Earlier this month, our new president gave a regrettable speech on the first day of Black History Month, in which he seemed not to know that Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and orator, who had escaped slavery, died in 1895. In fact, he said that Douglass “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.” He then went on to point to a cabal of African-Americans, from television personality and Trump staffer Omarosa to Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, who support him, as evidence of the great work he’s going to do for African-Americans, particularly in inner cities. The only way to combat such cultural and political tone-deafness and insensitivity is with information and facts — and not facts of the alternative variety. So here are a list of 10 really dope women past and present that you should know.

Ruby Bridges

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In 1960, at age 6, Ruby Bridges joined the school desegregation movement when federal marshals escorted her into the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana, to begin classes. She was one of many children who desegregated schools at both the K–12 level and the university level in the years after the passage of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Bridges’s desegregation efforts were the subject of a famous 1964 Norman Rockwell painting called “The Problem We All Live With.” This story is especially important right now, because earlier this week, a conservative comic, named Glenn McCoy, satirized the Rockwell painting, by placing new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in Bridges’s place and replacing the word “nigger” that had been scrawled on the wall behind Bridges in the original painting with the word “conservative.” This perverse misrepresentation of Betsy DeVos as a victim when really her views on public education will victimize so many children of color who rely on public schools to have a fighting chance at success is gross and appalling. Ruby Bridges represents the long struggle African-Americans have undertaken to secure access to a quality public education in this country. When the president reminds us of his goal to “make America great again,” he and his collection of incompetent Cabinet secretaries like DeVos intend to take us back to a time, when little black girls needed federal escorts just to receive a quality education.

Anna Julia Cooper

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If you have a U.S. passport, you may have seen this quote inside of it: “the cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or sect, a party or a class, it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.” Those are the words of Anna Julia Cooper, only the fourth black woman ever to receive a Ph.D., which she earned from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1925. Cooper was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1858. After the Civil War, she went on to Oberlin College, where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1884 and 1887, respectively. In 1892, she published a collection of political essays called A Voice From the South. This book is a groundbreaking tome of feminist ideas from a black woman of the 19th century. But it is also filled with Cooper’s characteristic snark. For instance, during her lifetime, women of all races had to fight to be educated. The view was that schooling would make women unfit for marriage. And she agreed, arguing that education shifted power from the man to the woman. “The question,” she wrote, “is not now with the woman, ‘How shall I so cramp, stunt, simplify and nullify myself as to make me eligible to the honor of being swallowed up into some little man?'” Instead the man would have to figure out “how to reach the ideal of a generation of women who demand the noblest, grandest and best achievements of which he is capable…” Yes, girl. That is a read for the ages.

Kamala Harris

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In November 2016, Kamala Harris became only the second African-American woman ever elected to the United States Senate, when she won in her home state of California. She is a Democrat and was previously attorney general in the state of California. Because Harris’s parents are of Indian and Jamaican descent, she is also the first Indian-American woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate as well. After the president issued his “Muslim ban,” Harris vocally defended immigrant rights, demanding that people detained because of the ban have access to proper legal counsel. There has already been significant buzz about Harris’s potential to become the first female president. She is one to watch.

Ida B. Wells

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Born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Ida B. Wells eventually moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she became both a hard-hitting journalist and an anti-lynching advocate. In 1892, a close friend of hers, Tom Moss, was lynched for running a successful grocery business that competed with a local white grocer. He and his business partners were shot down by a mob of angry white men. Enraged by this injustice, Wells set out on a national campaign to investigate lynchings all over the country. In particular, she exposed the lie that black men were being lynched because they raped white women. In many cases, she found that white women were pursuing illicit relationships with black men, and then accusing them of rape, to avoid being caught. When she dared to suggest such a thing in her paper, local white citizens burned her newspaper offices to the ground and threatened to kill her if she came back to town. She was an early adopter of using sociological methods and statistics to track lynching data, and provided some of the earliest and most comprehensive lists of lynchings that we have at the end of the 19th century. In 1913, when the white women organizers of a national march for woman suffrage in Washington, D.C., tried to segregate black women, Wells refused to march at the back. She waited on the sidelines, and when the delegation from Illinois (the state where she and her husband and family lived) marched past her, she simply joined in line. Wells is a great example of radical black feminist activism at the turn of the 20th century.

Octavia Butler

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When Americans think of science fiction writers, they typically don’t think of the work of black women novelists. But Octavia Butler, a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, was an African-American novelist of speculative fiction from the 1970s until her death in 2006. Author of more than a dozen novels and collections of short stories, her most famous works include her novels Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Wild Seed, and Lilith’s Brood. Notably, Parable of the Talents recounts a dystopian universe in which a white man rises to power with promises to “Make America Great Again.” It was published in 1998.

