1.
Molefi Kete Asante
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Molefi Kete Asante is an African-American professor. He is a figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies. He is currently professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University and he is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies. He is the author of more than 66 books and the editor of the Journal of Black Studies. He is the father of author and filmmaker M. K. Asante, Asante was born Arthur Lee Smith Jr. in Valdosta, Georgia, the fourth of sixteen children. His father, Arthur Lee Smith, worked in a warehouse and then on the Georgia Southern Railroad. During the summers Asante would return to Georgia to work in the tobacco, an aunt, Georgia Smith, influenced him to pursue his education, she gave him his first book, a collection of short stories by Charles Dickens. As an adolescent, Smith attended Nashville Christian Institute, a Church of Christ-founded boarding school for students, in Nashville. There he earned his high school diploma in 1960, while still in high school, he became involved with the Civil Rights Movement, joining the Fisk University student march in Nashville. After graduation, he enrolled in Southwestern Christian College of Terrell, Texas. There he met Nigerian Essien Essien, whose character and intelligence inspired Smith to learn more about Africa, the first member of his family to graduate from college, Smith received his B. A. from Oklahoma Christian College in 1964. He did graduate work, earning his M. A. from Pepperdine University in 1965 with a thesis on Marshall Keeble, Smith earned his PhD from UCLA in 1968 in communication studies. He worked for a time at UCLA, becoming the director of the Center for Afro-American Studies, at the age of 30, he was appointed by the University at Buffalo as a full professor and head of the Department of Communication. Shortly before assuming his new position in 1976, Asante chose to make a name change because he considered Arthur Lee Smith a slave name. Asante was elected president of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and his work in intercultural communication made him a leading trainer of doctoral students in the field. Asante has directed more than one hundred PhD dissertations, Asante published his first study of the black movement, Rhetoric of Black Revolution, in 1969. Subsequently, he wrote Transracial Communication, to explain how race complicates human interaction in American society, soon Asante changed his focus to African-American and African culture in communication, with attention to the nature of African-American oratorical style. Additional works on Afrocentric theory included Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge, in 1986 Asante proposed the first doctoral program in African-American studies to the administration at Temple University
2.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
3.
Greatness
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Greatness is a concept of a state of superiority affecting a person or object. Greatness can also be referred to individuals who possess an ability to be better than all others. The concept carries the implication that the person or object. As a descriptive term it is most often applied to a person or their work, an example of an expression of the concept in a qualified sense would be Michael Jordan is the definition of greatness or Stalin was one of the greatest wartime leaders. In the unqualified sense it might be stated Stalin achieved greatness within his own lifetime, thus implying that greatness is a definite, application of the terms great and greatness is dependent on the perspective and subjective judgements of those who apply them. Historically, in Europe, rulers were given the attribute the Great, as in Alexander the Great, Frederick the Great. Starting with the Roman consul and general Pompey, the Latin equivalent Magnus was also used, as in Pompeius Magnus, Albertus Magnus, the English language uses the Latin term magnum opus, to describe certain works of art and literature. Much of this research does not actually use the term ‘great’ in describing itself, preferring terms such as ‘eminence’, ‘genius’, ‘exceptional achievement’, historically the major intellectual battles over this topic have focused around the questions of ‘nature and nurture’ or ‘person vs context’. Today the importance of both dimensions is accepted by all, but disagreements over the importance of each are still reflected in variations in research emphases. The early research had a strong emphasis and focused on intelligence as the driving force behind greatness. The earliest such research, Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton, argued that people vary hugely in “natural ability” which is inherited biologically and those at the very top end of the range, i. e. geniuses, become the leaders and great achievers of their generation. Galton then calculated the odds of eminent people having eminent relations, taking account the closeness of the biological connection. His findings were as anticipated, the famous the parent, the greater likelihood there would be illustrious relatives, and the closer the blood tie. Catharine Cox’s book on The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses, was similar to Galton’s in its orientation, for example, John Stuart Mill reportedly studied Greek at 3, read Plato at 7, and learned calculus at 11. As such, what he was doing at 5, the average person couldn’t do until 9 years,6 months of age, there was one major anthropological study of genius, and it was triggered specifically by the author’s contentions with Galton’s work. Alfred Kroeber’s Configurations of Cultural Growth looked at many of the same historic greats as did Galton and Cox, then within these groupings he listed his notables in “strict chronological order”, identifying the most eminent figures by using capital letters for their surnames. Kroeber found that genius never appeared in isolation, but rather, in Simontons words and he also found that there were historical “crests” and “troughs” in every field. These fluctuations in the appearance of genius were much too rapid to be explained by the mechanism of genetic inheritance along family lines
4.
African Americans
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African Americans are an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. The term may also be used to only those individuals who are descended from enslaved Africans. As a compound adjective the term is usually hyphenated as African-American, Black and African Americans constitute the third largest racial and ethnic group in the United States. Most African Americans are of West and Central African descent and are descendants of enslaved peoples within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of 73. 2–80. 9% West African, 18–24% European, according to US Census Bureau data, African immigrants generally do not self-identify as African American. The overwhelming majority of African immigrants identify instead with their own respective ethnicities, immigrants from some Caribbean, Central American and South American nations and their descendants may or may not also self-identify with the term. After the founding of the United States, black people continued to be enslaved, believed to be inferior to white people, they were treated as second-class citizens. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U. S. citizenship to whites only, in 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected President of the United States. The first African slaves arrived via Santo Domingo to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony, the ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterwards of an epidemic, the settlers and the slaves who had not escaped returned to Haiti, whence they had come. The first recorded Africans in British North America were 20 and odd negroes who came to Jamestown, as English settlers died from harsh conditions, more and more Africans were brought to work as laborers. Typically, young men or women would sign a contract of indenture in exchange for transportation to the New World, the landowner received 50 acres of land from the state for each servant purchased from a ships captain. An indentured servant would work for years without wages. The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was similar to slavery, servants could be bought, sold, or leased and they could be physically beaten for disobedience or running away. Africans could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom and they raised families, married other Africans and sometimes intermarried with Native Americans or English settlers. By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial standards and purchased indentured servants of their own. In 1640, the Virginia General Court recorded the earliest documentation of slavery when they sentenced John Punch. One of Dutch African arrivals, Anthony Johnson, would own one of the first black slaves, John Casor
5.
Temple University
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Temple University is a state-related-public doctoral university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded in 1884 by Baptist Minister Russell Conwell, in 1882, Conwell came to Pennsylvania to lead the Grace Baptist Church while he began tutoring working class citizens late at night to accommodate their work schedules. These students, later dubbed night owls, were taught in the basement of Conwells Baptist Temple, hence the origin of the universitys name, by 1907, the institution revised its institutional status and incorporated as a university. In 2015, Temple received $227.5 million in funding, ranking it 93rd out of 905 institutions in the NSF’s Higher Education Research. Temple is among the nations largest providers of education, preparing the largest body of professional practitioners in Pennsylvania. Conwell came to Pennsylvania in 1882 to lead the Grace Baptist Church while he began tutoring working class citizens late at night to accommodate their work schedules. These students, later dubbed night owls, were taught in the basement of Conwells Baptist Temple, hence the origin of the universitys name, the Grace Baptist Church quickly grew popular within the North Philadelphia area. A temporary board of trustees was created to handle the rapidly growing formalities associated with the churchs programs, when the board conducted its first meeting they named Russell H. Conwell president of The Temple College. Within the following months, Grace Baptist Church appointed a new board of trustees, printed official admissions files, regardless of whether they had the resources to support the school, Conwell’s desire was “to give education to those who were unable to get it through the usual channels”. Philadelphia granted a charter in 1888 to establish “The Temple College of Philadelphia”, by 1888, the enrollment of the college was nearly 600. It was in 1907 that Temple College revised its institutional status, Legal recognition as a university enhanced Temple in noticeable ways including its reputation, professional and graduate programs, overall enrollment, and financial support. Over time, Temple expanded, Samaritan Hospital was founded, a Medical School was added, after the merger, Temple officially reincorporated as Temple University on December 12,1907. Today, Temple is a Pennsylvania state-related university, meaning the university receives state funds, subject to state appropriations, but is independently operated. In U. S. News & World Reports 2017 rankings, Temple is tied for 56th among U. S. public universities, tied for 118th among all national universities, Temple undergraduate college is among the top colleges profiled in The Princeton Reviews The Best 379 colleges. Temples Social Science faculty is also ranked 76-100 in the world in 2015 by ARWU, Temple is ranked 94th out of 643 US institutions in National Science Foundations 2013 Higher education Research and Development Survey. Tylers graduate programs are highly selective, maintaining their reputation for providing one of the finest programs in the nation, as of 2015, Tyler’s overall ranking is 13th in the nation. Tyler’s individual graduate programs, as of 2015, ranked highly in their fields, painting and drawing, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics. Temples Fox School of Business, founded in 1918, is one of the largest business schools in the country, the Fox School offers 13 undergraduate majors,10 professional masters programs, two PhD programs, and the school has a variety of international partnerships
6.
Hank Aaron
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Henry Louis Hank Aaron, nicknamed Hammer, or Hammerin Hank, is a retired American Major League Baseball right fielder who is currently the senior vice president of the Atlanta Braves. He played 21 seasons for the Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves in the National League and 2 seasons for the Milwaukee Brewers in the American League, Aaron held the MLB record for career home runs for 33 years, and he still holds several MLB offensive records. He hit 24 or more home runs every year from 1955 through 1973, in 1999, The Sporting News ranked Aaron fifth on its 100 Greatest Baseball Players list. Aaron was born and raised in and around Mobile, Alabama, Aaron had seven siblings, including Tommie Aaron, who later played in MLB with him. Aaron appeared briefly in the Negro American League and in minor league baseball before starting his major league career and he played late in Negro league history, by his final MLB season, Aaron was the last Negro league baseball player on a major league roster. Aaron played the vast majority of his MLB games in right field, in his last two seasons, he was primarily a designated hitter. Aaron was an NL All-Star for 20 seasons and an AL All-Star for 1 season, Aaron holds the record for the most seasons as an All-Star, the most All-Star Game selections, and is tied with Willie Mays and Stan Musial for the most All-Star Games played. He was a Gold Glove winner for three seasons, in 1957, he was the NL Most Valuable Player when the Milwaukee Braves won the World Series. He won the NL Player of the Month award in May 1958, Aaron holds the MLB records for the most career runs batted in, extra base hits, and total bases. Aaron is also in the top five for career hits and runs and he is one of only four players to have at least seventeen seasons with 150 or more hits. Aaron is in place in home runs and at-bats. At the time of his retirement, Aaron held most of the games key career power hitting records, since his retirement, Aaron has held front office roles with the Atlanta Braves. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, in 1999, MLB introduced the Hank Aaron Award to recognize the top offensive players in each league. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and he was named a 2010 Georgia Trustee by the Georgia Historical Society in recognition of accomplishments that reflect the ideals of Georgias founders. Aaron was born in Mobile, Alabama, to Herbert Aaron, Sr. Tommie Aaron, one of his brothers, also went on to play Major League Baseball. By the time Aaron retired, he and his brother held the record for most career home runs by a pair of siblings and they were also the first siblings to appear in a League Championship Series as teammates. While he was born in a section of Mobile referred to as Down the Bay, Aaron grew up in a poor family. His family could not afford baseball equipment, so he practiced by hitting bottle caps with sticks and he would create his own bats and balls out of materials he found on the streets
7.
