Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, 1981

Duchess of Sussex in 2018. Photo credit - Wikipedia

A member of the British royal family; a former actress and fashion blogger.

Born Rachel Meghan Markle in Los Angeles, California. Her mother is African-American, and her father is Caucasian. When she was 6 years old, her parents got divorced. Markle attended Hollywood Little Red Schoolhouse and then the all-girl Immaculate Heart High School. At 18, Markle began to study theatre and international studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In 2002, at 21, after earning her bachelor’s degree, she returned to LA to develop her acting career. As a biracial actress, Markle had difficulties getting roles, not being black enough for black roles and not white enough for white ones. To support herself financially, she taught bookbinding and worked as a calligrapher.

Markel’s first TV appearance was as a nurse in the soap opera General Hospital. Then she landed guest roles in various TV shows, such as 90210, CSI: NY, and CSI: Miami, as well as leading roles in movies, such as Random Encounters and Anti-Social. In 2011, at the age of 30, Markel had her big break in the TV show Suits, playing the role of Rachel Zane. At 33, Markle founded a lifestyle blog called The Tig, in which she wrote about fashion, food, traveling, beauty, and highlighting inspirational women. In 2016, at 35, Markle was appointed global ambassador for World Vision Canada. In this role, she traveled to Rwanda, promoting the Clean Water Campaign, and India, advocating for raising awareness for women’s issues, and debunking stigmatization regarding menstrual health.

In June 2016, Markle was introduced to Prince Harry, a member of the British royal family, by a mutual friend, and soon they became a couple and got engaged in the following year. As a future member of the British royal family, Markle retired from acting and closed her blog. The wedding took place on May 19, 2018, at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. Afterward, Markle was given the title Duchess of Sussex and took on various royal duties. She served as vice president of The Queen’s Commonwealth Trust and as the patron of numerous charities and organizations, including London’s National Theatre, The Royal Foundation, and the Association of Commonwealth Universities. Using her fashionista status, Markle collaborated with British stores and fashion houses to launch the Smart Set capsule collection to raise money for the Smart Works charity. Markle and Prince Harry also established the Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, which later was renamed Archewell Inc. On May 6, 2019, at the age of 38, Markle gave birth to her first son, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, the 7th in line of succession to the British throne.

In January 2020, after years of suffering public pressure, endless tabloid rumors, and scrutinizing, in addition to race issues raised by the royal members about her and her son, and with no support or protection from the crown, Markle and Prince Harry announced of their retirement from their royal duties and of their plan to become financially independent. Within six months, they settled in LA, where they continue to support and advocate for charities and organizations that promote social issues, such as mental health, women’s rights, animal welfare, and education access.

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“Women don’t need to find a voice. They have a voice. They need to feel empowered to use it, and people need to be encouraged to listen.”

“Women don’t need to find a voice. They have a voice. They need to feel empowered to use it, and people need to be encouraged to listen.”

Fun Facts

  • As a child, she frequently visited the set of the TV show Married... with Children, where her father worked as a director of photography and lighting.
  • At 11, she wrote to Procter & Gamble to gender-neutralize a dishwashing soap commercial. Following her request, the company changed it.
  • She was married for two years to the film producer Trevor Engelson.
  • In 2015-2016, she released two fashion collections for Reitmans – a Canadian clothing company, based on her style and her character in Suits.
  • One of her and Prince Harry’s early dates was a camping trip to Botswana.
  • She was raised Protestant but confirmed into the Church of England in preparation for the wedding with Prince Harry.
  • At her wedding, she wore a dress designed by Clare Waight Keller and a diamond tiara that was belonged to Queen Mary. To the reception, she wore a dress designed by Stella McCartney.
  • In 2019, she was a contributor and guest editor for the September issue of British Vogue, in which she highlighted the works of 15 women who acted as “Forces for Change.” The issue was the “fastest-selling issue in the history of British Vogue.”
  • Many are comparing her to her late mother in law Diana, Princess of Wales.
  • After suffering a miscarriage in the summer of 2020, she announced that she is expecting a girl.
  • She is a good friend of Serena Williams.
  • Through their producing company, Archewell, the couple also signed a deal with Netflix and with Spotify.
  • More than 50 million people around the world have watched their two hours interview with Oprah in March 2021. It was one of the most-watched interviews in history.

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Category: Fashion & Beauty, Philanthropy, Politics & Leaders, and Theater & Cinema
Tags: Actress, African-American Women, and Royalty

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Alice Coachman WWP
Sports

Alice Coachman, 1923-2014

High jump athlete, the first African-American woman to win an Olympic gold medal.

