Transcript Black History Biographies

Ida Wells-Barnett
(1862-1911)
• “I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a
dog or a rat in a trap.” Ida Wells-Barnett fought all her life against
racial injustice, but she is today honored most for her relentless and
literally death-defying campaign against racial lynching. Wells-Barnett
was an early predecessor of Rosa Parks in her refusal, in May 1884, to
give up a train seat in the white section. Removed by force, she sued
and won in the circuit court, but the Tennessee Supreme Court later
reversed the decision. The disheartening incident galvanized her desire
to fight for racial equality, using the weapon she wielded best - the pen.
Wells-Barnett became a full time journalist in 1891, and for many
years she defied mob violence and terror to train a relentless and harse
light on the national disgrace of lynching, even taking her campaign
abroad.
Martin R. Delaney
African American
Civil Rights Activist
• Martin R. Delaney was born 1812. He published his own
newspaper, ‘The Mystery’ in 1843. Helped Frederick
Douglas publish ‘The North Star’ from 1847 to 1849.
Published a book ‘The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and
Destiny of the Colored People of the United States,
Politically Considered in 1852. Led the first and only
exploratory party of American-born Negroes to Africa in
1859. Published a book “The Principles of Ethnology: The
Origins of Race and Color” in 1879. Commissioned a Major
in the U.S. Colored Troops. Customs inspector and a trial
judge in Charleston, South Carolina.
Jonathan Jasper Wright
African American Jurist
• Born in Pensylvania, Jonathan Wright studied law in a private
law office and in 1866 became the first Negro to be admitted to
the state bar. In 1865 the American Missionary Society sent him
to South Carolina to help organize schools for freedmen. From
1866 to 1868 he was employed by the Freedmen's Bureau as a
legal advisor. Wright resigned his post with the Bureau to
participate in politics and was a member of the constitutional
convention of 1868 and later elected state senator from Baufort.
From 1870 to 1879 he was Associate Justice of the State
Supreme Court of South Carolina. No other Negro rose to such
a high judicial post during the entire Reconstruction Era, and
few spoke out as eloquently against the institution of slavery.
Inman E. Page
African American Educator
• Inman E. Page was born in 1853 in Warrenton, Ohio. He received
his A.B. (1877) and M.A. (1880) from Brown University and an
honorary Dr. of Laws degrees from Wilberforce and Howard
Universities. In 1877 he began teaching and, from 1880 to 1898,
was president of Lincoln University in Missouri. After his next
appointment as president of the Colored Agricultural and Normal
University (1898-1915) he headed Western Baptist College and
Roger Williams University (1916-1921). He served as principal of
Douglass High School and supervising principal of the city's Negro
elementary schools from 1921 to 1935 - an inspiration to countless
young men and women as well as a dynamic leader whose
institutions flourished under him.
Ms. W. E. Matthews
African American Journalist
• This journalist and author was born in Fort Valley,
Georgia, in 1861. The cruelty of the times drove her
mother to New York where she brought and educated
her legally freed family. Mrs. Matthews wrote for
periodicals, white and Negro: The New York Times,
Herald, Mail, Express, National Leader, Detroit
Plaindealer and many Afro-American weeklies. She
was a member of the Woman's National Press
Association, and her later writings included several
textbooks and school literature.
Leonard A. Grimes
Christian African American
• Born in Leesburg, VIrginia, Nov. 9, 1815, Leonard Andrew Grimes
grew up hating slavery and its cruelties. Although he was born free
and so light he often passed for white, he served a prison term in
Richmond for aiding escaping slves. In 1843 the Twelth Street
Baptist Church in Boston was formed and Grimes was ordained
pastor, a position he held until his death. He also served as
president of the American Baptist Missionary Convention and the
Colsolidated Baptist Convention. Hundreds of escaping slaves
passed through his hands enroute to Canada, and he raised monies
to buy the freedom of many who were caught. During the Civil
War he aided the enlistment of colored soldiers and was offered the
chaplaincy of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment.
Madam Elizabeth Keckley
African American Businessperson
• Madam Keckley was known as a "White House
modiste and author." As a slave, born in 1840, she
learned the art of dressmaking so well that she became
the modiste to Mrs. Mary Lincoln. An intelligent and
creative person, she authored a book published in
1868 titled Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave
and Four Year in the White House. Her knowledge
led, after the war, to her being appointed director of
Domestic Art at Wilberforce University in the
combined Normal and Industrial Department.
Robert Russa Moton
African American Businessperson
• A native of Amelia County, Virginia, and a graduate of
Hampton, Robert Moton succeeded Booker T. Washington as
president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Through Moton's
efforts a five million dollar increase in endowment was achieved
for Hampton and Tuskegee in 1925. A speaker throughout the
South on race relations and White House representative under
Wilson, Moton fought white townspeople for control of Veterans
Hospital at Tuskegee. As a result, the hospital ws finally staffed
completely by Negro doctors, nurses, and workers. The author
of an autobiography, Finding a Way Out (1920), and What the
Negro Thinks (1920), Moton received many honorary degrees,
as well as the Harmon Award (1930) and the Spingarn Medal
(1932).
John Mitchell, Jr.
African American Businessperson
• Born July 11, 1863, in Henrice County, John Mitchell
attended Richmond Normal High School and received gold
medals for map drawing and oratory. In 1883 and 1884 he
was the richmond correspondent of the New York Freeman
and in December 1884 became editor of the Richmond
Planet. His bold and fearless personal investigations and
writings on lynchings and murders occurring in the south
earned Mitchell the reputation of a daring and vigorous
editor. Without fear or seeming concern for his own
welfare he south the truth about "Southern justice: and
wrote about it in direct and vitriolic language.
Isaac Myers
African American Businessperson
• Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Isaac Myers worked as an
apprentice caulker, and learned the trade so well he ws made
supervisor in one of the largest shipyards in Baltimore. To
counteract a movement to remove blacks from the ship building
industry, Myers raised ten thousand dollars and set up a blackowned and controlled shipyard, employing three hundred
Negroes. When the National Labor Union attempted to divide
the colored vote in the South, Myers called for a national labor
convention of all Negro workers and urged the formation of
local unions. The black National Labor Union, formed in 1869,
failed after three years, but Myers continued to be active in
unionism and Republican politics until his death in 1891.
Andrew F. Brimmer
African American Businessperson
• Recipient of the "Government Man of the Year" award (1963),
Andrew Brimmer was born the son of a sharecropper in
Newwllton, Lousiana, on September 13, 1926. He secured his B.A.
and M.A. degrees from the University of Washington, and Ph.D.
from Harvard (1967). An economist from the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York (1955-1958), a teacher at Harvard City College
of New York, the University of California, and Michigan State
University, Brimmer was appointed to the Department of
Commerce (1963-1966), and became the first Negro member of the
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1966). He also
helped develop the Anti-Poverty Program, the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, and still found time to author numerous articles and books.