Ira Aldridge
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Ira Frederick Aldridge was an American and later British stage actor and playwright who made his career after 1824 largely on the London stage and in Europe, especially in Shakespearean roles. He was especially popular in Prussia and Russia, where he received top honors from heads of state and he was married twice, once to an Englishwoman, once to a Swedish woman, and had a family in England. Two of his daughters became professional opera singers, Aldridge was born in New York City to Reverend Daniel and Luranah Aldridge on July 24,1807. At age 13, Aldridge went to the African Free School in New York City, established by the New York Manumission Society for the children of black people. They were given an education, with the study of English grammar, writing, mathematics, geography. His classmates at the African free school included Charles L. Reason, George T. Downing, Aldridges first professional acting experience was in the early 1820s with the African Company, a group founded and managed by William Henry Brown and James Hewlett. In 1821, the built the African Grove Theatre, the first resident African-American theatre in the United States. Aldridge made his debut as Rolla, a Peruvian character in Richard Brinsley Sheridans Pizarro. He may have played the male lead in Romeo and Juliet, as reported later in an 1860 memoir by his schoolfellow. Confronted with the persistent discrimination which black actors had to endure in the United States, Aldridge emigrated to Liverpool, England, during this time the Industrial Revolution had begun, bringing about radical economic change that helped expand the development of theatres. The British Parliament had already outlawed the trade and was moving toward abolishing slavery in the British colonies. Having limited onstage experience and lacking name recognition, Aldridge concocted a story of his African lineage, by 1831 he had taken the name of Keene, a homonym for the then popular British actor, Edmund Kean. Aldridge observed a common practice of assuming an identical or similar nomenclature to that of a celebrity in order to garner attention. In addition to being called F. W. Keene Aldridge, he would later be called African Roscius, on October 10,1825, Aldridge made his European debut at Londons Royal Coburg Theatre, the first African-American actor to establish himself professionally in a foreign country. He played the role of Oroonoko in The Revolt of Surinam, or A Slaves Revenge. According to the scholar Shane White, English people had heard of the African Theatre because of British actor and comedian Charles Mathews, bernth Lindfors says, hen Aldridge starts appearing on the stage at the Royalty Theatre, hes just called a gentleman of color. But when he moves over to the Royal Coburg, hes advertised in the first playbill as the American Tragedian from the African Theater New York City, the second playbill refers to him as The African Tragedian. So everybody goes to the theater expecting to laugh because this is the man they think Mathews saw in New York City, an innovation Aldridge introduced early in his career was a direct address to the audience on the closing night of his engagement at a given theatre
8.
Muhammad Ali
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Muhammad Ali was an American professional boxer and activist. He is widely regarded as one of the most significant and celebrated figures of the 20th century. From early in his career, Ali was known as an inspiring, controversial, Cassius Clay was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and began training as an amateur boxer when he was 12 years old. At age 18, he won a medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. At age 22 in 1964, he won the WBA, WBC, Clay then converted to Islam and changed his name from Cassius Clay, which he called his slave name, to Muhammad Ali. He set an example of pride for African Americans and resistance to white domination during the Civil Rights Movement. He was eventually arrested, found guilty of draft evasion charges, Alis actions as a conscientious objector to the war made him an icon for the larger counterculture generation. Ali is regarded as one of the leading heavyweight boxers of the 20th century and he remains the only three-time lineal heavyweight champion, having won the title in 1964,1974, and 1978. Between February 25 and September 19,1964, Ali reigned as the heavyweight champion. He is the boxer to be named The Ring magazine Fighter of the Year six times. Nicknamed The Greatest, he was involved in historic boxing matches. Notable among these were the first Liston fight, the Fight of the Century, Super Fight II, the Thrilla in Manila versus his rival Joe Frazier, and The Rumble in the Jungle versus George Foreman. At a time when most fighters let their managers do the talking, Ali thrived in and indeed craved the spotlight, as a musician, Ali recorded two spoken word albums and a rhythm and blues song, and received two Grammy Award nominations. As an actor, he performed in films and a Broadway musical. Additionally, Ali wrote two autobiographies, one during and one after his boxing career, as a Muslim, Ali was initially affiliated with Elijah Muhammads Nation of Islam and advocated their black separatist ideology. He later disavowed the NOI, adhering initially to Sunni Islam and later to Sufism, after retiring from boxing in 1981, Ali devoted his life to religious and charitable work. In 1984, Ali was diagnosed with Parkinsons syndrome, which his doctors attributed to boxing-related brain injuries, as the condition worsened, Ali made limited public appearances and was cared for by his family until his death on June 3,2016, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was born on January 17,1942, in Louisville and he had a sister and four brothers
9.
Richard Allen (bishop)
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Richard Allen was a minister, educator, writer, and one of Americas most active and influential black leaders. In 1794 he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the United States and he opened his first AME church in 1794 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He worked to upgrade the status of the black community, organizing Sabbath schools to teach literacy. Richard Allen was born into slavery on February 14,1760, when he was a child Allen and his family were sold to Stokeley Sturgis, who had a plantation in Delaware. When Sturgis had financial problems he sold Richards mother and three of his five siblings, Allen had an older brother and sister left with him and the three began to attend meetings of the local Methodist Society, which was welcoming to slaves and free blacks. They were encouraged by their master Sturgis, although he was unconverted, Richard taught himself to read and write. He joined the Methodists at age 17 and he began evangelizing and attracted criticism from local slave owners. Allen and his brother redoubled their efforts for Sturgis so no one could say his slaves did not do well because of religion, the Reverend Freeborn Garrettson, who had freed his own slaves in 1775, began to preach in Delaware. He was among many Methodist and Baptist ministers after the American Revolutionary War who encouraged slaveholders to emancipate their people, when Garrettson visited the Sturgis plantation to preach, Allens master was touched by this declaration and began to give consideration to the thought that holding slaves was sinful. Sturgis was soon convinced that slavery was wrong and offered his slaves an opportunity to buy their freedom, Allen performed extra work to earn the money and bought his freedom in 1780, after which he changed his name from Negro Richard to Richard Allen. Allens first wife was named Flora and they were married on October 19,1790. She worked very closely with him during the years of establishing the church from 1787 to 1799. They attended church school and worked together purchasing land, which was donated to the church or rented out to families. Flora Allen died on March 11,1801, after a long illness, scholars do not know if they had any children. After moving to Philadelphia, Allen married Sarah Bass, a slave from Virginia. She had moved to Philadelphia as a child and the couple met around 1800, Richard and Sarah Allen had six children. Sarah Allen was highly active in what became the AME Church and is called the Founding Mother, Allen was qualified as a preacher in 1784 at the Christmas Conference, the founding of the Methodist Church in North America at Baltimore, Maryland. He was one of the two black attendees of the conference along with Harry Hosier, but neither were permitted a vote during deliberations, Allen was subsequently allowed to lead services at 5 AM, which were attended mostly by blacks
10.
Marian Anderson
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Marian Anderson was an American contralto and one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. Music critic Alan Blyth said, Her voice was a rich, most of her singing career was spent performing in concert and recital in major music venues and with famous orchestras throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965. Although offered roles with many important European opera companies, Anderson declined and she preferred to perform in concert and recital only. She did, however, perform opera arias within her concerts and she made many recordings that reflected her broad performance repertoire of everything from concert literature to lieder to opera to traditional American songs and spirituals. Between 1940 and 1965 the German-American pianist Franz Rupp was her permanent accompanist, Anderson became an important figure in the struggle for black artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused permission for Anderson to sing to an audience in Constitution Hall. The incident placed Anderson into the spotlight of the community on a level unusual for a classical musician. She sang before a crowd of more than 75,000 people and her performance as Ulrica in Giuseppe Verdis Un ballo in maschera at the Met was the only time she sang an opera role on stage. She participated in the civil movement in the 1960s, singing at the March on Washington for Jobs. Marian Anderson was born on February 27,1897, in Philadelphia, the daughter of John Berkley Anderson and her father sold ice and coal at the Reading Terminal in downtown Philadelphia and eventually opened a small liquor business as well. Prior to her marriage, Andersons mother had attended the Virginia Seminary. As she did not obtain a degree, Annie Anderson was unable to teach in Philadelphia under a law that was applied only to black teachers and she therefore earned an income caring for small children. Marian was the eldest of the three Anderson children and her two sisters, Alice and Ethel, also became singers. Ethel married James DePreist and their son, James Anderson DePreist was a noted conductor. Andersons parents were both devout Christians and the family was active in the Union Baptist Church in South Philadelphia. Marians aunt Mary, her fathers sister, was active in the churchs musical life and, noticing her nieces talent. In that role she got to perform solos and duets, often with her aunt Mary, Marian was also taken by her aunt to concerts at local churches, the YMCA, benefit concerts, and other community music events throughout the city. Anderson credited her aunts influence as the reason she pursued a singing career, beginning as young as six, her aunt arranged for Marian to sing for local functions where she was often paid 25 or 50 cents for singing a few songs
11.
Maya Angelou
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Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies and she received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood, the first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim. She was an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, in 1982, she earned the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. beginning in the 1990s, she made around 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and she was respected as a spokesperson for black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of black culture. Her works are used in schools and universities worldwide although attempts have been made to ban her books from some U. S. libraries. Angelous most celebrated works have been labeled as fiction. She made an attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family and travel. Marguerite Annie Johnson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4,1928, the child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian Johnson. Angelous older brother, Bailey Jr. nicknamed Marguerite Maya, derived from My or Mya Sister, four years later, the childrens father came to Stamps without warning and returned them to their mothers care in St. Louis. At the age of eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mothers boyfriend and she told her brother, who told the rest of their family. Freeman was found guilty but was jailed for one day. Four days after his release, he was murdered, probably by Angelous uncles, Angelou became mute for almost five years, believing, as she stated, I thought, my voice killed him, I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never again, because my voice would kill anyone. Shortly after Freemans murder, Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother, Angelou credits a teacher and friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, with helping her speak again. When Angelou was 14, she and her brother moved in with their once again
12.
Arthur Ashe
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Arthur Robert Ashe, Jr. was an American World No.1 professional tennis player. He won three Grand Slam titles, Ashe was the first black player selected to the United States Davis Cup team and the only black man ever to win the singles title at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open. He was ranked World No.1 by Harry Hopman in 1968 and by Lance Tingay of The Daily Telegraph, in the ATP computer rankings, he peaked at No.2 in May 1976. In the early 1980s, Ashe is believed to have contracted HIV from a blood transfusion he received during heart bypass surgery, Ashe publicly announced his illness in April 1992 and began working to educate others about HIV and AIDS. He founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, on June 20,1993, Ashe was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the United States President Bill Clinton. Arthur Ashe was born in Richmond, Virginia, to Arthur Ashe Sr. and he had a brother, Johnnie, who was five years younger. In March 1950, Ashes mother Mattie died from complications related to a pregnancy at the age of 27. Ashe and his brother were raised by their father who worked as a handyman, Ashe Sr. Ashe attended Maggie L. Walker High School where he continued to practice tennis. Ron Charity brought him to the attention of Robert Walter Johnson, a physician, and coach of Althea Gibson, Ashe was coached and mentored by Johnson at his tennis summer camp home in Lynchburg, Virginia from 1953 when Ashe was age 10, until 1960. Johnson helped fine-tune Ashes game and taught him the importance of racial socialization through sportsmanship, etiquette and he was told to return every ball that landed within two inches of a line and never to argue with an umpires decision. In 1958, Ashe became the first African-American to play in the Maryland boys championships and it was also his first integrated tennis competition. Louis teacher, tennis coach and friend of Dr. Johnson, to move to St. Louis, Ashe lived with Hudlin and his family for the year, during which time Hudlin coached and encouraged him to develop the serve-and-volley game that Ashes, now stronger, physique allowed. In December 1960 and again in 1963, Ashe featured in Sports Illustrated and he became the first African-American to win the National Junior Indoor tennis title and was awarded a tennis scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles in 1963. During his time at UCLA, he was coached by J. D. Morgan and practiced regularly with his idol, Pancho Gonzales. Ashe was also a member of the ROTC which required him to active military service after graduation in exchange for money for tuition. He was active in other things, joining the Upsilon chapter of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity on campus, after graduating with a bachelors degree in business administration, Ashe joined the United States Army on August 4,1966. Ashe completed his training in Washington and was later commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Adjutant General Corps. He was assigned to the United States Military Academy at West Point where he worked as a data processor, during his time at West Point, Ashe headed the academys tennis program
13.
Crispus Attucks
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Crispus Attucks was the first person killed in the Boston massacre, in Boston, Massachusetts, and is widely considered to be the first American casualty in the American Revolutionary War. Aside from the event of his death, along with Samuel Gray and James Caldwell and he was probably a Native American slave or freeman, merchant seaman and dockworker of Wampanoag and African descent. Some circumstantial evidence suggests that his father may have been Prince Yonger, an African-born slave and his mother, Nanny Peterattucks, despite the lack of clarity, Attucks became an icon of the anti-slavery movement in the mid-19th century. He was held up as the first martyr of the American Revolution, in the 1850s, as the abolitionist movement gained momentum in Boston, supporters lauded Attucks as an African American who played a heroic role in the history of the United States. Historians disagree on whether Crispus Attucks was a man or an escaped slave. Because of his heritage, his story is also significant for Native Americans. Attucks appears to have born in Framingham, Massachusetts. While nothing is known with certainty about Attuckss family, some speculate that his father married a woman who originated from the Natick Tribe. Framingham had a population of black inhabitants from at least 1716. Attucks was almost certainly of mixed African and Native American parentage and many assume he was descended from John Attuck of Massachusetts, in 1750 William Brown, a slave-owner in Framingham, advertised for the return of a runaway slave named Crispas. In the advertisement, Brown describes what Attucks looked like and was wearing when he was last seen and he also said that a reward of 10 pounds would be given to whoever found and returned Attucks to him. Attuckss status at the time of the massacre as either a black or a runaway slave has been a matter of debate for historians. What is known is that Attucks became a sailor and he spent much of the remainder of his life at sea or working around the docks along the Atlantic seaboard, many historians also believe that he went by the alias Michael Johnson in order to avoid being caught. He may only have been temporarily in Boston in early 1770, radical Whigs had coordinated waterfront mobs against the authorities. The presence of troops, instead of reducing tensions, served to inflame them. After dusk on March 5,1770, a crowd of colonists confronted a sentry who had chastised a boy for complaining that an officer did not pay a barber bill, both townspeople and a company of British soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot gathered. The colonists threw snowballs and debris at the soldiers, Attucks and a group of men with Attucks approached the Old State House armed with clubs. A soldier was struck with a piece of wood, an act some witnesses claimed was done by Attucks, other witnesses stated that Attucks was leaning upon a stick when the soldiers opened fire
14.
