The way these two Bougie Brown Girls see the world.
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Portrait of Bill Traylor by Charles Shannon ca. 1939.
Bill Traylor (1854?–1949) was born into slavery on a plantation in Alabama. After emancipation, he continued to live and work on the plantation until sometime before 1928, when he moved permanently to Montgomery. There he worked as a laborer and briefly in a shoe factory until he was physically unable to continue, then began receiving modest government assistance. Under the challenging conditions of Depression-era Alabama, Traylor survived on the streets in the then primarily black enclave of Monroe Avenue (now called Monroe Street). He slept first in the storage room of a funeral parlor, then in a shoe repair shop, and spent his days sitting on the sidewalks, creating the more than 1,200 drawings he is believed to have produced.
-via High Museum of Art
“Educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown on her wedding day, 1912. Founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina, Ms. Brown was also a suffragist who worked for black women to have the same rights black men and white women were fighting for in the early 20th century. She was also the great aunt of singer Natalie Cole. In fact, she raised Natalie’s mother Maria and her sisters (her brother’s children) when their mother died in childbirth.”
