Trailblazers : Black women who helped make America great : American firsts/American icons. Vol. 1, Activism, dance, sports
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Since slavery, Black women have struggled to liberate themselves from racism and sexism. Yet despite these hurdles and under the most duress circumstances, they managed to achieve greatness. Trailblazers, Black Women Who Helped Make America Great, American Firsts/American Icons, Volume 1 by Gabrielle David shines a light on these historically marked footholds, which often led to widespread cultural change. TRAILBLAZERS is a six-volume series that examines the lives and careers of over 400 brilliant women from the eighteenth century to the present who blazed uncharted paths in every conceivable way...Volume 1 features an assortment of sixty-five activists, dancers, and athletes. We learn about the significance of activists like Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, Rosina Tucker, and Clara Day, who represent the hundreds of unnamed women who participated in the civil rights and labor movements. We re-discover dancers Jeni Legon and Margot Webb, who are honored alongside dance legends Josephine Baker, Katherine Dunham, Janet Collins, and a new generation of dancers including Misty Copeland, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, and choreographers like Camille A. Brown, and Cynthia Oliver. And then there are the Black women athletes who disrupted the world of sports, including the nearly forgotten tennis champion Ora Washington, and Alice Coachman, the first to compete and win in the Olympics, to Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in Olympic history. Throughout the series, as David re-introduces many of these women into the public sphere, they are not always in predictable ways. For example, Debbie Allen makes a brief appearance in this volume, not for her acting or as a director, but rather as the dancer she initially trained to be, reminding us that Black women are multifaceted, multitalented, and complex. What binds these women together is that as they struggled on the front lines, they shook-up the status quo of Black people in America. Throughout the volume, David also challenges the socially conditioned assumptions, stereotypes, and false binaries that denigrate Black women’s bodies particularly in dance and sports, including the barriers they face in how they wear their hair. In this regard, David addresses the totality of Black womanhood: physically, culturally and politically." --publisher's website