Celebrating Black women
25th March 2024 · 0 Comments
Black women continue to shake up the nation in pursuing justice and fairness.
New York Attorney General Letitia James’ successful multi-million dollar settlement against the Trump Organization, Georgia DA Fani Willis’ indicting at least 19 members of Trump acolytes on Rico charges, vice-president Kamala Harris touring and speaking out on women’s reproductive rights, groundbreaking legal work of women spearheading the Legal Defense Fund, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissents, are just a few examples of Black women holding America and its courts accountable for dispensing justice, while pursuing diversity, equality, and inclusion.
As we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month The Louisiana Weekly again wishes to spotlight Black women who have made significant contributions to Louisiana and New Orleans.
Some women have earned the distinction of being first in their respective roles. New Orleanians twice elected Mayor LaToya Cantrell, New Orleans’s first woman and Black woman mayor.
Voters also elected Sheriff Susan Hutson, the first woman and Black woman to oversee the Orleans Parish jail system. Retired LSC Chief Justice Bernette J. Johnson was the first woman and Black woman to sit on the state’s highest court and become its chief justice.
In Baton Rouge, voters elected Sharon Weston Broome Mayor-President of the capitol city of Baton Rouge and East Baton Rouge Parish. Broome was the first woman and first Black woman elected to this office. She has focused on addressing transportation, drainage, public safety, education, economic development, and revitalizing neighborhoods.
She previously served as a Baton Rouge Metro City Council member, a Louisiana state representative, and a Louisiana state senator.
While serving in the legislature, Broome became the first woman to hold the leadership positions of speaker pro tempore in the House and president pro tempore in the Senate.
Dorothy Mae DeLavallade Taylor, the first Black woman elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives, paved the way for Broome and other Black women in the Louisiana Legislature. The New Orleans native was an educator and politician.
Taylor represented District 20 in New Orleans for nine years.
She started her career as a teacher in the Head Start program, an early education program for preschool children.
She was active in civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, she worked on issues of health care, childcare, racial discrimination, and inhumane conditions in state prisons.
As Director of the Central City Neighborhood Health Clinic, Taylor mentored several future politicians, including Irma Muse Dixon, the first Black woman elected to the Louis-iana Public Service Commission.
Governor Edwin Edwards appointed her head of the state Department of Urban and Community Affairs, making her the first Black woman to hold a cabinet position.
Called the “firebrand” of the City Council, in 1986, Taylor was the first Black woman elected to an at-large seat on the New City Council. She held the position until reaching term limits in 1994.
Taylor shocked and upset white New Orleanians when she authored an ordinance demanding all Mardi Gras krewes stop discriminating and institute an open admission policy for anyone seeking to join their organizations if they chose to use city services to hold their parades.
Nearly all the old-line krewes were found to be “all-male and all-white”; they excluded not only Blacks but also women, gays, Jews, and Italians. The old krewes threw a hissy fit. However, Taylor stood by her assertion that if you benefit from public funding, you must be accessible to the public.
Stepping back into history, Doretha Combre, born in 1896 in Rosedale, Louisiana, was influential in integrating McNeese State University, Southwest Louisiana Technical School, and the public schools in Lake Charles, KPLC-TV reported.
She fought for integration as president of the Louisiana State Conference of NAACP. In 1952, she became the first Black woman in Lake Charles to enter politics by running for the school board. After Ms. Combre passed away, Riverside Elementary was renamed Doretha A. Combre Elementary.
Everyone in the ongoing fight for reparations owes a debt of gratitude to Queen Mother Moore (born Audley Moore) in New Iberia, Louisiana, in 1898. Moore was the first Black woman to fight for reparations of enslaved
Moore was the founder and president of the Committee for Reparations for Descendants of U.S. Slaves.
In 1957, Moore presented a petition to the United Nations and a second in 1959, arguing for self-determination, against genocide, for land and reparations, making her an international advocate.
Moore asked for 200 billion dollars to compensate for 400 years of slavery monetarily.
Moore moved to Harlem, New York, and later became a leader and life member of Garvey’s UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association).
She worked for various causes for years. Moore’s last public appearance was at the Million Man March alongside Jesse Jackson in October 1995.
When Moore died in May 1997 in Brooklyn, at age 98, her passing was covered by the national and international press.
