Roberta Hughes Wright was born in 1922 and grew up in Detroit. She attended Howard University at age 15 and completed her bachelor's degree at Wayne State University. During the course of her career she was an X-ray technician, teacher, school social worker, and probate attorney. She earned her PhD from the University of Michigan and a JD from Wayne State. After the passing of her first husband Wilbur B. Hughes II, she married Charles H. Wright, founder of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit.

Peggy Jenny Winick was born in 1920 to Russian immigrant parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her father, George Winick, worked in the metal industry. Following the Great Depression, she worked part-time to help rebuild the family’s livelihood. In 1945 she married Gerritt W. de Vries and they moved to Ann Arbor so that he could attend the University of Michigan School of Architecture & Design. Peggy worked in photo finishing and printing at Ivory Photo. The de Vries had three children, and they retired in Lake Leelanau.

Pamela Shultz was born in 1925 in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. She attended Florida State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and majored in Psychology. She married Edwin (Ted) Shultz in 1946, and they moved to the Detroit area soon afterwards. Shultz got her master’s in Special Education from the University of Michigan and taught developmentally disabled children in Livonia schools and the Plymouth State Home in the 1960s and 70s. She passed away on January 30, 2015.

Opal Simmons was born in 1931 in Detroit. After graduating from Eastern High School, she attended Fisk University and Wayne State University. She lived in New York for a few years as a young woman and recalls attending dances at the Savoy. She volunteered as a letter reader for the American Red Cross during World War II. During her working years in Detroit, she was secretary to the deputy mayor in the Coleman A. Young administration. Richard Simmons Jr. became her second husband.

Born in 1922, Nellie Harrell grew up in Richmond, Virginia. She began dancing at age 14, and moved to New York City a few years. During the height of her career as a noted singer, dancer, and entertainer, she went by her married name Nellie Hill. Hill performed in early music videos called “soundies,” appeared on the cover of Jet Magazine, and frequented Black clubs such as New York’s Kelly’s Stables and Detroit’s Flame Show Bar and 20 Grand. In the 1950s she married James Trapp and had three children.

Nancy Emmons Taylor was born in 1941 and grew up in Luxmanor, Maryland. She attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. She married Thomas Taylor soon after graduating, and they had two children. She received her Masters from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. When their children had graduated from high school, the Tayors moved to London for 12 years.

Mary Dyson Martin was born in 1914 in Dallas, Texas. Her grandmother had been enslaved in Tennessee, and she grew up conscious of that legacy. Martin graduated from Fisk University and got her masters in library science at the University of Illinois. She taught swimming lessons for the YWCA Girl Reserves during the summers. She was a high school librarian in Gary, Indiana and Detroit, Michigan for over thirty years. Her husband was a doctor and a World War II veteran.

Mary Frazier was born in 1910 in Marion, Arkansas, where her father owned a 140-acre cotton farm. She describes sharecropping, Black land-ownership, and the devastating effects of the boll weevil infestation on the cotton industry in the early twentieth century. When her father’s farm went under, she moved to Detroit to live with her aunt in the Black Bottom neighborhood. Over the course of her career, Frazier worked as a domestic laborer, hospital worker, and U.S. Postal Service employee.

Marlene Laws grew up in Detroit and graduated from Sidney D. Miller High School in 1958. She served in the military at Fort Sam in Houston, Texas from 1960 to 1962. Upon returning to Michigan, she was a nurse at Pontiac State Hospital for two years. Laws dedicated 43 years of her career to the United States Postal Service as a clerk and then as a Human Resources specialist. She and her former husband Kenneth had one daughter, Dr. Dawn N. Laws. Marlene Laws passed away on February, 4, 2017.

Louise Adams was born in 1928 and grew up in Ecorse, Michigan. She was the first Black student to graduate second highest in her class at Ecorse High School in 1946. She studied art education at Wayne State University and taught in public schools from 1951 until her retirement in 1983. She married Chuck Adams in 1951 and they had two children, Marcus Adams and Sylvia Adams Burns. They lived in Detroit and then Inskter, where the family built their own home. Louise Adams passed away on June 12, 2014.