Happy Women’s History Month! This month we launched our New Mexico Sheroes campaign to celebrate self-identified women who have made herstory in our state.
Anita Scott Coleman was a prodigious writer and contributor to the Harlem Renaissance who lived from 1890 to 1960. Born in Guaymas, Mexico and raised on a ranch near Silver City, New Mexico, she wrote award-winning essays, stories, and poems for national magazines about issues impacting Black women including racism, employment discrimination, White supremacist violence, and segregation. Despite her distinguished role in the Harlem Renaissance, and a long list of publications, her original words are hard to locate online to this day. This obscurity highlights the need to bring these powerful, underrepresented stories of women in our state to the forefront in an effort to make visible their profound contributions to the evolution of equity and social justice in NM.
Anita won many prizes for her short stories and was named as one of the best writers by The Messenger, one of the most steadfast Harlem Renaissance journals. She published works in the Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, The Messenger, The Crisis, The Half-Century Magazine, The Competitor, The Pittsburgh Courier and more. Her novel, Unfinished Masterpiece, can be found in libraries throughout the state.
We’d love to learn about and celebrate the New Mexico Sheroes in your life! To participate, post a photo of the New Mexico women you want to honor on your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter with a message about what they’ve meant to you and your community and tag us!