Countee Cullen, the Great Black Poet, Wrote, “Yet Do I Marvel at This Curious Thing: To Make a Poet Black, and Bid Him Sing!” These Days Black Women Are Singing Strong

“These Days, Black Women Are Singing Strong,” photographed by Irving Penn, was originally published in the May 1969 issue of Vogue.

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Their minds sinewy, their tactics delicate, feminine, five of them shown here and on the next four pages are special women—five out of hundreds who in one way or another have the ropes of power in their hands. All of them have been on the way for years, devoted to the service of all their countrymen. Like Mrs. Elizabeth Duncan Koontz who was the first Black woman to serve as President of the National Education Association before President Nixon appointed her as the Director of the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor. Like thousands of Black women who are teachers and principals. Like hundreds of Black women who are doctors, judges, psychologists, medical researchers. Like thousands more with bold minds, working in almost every field. They are one of the immense resources of this country, with no chance of depletion.

MRS. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., “classic nobility”

Armed with faith, warmed with humour, beautiful, disciplined, as outgoing as a flower, a non-violent activist, Coretta Scott King has almost disappeared into Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., within the year since the murder of her husband. The Kings worked together but not always at identical tasks ever since they first met when she studied singing at the New England Conservatory of Music and he worked on his doctorate at Boston University. Now, in their house at Atlanta, Georgia, where she still lives with their four children, she spends evenings with them, perhaps singing the folk songs of the Louisiana Creoles, especially “Mr. Banjo.” Much of her time still goes to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, much to the writing of her book, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., to be published this September. With verve and exaltation she recently gave the Sunday sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the first woman to do so. Calling her talk “The Dawn of a New Day,” she preached, with a low but powerful cadence in her voice, from the same pulpit as Dr. King had in 1964 on his way to Sweden to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

DR. MILDRED MITCHELL-BATEMAN, “I go at whatever I do”

Photographed by Irving Penn, Vogue, May 1969