The post was largely about how the web enables us to be there for one another in times of crisis. Molly shared how she found solace—while reeling from the emergency hospitalization of her mother—in the support of her community through email, Twitter, and Facebook.

Molly recognized the power of the web—and the Open Web in particular—to connect people and communities for the betterment of all humans. Sure, she saw the downsides too and would grumble about them quite often, but she was a firm believer that the web was a net positive for the world.

As I reflected on her life last year when we lost her, this passage really struck me:

Mortality reminds us in very cold, frightening terms how fragile our life and times truly are. The Web, which is a naturally social and interactive communications platform, can help bring us all closer. The fighting, the drama, the debates - they all become irrelevant in these very mortal moments. Let us all reach for the greatness within ourselves and put it into our Web work every day, because even on those days we feel it’s overwhelming or doesn’t matter, it really truly does. One world, one Web, one love, my brothers and sisters.

I cannot think of a better way to remember Molly on this day.

Much love to you and your communities!

This is a tough post to write, to be honest. It’s difficult to articulate just how influential Molly has been on my own work, my philosophical approach to web design, and my career.

# Molly was warm and welcoming

Molly was there when I gave my first talk. 2003. COMDEX. I’d been invited out by the World Organization of Webmasters to give a talk on XHTML. The talk was solid. My delivery was atrocious. Molly was quick to come up after and congratulate me. I was floored.

I told her how excited I was to see her and Eric Meyer give a talk on CSS later in the day. She told me Eric had had to cancel his trip last minute and asked me if I would be interested in giving the talk with her. Just like that. I don’t know that she had any idea who I was (I’d only just published my first piece in A List Apart a few months earlier). But that was how Molly rolled. She saw my passion for web standards and somehow knew I’d be able to step up.

That one welcoming gesture was huge for me. And it was the start of a long collaboration and friendship. After that talk, we met up in Vegas again in 2004 and then went on a speaking tour the U.S. together in 2005, running web standards workshops where we taught people the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and accessibility. I learned so much from her during that time and bore witness, over and over, to her immense capacity for welcoming people, bringing them together, breaking bread, building her tribe… she was the very embodiment of the word hospitable.

And gregarious. Her boisterous laugh was infectious and memorable. I can still hear it echoing in my ears.

# Molly was generous with her time

I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone who gave as much of herself as Molly did. She always, always put others first, sometimes to her own detriment.

When I first met Molly, she was leading the Web Standards Project (WaSP). She poured her heart and soul into that organization and the cause of web standards. I lost count of how many events she spoke at, often on her own dime. She invited educators into her home to teach them how to properly teach the next generation of web designers and developers… for free.

She always put her advocacy for the cause first… a double edged sword we’ve since named advocacy fatigue. It took a toll on her—mentally, physically, and spiritually—and she took the occasional break from it, but she never gave up on the fight for a more egalitarian web.

# Molly created opportunities for others

Another aspect of Molly’s giving nature was her insistence on opening doors for people, career-wise. I witnessed her pass along amazing opportunities that found their way into her inbox with an incredible amount of joy. Like doling out incredible gifts for a holiday.

One such gift she handed me was the opportunity to do some work with Adaptive Path. Through her introduction, I got the chance to work with an amazing team on several projects… all from my living room thousands of miles from their San Francisco offices. That was the kind of sway she pulled.

That work led to a part-time role (and health insurance) at Bolt|Peters, where I worked on Ethnio. That role gave me the freedom to quit my day job at an ad agency and begin building my own consulting business, which I launched a few months later and ran for over a decade.

All because of the doors Molly opened.

In a separate path, she invited me to join WaSP, where I worked on a lot of JavaScript-focused efforts. That led to me working with Microsoft on improvements to IE7 and IE8 and—years later—to me eventually joining Microsoft as a web standards advocate.

All because of the doors Molly opened.

And I was not alone. Wherever and whenever Molly saw an opportunity to help someone on their career journey, she would help them. Book contracts. Speaking engagements. Networking. Freelance work. If Molly saw any way she could help you, she did. No ego. No expectations. Selfless.

Her example is what inspired me to build my mentoring program. I don’t know that I can ever do as much good as she did for people, but she made me want to try.

# Molly wanted the web to win

If you know Molly’s name, this is probably why. She was a staunch—and loud—advocate for web standards and accessibility. A veteran of the browser wars (and subsequent skirmishes), she knew the landscape and she knew how imperative it was for standards to emerge and for browsers to implement them consistently.

I wasn’t there for the meeting, but she told me Bill Gates tried to tell her the web was “done” ’round about the IE6 days and she yelled at him. While she wasn’t one to shy away from the occasional embellishment, she was just as unlikely to shy away from a confrontation over the viability and future of the web… so it would not surprise me at all to hear that she’d yelled at him.

Molly was a lioness—nurturing and maternal to the web and its denizens and a fierce protector when they were threatened. She saw the potential of the web as a great equalizer and bristled when folks would try to wall it off or exclude people—especially disempowered people—from accessing it.

That passionate support for the open web never wavered, even when Molly became ill. In fact we’d been talking about whether it might make sense to re-launch WaSP this year, a decade after we’d shuttered it because we thought the work was done—it wasn’t.

# Molly will live on in our memories and our craft

Knowing Molly affected me. Deeply. Her kindness, thoughtfulness, generosity, and passion live on in everyone her life and work touched. Including me.

I don’t know what to make of a world without Molly, but I hate that we’re living in one. She truly was a force of nature and, as such, has left an indelible mark on this industry.

I’m so thankful to have known her. To have received her mentorship. To have called her a friend.

Goodnight Mols. I love you.

# Other folks’ memories of Molly

• John Allsopp
• Faruk Ateş
• Deborah Edwards-Oñoro
• Meryl Evans
• Jason Grigsby
• Stephen Hay
• Jay Hoffman
• Bruce Lawson
• Matt May
• Eric Meyer

More on front-end.social by following #MollyHolzschlag.

Know of others? Please share them.

After graduating from the USAFA, Charles had an impressive military career. He resigned from the Air Force in 1970 as a Major with a number of medals to his honor, including the Bronze Star. After his resignation, he went to Harvard Business School and began a second career in senior leadership of numerous companies including Max Factor and Hughes Electronics.

