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Showing posts with the label Bachelor's

Dorothy Height

While the name Dorothy Height is recognizable, many of her accomplishments are not. Height, who died recently in 2010 at the age of 98, was a social rights activist, administrator, and educator. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at New York University, Height later became active in fighting for social injustices. She was the president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. Also during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Height organized “Wednesdays in Mississippi” which brought together black and white women from the North and South to engage in dialogue about relevant social issues. Dorothy Height 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…I want to be remembered as one who tried,”a motto she lived by until her death. While the name Dorothy He...

William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868–1963)

Educator, essayist, journalist, scholar, social critic, and activist W.E.B. DuBois, was born to Mary Sylvina Burghardt and Alfred Dubois on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.   He excelled in the public schools, graduating valedictorian from his high school in 1884.  Four years later he received a B.A. from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1890 DuBois earned a second bachelor's degree from Harvard University.  DuBois began two years of graduate studies in History and Economics at the University of Berlin in Germany in 1892 and then returned to the United States to begin a two year stint teaching Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University in Ohio.  In 1895, DuBois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University.  His doctoral thesis,  "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America, " became the first book published by Harvard University Press in 1896.  Later that year Du...