Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, Sarah and Angelina Grimkè were the sixth and thirteenth out of fourteenth children of a wealthy planter and slaves owner family. As a child, Sarah’s inspirations to acquire education were dined by her father, and she was not allowed to go to school because of her gender, so she taught herself mathematics and history from her brothers’ books. When Sarah was 13 years old, her little sister Angelina was born, and she insisted to be her godmother. Throughout their lives, the Grimké sisters had a close relationship, and often Angelina called her older sister mother. In 1818, the 26 years old Sarah traveled with her father to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There, for the first time, she met members of the Quaker religion and got identified with their views on slavery abolition and gender equality. On her return to Charleston, surrounded by enslaved human beings, her abolitionist views became stronger. Three years later, she moved to Philadelphia and converted to Quakerism, and in 1829, Angelina joined her in place and faith. In 1835, 30 years old Angelina wrote a letter of support to the abolitionist journalist William Lloyd Garrison, who published the letter in his paper The Liberator without her permission. Unauthorized Individual acts were not accepted in the Quaker tradition, and the sisters were harshly criticized for sending the letter. On the other hand, the abolitionist movement embraced them and invited them to join the American Anti-Slavery Society. Their intellect, passion for the cause, and first-hand knowledge as slave-owners made them the perfect agents of the abolitionist movement, and the Grimké sisters became one of the first women to speak publicly about slavery. At first, they faced a female-only audience, and within a few months, their crowd has grown, and they began to speak before both men and women. At the time, women did not speak in front of men, and it was considered a disgrace. After been scold for their behavior, they became aware of the scale of the oppression against women, and they began to identify themselves as feminists. In 1836, Angelina wrote an Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, in which she urged white southern women to join the abolitionist movement. She claimed that slavery is prohibited by Christianity and the US Declaration of Independence and explained how it hurts society. She pleaded for freeing slaves, teaching them to read and to ignore wrongful state laws. In that same year, Sarah addressed the church, writing the Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States. In 1837, the sisters traveled through the Northeast, giving lectures on abolition and women’s rights. Their publications and public speaking drew negative attention and criticism for addressing such controversial topics. After the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts denounced them from speaking in churches, Sarah wrote a series of letters, known as Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, defending women’s rights for public speaking. In 1838, at the age of 33, Angelina married the abolitionist Theodore Weld. Two days later, she addressed the Massachusetts state legislature, becoming the first woman in the US to speak in front of a legislative body. During her speech, a mob of anti-abolitionist gathered outside the building and threw rocks through to window. After this event, the Grimké sisters stopped speaking in public but continued to promote the cause privately, attending antislavery meetings and publishing pamphlets, including the American Slavery as It Is Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a collection of stories and testimonies from Southern newspapers. In 1839, the sisters moved to a farm in New Jersey and opened a boarding school that later developed into the Raritan Bay Union cooperative. In 1864, they moved to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, where they were active members of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association and even tried to vote in 1870. Read more...

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to free parents. At 3, both of her parents had died, and she went to live with her maternal aunt and uncle, who were civil rights activists and abolitionists. She attended the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, which her uncle had founded, and at 13, began to work as a nursemaid for a Quaker family who owned a bookshop. In her free time, she continued her education by herself, reading the books in the shop and sharpening her writing skills. At 14, she began publishing her poems in antislavery journals, such as Frederick Douglass’ The Liberator. In 1845, at 20, she published her first verse collection, titled Forest Leaves. At 26, she moved to Wilberforce, Ohio, where she taught domestic science at Union Seminary, a school for free African-Americans, where she was the first female teacher. After two years, she moved to teach at another school in York, Pennsylvania, joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and continued to publish her poems. In 1854, at 29, she delivered her first antislavery speech called The Elevation and Education of Our People, which received praise. Afterward, she embarked on a two-year lecturing tour in Maine, in which she often recited from her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. She became a popular orator, and over the next eight years, she gave lectures across the US and Canada. She published essays, novels, and short stories, in which she wrote about the observations of her traveling, expressing her thoughts about racism, abolition, feminism, temperance, and classism. In 1860, at the age of 35, she married Fenton Harper. When he died four years later, she resumed her lectures and began to connect with women’s rights advocates, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1866, at the National Woman’s Rights Convention, she gave a speech titled We Are All Bound Up Together, calling for the inclusion of Black women in the suffrage movement, emphasizing that Black women were facing racism in addition to sexism. The next day, the attendees formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) to advocate for African-Americans’ and women’s right to vote. In the short time the AERA operated, Harper served on its Finance Committee. In 1870, following the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted Black men the right to vote, Harper began to work with the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mobile, Alabama, to encourage as many people to use their right to vote. She detailed her encounters with the newly freed men and their struggles in her poem collection, Sketches of Southern Life. In the next two decades, Harper was involved in numerous reform organizations. She headed the Colored Section of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, served as the director of the American Association of Education of Colored Youth, and co-founded the National Association of Colored Women alongside Harriet Tubman and Margaret Murray Washington, later serving as its vice president. During this time, she continued to publish her work, including 12 books and countless essays and articles. She died of heart failure at the age of 85. Read more...