James Baldwin
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James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son, explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, some Baldwin essays are book-length, for instance The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Devil Finds Work. An unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, was expanded upon and adapted for cinema as the Academy Award nominated documentary film, such dynamics are prominent in Baldwins second novel, Giovannis Room, written in 1956, well before the gay liberation movement. Baldwin was born after his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, left his father because of his drug abuse and moved to Harlem. There, she married a preacher, David Baldwin, Baldwin spent much time caring for his several younger brothers and sisters. At the age of 10, he was teased and abused by two New York police officers, an instance of racist harassment by the NYPD that he would experience again as a teenager and document in his essays. His adoptive father, whom Baldwin in essays called simply his father and his stepfather died of tuberculosis in summer of 1943 just before Baldwin turned 19. The quest to answer or explain family and social rejection—and attain a sense of selfhood,24 on 128th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues in Harlem, where he wrote the school song, which was used until the school closed down. He then went on to DeWitt Clinton High School, in the Bronxs Bedford Park section, there, along with Richard Avedon, Baldwin worked on the school magazine as literary editor but disliked school because of the constant racial slurs. The difficulties of his life, including his stepfathers abuse, led Baldwin to seek solace in religion, at the age of 14 he attended meetings of the Pentecostal Church and, during a euphoric prayer meeting, he converted and became a junior Minister. Before long, at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, he was drawing larger crowds than his stepfather had done in his day. At 17, however, Baldwin came to view Christianity as based on false premises, Baldwin once visited Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, who inquired about Baldwins religious beliefs. He answered, I left the church 20 years ago and havent joined anything since, Elijah asked, And what are you now. Still, his church experience significantly shaped his worldview and writing, Baldwin reflected that being in the pulpit was like working in the theatre, I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. Baldwin accused Christianity of reinforcing the system of American slavery by palliating the pangs of oppression, Baldwin praised religion, however, for inspiring some American blacks to defy oppression. He once wrote, If the concept of God has any use, it is to make us larger, freer, If God cant do that, its time we got rid of him. Baldwin publicly described himself as not religious, a recording of him singing Precious Lord, Take My Hand a cappella was played at his funeral. When Baldwin was 15, his high-school running buddy, Emile Capouya, skipped school one day and, in Greenwich Village, met Beauford Delaney, Capouya gave Baldwin Delaneys address and suggested paying him a visit
15.
Benjamin Banneker
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Benjamin Banneker was a free African American almanac author, surveyor, naturalist and farmer. Born in Baltimore County, Maryland, to a free African American woman and he is known for being part of a group led by Major Andrew Ellicott that surveyed the borders of the original District of Columbia, the federal capital district of the United States. Bannekers knowledge of astronomy helped him author a commercially successful series of almanacs and he corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, drafter of the United States Declaration of Independence, on the topics of slavery and racial equality. Abolitionists and advocates of racial equality promoted and praised his works, although a fire on the day of Bannekers funeral destroyed many of his papers and belongings, one of his journals and several of his remaining artifacts are presently available for public viewing. Parks, schools, streets and other tributes have commemorated Banneker throughout the years since he lived, however, many accounts of his life exaggerate or falsely attribute his works. Benjamin Banneker was born on November 9,1731, in Baltimore County, Maryland to his mother Mary, a black, and his father Robert. There are two conflicting accounts of Bannekers family history, Banneker himself and his earliest biographers described him as having only African ancestry. None of Bannekers surviving papers describe a white ancestor or identify the name of his grandmother, however, later biographers have contended that Bannekers mother was the child of Molly Welsh, a white indentured servant, and an African slave named Banneka. The first published description of Molly Welsh was based on interviews with her descendants that took place in 1836, Molly may have purchased Banneka to help establish a farm located near what eventually became Ellicotts Mills, Maryland, west of Baltimore. One biographer has suggested that Banneka may have been a member of the Dogon tribe that were reported to have knowledge of astronomy, Molly supposedly freed and married Banneka, who may have shared his knowledge of astronomy with her. Although born after Bannekas death, Benjamin may have acquired some knowledge of astronomy from Molly, in 1737, Banneker was named at the age of 6 on the deed of his familys 100-acre farm in the Patapsco Valley in rural Baltimore County. He lived on the farm for all of his life. As a young teenager, Banneker met and befriended Peter Heinrichs, Quakers were leaders in the anti-slavery movement and advocates of racial equality. Heinrichs shared his library and provided Banneker with his only classroom instruction. Bannekers formal education ended when he was old enough to help on his familys farm, in 1753 at the age of 22, Banneker completed a wooden clock that struck on the hour. He appears to have modeled his clock from a pocket watch by carving each piece to scale. The clock continued to work until Bannekers death, after his father died in 1759, Banneker lived with his mother and sisters. The Ellicotts were Quakers and shared the views on racial equality as did many of their faith
16.
Amiri Baraka
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Amiri Baraka, previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an African-American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received the PEN Open Book Award, previously known as the Beyond Margins Award, in 2008 for Tales of the Out, Barakas career spanned nearly 50 years, and his themes range from black liberation to white racism. Barakas poetry and writing have attracted high praise and condemnation. In the African-American community, some compare Baraka to James Baldwin and recognize him as one of the most respected, others have said his work is an expression of violence, misogyny, homophobia and racism. Regardless of viewpoint, Barakas plays, poetry, and essays have been defining texts for African-American culture, Barakas brief tenure as Poet Laureate of New Jersey involved controversy over a public reading of his poem Somebody Blew Up America. Accusations of anti-semitism, and some attention from critics and politicians. Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey and his father, Colt Leverette Jones, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. His mother, Anna Lois, was a social worker and he won a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951, but transferred in 1952 to Howard University. His classes in philosophy and religion helped lay a foundation for his later writings and he subsequently studied at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research without obtaining a degree. In 1954, he joined the US Air Force as a gunner and his commanding officer received an anonymous letter accusing Baraka of being a communist. This led to the discovery of Soviet writings in Barakas possession, his reassignment to gardening duty and he later described his experience in the military as racist, degrading, and intellectually paralyzing. While he was stationed in Puerto Rico, he worked at the library, which allowed him ample reading time. The same year, he moved to Greenwich Village, working initially in a warehouse of music records and his interest in jazz began during this period. At the same time he came in contact with the avant-garde Black Mountain poets, in 1958 he married Hettie Cohen, with whom he had two daughters, Kellie Jones and Lisa Jones. He and Hettie founded Totem Press, which published such Beat poets as Jack Kerouac and they also jointly founded a quarterly literary magazine, Yugen, which ran for eight issues. Baraka also worked as editor and critic for the literary and arts journal Kulchur, with Diane di Prima he edited the first twenty-five issues of their little magazine The Floating Bear. In the autumn of 1961 he co-founded the New York Poets Theatre with di Prima, the choreographers Fred Herko and James Waring, and he had an extramarital affair with di Prima for several years, their daughter, Dominique di Prima, was born in June 1962
17.
Romare Bearden
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Romare Bearden was an Afro-American artist. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, born in Charlotte, North Carolina, educated in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bearden moved to New York City after high school and went on to graduate from NYU in 1935. He began his career creating scenes of the American South. Later, he endeavored to express the humanity he felt was lacking in the world after his experience in the US Army during World War II on the European front and he later returned to Paris in 1950 and studied Art History and Philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1950. Beardens early work focused on unity and cooperation within the African-American community and his lifelong support of young, emerging artists led him and his wife to create the Bearden Foundation to support young or emerging artists and scholars. In 1987, Bearden was awarded the National Medal of Arts and his work in collage led the New York Times to describe Bearden as “the nations foremost collagist” in his 1988 obituary. Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina and his family moved him to New York City as a toddler, and their household soon became a meeting place for major figures of the Harlem Renaissance. His mother, Bessye Bearden, played a role with New York Citys Board of Education. Bessye Bearden was also a New York correspondent for The Chicago Defender, young Romare Bearden traveled frequently, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and to visit family members in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1929 he graduated from Peabody High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and he then enrolled in Lincoln University, the nations first Historically Black College and University founded in 1854. He later transferred to Boston University where he served as art director for Beanpot, Bearden studied art, education, science and mathematics, graduating with a degree in science and education in 1935. He continued his study under German artist George Grosz at the Art Students League in 1936 and 1937. During this period he supported himself as a political cartoonist for African-American newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-American, Bearden grew as an artist not by learning how to create new techniques and mediums, but by his life experiences. His early paintings were often of scenes in the American South, in 1935, Bearden became a case worker for the Harlem office of the New York City Department of Social Services. Throughout his career as an artist, Bearden worked as a case worker off, during World War II, Bearden joined the United States Army, serving from 1942 until 1945. After serving in the army, Bearden joined the Samuel Kootz Gallery, a commercial gallery in New York. He would return to Europe in 1950 to study philosophy with Gaston Bachelard, Bearden then traveled throughout Europe visiting Picasso and other artists. This completely changed his style of art as he started producing abstract representations of what he deemed as human and his works were exhibited at the Samuel M. Kootz gallery until his work was deemed not abstract enough
18.
Mary McLeod Bethune
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She attracted donations of time and money, and developed the academic school as a college. It later continued to develop as Bethune-Cookman University and she also was appointed as a national adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of what was known as his Black Cabinet. She was known as The First Lady of The Struggle because of her commitment to better lives for African Americans. Born in Mayesville, South Carolina, to parents who had been slaves and she took an early interest in becoming educated, with the help of benefactors, Bethune attended college hoping to become a missionary in Africa. She started a school for African-American girls in Daytona Beach, Florida and it later merged with a private institute for African-American boys, and was known as the Bethune-Cookman School. Bethune maintained high standards and promoted the school with tourists and donors and she was president of the college from 1923 to 1942, and 1946 to 1947. She was one of the few women in the world to serve as a president at that time. Bethune was also active in clubs, which were strong civic organizations supporting welfare and other needs. After working on the campaign for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. She advised him on concerns of people and helped share Roosevelts message and achievements with blacks. At the time, blacks had been disenfranchised in the South since the turn of the century. Upon her death, columnist Louis E. Martin said, She gave out faith and hope as if they were pills, McLeod was born in 1875 in a small log cabin near Mayesville, South Carolina, on a rice and cotton farm in Sumter County. She was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to Sam and Patsy McLeod, Most of her siblings had been born into slavery. Her mother worked for her master, and her father farmed cotton near a large house they called The Homestead. Her parents wanted to be independent so had sacrificed to buy a farm for the family, as a child, Mary would accompany her mother to deliver white people’s wash. Allowed to go into the white children’s nursery, Mary became fascinated with their toys, One day she picked up a book and as she opened it, a white child took it away from her, saying she didn’t know how to read. Mary decided then that the difference between white and colored people was the ability to read and write. McLeod attended Mayesvilles one-room black schoolhouse, Trinity Mission School, which was run by the Presbyterian Board of Missions of Freedmen and she was the only child in her family to attend school, so each day, she taught her family what she had learned
19.
