TRAILBLAZERS Vol. 5

TRAILBLAZERS, Black Women Who Helped Make America Great, American Firsts/Icons by Gabrielle David is a six-volume series that examines the lives and careers of over 400 brilliant women from the eighteenth century to the present who blazed uncharted paths in every conceivable way. The lives profiled here include recognizable figures alongside some women that readers will be discovering for the first time and those women shaping the era we live in today.

Volume 5 of TRAILBLAZERS features singers, women in education and scholarship, and public health and medicine. Black women singers have made an indelible mark on American music. From opera, jazz, and blues to gospel, soul, rap, and pop, women such as opera singer Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, Bessie Smith, “The Queen of Gospel” Mahalia Jackson, the jazz singer Sarah Vaughn “The Divine One,” and “The Queen of Soul,” Aretha Franklin, represent a group of pioneering vocalists who cannot be denied their place in history. Artists like Whitney Houston, Donna Summer, Janet Jackson, Mary J. Blige, and Missy symbolize Black women’s enduring influence on American music.

Black women educators and scholars have greatly impacted the Black community and American society. This historical account of Black women scholars begins in the nineteenth century with Sarah Jane Woodson Early, Anna J. Cooper, and Georgiana Rose Simpson and their insurmountable challenges. In the wake of new generations of institutional Black academics who foment political activism and cultural conversations around race, power, knowledge, and politics, educators and scholars like Mary Frances Berry, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Crenshaw represent a wide ideological spectrum of scholarly ideas in their work.

Health and race disparities in America have deep roots that have greatly impacted African Americans’ health outcomes, from slavery to the forced sterilization of Black women, to the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment and lead-poisoned water in Flint, Michigan. Black women doctors have spent more than a century dedicating their lives to grappling with prevention and cure, researching diseases, and investigating their communities’ physical and mental well-being. Readers become acquainted with Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler, the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, Ida Gray, the first Black woman dentist, to the amazing Helen Octavia Dickens, who was a physician, medical and social activist, health equity advocate, researcher, and health educator and administrator. They set the stage for Dorothy Lavania Brown, the first Black woman surgeon; Jane Cooke Wright, an oncologist and cancer researcher noted for her contributions to chemotherapy; and Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist and an early pioneer of laser cataract surgery. Physicians like Helene D. Gayle and Deborah V. Deas in high-level healthcare positions continue to deal with health disparities in the black community, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With painstaking research, David created an affordable, visually rich, accessible reference book. From the foremothers who blazed trails and broke barriers to the women who follow in their footsteps, TRAILBLAZERS offers powerful and inspiring role models for women and girls from all cultural backgrounds and for the intellectually curious. TRAILBLAZERS is a clarion call for recognition of the transformative work Black women have done and continue to do. Written in accessible prose that contains personal reflections for a broad audience, TRAILBLAZERS also serves as an indispensable reference guide for use in schools and libraries.