Ella Josephine Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia. At the age of seven, following a race riot in which black shipyard workers were beaten, her mother took the family to her hometown, Littleton, North Carolina, and her father stayed in Norfolk to continue working on a steamship. Growing up, Baker listened to her maternal grandmother’s stories about slavery, slave revolts, and women in the old days. Learning first-hand about the oppression of black people has shaped her sense of social injustice. After high school, Baker attended Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, graduating as valedictorian of her class. In 1927, at 24, she moved to NYC, where she worked as a domestic and waitress before she got a job as an editorial assistant at the Negro National News. Living in NYC during the Harlem Renaissance, Baker’s point of view evolved into actions, and she began her life-long dedication to political activism. In 1931, she became a member of the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL), which formed cooperatives that provided affordable services to its members. Soon, she was appointed the national director of the YNCL. She also taught classes on consumer education, African history, and labor history as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. In 1938, Baker became active at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), first as a field secretary. Within two years, she became director of branches and the highest-ranking woman in the organization. Through this position, she put into practice her belief that social change occurs from the bottom up, and the success of an organization depends on the commitment of its members, not its leaders, emphasizing the importance of women and young people to its success. As its director, Baker traveled throughout the South to recruit new members, earning the people’s trust with her personalized approach, sleeping in their homes, and attending church services. Over time, she built a network of people who played a significant role in the struggle for civil rights in the South. In 1946, at 43, Baker took custody of her niece and left her position at the NAACP but continued to be active as a volunteer at the New York branch. There, she mainly worked on the desegregation of schools and improving the education of black children. When she was 54, she moved to Atlanta to establish and serve as the executive director of Martin Luther King’s new organization – the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Its goal was to promote nonviolent actions to achieve racial justice and social progress. First, they organized education and church ceremonies to encourage people to register to vote. The campaign was not successful as hoped for, but it laid the foundations for local activist centers. In 1960, following the Greensboro sit-ins, when black college students refused to leave a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter, Baker left the SCLC to assist the Greensboro Four. She organized a meeting at Shaw University, where she formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Under her guidance, the SNCC became one of the leading human rights organizations in the US, initiating some of the most successful nonviolent protests of the time. Including the Freedom Rides of 1961, when buses of civil rights activists rode through the segregated Southern states, and the Freedom Summer of 1964, when hundreds of volunteers arrived in Mississippi protesting against the intimidation and discrimination against registered black voters. In addition to her work with the SNCC, Baker worked with the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), promoting social justice and interracial desegregation via the education of the southern white population. In 1964, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), served as its coordinator, and led its delegation to the National Democratic Party convention. At the age of 64, Baker returned to NYC, continuing her fight for social justice for two more decades. She consulted various organizations, such as the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the Third World Women’s Coordinating Committee. She remained a prominent figure in the fight for human rights until her death on her 83rd birthday. Read more...

