Pitahayas 1938

03/22/17

1. Yuri Kochiyama

Kochiyama was a civil rights activist who fought for the anti-war movement, black power, and atonement for Japanese internment.

2. Queen Liliuokalani

Adding historical context to the phrase “Yas Kween,” Queen Liliuokalani was the first female monarch of Hawaii and last sovereign of the Kamehameha dynasty (which ruled Hawaii since 1810) after its U.S. annex in 1898.

3. Sarojini Naidu

A child prodigy and poet, Naidu was the first female president of the India National Congress AND first female governor of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

4. Grace Lee Boggs

Considered the eldest human rights activist of our time, Boggs was a philosopher who fought for women’s rights, environmental justice, black power (alongside Angela Davis and Malcolm X), and labor rights.

5. Corazon Aquino

Having served as the first female president of the Philippines, Aquino’s leadership stemmed from opposition to then-dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

6. Anna May Wong

Considered the first Chinese-American film star, Wong gained international recognition through dozens of movies in Hollywood and Europe.

7. Trung Sisters

The Trung sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, were freedom fighters who led a rebellion against the Chinese Han-dynasty with a group consisting mostly of women fighters in 40 A.D., briefly establishing a sovereign state.

8. Aung San Suu Kyi

Winner of a Nobel Peace Prize and recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal, Suu Kyi is a politician and writer whose activism started with peaceful movements for democracy.

9. Maya Lin

Lin is a designer and architect who, at the age of 21, designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. NBD.

10. Phoolan Devi

Devi’s story bears remarkable similarities to a blockbuster film: Nicknamed “Bandit Queen,” she took up a life of burglary and ultimately became a gang leader after enduring sexual abuse from a young age.

11. Junko Tabei

A mountaineer, Tabei was the first woman to reach the top of Mount Everest in 1975 and, subsequently, was the first woman to climb the Seven Summits (the highest peaks of the seven continents!) in 1992.

How did this scene come to be?

Barry Jenkins: The scene is interesting to me because it’s like a turning point. These characters are essentially strangers to each other. And this scene is just after they’ve reconnected. Tarell Alvin McCraney’s original piece, “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” was kind of the starting point of this. Tarell wrote it as an undergrad at DePaul and passed it to me like a baton in a relay race.

Guess who is this. 

Yep, this is Viola Davis and that’s the only picture she has from her childhood. 

Our brilliant and amazing Oscar Winner has been through a lot until she became our role model in the Media. 

The actress was born in a one-room shack on her grandmother’s farm at the site of a former slave plantation where her grandfather worked as a sharecropper. Her parents, Dan and Mae Alice, moved to Rhode Island soon after her birth, and as they struggled to make ends meet, Viola and her five siblings struggled with hunger, dilapidated housing conditions and racist taunts from school bullies.

“I was the kind of poor where I knew right away I had less than everyone around me,” she says. “Our environment, our physical space reflected our income.” At home, “the boards were coming off the walls,” she says, and the family endured “shoddy plumbing and no phone and no food and rats and all of that. That very much was visible to me.”

The family’s rat problem was so bad, she has said, they bit the faces off her dolls and she had to go to sleep with rags tied around her neck to keep them from biting her at night. But the struggle didn’t weigh Davis down — it had the opposite effect.

“It became motivation as opposed to something else — the thing about poverty is that it starts affecting your mind and your spirit because people don’t see you,” Davis says. “I chose from a very young age that I didn’t want that for my life. And it very much has helped me appreciate and value the things that are in my life now because I never had it. A yard, a house, great plumbing, a full refrigerator, things that people take for granted, I don’t.”

Our struggles make us stronger.

Kate Bush shortly after she turned 21, 1979.