Throughout all of these experiences, Charles was well-aware of the problems brought about by a lack of representation within any organization’s upper management. In his retirement, he began to work with a handful of former military colleagues to try to change this reality in the Air Force.

In the mid-2000s, Charles and retired General Ron Fogleman, began putting more pressure on the USAFA (and the Air Force in general) to diversify senior leadership. They drafted a “Strategic Diversity Plan” for USAFA admissions. There was a lot of pushback to this from the Air Force and they went so far as to resist sharing racial demographics of the officer corps. With a little external help, they eventually obtained this Department of Defense (DOD) data through a rather circuitous route.

After compiling the data with a handful of others—many of whom did not take credit for the work for fear of retribution—they published the “DOD Executive Diversity Study” in 2008. The study concluded that whites rose into the DOD executive ranks at a rate of 3× more than Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, 4× greater than Black people, and 6× greater than Latinx folks. Clearly diversity was not a priority for the DOD. They attributed this reality to treating diversity as a personnel issue rather than a “critical mission element,strategically imperative to national security.”

These poor diversity statistics are partly a result of the past and current low numbers of qualified diversity candidates and graduates from our nation’s service academies and other officer-commissioning sources. This under-representation directly and adversely affects the pool of qualified diversity candidates available for senior promotions 25 years into the future.

It took over two years of advocacy, both within the military and in Congress and the White House for things to start to turn around. The Air Force began engaging with the Navy, which Charles felt offered a good model for increasing representation throughout its ranks. To put this in context, Charles recalls Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sharing just how important diversity within the officer corps is in a meeting in late 2010: “We measured ourselves on that… and if there were senior officers that weren’t [onboard], they were leaving.”

2010 was when the metaphorical rubber met the road for the Air Force, both within the military branch itself and within the USAFA. Policies were overhauled, directives were issued, and—to Charles’ joy—the admissions process for the Academy was reformed.

While Charles V. Bush was not solely responsible for the move to diversify the armed forces (or even the Air Force), his work highlighting inequity was instrumental in helping to improve representation within the officer corps.

If you’re interested, you should check out the Department of Defense’s Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan. It’s top three goals align perfectly with the goals every company and organization should hold:

1. Ensure Leadership Commitment to an Accountable and Sustained Diversity Effort
2. Employ an Aligned Strategic Outreach Effort to Identify, Attract, and Recruit from a Broad Talent Pool Reflective of the Best of the Nation We Serve
3. Develop, Mentor, and Retain Top Talent from Across the Total Force

# Further Reading

1. “Diversity Is A Leadership Issue” by Charles V. Bush. Speech at USAFA National Character & Leadership Symposium, 2011.
2. “Air Force Cadets” Uncredited. Ebony, February 1960.

Madame Jones was an opera singer born in 1869. Her father, Jeremiah Malachi Joyner, was a formerly enslaved minister who was both educated and literate (which was very uncommon for the time). Her mother sang in church choir and was a washerwoman. She sang from a young age, but mostly around the house. When her family relocated from Portsmouth, Virginia to Providence, Rhode Island, she began singing at her father’s church. In 1883 she began to formally study music at Providence Academy of Music before moving on to the New England Conservatory of Music and the Boston Conservatory. Clearly gifted, she began giving solo public performances two years later.

Madame Jones’s voice, much like Beyoncé’s, was phenomenal. “Her notes are as clear as a mockingbird’s” wrote the New York Echo when she became the first Black performer to sing at the Music Hall (later renamed Carnegie Hall) in 1892. Jody Rosen of the New York Times called Beyoncé’s voice “one of the most compelling instruments in popular music” in 2014. Yep, and Beyoncé also played Carnegie Hall numerous times, both with Destiny’s Child and solo.

Madam Jones also performed at Madison Square Garden in 1892, before an audience of 75,000. Beyoncé first played Madison Square Garden in 2005 with Destiny’s Child, but interestingly it wasn’t the same venue anymore and the maximum capacity was 20,000. The Madison Square Garden Madam Jones performed at was actually the second to bear that name, the one Beyoncé performed at was the fourth (and current) incarnation.

In 1892, Madame Jones also gave her first performance at the White House (for President Benjamin Harrison). She performed there for four consecutive presidents—Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, and Roosevelt—though she had to enter through the back door for all of them except Roosevelt. Beyoncé took numerous trips to the White House as well and, while I couldn’t find any record of her performing there, I’m she she carried a tune once or twice. Plus she did perform an amazing cover of Etta James’ “At Last” at President Obama’s Inauguration Ball in 2008 and sang the National Anthem at his inauguration ceremony in 2013. Close enough.

By 1895, a decade into her career, Madame Jones had become the most well-known and highly paid Black performer of her time. In 2014, Beyoncé became the highest-paid Black musician in history and she made Time’s “100 Most Influential People” list for the second year in a row.

This is where Madame Jones’ and Queen Bey’s careers diverge, however: Even when she was billing top dollar, Madame Jones was making pittance compared to her white counterparts. Adelina Patti, an Italian opera singer to whom Madame Jones was often compared, was making $4,000 a night in 1829, compared to Madame Jones’ $2,000 a week. Beyoncé is tied with Madonna as the only female singer to earn over $100 million in a single year… twice.

Sadly, Madame Jones’ first husband—also her manager, whom she divorced in 1899—mishandled and gambled away a lot of her money. When her mother fell ill in 1915, she retired form performing and returned to Rhode Island to care for her. She spent the rest of her life caring for her mother, two adopted children, and several homeless children. She survived on her earnings for a time, but eventually had to sell nearly everything—jewelry, medals, three of her four homes—to cover her expenses. In her final years, it’s said that the local head of the NAACP helped her pay her bills and even provided her with fuel to heat her home.

Madame Jones eventually developed cancer and died in poverty in 1933. She didn’t even have the money for a headstone. A 2018 GoFundMe campaign paid tribute to Madame Jones by purchasing a headstone for her.

