Our blog tracks Jose Arguelles' Dreamspell Calendar. "As chaos and confusion rise, galactic consciousness based on the Law of Time serves as planetary medicine, lifting us into the awareness that we exist within a higher, more expanded realm of existence than the world of third-dimensional form and appearance. Daily practice will elevate consciousness and increase experiences of synchronicity." (Arguelles)
Patricia Bell-Scott is an American scholar of women's studies and black feminism. She is currently a professor emerita of women's studies and human development and family science at the University of Georgia. As an author, she has been widely collected by libraries worldwide.
Patricia is an award-winning author and professor emerita of women's studies and human development and family science at the University of Georgia. Her most recent book, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice, won the Lillian Smith Book Award and was named Booklist Best Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year by the American Library Association. This book was also named a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and long listed for the National Book Award. Her previous books include Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women (1994), which was a featured selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club; Flat-footed Truths: Telling Black Women's Lives (1998); Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (1991), which won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982), an award-winning textbook that was named to the Black Issues Books Review list of "Books that Made the Century Great."
Bell-Scott served for a decade as co-founding editor of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women. She is a former contributing editor to Ms. Magazine. She is also a co-founder of the National Women's Studies Association, for which she served as co-convener of the inaugural coordinating council.
She has held post-doctoral fellowships at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University, as well as the Jane and Harry Willson Center for the Humanities and the Arts at the University of Georgia.
She has held professorial, research, and administrative appointments at the University of Connecticut, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her alma mater, the University of Tennessee. A distinguished teacher, she is a co-founder of the University of Georgia Teaching Academy. She has also been honored by a diverse group of professional societies and institutions, including the Research on Women Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association, Division 35 (Psychology of Women) of the American Psychological Association, the Connecticut Chapter of the Coalition of 100 Black Women; The Journal of Negro Education; the National Council on Family Relations, the National Association for Women in Education, and the National Institute for Women of Color.
A native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Bell-Scott lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, Charles Vernon Underwood Jr., a retired Tennessee Valley Authority information technology manager.
Publications
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982)
Black Adolescence: Current Issues and Annotated Bibliography
Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (1991)
Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women (1994)
Flat-Footed Truths: Telling Black Women's Lives (1998)
The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship (2016)*
Frances M. Beal, also known as Fran Beal, (born January 13, 1940 in Binghamton, New York) is a Black feminist and a peace and justice political activist. Her predominant focus has been women’s rights, racial justice, anti-war and peace work, as well as international solidarity. Beal was a founding member of the SNCC Black Women’s Liberation Committee, which later evolved into the Third World Women’s Alliance. She is most widely known for her publication, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female”, which theorizes the intersection of oppression between race, class, and gender. Beal is currently living in Oakland.
Early life
Beal was born in Binghamton, NY, to Charlotte Berman Yates and Ernest Yates. Her mother's Russian Jewish immigrant background and father's African American and Native American ancestry, along with their experiences with antisemitism and racism, inspired her later work as an activist.
Beal describes her upbringing as difficult, but acknowledges it's impact on shaping her political consciousness. As a child, she negotiated her parents' controversial political activism with the need to belong. In an interview she confesses, “I can remember as a child being embarrassed. Why does my mother have to do this?”, stating "you don’t want your parents to be different from everybody else; on another level, you’re learning about injustice." Her mother taught her that she had a personal and political social responsibility to confront inequalities that she and others are subjected to. Her background with progressive parents introduced her to the injustices in the world. She ultimately harnessed her feelings of displacement into trying to be the best at everything, transforming her discomfort into political activism.
After her father's death, she moved to St. Albans, an integrated neighborhood in Queens, NY.
During her junior year, Beal went abroad to live in France where she married James Beal and had two children. Beal and her husband lived in France from 1959 to 1966 as she attended the Sorbonne. After 6 years of marriage, they returned to the states and dissolved their union. Beal became aware of the fight to end the colonial domination in Algeria while studying abroad at the University of Sorbonne, which sparked her political consciousness and interest in social justice.
