Empowering Communities, Advancing Justice for Black History Month 2024

This year, our theme for Black History Month is Empowering Communities, Advancing Justice, and it will be informed by the topics for the 2024 YWCA Racial Justice Challenge, providing an opportunity to explore in depth how each topic of the Racial Justice Challenge impacts Black women and what YWCA is doing to advance justice in communities across America.

YWCA Brooklyn is highlighting pioneering women educators as part of our #BlackHistory focus this month.

PIONEERING WOMEN EDUCATORS

Mary McLeod Bethune was one of the most influential Black educators, setting the educational standards for today’s Black colleges. She was also a champion of racial and gender equity, and led many voter registration drives after some women gained the right to vote in 1920. She eventually became the highest ranking Black woman in government, and used her influence to fight discrimination at every opportunity.

June Millicent Jordan was a poet, teacher, and activist focused on gender, race, immigration, and representation. Notably, she was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture. Through her work and activism she reminds us of our responsibility in creating change.

Septima Poinsette Clark was a civil rights leader and pioneer educator. In 1945 she achieved equal pay for Black and white teachers, through working with the NAACP and Attorney Thurgood Marshall. She also developed literacy and citizenship workshops that were essential in the drive for voting rights and civil rights during the Civil Rights Movement.

Fanny Jackson Coppin was a lifelong advocate for women’s higher education. She attended Oberlin College, which was the first college in the US to accept both Black and women students, where she made waves by enrolling in the so-called “gentlemen’s course” which was more focused on mathematics and language than the “ladies’ course”. She eventually began teaching there herself, and later became the first African American school superintendent in the United States.

Watch our instagram or Facebook page for more about these impactful women.