# Further Reading

1. Sisseretta Jones Biography BlackPast, 2007.
2. “From Opera, Minstrelsy and Ragtime to Social Justice: An Overview of African American Performers at Carnegie Hall, 1892–1943” BlackPast, 2007.
3. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, edited by Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah. Basic Civitas Books, 1999.

On 23 September 1884, Judy W. Reed received patent number 305,474 for her “dough kneader and roller.” She is considered to be the first Black woman to receive a patent. We know don’t know much, but it’s believed she lived in Washington, D.C. or somewhere close by. She signed her patent application with an “X,” so it’s unclear if she was literate (slaves often risked their lives when they learned to read and write).

Judy’s invention improved on the design of existing dough kneaders by allowing the dough to mix more evenly. The dough moved between two rollers carved with corrugated slats that would knead it before moving it into a covered container that kept the dough clean.

The next year, on 14 July 1885, Sarah E. Goode received patent 322,177 for a piece of furniture that could hide a folded up mattress. In many ways, it was the precursor to the sleeper sofa, though her original design had it tucked away in a secretary desk. Unlike Judy, Sarah did sign her application with her name, so some consider her to be the first Black woman to be granted a patent in the United States.

Regardless of who you consider “first,” the fact is that this is just yet another example of Black women excelling at something often considered the domain of men (specifically white men, if we’re being honest). Black women have long struggled (and indeed continue to) for the recognition they deserve as inventors, entrepreneurs, and technologists. That needs to end.

Don’t stand idly by and let people erase Black women from technical conversations taking place in meeting rooms, at conferences, or on Twitter. Highlight them and their accomplishments when someone asks you who you}re inspired by. Look for opportunities to showcase their tremendous talent; that’s the only way we’re gonna make things better.

# Further Reading

1. “These Four Black Women Inventors Reimagined the Technology of the Home”Smithsonian Magazine, 2017
2. “Sisters in Innovation: 20 Women Inventors You Should Know” A Mighty Girl, 2018
3. Black Stars: African American Women Scientists and Inventors by Otha Richard Sullivan. Wiley, 2012.

Additional recommendations for little ones:

1. Izzy Gizmo by Pip Jones. Simon Schuster Children’s, 2017
2. Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty. Harry N. Abrams, 2016.

James same to San Francisco State partly to organize and partly to take classes and avoid the draft. A veteran activist, Jerry had been a Freedom Rider and he’d also been involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He wanted to agitate for change on campus.

Jerry was the chapter president of Alpha Phi Alpha, a Black fraternity. A Mississippi native, he’d joined the Air Force before ending up at San Francisco State. He was also active in the (Negro Student Association) NSA, an organized club for all Black students. He and James met at a party and instantly hit it off.

The two began meeting to discuss strategies for organizing on campus. Even though their ideas seemed like the sort of thing the NSA would be interested in, it became clear the NSA was not motivated to agitate in the same way James & Jerry wanted it to; their group needed its own identity. Tricia Navara, a fellow student, dubbed them the “Black Student Union” (BSU) and the name stuck.

“Our thing was not simply to understand the world. Our duty was to change it,” Garrett recalled. “Everybody on the campus who identified themselves as a Black person, whether they were a student, faculty, worked in the yards, you were a member of the Black Student Union by definition.”

Pretty soon word of the BSU spread beyond the San Fransisco State campus and the group began getting calls from other schools. First from a group at Stamford, then other colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools. As the BSUs spread, they put collective pressure on schools to diversify, to create more liberal admissions policies, and to change their treatment of Black students. Ibram Rogers referred to the movement as the Black Campus Movement.

With the power of the BSU behind him, James Garrett boldly proposed that San Francisco State should have a Black Studies department. He wrote and submitted a proposal to the faculty in the spring of 1967. Later that year, racial tensions at San Francisco State came to a head and students of color (the BSU among them) kicked off a legendary strike that led to the creation of a Black Studies Department (along with a slew of other significant changes).

Our educational system is by no means perfect, but the BSUs around the world have a legacy of agitating for equity for Black (and brown) students. Their work has led to the creation of ethnic studies departments and schools around the world. And they have made great strides in pushing for schools to have greater Black representation with their faculty. And all of that is thanks to the chance meeting of two young men at a frat party who decided they were going to make things better for themselves and their fellow Black students.

As an interesting side note, the Black Studies Department at San Francisco State grew into the College of Ethnic Studies. This year the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State will celebrate its 50th year!

# Further Reading

1. Blow it up!: The Black student revolt at San Francisco State College and the emergence of Dr. Hayakawa, by Dikran Karagueuzian, 1971
2. “On Strike! Blow It Up!”Code Switch podcast, 2019
3. “Remembering the Black Campus Movement: An Oral History Interview with James P. Garrett” by Ibram Rogers, M.A., Temple University
4. “The Black Student Union at SFSU started it all” SFGate, 2010

In the late 17th Century, Spain and Britain were bickering neighbors in the southeast of what is now the United states. In 1693, Spain’s King Charles II ordered Spanish colonists to grant freedom and protection to any escaped British slaves who agreed to convert to Catholicism and serve Spain in the militia for four years. To be clear, Spain did not do this because it didn’t support slavery—far from it—they did it for two directly related reasons: it undermined the British colonists by depleting their workforce and it boosted the size of La Florida. Between 1688 and 1725 at least six separate groups of slaves escaped from South Carolina and settled in St. Augustine (the capital of Spanish Florida).

We don’t know his original name, but the man baptized in the Catholic Church as “Francisco Menéndez” was from the Mandinka nation in western Africa, located along the Gambia River. It’s believed that he was captured and sold by slave traders and likely arrived in Carolina some time between 1709 and 1711. A veteran of the Yamasee War, Francisco was appointed captain of the slave militia at St. Augustine in 1726, just two years after his arrival. His defense of the city in 1727 earned him a reputation for strong leadership and bravery.

Despite Spain’s promise and all he had done for Spain in such a short time, Francisco did not earn his unconditional freedom from slavery until nine years later, in 1738. In that same year, the Spanish governor established Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (Fort Mose) about two miles north of St. Augustine. Slaves who had escaped from the British colonies were directed there and, with around 100 residents, Fort Mose became the first legal settlement of free Black people in what would eventually become the United States.

