Sistah Sci Fi
Check this out, a new book club and store that specializes in Black Women who write sci fi!! pretty cool. Check out their site.
Black women Tag
Black Is Beautiful 2021 – Cathy Hughes
Cathy Hughes was born in 1947 in Omaha Nebraska and knew from an early age knew what she wanted to be on the air. Before TV or the web was big it was all about radio. Cathy came from a family of entrepreneurs. Her mom was a professional trombonist with the group “International Sweethearts of Rhythm” an all ladies band. Her dad was a successful accountant and her grandfather founded a school for Black children. She became a teen single mother and began working for the Omaha Star which was one of the big Black newspapers owned by Mildred Brown. She went on to work for Omaha’s station Kowh before she met Tom Brown, a broadcaster who recognized her talent and asked her to come work for him as he established Howard’s (HBCU) first school of communications. There she helped build the station as a sales manager and eventually as general manager. Then the Washington Broadcasters brought her on to restructure and rebrand a failing station. When they wouldn’t make her an equal par owner she decided to start her own radio company and purchased 1450 Am WOL in 1980. She was turned down by over 30 banks and lending institutions when she wanted to buy it. And when she finally got it she had to live there with her son. She made it work. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week she was on the air or hired DJs tto be on the air. She developed a format most of us know from Black radio-the quiet storm. A program of sexy sweet soul and blues. She did well expanding to news coverage from a Black perspective and buying more stations.
At the height of her company she owned over 70 radio stations. She founded a TV company (TV One) in 1988 which still runs today. Her son took over of the umbrella company “Urban One” as CEO in 1997, the largest Black owned company of radio in the country. And her son , now a business school grad took the company public making her the first Black woman to own a publicly traded company in history. She is a powerhouse of business and media achievement touching Black families all over the country. In this illustration I imagined she must have mentored some younger folks along the way and she is literally passing the microphone to them. Inspiring work and she’s still going!
Sources: BOSS-The Black Experience in Business (film), How I built this (podcast), Block Starz TV
Did you catch this one about Robert Sengstacke Abbott (Chicago Defender)?
The last one from 2021 was Little Richard!
Who is She? 30 – Kimberly Bryant
Kimberly Bryant is the founder of “Black Girls Code”. She is an electrical engineer from Memphis, Tennessee born in 1967. She earned her degree at Vanderbilt college and began working for companies like Westinghouse, DuPont, Pfizer, and Genentech. But Parenthood has a way of opening your eyes to things that were not as noticeable before. BGC was founded because Kimberly’s daughter took an interest in computer programming, but could not find a program as diverse as her city. So, she made one. It started in Oakland in 2011 at the HUB with Bryant teaching her daughter and some of her friends some basic coding. It has expanded to other cities in the Bay Area and has gone across the U.S. teaching young women of color in more inclusive spaces that reflect them rather than turn them away. If you are unaware, in the last 3-4 years large tech companies we use everyday started releasing their numbers and much to the tech communities surprise the number of Black folks and people of color were tiny. Founding BGC was a ground breaking move because it helped spark a conversation in the Black community, a movement of girls of all backgrounds to get into coding, and it helped Bryant secure funding to bring the program internationally. If you can see it, you can be it. And if an invite is extended people will come. Kimberly has been recognized by Forbes Magazine, Business Insider, the White House, Fast Co, Tech Crunch, and more.
Sources: SF Chronicle, BlackGirlsCode.org, Wikipedia
Black is Beautiful (2017) 5 – Dr. Dorothy L. Brown
Dorothy Lavinia Brown was born in 1919 in Philadelphia, PA. She was brought up as an orphan and had a tough childhood, going back and forth between custody of her mother and orphanages. She said she never had real parents until she was in her mid teens. The family that took her in gave her love and asked that she finish school, which she did. She was the top of all her classes from her days at the orphanage to high school and later Bennett College. She got an internship at a hospital in New York. And when she was denied a residency there as a doctor she went back to school at Meharry College and got her residency there. In he late 50’s she became the chief of surgery at a hospital in Tennessee, a first for the state and the entire south. She also became the first un married parent to be authorized as an adoptive parent and was the first Black woman to represent Tennessee in the state legislature. She is an award winning doctor and activist who also gave back to the orphanage where she was raised, advocated for women’s right to abortion, and helped with the establishment of the first Black history week, which late became Black history month. She passed away in 2004.
Sources: Findagrave.com, Black Past -Abysinnia Baptist Church, Wikipedia