Affirm Black Women Portrait Series: Sylvia Woods
“I have seen people change. This is the faith you’ve got to have in people.” - Sylvia Woods
At ten years old Sylvia Woods lead her first protest. Born and raised in a segregated New Orleans she walked through a “whites only” park every day on the way to school. One morning she stopped singing the Star Spangled Banner telling the principal, "Because it says 'The land of the free and the home of the brave' and this is not the land of the free.”
At 16 Woods moved to Chicago and began work in a laundry where she organized a successful work stoppage after the company attempted to hire a white forelady instead of promoting a Black woman. On another occasion Woods encouraged all the women to protest their employer’s efforts to intimidate them over absenteeism. Instead of listing specific reasons on the form Woods instructed the workers to simply write in “tired”.
Sylvia Woods was a talented union organizer and a moving speaker. She went on to be a public spokesperson for the Communist Party in Illinois, rallied thousands of protestors to free Angela Davis, and later helped found the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.
View the complete Affirm Black Women portrait series here
“…I have dedicated my career to ensuring that the words engraved on the front of the Supreme Court building— ‘Equal Justice Under Law’—are a reality and not just an ideal.” — Ketanji Brown Jackson