Francisco became the military leader at Fort Mose, which also meant he was the leader of that maroon community. The fort defended the northern approach to St. Augustine, a role that was challenged in 1740 when the British invaded Florida with their eyes on St. Augustine. The Fort’s residents evacuated to the capital and its militia and the Spanish eventually defeated the British and drove them back, but not before Fort Mose was destroyed.

After this battle, Francisco took his fight to the high seas with the Spanish, where they raided British ships. He was captured in 1741 by British sailors who, upon discovering his role leading the Black militia at Fort Mose, tortured him and sold him back into slavery in the Bahamas.

A second Fort Mose was built in 1752. No one knows quite how it happened, but by 1759 Francisco was back in Florida and in charge of Fort Mose, yet again. That iteration of Fort Mose lasted until Florida was ceded to the British in 1763 as part of the Peace of Paris. Most of the inhabitants of Fort Mose, Francisco included, emigrated to Cuba with the evacuating Spanish. Once there, he established a community called San Agustín de la Nueva Florida that was modeled on Fort Mose.

You can visit the Fort Mose site, which is a national park.

# Further Reading

1. Fort Mose Site, Florida
2. Fort Mose: Colonial America’s Black Fortress of Freedom, University Press of Florida, 1995

Born to an interracial couple in 1908 and growing up in the small city of Poughkeepsie, New York, Jane was often the target of discrimination and abuse. Her father, Gaius Bolin, was the first Black man to graduate from Williams College. Jane attended the Smith Metropolitan AME Zion Church, which had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and regularly read The Crisis, both of which had a significant impact on her in her early years.

A smart and dedicated student, Jane enrolled in Wellesley College (Vassar would not let her in) as one of only two Black freshman. Despite (or perhaps in spite of) rejection from her white classmates, she excelled, graduating as one of the top students in her class in 1928. Her career counselor tried to dissuade her from applying to Yale Law School, saying there would be no work for a Black woman in law, but Jane applied anyway and became the only Black student and one of only three women in the school at the time. She graduated in 1931—the first Black woman to receive a law degree from Yale—and passed the New York Bar exam in 1932.

After practicing law briefly with her father in Poughkeepsie, Jane moved to New York City and took a position in the city’s legal affairs office. In 1933, she married Ralph Micelle, a fellow attorney who later joined FDR’s Federal Council of Negro Affairs (a.k.a., the “Black Cabinet”). Then, in 1936, Jane ran for the New York State Assembly as a Republican (back before the parties effectively swapped places). She didn’t win, but her campaign bolstered her visibility in New York state politics and the Republican party. In 1937, Jane became the first Black person to serve as assistant corporation counsel for the City.

In 1939, NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, appointed Jane as a judge to the Domestic Relations Court. This appointment, in 1931, made Jane Bolin the first Black woman judge in the United States and she remained the only Black woman to sit on the bench… for twenty years! She remained a judge in that court for a total of forty years, when the law required her to retire (at age 70).

While on the bench, Jane worked tirelessly to end racial discrimination. She fought to end segregation in child placement. She pushed for publicly funded childcare agencies to accept children of all races. And she helped create an integrated treatment center for delinquent boys.

Jane was also an activist for children’s rights and education. She served as a legal advisor to the National Council of Negro Women and served on the boards of the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Child Welfare League. Upon her retirement, she continued her work in education as a reading instructor in New York City public schools and reviewed disciplinary cases for the New York State Board of Regents.

In so many ways, Jane Bolin was a pioneer. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like to be the “first” so many times. To look around a room and see no one else who looks like you. No one who can understand your lived experiences. No one who you can be yourself around. That must have been incredibly lonely and isolating. Combine that with the number of folks who undoubtedly told her she could not succeed in the career she wanted and I can’t help but be amazed by her resilience. She persisted in so many ways and I am just in awe.

# Further Reading

• Jane Bolin Biography, Biography.com, 2014
• “1st African-American female judge ‘showed the strength of the subtle’”, Poughkeepsie Journal, 2017
• “Jane Matilda Bolin—A Woman of Firsts”, New York Post, 2007

Though born in Delaware, Rebecca was raised largely by her aunt in Pennsylvania. This aunt spent much of her time caring for the sick and infirm in her neighborhood, inspiring Rebecca to do the same. In 1852, at age 21, she moved to Massachusetts to pursue nursing and quickly made an impression on the doctors with whom she worked. Urged by her colleagues, who recognized her skill and intelligence, she applied to and was accepted by the New England Female Medical College in 1860. This was a huge deal because it was rare for either women or Black men to be accepted into medical school at the time, so admittance of a Black woman was quite literally unheard of. To put this in context, when she entered medical school, only 300 of the over 54,000 doctors in the U.S. were women; none were Black women.

After being named a Doctor of Medicine in March of 1864, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler began practicing medicine in Boston, primarily serving poor Black women and children. When the Civil War ended the following year, she relocated to Richmond, Virginia, which she believed was “a proper field for real missionary work, and one that would present ample opportunities to become acquainted with the diseases of women and children.” In her work with the Freedmen’s Bureau, she tended to newly freed slaves that were refused treatment by white doctors. Her patients were not the only ones on the receiving end of prejudice in those years, Dr. Crumpler was similarly snubbed or ignored by her white male colleagues, pharmacists, and others. Some apparently joked that the “M.D.” she earned really stood for “mule driver.” Frankly I’m glad their names have been lost to time; fuck them.

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Crumpler opted to return to Boston some time before the birth of her daughter in 1870. There, she continued her work with poor Black women and children from her practice at 67 Joy Street on Beacon Hill. Due to the nature of her clientele, Dr. Crumpler frequently worked pro bono. She retired from her practice in 1880 and relocated to Hyde Park. Three years later, she published A Book of Medical Discourses, which she dedicated to nurses and mothers. Its focus is on the medical care of women and children and it was a distillation of the notes she had kept throughout her many years in the medical field. Unlike many books by other Black authors, hers bore no introduction from a white male authority.

