For Black History month, we are spotlighting Black historical figures who acted as activists and trailblazers. While we don’t know everything about their personal lives and struggles, we can see coping skills and resilience in their accomplishments, especially in the face of racism and discrimination. Here are four individuals who do not always get to be center-stage when celebrating Black history, resilience, and joy.
We’ve chosen individuals who have worked in mental health fields like social work and psychology as well as historical figures who lived through their own personal struggles. These four individuals paved the way for today’s mental health advocates and we celebrate them this Black History Month.
How do you celebrate those who have paved the path you’re walking?
Alvin Ailey (1931-1989): Dancer and Choreographer
Alvin Ailey founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Ailey School after a successful career as a dancer. He was especially interested in the African American experience, and making sure that Black artists had support to express themselves and embody their experiences in dance. He has received numerous fellowships and medals, and choreographed over thirty productions that premiered in New York from the 1960s to the 1980s. Perhaps his most famous work Revelations, uses a variety of music from African-American spirituals to song-sermons, gospel songs, and holy blues. Ailey’s energetic and moving choreography draws inspiration from ballet, jazz, modern dance and theater.
Especially when traveling internationally, Ailey faced descrimination because of both his race and his sexuality. As a gay man living in the second half of the twentieth century, he spend most of his life in the closet. He rejected being referred to as a “Black choreographer” preferring instead to be known simply as a choreographer and allowing his work to speak for the African-American experience.
While extremely private about his personal life, we do know that Ailey suffered from what would later become known as bipolar disorder. Even living with this condition, he was able to have an incredible career. Furthermore, he built a large support system of fellow dancers and choreographers. When his illness caused him to step back from working, his long-time collaborator Judith Jamison stepped into his role. She now serves as the Artistic Director Emerita of the Alvin Ailey American Dance theater after having served as its artistic director from Ailey’s death in 1989 until 2010.
Ailey paved the way for other Black performers in the dance world, including Alonzo King, Misty Copeland, Darrell Grand Moutrie and countless others. Ailey’s work captures the African American experience, depicting struggle and joy through movement and music. Ailey’s work, performed by new generations of dancers, continues to reach a global audience today.
Audre Lorde (1934–1992): Writer and activist
Audre Lorde is often quoted as describing herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” Lorde’s intersecting identities helped her to advocate for women, people of color, poor people, and queer people. She attended both Hunter College and Columbia University in New York City, earning her master’s degree in library science. She then worked as a librarian at the New York public schools throughout the 1960s. She went on to work as a professor of English at John Jay college and Hunter College in New York City. Her poetry, prose, and theory has been published and widely acclaimed.
Lorde’s love of poetry started as a young teenager as a way to express her emotions. Her most widely cited essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle The Master’s House,” has influenced critical race theory, queer theory, and feminist thought. Throughout her life, Audre Lorde worked as a teacher and an activist, advancing feminist thinking through her activism and scholarship. Lorde speaks to this idea in the essay, writing:
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.
Here Lorde encourages her fellow activists and individuals who live outside of society’s norms to operate outside of those spaces rather than striving for conformity. She believes that the words, actions, and systems of the oppressor will never be able to be used by the oppressed to bring about justice.
Lorde’s writing has been beyond instrumental in academic and activist circles alike. She lived by the words put forth in this essay, collaborating with other individuals to bring about new forms of thought, advocacy, and dismantling oppressive systems.
Francis Sumner (1895–1954): Psychologist and Education reformer
Francis Sumner was born in Arkansas and attended school in the south before being drafted into the army during World War I. After the war, he returned home to pursue a PhD studying Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. His work responded to these European theorists, questioning mainstream arguments and biases in psychology that claimed Black individuals were inferior to whites. Despite facing racial descrimination, especially when it came to funding, Sumner was able to publish his research in journals and work as a professor at multiple universities. He went on to work with others to found the psychology department at Howard University. He served as its chair from 1928 until his death.
Much of Sumner’s work focused on what today we would call racial justice. His work aimed to better understand the psychological and social reasoning behind racism and descrimination. He advocated for education for Black Americans by adapting ways of teaching specifically to the African American experience.
He is remembered as the “father of Black Psychology” and his work and writings have inspired psychologists, educators, activists, and the ways we think about education and segregation.
Dorothy Height (1912–2010): Educator and activist
In her ninety-eight years, Doctor Dorothy Height worked tirelessly for social causes that impacted women and African Americans in the United States. Taking what we could call an intersectionality lens today, Dr. Height saw the problems of inequality for women and African Americans as connected civil rights issues.
Height was engaged in activist work starting in high school. Furthermore, she polished her oratory skills throughout her life, first earning an award for them in her teens. She studied social work and psychology at New York University and Columbia University. She worked tirelessly for the New York Department of Welfare, the Young Women’s Christian Association’s Harlem Branch (YWCA), and the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), serving as its presidedent from 1957 to 1997.
She received countless awards and accolades, but her true accomplishments were with the many individuals and communities she served throughout her career. She is quoted as saying, “I want to be remembered as someone who used herself and anything she could touch to work for justice and freedom.” Certainly this is how we remember and honor her.
Upon her death in 2010, she was eulogized by President Barack Obama. In the speech, he described her life as, “a life that lifted other lives.”
Do you see yourself as a product of your community and your history? In what ways?