Emmeline Pankhurst was born to a wealthy and politically active family in Manchester, England. Her parents were abolitionists and supporters of female suffrage. Growing up, she read her mother’s Women’s Suffrage Journal, and at 14, she started going with her to meetings. For her higher education, she attended the École Normale de Neuilly in Paris, where she learned chemistry, bookkeeping, and “feminine arts” such as embroidery. In 1878, at the age of 20, she met Richard Pankhurst, a 44 years old barrister who also advocated for women’s suffrage and other social causes, including education reform and freedom of speech. They married in the following year, and within ten years, they had five children. The couple agreed that Pankhurst would not become “a household machine” and remained active at the Women’s Suffrage Society. In 1886, the family moved to London, where Pankhurst and her sister opened a fabric shop while her husband unsuccessfully ran for Parliament. At the time, their house became a meeting place for activists and intellectuals, from socialists and suffragists to anarchists and radicals. In 1889, after inside conflicts within the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, Pankhurst and her husband founded the Women’s Franchise League (WFL). The WFL focused on more aspects of equal rights for women, like divorce and inheritance. 4 years later, the family returned to Manchester, where 30 years old Pankhurst continued to promote women’s suffrage and became involved with the Women’s Liberal Federation, an adjunct organization of the Liberal Party. In the same year, Pankhurst resigned from the WFL to join the newly formed Independent Labour Party (ILP) but got denied by the local branch because of her gender, eventually joining the ILP nationally. In 1894, Pankhurst was appointed as the Poor Law Guardian in Chorlton-on-Medlock, overseeing the economic, nutrition, and hygienic needs of the poor residences in the area. Witnessing the harsh conditions at the workhouses – an accommodation and employment facilities for the poor, pushed her to promote reform in the Board of Guardians who was in charge of the institutions. In 1898, when she was 39 years old, her husband died, leaving her with debts. Pankhurst moved with her children to a small house and started working for the Registrar of Births and Deaths in Chorlton. There, she gained insight into the conditions of the women and the different treatment men and women received for the same issues, such as illegitimacy. As a member of the Manchester School Board, she saw more examples of injustice towards girls and women and the unequal treatment they receive compared to boys and men. At the time, she re-opened her fabric store to have an additional income. Throughout the years, Pankhurst’s children had different approaches to her activism. Still, after her husband died, all of them became involved with the suffrage movement, especially her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. By 1903, at 44, Pankhurst realized that moderate speeches and polite methods yielded no progress from the members of Parliament, coming to believe that only militant actions would provide results. On 10 October 1903, Pankhurst, Christabel, and other activists founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which later became the Women’s Party – a women-only organization devoted solely to voting rights, guided by the motto – Deeds Not Words. At first, the WSPU took non-violent actions, such as lectures, rallies, petition signing, talking to parliament members, and publishing a newsletter. Over time, their activities became more radical, including harassing parliament members, provoking the police, vandalizing public art, window-breaking, and arson. These tactics led to recurring arrestments of the WSPU members, including Pankhurst herself, who got imprisoned seven times. Their imprisonments were sometimes deliberate, believing that it would bring publicity to the cause. In 1909, the imprisoned WSPU members began to engage in hunger strikes, which often led to violent force-feeding. During WW1, Pankhurst decided to moderate the WSPU’s activities and support the government as well as the cause by encouraging women to engage with the war efforts, taking the place of the men on factory jobs while they were fighting on the war front. Women’s contributions during wartime led to the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1918, which gave women over the age of 30 limited voting rights. Within a few months, another bill granted women the option to be elected to Parliament. After the war, Pankhurst became concerned about the rise of Bolshevism, and she joined the Conservative Party and ran for a seat in the Parliament. Her campaign ran short due to poor health, a result of years of lecture tours, imprisonments, and hunger strikes. Eventually, she moved into a nursing home, where she died at the age of 69. Less than a month later, Pankhurst’s 40 years campaign paid off when the British Parliament gave women full equality voting rights. Read more...