T. Thomas Fortune
African American Businessperson
• T. Thomas Furtune, born October 6, 1856, in Florida of slave
parents, worked in alocal newspaper office, served as special
inspector of customs attended Howard University and taught
school before he began publication of a newspaper, The New
York Globe, in 1882. One week after it folded in 1884 he
opened The New York Freeman (later remaned The New
York Age), a militant newspaper. Author of three books,
Black and White, The Negro in Politics, and Dream of Life,
Fortune believed that the racial situation was a cancer upon
the body of AMerican society and that a bond of union
between whites and blacks of the South was essential.
Miss Mary Mahoney
African American Businessperson
• Although the exact date of birth of Miss Mahoney
is unknown, her significant achievement is dated
during the Reconstruction Era. During this period
when racial bars were at their highest and
educational opportunities for Negroes were at their
lowest, Miss Mahoney entered the medical school
of the New England Hospital for Wonen and
Children, and graduated in 1879 to become the
first professional colored nurse.
Hobart Taylor, Jr.
African American Businessperson
• Banker and lawyer, Hobart Taylor, Jr. was born in Texarkana, Texas on
December 17, 1920, received his A.B. from Prairie View State College
(1939), A.M. from Howard University (1941), LL.B. from the
University of Michigan (1943). Admitted to the Michigan bar in 1944,
he was a research assistant for the Michigan Supreme Court (19441945), partner in the firm Bledsoe and Taylor (1945-1948), assistant
prosecuting attorney in Wayne County, Michigan (1949-1950), served
as special counsel to the Committee on Equal Employment
Opportunity (1961-1962), and executive vice chairman of CEEP from
1962 to 1965. He resigned this position to become director of the
Export-Import Bank of Washington, continuing to serve as special
consultant to Plans for Progress, an association which he previously
directed.
Mary E. Pleasant
African American Businessperson
• For a period "Mammy Pleasant" led an eventful life in San
Francisco, acting as financial advisor to distinguished white
gentlemen, and securing a Negro monopoly on domestic jobs
in the state. Reported to have given John Brown thirty
thousand dollars to finance the raid on Harpers Ferry,
mysterious Mary Ellen Pleasant began life as a slave in
Georgia, but in 1849 settled in San Francisco, California. In
1864 she brought suit against a street car company for rude
treatment and won a favorable judgement. She aided in the
rescue of slaves who were being held illegally and in 1863
won for Negroes the Right of Testimony.
John H. Johnson
African American Businessperson
• John H. Johnson, born on Jan 19, 1918 in Arkansas City,
Arkansas, in 1937 moved to Chicago. He started thr Negro
Digest (later called Black World) in 1942 with a $500 loan;
published the first issue of Ebony in 1945; published two
pocket-sized magazines, Jet and Hue, followed by Tan
(later changed to Black Stars), a "true confession" type of
magazine; entered the field of hard-covered books in 1963
with volumes by Lerone Bennett and other writers. The
Johnson Publishing Company grossed over $23 million in
1972, even before it purchased radion station WGRT in
1973, the first station in Chicago to be owned by blacks.
A. Phillip Randolph
African American Businessperson
• Asa Phillip Randolph was born April 15, 1889 in Cresent
City, Florida; wrote for Opportunity magazine and co-edited
The Messenger (1917); organized the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, AFL, in 1925; organized and directed
the 1941 March on Washington which led President
Roosevelt to start the FEPC; helped mount the pressure
which led to desegregation of the Armed Forces in 1946;
helped plan the first Freedom Rides in 1946; became the first
Negro vice-president of the AFL-CIO in 1957; helped
organize and lead the 1963 March on Washington; advocated
the $185 billion Freedom Budget in 1966.
Malcolm Malik El-Shabazz
African American Businessperson
•
One of the most compelling human rights activists of modern America,
Malcolm X was an ideological heir to Marcus Garvey and others who regarded
black self-hatred as the most insidious product of racial oppression - and the
most fundamental obstable to black self-realization. In the now-classic
Autobiography of Malcolm X (with Alex Haley, 1964) he recounted his own
journey from troubled you to exponent of black power as an adherent of the
Nation of Islam. Born Malcolm Little, he replaced his surname with the
designation “X” (for the unknown African tribe of his origin) in the early
1950s and articulated a political vision more concerned with challenging white
domination than racial segregation per se, using rhetoric that was distinctly
harsher and more separatist thean that of the mainstream civil rights
movement. With an ever-searching intellect, Malcolm X also had the courage
to revise his ideas as his thought evolved, holding up his transformations as
useful examples for others. Though assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X remains
a powerful symbol of unbowed black dignity and possibility.
Richard Wright
(1908-1960)
• Born on a Mississippi plantation, Richard Wright was the son of a
farmworker, and his early life was marked by poverty, hunder, and
racial prejudice, experiences that formed the core of his later work.
“Negroes are my people,” he said in acceting the Spingarn Medal in
1941, “ and my writing-which is my life and which carrier my
convictions - attempts to mirror their struggles for freedom during
these troubled days.” From his forst stories, collected in Uncle Tom’s
Children, to the celebrated novel Native Son and the autobiographical
Black Boy, Wright created provocative works of lasting influence. He
broke ground for other African Amrican writers - Ralph Ellison and
James Baldwin among them - and was, in the words of biographer
Robert Felgar, “perhaps the very first writer to give the white
community explanations and themes that ut through its predjudices and
forced it to look at the reality of black life in America.
Booker T. Washington
(1859-1915)
•
Born in Franklin County, Virginia, just before the U.S. Civil War of a
mulatto mother and a white father, Booker T. Washington grew up and
tenaciously pursued an education in the turbulent Reconstruction era. He
worked in salt furnaces and coal mines to get the means to travel to the
Hampton Institute, where he worked as a janitor for his room and board.
Further education and growing experience as a teacher led to his
appointment in 1881, as organizer and principal of Tuskegee Institute.
Author of a number of books, including the admirable autobiography Up
from Slavery, Washington was also one of the most able public speakers of
his time. It was a speech he ave in 1895 on the place of the Negro in
American life that opened an oftern strident debate among African
American leaders on whether slow development through vocational
training, as advocated by Washington, was the correct course or whether
immediate equality and full citizenship should be demanded.
Sojourner Truth
(1797-1883)
•
Sojourner Truth was, and in some ways still seems, ahead of her time - as
a feminist in an abolitionist movement in which “slave” typically meant
“man” and as an activist for African American rights in a suffregist
movement in which “woman” typically meant “white middle-class
woman.” If there was ever a person fit to take on the problem of black
female invisibility, however, it was the electrifying Truth. Like Harriat
tubman, Truth was born into slavery (with the given name Isabella) and
had no formal education. She fled the last of a series of masters in 1827,
and several years later, in response to what she described as a command
from God, became an itinerant preacher and took the name Sojourner
Truth. One of her most memorable appearances was at an 1851 women’s
rights conference in Akron, Ohio, where she forcefully attacked the the
hypocrisies of organized religion, white privilege, and everything in
between in her famous “Ain’t I a woman?” speech.
