This month’s AMPLIFY features scholar and social justice and reproductive justice advocate/activist Dorothy Roberts. Dorothy Roberts is a Critical Race Sociologist, and the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and Law School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her studies and work focus on the intersection of race, gender, and socioeconomic status through a policy lens.
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Reiko Okuyama was born in Japan c.1936. As a child, she developed an interest in drawing while being confined to her bed due to an ongoing childhood illness. Okuyama entered the world of animation by accident. She applied for what she believed was a designer position for children’s books at Toei Doga (doga meaning picture book) but ended up in the animation department.
Read MoreHello sweet HerStry babes! How are we doing? Holding up? Holed in? I hope you are all protecting yourselves the best you can and taking care of your heads and hearts. As you may have noticed, there was no March Amplify and we’re picking up in April. If you’re a frequent reader of Amplify, you know I’m no stranger to skipping a month here and there when it comes to the column, but usually I do this with a great amount of guilt. This time, though, I offered myself a bit of grace because we are all, collectively, living through a pandemic. So today, in addition to learning about Dr. Ruby Sakae Hirose, I want to remind each reader that you should always offer yourself grace.
Read MoreAlright folks, I’m two for two on the year for articles, so let’s hope I keep on this positive trajectory. Thanks for meeting me back here on HerStry for the next installment of Amplify. This month, we’re talking about Winona LaDuke.
Read MoreHappy New Year, HerStry Babes! This month marks the start of the third year of Amplify, a column meant to highlight different women throughout history whose names we should know, but usually don’t. Watching HerStry grow and change in the past two years has been nothing short of inspiring. I am so excited to be on board for the next year as we watch HerStry only continue to grow and to see our fearless founder, Julia, embark on her journey into motherhood.
Read MoreFor the frequent flyers of the Amplify column, you’ll know that I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so I was incredibly pleased to come across Mary Dee Dudley, a trailblazer in radio who happens to be from the Pittsburgh area. She was a staple in the black community in the 1940’s & 50’s, airing her radio show from a storefront in a historically black neighborhood for most of her tenure in Pittsburgh.
Read MoreThis will likely be one of the shortest editions of Amplify. So short, in fact, that I don’t even have a timeline following this article because the life of Esther Jones was not well documented. In fact, the best source available (for free) online is Wikipedia. In most cases I wouldn’t use Wikipedia as a source, let alone my only source, but the citations for this particular Wikipedia article about the child who inspired the woman who inspired Betty Boop are books, newspaper articles, and scholarly articles so big thanks to the angel that put that page together.
Read MoreLuisa Moreno was born Blanca Rosa Lopez Rodriguez on August 30, 1907, in Guatemala City, Guatemala, to a prominent and well-to-do family (2). Details on the specifics of Moreno’s life are hard to come by, but we do know that during her school-age years, she attended boarding school in Oakland, California.
Read MoreJane Bolin was born on April 11, 1908 in Poughkeepsie, New York to Gaius Bolin and Matilda Emery. Her father, Gaius, was the first black person to graduate from Williams College and he had his own law practice. Because of his success, Bolin had a comfortable childhood and was inspired to be an attorney after being exposed to the beauty of his leather-bound books and the horror of the court cases they contained.
Read MoreHappy February, HerStry Readers! This month, we’re taking a look at the life of Madam C.J. Walker, America’s first (reported) self-made black woman millionaire. Sure, there are a lot of qualifiers there, but Madam Walker reached this accomplishment in the early 1900’s.
Read MoreHappy January, HerStry readers! I apologize for the lack of Amplify in December. One of my low-key resolutions is to not miss a single month of Amplify in 2019. There are so many stories to tell and no one wants an unreliable columnist.
Read MoreI live in Pittsburgh. My home is 4.9 miles from the Tree of Life Synagogue. I don’t think I’ll ever have the words to describe how Pittsburgh felt on October 27, 2018.
Read MoreThis month for Amplify, I decided to do something a little different. Instead of searching deep through the internet and archival websites for women to highlight, I looked right at the headlines. I had heard the name Anita Hill many times before this past week, but never knew who she really was.
Read MoreIn 1865, La Flesche Picotte was born to Chief Iron Eyes (Joseph La Flesche) and his wife, One Woman (Mary) in northeastern Nebraska, in a tipi. Her father was Chief of Omaha Nation, but he felt that the Omaha people would only survive by assimilating to white culture. She attended school on the reservation until she was fourteen years old and was then sent to the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies in New Jersey to help her assimilate. La Flesche Picotte was called a “cultural broker” because she grew up in a mostly Western way, but still held on to the traditions of the Omaha people.
Read MoreThere are few people on this planet that would walk away from the trajectory of fame that Linda Martell left behind. After breaking big into the country music industry in 1969, our May AMPLIFY feature retired just five years later, in 1974.
Read MoreLa Malinche went by many names, but there was one that, up until recent history, tarnished the story of our April AMPLIFY feature: traitor.
Read MoreWe’re back, with the second installment of Amplify! I have a weird connection to our February Amplify feature, Frances Harper, but we’ll get to that later. Frances Harper initially came on to my radar as the first black woman to publish a short story, but her actual life story is just as compelling as any work of fiction.
Read MoreOur first Amplify feature is Dolores Huerta. Huerta has worked, and continues to work, tirelessly for the rights of farmworkers. She is the recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Freedom Award and the Eleanor Roosevelt Award, she is in the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and received the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.
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