Collaborating with others who have different skillsets or points of view can help grow you. I love the story of how Ida B Wells was having a meal with Frederick Douglass. She had said she would like to eat at the restaurant across from their meeting place, but it did not allow our people in.
Douglass walked in, she followed. After not being welcome and told to leave, Douglass told them who he was. Once they learned who he was, they not only allowed them to eat, but shared stories with them. This situation gave Wells the opportunity is there even when you don’t think it is. Collaborating allowed her to see things from a different perspective.
Ida B Wells understood what working with others could do. She collaborated with others throughout her life to form some life changing organizations like the NAACP. She also did work that put a spotlight on lynchings through her journalistic work.
Wells did not focus on one thing with her life, but spread out to collaborate with others throughout her life over many things.
This month the word is Collaboration. This is the action of working with someone to produce or create something. Some of the most amazing things in the world were created when people worked together on it.
To defy anything is not easy. It usually requires passion and a desire to accomplish something. Josephine Baker lived a life that accomplished a lot defying her naysayers.
Josephine Baker faced a lot of rejection but was able to move past it. She defied the odds. She did not give up performing. She continued and became one of the best in the business.
Baker then used her gift of performance to work for French Intelligence during World War II. She was awarded a medal of honor after the war.
Josephine Baker defied all things in life. When she was young, she really wanted to be in the chorus line on Broadway, but they told her she was too skinny. She created a comic route that ensured she would always be in the line. She did not allow the impossibility of her dream stop her from achieving it.
This month, I am examining the things that seem impossible. What does it really take to achieve them? Do I have it in me? Lets see.
This month the word is Defy. It means to confront with assured power of resistance; to challenge to do something considered impossible. In facing some of these fears, we change the world.
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.
From 1898 to 1909 Burroughs went to work for the National Baptist Convention in Kentucky. She was one of the founders of the Women’s Convention and served as president for 13 years. She also found the National Training School in 1908 that provided evening classes for women who had no other means of education.
In 1908 she opened the National Training School. Her goal was to uplift the race. The main themes of the school was the three B’s: the Bible, the bath, and the broom.
In 1920 she wrote two plays, one The Slabtown District Convention and Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight?
In 1928, Burroughs was appointed committee chairwoman by the Hoover Administration for the White House Conference 1931 Home Building and Ownership. She also spoke at conferences.
Nannie Helen Burrough’s life exemplifies what determination looks like. She wanted to ensure that African American women and girls had access to education that could improve their lives. She worked through many different ways to provide that education, as a teacher, as an activist and as a businesswoman.
It reminds me that I can be determined about something, but it doesn’t mean there is only one way to get it done. Use all the paths to accomplish the goal.
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