Guion Bluford
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Guion Stewart Bluford, Jr. Ph. D. is an American aerospace engineer, retired U. S. Air Force officer and fighter pilot, and former NASA astronaut, who was the first African American in space. Before becoming an astronaut, he was an officer in the U. S. Air Force and he participated in four Space Shuttle flights between 1983 and 1992. Bluford was born November 22,1942, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1964, a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. He has also attended the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania and his hobbies include reading, swimming, jogging, racquetball, handball, scuba diving and golf. He married Linda Tull in 1964 and has two sons, Guion III and James, Bluford attended pilot training at Williams Air Force Base, and received his pilot wings in January 1966. He then went to F-4C combat crew training in Arizona and Florida and was assigned to the 557th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Cam Ranh Bay and he flew 144 combat missions,65 of which were over North Vietnam. In July 1967, Bluford was assigned to the 3630th Flying Training Wing, Sheppard Air Force Base and he served as a standardization/evaluation officer and as an assistant flight commander. In early 1971, he attended Squadron Officer School and returned as an executive officer to the Deputy Commander of Operations. In August 1972, Bluford entered the U. S. Air Force Institute of Technology residency school at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Upon graduating in 1974 with his masters degree, he was assigned to the Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base as a development engineer. He served as deputy for advanced concepts for the Aeromechanics Division and as chief of the Aerodynamics. He has written and presented several papers in the area of computational fluid dynamics. He has logged over 5,200 hours of jet time in the T-33, T-37, T-38, F-4C, U-2/TR-1. He also has an FAA commercial pilot license, Bluford was chosen to become a NASA astronaut in August 1979 out of thousands of possible candidates. Bluford was a mission specialist on STS-8, STS-61-A, STS-39, blufords first mission was STS-8, which launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on August 30,1983. This was the flight for the Orbiter Challenger and the first mission with a night launch. STS-8 completed 98 orbits of the Earth in 145 hours before landing at Edwards Air Force Base, California, Bluford then served on the crew of STS-61-A, the German D-1 Spacelab mission, which launched from Kennedy Space Center on October 30,1985. This mission was the first to carry eight crew members, the largest crew to fly in space, after completing 111 orbits of the Earth in 169 hours, Challenger landed at Edwards Air Force Base on November 6,1985
20.
Arna Bontemps
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Arnaud Arna Wendell Bontemps was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family and his father, Paul Bismark Bontemps, worked as a bricklayer, his mother, Maria Carolina Pembroke, as a schoolteacher. When he was three years old, his family moved to Los Angeles, California in the Great Migration of blacks out of the South and into cities of the North and they settled in what became known as the Watts district. After attending public schools, Bontemps attended Pacific Union College in Angwin, California and he majored in English and minored in history, and he was also a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. Along with many other West Coast Intellectuals, Bontemps was drawn to New York during the Harlem Renaissance, after graduation, he moved to New York to teach at the Harlem Academy in 1924. The Harlem Academy is the present day Northeastern Academy in New York City, while he was teaching, Bontemps began to publish poetry. In both 1926 and 1927, he received the Alexander Pushkin Prize of Opportunity, a National Urban League published journal, and in 1926 he won the Crisis Poetry Prize, which was an official journal of the NAACP. In New York, Bontemps met many friends including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Hughes became a role model, collaborator, and dear friend to Bontemps. Bontemps was married in 1926 to Alberta Johnson, with whom he had six children, from oldest to youngest they are, Joan, Paul, Poppy, Camille, Connie and Alex. In 1931, he left New York and his position at the Harlem Academy as the Great Depression got severely worse. He and his moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he had a teaching position at the Oakwood Junior College for three years. In the early 1930s, Bontemps expanded his writing as he began to publish fiction and he received a considerable amount of attention for his first novel, God Sends Sunday. This novel was a quintessential writing piece of the Harlem Renaissance movement and it followed the story of an African-American jockey named Little Augie who effortlessly earns money and then carelessly squanders it. Little Augie ends up wandering through the sporting world when his luck as a jockey eventually runs out. Bontemps was praised for his style, his re-creation of the black language. However, despite the abundant amount of praise Bontemps received for this novel, du Bois viewed it as “sordid” and equated it with other “decadent” novels of the Harlem Renaissance. Later in his career, Bontemps collaborated with Countee Cullen to create a dramatic adaption of the novel, together in 1946 they published this adaption of the book titled St. Louis Woman
21.
Edward Brooke
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Edward William Brooke III was an American Republican politician. In 1966, he became the first African American popularly elected to the United States Senate and he was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts, defeating former Massachusetts governor Democrat Endicott Peabody in a landslide. He served for two terms, and was defeated by Paul Tsongas in 1978, upon the death of Harry F. Byrd Jr. on July 30,2013, he became the oldest living former Senator, and remained so until his death on January 3,2015. Edward William Brooke III was born on October 26,1919, in Washington, D. C. to Edward William Brooke, Jr. and Helen Brooke. After graduating in 1936, he enrolled in Howard University, where he first considered medicine, Brooke graduated in 1941, and enlisted in the United States Army immediately after the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor. Brooke was commissioned as an officer, served five years in the Army, saw combat in Italy during World War II as a member of the segregated 366th Infantry Regiment, and earned a Bronze Star Medal. In Italy Brooke met his future wife Remigia Ferrari-Scacco, with whom he had two daughters, Remi and Edwina, following his discharge, Brooke graduated from the Boston University School of Law in 1948. I never studied much at Howard, he reflected, but at Boston University, I didnt do much else and his papers are stored at Boston Universitys Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. In 1950 he ran for a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in both the Democratic and Republican primaries, Brooke won the Republican nomination, but lost the general election. Brooke made two more tries for office, including one for secretary of state, but lost both races, the loss in the secretarys race was particularly close. Republican leaders took notice of Brookes potential, Governor John Volpe sought to reward Brooke for his effort, and offered him a number of jobs, most judicial in nature. He was described in the press as having the tenacity of a terrier and he parlayed his achievements there into a successful election as Attorney General of Massachusetts in 1962, he was the first elected African-American Attorney General of any state. He also coordinated with local police departments on the Boston strangler case, Brooke was portrayed in the 1968 film dramatizing the case by William Marshall. In 1966, Brooke defeated former Governor Endicott Peabody with 1,213,473 votes to 744,761, and served as a United States Senator for two terms, from January 3,1967, to January 3,1979. The black vote had, Time wrote, no measurable bearing on the election as less than 3% of the population was black. Brooke, who supported Michigan Governor George W, in 1967, Brooke was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. By his second year in the Senate, Brooke had taken his place as an advocate against discrimination in housing. With Walter Mondale, a Minnesota Democrat and fellow member of the Senate Banking Committee, he co-authored the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the Act also created HUDs Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity as the primary enforcer of the law
22.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won many awards for her work and influence, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1,1950, throughout her career Brooks received many more honors. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, a held until her death. Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7,1917, in Topeka, Kansas and she was the first child of David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Brooks. Her father was a janitor for a company who had hoped to pursue a career as a doctor but sacrificed that aspiration to get married. Her mother was a teacher as well as a concert pianist trained in classical music. Family lore held that her grandfather had escaped slavery to join the Union forces during the American Civil War. When Brooks was six weeks old, her moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, from then on. After completing high school, she graduated in 1936 from Wilson Junior College, Brooks began writing at an early age and her mother encouraged her saying, You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar. After these early experiences, Brooks never pursued a four-year degree because she knew she wanted to be a writer. I am not a scholar, she later said, im just a writer who loves to write and will always write. She worked as a typist to support herself while she pursued her career and she would closely identify with Chicago for the rest of her life. In a 1994 interview, she remarked on this, iving in the city, I wrote differently than I would have if I had been raised in Topeka, living there has given me a multiplicity of characters to aspire for. I hope to live there the rest of my days, Brooks published her first poem, Eventide, in a childrens magazine, American Childhood, when she was 13 years old. By the age of sixteen she had written and published approximately seventy-five poems. At seventeen, she started submitting her work to Lights and Shadows, the column of the Chicago Defender. Her poems, many published while she attended Wilson Junior College, ranged in style from traditional ballads and her characters were often drawn from the inner city life that Brooks knew well
23.
Blanche Bruce
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Blanche Kelso Bruce was a U. S. politician who represented Mississippi as a Republican in the U. S. Senate from 1875 to 1881, of mixed race, he was the first elected black senator to serve a full term. Hiram R. Revels, also of Mississippi, was the first African American to serve in the U. S. Senate, but did not serve a full term. Bruce was born into slavery in 1841 in Prince Edward County, Virginia near Farmville to Polly Bruce and his father was her master, Pettis Perkinson, a white Virginia planter. Bruce was treated well by his father, who educated him together with a legitimate half-brother. When Blanche Bruce was young, he played with his half-brother and his father legally freed Blanche and arranged for an apprenticeship so he could learn a trade. Bruce taught school and attended Oberlin College in Ohio for two years and he next worked as a steamboat porter on the Mississippi River. In 1864, he moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he established a school for black children, in 1868, during Reconstruction, Bruce moved to Bolivar, Mississippi and bought a plantation. He became a landowner of several thousand acres in the Mississippi Delta. He was appointed to the positions of Tallahatchie County registrar of voters and he later was elected to other county positions, including tax collector and supervisor of education, while he also edited a local newspaper. He became sergeant-at-arms for the Mississippi state senate in 1870, in February 1874, Bruce was elected by the state legislature to the Senate as a Republican, becoming the second African American to serve in the upper house of Congress. On February 14,1879, Bruce presided over the U. S. Senate, in 1880, James Z. George was elected to succeed Bruce. The presidential nominee that year was James A. Garfield, who won election, in 1881, Bruce was appointed by President Garfield to be the Register of the Treasury, becoming the first African American to have his signature featured on U. S. paper currency. Bruce was appointed as the District of Columbia recorder of deeds in 1890–93 and he also served on the District of Columbia Board of Trustees of Public Schools from 1892-95. He was a participant in the March 5,1897 meeting to celebrate the memory of Frederick Douglass which founded the American Negro Academy led by Alexander Crummell. He was appointed as Register of the Treasury a second time in 1897 by President William McKinley, on the Bruce plantation in Mississippi, black sharecroppers lived in flimsy wooden shacks, working in the same oppressive conditions as on white-owned estates. After his Senate term expired, Bruce remained in Washington, D. C. where he secured a succession of Republican patronage jobs, there, he also acquired a large townhouse and summer home, and presided over black high society. One newspaper wrote that Bruce did not approve of the colored men. He often said, I am a Negro and proud of it, on June 24,1878, Bruce married Josephine Beal Willson, a fair-skinned socialite of Cleveland, Ohio amid great publicity, the couple traveled to Europe for a four-month honeymoon
24.
Ralph Bunche
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Ralph Johnson Bunche was an American political scientist, academic, and diplomat who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s mediation in Israel. He was the first African American to be so honored in the history of the prize and he was involved in the formation and administration of the United Nations. In 1963, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy, for more than two decades, Bunche served as chair of the Department of Political Science at Howard University, where he also taught generations of students. Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1903 or 1904 and his father Fred Bunche was a barber and his mother, Olive Agnes, was an amateur musician, from a large and talented family. Her siblings included Charlie and Ethel Johnson and his maternal grandfather, Thomas Nelson Johnson, was mixed-race African American, the son of Eleanor Madden and her husband. Eleanor was the daughter of an African-American slave mother and Irish planter father. Thomas Nelson Johnson graduated from Shurtleff College in Alton, Illinois in 1875, in September 1875 he married Lucy Taylor, one of his students. Genealogist Paul Heinegg thinks that Fred Bunche were probably descended from the South Carolina branch of the family and he said that the censuses of 1900 and 1910 for Detroit list several members of the Bunch family who were born in South Carolina, but Fred Bunch was not among them. He believes that Bunche was descended from Bunch ancestors established as people of color in Virginia before the American Revolution. There were men of the Bunch surname in South Carolina by the end of the 18th century, the Bunch/Bunche surname was extremely rare. Several generations of the Bunch men, free men of color, married white women colonists from the British Isles, when Ralph was a child, his family moved to Toledo, Ohio, where his father looked for work. They returned to Detroit in 1909 after his sister Grace was born, with the help of their maternal aunt and their father did not live with the family again after Ohio and had not been a good provider. But he followed them when they moved to New Mexico, because of the declining health of his mother and uncle, Ralph moved with his maternal grandmother, Lucy Taylor Johnson, to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1915. His mother died in 1917, his uncle committed suicide three months later, in 1918, Lucy Taylor Johnson moved with the two Bunche grandchildren to the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles, which was then mostly white. Fred Bunche later remarried, and Ralph never saw him again, Bunche was a brilliant student, a debater, and the valedictorian of his graduating class at Jefferson High School. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, and graduated cum laude. Using the money his community raised for his studies and a scholarship at Harvard University. To help with living expenses at Harvard, Bunche sought a job at a local bookstore, the owner offered him a part-time job, and Bunche ran the store to his employers satisfaction
25.