Prudence Crandall was born in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, into a Quaker family. At the age of 10, she moved with her family to Canterbury, Connecticut. She attended the Black Hill Quaker School in Plainfield and later studied at the Quaker the New England Yearly Meeting boarding school. After graduation, Crandall taught in a school in Plainfield, and a few years later, she and her sister opened a private academy for girls in Canterbury. The school’s curriculum included subjects that at the time were not common for girls, such as history, geography, arithmetic, and grammar. Soon, it became known as one of the best schools in the state. In 1832, a black girl named Sarah Harris started studying in the school. By admitting her, Crandall established the first integrated school in the US. Many of the townspeople objected to this decision, putting pressure to dismiss Harris, and parents took out their daughters from the school. Following the backlash, and with the support of numerous prominent abolitionists such as Samuel J. May, William Lloyd Garrison, and Arthur Tappan, Crandall temporarily closed the school and reopened it as Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color. She recruited black students from other states, publishing advertisements for the school in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. On April 1, 1833, 20 new students arrived at the first school in the US for black girls. The residences of Canterbury were furious, protested against the school, its students, and management. Crandall and the students received threats and suffered from violence, pelted with eggs, manure, and stones. Within a month since the school’s opening, the Connecticut legislature passed a “Black Law,” making it illegal to admit black students from other states without the consent of local authorities. Refusing to close the school or to stop teaching her non-residence students, Crandall was arrested and jailed for a night. Her first trial resulted in no verdict, the second she was convicted, but in her third trial before Connecticut Supreme Court, the case was dismissed. In response to the verdict, Canterbury’s residents set the school on fire, and the vandalism and harassment continued until Crandall felt she put her students in too much danger. On September 10th, 1834, Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color was closed after 18 months of operation. A month earlier, Crandall married Calvin Philleo, a Baptist minister and a widower with three children. After the school was closed, they tried to live in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Illinois before separated in 1842 after he became abusive toward her. Crandall continued to work as an educator and a principal at a school in LaSalle County, Illinois. In 1838, Connecticut repealed the Black Law, and in 1886, when she was 63 years old, the state honored her with an annual pension of $400 (approximately $11,500 in today’s terms). In 1877, at the age of 74, she moved to live with her brother in Elk Falls, Kansas, where she died at 86. Read more...

The origin of Mary Ellen Pleasant is not clear. She claimed that she was born free in Philadelphia, while researchers believed she was born into slavery in Virginia or Georgia. Her mother disappeared when she was an infant and that she was raised in Philadelphia by free people of color named Williams. When Pleasant was about 6 years old, she worked as a domestic servant at the Hussey-Gardner family in Nantucket, Massachusetts. The Husseys were Quakers and abolitionists, and though Pleasant did not attend school, their son taught her how to read and write. In 1840, at the age of 26, Pleasant moved to Boston and worked as an apprentice for a tailor. There, she met her first husband, James Smith, an abolitionist who got her involved in the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to their freedom. When her husband died four years later, he left her an inheritance of thousands of dollars. At 34, she married John James Pleasants, a former slave who worked as a cook-seaman. In 1852, 38 years old Pleasant sailed to San Francisco, escaping from being captured for her abolitionist work. Her fair skin enabled her to pass as white, so to keep her identity and abolitionist work safe, she presented herself in public as a white woman, while the black community knew her as black. During the California Gold Rush, most migrants were men miners, and Pleasant seized the opportunity to establish a household services business. She opened laundries and boardinghouses, staffed mainly by African-American men and women; many were former slaves. She used to listen to her wealthy customers’ conversations and make successful investments based on the advice they gave one another. With the fortune she made, she expanded her business, opened a chain of restaurants, bought various properties in California and Canada, and co-founded the Bank of California. Upon her arrival to San Francisco, Pleasant became a prominent figure in the local Underground Railroad. As her wealth grew, she gave more to the abolitionist cause. She sponsored the founding of the Athenaeum Building – a library and meeting place for the black community, and established safe houses for slaves on the run, ensuring they have all their needs in San Francisco as well as on the road north. She paid for legal services for those who have been extradited to their former owners. Pleasant also helped women of any color with clothing and housing, providing them money and advice on how to dress and carry themselves in the unsafe streets of the early days of San Francisco. For her tireless efforts for her community, Pleasant became known as a “one-woman social agency” and was referred to as “Mother of civil rights in California.” After the Civil War, Pleasant began to identify herself as a woman of color. She stopped working as a housekeeper and dedicate all her time to civil rights activities. She established schools for the black community, housing for the newly free people, and fought against Jim Crow laws. In the 1870s, Pleasant developed a business partnership with a banker called Thomas Bell, which by 1875 gained them both a sum of $30 million (approximately $698,454,545 today). Pleasant spent her final years in a legal battle with Bell’s widow, who accused Pleasant of stealing money. The case was still not settled when Pleasant died at the age of 90. Read more...

