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  • Miscellaneous Occupations and Realms of Renown x
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Article

Jones, Amanda  

Joshunda Sanders

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

centenarian and symbol of racial progress, was the daughter of Emmanuel Alfred Roberts, emancipated from slavery in 1865, and Moriah Josephine Washington, farmers on Alum Creek, east of Austin, Texas. Jones gained widespread recognition as a symbol of America's racial progress when, at age 109, she voted for Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) for President in November 2008. She was one of the oldest registered active voters in Texas at the time.

Amanda Jones was a deeply religious woman who had for most of her life been a stay at home mother of ten in rural Central Texas. She resided along a rural highway in central Texas for most of her life. Her granddaughter, Brenda Baker said she lived to be 110 because of her religious faith which was evident in the scriptures and photographs of her in her Sunday best which decorated the walls of ...

Article

Rhinelander, Alice Jones  

Angelita D. Reyes

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

cause célèbre, was born Alice Beatrice Jones, the daughter of a white mother and supposedly “black” father, both of whom had emigrated from England to the United States in 1891. While the race of her mother Elizabeth Jones was familiar and recognizable enough for Americans to classify as white, the racial background of George Jones, her father, was not as clearly determined. While general references considered him to be British of West Indian descent, he was distinctly not African American according to an array of witnesses and census documentation in the United States.

Various newspapers of the period described Alice Jones as “dusky,” “a tropical beauty,” or of a “Spanish complexion” (Lewis and Ardizzone, 63–66, 163). Not considering herself black in the American rhetorical denotation of race, Alice Jones Rhinelander affirmed during the annulment trial of the interracial marriage to Leonard Rhinelander (1903 ...

Article

Shabazz, Hajj Bahiyah “Betty”  

James Lance Taylor

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

activist, was born Betty Dean Sanders in Pinehurst, Georgia (though she later claimed Detroit, Michigan), to Shelman “Juju” Sandlin, a Philadelphia steelworker, and Ollie Mae Sanders, who conceived her out of wedlock as a teenager. Rumors of maternal neglect (Sandlin was an absent father) landed Betty in Detroit, Michigan, with her devout Catholic foster parents Helen Lowe, a grammar school teacher, and Lorenzo Don Malloy a shoemaker and proprietor. She was their only child.

Growing up with the Malloys, young Betty witnessed Helen Malloy's activism in social uplift causes through a Detroit affiliate of the National Housewives League the National Council of Negro Women and the then militant National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Betty participated in the Detroit League s youth program where she competed in debutant contests studied Negro history and affiliated with the well regarded Del Sprites social club Long ...

Article

Sprague, Rosetta Douglass  

Leigh Fought

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
01 December 2006

As the first child of Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray Douglass, Rosetta Douglass bore the responsibility of being the daughter of the most famous black man of the nineteenth century and acted as a mediator in her parents' marriage. She was born in the first year of her father's freedom, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Rosetta spent her early years there and in Lynn, Massachusetts, helping her mother maintain the household as it grew to include three brothers (and later, in New York, a sister), as well as boarders from the abolitionist movement and such long-term guests as the fugitive slave Harriet Bailey whom Frederick Douglass adopted as his sister and whom Rosetta called aunt Rosetta s assistance was invaluable to her mother who attempted to run the household on her husband s small income as a speaker for the American Anti Slavery Society Additionally Frederick Douglass s ...

Article

Visesegan  

Edna G. Bay

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

high official in the government of King Glele (1858–1889) of the Fon kingdom of Dahomey (located in what is now southern Benin), held the key office of Tononu, a position that is sometimes compared with that of the head wife in polygynous marriages (e.g., the woman who directed all others in the household). Reportedly the king’s favorite, Visesegan was one of thousands of the king’s wives or dependents, all of whom—women and men—were called ahosi. A woman grown wealthy through commercial activities, Visesegan played a central political role in two major internal struggles of the late nineteenth century: the question of which prince would succeed Glele, and the development of appropriate responses to French demands that led to the 1892 invasion and conquest of Dahomey.

In the late nineteenth century an estimated five thousand plus women and a much smaller number of eunuchs inhabited a series of ...