Maggie Lena Walker founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, offering checking and savings accounts, mortgages, and loans to provide economic empowerment to women and help strengthen Richmond's emerging black middle class.
Madam C.J. Walker, was born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 in a one-room cabin with a fireplace, a few windows, and a porch located on a cotton plantation on Delta, Louisiana. She would build a beauty empire employing 40,000 African American women and men in the US, Central America, and the Caribbean and found the National Negro Cosmetics Manufacturers Association in 1917.
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross around 1820 in Bucktown, Maryland. She would escape to Pennsylvania in 1849. She worked for the union army as a spy, scout, nurse and cook from 1862 to 1865 during the American Civil War and would become a supporter of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, joining their cause in campaigning for women's suffrage.
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree around 1797 in New York to Dutch slaveowners, the Hardenberghs. During her lifetime, she supported the cause of the Underground Railroad, she provided needed clothing, blankets, food, and recruited African American soldiers for the Union’s only Black regiment during the Civil War.
Lise Meitner was born in Vienna, Austria. She developed an interest in physics and was the first woman admitted to the physics lectures and laboratories at the University of Vienna. Through written correspondences, she continued her collaboration with Otto Hahn in determining whether a uranium atom could be split… the discovery of fission.
