Volume 5 highlights Black women in singing, public health and medicine, as well as education and scholarship.Black female vocalists have left a lasting impact on American music, spanning genres such as opera, jazz, blues, gospel, soul, rap, and pop. Notable figures include opera singer Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, blues legend Bessie Smith, gospel icon Mahalia Jackson, jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughn known as “The Divine One,” and soul superstar Aretha Franklin. Other influential singers like Patti LaBelle, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, and Mary J. Blige continue to exemplify their lasting legacy in American music.

 

Black women educators (with a particular focus on higher education) and scholars have greatly impacted the Black community and American society. In the early twentieth century, one of the important goals of Black scholars was to counteract the negative images and representations of African Americans that were institutionalized within academia and society. This historical account of Black women scholars begins in the nineteenth century with Sarah Jane Woodson Early, Anna J. Cooper, and Georgiana Rose Simpson and the insurmountable challenges they faced. Some educators created schools and programs like Mary McLeod Bethune or taught at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In the wake of new generations of institutional Black academics who foment political activism and cultural conversations around race, power, knowledge, and politics, Black women educators and scholars like Mary Frances Berry, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Crenshaw represent a wide ideological spectrum of scholarly ideas in their work.

 

Persistent health and racial disparities have affected African Americans throughout history, from slavery and unethical medical practices to modern crises like Flint’s water contamination. Black women have always devoted themselves to disease prevention and improving the physical and mental health of their communities. Pioneers such as Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler, the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the U.S.; Ida Gray, the first Black woman dentist; and Helen Octavia Dickens, a physician and advocate for health equity, laid the groundwork for later figures like Dorothy Lavania Brown, the first Black woman surgeon; Jane Cooke Wright, a cancer researcher who advanced chemotherapy; and Patricia Bath, an innovator in laser cataract surgery. The legacy continues with contemporary leaders like Helene D. Gayle and Deborah V. Deas, who actively combat health discrepancies in the Black community, a challenge recently underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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