I want to say Thank you for supporting the Queens project to Crystal Singleton Patton. You will help me tell the stories of women like Mary Jane McLeod Bethune who was an educator and civil rights leader. She was one of seventeen children and the only one in her family to attend school, so each day, she taught the others what she had learned. Bethune wrote later, “I considered cash money as the smallest part of my resources. I had faith in a loving God, faith in myself, and a desire to serve.”
I want to say Thank you for supporting the Queens project to Marsha Bolden. You will help me tell the stories of women like Shirley Chisholm who was the first African American woman to be elected to Congress. Even though she was born in the U.S. her mother sent her to Barbados for her early education. She said “Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict, traditional, British-style schools of Barbados. If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason.”
I want to say Thank you for supporting the Queens project to Jana Reed. You will help me tell the stories of women like Elizabeth Phoebe Griscom Ross better known as Betsy Ross who was born the eighth of seventeen children. During the Revolutionary War, she worked in the upholstery business repairing uniforms, making tents and blankets and prepackaged ammunition.
I want to say Thank you for supporting the Queens project to Aldo Billingslea. You will help me tell the stories of women like Bessie Smith who was nicknamed The Empress of the Blues. As a child, her brother and she used to dance and sing on the street to earn money. She later became one of the highest paid entertainers of her day.
I want to say Thank you for supporting the Queens project to Kerry McCormick. You will help me tell the stories of women like Sacagawea who was an interpreter and guide during the exploration of Lewis and Clark. She was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who the NAWSA used as a symbol of women’s worth and independence. She was pregnant with her first child when she began to work with Lewis and Clark.
I want to say Thank You for supporting the Queens project to Regina Anderson. She will help me tell stories of women like Sojourner Truth who was born Isabella (“Bell”) Baumfree. She changed her name to Sojourner Truth in 1843.
She said “I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right.”
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