Happy Tuesday!!

                     Happy Tuesday!!
                        A Tuesday After a Holiday is Like a double Whammy Monday... 😄

Today our black history fact is about two courageous women.
 Janet Emerson Bashen ( February 12,1957- Present); Lyda D. Newman ( 1885).

Born in Mansfield, Ohio Janet Emerson grew up in a working class family. Her family moved to Huntsville, Alabama where her father worked as a garbage collector and her mother was the city's first emergency room nurse. She attended Alabama A&M until she got married and then she relocated to Houston.

While in Houston Janet receive her undergraduate degree in legal studies and government from the University of Houston and she went on to later complete her graduate degree in Administration at Rice University's Jesse Jones Graduate School. She also attended                                                     Harvard University's Women of Power: Leadership of the New World.

After graduation, Janet worked in the insurance industry.  While working in the insurance industry she called for the creation of third party teams to investigate Equal Employment Opportunity claims as they became known in her work place.  She would argue that the third party investigators would be less subject to influence. Since the CEO of the company Janet work for did not listen to her argument about third party investigators for Equal Opportunity claims. At the encouragement of the National Urban League, Janet borrowed 5,000 from her mother and in the year 1994 from her dining room table, she started her own EEO complaints management business.  

The new company Bashen Corporation specialized in investigating complaints that were made to the Equal Employment Opportunity commission. As her business grew she encountered a problem when it came to storing and retrieving information that was related to the Equal Employment Opportunity. In the year 2001 she reached out to the cousin Donny Moore who was a computer scientist from Tufts University.  They worked together to develop a software that she can used to secure and store information about cases.  Janet decide to make all EEO cases public, in order to keep people informed.   Also in this same year she filed a patent for Link Line and in the year 2006 she got it approved. She became the first African American Women in the U.S. to hold a software patent.

In the year 2003 Janet received the Greater Houston Black Chamber's Pinnacle award and in 2012 she was named to Ebony Magazine's list of the 100 most influential African Americans in entertainment, politics, sports and business.

Lyda D Newman was born in Ohio in the year 1885. By the late 1890's she became an New York resident.  In the year 1898 she applied to the U.S. patent for a new style of the hairbrush. The patent was approved patent in November 15, 1898. The hairbrush designed included several features efficiency and hygiene. It had evenly spaced rows of bristles with open slots to guide debris away from the hair into a recessed compartment and a back that opened at the touch of a button for cleaning out the component.

In the year 1915 she was mention in local newspapers for her suffrage in work.  She was an organizer of an African American branch of the Women Suffrage Party which fought to give women the legal right to vote. She also canvassed her neighborhood to raise awareness of the cause and she organized suffrage meetings in her voting district.