By: Bre - from the series of guest posts written by Dr. Baldwin's students at Michigan State University.

So with February being Black History Month I decided to actually do what they wanted us in elementary school to do. I started to research and read about different women’s lives and their achievements towards equality. I read quite a few and was quite amazed at the difficulties that these women had to overcome for our modern world to be become more equal. For example, Daisy Bates guided and advised the Little Rock Nine. The nine children that voluntarily forced a white school to integrate and allow black children in. During this time she was arrested and voluntarily went to jail for a violation of a city ordinance just for helping and protecting the children. Also she and her husband started and wrote a newspaper that voiced civil rights, before the Civil Rights Movement was even a movement. She later went on to improve the life of her community until she died in 1999. But what makes her truly stand alone is that she was the only female civil rights leader to speak at the March on Washington in 1963.

Mary McLeod Bethune also lived to improve her community. She founded a school for African American children, now known as the Bethune-Cookman College, in 1904. At the time she was only one of a few women who were the president of a college. The school she founded surpassed the standards of traditional black schools and rivaled those of white schools. She was also president of the National Association of Colored Women. And among her list of credentials she was also a member of Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet” whose purpose was to raise concerns about the black community.

One more woman I want to mention, that I believe should be a role model to everyone is Dr. Maya Angelou. She experienced many hardships growing up as many people of her race and of her gender also did. She spoke about many of these in her book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” which memoirs her childhood. She worked closely on the civil rights campaigns of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. And was even a world wide activist with her early career in West Africa. Dr. Maya Angelou was even appointed to many capacities by many presidents and read an original poem at President Clinton’s inauguration in 1993.