Is there a SYWTC article or video about how to create a waitlist for a program? Thank you for your help, fellow community members. 🙂

Black women are earning degrees faster than anyone else in America — and some of us are still standing in line for food stamps. So let’s talk about a woman who refused to let credentials be the finish line. Welcome to Day 27 of Deleted History — 28 Black women leaders they prayed you would never learn about. Recent headlines say Black women are among the most educated groups in the U.S. At the same time, we’re seeing stories of Black women with PhDs on public assistance, doing everything “right” and still being underpaid and under‑hired. Degrees were never designed to guarantee our safety. They were designed to make us eligible to be useful. Dr. Eliza Atkins Gleason understood that in 1940. She didn’t just stack degrees. She built infrastructure. Born in 1909 in Winston‑Salem, North Carolina to an educator family, she earned degrees from the University of Illinois, UC Berkeley, and then a doctorate in Library Science from the University of Chicago. But the doctorate was step one, not the goal. Her dissertation documented how segregation blocked Black people from library access across the South — turning a “hidden” barrier into a public record and positioning her as the expert on the problem. In 1941, she made her power move: She founded and led the School of Library Service at Atlanta University. During segregation. When most library schools wouldn’t admit Black students. She built the school that trained the Black librarians who would: • Run Black libraries • Integrate white institutions • Redesign who got access to knowledge for decades She didn’t stop there. She served on the American Library Association Council in the 1940s, bringing Black voices into national professional decisions. Eliza didn’t treat her doctorate like a crown. She treated it like a key — then built doors for other people to walk through. That’s the opposite of what’s happening to too many Black women now: • Degrees on degrees • Loans that look like mortgages • Roles that don’t match our expertise or our value

Cities led by Black women are literally being threatened with federal takeover on live TV. And somewhere, Lillian Harris Payne is looking down on us like, “We’ve seen this movie before.” Welcome to Day 26 of Deleted History — the women they prayed you would never learn about. Right now, Trump is: ➤ Telling a Black woman mayor he can “take over” her city and run it himself ➤ Trying to strip Black women of control over their own police departments ➤ Floating federal crackdowns in Black‑led cities as if our leadership is the problem It looks new because the cameras are better. The playbook is not. Lillian Harris Payne lived through an earlier version of this in Richmond: No one handed her a title meant to be seen. So she went after the levers instead. She started as a teacher. That paycheck was step one. Through Black women’s clubs, she connected with Maggie Lena Walker and stepped into the Independent Order of St. Luke — right as it shifted from a small benevolent society into a financial powerhouse for Black Richmond. Lillian became the woman in the back room who quietly ran things. ➤ She steered mortgages and loans so Black families in Jackson Ward could buy homes. ➤ In media, she rose from proofreader to managing editor of the St. Luke Herald, shaping what Black Richmond read each week about money and power. ➤ In culture, she wrote plays and organized pageants that built pride and funded community work. Bank. Newspaper. Stage. Not three random gigs — one integrated power system. And here’s the part that should hit every Black woman leader watching this administration test your limits: They can undermine your title. They can insult your competence. They can threaten to “take over” your city. It is much harder to take over: ➤ A bank that you helped build ➤ A narrative ecosystem you edit ➤ A community that runs on the systems you designed Lillian’s life is the contrarian truth: The real power isn’t just in the mic or the mayor’s seat. It’s in the systems that decide who gets money, what stories get told, and which visions get resourced.

Hollywood is suing AI companies to stop them from stealing actors’ faces. But the film industry has been stealing women’s work since the beginning. Welcome to Day 24 of Deleted History— the women they prayed you would never Google. Her name is Alice Guy-Blaché. Before Hollywood. Before Oscars. Before today’s AI copyright battles. There was a 20-something secretary in Paris who looked at a clunky camera and thought: “This isn’t just a machine. This is a storytelling weapon.” While men filmed trains and street scenes, Alice wrote and directed one of the first narrative films ever made. While they treated cameras like lab equipment, she used them to invent on-screen fiction, special effects, and synced sound. While they waited for an industry, she built a studio. She went from “just the secretary” at a camera company… to head of production, supervising hundreds of films. Then she crossed the ocean and did something wild for the 1910s: She built Solax Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Soundstages. Crews. Distribution. Over 1,000 films written, directed, or produced across her career. And then? History did to Alice what today’s AI models try to do to creators: It scraped her work. Reassigned her credit. Acted like her genius belonged to the men around her. The same industry now running to court yelling “protect our IP” quietly erased the woman who helped create it. Hollywood didn’t suddenly discover respect for creators because of AI. It’s just different people getting exploited now. Alice Guy-Blaché is the original cautionary tale and the blueprint: If you only make content, they can erase you. If you build categories and infrastructure, they have to chase you. She didn’t wait for permission. She treated her vision like law and built around it. That’s exactly what we’re doing at Black Women Sell Live 2026. There are over 5,100 women on the waitlist. There are only 850 seats. Tickets open February 25th — and they open to the waitlist only on that date.

She didn’t start with a pitch deck. She started in a tiny one‑room beauty shop in Atlantic City in 1913, doing hair by day and knocking doors to sell her own products at night. She died a millionaire whose company employed around 500 people and worked with roughly 45,000 sales agents worldwide. And most people have never heard her name. Welcome to Day 7 of Deleted History: 28 Black Women They Prayed You'd Never Learn About... Sara Spencer Washington didn’t wait for help. She created the Apex News & Hair Company in a market that didn’t even think Black women were worth advertising to. By the 1940s, “Madame Washington” had turned that one-room shop into an empire - literally. She created a manufacturing lab producing hundreds of products, beauty colleges in about a dozen states, international schools, and a sales force stretching from Haiti to South Africa. She was what we’d now call a high‑growth founder, long before anyone used that language. But here’s what really matters: She refused to accept the economic rules written for Black people in her era. When Black golfers were barred from local courses, she built the Apex Golf Club, one of the first Black‑owned golf courses in the country. When her neighbors couldn’t afford heat in the Great Depression, she delivered coal herself. Even in death, her business was estimated at over a million dollars, employed about 500 workers, and was supported by tens of thousands of independent agents—many of them Black women using sales to buy their own freedom. Her beauty colleges graduated thousands of students. Her slogan was simple and brutally clear: “Now is the time to plan your future by learning a depression-proof business.” She understood that sales was not a dirty word; it was a survival strategy. A century later, Black women are still carrying the economy on their backs—and still getting the smallest share of the rewards. Black women are the fastest‑growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S., now running roughly 2.1–2.7 million businesses and generating close to 100 billion dollars in revenue.