George Washington Carver
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George Washington Carver, was an American botanist and inventor. The exact day and year of his birth are unknown, he was born into slavery in Missouri, either in 1861, Carvers reputation is largely based on his promotion of alternative crops to cotton, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes. He wanted poor farmers to grow alternative crops both as a source of their own food and as a source of products to improve their quality of life. The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes using peanuts and he spent years developing and promoting numerous products made from peanuts, none were commercially successful. He was also a leader in promoting environmentalism and he received numerous honors for his work, including the Spingarn Medal of the NAACP. In an era of high racial polarization, his fame reached beyond the black community. He was widely recognized and praised in the community for his many achievements and talents. In 1941, Time magazine dubbed Carver a Black Leonardo, Carver was born into slavery in Diamond Grove, Newton County, near Crystal Place, now known as Diamond, Missouri, possibly in 1864 or 1865, though the exact date is not known. His master, Moses Carver, was a German American immigrant who had purchased Georges parents, Mary and Giles, from William P. McGinnis on October 9,1855, Carver had 10 sisters and a brother, all of whom died prematurely. When George was only an old, he, a sister. Georges brother, James, was rushed to safety from the kidnappers, the kidnappers sold the slaves in Kentucky. Moses Carver hired John Bentley to find them, but he located only the infant George, Moses negotiated with the raiders to gain the boys return, and rewarded Bentley. After slavery was abolished, Moses Carver and his wife Susan raised George and they encouraged George to continue his intellectual pursuits, and Aunt Susan taught him the basics of reading and writing. Black people were not allowed at the school in Diamond Grove. There was a school for black children 10 miles south in Neosho, when he reached the town, he found the school closed for the night. He slept in a nearby barn, by his own account, the next morning he met a kind woman, Mariah Watkins, from whom he wished to rent a room. When he identified himself as Carvers George, as he had done his whole life, she replied that from now on his name was George Carver. George liked Mariah Watkins, and her words, You must learn all you can, then go out into the world and give your learning back to the people
26.
Shirley Chisholm
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Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was an American politician, educator, and author. In 1968, she became the first black elected to the United States Congress. In 1972, she became the first black candidate for a partys nomination for President of the United States. In 2015, Chisholm was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Shirley Anita St. Hill was born on November 30,1924, in Brooklyn, New York, to immigrant parents from the Caribbean region. She had three sisters, two born within three years after Shirley, one later. Their mother, Ruby Seale, was born in Christ Church, Barbados, as a consequence, in November 1929 as Shirley turned five, she and her two sisters were sent to Barbados on the S. S. Vulcana to live with their maternal grandmother, Emaline Seale. There they lived on the farm in the Vauxhall village in Christ Church. She did not return to the United States until May 19,1934, as a result, Shirley spoke with a recognizable West Indian accent throughout her life. If I speak and write easily now, that education is the main reason. As a result of her time on the island, and regardless of her U. S. birth, regarding the role of her grandmother, she later said, Granny gave me strength, dignity, and love. I learned from an age that I was somebody. I didnt need the black revolution to tell me that, beginning in 1939, Shirley St. Hill attended Girls High School in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, a highly regarded, integrated school that attracted girls from throughout Brooklyn. St. Hill earned her Bachelor of Arts from Brooklyn College in 1946 and she was a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. St. Hill met Conrad O. Chisholm in the late 1940s and he had come to the U. S. from Jamaica in 1946 and would later become a private investigator who specialized in negligence-based lawsuits. They married in 1949 in a large West Indian-style wedding, Shirley Chisholm taught in a nursery school while furthering her education, earning her MA in elementary education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952. From 1953 to 1959, she was director of the Friends Day Nursery in Brownsville, Brooklyn, from 1959 to 1964, she was an educational consultant for the Division of Day Care. She became known as an authority on issues involving early education, Chisholm was a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly from 1965 to 1968, sitting in the 175th, 176th and 177th New York State Legislatures. Her successes in the legislature included getting unemployment benefits extended to domestic workers and she also sponsored the introduction of a SEEK program to the state, which provided disadvantaged students the chance to enter college while receiving intensive remedial education
27.
Kenneth B. Clark
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Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark were African-American psychologists who as a married team conducted important research among children and were active in the Civil Rights Movement. They founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem and the organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Kenneth Clark also was an educator and professor at City College of New York, and first black president of the American Psychological Association. They were known for their 1940s experiments using dolls to study childrens attitudes about race, the Clarks testified as expert witnesses in Briggs v. Elliott, one of five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education. The Clarks work contributed to the ruling of the U. S. Supreme Court in which it determined that de jure segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Brown v, the oldest of three children, two girls and one boy, Mamie Phipps was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Harold and Katie Phipps. Her father was a doctor, a native of the British West Indies and her father also supplemented his income as a manager at a nearby vacation resort. Her mother helped him in his practice and encouraged both their children in education, even though Mamie grew up during the Depression and a time of racism and segregation, she had a privileged childhood. Her father’s occupation and income allowed them to live a middle-class lifestyle, however, Mamie still attended segregated elementary and secondary schools, graduating from Pine Bluff’s Langston High School in 1934 at only 16 years old. Being able to do things that people could do, but still having to go to a segregated school allowed her to see how society treated white. This realization contributed to her research of racial identity in black children. Despite the small amount of opportunities for students to pursue higher education. Phipps entered Howard University as a physics and mathematics major and she soon wanted to change her major because the mathematics and physics departments were not supportive of her because of prejudice against women in those fields, especially African American women. The only problem was that she did not know what to change her major to and she then met the most influential person on her becoming a psychologist, her future husband and partner Kenneth Clark. He was a student in psychology and he convinced her to change her major to psychology, another very important person that influenced Clark’s future career was Francis C. Sumner, who was the head of the Psychology department at Howard and he was supportive of her being in the psychology department, if he wasn’t she likely would not have wanted to be in the psychology program. Sumner also allowed her to work part-time in the department where she expanded her knowledge about psychology. During her senior year in 1937 Kenneth and Mamie got married, a year later, she earned her B. A. magna cum laude in psychology. Both Kenneth and Mamie went on for additional study at Columbia University and they later had two children together, Katie Miriam and Hilton Bancroft
28.
John Henrik Clarke
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John Henrik Clarke, was a Pan-Africanist writer, historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s. He was born John Henry Clark on January 1,1915, in Union Springs, Alabama, with the hopes of earning enough money to buy land rather than sharecrop, his family moved to the closest milltown, Columbus, Georgia. There he pursued scholarship and activism and he renamed himself as John Henrik and added an e to his surname, spelling it as Clarke. Clarke was a professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York from 1969 to 1986 and he also was the Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Visiting Professor of African History at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center. Additionally, in 1968 he founded the African Heritage Studies Association, in its obituary of Clarke, The New York Times noted that the activists ascension to professor emeritus at Hunter College was unusual. Without benefit of a school diploma, let alone a Ph. D. It acknowledged that nobody said Professor Clarke wasnt an academic original, in 1994, Clarke earned a doctorate from the non-accredited Pacific Western University in Los Angeles, having earned a bachelors degree there in 1992. By the 1920s, the Great Migration and demographic changes had led to a concentration of African Americans living in Harlem, a synergy developed among the artists, writers and musicians and many figured in the Harlem Renaissance. They began to develop supporting structures of study groups and informal workshops to develop newcomers, arriving in Harlem at the age of 18 in 1933, Clarke developed as a writer and lecturer during the Great Depression years. He joined study circles such as the Harlem History Club and the Harlem Writers Workshop and he studied intermittently at New York University, Columbia University, Hunter College, the New School of Social Research and the League for Professional Writers. He was an autodidact whose mentors included the scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, from 1941 to 1945, Clarke served as a non-commissioned officer in the United States Army Air Forces, ultimately attaining the rank of master sergeant. In the post-World War II era, there was new artistic development, with presses and magazines being founded. Clarke taught at the New School for Social Research from 1956 to 1958, traveling in West Africa in 1958–59, he met Kwame Nkrumah, whom he had mentored as a student in the US, and was offered a job working as a journalist for the Ghana Evening News. He also lectured at the University of Ghana and elsewhere in Africa and he challenged the views of academic historians and helped shift the way African history was studied and taught. Clarke was a devoted to redressing what he saw as a systematic. He accused his detractors of having Eurocentric views and his writing included six scholarly books and many scholarly articles. He also edited anthologies of writing by African Americans, as well as collections of his own short stories, in addition, Clarke published general interest articles. Besides teaching at Hunter College and Cornell University, Clarke founded professional associations to support the study of black culture
29.
John Coltrane
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John William Coltrane, also known as Trane, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career and he led at least fifty recording sessions during his career, and appeared as a sideman on many albums by other musicians, including trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk. As his career progressed, Coltrane and his music took on a spiritual dimension. Coltrane influenced innumerable musicians, and remains one of the most significant saxophonists in music history and he received many posthumous awards and recognitions, including canonization by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane and a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007. His second wife was pianist Alice Coltrane and their son Ravi Coltrane is also a saxophonist, Coltrane was born in his parents apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue, Hamlet, North Carolina on September 23,1926. His father was John R. Coltrane and his mother was Alice Blair and he grew up in High Point, North Carolina, attending William Penn High School. Beginning in December 1938 Coltranes aunt, grandparents, and father all died within a few months of one another, leaving John to be raised by his mother, in June 1943 he moved to Philadelphia. In September of that year his mother bought him his first saxophone, Coltrane played the clarinet and the alto horn in a community band before taking up the alto saxophone during high school. He had his first professional gigs in early to mid-1945 – a cocktail lounge trio, with piano and guitar. To avoid being drafted by the Army, Coltrane enlisted in the Navy on August 6,1945, by the time he got to Hawaii, in late 1945, the Navy was already rapidly downsizing. As the Melody Masters was a band, however, Coltrane was treated merely as a guest performer to avoid alerting superior officers of his participation in the band. He continued to other duties when not playing with the band, including kitchen. By the end of his service, he had assumed a role in the band. His first recordings, a session in Hawaii with Navy musicians. Coltrane played alto saxophone on a selection of standards and bebop tunes. In Philadelphia after the war, he studied theory with guitarist and composer Dennis Sandole. Originally an altoist, in 1947 Coltrane also began playing saxophone with the Eddie Vinson Band. Coltrane later referred to point in his life as a time when a wider area of listening opened up for me
30.
Bill Cosby
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William Henry Bill Cosby, Jr. is an American stand-up comedian, actor, author, and singer. Cosbys start in comedy began at the hungry i in San Francisco and was followed by his landing a starring role in the 1960s television show I Spy. He was also a regular on the television series The Electric Company during the shows first two seasons. Throughout the 1970s, Cosby starred in a number of films, after attending Temple University in the 1960s, he received his bachelors degree there in 1971. In 1973, he received a degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His dissertation discussed the use of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids as a tool in elementary schools. The sitcom highlighted the experiences and growth of an affluent African-American family, Cosby has been the subject of publicized sexual assault allegations since about 2000. He surrendered to authorities on December 30,2015, and was released on $1 million bail, Cosby is scheduled to go on trial on or before June 5,2017. Cosby was born on July 12,1937 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and he is one of four sons of Anna Pearl, a maid, and William Henry Cosby Sr. who served as a mess steward in the U. S. Navy. During much of Cosbys early childhood, his father was away in the U. S. armed forces, as a student, he described himself as a class clown. Cosby was the captain of both the team and the track and field team at Mary Channing Wister Public School in Philadelphia. Early on, though, teachers noted his propensity for clowning around rather than studying, at FitzSimons Junior High School, Cosby began acting in plays as well as continuing his devotion to playing sports. Cosby went on to Philadelphias Central High School, a magnet and academically rigorous university prep school where he played football, basketball, baseball, and ran track. In addition, Cosby was working before and after school, selling produce, shining shoes and he transferred to Germantown High School, but failed the tenth grade. Instead of repeating, he got a job as an apprentice at a repair shop, which he liked. In 1956, Cosby enlisted in the Navy, serving at the Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, Naval Station Argentia, Newfoundland and at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. During his four years in the Navy, Cosby served as a Hospital Corpsman working in therapy with Navy. He finished his equivalency diploma via correspondence courses and was awarded a track, there, he studied physical education while running track and playing fullback on the universitys football team
31.
