Field Notes: Lineage

Portrait of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin

Ruffin built the platform — literally, a printing press — that gave Black women's voices a national newspaper of their own for the first time.

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin

Ruffin built the platform — literally, a printing press — that gave Black women's voices a national newspaper of their own for the first time.

Portrait of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Harper made her pen a tool of abolition, using poetry and public speaking to carry the antislavery and women's rights case to audiences across the country.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Harper made her pen a tool of abolition, using poetry and public speaking to carry the antislavery and women's rights case to audiences across the country.

Portrait of Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell

Terrell used education and organization as tools of resistance, building institutions for Black women that outlasted her own long fight for equality.

Mary Church Terrell

Terrell used education and organization as tools of resistance, building institutions for Black women that outlasted her own long fight for equality.

Portrait of Ida B. Wells, circa 1895

Ida B. Wells

Wells turned grief into data, transforming the murder of her friends into a national reckoning with lynching built on evidence rather than rumor.

Ida B. Wells

Wells turned grief into data, transforming the murder of her friends into a national reckoning with lynching built on evidence rather than rumor.

Carte-de-visite portrait of Sojourner Truth, 1864

Sojourner Truth

Truth turned her own life story into public testimony, using her voice as both witness and weapon against slavery and inequality.

Sojourner Truth

Truth turned her own life story into public testimony, using her voice as both witness and weapon against slavery and inequality.

Portrait of Harriet Tubman, circa 1885

Harriet Tubman

Tubman turned the terrain of her own enslavement into a map for other people's freedom, then kept walking that road for the rest of her life.

Harriet Tubman

Tubman turned the terrain of her own enslavement into a map for other people's freedom, then kept walking that road for the rest of her life.