Aug 17, 2017
Portraits of 19th Century African American Women Activists
By Beverly Brannan
African American women as well as men assumed civic responsibilities in the decades after the Civil War. William Henry Richards (1856–1941) was active in several organizations that promoted civil rights and civil liberties for African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century.
Richards taught at Howard University Law School from 1890 until his retirement in 1928. In 2013, the Library acquired his collection from the descendants of William C. McNeill, his physician at the end of Richards’s life. Both men were on the faculty of Howard University.
Richards’s portrait is the medallion in this photograph of one of his law school classes at Howard University:
Richards’s collection includes portraits of people who joined him and others working in the suffrage and temperance movements and in education, journalism and the arts. Among them were women who were in the public eye, active in a variety of professions and causes. These photographs show the women at earlier ages than most portraits previously available of them online. In alphabetical order, the women are:
As research on women’s contributions to social organizations continues to expand, we hope that these newly digitized portraits will help make the faces of these dedicated women become more widely known and will encourage further scholarship.
Learn more:
- Get a sense of the contents of William Henry Richards’s personal papers, which are held by the Library’s Manuscript Division. View catalog record and finding aid.
- For more information about the William Henry Richards collection, or how to access other Library of Congress prints and photographs, please use our Ask a Librarian service.
- View faces from related movements, including later African American activists and images relating to the struggle for women’s suffrage.
Beverly Brannan is curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress.