Alice Coachman was born in Albany, Georgia. While in elementary school, her teacher and aunt noticed her athletic skills and encouraged her to practice sports despite her parents’ objections. As a girl in the segregated south, Coachman had no access to athletic training facilities or the opportunity to compete in organized sports events (due to color and gender). Determine to develop her natural talent, Coachman used everything available to her – running with no shoes in fields and dirt roads and making high jump crossbars out of rope and sticks. During high school, Coachman caught the attention of the boys’ track coach, who took her under his wings and coached her. Within a year, she was spotted by a recruiter from Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, and at 15, she got a scholarship. Her unusual jumping style, combined western roll, and straight jumping techniques helped her win the national championships in the next nine years. In 1939, at the age of 16, she started her scholarship at the Tuskegee Preparatory School, which in addition to studying and practicing, required mending uniforms and cleaning the school’s sports facilities. During this period, she won high jumps companions and national championships in the 50-meter dash, 100-meter dash, and the 400-meter relay team. She also won three conference championships as a guard on the women’s basketball team. At 23, Coachman received her degree in dressmaking and continued her education at Albany State College, where she studied Home Economics and science. In her late teens and early 20s, the years that were supposed to be the pick of her career, the Olympic Games were canceled because of WW2. Her first global stage appearance was made possible at the 1948 Olympic Games in London. On her Olympic tryouts, Coachman qualified to the US team with a high jump of 5 feet 4 inches, breaking the previous record by ¾ inch. At the Olympics high jump finals, she reached first place with a leap of 5 feet and 6⅛ inches on her first try, becoming the first black woman to win the gold medal and the only American woman to win a gold medal at the 1948 Games. On her return to the US, Coachman became a celebrity, she met President Truman and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and various parades were held in her honor. Following the Olympic Games, 24 years old Coachman retired from her athlete career, with 34 national titles under her belt. She finished her degree at Albany State College and became a teacher and track-and-field instructor. In 1952, at the age of 29, she made history again when she signed as Coca-Cola Company’s spokesperson, becoming the first African-American woman to endorse an international product. In 1994, at 71, she established the Alice Coachman Track and Field Foundation. This non-profit organization supports young athletes in starting their careers and helps Olympic veterans adjust to life after retainment. Coachman died at the age of 90 of cardiac arrest. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alice-Dunbar-Nelson-WWP
Literature & Poetry

Alice Dunbar Nelson, 1875-1935

A poet, journalist, playwright, and political activist. Associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Alice Ruth Moore was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of a Creole seaman and a former enslaved black seamstress. After graduating high school at 14, she attended a teacher-training program at Straight University, and at 17, she began teaching at an Elementary school in New Orleans. She became involved with activism at the Phyllis Wheatley Club and wrote for the Woman’s Era Club newspaper – the first newspaper created for and by African American women. In 1895, she published her first collection of poems, essays, and short stories titled “Violets and Other Tales.” That same year she moved to NYC, where she helped establish the White Rose Mission – a settlement house for colored girls. Furthering her education, she took courses at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Her writings for the Woman’s Era newspaper caught the attention of the poet and journalist Paul Laurence Dunbar, and in 1898, after two years of correspondence, she moved to live with him in Washington, DC, and they got married. Their relationship fertile their writing but was also disruptive and abusive. He raped her before they got married, and after three years of violent behavior, she left him and moved to Wilmington, Delaware. There, Dunbar taught at various institutes, including Howard High School, the Hampton Institute, and the State College for Colored Students. She never stopped studying, and at 32, she received her M.S degree from Cornell University. In 1913, Dunbar worked as the co-editor and writer for the A.M.E. Review – the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s newspaper. She met poet and civil rights activist Robert J. Nelson, and they got married in 1916. Although she was always involved in political activism, supporting the women’s rights movement and working toward the empowerment of women of color, it was only in 1918 that Dunbar-Nelson was appointed to an official role in the movement as a representative of the Woman’s Committee of the Council of Defense. In 1920, she became the co-editor of the progressive black newspaper, the “Wilmington Advocate.” In that same year, she published a literary anthology, aiming at black readers, titled “The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer.” At 45, Dunbar-Nelson was a successful and popular writer, consistently publishing articles, columns, and essays in newspapers as well as in academic journals. Dunbar-Nelson became a speaker at various events, including the 1928 American Negro Labor Congress Forum in Philadelphia. After she moved with her husband to Philadelphia in 1932, her health declined, and two years later, she passed away at the age of 60. Dunbar-Nelson is a representative of the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Her writing is characterized by complex understandings of race, gender, and ethnicity. In her work, Dunbar-Nelson explored issues that she dealt with as a woman of color, especially her mixed-raced experiences, not belonging here or there. She wrote about her perspective of education opportunity, workplace environment, and social oppression, inspiring generations of black writers to come. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alice Walker WWP
Literature & Poetry

