Women’s Hall of Fame honors Aretha Franklin

SENECA FALLS, N.Y. » “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin and Nobel laureate and “Beloved” author Toni Morrison will be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame Thursday as part of a posthumous class of Black honorees that also includes Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were widely used in biomedical research; Barbara Hillary, the first Black woman to travel to both the North and South Poles, and civil rights activists Barbara Rose Johns Powell and Mary Church Terrell.

The evening ceremony will be the first in a series of planned virtual inductions meant to correct a lack of diversity among honorees, hall officials said in a news release.