Alexander Crummell
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Alexander Crummell was a pioneering African-American minister, academic and African nationalist. Ordained as an Episcopal priest in the United States, Crummell went to England in the late 1840s to raise money for his church by lecturing about American slavery, abolitionists supported his three years of study at Cambridge University, where Crummell developed concepts of pan-Africanism. In 1853 Crummell moved to Liberia, where he worked to convert native Africans to Christianity and educate them and he wanted to attract American blacks to Africa on a colonial, civilizing mission. Crummell lived and worked for 20 years in Liberia and appealed to American blacks to join him, after returning to the United States in 1872, Crummell was called to St. Marys Episcopal Mission in Washington, DC. In 1875 he and his congregation founded St. Lukes Episcopal Church and they built a new church on 15th Street, NW, beginning in 1876, and celebrated their first Thanksgiving there in 1879. Crummell served a rector there until his retirement in 1894, the church was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976. Crummell was born in New York City to Charity Hicks, a woman of color, and Boston Crummell. According to Crummells own account, his grandfather was an ethnic Temne born in Sierra Leone. Both parents were active abolitionists, and allowed their home to be used to publish the first African-American newspaper, Boston Crummell instilled in his son a sense of unity with Africans living in Africa. His parents influence and these early experiences within the abolitionist movement shaped Crummell’s values, beliefs, for example, even as a boy in New York, Crummell worked for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Crummell began his education in the African Free School No.2. Other African-American men who became active in the abolitionist movement, such as James McCune Smith and Henry Highland Garnet, also graduated from the school, Crummell attended the Canal Street High School. After graduating, Crummell and his friend Garnet attended the Noyes Academy in New Hampshire, however, a mob opposed to the new black first-year students attacked and destroyed the school. Crummell next enrolled in the Oneida Institute in central New York, while there, Crummell decided to become an Episcopal priest. His prominence as a young intellectual earned him a spot as keynote speaker at the anti-slavery New York State Convention of Negroes when it met in Albany in 1840. Denied admission to the General Theological Seminary in New York City because of his race, Crummell went on to study and receive holy orders, he was ordained in 1842 in Massachusetts. Bishop Onderdonk replied, I will receive you into this diocese on one condition, No negro priest can sit in my church convention, Crummell is said to have paused for a moment, and then said, I will never enter your diocese on such terms. In 1847, Crummell traveled to England to raise money for his congregation at the Church of the Messiah, while there, Crummell preached, spoke about abolitionism in the United States, and raised almost $2,000
32.
Countee Cullen
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Countee Cullen, born as Coleman Rutherford, was an African-American poet, author and scholar who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He pronounced his name Coun-tay, not Coun-tee, Countee Cullen was possibly born on May 30, although due to conflicting accounts of his early life, a general application of the year of his birth as 1903 is reasonable. He was either born in New York City, Baltimore, or Lexington, Kentucky, Cullen was abandoned by his mother, and reared by a woman named Mrs. Porter, who was probably his paternal grandmother. Porter brought young Countee to Harlem when he was nine, no known reliable information exists of his childhood until 1918 when he was taken in, or adopted, by Reverend and Mrs Frederick A. Cullen of Harlem, New York City. The Reverend was the minister, and founder, of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church. At some point, Cullen entered the DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx, in January 1922, he graduated with honors in Latin, Greek, Mathematics, and French. After graduating high school, he entered New York University, in 1923, he won second prize in the Witter Bynner undergraduate poetry contest, which was sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, with a poem entitled The Ballad of the Brown Girl. At about this time, some of his poetry was promulgated in the national periodicals Harpers, Crisis, Opportunity, The Bookman, the ensuing year he again placed second in the contest, but in 1925 he finally won. Cullen competed in a poetry contest sponsored by Opportunity and came in second with To One Who Say Me Nay, sometime thereafter, Cullen graduated from NYU as one of eleven students selected to Phi Beta Kappa. Cullen entered Harvard in 1925, to pursue a masters in English, about the time his first collection of poems. Written in a careful, traditional style, the work celebrated black beauty, the book included Heritage and Incident, probably his most famous poems. The poet accepts that there is God, and God is good, well-meaning, kind, but he finds a contradiction of his own plight in a racist society, he is black, Cullens Color was a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance. He graduated with a degree in 1926. This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African Americans, however, Cullen considered poetry raceless, although his poem The Black Christ took a racial theme, lynching of a black youth for a crime he did not commit. Countee Cullen was very secretive about his life and his real mother did not contact him until he became famous in the 1920s. The movement was centered in the community of Harlem, in New York City. During the 1920s, a generation of writers emerged, although a few were Harlem-born. Other leading figures included Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer, the movement was accelerated by grants and scholarships and supported by such white writers as Carl Van Vechten
33.
Benjamin O. Davis Jr.
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Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr. was an American United States Air Force general and commander of the World War II Tuskegee Airmen. He was the first African-American general officer in the United States Air Force, on December 9,1998, he was advanced to four-star general by President Bill Clinton. During World War II, Davis was commander of the 99th Fighter Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group, Davis himself flew sixty missions in P-39, Curtiss P-40, P-47 and P-51 Mustang fighters. Davis followed in his fathers footsteps in breaking racial barriers, as Benjamin O. Davis Sr. was the first African-American general in the United States Army. Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr. was born in Washington, D. C. on December 18,1912 and his father was a U. S. Army officer, and at the time he was stationed in Wyoming serving as a lieutenant with an all-white cavalry unit. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. served 41 years before he was promoted to general in October 1940. Elnora Davis died from complications giving birth to their third child in 1916. At the age of 13, in the summer of 1926, the experience led to his determination to become a pilot himself. After attending the University of Chicago, he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point and he was sponsored by Representative Oscar De Priest of Chicago, at the time, the only black member of Congress. During the four years of his Academy term, Davis was racially isolated by his White classmates and his classmates hoped that this would drive him out of the Academy. The silent treatment had the opposite effect and it made Davis more determined to graduate. He graduated in 1936, 35th in a class of 276 and he was the academys fourth black graduate after Henry Ossian Flipper, John Hanks Alexander, and Charles Young. When he was commissioned as a lieutenant, the Army had only two black officers – Benjamin O. Davis Sr. and Benjamin O. Davis Jr. After graduation he married Agatha Scott, at the start of his junior year at West Point, Davis had applied for the Army Air Corps but was rejected because it did not accept blacks. He was instead assigned to the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment at Fort Benning and he was not allowed inside the base officers club. He later attended the U. S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, and then was assigned to military tactics at Tuskegee Institute. This was something his father had years before, as a way for the Army to avoid having a black officer in command of white soldiers. Captain Davis was assigned to the first training class at Tuskegee Army Air Field and he was the first black officer to solo an Army Air Corps aircraft
34.
Martin Delany
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Martin Robison Delany was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician, and writer, and arguably the first proponent of black nationalism. He was one of the first three black people admitted to Harvard Medical School, trained as an assistant and a physician, he treated patients during the cholera epidemics of 1833 and 1854 in Pittsburgh, when many doctors and residents fled the city. He worked alongside Frederick Douglass to publish the North Star, after the Civil War, he worked for the Freedmens Bureau in the South, settling in South Carolina, where he became politically active. He ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor and was appointed a Trial Judge, later he switched his party loyalty and worked for the campaign of Democrat Wade Hampton III, who won the 1876 election for governor. Delany was born free in Charles Town, Virginia to Pati, although his father was enslaved, his mother was a free woman, and Martin took her status under Virginias slave laws. Both sets of Delanys grandparents were African and his paternal grandparents were of Gola ethnicity, taken captive during warfare and brought as slaves to the Virginia colony. Family oral history said that the grandfather was a chieftain, escaped to Canada for a period, patis parents were born in the Niger Valley, west Africa, and were of Mandinka ethnicity. Her father was said to have been a prince named Shango, captured with his betrothed Graci, after some time, they were given their freedom in Virginia, perhaps based on their noble birth. Graci stayed in America with their only daughter Pati, when Delany was just a few years old, attempts were made to enslave him and a sibling. Their mother Pati carried her two youngest children 20 miles to the courthouse in Winchester to argue successfully for her familys freedom, based on her own free birth. As he was growing up, Delany and his siblings learned to read and write using The New York Primer and Spelling Book, Virginia prohibited education of black people. When the book was discovered in September 1822, Pati took her out of Virginia to Chambersburg in the free state of Pennsylvania to ensure their continued freedom. They had to leave their father Samuel, but a later he bought his freedom. In Chambersburg, young Martin continued learning, occasionally he left school to work when his family could not afford for his education to continue. In 1831, at the age of 19, he journeyed west to the city of Pittsburgh. Having heard stories about his parents ancestors, he wanted to visit Africa, while living in Pittsburgh, in 1843 Delany met and married Catherine A. Richards. She was the daughter of a successful food provisioner, said to be one of the wealthiest families in the city, the couple had eleven children, seven of whom survived into adulthood. The parents stressed education and some of their children graduated from college, Delany became a student at Trinity A. M. E
35.
Frederick Douglass
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Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. In his time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders arguments that slaves lacked the capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave. After the Civil War, Douglass remained an active campaigner against slavery and wrote his last autobiography, Life, First published in 1881 and revised in 1892, three years before his death, it covered events during and after the Civil War. Douglass also actively supported womens suffrage, and held public offices. Douglass was a believer in the equality of all peoples, whether black, female, Native American. He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, one biographer argues, The most influential African American of the nineteenth century, Douglass made a career of agitating the American conscience. He spoke and wrote on behalf of a variety of causes, womens rights, temperance, peace, land reform, free public education. But he devoted the bulk of his time, immense talent and these were the central concerns of his long reform career. Douglass understood that the struggle for emancipation and equality demanded forceful, persistent, and he recognized that African Americans must play a conspicuous role in that struggle. Less than a month before his death, when a black man solicited his advice to an African American just starting out in the world, Douglass replied without hesitation. Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Talbot County, the plantation was between Hillsboro and Cordova, his birthplace was likely his grandmothers shack east of Tappers Corner, and west of Tuckahoe Creek. The exact date of his birth is unknown, and he chose to celebrate his birthday on February 14. In his first autobiography, Douglass stated, I have no knowledge of my age. Douglass was of mixed race, which likely included Native American on his mothers side and he was given his name by his mother, Harriet Bailey. After escaping to the North years later, he took the surname Douglass and he wrote of his earliest times with his mother, The opinion was. Whispered that my master was my father, but of the correctness of this opinion I know nothing and my mother and I were separated when I was but an infant. It common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, … I do not recollect ever seeing my mother by the light of day
36.