Mary Edwards Walker was born in Oswego, New York. Her parents, Vesta and Alvah, were progressive who raised their children to independence and critical thinking. They did not obey the traditional gender roles, and while her mother worked at the farm, her father did household chores. To provide equal education to all of their children, they established the first free school in the city, which Walker attended until she went to the Falley Seminary in Fulton, New York. After graduation, she worked as a teacher until she saved enough money to pay for medical school. In 1855, at the age of 23, she graduated with honors from Syracuse Medical College – the only woman in her class and the second in the college’s history. From a young age, Walker preferred to wear men’s clothes instead of restricting and uncomfortable skirts, petticoats, and corsets. This preference, as well as her views of women’s role, were visible when she married Albert Miller, a fellow medical student. At the wedding, she refused to say “obey” in her vows, wore a short skirt with trousers instead of a dress, and kept her last name. In their short-lived marriage, the couple opened a practice in Rome, New York, but it failed because female physicians were frown-upon. At 28, Walker attended Bowen Collegiate Institute but got suspended after refusing to resign from the school’s male-only debating society. Over time, she became blunter, demonstrating dress reform, and by the age of 30, her typical outfit was a knee-length dress with a tight waist and full skirt with trousers and suspenders underneath. Even though she was often criticized and ridiculed, she kept advocating the idea that clothes should “protect the person, and allow freedom of motion and circulation, and not make the wearer a slave to it.” In 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, Walker wanted to join the Union army as a surgeon but was rejected because of her gender. Instead, she volunteered as a civilian at the Patent Office Hospital in Washington, DC. There, she established a Women’s Relief Organization to help the families of wounded soldiers. In 1862, she moved to Virginia to treat soldiers near the front lines, and in the following year, she was hired by the Army of the Cumberland as a “Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian)” – the first female surgeon of the Union army. She insisted on wearing men’s clothes, which enable her to be more efficient in her work. Later she was assigned to the 52nd Ohio Infantry, regularly crossing the battle lines to treat civilians. On April 10, 1864, right after helping a Confederate doctor, Walker was captured by the Confederate army and was arrested as a spy. She was imprisoned at Castle Thunder in Richmond, Virginia, for four months before being released in a prisoner exchange. In 1865, Walker was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor for her work during the war (the first and only woman ever to receive it). In 1916, the medal was taken from her due to eligibility issues. More than 60 years later, her honor restored when President Jimmy Carter reinstated it. After the war, Walker worked as a supervisor at a female prison in Louisville, Kentucky, and later as head of an orphanage in Tennessee. She continued to lobby for dress reform and women’s rights. She was an active member of the central woman’s suffrage Bureau in Washington, DC, and in the elections of 1871, she unsuccessfully attempted to register to vote. Opposing the mainstream suffrage fight for a constitutional amendment, Walker argued that the Constitution already granted women the right to vote. Although she was not aligned with the movement, she continued to attend conventions and testified on its behalf in front of the US House of Representatives. Walker died in February 1919, only six months before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. She was buried in a black suit. Read more...

Mary Ann Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware, to free African-Americans and abolitionists parents. Her father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and their home was a refuge for fugitive slaves. When she was 10 years old, it became illegal for African-Americans to receive education in Delaware, so the family moved to Pennsylvania, where she attended a Quaker Boarding School. At 16, after graduating high school, she established a school for black children in East Chester, and later she taught in several cities, including NYC. At the age of 27, the family moved to Canada, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed everyone to capture free slaves and returning them to their masters. As a natural-born activist, Shadd became an outspoken advocate for full racial integration and encouraged African-Americans to immigrate to Canada. She founded a school for both black and white children, and in 1852, she published a pamphlet titled “Notes on Canada West,” in which she discussed the benefits and the opportunities that wait for African-Americans in Canada. In 1953, she established “The Provincial Freeman” – the first anti-slavery newspaper, which made her the first female journalist in Canada and the first black female editor in North America. In its seven years of publication in Canada and the US, it explored a variety of topics, from immigration to world events and culture. Her unorthodox approach toward immigration made her a controversial figure in her community, and it almost cost her speech at the Philadelphia Colored Convention of 1855. When Shadd was 33, she married Thomas F. Cary, and when he died four years later, while she was pregnant with their second child, she returned to the US. During the Civil War, she served as a recruiting officer, enlisting black volunteers for the Union Army. After the war, she settled in Washington, DC, where she worked as a teacher while attending evening classes at Howard University Law School. In 1883, Shadd graduated at the age of 60 and became the second black woman in the US to earn a law degree. She never stopped writing, publishing articles in numerous newspapers, including The People’s Advocate and the National Era. Shadd was also a women’s rights activist, working alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony at the National Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1880, she established the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise – an organization promoting equal rights of African-American women. She died at the age of 70 from stomach cancer. Read more...