Hazel M. Johnson is considered to be the mother of environmental justice. Johnson was born in New Orleans in 1935 but moved to the south side of Chicago, where she founded the non-profit People for Community Recovery in 1982 to address tenant issues within the Chicago area.
The group focused “on fighting environmental racism as it affected the Altgeld Gardens public housing project residents.” The organization lobbied the city of Chicago to test the drinking water supplied to Maryland Manor. The test identified the presence of toxins, including cyanide, in the community’s water. The 1984 findings resulted in the introduction of water and sewer lines to the area.
She passed in 2011.
Today, Dr. Beverly L. Wright continues to fight environmental racism nationwide. Dr. Wright is an environmental justice scholar, advocate, author, civic leader, professor of Sociology, and the founder and executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ), the first-ever environmental justice center in the United States.
Wright is currently working with the Biden administration as an appointee to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, where she advises on how the federal government can address current and historic environmental injustices.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Dr. Wright experienced and witnessed the polluting effects of Cancer Alley – an 85-mile stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, home to over 150 petrochemical plants and refineries.
DSCEJ has addressed environmental and health inequities along the Mississippi River and coastal regions of Louisiana for two decades while providing education, health, and safety training and job placement for residents in communities impacted by climate change.
The organization also developed the first-ever environmental justice map to show the connection between race and pollutants, which became the basis for how the EPA determined an environmental justice community to be eligible for funding.
Alongside other environmental justice organizations, Dr. Wright debuted the first-ever Climate Justice Pavilion inside the Blue Zone at COP27, the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Jewel Limar Prestage , born in Hutton, Louisiana, on August 12, 1931, was an American political scientist, citizen activist, educator, mentor, and author. She was the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate in political science in the United States.
Prestage mentored many others in her field, which is how she received the title “The Mother of Black Political Science.” Prestage conducted ample research on African Americans’ role in the political process. In 1977, she co-authored the anthology “A Portrait of Marginality,” which examines the political socialization of Black women.
Donna Lease Brazile, a native of New Orleans, is an American political strategist, campaign manager, political analyst, and author who served twice as acting Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Brazile was the first African-American woman to direct a major presidential campaign, acting as campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000.
Brazile earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial psychology from Louisiana State University (LSU) in 1981 and was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Brazile was reportedly instrumental in the successful campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday.
Akasha Gloria Hull, born in Shreveport, Louisiana, is an American poet, educator, and writer. As one of the architects of Black Women’s Studies, Hull’s activism increased the legitimacy of feminism and African American studies.
She graduated valedictorian from Booker T. Washington High School in Shreveport and summa cum laude from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She was also secretary for the local chapter of the NAACP.
Beginning her academic career at the University of Delaware, Hull had advanced to a full professorship by 1986.
Clementine Hunter was a self-taught Black folk artist who lived and worked on Melrose Plantation. Hunter was born at Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana.
Hunter was the first African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art).
In February 1985, the museum hosted A New Orleans Salute to Clementine Hunter’s Centennial, an exhibit in honor of her 100th birthday.
Hunter achieved significant recognition, including an invitation to the White House from U.S. President Jimmy Carter and letters from both President Ronald Reagan and U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston Jr.
She moved to Melrose Plantation when her father Janvier “John” Reuben was hired as a wage laborer by John H. Henry, the owner of Melrose.
Hunter worked as an agricultural laborer, harvesting 150 to 200 pounds of cotton a day, for 75 cents. In 1924, Clementine married Emmanuel Hunter, a Creole woodchopper at Melrose.
In her fifties, she began to sell her paintings for 25 cents but before her career was over, Hunter’s paintings sold for thousands.
She lived in communities of Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers where she would sew clothes for family, would make quilts, weave baskets before she began her painting career. Her quilts were works of art.
A director of the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City described Hunter as “the most celebrated of all Southern contemporary painters.”
There are no doubt hundreds more Black women from New Orleans and Louisiana who have left their indelible marks here, nationally, and internationally. There needs to be more space to sing their praises.
In 2020, The Louisiana Weekly profiled history-making Black women in New Orleans and Louisiana. The editorial board’s article is unique and instructive. Visit http://www.louisianaweekly.com/a-celebration-of-n-o-history-making-women/.
This article originally published in the March 25, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