Political organizing
In 1958 she began working with the NAACP where she ran into conservative restrictions that discouraged her from American politics.
Beal formally reengaged with political organizing by joining the SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement. She actively worked to empower Black women through her political involvement in organizations and positions held on committees. In 1969 Beal composed an essay that addressed the complex relations black women were facing in their collective black struggle, called "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female". This document became the SNCC’s official stance on women. The publication became a part of the history of black feminist organizing, where her work “coincided with other essays exploring the intersections of race and gender in black women's lives, and more specifically, the political agency of African American women".
During her time there, SNCC activities shifted toward male-dominated Black Power, moving away from “sustained community organizing toward Black Power propagandizing that was accompanied by increasing male dominance”. Beal and her female colleagues worked in and contributed to the organization but were not recognized for leadership positions, while patriarchy influenced SNCC's organizing, race became the primary issue that was addressed. Compounded with her concerns over women's rights, Beal became involved with the Women’s Movement. Due to women’s inferior positions within male-dominated organizations like the SNCC, she co-founded the Black Women's Liberation Committee of SNCC in 1968, which evolved into the Third World Women's Alliance. In retrospect, Beal aired her grievances in the film She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, stating,
“I was in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. You’re talking about liberation and freedom half the night on the racial side, and then all of a sudden men are going to turn around and start talking about putting you in your place. So in 1968 we founded the SNCC Black Women’s Liberation Committee to take up some of these issues.”
The Black Women's Liberation Committee of SNCC became the Black Women’s Alliance, and eventually evolved into the Third World Women's Alliance in 1969. The TWWA is an organization committed to helping marginalized women and communities globally in the struggle for social justice. This organization’s fundamental belief recognizes the core stance of intersectionality politics, which insists on confronting issues of race and class that affect women of color and poor women uniquely, therefore challenging the idea of a universal womanhood in the process.
While working in the SNCC, Beal and her female colleagues became increasingly concerned about female issues, specifically assault on Black women’s reproductive justice through forced sterilization, which motivated her to become a voice for Black women’s liberation. She was actively involved in CESA, the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse. This organization fought to help poor women of color who were being disproportionately targeted and coerced into involuntary sterilization get reproductive justice.
She was also a member of the National Anti-Racist Organizing Committee, which focused on anti-racist politics and centered around national organizing.
Through her organizing, Beal confronted a range of oppressive regimes that encompassed complex power relations which subordinated and disenfranchised Black women in particular. Her political organizing sought to address structural inequalities and empower marginalized groups.
Journalism
Aside from her involvement in organizations, Beal maintained a career as a writer and editor. She was an associate editor of The Black Scholar and a reporter for the San Francisco Bay View. Beal also was an editor of the TWWA's newspaper, Triple Jeopardy, The Black Woman’s Voice for the National Council of Negro Women, and a contributing editor to the Line of March, a Marxist-Leninist Theoretical Journal.
Publications
Beal wrote an essay called "Slave of A Slave No More: Black Women in Struggle". Her essay was published in 1975 and appears in the 6th issue of The Black Scholar. This essay addresses chauvinist attitudes of Black men that were predominant during the Civil Rights era. She argues that Black women have been subjected to exploitation and oppression because their black brothers maintain gendered ideologies in what should be a collective fight for social justice.
In 1969 she published "Black Women's Manifesto; Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female". She describes the nature of African American women's unique oppression within sexist and racist orders and prescribes Black women's agency. That pamphlet was later revised and then published in The Black Woman, an anthology edited by Toni Cade Bambara in 1970. A revised version of "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" also appears in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan. It was featured in The Black Scholar in 1975.
In 2002, Beal wrote an article called “Frederick Douglass’ Legacy for Our Times”, in which she describes the erasure of overlooked imperialist struggles on Independence Day and draws from Fredrick Douglass to remind people "Freedom is a constant struggle."
