Zelda Foxall, a professional storyteller, has been doing in-character vignettes of historically significant African American Women since 2008, when she co-founded the performing arts company “Cause It’s Art”, which existed from 2008 to 2014. Through Zelda, these women are stepping forward to tell their own stories of how they overcame the tremendous odds of poverty, racism, and ignorance to climb to the top of their fields. She has portrayed powerful women such as Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights activist; Mae Jemison, former NASA astronaut on the space shuttle “The Endeavor” in 1992; Shirley Chisholm, the first African AmericanWoman elected to Congress in 1968; and Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and a 2004 Nobel peace prize recipient and others.

On June 25 she will present Sister Thea Bowman. Thea Bowman was born Bertha Bowman in 1937. When the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration came to Canton to establish a school for Blacks, her parents promptly enrolled her so that she could get a better education. At age 9, she became a catholic and eventually became a nun, changing her name to “Sister Thea” a name that literally means God. Sister Thea Bowman became one of a small number of Black Nuns, nationwide in the 1960s. She trained as a teacher and got her Doctorate degree in English from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. She was also a singer and a writer, as well as an evangelizer. She wore African attire and in an interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes in May of 1987, she talked about preaching a new black Catholic gospel that was powered by the conviction that when something is wrong, you change it. Sister Thea was also a co-founder of the Institute for Black Catholic Studies. In 1989, she gave a powerful presentation to the U.S. Bishops about what it meant to be Black and Catholic. She challenged the bishops to continue to evangelize the African American community, to promote inclusivity and full participation of blacks within Church leadership and to understand the necessity and value of Catholic schools in the African American community.