Charles R. Drew
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Charles Richard Drew was an American physician, surgeon, and medical researcher. He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage and this allowed medics to save thousands of lives of the Allied forces. The research and development aspect of his blood storage work is disputed, Drew was born in 1904 into an African-American middle-class family in Washington, D. C. His father, Richard, was a layer and his mother. Drew and his siblings grew up in D. C. s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, Drew won an athletics scholarship to Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he graduated in 1926. An outstanding athlete at Amherst, Drew also joined Omega Psi Phi fraternity and he attended medical school at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, receiving his MDCM in 1933, and ranked 2nd in his class of 127 students. A few years later, Drew did graduate work at Columbia University, in 1941, Drews distinction in his profession was recognized when he became the first African-American surgeon selected to serve as an examiner on the American Board of Surgery. Drew had a research and teaching career and became a chief surgeon. He was to collect, test, and transport large quantities of blood plasma for distribution in the United Kingdom, Drew went to New York City as the medical director of the United States Blood for Britain project. The Blood for Britain project was a project to aid British soldiers, Drew created a central location for the blood collection process where donors could go to give blood. He made sure all blood plasma was tested before it was shipped out and he ensured that only skilled personnel handled blood plasma to avoid the possibility of contamination. The Blood for Britain program operated successfully for five months, with collections of almost 15,000 people donating blood. As a result, the Blood Transfusion Betterment Association applauded Drew for his work, out of his work came the American Red Cross Blood Bank. In 1939, Drew married Minnie Lenore Robbins, a professor of economics at Spelman College whom he had met earlier that year. They had three daughters and a son and his daughter Charlene Drew Jarvis was the president of Southeastern University from 1996 until 2009. Beginning in 1939, Drew traveled to Tuskegee, Alabama to attend the free clinic at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital. For the 1950 Tuskegee clinic, Drew drove along with three other black physicians, Drew was driving around 8 a. m. on April 1. Still fatigued from spending the night before in the operating theater, after careening into a field, the car somersaulted three times
37.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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William Edward Burghardt W. E. B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, Du Bois rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation and he referred to this group as the Talented Tenth and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership. Racism was the target of Du Boiss polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies and he was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to fight for independence of African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia, after World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread bigotry in the United States military. Du Bois was a prolific author and he wrote one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and he published three autobiographies, each of which contains insightful essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACPs journal The Crisis, Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament, the United States Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23,1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to Alfred, Mary Silvina Burghardts family was part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state. She was descended from Dutch, African and English ancestors, William Du Boiss maternal great-great-grandfather was Tom Burghardt, a slave, who was held by the Dutch colonist Conraed Burghardt. Tom briefly served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War and his son Jack Burghardt was the father of Othello Burghardt, who was the father of Mary Silvina Burghardt. William Du Boiss paternal great-grandfather was James Du Bois of Poughkeepsie, New York, One of James mixed-race sons was Alexander. He traveled and worked in Haiti, where he fathered a son, Alfred, Alexander returned to Connecticut, leaving Alfred in Haiti with his mother. Sometime before 1860, Alfred Du Bois emigrated to the United States and he married Mary Silvina Burghardt on February 5,1867, in Housatonic. Alfred left Mary in 1870, two years after their son William was born, Mary Burghardt Du Bois moved with her son back to her parents house in Great Barrington until he was five. She worked to support her family, until she suffered a stroke in the early 1880s, Great Barrington had a majority European American community, who treated Du Bois generally well
38.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
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Paul Laurence Dunbar was an American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper, much of Dunbars more popular work in his lifetime was written in the Negro dialect associated with the antebellum South, though he also used the Midwestern regional dialect of James Whitcomb Riley. He wrote the lyrics for the musical comedy In Dahomey, the first all-African-American musical produced on Broadway, the musical later also toured in the United States and the United Kingdom. Dunbar also wrote in conventional English in other poetry and novels, since the late 20th century, suffering from tuberculosis, Dunbar died at the age of 33. Paul Laurence Dunbar was born at 311 Howard Street in Dayton, Ohio, on June 27,1872, after being emancipated, his mother Matilda had moved to Dayton with other family members, including her two sons Robert and William from her first marriage. Dunbars father Joshua had escaped slavery in Kentucky before the war ended. He traveled to Massachusetts and volunteered for the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the senior Dunbar also served in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment. Paul Dunbar was born six months after Joshua and Matilda married on Christmas Eve,1871, the marriage of Dunbars parents was troubled and Dunbars mother left Joshua soon after having a second child, a daughter. Joshua died on August 16,1885, Paul was then 12 years old, Dunbar wrote his first poem at the age of six and gave his first public recital at the age of nine. His mother assisted him in his schooling, having learned to read expressly for that purpose and she often read the Bible with him, and thought he might become a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It was the first independent black denomination in America, founded in Philadelphia in the early 19th century, Dunbar was the only African-American student during his years at Central High School in Dayton, Orville Wright was a classmate and friend of his. Well-accepted, he was elected as president of the literary society, and became the editor of the school newspaper. At the age of 16, Dunbar published Our Martyred Soldiers, in 1890 Dunbar wrote and edited The Tattler, Daytons first weekly African-American newspaper. It was printed by the company of his high-school acquaintances, Wilbur. After completing his schooling in 1891, Dunbar took a job as an elevator operator. He had hoped to study law, but was not able to because of his mothers limited finances, the next year, Dunbar asked the Wrights to publish his dialect poems in book form, but the brothers did not have a facility that could print books. They suggested he go to the United Brethren Publishing House which, in 1893, printed Dunbars first collection of poetry, Oak and Ivy. Dunbar subsidized the printing of the book, and quickly earned back his investment in two weeks by selling copies personally, often to passengers on his elevator
39.
Katherine Dunham
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Katherine Mary Dunham was an American dancer, choreographer, author, educator, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful careers in American and European theater of the 20th century. She has been called the matriarch and queen mother of black dance, while a student at the University of Chicago, Dunham took leave and went to the Caribbean to study dance and ethnography. She later returned to graduate and submitted a thesis in anthropology. She did not complete the requirements for the degree, however. Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology and she also developed the Dunham Technique. Katherine Mary Dunham was born on June 22,1909 in a Chicago hospital and taken as an infant to her parents home in Glen Ellyn, Illinois and her father, Albert Millard Dunham, was a descendant of slaves from West Africa and Madagascar. Her mother, Fanny June Dunham, who was of mixed French-Canadian and Native American heritage and she had an older brother, Albert Jr. with whom she had a close relationship. After her fathers remarriage a few later, the family moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois. Dunham became interested in writing and dance at a young age. In 1921, a story she wrote when she was 12 years old called Come Back to Arizona appeared in volume 2 of The Brownies Book. In high school she joined the Terpsichorean Club and began to learn a kind of dance based on the ideas of Jaques-Dalcroze. At a young age, Dunham organized a party to raise money for her church in which she starred in. At the age of 15, she organized the Blue Moon Café, a cabaret for Browns Methodist Church in Joliet. While still a school student, she opened a private dance school for young black children. After completing her studies at Joliet Junior College, Dunham moved to Chicago to join her brother Albert, in a lecture by Robert Redfield, a professor of anthropology, she learned that much of black culture in modern America had begun in Africa. She consequently decided to major in anthropology and to focus on dances of the African diaspora, besides Redfield, she studied under anthropologists such as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edward Sapir, and Bronisław Malinowski, under their tutelage, she showed great promise in her ethnographic studies of dance
40.
Duke Ellington
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Edward Kennedy Duke Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and bandleader of a jazz orchestra, which he led from 1923 until his death in a career spanning over fifty years. Ellington was based in New York City from the mid-1920s onward, in the 1930s, his orchestra toured in Europe. Some of the musicians who were members of Ellingtons orchestra, such as saxophonist Johnny Hodges, are considered to be among the best players in jazz, Ellington melded them into the best-known orchestral unit in the history of jazz. Some members stayed with the orchestra for several decades, a master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78 rpm recording format, Ellington often composed specifically to feature the style and skills of his individual musicians. Ellington also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, for example Juan Tizols Caravan, and Perdido, after 1941, Ellington collaborated with composer-arranger-pianist Billy Strayhorn, whom he called his writing and arranging companion. With Strayhorn, he composed many extended compositions, or suites, following an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, in July 1956, Ellington and his orchestra enjoyed a major career revival and embarked on world tours. Ellington recorded for most American record companies of his era, performed in films, scoring several. His reputation continued to rise after he died, and he was awarded a special posthumous Pulitzer Prize for music in 1999, Ellington was born on April 29,1899, to James Edward Ellington and Daisy Ellington in Washington, D. C. Daisy primarily played parlor songs and James preferred operatic arias and they lived with his maternal grandparents at 2129 Ida Place, NW, in the West End neighborhood of Washington, D. C. Dukes father was born in Lincolnton, North Carolina, on April 15,1879, Daisy Kennedy was born in Washington, D. C. on January 4,1879, the daughter of a former American slave. James Ellington made blueprints for the United States Navy, when Ellington was a child, his family showed racial pride and support in their home, as did many other families. African Americans in D. C. worked to protect their children from the eras Jim Crow laws, at the age of seven, Ellington began taking piano lessons from Marietta Clinkscales. Daisy surrounded her son with dignified women to reinforce his manners, Ellingtons childhood friends noticed that his casual, offhand manner, his easy grace, and his dapper dress gave him the bearing of a young nobleman, and began calling him Duke. Ellington credited his chum Edgar McEntree for the nickname, I think he felt that in order for me to be eligible for his constant companionship, I should have a title. Though Ellington took piano lessons, he was interested in baseball. President Roosevelt would come by on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play, Ellington went to Armstrong Technical High School in Washington, D. C. He gained his first job selling peanuts at Washington Senators baseball games, in the summer of 1914, while working as a soda jerk at the Poodle Dog Café, Ellington wrote his first composition, Soda Fountain Rag. He created the piece by ear, as he had not yet learned to read, I would play the Soda Fountain Rag as a one-step, two-step, waltz, tango, and fox trot, Ellington recalled
41.
James Forten
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James Forten was an African-American abolitionist and wealthy businessman in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Born free in the city, he became a sailmaker after the American Revolutionary War, following an apprenticeship, he became the foreman and bought the sail loft when his boss retired. Based on equipment he himself had developed, he established a profitable business. It was located on the waterfront of the Delaware River. Forten used his wealth and social standing to work for rights for African Americans in both the city and nationwide. Beginning in 1817, he killed himself the colonization movements, particularly that of the American Colonization Society and he affirmed African Americans claim to a stake in the United States, arguing instead for gaining civil rights in their country of birth. He persuaded William Lloyd Garrison to adopt an anti-colonization oo, and helped fund his newspaper The Liberator and he became vice-president of the biracial American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833, and worked for national abolition of slavery, and for black education and temperance. His large family was devoted to these causes, and two daughters married the Purvis brothers, who used their wealth as leaders for abolition. James Forten was born free on September 2,1766, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Thomas Forten was the grandson of a slave who had freed himself. However, Thomas Forten died young, and his son James started to work at the age of seven to help his mother and sister, at first he was a chimney sweep, later becoming a grocery-store clerk. He also attended the African School, run by Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet and his mother insisted that he continue in school, but by the age of nine, Forten had left school to work full-time. His early years of work became a measure for progress in his life, at the age of 14, during the Revolutionary War, Forten served on the privateer Royal Louis, commanded by Captain Stephen Decatur, Sr. The Royal Louis was captured by the British, and Forten was at risk of being made a slave, Royal Navy Captain John Beazley, who had captured the privateer, was impressed with Forten, and saw to it that he was treated as a prisoner of war. The prisoners were all transported to the English prison ship HMS Jersey, then moored in Wallabout Bay and this was one of several ships used as prisons, where a total of about 11,000 persons died during the war. The British also held Continental Army soldiers on the ship, which had extremely harsh conditions, thousands of men were crammed below decks where there was no natural light or fresh air, and few provisions for the sick and hungry. Prisoners were brutally treated, but most died due to poor sanitation, as many as eight corpses a day were buried from the HMS Jersey, before the British surrendered at Yorktown on October 19,1781. Forten was fortunate as he was exchanged after seven months imprisonment and he walked from Brooklyn to Philadelphia to return to his mother and sister. He signed up on a merchant ship, which sailed to England and he lived and worked there for more than a year in a London shipyard
42.
John Hope Franklin
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Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma in 1915 to attorney Buck Colbert Franklin and his wife Mollie Franklin. He was named after John Hope, a prominent educator who was the first African-American president of Atlanta University, Franklins father Buck Colbert Franklin was a civil rights lawyer, aka Amazing Buck Franklin. He was of African-American and Choctaw ancestry and born in the Chickasaw Nation in western Indian Territory and he was the seventh of ten children born to David and Milley Franklin. David was a slave, who became a Chickasaw Freedman when emancipated after the American Civil War. Milley was born free before the war and was of one-fourth Choctaw and this was known at the time as the Black Wall Street, and was the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a center of black commerce and culture. Franklin and his colleagues also became experts at oil law, representing blacks and his career demonstrated a strong professional black life in the West, at a time when such accomplishments would have been more difficult to achieve in the Deep South. John Hope Franklin graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa and he graduated in 1935 from Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, then earned a masters in 1936 and a doctorate in history in 1941 from Harvard University. My challenge, Franklin said, was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly. In his autobiography, Franklin has described a series of incidents in which he confronted racism while seeking to volunteer his services at the beginning of the Second World War. He responded to the search for qualified clerical workers, but after he presented his extensive qualifications. He was similarly unsuccessful in finding a position with a War Department historical project, when he went to have a blood test, as required for the draft, the doctor initially refused to allow him into his office. Afterward, Franklin took steps to avoid the draft, on the basis that the country did not respect him or have an interest in his well-being, because of his color. In the early 1950s, Franklin served on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund team led by Thurgood Marshall and this case, challenging de jure segregated education in the South, was taken to the United States Supreme Court. It ruled in 1954 that the segregation of black and white children in public schools was unconstitutional. Franklins teaching career began at Fisk University, during WWII, he taught at St. Augustines College from 1939 to 1943 and the North Carolina College for Negroes, currently North Carolina Central University from 1943 to 1947. From 1947 to 1956, he taught at Howard University, in 1956, Franklin was selected to chair the history department at Brooklyn College, the first person of color to head a major history department
43.