Throughout her career, Dr. Crumpler worked to improve the health (and lives) of poor Black women and children. Her devotion to the most vulnerable, even in the face of sustained abuse and threats is incredibly inspiring. So many of us are afraid to put our comfort on the line in service of others, let alone our livelihoods (or our lives). We have a lot to learn from brave, trailblazing Black women like Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler.

# Further Reading

1. Women’s History Month Honors Rebecca Lee Crumpler, M.D. First Black Female Physician in the United States, All Things in Mind, 2016
2. Biography of Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, National Library of Medicine, 2003

Born in 1902, Orrin began his career at 17, writing for Sportsman’s Magazine. He honed his journalistic skills at the Philadelphia Tribune, the oldest Black newspaper in the country, before breaking the color barrier to become the first Black writer to cover general assignments for the Philadelphia Record. His 1944 article series on segregation in the armed services helped end the practice (and became a part of the congressional record), but it also drew the ire of folks intent on upholding the status quo. His family received numerous death threats, which led to their home being protected at one point by a 24-hour vigil held by friends, both Black and white.

When the Record was shuttered during a protest, Orrin began looking for new opportunities. He wrote for a variety of notable publications, but he saw great potential in using comic books to reach the Black community. He had always been enamored by the way in which a well-crafted cartoon could make complex topics easy to understand.

In 1947, Orrin formed a partnership with four of his former colleagues at the Register to form All-Negro Comics, Inc. Together they worked with several cartoonists from both Philadelphia and Baltimore to assemble stories that met with Orrin’s moral and educational standards.

The first issue of All-Negro Comics became available in July of 1947 for 15¢. When the second issue was ready to publish, Orrin’s newsprint supplier refused to sell to him. Other potential vendors also refused to work with him. And so the second issue remains unpublished to this day.

There is some speculation that, in addition prejudice on the part of the paper suppliers, two rival white publishers (Parents Magazine Press and Fawcett Comics) had conspired to undermine the burgeoning company in an effort to reduce competition for their own Black-themes titles.

In addition to Lion Man, All-Negro Comics #1 featured, among other characters, another Black protagonist, detective Ace Harlem. And, while there were other comic books aimed at the Black community, there were no memorable Black heroes in comics until the introduction of Black Panther in Fantastic Four #52 (July 1966). In fact, Black people in general were pretty much non-existent, even in street scenes in comic books until the 1960s. Spiderman #18, published in November of 1964, was notable for depicting a Black policeman!

Comics are still pretty damn white, but I am hopeful things are changing for the better. Incredibly successful franchises like Black Panther and Luke Cage (a.k.a. Power Man) play a part, as does Miles Morales’ Spiderman. I loved Dwayne McDuffie’s Damage Control back in the ’80s and Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks in the late ’90s/early ’00s. I’m really excited for the future of the genre though, especially with folks like Eve Ewing (Champions, Ironheart) getting involved in the medium.

# Further reading

1. “Orrin C Evans and the story of All Negro Comics” (archived), tomchristopher.com, 2002; first published in Comic Buyer’s Guide
2. “Orrin C Evans: The First Black Comic Book Publisher” (archived), First Comic News, 2016
3. “The Press: Ace Harlem to the Rescue” (archived), Time Magazine, 1947

As I mentioned, Lucy Hicks Anderson was born in 1886. Born “Tobias Lawson,” she was assigned male at birth. She was adamant that she was a girl from a very early age and insisted on wearing dresses and being called Lucy when she started school. Her mother took her to a physician and he supported Lucy’s parents in raising her as a young woman.

Lucy left school at 15 and worked as a domestic servant. In doing so, she raised enough money to move West. First to Texas, then New Mexico. She met her first husband, Clarence Hicks, in New Mexico and the two later relocated to Oxnard, California where Lucy gained some notoriety as a chef. By the time her marriage ended, Lucy had saved up enough money to purchase a boarding house/brothel that also sold liquor during the height of prohibition. In 1944, Lucy married a soldier named Rueben Anderson.

A year later, another soldier claimed to have caught an STD from Lucy’s brothel, a claim which prompted all of the women in the brothel—including Lucy—to be tested for disease. When the district attorney for Ventura County learned—during the course of the exam—that Lucy had been assigned male at birth, he tried her for perjury, saying she’d lied about being a woman on her marriage license. The jury convicted Lucy of perjury, despite her challenge: “I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman … I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.”

The judge placed her on probation for ten years rather than send her to prison, but her marriage was declared invalid. This triggered the federal government to charge her (and Rueben) with fraud for receiving financial allotments granted to the wives of soldiers under the GI Bill and with failing to register for the draft. She and her husband were both sentenced to prison and Lucy was not allowed to wear women’s clothes.

When the couple was released from prison, the Oxnard sheriff barred them from returning and they decided to move to Los Angeles to live out their remaining years. Lucy died in 1954.

I cannot help but admire Lucy’s resilience through all of this. She knew who she was and stood up for herself, speaking truth to power despite the danger inherent in doing so.

In an interview with Oprah in 2013, Angelou recalled “I saw women on the street cars with their little changer belts. They had caps with bibs on them and form-fitting jackets. I loved their uniforms. I said that is the job I want.”

Her mom, Vivian Baxter, encouraged her to apply, but Market Street Railway Company refused to let her. When her mom asked her if she knew why “I said, ‘Yes, because I’m a Negro.’”

Her mom knew how much she wanted the job and told her to “go get it,” advising her to “Go down everyday and be there before the secretaries get there and read your big Russian books” (she was reading Dostoevsky). “And sit there until they leave.” After sitting there for two weeks, Angelou’s ambition and determination finally paid off and she was invited to apply and got the job.

While this is an interesting tidbit from Angelou’s life—which has been chronicled in several of her books, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Mom & Me & Mom—it still resonates today. Here we are, 76 years later, and Black people—especially Black women—are still disadvantaged when it comes to applying for jobs.

Angelou’s perseverance in the face of bigotry is laudable, but it’s incredibly sad that she and so many others have needed to go to such lengths just to get their feet in the door. We must work to change this.