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, to a free African-American blacksmith. At age 21, she met her future husband, John Jones, who came to the city to be a tailor’s apprentice. Soon after, she moved with her family to Alton, Illinois, and the couple had to separate. Three years later, after completing his apprenticeship requirements, he followed her to Alton, and they got married. The following year, after giving birth to her daughter Lavinia, they wanted to move to Chicago, but to do so, they had to post a $1000 bond for their certificate of freedom, which allowed them to travel as free people. They were among the only 140 black people in the city. Shortly after they settled in, her husband opened a small tailoring shop – the first establishment owned by an African-American. Over time, the business grew and served many of the city’s elite. The Joneses dedicated their lives to fight for freedom, equality, and justice, and together they became leading figures in the abolitionist movement. Their home in 116 Edinah street was a gathering place as well as the second stop of the underground railroad, helping hundreds of escaped slaves on their way to Canada. The couple was among the founders of Olivet Baptists church – the second oldest church in Chicago. They donated money for various causes and land to build a school for their community. After the Civil War, she joined the suffrage movement, one of the first African-American women to advocate for their right to vote. She died at the age of 89. Her gravestone reads ‘Grandma Jones’ – a commemoration of her status within the community.   Read about more inspiring African-American women: Read more...

Kathleen Neal was born in Dallas, Texas, to well-educated and civil rights activists’ parents. When she was 9 years old, they moved to live abroad following her father’s job. Living in third world countries as Liberia, India, and Sierra Leone opened her up to different beliefs and ideologies. When her brother died of leukemia, she returned to the US to complete her education in a Quaker boarding school near Philadelphia. After graduating high school with honors, she studied at Oberlin College and then transferred to Barnard College, where she got more involved in civil rights movements. When her childhood friend got murdered by white supremacists, she moved to NYC to work at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A year later, when she is 22, she met Eldridge Cleaver – the minister of information for the Black Panther Party. Not long after, she moved to San Francisco, and they got married. She served as the Communications Secretary for the party, holding press conferences, organizing rallies, and delivering speeches all over the country. She became the first female member to participate in the decision-making meetings, and as such, she had a huge impact on the progressive way that gender was approached at the party. She also helped party members, especially women, with their problems, from food and medical care to prison visits and rehabilitation after been tortured and living underground. As one of the party’s leaders, she and her husband were often investigated by the police, and in 1968 their apartment was raided. Later that year, her husband escaped to Cuba after being accused of attempted murder for staging ambush on police officers, in which two police officers were injured. She reunited with her husband in Algeria, where she gave birth to their first son, and in the following year, while in North Korea, she gave birth to their daughter. In 1971 the International Branch of the Black Panther Party was separated, and the couple founded a new organization – Revolutionary People’s Communication Network. Cleaver returned to NYC with her children to promote the organization. After 12 years in exile, her husband came back to the US, straight to jail. Although he was released after two years, they broke up, and in 1981, 36 years old Cleaver went back to school with a full scholarship to Yale University. She graduated with honors with a BA in History, and she continued to study for a J.D. degree, in a mission to become a lawyer. Afterward, she worked at a law firm in NYC, then as a law clerk in the US Court of Appeals, as well as a lecturer in numerous academic institutions. Throughout the years, she published articles in various newspapers and magazines and contributed to many scholarly essays regarding civil rights and the feminist aspect of the movement. Read more...