Harriet Tubman
(1820-1913)
• Harriet Tubman was the best-known “conductor” on the
Underground Railroad, a network of abolitionists who spirited
blacks to freedom. A fugitive slave herself, Tubman made some
nineteen return trips to rescue as many as three hundred slaves
from bondage. Her courage and shrewdness were widely known
and all the more remarkable given the blackouts she suffered
throughout her life as a result of being struck on the head with a
two-pound weight by an overseer. During the Civil War she
served as a nurse, spy, and scout for groups of raiders
penetrating Confederate lines. In her later years Tubman worked
for black education and social betterment, women sufferage, and
other causes.
Malcolm Malik El-Shabazz
a.k.a. Malcolm X
(1925-1965)
•
One of the most compelling human rights activists of modern America,
Malcolm X was an ideological heir to Marcus Garvey and others who regarded
black self-hatred as the most insidious product of racial oppression - and the
most fundamental obstable to black self-realization. In the now-classic
Autobiography of Malcolm X (with Alex Haley, 1964) he recounted his own
journey from troubled you to exponent of black power as an adherent of the
Nation of Islam. Born Malcolm Little, he replaced his surname with the
designation “X” (for the unknown African tribe of his origin) in the early
1950s and articulated a political vision more concerned with challenging white
domination than racial segregation per se, using rhetoric that was distinctly
harsher and more separatist thean that of the mainstream civil rights
movement. With an ever-searching intellect, Malcolm X also had the courage
to revise his ideas as his thought evolved, holding up his transformations as
useful examples for others. Though assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X remains
a powerful symbol of unbowed black dignity and possibility.
Claude McCay
(1889-1948)
•
One of the most prominent voices of the Harlem Renaissance, poet and
novelist Claude McKay wrote of the sweet experience of his early years in
Jamaica, of life in Harlem, of his travels in Europe and the Soviet Union.
But the core of his work was his rage at the injustice of racial prejudice.
The white man is a tiger at my throat/Drinking my blood as my life ebbs
away/ And muttering that his terrible striped coat/ Is Freedom’s and
portends the Light of Dy (“Tiger”). A gentle man of acute intellect, McKay
held many jobs throughout his peripatetic life to support the literary work
that was his true vocation. His dedication gained him respect and readers,
both white and black. It also brought him honors. In 1912, he became the
first black islander to receive the medal of the Jamaican Institute of Arts
and Sciences. Sixteen years later, his Home to Harlem became the first
novel by a black writer to reach the commercial best-seller lists, It was
reprinted five time in two months.
Paul Robeson
(1898-1976)
•
In his stormy life, Paul Robeson was many things: star athlete, scholar, singer,
and actor; law school graduate, social activist; and author. Valedictorian of his
class at Rutgers University as well as an All-American in football (and
letterman in three other varsity sports), Roberson was prophesied by his class
to become “the leader of the colored race in America.” He did rise to be among
the most prominent and respected African American men of the 1930s and
1940s, primarily through his achievements and imposing presence on the stage
as an actor and singer. Gradually devoting himself entirely to singing,
Roberson became an international star, and his desire to break down barriers of
ignorance, he learned to speak more than twenty languages. Always outspoken
on racism, Roberson also came to embrace a political worldview increasingly
at odds with that of mainstream America, particularly in his support of Soviet
Russia, whose egalitarian ideals he admired. Blacklisted and denounced,
Roberson and his career declined. Today he is remembered as a figure of
prodigious achievement and conviction who fully embodied the complexities
of his time.
Frederick Douglass
(1817-1895)
•
“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but
thunder….The feeling of the nation must be roused.” Born into slavery,
abolitionist, autor, orator, and editor Frederick Douglass dopted his last
name from literature (the hero of Scott’s Lady of the Lake) and used the
power of words thereafter to prod his country toward racial equality. He
spoke eloquently before audiences in America and abroad, edited an
antislavery journal from 1847 to 1860, helped organize two regiments of
Massachusetts Negroes during the Civil War, saw two of his sons serve in
the Union Army during the war, and kept pushing for true civil rights
when the war was over. Canny in his judgments, practical in his
persistence, Douglass remained an influential and respected spokesman for
his cause throughout his life. “Power,” he said, “concedes nothing without
a demand. It never did and it never will.”
William Edward Burghardt
DuBois
•
(1868-1963)
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always
looking at one’s self through the eyes of others….One feels his twoness an American, a Negro; two sould, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength
alsone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W.E.B. Du Bois was an
impassioned scholar, an intellectual warrior on behalf of true citizenship
for African Americans. Educated at Fisk and Harvard Universities, Du
Bois wrote histories, sociological studies, informed sketches of Negro life,
and an autobiography. Editor, teacher, and organizer as well s write, Du
Bois organized the First International Congress of Colored People and was
a founder of the NAACP. He was often at the center of controversy and,
toward the end of his life, grew discouraged with his struggles in the
United States. In 1961 he moved to Ghana, becoming a citizen there the
year of his death.
Marcus Garvey
(1887-1940)
•
Marcus Garvey articulated a powerful vision of self-determination for peoples
of African descent that, though ahead of its time, has inspired and informed
movements for black economic and political power up to the present day. A
native of Jamica trained as a printer, Garvey had his first taste of political
activism as a union organizer. Travels he made starting in 1910 furthered his
interest in black history and black nationalist thought - and in actualizing the
ideals they contained. In 1914 Garvey founded the Universal Negro
Improvement Association, which at its peak I the mid-1920s had some 8
million followers, making it the largest international movement of African
peoples in history. Though his efforts to launch a modern back-to-Africa
movement - based on the view that blacks would never truly prosper in
societies where they were in a minority - did not ultimately succeed, Garvey’s
legacy of black pride and independence was profound and lasting. And the red,
black, and green flag of African liberation that he made famous remains a
beacon of black power and pan-African unity.
Josephine Baker
(1906-1975)
•
From the time she was a little girl, Josephine Baker was drawn to the glamour
of the theater. Despite living in the slums of St. Louis and being pulled out of
school before she turned ten, she found the courage - and had enough talent to follow her dreams. Baker danced in vaudeville houses and joined a traveling
dance troupe when shw was sixteen. In 1923, she landed a chorus line spot in
the Broadway show Shuffle Along. But it was in Paris two years later that she
stepped fully into the spotlight, in LaRevue Negre. Baker fell in love with
Paris, and the city responded in kind. She was irreverent and exotic, known for
her magnetic stage presence, lush body, deep red lipstick, and outrageous
promotonal antics, including her famous walk with a leopard down the
Champs Elysees. A politically courageous woman, Baker spoke and acted
against racism throughout her life and was a member of the French Resistance
in World War II, for which she earned both the Medal of the Resistance and
later, the Legion of Honor.
