From her biography: This queen of Zazzua, a province of Nigeria now known as Zaria, was born around 1533 during the reign of Sarkin (king) Zazzau Nohir. She was probably his granddaughter. Zazzua was one of a number of Hausa city-states which dominated the trans-Saharan trade after the collapse of the Songhai empire to the west. Its wealth was due to trade of mainly leather goods, cloth, kola, salt, horses and imported metals.

At the age of sixteen, Amina became the heir apparent (Magajiya) to her mother, Bakwa of Turunku, the ruling queen of Zazzua. With the title came the responsibility for a ward in the city and daily councils with other officials. Although her mother’s reign was known for peace and prosperity, Amina also chose to learn military skills from the warriors.

Queen Bakwa died around 1566 and the reign of Zazzua passed to her younger brother Karama. At this time Amina emerged as the leading warrior of Zazzua cavalry. Her military achievements brought her great wealth and power. When Karama died after a ten-year rule, Amina became queen of Zazzua.

She set off on her first military expedition three months after coming to power and continued fighting until her death. In her thirty-four year reign, she expanded the domain of Zazzua to its largest size ever. Her main focus, however, was not on annexation of neighboring lands, but on forcing local rulers to accept vassal status and permit Hausa traders safe passage.

She is credited with popularizing the earthen city wall fortifications, which became characteristic of Hausa city-states since then. She ordered building of a defensive wall around each military camp that she established. Later, towns grew within these protective walls, many of which are still in existence. They’re known as “ganuwar Amina”, or Amina’s walls.

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Via Danuta Bois: Biddy Mason won freedom from slavery, worked as a nurse/midwife and then became a successful entrepreneur and a generous contributor to social causes. She was born August 15, 1818 in Mississippi, U.S.A. as a slave on a plantation owned by Robert Marion Smith and Rebecca (Crosby) Smith. She had three daughters, Ellen, Ann and Harriet, whose father was reputedly Smith himself. In 1847, Smith became a Mormon convert and decided to move to the Utah Territory with his household and slaves. In this strenuous two-thousand-mile cross-country trek, Mason was responsible for herding the cattle. She also prepared meals, acted as a midwife and took care of her children.

In 1851, Smith moved his household again, this time to San Bernardino, California, where Brigham Young was starting a Mormon community. Smith probably did not know that California had been admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state and that slavery was forbidden there. Mason petitioned the court and in 1856 won freedom for herself and for her daughters. She moved to Los Angeles and found employment as a nurse and midwife. Hard work and her nursing skills allowed her to become economically independent.

Mason was also very frugal and only ten years after gaining her freedom, she bought a site on Spring Street for $250. She instructed her children never to abandon this site. Mason was one of the first black women to own land in Los Angeles. This site is now in the center of the commercial district in the heart of Los Angeles. In 1884, she sold a parcel of the land for $1500 and built a commercial building with spaces for rental on the remaining land. She continued making wise decisions in her business and real estate transactions and her financial fortunes continued to increase until she accumulated a fortune of almost $300,000. Her grandson, Robert Curry Owens, a real estate developer and politician, was the richest African-American in Los Angeles at one time.

Biddy Mason also gave generously to various charities and provided food and shelter for the poor of all races. Lines of needy people were often forming at 331 South Spring Street. She also remembered the jail inmates whom she visited often. In 1872 she and her son-in-law, Charles Owens, founded and financed the Los Angeles branch of the First African Methodist Episcopal church, L.A.’s first black church.

Biddy Mason died January 15, 1891 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Evergreen cemetery in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles. Nearly a century later, on March 27, 1988 a tombstone was unveiled which marked her grave for the first time in a ceremony attended by Mayor Tom Bradley and about three thousand members of the First African Methodist Episcopal church.

Thursday, November 16, 1989 was declared a Biddy Mason Day and a memorial of her achievements was unveiled at the Broadway Spring Center located between Spring Street and Broadway at Third Street.

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From the site of the Burwell School: In December of 1835, a young enslaved woman named Elizabeth Hobbs accompanied Robert and Anna Burwell to Hillsborough. “Lizzie,” as she was known, had been born into slavery in the household of the Rev. Burwell’s father and was sent to live with Robert and Anna Burwell when they married. Elizabeth Hobbs lived in Hillsborough, in the Burwell household, for approximately five years.

According to Mrs. Keckly’s memoir, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years as a Slave and Four Years in the White House, during their early years in Hillsborough, the Burwell family “practiced the closest economy” and she “did the work of three servants, and yet I was scolded and regarded with distrust.” She spoke fondly of Robert Burwell in her memoir, having known him as a young man in his father’s house. She called him “unusually kind” and “naturally good natured”, but she described Anna Burwell as “morbidly sensitive” with a “cold, jealous heart”. Mrs. Keckly’s memoir she also describes severe physical abuse at the hands of the Robert Burwell and a neighbor, William Bingham. Mrs. Keckly also wrote that “These revolting scenes created a great sensation at the time, were the talk of the town and the neighborhood, and I flatter myself that the actions of those who had conspired against me were not viewed in a light to reflect much credit upon them.”

