Judge Mattie Belle Davis, 1st woman in Florida & 2nd nationally to be elected Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

In 1959, Davis was appointed as the first woman judge of the Metropolitan Court of Dade County, and was the only woman judge with county wide jurisdiction from 1959-1965.

Althea Gibson was the 1st African-American woman to achieve major athletic fame by winning at Wimbledon in 1957 when she was named Woman Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. In 1958, Gibson won the American Tennis Association's women's championship and U.S. national singles titles.

Gibson retired from tennis in 1959 and played professional golf for another decade.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is the best known Florida author and winner of two O'Henry Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. She won her first O'Henry Award in 1932 for her short stories and one again in 1945. In 1938 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Yearling which was a bestseller and made into an Academy Award winning movie in 1946.