George Washington Carver
(1864-1943)
•
A world-renowned agricultural chemist whose advice was sought by scientists
around the world, George Washington Carver was also, in the words of Nobel
laureate ralph Bunch, “the least imposing celebrity the world has ever known.”
Born amidst the bloody struggle over slavery in Missouri - and orphaned by it
- Carver grew up in various parts of the Midwest, working at odd jobs as he
gained a high school and college education. Though gifted in both music and
art (one of his paintings was exhitibed at the 1893 World’s Columbian
Exposition), Carver ultimately chose to pursue his lifelong fascination with
plants, earning a master’s degree in science at the Iowa State College of
Agriculture. Subsequently he was invited by Booker T. Washington to join the
faculty of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. There for many years he
conducted the research that would make him almost as well known as his
friend Luther Burbank - extracting from soil and crops such as the peanut and
sweet potato an unprecedented array of dyes, foods, and other useful products.
Joseph Cinque
African Activist in America
• Born in Africa, Prince Joseph Cinque was kidnapped and sold
into slavery in Havana, Cuba, in 1839. He and thirty-eight
other captives were put aboard the schooner Armistad.
Cinque led a revolt of the slaves, killing all but the owners
who were directed to steer the ship for Africa. By trickery, the
ship landed in New York and all were taken prisoner. The
U.S. Justice Department fought the freeing of the slaves, all
the way to the U.S. Supreme Court level. However, John
Quincy Adams defended the Armistad Revolution and the
U.S. Supremem court ruled in favor of Cinque and the other
Africans, declaring them free to return to Africa.
Harriet Tubman
African American Activist
• Harriet Tubman was born in slavery in Bucktown,
Maryland in 1820, escaped from bondage in 1849; spent
the years between 1850 and 1857 guiding more than 300
slaves to freedom in the North and in Canada; served the
Union Army as a nurse and spy in 1862-1863, led 300
soldiers in a raid up the Combahee River in South
Carolina to rescue 800 slaves in June of 1863;
established the Harriet Tubman Home at Auburn, New
York after the Civil War; received a medal from Queen
Victoria.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
African American Activist
• Frances Elen Watkins Harper, a writer of verse, was born free in
Baltimore, Maryland, in 1825. Her first volume of poetry was
published in 1845 and she later wrote the novel "lola Leroy, or
the Shadows Uplifted." Later, in Philadelphia, scenes of slaves
escaping, being caught and returned to slavery led her into the
anto slavery conflict. In 1854 she became an antoslavery
lecturer and toured the North and Canada for six years. Miss
Watkins married Fenton Harper of Cincinnati and as a teacher,
lecturer and writer, became one of the most popular women of
her time. She is remembered for the following poems: "Eliza
Harris," "The Slave Moter," "Bible," "Defense of Slavery," "The
Freedom Bell" and "Bury Me in a Free Land."
Anthony Burns
African American Activist
• Typical of the 75,000 slaves who sought their freedom in the
decade before the Civil War, Anthony Burns bacame one of the
most renown when his capture and return to slavery caused the
Boston Slave Riot in 1854. As a trusted slave in Virginia, Burns
had learned to read and write and his freedom of movement
enabled him to escape by boat. On May 24, 1854, he was
arrested and held in chains at the Boston courthouse, guarded by
a posse of known thugs. When aroused citizens attempted to
free him by force, one man was killed before military
reinforcements arrived. Ordered to be returned, Burns was
escorted to the ship by the police and twenty-two military units,
including one cannon.
Crispus Attucks
African American Activist
• Crispus Attucks was born in slavery about 1723, 1750
escaped from bondage; became a seaman and earned his
living on the ships and docks around Boston,
Massachusetts; he opposed the taxation and oppression of
the British; on March 5, 1770 he ws one of the band of
colonists in rebellion against the "Redcoats" in the Boston
Massacre, and was the first of five men to be shot down by
the British soldiers; his name leads the list on the
monument erected in Boston Commons commemorating
this event; his bravery inspired 5,000 Negroes to fight with
the colonists in the American Revolution.
Ida B. Wells
African American Activist
• Miss Wells was born in Holly Springs, Arkansas, in 1869.
She taught in the schools of Arkansas and for six years in
Memphis, Tennessee. In 1889 she was secretary to the
National Afro-American Press Convention. In 1892, her
paper, The Memphis Free Speech, exposed people in a
lynching and was destroyed. She compiled the first
statistical pamphlet on lynching, A Red Record, in 1895.
Miss Wells married Ferdinand Barnett, a militant race
leader, in Chicago. She became chairman of the ANtiLynching Bureau of the National Afro-American Council,
and a famous speaker at home and abroad on Negro rights.
Henry H. Garnet
African American Activist
• Born in Delaware on December 23, 1815, Henry Highland
Garnet attended the African Free School in New York, the
New Canaan, Connecticut, school for Negro youth, and
Oneida Institute. In 1842 he was licensed as a Presbyterian
minister and began work at Troy Liberty Street, Presbyterian
Church. He was one of the most influential Negroes of his era
until he advocated a slave strike and revolt at the Buffalo
Convention of Colored Citizens in 1843. Though his public
influence lessened because of his radical views, he remained
active in the Underground Railroad. After the Civil War he
returned to public life, serving as Recorder of Deeds and in
1881 as Minister to Liberia.
Harriet Tubman
African American Activist
• Harriet Tubman was born in slavery in Bucktown,
Maryland in 1820, escaped from bondage in 1849; spent
the years between 1850 and 1857 guiding more than 300
slaves to freedom in the North and in Canada; served the
Union Army as a nurse and spy in 1862-1863, led 300
soldiers in a raid up the Combahee River in South
Carolina to rescue 800 slaves in June of 1863;
established the Harriet Tubman Home at Auburn, New
York after the Civil War; received a medal from Queen
Victoria.
Nat Turner
African American Activist
• Leader of a major slave revolt, Nat Turner was born a slae in
Virginia on October 2, 1800. In May of 1828 Turner
interpreted visions he experienced to mean that he was to
lead a black army of liberation against slavery. On August 21,
1831, Turner started the revolt with a half-dozen men; the
number soon grew to sixty, and the group moved from one
house of whites in Southampton County to another, killing
everyone in sight. In 48 hours 55 persons were dead. Further
efforts met with white posse action and the group fled. All
slaves became suspect; hundreds were shot down and
seventeen of he captured insurrectionists, including Turner,
were hanged on Nov. 11, 1831.
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin
African American Activist
• Mrs. Ruffin was a pioneer organizer of women. Born
before the Civil War, in 1843, she made the ost of
opportunities which post-war freedom gave. In 1880 she
organized one of the first Negro women's clubs, the
Women's Era Club, in Boston, and issued the first
conference of Negro women to meet in Boston in 1895 for
national organization. She was the first Negro delegate
from the (white) Massachusetts Federation of Women's
Clubs, and pioneered in the organization of the National
Association of Colored Women.
