Endesha Ida Mae Holland

Endesha Ida Mae Holland was born on August 29, 1944, in Greenwood. Named Ida Mae after her mother, she later gave herself the name “Endesha,” a Swahili word meaning “to steer,” fitting her work as a driven social activist, educator, and prize-winning playwright. Despite an abusive childhood and involvement in prostitution, she joined the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s as a volunteer for SNCC, and her efforts to help Black people register to vote led to her being jailed multiple times. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in African American Studies and later earned her M.A. and Ph.D. there. Her play Second Doctor Lady, about her mother, became the source material for her autobiographical play From the Mississippi Delta and her memoir of the same title. In it she wrote, “If South is a perspective as well as a direction, then the Mississippi Delta may well be the most southern place on earth.” She died on January 25, 2006, in California.

Greenwood, Mississippi · United States