Monroe Alpheus Majors

Majors sketched the lives of nearly 300 women, including Edmonia Lewis, Amanda Smith, Ida B. Wells, and Sojourner Truth. Majors began to compile the book in Waco, Texas in 1890.
He hoped to show the worth of black women for themselves and as an expression of the value of all African Americans. A significant omission from the book was Harriet Tubman.

The book sought to shape contemporary attitudes and historian Milton C. Sernett hypothesizes that including Tubman would invoke memories of the pain of slavery.

Majors' work was perhaps the first of its kind[1] although the same year another anthology of biographies of African American Women was published, Women of Distinction. Women of Distinction was edited by Lawson A. Scruggs and included contributions by fifteen writers.

These works coupled with the increased prominence of African American woman, and particularly the 1892 publication of Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells led to 1893 being proclaimed "Year of the Black Women".

Noted Negro Women and Women of Distinction were volumes about notable African American women which were a part of a group of biographical anthologies about African Americans published in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Majors' work was meant to inspire women and serve as a manual of feminine behavior.

Majors' and Scruggs' books reflected fresh optimism about the future of African Americans. Frederick Douglass was skeptical of the project, stating in regards to an inquiry by Majors for his book that he did not know of any women who could be called famous.

List of individuals with biographies in anthology
Octavia V. Rogers Albert
Caroline Still Anderson
Naomi Anderson
Flora Batson
Rosa Dixon Bowser
Mary E. Britton
Hallie Quinn Brown
Pauline Powell Burns
Lulu Vere Childers
Lucretia Newman Coleman
Anna J. Cooper
Fanny Jackson Coppin
Julia Ringwood Coston
Olivia A. Davidson
Henrietta Vinton Davis
Georgia Mabel DeBaptiste
Louise De Mortie
Dr. H. T. Dillon
Sarah Jane Woodson Early
Ida Gibbs
Ida Gray
Elizabeth Greenfield
Charlotte Forten Grimké
Frances Harper
Myrtle Hart
Josephine D. Heard
Joan Imogen Howard
Hyers Sisters
Amelia E. Johnson
Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones
Sophia B. Jones
Elizabeth Keckley
Lucy Craft Laney
Nellie A. Ramsey Leslie
Edmonia Lewis
Lillian A. Lewis
Harriet Gibbs Marshall
Louise De Mortie
Gertrude Bustill Mossell
Lucy Ella Moten
Ednorah Nahar
Effie Lee Newsome
Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba
Zelia Ball Page
Mary Virginia Cook Parrish
Georgia E. L. Patton Washington
Mary S. Peake
Ida Platt
Frances E. L. Preston
Ranavalona III
Charlotte E. Ray
Emma Ann Reynolds
Martha Ann Erskine Ricks
Celia Dial Saxon
Mary Ann Shadd
Susie Lankford Shorter
Amanda Smith
Christine Shoecraft Smith
Lucy Wilmot Smith
Susan McKinney Steward
Elizabeth Stumm
Mary Church Terrell
Clarissa M. Thompson
Amelia Tilghman
Katherine D. Chapman Tillman
Sojourner Truth
Olivia A. Davidson
Josephine Turpin Washington
Ida B. Wells
Julia Williams (abolitionist)
Marie Selika Williams
Phillis Wheatly

References
Appiah, Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates Jr, eds. Africana: The encyclopedia of the African and African American experience. Oxford University Press, 2005. p696
Sernett, Milton C. Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History. Duke University Press, 2007. p165
Smith, Jessie Carney. Black firsts: 4,000 ground-breaking and pioneering historical events. Visible Ink Press, 2012. p619
White, Deborah Gray, The Cost of Club Work in Hewitt, Nancy A., and Suzanne Lebsock. Visible women: new essays on American activism. Vol. 112. University of illinois press, 1993.
Powell, William S., ed. Dictionary of North Carolina Biography: Vol. 5, PS. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2000. p307
McMurry, Linda O. To keep the waters troubled: The life of Ida B. Wells. Oxford University Press on Demand, 2000. p188
Des Jardins, Julie. Women and the historical enterprise in America: gender, race, and the politics of memory, 1880-1945. UNC Press Books, 2003. p127-128
Schechter, Patricia A. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2003. p38
External links
Majors, Monroe Alphus. Noted Negro women: Their triumphs and activities. Donohue & Henneberry, 1893.