Mary E. Pleasant
African American Activist
• Reported to have given John Brown thirty thousand dollars to
finance the raid on Harpers Ferry, mysterious Mary Ellen
Pleasant began life as a slave in Georgia, but in 1849 settled in
San Francisco, California. In 1864 she brought suit against a
street car company for rude treatment and won a favorable
judgement. She aided in the rescue of slaves who were being
held illegally and in 1863 won for Negroes the Right of
Testimony. For a period "Mammy Pleasant" led an eventful life
in San Francisco, acting as financial advisor to distinguished
white gentlemen, and securing a Negro monopoly on domestic
jobs in the state.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
African American Activist
• Born in Atlanta on Jan. 18, 1929, Martin Luther King earned
degrees from Morehouse College, Cozier Theological Seminary
in Chester, Pa. and Boston University. At 26 he became the
leader of the revolution against social injustice with the
successful boycott against Montgomery's segregated buses. In
spite of being arrested 14 times, stabbed, stoned and having his
home bombed three times he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964
for consistently asserting the principle of nonviolence. In the
cities of the North and South he preached and marched for open
housinh and jobs for the poor. He words deeply touched
America's conscience with his famous "I have a dream" speech
delivered during the 1969 March on Washington.
Rev. Henry McNeal
Christian African American
• Rev. McNeal was born February 1, 1833. Appointed
U.S. chaplain by President Lincoln in 1863; recommissioned in the regular army and detailed to work
in the Freedman's Bureau in 1865; elected member of
the Georgia Legislature in 1868; re-elected to Georgia
Legislature in 1870, expelled from the Legislature
because of color; appointed Postmaster of Macon,
Georgia in 1869; Chancellor of Morris Brown
University in Atlanta, Georgia; appointed Coast
Inspector of customs and U.S. government detective.
Father Divine
Christian African American
• Revered as God by many of his followers, Father Divine
emerged from relative obscurity when he established his Peace
Mission Movement in Sayville, Long Island in the early 1920s.
Records indicate that he was born George Baker about 1874 in
Georgia and practiced in the South and in Harlem before his
multi-million dollar, biracial cult became famous for its
preechments of brotherhood and peace. During the Depression
his hundreds of "peace missions" offered meals, lodging and
services, including job placement, to the needy at no cost.
Although he died virtually penniless, his "kingdom" controlled
properties woth $30,000,000 and he was mourned by an
estimated twenty million members of missions all over the
world.
Francis K. Grimke’
Christian African American
• Born on November 4, 1850, in Charleston, South Carolina,
Francis James Grimke' graduated from Lincoln University in
Pennsylvania in 1870 and Princeton Theological Seminary in
1878. A student of law, a scholarly minister, and an otspoken
defender of the rights of Negroes, Grimke' preached sermons
denouncing segregation in CHristian churches. Through
pamphlets which he printed and distributed to both white and
black clergymen, he urged support of a true Christian ethic.
When Hampton and Tuskegee Institute committed
themselves exclusively to "special training" for the Negro,
Grimke' lessened his support of these institutions.
James Augustine Healey
Christian African American
• The first Catholic Bishop of African descent in the U.S.,
James A, Healy was born in Macon, Georgia, but educated at
the Franklin Park Quaker School in Burlington, New York,
and Holy Cross College, Worchester, Massachusetts. He also
studied abroad. For 25 years, Bishop Healy presided over the
diocese of Main and New Hampshire. In recognition of his
work he was made Assistant to the Papal Throne. He also
served as assistant to Bishop Fitzpatrick of Boston and was
pastor of St. James Church in Boston. Under Bishop Healy,
68 mission stations, 18 parochial schools and 50 church
buildings were erected and Catholics of Massachusetts, Main
and New Hampshire came to revere him.
Elijah Muhammed
African American Clergyman
• Leader of the Black Muslims founded in 1930, Elijah Muhammad
"prophet and messenger of a black Allah," was born Elijah Poole
on Oct. 10, 1897 in Sanderville, Georgia, and began his career as a
disciple of an "Arab Savior" named D.W. Fard. His movement,
which may number of 100,000 is dedicated to freedom, justice,
equality of opportunity, and the establishment of a separate
territory to be subsidized by "former slave masters," until blacks
can produce and supply their own needs. The Muslims publish a
weekly newspaper "Muhammad Speaks", and in 1969 invested
$6,000,000 in their own businesses in Chicago, Cleveland, and
other cities, while operating 47 schools across the country,
including the 37-year old University of Islam in Washington.
Charlotte Forten
Christian African American
• Sensitive member of a distinguished family, Charlotte Forten of
Massachusetts enlisted in the anti-slavery fight as a volunteer
teacher with the Freedmen's Aid Society. Earlier she served as a
correspondent for the National ANti-Slavery Standard and wrote
for the Atlantic Monthly. Her witty and penetrating comments
were often extracted to appear in other publications. An
accomplished poet, she wrote of interracial conflict out of a
deepened resentment against the prejudice of the white world. In
Washington, D.C., where she settled, Charlotte Forten was a
force in supplying high culture, ideals, and intellectual power to
the advancement of Negroes and their survival against
prejudice.
Richard Allen
Christian African American
• Richard Allen, born February 14, 1760, in Philadelphia, Pa., was
a slave during the Revolutionary War who managed to purchase
his freedom at the age of 23. On April 12, 1787, he and several
other Negroes formed the Free African Society, a group
dedicated to the improvement of social and economic conditions
of free Negroes. That same year, Allen founded the African
Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of a rebellion against the
restriction of segregation in Philadelphia's leading Methodist
church. In 1816, Allen was instrumental in organizing into one
group sixteen independent Negro Methodist congregations from
different states. He was elected first bishop of this new
denomination, a church which has endured to this day.
Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.
Christian African American
• One of sixteen children, born May 5, 1865, in a one-room log
cabin in Virginia, Adam Powell, Sr. built the Abyssinian Baptist
Church of New York City to a position of significant power and
size. Entering Virginia Union College in 1888, he worked his
way through that institution as a janitor and waiter, continuing
his studies at Yale University School of Divinity, Powell became
pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Curch of New York in 1908, a
time when its membership numbered 1600 and the church owed
$146,354. In the twenty-nine years of Powell's leadersip the
church was moved to a $350,000 structure, acquired assets of
$400,000, a membership of 14,000 and served as the seat of
power for a U.S. Congressman.
Thomas Paul
Christian African American
• Ordained a minister in 1806, Thomas Paul organized a
congregation of free Negroes in Boston, Masssachusetts.
Word was spread of is ability and by 1808 he was so famous
white churches in New Yrok were inviting him to speak. Paul
persuaded whites and Negroes alike that separate Negro
congregations could be organized and the Abyssinian Baptist
Church of New York city was formed under his leadership.
Brilliant and vigorous, Paul spent six months in Haiti
teaching and preaching to the Haitians but because he could
not speak French he ws not as successful as he had been in
the United States. He returned to AMerican and continued his
work.