And so I urge you to get involved in your company’s hiring (and promotion) process. Agitate for change. Eliminate bias. Expand the pool of talent to which you advertise positions. Make sure interview loops are diverse. Fight for the advancement of underrepresented colleagues. Take an active role in dismantling the systems of white supremacy (and misogyny) that continue to deny access (and advancement) to so many amazing people.

I only recently discovered that this fixture of my childhood was made possible by a Black engineer named Jerry Lawson.

Jerry Lawson was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, NY to a longshoreman and a municipal employee. Both of his parents were interested in science and his grandfather was educated as a physicist—though he struggled to build a career in physics (ahem, white supremacy) and ended up becoming a postmaster. Suffice to say, his family valued education and encouraged him to pursue scientific hobbies. At 13, he was a licensed amateur ham radio operator who build a radio station in his bedroom. In high school he repaired TVs for money.

Lawson never earned a degree, but he joined Fairchild Semiconductor in 1970 as an applications engineering consultant. While working there, he built a game called Demolition Derby in his garage. That game was one of the earliest microprocessor-driven games, using Fairchild’s F8 microprocessor. It put him on the map at Fairchild and he was promoted to Chief Hardware Engineer in the mid-’70s. He also became the director of engineering and marketing for their video game division.

In this new role, Lawson led the development of the Fairchild Channel F, the first system to feature interchangeable game cartridges that enabled a single system to play multiple titles. Prior to that, a game’s ROM had been soldered to the game hardware. This move was a game changer (pardon the pun) for the burgeoning industry, creating a whole new revenue stream for console manufacturers. While the Channel F didn’t achieve much commercial success, its novel approach to game integration was quickly copied by the Atari 2600, released in 1977. And the rest, as they say, is history.

It’s also worth noting that Lawson was one of only two members of the influential Homebrew Computer Club (alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak). According to Lawson, he even interviewed “Woz” for a position at Fairchild, but declined to hire him.

Lawson died of complications from diabetes in 2011, just one month after being recognized by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) for his role in the development of the cartridge-based game console.

You can read more about Jerry Lawson on the Vintage Computing & Gaming blog.

Born in 1905 in West Virginia coal country, Angie Turner King was the granddaughter of slaves. She lost her parents when she was young and went to live with a light-skinned grandmother who verbally abused and degraded her because of her dark skin. She later moved in with her grandfather who, while illiterate himself, insisted she go to school. She graduated form high school in 1919 at the age of 14.

Not knowing anything about scholarships, King cited tables and did other odd jobs to afford college. She graduated cum laude from West Virginia State in 1927 with a degree in mathematics and chemistry. After graduating, she began teaching, which was one of the few career options for women—especially women of color—in STEM at the time. While teaching high school, she enrolled in Cornell University and worked toward her Masters Degree, which she earned in 1931, over the summers.

After Cornell, she accepted a position at West Virginia State College, teaching at the laboratory school. She focused on getting the labs in shape “so students would know what a real laboratory looks like.” During World War II, she taught chemistry to soldiers as part of the Army Specialized Training Program at the college.

King went on to earn her PhD, even after getting married and birthing five daughters. She continued teaching and mentoring young minds. One of those minds was Katherine Johnson, the NASA scientist who cited her as a major influence: “a wonderful teacher – bright, caring, and very rigorous.” Another was entomologist and civil rights advocate Margaret Collins

To the best of our knowledge, Angie Turner King only every published two works (her dissertations). She didn’t invent some groundbreaking technology we can’t live without. She didn’t cure a horrible disease. She didn’t do one specific thing we should recognize her for. She did many things. She taught. She mentored. She nurtured. She put her energy into her students and gave them the tools they needed to be successful. She put others before herself and that’s damn admirable.

For this reason, I think Angie Turner King is the perfect person on whom to close out this series. So many incredibly important figures have been wiped from history by people who find them threatening. We need to share their stories. And even more never stepped into the limelight (or searchlight) to begin with. We need to discover them and share them too. We need to acknowledge and thank them enough for their activism, their sacrifice, and their commitment to improving this world of ours. We need to remember their names.

Collins was born in 1922 in West Virginia. She was always into bugs and collected them in the woods near her childhood home. At six, she was recognized as a prodigy and was granted access to West Virginia State University’s book collections. She used this opportunity to propel herself forward educationally, skipping two grades and graduating high school at 14. She obtained a Bachelor of Science in biology in 1943 and completed her PhD in Zoology seven years later (at age 28) with a dissertation on termites. At graduation, she became the first female entomologist of color.

After doing a stint as an assistant professor at Howard University, she left because of the inequality she saw between how male and female faculty members were treated. She relocated to Florida A & M University in Tallahassee, Florida. In 1953, she became chair of the Biology department.

In the early 1950s, while the civil rights struggles were really beginning to coalesce, Collins realized she could not sit idly by. She began to look for ways to do her part for the cause.

When invited to speak at a predominantly white university nearby, she decided to speak about biology and its implications when it came to discussions of equality. When word got out, someone phoned in a bomb threat and the university canceled her talk.¹

In 1956, when the president of the Florida A & M Student Council called for a bus boycott in Tallahassee, she volunteered to drive people back and forth to work. When the protest organization got a tip that police and the FBI were going to raid their offices, Collins volunteered to transport the records containing sensitive information like the protestors’ names and addresses to safety. During this time, she recalled being routinely followed by both police and the FBI.

During the period from 1952–1957, Collins didn’t publish a single paper. In the years prior and subsequent to this period, she published at least two. That gives you some idea of how much of a focus her civil rights work had become.She recalled “A lot of people opposed our civil rights efforts. I had to do what I thought was the most important thing. That’s all there was to it.”

In 1958, she returned to field work with termites, which was her greatest passion. She continued her research and field work right up until her death in 1996 while researching termites in the Cayman Islands.

What I truly appreciate about Margaret Collins is her focus and drive. She saw work that needed to be done and she stepped up and did it. Even when it terrified her.

If you’ve read the book or seen the movie Hidden Figures, you no doubt know who Katherine Johnson is, but I want to share some interesting pieces of her story.

First off, Johnson was born in 1918. Growing up, she showed an incredible gift for mathematics, but she couldn’t attend public school past eighth grade in her West Virginian county because she was Black and, well, racism. So her parents arranged for her to attend high school on the campus of West Virginia State College (now University). She enrolled at 10!

