Maya, Ella, Robert, and Harriet

Maya Angelou, Ella Baker, Robert Abbott, and Harriet Tubman

Maya Angelou was an important person in black history because she rose to greatness despite facing some of life’s cruelest hardships.

Ella Baker was an important person in black history because she didn’t let her gender keep her from defending her race

Robert Abbott was an important person in black history because he gave voice to the voiceless

Harriet Tubman was an important person in black history because she was a conductor of the Underground Railroad

All those people was an important person in black history because of the role they play in black people live and even now like Maya she was a poet and activist. Ella was a civil rights activist. Robert was a founder of the chicago defender. And Harriet was a abolitionist.

According to britannica.com Maya Angelou original name was Marguerite Annie Johnson, Maya was born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. and died on May 28, 2014, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina., Maya was an American poet, memoirist, and actress whose several volumes of autobiography explore the themes of economic, racial, and sexual oppression. Although Maya was born in St. Louis, she spent most of her childhood in the care of her paternal grandmother in rural Stamps, Arkansas. When she was not yet eight years old, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and told of it, after which he was murdered; the traumatic sequence of events left her almost completely mute for several years. This early life traumatic was the focus of her first autobiographical work, names I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings., 1969; TV movie 1979, which gained critical acclaim and a National Book Award nomination. Subsequent volumes of autobiography include Gather Together in My Name 1974, Singin’ and Swingin and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas 1976, The Heart of a Woman 1981, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes 1986, A song Flung Up to Heaven 2002, and Mom & Me & Mom 2013. In 1940 Maya moved with her mother to San Francisco worked intermittently as a cocktail waitress, a prostitute and madam, a cook, and a dancer. In late 1950s, Maya move to New York City, in moving to New York Maya found encouragement for her literary talents at the Harlem Writers’ Guild. About the same time, Maya landed a featured role in a State Department-sponsored production of George Gershwin’s folk opera Porgy and Bess; with this troupe she toured 22 countries in Europe and Africa. As the writer of a movie drama Georgia, Georgia 1972, Maya became one of the first African American women to have a screenplay produced as a feature film. Maya received a Tony Award nomination for her performance in Look Away 1973, despite the fact that the play closed on Broadway after only one performance. The Maya World series, which was published in 2004-05 and featured stories of children from various parts of the world. Maya dispensed anecdote-laden advice to women in Letter to my daughter 2008; her only biological child was a male. She celebrated the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in the poem “A Brave and Startling Truth” 1995 and elegized Nelson Mandela in the poem “His Day Is Done” 2013, which was commissioned by the U.S. State Department and released in the wake of the South African leader’s death. In 2011 Maya was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Ella Baker, full name was Ella Josephine Baker, ella was born in Dec. 13, 1986, in New York, N.Y., Ella joined an american community organizer and political activist who brought her skills and principles to bear in the major civil rights organizations of the mid-20th century. In 1918 she began attending the high school academy of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. She then moved to New York City in search of Employment. There she found people suffering from poverty and hardship caused by the Great Depression and Ella was introduced to the radical political activism that became her life’s work. In the early 1930s, in one of her first efforts at implementing social improvement, she helped organize the Young Negroes Cooperative League, which was created to form cooperative groups that would pool community resources and therefore provide less-expensive goods and services to members. In the late 1930s and then joined the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, first as a field secretary and later as national director of the NAACP’s various branches. Later on Ella become unhappy with the bureaucratic nature of the NAACP and newly responsible for the care of her young niece, Baker resigned from her director position in 1946 but worked with the New York branch to integrate local schools and improve the quality of education for black children. In 1957 Baker met with ministers and helped form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate reform efforts throughout the South. Martin Luther King, Jr., served as the SCLC’s first president and Baker as its director. Baker left the SCLC in 1960 to help student leaders of college activist groups organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Because of Baker guidance and encouragement, SNCC became one of the foremost advocates for human rights in the country. Baker influence was reflected in the nickname she earn: Fundi meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next

generation. Baker continued to be a respected and influential leader in the fight for human and civil rights until her death on her 83rd birthday.