Augustus Tulton
Christian African American
• Born on April 1, 1854, in Ralls County, Missouri, Augustus
Tolton entered the College of Propaganda at Rome in 1880 and
was ordained in 1886. He became the first American Negro ever
to be ordained for he priesthood. Within the year, Rev. Tolton
was made pastor of St. Joseph's Catholic Church for Negroes in
Quincy, Illinois. When St. Monica's Church for Negro Catholics
was established in Chicago in 1890, Father Tolton served as
pastor, remaining there until his death. A lifetime of service to
others won him the honor of offering Easter Sunday Holy Mass
on the High Altar at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, an offering
which only the Pope himself usualy makes.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Christian African American
• Born in Atlanta on Jan. 18, 1929, Martin Luther King earned
degrees from Morehouse College, Cozier Theological Seminary
in Chester, Pa. and Boston University. At 26 he became the
leader of the revolution against social injustice with the
successful boycott against Montgomery's segregated buses. In
spite of being arrested 14 times, stabbed, stoned and having his
home bombed three times he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964
for consistently asserting the principle of nonviolence. In the
cities of the North and South he preached and marched for open
housinh and jobs for the poor. He words deeply touched
America's conscience with his famous "I have a dream" speech
delivered during the 1969 March on Washington.
John H. Johnson
African American Publisher
• John H. Johnson, born on Jan 19, 1918 in Arkansas City,
Arkansas, in 1937 oved to Chicago where he studied at
Northwestern and the University of Chicago. He started
Negro Digest (later called Black World) in 1942 with a $500
loan; published the first issue of Ebony in 1945; published
two pocket-sized magazines, Jet and Hue, followed by Tan
(later changed to Black Stars), a "true confession" type of
magazine; entered the field of hard-covered books in 1963
with volumes by Lerone Bennett and other writers. The
Johnson Publishing Company grossed over $23 million in
1972, even before it purchased radion station WGRT in 1973,
the first station in Chicago to be owned by blacks.
Robert S. Abbot
African American Publisher
• Robert Sengstake Abbott was born on St. Simon
Island, off the Georgia coast in 1870; attended
Hampton Institute in Virginia; moved to Chicago in
1899; published first issue of the Chicago Defender on
May 5, 1905; guided the Chicago Defender to a
circulation of over 250,000 copies by 1929; wrote
strong editorials attacking injustice and encouraging
Southern Negroes to seek better lives away from the
Deep South; made the Chicago Defender an articulate
voice of Chicago's black metropolis.
Otis Boykin
African American Scientist
• Otis Boykin, born in Dallas, Texas, on Aug. 29, 1920,
attended Fisk University and Illinois Institute of Technology
(1946-47), but was discovered in 1941 by Dr. H. F. Fruth
while woring as a parcel post clerk. Boykin is credited with
devising the control unit used in artifical heart stimulators;
inventing a tiny electrical devices used in all guided missiles
and I.B.M. computers, plus 26 other electronic devices, and
an air filter. Thirty-seven resulting products are now being
manufactured in Paris and distributed throughout Western
Europe. Since 1964 Boykin has been a private research
consultant for several American companies and three firms in
Paris.
John L. Jasper
Christian African American
• Born July 4, 1812, in the state of Virginia, John Jasper was
the last of 24 children. As a Baptist minister, a liberal-minded
believer in the Bible, he preached for over sixty years to
white and Negro congregations in Virginia, Washington,
Maryland and New Jersy. In London, Paris and Berlin,
scholars took note of his views and sayings. His most famous
sermon was "The Sun Do MOve." He argued that the earth is
the center of the solar system although Galileo had proved
this view false. Few could outdo Jasper in using the Bible to
"prove" this view and his spell-binding oratory and original
views entranced the throngs who flocked to hear him.
Maggie L. Walker
Notable African American
• Maggie L. Walker was born in Richmond, Virginia in
1867; taught school briefly; became secretary of the
Independent Order of St. Luke, a Virginia-based
benevolent society, in 1889, and increased the Order's
membership from 3,408 to 100,000; organized the St. Luke
Penny Savings Bank - Later known as the St. Luke Bank
and Trust Company - in 1902; founded a children's thrift
club of 15,000 members; established a newspaper, the St.
Luke Herald; served as Virginia state president of the
National Association of Colored Women; a civic and
community leader until her death in 1934.
Mary McLeod Bethune
African American
• Mary McLeod Bethune as born n Maysville, South
Carolina in 1875. Educated at Scotta Seminary and Moody
Bible Institute in Chicago. Founded Bethune-Cookman
College at Daytona Beach, Florida in 1904 with five
pupils. Founded the National Council of Negro omen; was
Florida State Director of the American Red Cross. Director
of the Negro Affairs Division of the National Youth
Administration. Consultant to the founding conference of
the United Nations, the recipient of many awards,
including the NAACP's Spingarn Award and the Medal of
Merit from the Republic of Haiti.
Benjamin Quarles
African American Educator
• A leading scholar of American Negro history, Benjamin Quarles
was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his doctorate in
1940. He served as professor of history and dean of instruction at
Dillard University and as professor at Morgan State College in
Maryland. His most outstanding work is considered to be 'Lincoln
and the Negro' (1962) but Quarles has also authored 'Frederick
Douglass' (1948). 'The Negro in the Civil War' (1953), and 'The
Negro in the American Revolution' (1961), important books that
detail Negro contributions. He is a participant in the Association
for the Study of Negro Life and History, an associate editor of the
Journal of Negro History, contributing editor to Phylon, and was at
one time president of Associated Publishers.
Booker T. Washington
African American Educator
• Booker T. Washington was born in slavery at Hale's Ford,
Virginia in 1856; entered Hampton Institute in Virginia in
1872; appointed principal of Tuskegee Institute (then
composed of two small frame buildings and thirty
students) in 1881; made famous Atlanta Exposition Speech
in 1895; organized the National Negro Business League in
Boston, Massachusetts in 1900; took part in the
organization of the General Education Board in 1910 and
the Phelps Stokes Fund in 1911; advisor to Presidents
Theodore Roosevelt and Howard A. Taft from 1901 to
1912.
George W. Williams
African American Educator
• George Williams was born October 16, 1849. Became first
Negro to graduate from Newton Theological Seminary in
1874. Appointed to the Post Office Department, Washington,
D.C. in 1875; nominated to the Ohio Legislature in 1877,
appointed internal revenue storekeeper, Cincinnati, Ohio in
1878; authored "History of the Negro Race in AMerican from
1619-1880" and "History of Negro Troops in the War of
Rebellion;" Chairman of the Ohio Legislature special
committee on railroad terminal facilities, second ember of the
committee on universities and colleges, appointed Minister to
Haiti in 1885, but President Cleveland did not confirm the
appointment.