Henry Highland Garnet
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Henry Highland Garnet was an African-American abolitionist, minister, educator and orator. An advocate of militant abolitionism, Garnet was a prominent member of the movement that led beyond moral suasion toward more political action, renowned for his skills as a public speaker, he urged blacks to take action and claim their own destinies. For a period, he supported emigration of American free blacks to Mexico, Liberia or the West Indies, Henry Garnet was born into slavery in New Market, Kent County, Maryland, on December 23,1815. According to James McCune Smith, Garnets father was George Trusty, when Garnet was ten years old, his family reunited and moved to New York City, where from 1826 through 1833, Garnet attended the African Free School, and the Phoenix High School for Colored Youth. While in school, Garnet began his career in abolitionism and his classmates at the African free school included Charles L. Reason, George T. Downing, and Ira Aldridge. In 1834, he joined William H, day and David Ruggles to establish the all-male Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association. It garnered mass support among whites, but the club ultimately had to due to racist feelings. Two years later, in 1835, he started studies at the Noyes Academy in Canaan, due to his abolitionist activities, Henry Garnet was driven away from the Noyes Academy by an angry segregationist mob. He completed his education at the Oneida Theological Institute in Whitesboro, New York, here he was acclaimed for his wit, brilliance, and rhetorical skills. The year after graduation in 1839 he injured his knee playing sports and it never recovered, and his lower leg had to be amputated in 1841. Garnet married Julia Williams, whom he had met as a student at the Noyes Academy. Together they had three children, only one of whom survived to adulthood, in 1839, Garnet moved with his family to Troy, New York, where he taught school and studied theology. In 1842, Garnet became pastor of the Liberty Street Presbyterian church, during this time, he published papers that combined both religious and abolitionist themes. Closely identifying with the church, Garnet supported the temperance movement and he later returned to New York City, where he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and frequently spoke at abolitionist conferences. One of his most famous speeches, Call to Rebellion, was delivered August 1843 to the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, upon the conclusion of the Negro national convention of 1843, Garnet led a state convention of Negroes assembled in Rochester. These conventions by black activists were called to work for abolition, Garnet said that slaves should act for themselves to achieve total emancipation. He promoted an armed rebellion as the most effective way to end slavery, Garnet supported the Liberty Party, a party of reform that was eventually absorbed into the Republican Party. Garnet disagreed with the later Republicans, womens participation in the abolitionist movement was highly contentious at this time, which led to a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society
44.
Marcus Garvey
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He also founded the Black Star Line, a shipping and passenger line which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands. Prior to the 20th century, leaders such as Prince Hall, Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, only his sister Indiana along with Marcus survived to adulthood. His family was financially stable given the circumstances of time period. Garveys father had a library, and it was from his father that Marcus gained his love for reading. He also attended schools in St. Anns Bay during his youth. While attending these schools, Garvey first began to experience racism, in 1907, he took part in an unsuccessful printers strike and the experience kindled in him a passion for political activism. In 1910 Garvey left Jamaica and began traveling throughout the Central American region and his first stop was Costa Rica, where he had a maternal uncle. He lived in Costa Rica for several months and worked as a keeper on a banana plantation. He began work as editor for a newspaper called La Nacionale in 1911. Later that year, he moved to Colón, Panama, where he edited a biweekly newspaper, over time, Marcus Garvey became influenced by many civil rights activists of his time. After years of working in the Caribbean, Garvey left Jamaica to live in London from 1912 to 1914 and he also worked for the African Times and Orient Review, published by Dusé Mohamed Ali, who was a considerable influence on the young man. Garvey sometimes spoke at Hyde Parks Speakers Corner, in 1914, Garvey returned to Jamaica, where he organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association. In an article titled The Negros Greatest Enemy, published in Current History, Garvey explained the origin of the organizations name and he related to me in conversation such horrible and pitiable tales that my heart bled within me. Such a name I thought would embrace the purpose of all black humanity, thus to the world a name was born, a movement created, and a man became known. He intended to make a tour and to raise funds to establish a school in Jamaica modeled after Washingtons Institute. Garvey visited Tuskegee, and afterwards, visited with a number of black leaders, throughout his life, Garvey and the UNIA used the organizations resources to give people of African descent opportunities in academics that he felt they wouldnt be provided otherwise. After moving to New York, he work as a printer by day. He was influenced by Hubert Harrison, at night he would speak on street corners, much as he did in Londons Hyde Park
45.
Prince Hall
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Prince Hall was an African American noted as an abolitionist for his leadership in the free black community in Boston and as the founder of Prince Hall Freemasonry. He lobbied for education rights for children and was active in the back-to-Africa movement. Hall tried to gain New England’s enslaved and free blacks a place in Freemasonry, education and the military, Hall is considered the founder of “Black Freemasonry” in the United States, known today as Prince Hall Freemasonry. Hall formed the African Grand Lodge of North America, Prince Hall was unanimously elected its Grand Master and served until his death in 1807. There is confusion about his year of birth, place of birth, parents, Prince Hall was born between 1735 and 1738. His place of birth and parents are also unclear, the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, in its Proceedings of 1906, opted for 1738, relying on a letter from Reverend Jeremy Belknap, a founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Prince Halls birthday is celebrated on September 14. Historian Charles H. Wesley theorized that by age 11 Prince Hall was enslaved to Boston tanner William Hall and it was through William Hall that Prince learned how to process and dress leather. Inside Prince Hall author and historian David L. Gray states that he was unable to find a historical record of the manumission. Hall, identified as able to read and write, may have been self-taught or, like other enslaved people and free blacks in New England, Hall joined the Congregational Church in 1762 at 27 years of age. He married a woman named Sarah Ritchie who died in 1769. Hall married Flora Gibbs of Gloucester in 1770 David Gray, states he was married for a time to Sylvia Ward Hall. An article about Prince for Africans in America by PBS states that Prince Hall married a woman named Delia, a servant outside William Halls household, in Boston, Hall worked as a peddler, caterer and leatherworker, owning his own leather shop. In April 1777, he created five leather drumheads for a regiment of Boston. Hall was a homeowner who voted and paid taxes, Hall encouraged enslaved and freed blacks to serve the American colonial military. He believed that if blacks were involved in the founding of the new nation, Hall proposed that the Massachusetts Committee of Safety allow blacks to join the military. He and fellow supporters petition compared Britain’s colonial rule with the enslavement of blacks, England issued a proclamation that guaranteed freedom to blacks who enlisted in the British army. Once the British Army filled its ranks with troops, the Continental Army reversed its decision
46.
Fannie Lou Hamer
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Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting rights activist, a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, and philanthropist who worked primarily in Mississippi. She was instrumental in organizing Mississippis Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and she was the vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Hamer was born in 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi, to Ella and James Lee Townsend and her family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi in 1919 to work as sharecroppers on the plantation of W. D. Marlow. Starting at the age of six, Hamer picked cotton with her family and she attended school in a one-room schoolhouse on the plantation, from 1924 to 1930, at which time she had to drop out to help support her family. By the age of 13, Hamer could pick 200–300 pounds of cotton daily, in 1944, after the plantation owner discovered that she was literate, Hamer was selected as the plantations time and record keeper. In 1945 she married Perry Pap Hamer and they worked together on the Marlow plantation for the next 18 years. The Hamers later raised two impoverished girls, whom decided to adopt. During the 1950s, Hamer attended several conferences of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership in the all-black town of Mound Bayou. The RCNL, a civil rights and self-help organization, was led by Dr. T. R. M. Howard. On August 23,1962, Rev. James Bevel, an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and he followed it with an appeal to those assembled to register to vote. Hamer was the first volunteer to respond to Bevels call and she later said, I guess if Id had any sense, Id have been a little scared — but what was the point of being scared. The only thing they could do was kill me, and it seemed like theyd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember. On August 31, Hamer traveled on a bus with other Bevel volunteers to Indianola, Mississippi. Singing the spirituals also reflected Hamers belief that the civil rights struggle was a deeply Christian one and that same day, after Hamer returned to the plantation, she was fired by the owner Marlow, he had warned her against trying to register to vote. Hamers courage and leadership in Indianola came to the attention of SNCC organizer Bob Moses and he dispatched Charles McLaurin from SNCC to find the lady who sings the hymns. McLaurin found and recruited Hamer, and though she remained based in Mississippi, on June 9,1963, Hamer was on her way back from Charleston, South Carolina, with other activists from a literacy workshop. Stopping in Winona, Mississippi, the group was arrested on a false charge, once in jail, Hamers colleagues were beaten by the police in the booking room. Hamer was then taken to a cell where two inmates were ordered, by the police, to beat her using a blackjack, the police ensured she was held down during the almost fatal beating, and beat her further when she started to scream
47.
Lorraine Hansberry
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Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an African-American playwright and writer. She was the first black woman to write a play performed on Broadway and her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. Hansberrys family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant, the title of the play was taken from the poem Harlem by Langston Hughes, What happens to a dream deferred. Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, at the age of 29, she won the New Yorks Drama Critics Circle Award- making her the first black dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, much of her work during this time concerned the African struggle for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry has been identified as a lesbian, and sexual freedom is an important topic in several of her works and she died of cancer at the age of 34. Hansberry inspired Nina Simones song To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Lorraine Hansberry was the youngest of four children born to Carl Augustus Hansberry, a successful real-estate broker, and Nannie Louise a driving school teacher and ward commiteewoman. In 1938, her father bought a house in the Washington Park Subdivision of the South Side of Chicago, the latters legal efforts to force the Hansberry family out culminated in the U. S. Supreme Courts decision in Hansberry v. Lee. The restrictive covenant was ruled contestable, though not inherently invalid, Carl Hansberry was also a supporter of the Urban League and NAACP in Chicago. Both Hansberrys were active in the Chicago Republican Party, Carl died in 1946, when Lorraine was fifteen years old, American racism helped kill him, she later said. The Hansberrys were routinely visited by prominent Black intellectuals, including W. E. B, Carl Hansberrys brother, William Leo Hansberry, founded the African Civilization section of the history department at Howard University. Her grandniece is actress Taye Hansberry and her cousin is the flutist, percussionist, and composer Aldridge Hansberry. Hansberry became the godmother to Nina Simones daughter Lisa—now Simone, Hansberry graduated from Betsy Ross Elementary in 1944 and from Englewood High School in 1948. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she became politically active. Hansberrys classmate Bob Teague remembered her as. the only girl I knew who could whip together a fresh picket sign with her own hands, at a moments notice and she worked on Henry A. Wallaces presidential campaign in 1948, despite her mothers disapproval. She spent the summer of 1949 in Mexico, studying painting at the University of Guadalajara and she decided in 1950 to leave Madison and pursue her career as a writer in New York City, where she attended The New School. She moved to Harlem in 1951 and became involved in activist struggles such as the fight against evictions, in 1951, she joined the staff of the black newspaper Freedom, edited by Louis E. Burnham and published by Paul Robeson. At Freedom, she worked with W. E. B, du Bois, whose office was in the same building, and other Black Pan-Africanists
48.
Dorothy Height
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She was the president of the National Council of Negro Women for forty years and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. Dorothy Height was born in Richmond, Virginia, during childhood, she moved with her family to Rankin, Pennsylvania, a steel town in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, where she graduated from Rankin High School in 1929. Height received a scholarship from the Elks, which helped her to attend college and she was admitted to Barnard College in 1929, but upon arrival was denied entrance because the school had an unwritten policy of admitting only two black students per year. She enrolled instead at New York University, earning an degree in 1932. She pursued further work at Columbia University and the New York School of Social Work. Height started working as a caseworker with the New York City Welfare Department and she fought for equal rights for both African Americans and women. In 1944 she joined the staff of the YWCA. She was also a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. throughout her life, developing leadership training programs. She was initiated at Rho Chapter at Columbia University and she served as national president of the sorority from 1947 to 1956. In 1957, Height was named president of the National Council of Negro Women, during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, she organized Wednesdays in Mississippi, which brought together black and white women from the North and South to create a dialogue of understanding. Height was also a member of the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership. In his autobiography, civil rights leader James Farmer described Height as one of the Big Six of the Civil Rights Movement, american leaders regularly took her counsel, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Height encouraged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to desegregate schools and President Lyndon B. Johnson to appoint African-American women to positions in government, in 1990, Height, along with 15 other African Americans, formed the African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom. Height was recognized by Barnard for her achievements as an honorary alumna during the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 2004. The musical stage play If This Hat Could Talk, based on her memoirs Open Wide The Freedom Gates, Height was the chairperson of the Executive Committee of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the largest civil rights for womens rights organization in the USA. She was an honored guest at the inauguration of President Barack Obama on January 20,2009 and she attended the National Black Family Reunion that was celebrated on the National Mall in Washington, D. C. every year until her death in 2010. On March 25,2010, Height was admitted to Howard University Hospital in Washington D. C. for unspecified reasons and she died six weeks later, on April 20,2010, at the age of 98. Her funeral service at the Washington National Cathedral on April 29,2010 was attended by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, as well as other dignitaries