While she was in Hillsborough, young Elizabeth Hobbs also had a child, against her will, with a prominent white man. In 1839, after the birth of her son George, Elizabeth Hobbs left Hillsborough and returned to Virginia, to the home of Robert Burwell’s younger sister Ann Garland. The Garland family then moved to St. Louis where Mrs. Keckly, who had become a skilled seamstress, provided income for the family by creating elaborate 19th century dresses. While in St. Louis, Elizabeth Hobbes married James Keckly, but they lived together only a short time. On November 15, 1855 with loans from her wealthy clients, Mrs. Keckly purchased her freedom that of her son George.

Elizabeth Keckly left St. Louis in 1860 and established her own dressmaking business, first in Baltimore and then in Washington, D.C. Among her prominent clients were Mrs. Robert E. Lee, Mrs. Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, and, perhaps most significantly, the First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Mrs. Keckly became much more than a dressmaker to Mrs. Lincoln, functioning as her confidante and, in Mrs. Lincoln’s own words, “her best friend.” In this position, she interacted with the First Family on a very personal basis, traveled with the First Lady, and was an intimate witness to many of the extraordinary events of the Lincoln Presidency.

Partially motivated by her friendship with the unpopular former First Lady, Mrs. Keckly wrote a memoir that told her own story and attempted to paint a sympathetic picture of Mrs. Lincoln. The book, entitled Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years as a Slave and Four Years in the White House, was published by Carleton and Co. in 1868. The publication of her memoir marked the end of her friendship with Mrs. Lincoln who felt her confidence had been betrayed. Elizabeth Hobbes Keckly finished her career teaching in the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio. She died in Washington, D.C., in 1907, at the age of 88.

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Born in Philadelphia in 1898, the youngest of three children, she is a member of an old and distinguished family. Her maternal grandfather was Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835-1923), a Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Bishop Tanner had seven children, the best known of whom is the painter Henry O. Tanner (1859-1937). Another daughter of Bishop Tanner, Hallie Tanner Johnson, became a physician and established the Nurses’ School and Hospital at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Sadie Alexander’s most accomplished relative on the Mossell side was her father’s brother, Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell (1856-1946), physician and co-founder of the Frederick Douglass Hospital (founded 1895), which later merged with Mercy Hospital to form Mercy-Douglass. When Sadie was a child, her mother and siblings frequently alternated residence between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.

When she reached high school, she went to live in Washington with her uncle, Lewis Baxter Moore, who was dean at Howard University. She attended the M Street High School in Washington and graduated in 1915. She then attended the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1918. Following her college graduation, she entered the Graduate School at Penn to study economics. In 1921, she became the first black woman in the U.S. to obtain a Ph.D. Despite her academic achievements, she had difficulty finding employment in Philadelphia and went to work for the black-owned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in Durham, remaining there for two years. In 1923, shortly after Raymond Alexander was admitted to the Bar and opened his practice, she returned to Philadelphia to be married. The following year, in the fall of 1924, she entered the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She became the first black woman to graduate from that institution and the first black woman admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar in 1927. Thereupon, she joined her husband’s practice, specializing in estate and family law. She was appointed Assistant City Solicitor for the City of Philadelphia and held that position from 1928 to 1930 and from 1934 to 1938.

From that time forward, she served on numerous boards, committees, and commissions and held office in many local and national organizations. Among her most notable activities was her service on President Truman’s Committee on Human Rights in 1947 and on the Commission on Human Relations of the City of Philadelphia from 1952 until 1968. She was also the first national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. She continued her employment in her husband’s firm from 1927 until 1959, when he was named to the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. She subsequently practiced independently until 1976, when she joined the firm of Atkinson, Myers, and Archie in the capacity of counsel. She retired from practice and from public life generally in 1982. Mrs. Alexander died in 1989.

Born in 1903 in Columbus Ohio, Ruth Ella Moore was the first African American woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in the natural sciences. Her doctorate was in the field of bacteriology. Moore earned a B.S. in 1926 and a M.S. in 1927 from Ohio State University. Moore supported herself during graduate school by teaching English and hygiene at Tennessee State College (now Tennessee State University) in Nashville. Her dissertation on tuberculosis earned her a doctorate in bacteriology in 1933, also from Ohio State University.

Dr. Moore was hired as an assistant professor at Howard University Medical College in 1940. From 1952 to 1957 she chaired the bacteriology department. During that period she was promoted to associate professor. In 1957 Moore stepped down from her leadership position. Though there are gaps in Howard’s personnel records, it is generally believed that Moore continued to teach and conduct research on bacteriology at Howard until she retired in 1973. Her research at Howard focused on blood groups and enterobacteriaceae, a family of bacteria which includes salmonella and E. coli.