Alain L. Locke
African American Educator
• Born in Philadelphia on September 13, 1886, Alain Locke
attendede Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (1907-1919), the
University of Berlin (191001911), and Harvard, where he
secured his Ph.D. in 1918. He was the first Negro to be elected
president of the National Council of Adult Education; an
exchange professor to Haiti in 1943; a visiting professor at Fisk
and the University of Wisconsin; and professor of Philosophy at
Howard University from 1912 until his retirement in 1953. As
an editor and author of many books and articles, he became the
chief intellectual interpretor, critic and historian of the Negro's
contribution to American culture. His masterwork, The Negro in
AMerican Culture, was completed after his death.
Benjamin E. Mays
African American Educator
• President of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, for twentyseven years (1940-1967), Benjamin Mays improved that institution
by expanding the school's physical plant, bringing in abundant
scientific equipment for students, and collecting a scholarly,
distinguished faculty. Mays, born August 1, 1895, in Epworth,
South Carolina, has served as a practicing minister, a professor of
higher mathematics and English, an Urban League official, vice
president of the Federal Council of Churches, and as a member of
numberous national boards and panels. A columnist for the
Pittsburg Courier for years, his views reflected race pride,
opposition to racial injustice, and faith in AMerica. He has received
twenty-three honorary degrees in recognition of his achievements.
William H. Hastie
African American Jurist
• William Hastie, born November 17, 1904, was appointed U.
S. District Judge for the Virgin Islands in 1931, becoming the
first Negro ever appointed to the Federal Bench. A student of
Amherst and Harvard Colleges, Hastie became Dean of the
Howard Law School in 1939. Taking a leave of absence, a
year later he served as civilian aide to the Secretary of War,
making a great effort to step up integration in the armed
forces. Continued segregation policies triggered his
resignation in 194. In 1946 Hastie was appointed governor of
the Virgin Islands, the first Negro to hold that position. He
has been on the appellate bench of the U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals, Third Circuit, since 1940.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
African American Jurist
• Mrs. Cary, who was born in 1823, is credited with
being te first woman editor in the United States editor of The Provincial Freeman in 1850. She
was also a teacher, a graduate of the Harvard
University Law School, a practicing lawyer, and a
pioneer in the Negro migration into Canada. In
1862 she had the unique onor of being appointed a
Recruiting Army Officer by Governor Levi P.
Morton of Indiana.
Thurgood Marshall
African American Jurist
• Thurgood Marshall, "Mr. Civil Rights," was born in Baltimore,
Maryland, July 2, 1908; graduated from Lincoln University;
earned a law degree with honors from Howard University Law
School; practiced law in Baltimore, Maryland; held position as
Chief Legal Council for the NAACP for twenty-four years; won
thirty-two of thirty-five cases before the United States Supreme
Court, as lawyer for the NNACP; appointed Federal Judge, Fifth
Circuit Court, New York; served with Second Circuit Court of
Appeals after being nominated by President Kennedy; in 1965
appointed 33rd U.S. Solicitor General, third ranking office of
the Department of Justice; became first Negro justice of the
Supreme Court in 1967.
James Benton Parsons
African American Jurist
• James Benton Parsons was born in Kansas City, Missouri
August 13, 1911; graduated from Millikin University, Decatur,
Illinois in 1934; taught at Lincoln University, Missouri for six
years; taught in the City Schools of greensboro, North Carolina
until 1942; received his master's degree in political science
(1946) and degree of Doctor of Laws (1949) from University of
Chicago (1949-1951); appointed assistant corporation counsel
of Chicago in 1949, and in 1951 appointed to the U.S. attorney's
office; elected jusge of the superior court to Cook County,
1960; Appointed in 1961, by President Kennedy, to judge of the
U.S. District Court, North District of Illinois.
Mifflin Wister Gibbs
African American Jurist
• Mifflin Gibbs was born April, 1828. Elected to the
Common Council in Victoria, Vancouver Island in
1866 and 1807; appointed County Attorney of
Pulaski County, Arkansas in 1871; elected to the
office of city judge in 1873; appointed retrister of
the U. S. Land Office at Little Rock, Arkansas in
1876 and 1881; delegate to the Republican
National Convention in 1876 and 1880.
Patricia Roberts Harris
African American Jurist
• The first American black wooman named an ambassador, Patricia
Roberts Harris was born May 31, 1924, in Mattoon, Illinois,
received her B.A. from Howard University (1945), J.D. from
George Washington University (1960) did postgraduate work at the
University of Georgia (1945-194) and at the American University
(1949-1950) and obtained an LL.D. from Lindenwood College.
From 1950 to 1961 she was an attorney in the Department of
Justice, becoming associate dean of students and lecturer in law at
Howard university in 1962, and co-chairman of the National
Women's Committee for Civil Rights in 1963. Before long being
appointed Ambassador to Luxembourg in 1965, she held important
positions in the Washington, D.C. chapters of the NAACP, the
Urban League and the Civil Liberties Union.
Constance Baker Motley
African American Jurist
• Born in September 1, 1921, in New Haven, Connecticut,
Constance Baker Motley received a B.A. degree from New York
University, and a law degree from Columbia University School
of Law in 1946. She was legal assistant for the NAACP in 1946
and associate counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from
1948 to 1965. In the latter capacity, Mrs. Motley handles the
famous James Meredith against the University of Mississippi
case, winning for Meredith the desired admission to the
university. In 1964 she ran successfully for a seat in the New
York senate, was elected president of the Borough of Manhattan
in 1965, and was appointed a federal circuit judge in 1965.
Matthew A. Henson
African American Scientist
• Matthew A. Henson was born in Charles County, Maryland
in 1867. He became a seaman and voyaged to Japan, the
Phillippines, France, Spain, West Africa and Russia.
Commenced a series of expeditions with Robert E. Perry to
the far North beginning in 1892 and ending in 1909, when he
planted the American Flag at the North Pole; was appointed
to a position in the New York Customs House in 1913 by
Executive Order of President Howard A. Taft. Received many
honors, including the Gold Medal of the Geographic Society
and the Cngressional Medal of Honor (Civil Division).
William Augustus Hinton
African American Scientist
• Born Dec. 15, 1883, in Chicago, Illinois, William Hinton won
international recognition for his development of the Hinton Test
for syphilis an his textbook on that disease. Receiving his M.D.
degree from Harvard in 1912, he served as laboratory
department director of the Boston Dispensary in 1915, was
appointed chief of the Wasserman Laboratory, and became an
instructor at Harvrd, where from 1921-1946 he taught
bacteriology and immunology. He also served as special
consultant to the United States Public Health Service, consultant
for the Massassachusetts School for Crippled Children and
lecturer at Simmons College in Boston, while continuing his
work on the use of serums in fighting diseases of the blood.
Charles Drew
African American Scientist
• Star athlete, scholar, scientist and surgeon, Charles Drew was
born at Washington, D.C. June 3, 1904. As a student at the
McGill University in Canada (1933) he won first prize in
psysiological anatomy, later researching the properties of blood
plasma at Columbia University (1940). Drew discovered ways
of preserving blood plasma at blood banks and in 1940 was
requested by the British to setup a plasma program for them. He
did the same thing for the United States in1942, his work on
plasma research saved hundreds of thousands of lives during
World War II. At the time of his death, Dr. Drew was chief
surgeon and chief of staff at Freedman’s Hospital and had
written fourteen learned books and articles.