Beal is featured in the 2013 historical documentary Feminist: Stories from Women's Liberation.
Most recently, in 2014, Beal was featured in the feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry.*
Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade (March 25, 1939 – December 9, 1995), was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.
Biography
Miltona Mirkin Cade was born in Harlem, New York, to parents Walter and Helen (Henderson) Cade. She grew up in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), Queens and New Jersey. At the age of six, she changed her name from Miltona to Toni, and then in 1970 changed her name to include the name of a West African ethnic group, Bambara, after finding the name written as part of a signature on a sketchbook discovered in a trunk among her great-grandmother's other belongings.
Bambara graduated from Queens College with a B.A. in Theater Arts/English Literature in 1959. She then studied mime at the Ecole de Mime Etienne Decroux in Paris, France. She became interested in dance before completing her master's degree at City College, New York in 1964, while serving as program director of Colony Settlement House in Brooklyn. She also worked for New York social services and as a recreation director in the psychiatric ward of Metropolitan Hospital. From 1965 to 1969 she was with City College's "Search for Education, Elevation, Knowledge" (SEEK) program. She taught English, published material and worked with SEEK's black theater group. She was made assistant professor of English at Rutgers University's new Livingston College in 1969 and continued until 1974. She was visiting professor in Afro-American Studies at Emory University and at Atlanta University (1977), where she also taught at the School of Social Work (until 1979). Bambara was writer-in-residence at Neighborhood Arts Center (1975–79), at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri (1976) and at Atlanta's Spelman College (1978–79). From 1986 she taught film-script writing at Louis Massiah's Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia.
Bambara participated in several community and activist organizations, and her work was influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the 1960's. In the early to mid-1970's, she traveled to Cuba and Vietnam to study how women's political organizations operated. She put these experiences into practice in the late 1970's after moving with her daughter Karma Bene to Atlanta, Georgia, where Bambara co-founded the Southern Collective of African American Writers.
Toni Cade Bambara was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1993 and died of it in 1995, at the age of 56 in Philadelphia, PA.
Writing
Bambara was active in the 1960's Black Arts Movement and the emergence of black feminism. Her anthology The Black Woman (1970), including poetry, short stories, and essays by Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall and herself, as well as work by Bambara's students from the SEEK program. The Black Woman, was the first feminist collection to focus on African-American women. Tales and Stories for Black Folk (1971) contained work by Langston Hughes, Ernest J. Gaines, Pearl Crayton, Alice Walker and students. She wrote the introduction for another groundbreaking feminist anthology by women of color, This Bridge Called My Back (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and CherrÃe Moraga. While Bambara is often described as a "feminist", in her chapter entitled "On the Issue of Roles", she writes: "Perhaps we need to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Blackhood."
Bambara's 1972 book, Gorilla, My Love, collected 15 of her short stories, written between 1960 and 1970. Most of these stories are told from a first-person point of view and are "written in rhythmic urban black English." The narrator is often a sassy young girl who is tough, brave, and caring and who "challenge[s] the role of the female black victim". Bambara called her writing "upbeat" fiction. Among the stories inncluded were "Blues Ain't No Mockin Bird" as well as "Raymond's Run" and "The Lesson".
Her novel The Salt Eaters (1980) centers on a healing event that coincides with a community festival in a fictional city of Claybourne, Georgia. In the novel, minor characters use a blend of modern medical techniques and traditional folk medicines and remedies to help the central character, Velma, heal after a suicide attempt. Through the struggle of Velma and the other characters surrounding her, Bambara chronicles the deep psychological toll that African-American political and community organizers can suffer, especially women.
After the publication and success of The Salt Eaters, she focused on film and television production throughout the 1980's. From 1980 to 1988, she produced at least one film per year. Bambara wrote the script for Louis Massiah's film The Bombing of Osage Avenue, which dealt with the massive police assault in Philadelphia on the headquarters of the black liberation group MOVE, at 6221 Osage Avenue, on May 13, 1985. The film won two awards and was a success, viewed at film festivals and airing on national public broadcasting channels.
