on efforts such as the Selma voting rights movement and with his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Nash was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was arrested and jailed many times (including while pregnant) for her civil rights work, and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. AP Diane NashĬivil rights activist Diane Nash was a key player in the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s, which aimed to bring awareness of ongoing segregation and racism in the South.

She eventually left her big-time publisher, Harper and Row, for smaller Black publishing houses to support her community. Brooks was known to be a humble and generous person who wrote mostly about the everyday lives of urban Black people in America. She had a distinguished teaching career despite only going to junior college herself. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks was the first Black author to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was just 32 when “Annie Allen,” a book of poetry, won the prize, and she would go on to be awarded many more accolades. Here are 10 of these women you might not know. But although names like Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou and Wilma Rudolph are widely known, there are many more obscure but equally influential Black women in history. The list of groundbreaking Black women in the U.S.

Facts about gwendolyn brooks