At 14(!) she graduated high school and enrolled at West Virginia State. She took every math class she could, and when she ran out of those, one of her professors, W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, created new classes for her to take. She graduated summa cum laude in 1937—at the age of 18—with degrees in math and French.

Two years later, Katherine Johnson began graduate studies at West Virginia University, becoming the first woman of color to attend the graduate program at the university. In fact, she was one of only three African-American students (and the only woman) selected to integrate the graduate school after Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. She left a year later, after becoming pregnant, to focus on her family.

Think about how few people of color (let alone women of color) you see in STEM careers today. Now turn the clock back 80 years and you start to get a sense of how hard it was for Katherine Johnson to find any work in mathematics that weren’t teaching positions. However, as luck would have it, she learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the precursor to NASA) was hiring mathematicians. She applied and was hired into the Guidance and Navigation Department of NACA, which had a relatively progressive (by today’s standards) hiring policy.

NACA had a growing pool of women—including Black women—who were “computers” that would read data from aircraft black boxes and execute precise mathematical calculations. Despite the progressive hiring policy, NACA segregated its employees and the Black women were restricted to their own office and had to eat in their own dining room and use their own toilets. Still, Johnson’s mind and assertiveness enabled her to become part of the previously all-male flight research teams and higher level meetings where there wasn’t a woman in sight. She was matter-of-fact in her assertiveness too, simply telling people she had done the work and she belonged there.

When NACA became NASA, the segregated work environment went away, but discrimination was still pervasive, especially when it came to gender. Johnson recalled:

We needed to be assertive as women in those days – assertive and aggressive – and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be. In the early days of NASA women were not allowed to put their names on the reports – no woman in my division had had her name on a report. I was working with Ted Skopinski and he wanted to leave and go to Houston … but Henry Pearson, our supervisor – he was not a fan of women – kept pushing him to finish the report we were working on. Finally, Ted told him, “Katherine should finish the report, she’s done most of the work anyway.” So Ted left Pearson with no choice; I finished the report and my name went on it, and that was the first time a woman in our division had her name on something.

At NASA, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectory for Alan Shephard’s 1961 space flight. When NASA used computers to calculate John Glenn’s orbit around Earth—the first time they’d used electronic ones rather than human ones—they asked Johnson to verify the result. Glenn apparently refused to go up without her help. In the book Hidden Figures, author Margot Lee Shetterly, also a Black woman, nails the irony:

So the astronaut who became a hero, looked to this Black woman in the still-segregated South at the time as one of the key parts of making sure his mission would be a success.

In addition to verifying their calculations, Johnson worked with computers too. In fact, in many ways she helped build confidence in the burgeoning technology. She calculated Apollo 11’s trajectory to the Moon and it was her work on backup procedures that helped make it possible for Apollo 13 to return safely to Earth.

I can’t even begin to comprehend the brilliance of Katherine Johnson’s mind. And I am in awe of her, but not just for that… for her perseverance. We are only just starting to recognize, as a society, how much we stand to gain when we work in a diverse and inclusive environment. Imagine how much we might have missed out on had she not been assertive, had she not believed in herself. Her story is yet another in a long line of stories that prove how important it is to give people the opportunity to do their best work. And how important it is to believe in them and encourage them to believe in themselves.

It’s hard to find a ton of detail about Frederick McKinley Jones, but he was born in 1893 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was pretty much an orphan, living in a Catholic rectory, until he quit school at age 11 to work as a cleaning boy. By 14, he was an auto mechanic. He was an avid reader and combined that with his natural mechanical ability to great success.

After returning from service in World War I, and while working full-time as a mechanic, Jones taught himself electronics and built a transmitter for Hallock, Minnesota’s radio station. He also invented a device that would sync audio with motion pictures, which led to him getting a job with Cinema Supplies, Inc. in 1930.

Around 1938, Jones designed a portable air cooling system for trucks. He received a patent on it in 1940. His boss at Cinema Supplies, Joseph A. Numero, sold his business to RCA and joined Jones in forming the U.S. Thermo Control Company, which we now know as Thermo King. By 1949, it was already a $3 million business. Jones’ invention revolutionized food delivery, but it also made it possible to transport life-saving medicine and blood to army hospitals during World War II.

By the time he died, Frederick McKinley Jones has been awarded over 60 patents, which is astounding. Moreover, they aren’t all focused on refrigeration. He designed ticket dispensers, gasoline engines, and even X-ray machines! That’s quite a resume for a Black man in America who was born less than 30 years after the Civil War and died four years before the Voting Rights Act was passed. Amazing!

Amelia Boynton Robinson is often brought up in the context of these marches, and with good reason. It took a great deal of courage and faith to participate as it meant risking life and limb. And, in truth, I’m sure it was terrifying. In a 2014 interview with he New York Post, Robinson recalled

Then they charged. They came from the right. They came from the left. One [of the troopers] shouted: ‘Run!’ I thought, ‘Why should I be running?’ Then an officer on horseback hit me across the back of the shoulders and, for a second time, on the back of the neck. I lost consciousness.

According to the article, another officer stood over her unconscious body, “pumping tear gas into her eyes and mouth from a canister.” He left her for dead and it’s a miracle she survived.

But Bloody Sunday wasn’t the only time Robinson agitated for change. As a young girl in Savannah, Georgia, she was involved in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1934, at the age of 23, she registered to vote in Selma, Alabama, where she had relocated after taking a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Registering to vote was no easy task for a Black person in Alabama, thanks to disenfranchising constitution it passed during reconstruction. The articles of that constitution excluded most Black people from politics right up until the 1960s.

In 1963, when her first husband, Samuel Boynton, died, Robinson began to focus her attention on the civil rights struggles in Selma. Her home and office became a center for strategy sessions, meetings, and a voting rights campaign. Hoping to encourage Black registration and voting, she even ran for Congress—a first for a Black woman in Alabama and a first for any woman running as a Democrat in Alabama.¹

In 1964 and 1965, she worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to plan demonstrations for civil and voting rights. And, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, she helped raise the number of registered Black voters in Selma—a town that was 50% Black—from 300 to 11,000.