Marley Dias

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Twelve-year-old Marley Dias made headlines last year when she put out a call to collect #1000BlackGirlBooks, books that featured black girl characters. The then-fifth grader was tired of reading books that had no girls representative of her experience in them. She collected more than 8,000 books after her call went viral and has since become an editor-at-large at Elle.com, where she has a zine called Marley Mag. She also recently signed a book deal with Scholastic Books to publish a social justice handbook marketed to youth ages 10 and up. She is #BlackGirlMagic personified.

Mary Church Terrell

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Mary Church Terrell had a 60-year-career as an advocate for women’s rights and civil rights, and as a peace activist. She was born in 1863, the year the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and she died in 1954, just a few weeks after the Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregated America’s public schools. Terrell herself was the first black woman to serve on the D.C. Board of Education. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1884, becoming one of the earliest black women ever to receive a college degree. Terrell was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, the largest organization of black women at the turn of the 20th century. She was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a peace activist during WWI, and a famous public speaker and writer throughout the 20th century. In 1953, she became one of the original plaintiffs in the lawsuit District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson & Co. that eventually reached the Supreme Court and desegregated the nation’s capital in 1953. Throughout the 1950s, when she was well into her 80s, she showed up at protests carrying a picket sign demanding freedom and equal rights for African-Americans.

Ava DuVernay

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Ava DuVernay is a director of film and television who hails from Compton, California. With the release of the 2015, widely acclaimed historic film Selma, DuVernay became one of only a handful of black women ever to direct a movie with a general theatrical release in the U.S. (Julie Dash was the first with her film Daughters of the Dust.) Selma received both a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Original Song. Selma was also the first film directed by a black woman to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. This year, DuVernay’s feature-length documentary, 13th, a searing look at the problem of mass incarceration, is nominated for an Academy Award, making her the first black woman ever nominated in that category. In 2018, DuVernay will release the Disney film version of the children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time. The film has a budget of $100 million and again, DuVernay is the first black woman ever to have such a large budget for a film. More recently, DuVernay moved into television, acting as showrunner for the acclaimed hit Queen Sugar on OWN. In one particularly bawse move, DuVernay chose all women directors for each episode of the show, creating opportunities, in particular, for black women directors who had been structurally shut out of directing opportunities on other television shows.

Kimberlé Crenshaw

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Kimberlé Crenshaw is distinguished professor of law at both the UCLA School of Law and Columbia University Law School. In 1989, she coined the term "intersectionality" as a way to explain the unique kinds of discrimination black women experience at the crosshairs of racist and sexist institutional practices. Today, the term "intersectionality" enjoys wide usage, but frequently, Crenshaw’s pioneering work to bring the concept to bear in questions of social justice is overlooked. In 2014, Crenshaw led a campaign to force President Barack Obama’s racial justice initiative My Brother’s Keeper to be inclusive of girls and women of color. More than 1,500 women, including me, signed an open letter to the president outlining the myriad structural challenges that black and Latina girls, in particular, face. In the fall of 2015, the White House Council on Women and Girls launched a groundbreaking initiative called Advancing Equity for Women and Girls of Color, bringing together philanthropists and academics to research and fund concerns related to this population of Americans. That thankless work is largely due to Crenshaw and a team of activists and researchers that she assembled to advocate for black women and girls. In 2015, Crenshaw, director of the African American Policy Forum, also launched the #SayHerName initiative, to highlight state violence done to black women and girls. The #SayHerName campaign has become a critical component of organizing under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter. And the concept of intersectionality remains more important than ever, for it teaches us how to think about the variety of ways that we all experience our womanhood differently because our race, class, sexuality, and other factors.

Pauli Murray

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Pauli Murray was born in Baltimore in 1910. She eventually graduated at the top of her class from Howard University Law School in 1944. Her senior thesis at Howard Law School became the basis for the strategy in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, when it was tried more than 10 years later. While at Howard, she also participated in an early series of sit-in-style protests to desegregate restaurants near the campus, and these happened more than 15 years before the famous Greensboro sit-ins of the 1960s. Murray was also the first black woman to serve as a deputy district attorney in the state of California. In 1965, she became the first black woman to receive a doctorate from Yale Law School. In 1976, she became the first black woman ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church. Her list of professional firsts is voluminous. But Murray also matters because she was an openly queer black woman from her early 20s through the rest of her life. For much of her life, she identified as what we would today term a trans man. However, the term "transgender," didn’t exist in the 1940s. After many decades of battling with scientists about her gender and sexual identity, Murray settled into her life as a woman and a lesbian. In 2012, the Episcopal Church raised Murray (who died in 1985) to the status of sainthood because of her lifetime of work for freedom.

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