Human Interest

As the November election approached, I commented to a friend that I was so exhausted by online acrimony that I was thinking of spending a lot of time in the blog exploring local human interest stories. Howard County must have tons of them. Here is one I wish I had known more about sooner:

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, 77, dies, Historian Recognized Black Suffragists

I remember seeing her at events in Oakland Mills. I wish I had known her. A shoutout to my friend and Oakland Mills neighbor Mary Kate Murray for bringing this to my attention.

“She committed the first decades of her career to the deep research that was required to pull back the curtain, dispel the myths and otherwise challenge the story about the history of women and the vote that had been, to an important degree, crafted by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Martha S. Jones, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said in a telephone interview. 

Ms Terborg-Penn is quoted in the piece, responding to the pushback her work received from those in positions of authority:

“Nonetheless,” she added, “we have made a way when there was no way.”

Please take a moment today to read about this amazing woman and her life’s work.