Amelia Boynton Robinson’s courage and commitment to getting (and keeping) the vote for all Black Americans is truly awe-inspiring. We‘re lucky to have had her in our world.

Dean grew up tinkering with machinery, building a tractor with his dad from scratch. An ace student, he graduated top of his class at the University of Tennessee in 1979 and joined IBM the next year. His first major project at IBM: chief engineer on the 12-person team developing the first IBM Personal Computer (PC). He was instrumental to the project and holds 3 of the 9 original patents for the device.

To say the World Wide Web might not have been possible without him may seem like hyperbole, but it was his pioneering work designing the Industry Standard Architecture bus that made it possible to connect other devices to the PC—stuff like printers and modems. No modem, no Internet.

Dean also made laid the groundwork for color monitors and helped create the first gigahertz processor. You may well be wondering Is Mark Dean Santa Claus? Perhaps.

Apple released the iPad in 2010. Dean was working on a tablet in 1999. And not just some Palm-like tablet, but a true tablet in the modern sense of the word. He saw this kind of device as being capable of streaming audio and video, connecting wirelessly to the Internet, making phone calls, recognize handwriting, and communicate verbally with its users. While Dean was certainly not the first to dream up or even build a tablet, his vision was pretty much dead-on a full twenty years before similar devices became widely available.

What an amazing career Mark Dean has had. His story only serves to underscore what’s possible when we embrace diversity and push for people from underrepresented communities to have a seat at the table. We need to do better.

Jack Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas in 1878. His parents were former slaves working blue collar jobs in that southern port city during the height of Jim Crow. Growing up in a mixed neighborhood that was defined more by poverty than race, Johnson recalled “As I grew up, the white boys were my friends and my pals. I ate with them, played with them and slept at their homes. Their mothers gave me cookies, and I ate at their tables. No one ever taught me that white men were superior to me.”

After moving around a bit, Johnson took an apprenticeship with a carriage painter named Walter Lewis, who instilled in him a love of boxing. After moving briefly to Manhattan, where he lived with West Indian boxer Joe Walcott, Johnson lost his job exercising horses and returned to Galveston and took a job as janitor at a gym owned by German-born heavyweight fighter Herman Bernau. He saved up the money to buy a pair of gloves sparred whenever he could.

Jack Johnson made his professional boxing debut in 1898 in Galveston. By 1903, Johnson had won at least 50 fights against both white and Black contenders. It was that year that he took the title of World Colored Heavyweight Champion from Denver Ed Martin.

Even though Johnson had tussled with white boxers previously—most notably Joe Choynski, who became somewhat of a mentor—there was a gentlemen’s agreement that Black boxers would not be allowed to challenge white boxers for titles like Heavyweight Champion of the World. Not willing to accept that, Johnson began spending his own time and money traveling the world to take a ringside seat wherever the current champ was fighting. From the seats, he would troll them mercilessly.

James J. Jeffries refused to fight him, even when Johnson reportedly KO’d Jeffries’ brother Jack and taunted him about it. When Tommy Burns took the title, Johnson set his sights on him, daring him to put his title on the line and step into the ring with him.

After sustaining two years of trolling, both from the ringside and in the press, Burns gave in. The two arranged a title fight in Sydney, Australia because no one in the U.S. or Canada would host it. Fourteen rounds in, Burns was taking such a beating that the police stepped to break up the fight and the referee awarded the title to Johnson.

If you’ve heard the term “Great White Hope” before, it actually originated in the racist backlash to Johnson‘s victory over Burns. Whites, furious over this revocation of their supremacy, began searching for a “Great White Hope” to put Johnson “back in his place.” They even coerced Jeffries¹ to come out of retirement in 1910, but Johnson didn’t back down and Jeffries was forced to throw in the towel. Race riots—prompted, no doubt, by feelings of jubilation on one side and humiliation on the other—broke out in more than 50 U.S. cities, killing at least twenty people and injuring hundreds more.

Oddly, as World Heavyweight Champion, Johnson stuck to the script and refused to fight fellow Black boxers. Allegedly he did so because he could make more money fighting white boxers, but, regardless of the reason, this decision was incredibly offensive to the Black community. And when he did finally agree to fight another Black boxer in 1913, he didn’t give the title shot to the then-current World Colored Heavyweight Champion Sam Langford. Instead, he agreed to fight Battling Jim Johnson, a lesser boxer who had lost repeatedly to the various Black heavyweights who had reigned from the time Jack Johnson earned the world heavyweight title.

Despite his holding of the “color line” when it came to boxing, Johnson had no issues crossing it in his private life. Having had his heart broken by two Black women, he switched to dating white women and married a few of them too. This was hugely irritating to the white institutions of power that just couldn’t seem to keep him down. Add this to the fact that he was also earning a ton of money from his fights, endorsement, etc. and the white establishment became convinced they needed to take him down by any means necessary.

They decided to use the Mann Act—which was written to counter white slavery—against him. There was a clause in the law that prohibited “transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes”. Since interracial relationships were considered “immoral,” Johnson was arrested in 1912 while traveling with his then-girlfriend (and future second wife) Lucille Cameron. When that case fell apart, they arrested him a second time and convinced Belle Schreiber, another woman who he had been involved with for several years, to testify against him. He was convicted by an all-white jury in 1913, despite the fact that the incidents used to convict him predated passage of the Mann Act.

Aware of the motivations behind this move, Johnson skipped bail and fled to Canada by posing as a Black baseball player. There, he reunited with Cameron and the two of them set off for France. For the next seven years, they lived in exile in Europe, Mexico, and South America. In 1920, he returned to the U.S. and turned himself in to authorities. He served about 9 months of his sentence in Leavenworth before being released. He was posthumously pardoned for his obviously racially-motivated conviction by President Trump in 2018.

It’s doubtful that Johnson would consider himself part of the resistance or an activist, but his unwillingness to settle for what he was given as a Black man in early 20th Century America became an example for future athletes to use their visibility to agitate for change.

For more on Jack Johnson, check out the Ken Burns documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.