De Mena was born into a Creole family in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, and obtained her education in the United States before marrying a Nicaraguan and moving to Central America.
[14][Notes 2] Reconstruction and rioting, coupled with the implementation of Jim Crow laws in Louisiana led most of the Turpeau family to leave the area and become professionals in the north.
[6] David DeWitt became a well-known preacher and a member of the Ohio House of Representatives[19] and his daughter, Leontine T. Kelly born in Washington, D.C. was the first black woman bishop of the United Methodist Church.
[6][22] Turpeau, rather than moving north, chose to go south to Bluefields, Nicaragua, with her new husband Francisco Hiberto Mena (aka Francis or Frank in English sources), a Creole planter, activist, and newspaperman.
[6][23] By the time de Mena arrived in Bluefields, the Mosquito Coast had transitioned from a British protectorate to a Nicaraguan capital city of the Zelaya Department with strong commercial ties to the United States.
[28] In 1936, another U.S. law was passed which allowed women who had lost their citizenship by marrying a foreigner between 1907 and 1922 to forgo a petition of naturalization, only if their spouse had died or the couple had divorced and if the woman was willing to swear an oath of allegiance.
[32] Though not native to Nicaragua, having lived in the stratified social order of a Hispanic country,[24] de Mena was able to empathize with Afro-Latina discontent in her travels through Latin America for UNIA and she spoke their language.
[28] On ship passenger manifests, she claimed to be African, colored, Negro, Spanish American, West Indian, and white on various voyages[34] and was known to travel on both a Nicaraguan and British passport.
[36] While de Mena may have been involved with the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Bluefields, as she later claimed, there is no documentation confirming her participation in the organization in Nicaragua.
[25] UNIA, founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914, was a Pan-African movement with the dual goals of bringing self-authority to black people worldwide and taking possession of Africa as a Negro right.
[46] De Mena's leadership of the UNIA, as a single mother,[47] "proved that [women] were intellectually equipped to be local leaders as well as transnational policy makers within the organization".
[48] Soon after the convention, Garvey was arrested on charges of mail fraud involving the Black Star Line's scheme to bring American Negros "home" to Liberia.
[53] De Mena proved successful in both fund raising and recruiting new members, and her language skills with Spanish were rewarded with a higher salary than Davis'.
By the time the women returned, now enjoying a reputation as a motivational speaker, de Mena was asked to join Garvey on stage on July 5, 1925, to call for unity.
[54] Throughout the summer and fall of that year, de Mena accompanied Amy Jacques-Garvey on a speaking tour covering many major cities in the Midwest, along the Atlantic coast and to New Orleans.
[55] At the emergency convention of 1926, de Mena was elected as assistant international organizer[42] and the following year succeeded Davis as the fourth vice president general, becoming Garvey's official representative.
[53] In 1928, de Mena married a Cameroonian medical student, Milton Tube Ebimber, who had studied in Germany, Japan and China and spoke several African, Asian, and European languages.
[34] Their opulent wedding, in which the bride was given away by her brother, David DeWitt Turpeau, was held at UNIA's Liberty Hall headquarters attracting wide coverage in the black newspapers.
The following year, Garvey appointed de Mena officer-in-charge of North America and his personal representative in the U.S., as he had formally split with UNIA, Inc. in New York and created the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League of the World operating out of Jamaica.
[61] As director of the UNIA's newspaper Negro World from 1932,[53][58] de Mena worked with Jacques-Garvey to create a ladies' page, breaking new ground at the time.
[34][66] Garvey tried to bring the UNIA back to its former status from Jamaica, continuing to write articles for the Negro World and developing two other short-lived papers, The Blackman and The New Jamaican, but all had folded by 1933.
Aiken used the paper to call for anti-lynching legislation and championed African-American civil rights, including liberation in "spiritual, economic, political and industrial emancipation".
[74] She supported a variety of causes including the improvement of conditions for children and orphans,[75] hygiene and licensing regulations for beauticians,[76] care facilities for the elderly, better schools, and controlling government waste.
[78][76] She believed that until women could plan the size of their own families, they would not be able to improve the economic, educational, or moral status of the black community as they would be unable to devote quality support to large numbers of children.
[69] That same year, she made a trip back to the U.S., in part to console one of her sisters who was ailing,[82] but also to visit the Birth Control Research Bureau, attend lectures at Howard University and participate in roundtable discussions with the National Woman's Party.
She was the current president of the Women's Liberal Club when she boarded a ship in September 1953 to see a doctor in the U.S.[5] Aiken died on October 23, 1953, from cancer and was buried in the Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.