Black Women Activists/Suffrage/Civil Rights/Educators

Rare 19th-century photographs of African American women who were active in suffrage, civil rights, temperance, education, reform, and journalism.
Digitized By the Library of Congress.

While Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman may be among the most recognized 19th-century black women activists, a recent photography digitization project at the Library of Congress (LOC) spotlights some lesser-known figures. Images of women like Josephine A. Silone Yates, who studied chemistry and was one of the first black teachers at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, and educator Fannie Barrier Williams, who advocated for black involvement in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, are among the rare photographs in the collection of William Henry Richards.

The late 19th-century portraits come from a post–Civil War period when rights and opportunities for African Americans, especially women, remained severely limited. The newly digitized cabinet cards and tintypes feature women who were active in everything from suffrage to temperance, such as writer Hallie Quinn Brown, who helped found the Colored Women’s League of Washington, DC, which eventually became part of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (of which she served as president in the 1920s), and journalist Lillian Parker Thomas, who worked as an editor at the Freeman.

“William Henry Richards (1856-1941) was active in several organizations that promoted civil rights and civil liberties for African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century,” Richards taught at Howard University Law School from 1890 until his retirement in 1928. In 2013, the Library acquired his collection from the descendants of William C. McNeill, his physician at the end of Richards’ life. Both men were on the faculty of Howard University.
The library acquired Richards’s collection in 2013, Prints and Photographs Division staff digitized selected photographs from the collection showing women who were identified by name. These photographs show the women at earlier ages than most portraits previously available of them online.”