Attorney for Racial Justice The Story of Elsie Austin

Elsie Austin was the first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Cincinnati School of Law in 1930. She declared her belief in Bahá ’ u’ llá h in 1934 and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as assistant attorney general for the state of Ohio. For a decade afterward, she was a foreign service diplomat for the US Information Agency and worked tirelessly on cultural and educational projects in several African countries. From 1953 to 1957, she pioneered to Tangier, Morocco and served on the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá ’ í s of North and West Africa from 1953 to 1958. In 1957, Shoghi Effendi named her a Knight of Bahá ’ u’ llá h. This book gives a fictionalized account of Elsie Austin’ s life based on the author’ s research of and interviews with her. It is hoped that the reader will gain an appreciation for this champion of racial justice and how she rose during her lifetime to become a Change Maker.

Luthando Mazibuko has had a passion for drawing since his early childhood in South Africa and holds a BFA in illustration from Northern Illinois University and an MAT in fine art from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis is a professor emerita at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She is the author of My Soul Is My Own: Oral Narratives of African American Women in the Professions, Unrelated Kin: Race and Gender in Women’ s Personal Narratives, and co-authored Lights of the Spirit: Historical Portraits of Black Bahá ’ í s in North America, 1989– 2000 with Richard Thomas. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship, a Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.