Single Mom…and so much more!

Sheroes

These fascinating women defy the single mom stereotypes. Each of them have had a season of single motherhood, but they didn’t sit around waiting for life to happen to them; they made things happen for themselves.

Cathy Hughes

Media giant Catherine “Cathy” Hughes is the Founder and Chairperson of Radio One, Inc. She was an unwed mother at 17, who later married, and then divorced. She is the first African-American woman to head a firm publicly traded on a New York stock exchange in the United States.

Susan L. Taylor

Susan L. Taylor is the former editor-in-chief of Essence magazine. After divorcing her first husband, William Bowles, Susan L. Taylor struggled as a single parent in personal and financial crisis. Her rise to the top at Essence took some ten years. She moved from the part-time position of freelance beauty editor, to the full-time staff position of fashion and beauty editor, and eventually became editor-in-chief in 1981.

Dr. Maya Angelou

Pulitzer Prize nominee, Dr. Maya Angelou, became the single mother of a son at the age of 17. In her latest book, Letter to My Daughter, Angelou states that her first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.

Katie Couric

Katie Couric is a television journalist raising two daughters as a single mom. Her husband, Jay Monahan, died of colon cancer at the age of 42. As a result, Couric is a prominent spokeswoman for colon cancer awareness.

Joy Mangano

Joy Mangano is an inventor and entrepreneur. She was a single mother of three struggling to make ends meet when she invented the world’s first self-wringing mop, the Miracle Mop. But nothing could be more practicle than Joy’s Huggable Hangers, which she premiered on HSNtv in 2000. She has sold more than 200 million hangers to date.

Check out Joy’s Up from nothing story in ABC’s 20/20 archives.

Dr. Donda West

The late Dr. Donda West, Former Chair of the University of Chicago English department raised rap superstar Kanye West as a single mom.

Iyanla Vanzant

Iyanla Vanzant, law school graduate, best-selling author and Yoruba Priestess, is the former single mother of 3. Born Rhonda Eva Harris in the back of a taxi, she is a domestic abuse survivor. Vanzant is a graduate of Medgar Evers College (BA) and City University of New York (JD), and the best-selling author of Acts of Faith, In the Meantime, and many other books.

Vanzant is the founder of Inner Visions .

Valerie Jarrett

Valerie Jarrett is a prominent business leader, a single mother, and a key adviser to Barack Obama.

Princess Diana

The late Princess Diana, Princess of Wales, a humanitarian, was very well known for her support of several charity projects. At the time of her death she was the divorced mother of Prince William and Prince Harry.

Kimora Lee Simmons

Kimora Lee Simmons is a fashion icon (Baby Phat, KLS and Fabulosity), author (Fabulosity), model, and a divorced single mom to two daughters, Ming Lee and Aoki Lee.

Kimora also stars in her own reality TV show, Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane.

Debbie Phelps

Debbie Phelps is a middle school principal. After her divorce, she raised her son, Olympic Gold-medalist Michael Phelps (the most-medaled Olympic athlete) and his two sisters as a single mom. She is also JOHNSON’S Mom of the Olympic Games.

Sarah Ferguson

Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, is the Founder of Children in Crisis and The Sarah Ferguson Foundation, a 2005 global ambassador for Ronald McDonald House Charities’ World Children’s Day, and a divorced mother of two daughters.

Gayle King

Gayle King, Editor-at-large for O, the Oprah Magazine, is the divorced mother of a son and a daughter, Will and Kirby. King hosts a daily radio show, The Gayle King Show, on Oprah’s XM radio station,
XM 156.

Paula Deen

Paula Deen is a Restauranteur (The Lady & Sons and Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House) and an Emmy-award winning personality. She’s the divorced mother of two sons.

J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling is the best-selling, billionaire author of the Harry Potter novels. She was divorced, unemployed and living on state benefits when she completed her first novel in many cafes, especially Nicolson’s Cafe, whenever she could get her daughter, Jessica, to fall asleep.

Sharon Sayles Belton

Sharon Sayles Belton was an unwed mother and a student at Macalaster College when she gave birth to a brain-damaged and severely disabled daughter. She later became Mayor of Minneapolis, MN.

Widows of the Civil Rights Movement
Dr. Betty Shabazz, Coretta Scott King, Myrlie Evers-Williams

The late Dr. Betty Shabazz, raised 4 daughters as a single mother after the assassination of her husband, Malcolm X. Shabazz was pregnant with twins at the time of his assassination. She was a registered nurse, having earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the Brooklyn State Hospital School of Nursing in 1958. She received a Bachelor of Arts in public health education and her Master of Arts in public health education from Jersey City State College. In 1975, she received her Ph.D. in education administration at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She was a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

The Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, [The Shabazz Center] honors the lives and legacies of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz by promoting human and civil rights through knowledge of the history and culture of the African Diaspora; education and self-empowerment; family values; and racial and religious reconciliation.

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After the assassination of her husband, Martin Luther King, Jr., the late Coretta Scott King concentrated her energies on fulfilling her husband’s work by building The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change as a living memorial to her husband’s life and dream.

In 1981, The King Center, the first institution built in memory of an African American leader, opened to the public. The Center is housed in the Freedom Hall complex encircling Dr. King’s tomb in Atlanta, Georgia. It is part of a 23-acre national historic site that also includes Dr. King’s birthplace and the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he and his father both preached.

She and Dr. King had four children before his murder.

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Myrlie Evers-Williams is an African American activist. She was the first full-time chairman of the NAACP and is the widow of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers. She and Evers had three children before he was murdered.