Black History month is over but that doesn’t mean it’s time to disregard the beautiful of melanin magic. A celebration of the culture should happen every year and today, I want to celebrate five women that history has attempted to overlook or over right.

1. Claudette Colvin

Ms. Colvin did the exact same thing as Rosa parks did 9 months prior. In December 1955 she’d refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. But, Claudette was a 15-year-old high school student who would soon become pregnant out of wedlock, Rosa Parks was a 42-year-old NAACP officer. “They” felt She’d make a better symbol for the movement and thus many don’t know about the brave teenager who stood, or sat, for what she believed in.

2. Henrietta Lacks

In 1951 Henrietta arrived at John Hopkins with a “knot on her womb,” within the year she’d died from an aggressive form of cervical cancer. Before she died though, medical staff at the hospital biopsied her tumor. The cells they collected did not do as expected, in fact, they became the first human cells to thrive outside of the body. After this discovery, without her knowledge or consent, doctors began removing cancerous cells from her body for their research. These cells became the infamous HeLa cell line that helped researchers find cures for many diseases, and which are still being used for medical research today.

Her family, however, despite being descended from the woman whose cells had helped create the polio vaccine and was being sold commercially all over the world were very poor. In fact, they knew nothing of what was done to their mother until 1975 when, after researchers had contaminated a large portion of their mother's cells, reached out to her children for blood samples.

3. Elizabeth Keckley

Elizabeth Keckly was born a slave in 1818. She was a talented seamstress and she used the talent to pay her master $1,200 to free herself and her son in 1855. In 1861 she was chosen by Mary Todd Lincoln to become her personal dressmaker. She became whiteness to the private lives of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. In 1862 she founded the Contraband Relief Association which provided food, shelter, clothing, and emotional support to recently freed slaves and wounded soldiers.

She released an autobiography in 1868, after President Lincoln’s Assassination, that contrasted her life with that of the Lincolns’. She was criticized for violating her employer's privacy and lost many of her customers because of it. However, the book needed to be written, the contrast between the lives of the two women needed to be documented. Keckly’s book,

4. Isabell Baumfree

Born Sojourner Truth, born Isabel Baumfree, began her life as a slave to a Dutch family in the North. She dedicated her life to teaching black women what it meant to be a black woman. In her famous speech, “ain’t I a woman,” she focuses on the very obvious fact that antebellum society had no place for people like her. She told them how to make a place for themselves. There are many different versions and readings of her famous speech, many that are depicted with a false Southern antebellum accent. If she did have an accent, it would have been Dutch in origin as that was her first language.

5. Eliza Potter

Eliza Potter was a free-born woman who traveled the world during the antebellum. Her autobiography, a Hairdresser’s experience in highlife, pays homage to her quick-wittedness and her refusal to be overlooked or miss treated. Eliza learned her trade in France, and her services where in high demand by white women in America, as such she had the ability to travel as she wished and refuse customers simply if she thought they were mean. In a time when black women were supposed to do what they were told Eliza Potter was ahead of her time. She took great pleasure in having choice, something that was denied many others like her.