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Dorothy Donegan: World Changer of the Month — August 2023

  • Kimberley Guillemet
  • Aug 1, 2023

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Dorothy Donegan was born in Chicago on April 6, 1922. Her father, Donazell Donegan, was a cook, and her mother, Ella Donegan, rented out rooms in the family’s large apartment. Donegan’s mother used the rent money to support her daughter’s music studies. Donegan readily admitted that it was her mother who truly appreciated her talent, listened to her, and encouraged her to put feeling into her music. Her mother even served as her first business manager.


With her mother’s encouragement, Donegan began taking piano lessons when she was five years old and obtained her musical education in Chicago’s public schools. By the age of ten, she was already performing as a church organist, and began playing jazz professionally in local nightclubs during her high-school years. At 14 years old, she became the first African American to perform at Costello’s Grill in Chicago. At the age of 17, she graduated from Chicago's DuSable High School, and was hired to play jazz piano with The Bob Tinsley Band.


In 1942, Donegan recorded her first album of blues and boogie-woogie on the Bluebird label. However, despite her early jazz success, she still aspired to be a classical pianist. Consequently, she continued her classical music education, studying piano at the Chicago Musical College and later attending the University of Southern California. One year after releasing her first jazz album, Donegan became the first African-American performer and first jazz pianist to perform in concert at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. The concert earned Donegan a frontpage review in the Chicago Tribune and caught the attention of legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum. Blessed with an enormous orchestral capacity at the keyboard, Donegan was fluent in several styles of jazz, as well as with European classical music.


In the 1950s, she developed her flamboyant performance style, which at times tended to obscure her extraordinary piano playing, deep sense of swing, and wide-ranging repertoire. She would often spice her performances with uncanny impressions of other pianists and singers, skills that enhanced her abilities as an entertainer. She spent the bulk of her career performing in trios with bass and drums. Her appearance at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in 1980 broke all previous attendance records.


Unfortunately, her first six albums proved to be obscure compared to her successes in performance. In 1987, a recorded appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival and her live albums from 1991 were met with acclaim. Even so, she remained best known for her live performances. Ben Ratliff argued in The New York Times that "her flamboyance helped her find work in a field that was largely hostile to women.


Donegan was often referred to as “the wild one,” “the triumphantly unfettered, “the shoulder-shaking, finger-popping, hip-slapping lioness of piano rooms.” At the same time, however, critics also were quick to add that Donegan was, “wild but polished,” “possessor of enormous technical skill,” and “brilliant, ridiculously talented.” Donegan was outspoken about her view that sexism, along with her insistence on being paid the same rates as male musicians, had limited her career.


As Donegan entered the last decade of her life, she finally seemed to be earning recognition commensurate with her talent. She was awarded a Jazz Masters fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992 and played at the White House in 1993. The following year she received an honorary doctorate from Roosevelt University, and in 1995 she made a guest appearance on Sesame Street, playing the blues with Hoots the Owl. During this period Donegan also lectured at several universities, including Harvard, Northeastern, and the Manhattan School of Music. Her last big show was in 1997 at the Concord Jazz Festival in the Bay Area.


Despite being underrated during her lifetime, Donegan was an exceptional pianist with a rich harmonic sense who broke race and gender barriers. She was a musical genius who was ahead of her time.



Josephine Leavell Allensworth: World Changer of the Month — July 2023

  • Kimberley Guillemet
  • Jul 1, 2023

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Born in 1855 in Trenton, Kentucky, Josephine Leavell was an accomplished pianist, organist and music teacher. She attended Roger Williams University in Nashville, Tennessee where she met prominent Baptist minister, Lieutenant Colonel Allen Allensworth, the first African American to reach the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. The couple married in 1877. They had two daughters, Eva and Nella.


Upon Rev. Allenwsorth’s retirement from the military in 1906, the family settled in Los Angeles, California. During that time, they became inspired by the idea of establishing a self-sufficient, all-Black California community where African Americans could live free of the racial discrimination that pervaded post-Reconstruction America. Their dream was to build a community where Black people might live and create “sentiment favorable to intellectual and industrial liberty.”


On June 30, 1908, the Allensworths and their business partner Professor William Alexander Payne established the California Colony and Home Promoting Association. The Association purchased 20 acres of land from the Pacific Farming Company with the goal of establishing a town for Black soldiers. The land, situated in Tulare County, about 40 miles north of Bakersfield, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, was divided into individual parcels, forming “a colony of orderly and industrious African Americans who could control their own destiny.”


Allensworth's reputation drew people from all over the country, causing some to buy property sight-unseen in order to support the efforts. California's first African American school district was established there in 1910. Soontherafter, residents elected the first African-American Justice of the Peace in post-Mexican California. By 1914, the Allensworth community had grown to 900 acres of deeded land.

