Missing In History Bookmark Guide

Ready to create your powerful bookmarks to help your textbook tell more inclusive history? Here are some amazing people in history to put into your textbook:

Harriet Ann Jacobs

Textbooks rarely tell us about the important contributions of people who were enslaved. Harriet Ann Jacobs was a fierce abolitionist who also escaped slavery. She wrote “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” an autobiographical novel, which was one of the first to address the sexual harassment and abuse faced by female slaves. Jacobs worked throughout her life to fight for freedom and an end to slavery.

Ida B Wells

Ida B Wells was an African-American suffragist, sociologist, feminist, journalist and early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1890s, she started her anti-lynching campaign, documenting lynchings and raising more than $500 to investigate lynchings and publish her results. Wells found that black people were almost always lynched for reasons like failing to pay debts, not appearing to give way to whites, or being "drunk" in public. She found little basis for the frequent claim that black men were lynched because they had allegedly attacked white women. Wells fought tirelessly for the right of black women to speak out and fight for their rights. By documenting the heinous practice of lynching, Wells' work was crucial to intersectional research, showing how racial and gender discrimination are linked. Wells' work was integral to the black feminist movement.