By April Dinwoodie, TRJ's Executive Director
Taraji P. Henson began her professional acting career in the late 90’s after graduating from HBCU, Howard University. For nearly three decades she has lite up our screens with her talent and grace. She has won a Golden Globe Award as well as being nominated for an Academy Award and four Primetime Emmy Awards.
Taraji made her film debut in the crime film Streetwise (1998), gained recognition for her role in Hustle & Flow (2005). For her role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button she earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2016, she portrayed mathematician Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures. She has also acted in Baby Boy (2001), The Karate Kid (2010), Think Like a Man (2012), Acrimony (2018), What Men Want (2019), and The Best of Enemies (2019). Henson has also been prolific in television acting. From 2011 to 2013, she co-starred as Joss Carter in the CBS drama series Person of Interest. From 2015 to 2020, she starred as Cookie Lyon in the Fox drama series Empire, for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama and was nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards in 2015 and 2016. Her other Emmy-nominated roles were for the Lifetime movie Taken from Me: The Tiffany Rubin Story (2011) and for her guest role in the ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary (2023). In 2016, Time named Henson one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Later that year, she released a New York Times best-selling autobiography titled Around the Way Girl. In 2019, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Most recently, Taraji stars in the Color Purple playing Shug Avery, the beautiful, vivacious, and flamboyant blues singer. For this role, Henson adds singer to her list of gifts and talents she shares with the world. During the media interviews for the film, Henson has been vocal about the heavy lift that professional Black women have in Hollywood (and generally) and the inequities in pay they face. “I’m just tired of working so hard, being gracious at what I do, getting paid a fraction of the cost,” Henson told Gayle King on December 19. “I’m tired of hearing my sisters say the same thing over and over. You get tired. I hear people go, ‘You work a lot.’ I have to.”
The beauty, strength and grace from Taraji P. Henson is Black excellence personified and there are so many reasons to hold her up as an example for us all.