ABSTRACT
American slavery ended formally in 1865 with the Unions victory over the Confederacy and the ratification of the 13th Amendment. But white assumptions of black inferiority persisted long afterwards, maiming the personalities and limiting the life options of black women and men. This chapter focuses on the lives of six African-American women who demonstrated exceptional, if not formidable, leadership in different times, fields, and methodsabolitionist Harriet Tubman, anti-lynching reformer Ida B. Wells, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, diplomat Condoleezza Rice, and entertainer Oprah Winfrey. All of them came from the South, five from the Deep South. All of them were or are religious, with Christianity serving as their bedrock faith. Four of them received a college education of varying lengths. Four of them married and raised children. All but Rice have been consciously race leaders. Their stories, like so many other African-American women, have been ones of persistence and progress.