The novel Those Bones Are Not My Child (or "If Blessings Come" — the title of the manuscript) was published posthumously in 1999. It deals with the disappearance and murder of 40 black children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. It was called her masterpiece by Toni Morrison, who edited it and also gathered some of Bambara's short stories, essays, and interviews in the volume Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays & Conversations (Vintage, 1996).
Her work is explicitly political, concerned with injustice and oppression in general and with the fate of African-American communities and grassroots political organizations in particular, especially The Salt Eaters.
Female protagonists and narrators dominate her writing, which was informed by radical feminism and firmly placed inside African-American culture, with its dialect, oral traditions and jazz techniques. Like other members of the Black Arts Movement, Bambara was heavily influenced by "Garveyites, Muslims, Pan-Africanists, and Communists", in addition to modern jazz artists such as Sun Ra and John Coltrane, whose music served not only as inspiration but provided a structural and aesthetic model for written forms as well. This is evident in her work through her development of non-linear "situations that build like improvisations to a melody" to focus on character and building a sense of place and atmosphere. Bambara also credits her strong-willed mother, Helen Bent Henderson Cade Brehon, who urged her and her brother Walter Cade (an established painter) to be proud of African-American culture and history.
Bambara contributed to PBS's American Experience documentary series with Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies. She also was one of four filmmakers who made the collaborative 1995 documentary W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices.
Bambara was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2013.
Fiction
Gorilla, My Love. New York: Vintage, 1972 (short stories)
War of the Walls 1976, My Love. New York: Random House, 1972 (short stories)
"Blues Ain't No Mockin Bird"
The Lesson. New York: Bedford/St.Martin's, 1972 (short stories)
"The Lesson"
The Sea Birds Are Still Alive: Collected Stories. New York: Random House, 1977 (short stories)
"A Girl's Story"
The Salt Eaters New York: Random House, 1980 (novel)
Toni Morrison (editor): Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays and Conversations. New York: Pantheon, 1996 (various)
Those Bones Are Not My Child. New York: Pantheon, 1999 (novel)
This Bridge Called My Back. Fourth Edition. New York: 2015 (various)
Academic
The American Adolescent Apprentice Novel. City College of New York, 1964. 146 pp.
Southern Black Utterances Today. Institute of Southern Studies, 1975.
What Is It I Think I'm Doing Anyhow. In: J. Sternberg (editor): The Writer on Her Work: Contemporary Women Reflect on Their Art and Their Situation. W.W. Norton, New York 1980, pp. 153–178.
Salvation Is the Issue. In: Mari Evans (editor): Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. Anchor/Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1984, pp. 41–47.
Anthologies
as Toni Cade (editor): The Black Woman: An Anthology. New American Library, New York 1970
Toni Cade Bambara (editor): Tales and Stories for Black Folks. Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1971
Foreword, This Bridge Called My Back. Persephone Press, 1981.
Produced screenplays
Zora. WGBH-TV Boston, 1971
The Johnson Girls. National Educational Television, 1972.
Transactions. School of Social Work, Atlanta University 1979.
The Long Night. American Broadcasting Co., 1981.
Epitaph for Willie. K. Heran Productions, Inc., 1982.
Tar Baby. Screenplay based on Toni Morrison's novel Tar Baby. Sanger/Brooks Film Productions, 1984.
Raymond's Run. Public Broadcasting System, 1985.
The Bombing of Osage Avenue. WHYY-TV Philadelphia, 1986.
Cecil B. Moore: Master Tactician of Direct Action. WHY-TV Philadelphia, 1987.
W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1995)*
Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur is an author and activist (faith-based initiatives and gender equality in Islam). She works with Malaria No More, a leading non-profit formed to advance the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by ending malaria-related deaths by 2012. She also consults on a variety of interfaith projects and volunteerism efforts.