The birth of Robert Abbott in 1870 is celebrated on this date. Abbott was an African American news businessman and lawyer. Abbott parents were former slave captives on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia. Abbott studied at Claflin University, Hampton Institute, and Kent Law school in Chicago. When Abbott received his law degree Abbott was told he was too dark to practice law in America. Abbott became convinced that he could defend his people in public print better than he could in a courtroom, so he took a job learning the trade as a printer at his stepfather’s newspaper. On may 5, 1905, Abbott started the Chicago Defender. Abbott sold 300 copies of the four-page booklet by going door to door, visiting every barber shop, poolroom, drugstore, and church on the South Side of Chicago. Abbott worked for 15 years and finally made a success profit out of the Defender. The Defender became a national newspaper with a circulation of 250,000 in 1929. The Defender fought for social justice and political and economic equality. It attacked discrimination, segregation, and lynching. One of the nation’s largest and most influential Black newspapers, it was one of only two that was published on a daily basis out of 350 Black-owned newspapers in 1966. According to aaregistry.org after black Civil War servicemen crushed the Confederacy in the 449 documented battles that were fought, the black man was turned out into a society legally free but penniless and unwanted. Blacks had fought to preserve the United States and blacks decided that to fight for all of the freedom promised to all white male citizens. Abbott published a short-lived paper called Abbott’s Monthly. Abbott died of Bright’s disease on February 29, 1940, and left the paper in the control of his heir and nephew, John Sengstacke.

Harriet Tubman was enslaved, escaped, and helped others gain their freedom as a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad. Tubman also served as a scout, spy, guerrilla soldier, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War.Tubman was considered the first African American woman to serve in the military. Tubman’s exact birth date was unknown, but estimates place it between 1820 and 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland. By the age of five, Tubman’s owners rented her out to neighbors as a domestic servant. Although slaves were not legally allowed to marry, Tubman entered a marital union with John Tubman, a free black man, in 1844. Contrary to legend, Tubman did not create the Underground Railroad; it was established in the late eighteenth century by black and white abolitionists. After Tubman escape slavery with her two brothers. Tubman returned to the South several times and helped dozens of people escape. Tubman success led slave owners to post a reward of $40,000 for her capture or death. Tubman participated in other anti-slavery efforts, including supporting John Brown in his failed 1859 raid on the Harpers Ferry, Virginia arsenal. Through the Underground Railroad, Tubman learned the towns and transportation routes characterizing the South information that made her important to Union military commanders during the Civil War. Tubman helped many of these individuals find food, shelter, and even jobs in the North. As a nurse, Tubman dispensed herbal remedies to black and white soldiers dying from infection and disease. According to womenshistory.org after the war, Tubman raised funds to aid freedmen, joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in their quest for women’s suffrage, cared for Tubman aging parents, and worked with white writer Sarah Bradford on Tubman autobiography as a potential source of income. After an extensive campaign for a military pension, she was finally awarded $8 per month in 1895 as Davis widow and $20 in 1899 for her service. Tubman died in 1913 and was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York.

All those people were famous and important to black people because of the role their play in black african american life back then when their were alive and even now their still playing a role in black people live. Because what they started back then is still live on today. Look at Abbott he become important by become the first black person to gave voice to the voiceless and the way he did that is by the become the first to founded a weekly newspaper, The Chicago Defender, one of the most important black newspapers in history in 1905. According to an articles the success of The Chicago Defender made Abbott one of the nation’s most prominent post-slavery black millionaires, along with beauty product magnate. Angelou she rose to greatness despite facing some of life’s cruelest hardships she used literature to recover from life’s cruelest hardships, but got pregnant at 16. According to an articles Angelou found work as San Francisco’s first African- American female cable car conductor and later worked in the sex trade and as a calypso singer to support her family. Baker she didn’t let her gender keep her from defending her race. Baker proof that visibility is not necessary to make an impact, Baker is one of history’s lesser-known civil rights heroes, yet one of the most important. According to articles if Martin Luther King Jr. was the head of the civil rights movement, Baker was its backbone. And Tubman she was a conductor of the Underground Railroad. Tubman led hundreds of slaves out of the South to freedom and each journey and every person mattered. According to an articles after passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slaves who escaped to the North could be recaptured and returned to slavery, Tubman changed her routes to end in Canada, a country where slavery was outlawed. I choose those 4 people because their leave a legacy for every black person out there who think that they live life is too hard for them to try change something well they life was hard but their still live a legacy for everyone.