While the term transgender is a recent development, trans people have always been with us. In the white supremacist system that dominates the United States and has declared cit-het people “normal” (and everyone else “abnormal”), being trans has never been easy, but it’s been especially dangerous for black trans women. Knowing this, I am awestruck by the bravery of Lucy Hicks Anderson, a black trans woman born in Kentucky in 1886, who became a renown socialite and hostess in 1940s California.

There are so many reasons to love and admire Maya Angelou. Most of these stem from her novels, poetry, and civil rights work, but I’m going to pick an unusual one: she was determined to be the first black woman to conduct a cable car in San Francisco. And she succeeded at 16.

One of my fondest childhood memories was getting a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday. It wasn’t the expensive set with the robot and the gun (we were poor), but my mom somehow managed to scrape together the $199 (over $470 in today’s dollars) for the system. It opened up a whole new world for me.

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

It’s hard to believe how quickly the last year has gone. It has been a tremendous honor to work with Ace, Dezzie, Marcy, Olu, and Sara for these past 12 months. And while we wrap up our mentorship calls this month, I thought it would be a good idea to open up the application for my 2020–21 cohort.

As many of you know, I’ve been involved in the push for web standards for the better part of two decades. I caught the bug early and have been advocating for their use in pretty much every article, book, talk, and workshop I’ve created. I’ve also had the great pleasure of helping run the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a group whose impact on the web cannot be understated.¹ And so, when a handful of my colleagues reached out to see if I’d consider running for the W3C Advisory Board, I was… well… speechless. What an honor it is to be nominated, especially out of the blue like that!

Progressive Web Apps are often something we think of as building for others, but while I was redoing the Service Worker implementation on this site—to improve performance for you, dear reader—I decided to throw in a little goody for me as well, in the form of the Share Target.

Late last year, I opened applications for my 2019 mentorship cohort.. To say I was overwhelmed by the response is a drastic understatement. I got so many awesome applications, that I decided to increase the slots from two to five! In the end, I’m really excited about the folks I’ll be working with this year: Adewale Abati, Olu Niyi-Awosusi, Marcy Sutton, Sara Wegman, and Desirée Zamora García.

I’ve been working with all five of them for a few months now and wanted to highlight a bit about who they are and what we are working on.

Chances are you’ve never heard the name Angie Turner King, and that’s because, like so many black women, she invested her time and energy in other people. In King’s case, students.

Unless you’re really into bugs, the name Margaret S. Collins may not mean that much to you. She was an entomologist who specialized in the study of termites, publishing prolifically throughout her career. She wasn’t just the “Termite Lady,” though, she was also an advocate for civil rights who pushed for equality through scientific investigation, risking both her life and freedom.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve wasn’t all that into space growing up. That said, I remember going to the Kennedy Space Center and watching movies and TV shows about our journeys into space. And I vividly recall the participants being depicted as white men. All of them. But that’s not accurate; there was an entire corps of women who did complex math to make flight (including space flight) possible and safe. And among those women, there was a group of black women who did this work too. Katherine Johnson was chief among them.