Career
In April 2008, the US State Department hosted Abdul-Ghafur on an eight-city speaking tour of the United Kingdom to cultivate a conversation about Muslims in the West. On this tour, Abdul-Ghafur spoke at the House of Commons of the United Kingdom and the University of Oxford. She has accepted invitations to speak at a host of educational institutions including Harvard University, Emory University and Yale University. She has been a guest on CNN and National Public Radio and her work has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times.
In addition to work on behalf of women, Abdul-Ghafur's was the Associate Director of Corporate Volunteerism at Hands On Atlanta, a multi-million-dollar non-profit service provider in the southeast. She has been responsible for sourcing the nation's largest service day, Hands On Atlanta Day, which hosted 17,000 volunteers in 250 unique service projects.
Abdul-Ghafur came to Atlanta in 2003 to join the team that produced Azizah magazine, the first and only magazine for American Muslim women. Prior to Abdul-Ghafur's work with Azizah, she was a program officer for Victoria Foundation. Victoria Foundation is among the oldest and largest private foundations and Abdul-Ghafur oversaw $12 million in grants to non-profits.
Activism
Abdul-Ghafur was selected to participate in the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow retreat hosted by the World Economic Forum in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006. The Forum convened thirty Muslim leaders from the United States along with their counterparts in Western Europe in order to outline strategies for the future of Islam and Muslims in the West. Out of this retreat came a commitment to address gender issues within Muslim communities in the West.
Abdul-Ghafur participated in the seminal events challenging the role of Muslim women in contemporary society. In 2005, she proposed nominating women as prayer leaders, a concept that is unprecedented in the American Muslim community. She also co-organized the historic women-led prayer in New York City. In 2004, she participated in a civil action in Morgantown, West Virginia to give women space and voice in American mosques where they have traditionally been banned. To varying degrees, subsequent to these actions Muslim communities throughout the United States and the West have reexamined the ways Muslim women participate in community life. Mosques in San Francisco, New York City and Chicago are among those that actively develop programs for women, eliminating barriers between women and men and allowing women to sit on mosque boards.
Works
Abdul-Ghafur is the editor for Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak (Beacon Press), the first anthology reflecting the voices of American Muslim women. The book reflects American Muslim women dealing with the complexity of forging their own identities while contributing powerfully to public life. Contributors include poet and author Suheir Hammad, and journalist Asra Nomani. Living Islam Out Loud has received attention from both the mainstream and Muslim press. She has attracted controversy for publicizing in The New York Times her marriage to the man she later accused of being abusive in her book.
Abdul-Ghafur presents frequently at workshops, seminars and conferences about popular culture, Islam and women. She contributed to the coming of age anthology, What Your Mama Never Told You: True Stories about Sex and Love (Graphia 2007). Abdul-Ghafur also contributes to online ezines and blogs. A recent piece, "A Hajj for the Children of Mali", described a historic delegation's pilgrimage to Mali to save the lives of African children. It appeared on Beacon Press' blog, Beacon Broadside. Other online pieces include "Holla if you Hear Me", (Naseeb.com) a look at ethnic divisions in the American Muslim community and "Preach from the Ashes," (pmuna.org) her personal account of the historic women-led prayer.
Affiliations
Abdul-Ghafur was a board member of the Progressive Muslim Union of North America. She is a member of Atlanta Habitat for Humanity's advisory board and the WOMENBUILD steering committee. Abdul-Ghafur serves on the Atlanta Women's Foundation's Faith, Feminism and Philanthropy steering committee. This committee is the Atlanta-based representation of the national conversation to bridge the divide between faithful and secular feminists around a common agenda of women's empowerment. Saleemah has been a guest on CNN and NPR and her work has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times. In May 2007 Abdul-Ghafur received the Kent Place School alumna achievement award. Abdul-Ghafur is a graduate of Columbia University.*
Roger Arliner Young (1889 – November 9, 1964) was an American scientist of zoology, biology, and marine biology. She was the first African American woman to receive a doctorate degree in zoology.