An activist and leader in her own right, Josephine founded the town’s Women’s Improvement League, sat on the school board, and donated the property for the Mary Dickinson Memorial Library, the town’s public library which was named for her mother.


Allensworth’s prosperity peaked in 1925, after which time the lack of water available for irrigation began to plague the town. The water needed for irrigation was never supplied in the amount promised by the Pacific Farming Company, the land development firm that handled the original purchase. As a result, town leaders became engrossed in lengthy and expensive legal battles with the company, expending scarce financial resources on a battle they would not win.


By 1930 the town’s population had dropped below 300 people, as residents and nearby farmers began to leave in search of other employment. The deficient water supply would no longer sustain the town’s agricultural and ranching enterprises. By 1966, the town was scheduled for demolition when arsenic was found in the water supply. The state of California eventually stepped in and preserved the land and the buildings, designating the area as the “Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park.”


To this day, Allensworth remains the only California community to be founded, financed and governed by African Americans. One historian described Allensworth as “a planned experiment in civic power that had significant impact around the state and meaning for all…Just as the town touched diverse peoples and places around California, today Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park attracts a wide array of visitors of all ethnic groups—drawn to this symbol of the universal dream of freedom.”



This text is excerpted from:





Malala Yousafzai: World Changer of the Month — June 2023

  • Kimberley Guillemet
  • Jun 1, 2023

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Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997 in the Swat District of Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, to parents Ziauddin Yousafzai and Toor Pekai Yousafzai.

She was given her first name Malala (meaning "grief-stricken") after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan.


Fluent in Pashto, Urdu and English, Yousafzai was educated mostly by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, a poet, educational activist and director of a girls’ school. In an interview, Yousafzai once said that she aspired to become a doctor, though later her father encouraged her to become a politician instead. Ziauddin referred to his daughter as “something entirely special.”


When the Islamic Taliban movement took control of the area where Yousafzai and her family lived in 2008, girls’ schools were burned down. Yousafzai kept a diary of the events where she spoke out against the Taliban’s terrorist regime.


On January 3, 2009, her first entry was posted to the BBC Urdu blog. She hand-wrote notes and passed them to a reporter who scanned and emailed them. The blog recorded Yousafzai's thoughts during the First Battle of Swat as military operations took place. The following is excerpted from one of her early entries:


I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools. Only 11 out of 27 pupils attended the class because the number decreased because of the Pakistani Taliban's edict. My three friends have shifted to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families after this edict.


The Pakistani Taliban issued an edict that no girls could attend school after January 15, 2009, and Yousafzai's school was shut down. By that time, more than 100 girls’ schools had been destroyed. The night before the ban took effect was filled with the noise of artillery fire, waking Yousafzai several times. The following day, she also read for the first time excerpts from her blog that had been published in a local newspaper. Soon thereafter, an American documentary film was made featuring Yousafzai, making her internationally famous.


As Yousafzai became more recognized, the dangers facing her increased. Death threats against her were published in newspapers, slipped under her door and posted via social media. Eventually, a Pakistani Taliban spokesman said they were “forced” to act. In a meeting held in the summer of 2012, Taliban leaders unanimously agreed to kill her.


Yousafzai envisioned a confrontation with the Taliban, writing, “I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.”

On the afternoon of October 9, 2012, a Taliban gunman boarded the school bus that Yousafzai was riding with her schoolmates. Just 15 years old at the time, Yousafzai was on her way home after taking an exam. According to reports, the masked gunman shouted, “Which one of you is Malala? Speak up, otherwise I will shoot you all.” Upon being identified, Yousafzai was shot in the head with one bullet, which traveled 18 inches from the side of her left eye, through her neck and landed in her shoulder.


Yousafzai was rushed to the hospital for life-saving procedures. After months of surgeries and rehabilitation, Yousafzai was able to join her family in the United Kingdom. The family had to relocate to England and live in exile there due to ongoing threats to Yousafzai’s life.


In 2013, TIME magazine named Yousafzai one of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” On her 16th birthday she gave an address before the United Nations. In her speech Yousafzai called for the equal right to education for girls all over the world, and became an international symbol of this cause.


In 2014, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for the right of every child to receive an education, becoming the youngest-ever Nobel laureate.


Yousafzai and her father established the Malala Fund, a charity dedicated to giving every girl an opportunity to achieve the future she chooses. In 2017, she began studying at the University of Oxford. In 2020, she completed the Philosophy, Politics and Economy degree, one of the university’s most prestigious.


Yousafzai continues her activism. Upon her release from the hospital in 2014, she wrote: “It was then I knew I had a choice: I could live a quiet life or I could make the most of this new life I had been given. I determined to continue my fight until every girl could go to school.”



This text is excerpted from: https://malala.org/malalas-story,





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