Photograph source: New York Public Library's Digital Library under the digital ID 1221505: digitalgallery.nypl.org → digitalcollections.nypl.org

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Monroe Alpheus Majors Bio - Wikipedia

Monroe Alpheus Majors (October 12, 1864 – December 10, 1960)[1] was an American physician, writer and civil rights activist in Texas and Los Angeles. He was one of the first black physicians in the American southwest and established a medical association for black physicians who were not allowed entry into the American Medical Association. He wrote a noted book of biographies of African-American women, Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities, published in 1893, and wrote for numerous African-American newspapers, notably the Indianapolis Freeman, of which he was an associate editor in 1898 and 1899, and the Chicago Conservator, which he edited from 1908 to 1910. He was the father of composer Margaret Bonds.

Early life
Monroe Alpheus Majors was born in Waco, Texas, in 1864, the son of Andrew Jackson Majors and Jane Barringer. In 1869, they moved to Austin, Texas,[2] where Majors went to Freedmen's Bureau schools.[3] He attended college at West Texas College, Tillotson Normal and Collegiate Institute, and Central Tennessee College. He then attended Meharry Medical College in Nashville, graduating in 1886.[2]

Career
Majors then moved back to Texas to practice medicine, working in Brenham, Dallas, and Calvert. He was the first African-American doctor in Calvert. In 1886, he established the Lone Star State Medical Association for African American physicians, as an alternative to the American Medical Association which restricted black membership. In 1888, he moved to Los Angeles, where he lectured at the Los Angeles Medical College. He was the first African American to pass the California Board of Medical Examination.[2]

Majors was also active in civil rights, first in Texas and later in California. He edited the Los Angeles Western News, where he advocated for African-American appointment to civic positions.[2]

In 1889, Majors married Georgia A. Green, who was from Texas, and in 1890 they returned to Waco, where he practiced medicine and taught at Paul Quinn College. He also edited a paper, the Texas Searchlight, raised money for the building of a hospital, and opened the first black-owned drugstore in the American Southwest.[2]

In 1893, Majors published Noted Negro Women. He wrote the book mainly to show the accomplishments of black women, but also to express the "progress" of African Americans since the end of slavery in the 1860s.[4] He also began writing for various national African-American newspapers, particularly the Indianapolis Freeman. In 1898, he moved to Decatur, Illinois. In Illinois, his life was threatened due to his writings against lynching, particularly that which occurred in Decatur shortly before he arrived, and he fled to Indianapolis where he became an associate editor of the Freeman. In 1899, he returned to Waco, but death threats forced him to return to the north, and he moved to Chicago in 1901. He continued practicing medicine, and in Chicago he also wrote for many newspapers, notably The Broad Ax, The Chicago Defender, The Washington Bee, The People’s Advocate, and The Colored American. From 1908 to 1910 he edited The Chicago Conservator.[2]

Later life and family
In 1889, Majors married Georgia A. Green, and they divorced in 1908. In 1909 he married Estelle C. Bonds, and he later married twice more.[2] A daughter of Majors and Estelle was Margaret Allison, who became a noted composer.[5] When Bonds and Majors divorced in 1917, Margaret's mother changed her last name from Majors to Bonds.[6] In the 1920s, Majors began to lose his eyesight and was forced to curtail his work.[1] He largely retired from medicine in 1923. In 1933, he moved back to Los Angeles, where he died aged 96 in 1960.[2]