Alice Walker, 1944

A novelist, poet, and social activist. The first African-American woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers. At 8, she was injured in her eye after her brother played with a BB gun, causing her permanent blindness in one eye. The mark on her eye made her an easy target to her classmates, so she turned to poetry for comfort. Growing up in the segregated south, she attended an only black kids’ high school, from which she graduated valedictorian. Her high scores granted her a full scholarship to Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College in NYC. In this period, Walker had an abortion which caused her suicidal thoughts. She wrote all about it in her poems. In 1965, at the age of 21, Walker moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and became active in the civil rights movement. She worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program while serving as writer-in-residence in various academic institutes publishing essays and short stories. At 23, she married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in the south, and the couple had to travel to NYC to get married. On their return, they became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi since 1822, when the miscegenation laws passed. During their nine years of marriage, they suffered recurring harassment from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1970, at 26, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, following the life of an abusive sharecropper husband and father. Three years later, she was appointed editor of Ms. Magazine, published her second poetry collection and her first collection of short stories. In 1976, Walker returned to NYC and published her second novel Meridian, about several civil rights activists in the south during the 1960s. In the late 1970s, she moved to California, where she wrote her best-known work, The Color Purple. Published in 1982, the novel explores the struggles of a black woman in the racist and patriarchal society of 1900s Georgia. The book was a best-seller, and in the following year, 39 years old Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Later the novel was adapted into a film featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg and a Broadway musical produced by Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey. In 1984, she co-founded the feminist publishing company Wild Tree Press. She deepened the world of some of her characters from The Color Purple in two of her novels, The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, and created new characters that allowed her to delve into other social issues, such as female sexuality in By the Light of My Father’s Smile from 1998, and identity questions in Now Are the Time to Open Your Heart from 2005. Throughout the decades, Walker published seven novels, ten poetry collections, four short stories collections, four children’s books, and a dozen collections of essays and articles. In all of her work, Walker deals with the struggles of black people, especially women, and their experiences in sexist, racist, and violent surroundings. Often using Black vernacular, which highlights the hundreds of years of slavery and oppression, she had dealt with complex topics such as rape, isolation, bisexuality, and troubled relationships within the black community. Walker is a long-time social and political activist, promoting and fighting for various causes, from black and women’s rights to environmental issues, Palestinians’ fight for independence, and the elimination of female genital mutilation. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alicia-Keys-WWP
Music

Alicia Keys, 1981

Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter, producer, and actress.

Born as Alicia Augello Cook in Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in NYC. Her father left when she was 2 years old, and she was raised mainly by her mother. As a child living in a rough neighborhood, Keys was exposed to drugs, prostitution, and street violence. She credits her mother for leading her to the right path, supporting her interest in music and performance, which began at a young age. In preschool, she sang in her school’s productions, and at the age of 6, began classical training, practicing the piano six hours a day. At 12, Keys wrote and composed her first song. Two years later, she began studying jazz. After graduating at age 16 as valedictorian from the Professional Performance Arts School, she signed a deal with the record producer Clive Davis, first at Arista Records and later at J Records. In 2001, 20-year-old Keys released her debut album “Songs in A Minor”, which included the #1 hit “Fallin”. The album sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, and Keys won 5 Grammy awards. Four years later, Keys released her second album, “The Diary of Alicia Keys”, for which she won 4 Grammys, including best album award and best song award, and for her 3rd album “As I Am”, Keys won 3 more Grammys. Throughout the years, Keys continued to release #1 hits, including “No One”, “Empire State of Mind”, and “Girl on Fire”. Overall between 2001 to 2016, Keys released 6 studio albums, 2 live albums, and 1 EP. In addition to being an acclaimed musician, Keys is also an actress. She acted in various films and TV shows, including “Empire”, “SNL”, “Smokin’ Aces”, and “The Secret Life of Bees”. She is also a film producer and directed one out of five segments of the movie “Five”. In 2004, Keys co-founded and became the global ambassador of ‘Keep a Child Alive’ – a non-profit organization providing medicines in Africa for HIV and AIDS. Alicia Keys is a women empowerment icon; her point of view can often be found in her lyrics as well as in the #nomakeup campaign she launched. In 2016 Keys wrote an essay in which she stated that she lost herself behind eyeliners and lipsticks, and since she is make-up free, she feels more beautiful than ever. She is encouraging other women to discover themselves without the masks. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
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