Nannie Helen Burroughs meets us at the intersection of gender, race, and profession. She was an educator, civil rights activists, feminist, and businesswoman.

Burroughs was born May 2, 1879, in Orange Virginia.  Her parents were formerly slaves, and her father was a farmer and Baptist preacher.  Her father died when she was young, so Burroughs and her mother moved to Washing DC.

She attended high school in DC where she met Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell, who were suffragists and civil rights activists.

After graduation she applied for a job with the District but could not get one because her skin was too dark. This set in her the determination to ensure women of her skin tone could improve their situation.

https://www.nps.gov/people/nannie-helen-burroughs.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nannie_Helen_Burroughs

Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection.

She is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Jones was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Thomas Vreeland Jones and Carolyn Adams. Her father was a building superintendent who later became a lawyer after becoming the first African-American to earn a law degree from Suffolk Law School. Her mother worked as a cosmetologist. 

Jones’s parents encouraged her to draw and paint using watercolors during her childhood. Her parents bought a house on Martha’s Vineyard, where Jones met those who influenced her life and art, such as sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, composer Harry T. Burleigh, and novelist Dorothy West.

From 1919 to 1923, Jones attended the High School of Practical Arts in Boston. She took night classes from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts through an annual scholarship. Additionally, she apprenticed in costume design with Grace Ripley. She held her first solo exhibition at the age of seventeen in Martha’s Vineyard. Jones began experimenting with African mask influences during her time at the Ripley Studio. From her research of African masks, Jones created costume designs for Denishawn.

From 1923 to 1927, Jones attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to study design, where she won the Susan Minot Lane Scholarship in Design yearly. She took night courses at the Boston Normal Art School while working towards her degree. After graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she received her graduate degree in design from the Design Art School of Boston in 1928. Afterwards, she began working at the F. A. Foster Company in Boston and the Schumacher Company in New York City. During the summer of 1928, she attended Howard University, where she decided to focus on painting instead of design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Mailou_Jones