the family’s television set, and furthered when she got her hands on a copy of The Boys First Book on Electronics at the age of eight. But despite the fact that her father was the reason for her interest in the field at all, he would not help her with the projects in the book. To make matters worse, her all-girls school did not encourage participation in math and science. It was at Morgan State University, where she would be one of only two women in the physics major, that her interest in math and science was nurtured and encouraged.

Following graduation, Thomas accepted a position as a data analyst at NASA, where she oversaw the creation of the image-processing systems for the first satellite to send images to the Earth from space. She made numerous other contributions to the study of space, including developing computer program designs that supported research on Halley’s Comet, the ozone layer, and satellite technology. She would go on to invent the illusion transmitter, a device NASA still uses, and which has been adapted as a surgical tool and a for use in television and video. She received a patent for the device in 1980.

Before retiring from NASA in 1995, she would serve as Project Manager of the Space Physics Analysis Network and Associate Chief of the Space Science Data Operations Office.

Patricia Roberts Harris graduated summa cum laude from Howard University and went on to be the first Black woman named as an American envoy when President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointee her as ambassador to Luxembourg.

“I feel deeply proud and grateful this President chose me to knock down this barrier, but also a little sad about being the ‘first Negro woman’ because it implies we were not considered before,” she said at the time.

Following the end of her diplomatic career, she assumed the role of dean of Howard University’s law school, making her the first Black woman head of a U.S. law school.

President Jimmy Carter appointed her as secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1977, making her the first Black woman to hold a cabinet position. In that post, she called for an end to discriminatory housing and employment practices and worked hard to rebuild urban neighborhoods by urging businesses to invest in them.