Early years
Born in Clifton Forge, Virginia in 1889, Young soon moved with her family to Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. The family was poor and much time and resources were expended in the care of her disabled mother.
In 1916, Young enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C. to study music. She wrote in the yearbook: "Not failure, but low aim is a crime." She did not take her first science course until 1921. Though her grades were poor at the beginning of her college career, some of her teachers saw promise in her. One of these was Ernest Everett Just, a prominent black biologist and head of the Zoology department at Howard. Young graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1923. Just tried unsuccessfully to help her gain funding for graduate school, but in 1924 Young began studying for her master's degree at the University of Chicago, which she received in 1926.
Young worked with Ernest Everett Just for many years, teaching as an Assistant Professor at Howard University from 1923 to 1935. Research was done during the summers. Young assisted Just in his research from 1927 through 1930; although her assistance was noted in his grant applications, her name does not appear as a coauthor in the resulting publications.
While studying at Chicago, she was asked to join Sigma Xi, a scientific research society, which was an unusual honor for a master's student. In 1924 her first article, "On the excretory apparatus in Paramecium" was published in the journal Science, making her the first African American woman to research and professionally publish in this field.
Career
In 1927, Ernest Everett Just invited Young to work with him during summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. While there, they worked on researching the fertilization process in marine organisms, as well as the process of hydration and dehydration in living cells. In 1929, Young became interim department head for the zoology department at Howard University for the time while Just was in Europe seeking grant money. Young's eyes were permanently damaged by the ultraviolet rays used in the experiments conducted at Howard for Just.
In the fall of 1929, Young returned to the University of Chicago to begin her doctorate degree under the direction of Frank Rattray Lillie. Lillie had been a mentor of Just while both were involved with the Marine Biological Laboratory. However, in 1930 she failed to pass her qualifying exams, and for a time, disappeared from the scientific community. She returned to Howard University to teach and continued working with Just at the Marine Biological Laboratory during the summers.
However, around 1935, rumors started circulating that there was a romance between Just and Young. Later that year she was fired, ostensibly because she mistreated lab equipment and missed classes. In her words, "The situation here is so cruel and cowardly that every spark of sentiment that I have held for Howard is cold." She used this setback as an opportunity to try again to obtain a PhD. In June 1937, she went to the University of Pennsylvania, studying with Lewis Victor Heilbrunn (another scientist she met at the Marine Biological Laboratory) and graduated with her doctorate in 1940.
After obtaining her doctorate, Young became an assistant professor at the North Carolina College for Negroes and Shaw University (1940–1947), and held teaching positions in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana until 1959.
Young contributed a great deal of work to science. She studied the effects of direct and indirect radiation on sea urchin eggs, on the structures that control the salt concentration in paramecium, as well as hydration and dehydration of living cells.
Personal life
Young was never married. In addition to the occupation-related damage to her eyes, she had financial struggles, and was the sole support for her ill mother. Away from Howard, her options as an African-American woman scientist were limited to teaching positions without access to research facilities and support. In the 1950's she admitted herself to hospital for mental health problems. Roger Arliner Young died on November 9, 1964 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She had done much to help us to this day, but she is not widely recognized.
Honors
Roger Arliner Young was recognized in 2005 in a Congressional Resolution along with four other African American women "who have broken through many barriers to achieve greatness in science." The others honored were Ruth Ella Moore ("who in 1933 became the first African American woman to earn a PhD in natural science from the Ohio State University"), Euphemia Lofton Haynes ("who in 1943 became the first African American woman to receive a PhD in mathematics from the Catholic University of America"), Shirley Ann Jackson ("who in 1973 became the first African American woman to receive a PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology"), and Mae Jemison ("a physician and the first African American woman in space").
A group of environmental and conservation groups established the Roger Arliner Young (RAY) Marine Conservation Diversity Fellowship in Young's honor, to support young African Americans who want to become involved in marine environmental conservation work.*
