The photo portrays Lulu Merle Johnson in the late 1920s; she would be the first African American woman in the nation to earn the PhD in history, at the University of Iowa in 1941.

The Iowa Women's Archives holds more than 1100 manuscript collections that chronicle the lives and work of Iowa women, their families, and their communities.  These personal papers and organizational records date from the nineteenth century to the present.  Together with oral histories, they document the activities of Iowa women throughout the state and beyond its borders.  Included in their collecting efforts are special projects devoted to collecting and preserving the papers of and about African American women, and the Mujeres Latinas Project, established to collect and preserve materials which document the lives and contributions of Latinas and their families to Iowa history.