Percy Julian
African American Scientist
• Dr. Percy Julian was born April 11, 1899, graduated from
DePauw University in 1920; taught at Fisk University,
Howard University, and West Virginia State College;
attended Harvrd; took his doctorate at the University of
Vienna; taught at DePauw University; headed the soybean
research department of the Glidden Co., formed his own
company, Julian Laboratories; merged his company with
the Smith, Kline and French Pharmaceutical Co. in 1961;
was responsible for making cortisone available at a
reasonable cost; became president of two companies and a
millionaire.
Earnest E. Just
African American Scientist
• A native of South Carolina, Ernest E. Just graduated from
Dartmouth College magna cum laude. While professor in the
biological sciences at Howard University, he received many
awards and grants for research. Scientists from all over
America and Europe studied his work and sought him out.
Author of two major books and over sixty scientific papers,
Just was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1914 in recognition
of his work as a scientist making pioneer investigations into
the mysteries of egg fertilization and the study of the cell. He
was seen as creator of “new concepts of cell life and
metabolism which will make for him a place for all time.”
Phyllis Wheatley
(c.1753-1784)
• After being kidnapped from West Africa as a child and taken to Boston
on a slave ship, Phyllis Wheatley landed in relatively fortunate
circumstances - servitude in a Boston family that treated her well and
encouraged her education - in which she was able to cultivate her
natural gifts for verse and language. By the time she published her first
poems in 1767, Wheatley had also mastered Greek and Latin (to the
amazement of local scholars, many of whom had genuinely believed
such feats to be beyond the capacity of Africans). Many of Wheatley’s
subsequent poetic works, written in the English neoclassical style, wee
published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773.
Wheatley’s literary reputation and personal magnetism gained her
admiration boh in the United States and England, and after her death
she became a potent symbol of black intellectual accomplishment in
the ideological battle against slavery.
Gwendolyn Brooks
(1917-Present)
• Born in the American midwest, Gwendolyn Brooks found
poetry there, beginning to put rhymes together when she was
only seven years old and publishing her first poem,
“Eventide,” in the magazine American Childhood at thirteen.
“Poetry is life distilled,” she has said, and true to that
philosophy, she draws poems out of her own personal, social,
and racial experiences, making them not merely personal but
universal in their implications. As Library of Congress
consultant in petry she held readings at community centers,
prisons, universities, and schools, bringing the message that
poetry, written or read, can enrich, deepen, and strengthen
individual lives - a matter of no small importance.
Alex Haley
(1921-1992)
•
Like Cyrano de Bergerac, Alex Haley penned love letters on behalf of
friends, De Bergerac wrote his within the pages of a drama; Haley
authored dis during off-duty hours as a messboy in the U.S. Coast Guard,
beginning to hone the skills that would result, some twenty years later, in
his becoming a fiercely independent professional writer in the civilian
world. Growing up in Tennessee, Haley had listened to stories about his
ancestors that, embellished by intensive research and creative imagination,
served as the foundation for Roots: The Sage of an American Family. The
story of West African Kunta Kinte and his American descendants
eventually was translated into twenty-six languages and reaped 271
awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. It was published eleven years after the
appearance of Haley’s first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a
riveting description of a dramatic life that was also a best seller - though
its popularity did not reach the phenomenal level attained by Roots.
Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.
(1929-1968)
•
Born in Atlanta into a family of Baptist ministers, Martin Luther King Jr.
came to lead and symbolize some of the most important civil rights
campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. Articulating the movement for African
American civil rights as an essential fulfillment of the spirit and ideals of
American democracy, and using Gandhian tactics of nonviolent resistance
to minimize bloodshed, King was instrumental in breaking the back of
institutionalized racial segregation during those decades and in bringing
unprecedented visibility and support to the cause of racial equality. In
1964 King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest person ever
to gain the honor, in his acceptance speech he described his work as a
“creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice.” Since his
assassination in 1968, and with the designation of his birthday as a
national holiday, King has assumed a place as one of the most important
American leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century.
Mary Lou Williams
(1910-1981)
•
Pianist, composer, arranger, and educator Mary Lou Williams grew up in a
home where her prodigious natural gifts were recognized and nurtured, and the
rich musical landscape beyond - dotted with figures like Ma Rainey and James
P. Johnson - provided constant inspiration. Seeing pianist-arranger Lovie
Austin perform had a particular impact; Williams later recalled Austin
“playing with her left hand, writing music for the next act with the other…and
conducting the band with her head. Although I was just a little baby, I said to
myself, ‘I’m going to do that one day>‘“ Williams did that and much more,
from her earliest professional performances at age twelve through her seminal
contributions to the bluesy, driving “Kansas City Swing” style of big-band, as
a champion of bebop and its early innovators, and as composer whose works
encompassed almost every style of twentieth-century ppular, jazz, and
“serious” music. Long known as “the First Lady of Jazz” Williams in her later
years taught on the faculties of Duke University and the University of
Massachusetts.
Lucy Craft-Laney
African American Educator
•
•
One of the state’s most famous personalities. Lucy Laney was the founder of
the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute. Born April 13, 1855, in Macon,
Georgia, Miss Laney was the daughter of a slave. At a very early age, Lucy
Craft Laney attracted attention by exhibiting extraordinary literary talent. She
astounded those around her by being able to correctly translate difficult Latin
passages at the age of 12. When she was 14, she attended one of the first
classes at Atlanta University. From there, she devoted herself to teaching in the
public schools of Macon, Milledgeville, Savannah and Augusta.
Miss Laney established the first kindergarten and first nursing school for
the city of Augusta. Her home at 1116 Phillips Street has been restored by the
Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and is now the Lucy Craft Laney Museum of
Black History and meeting place. Lucy C. Laney Comprehensive High School,
located on the Haines Institute site , is named in her honor.
S. Johnson
African American Pysician
• Scipio S. Johnson was a physician and
president of the Board of Trustees of
Haines Institute. He was a practicing
physician in Augusta in the first half of
the century and owner of a drug store.
Carter G. Woodson
The Millenium Man
•
•
•
American historian, born in Buckingham County, Virginia. Entered high school at
the age of 20. Taught elementary school for two years after his graduation. Woodson later studied at Berea
College, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University, receiving a Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1912.
He was dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Howard University from 1919 to 1920 and of West Virginia
Institute (now West Virginia State College) from 1920 to 1922.devoted his life to making "the world see the
Negro as a participant rather than as a lay figure in history." To this end he established (1915) the Association
for the Study of Negro Life and History; founded (1916) and edited (1916-50) the Journal of Negro History,
a quarterly; organized (1926) the first annual Negro History Week; and founded (1937) the Negro History
Bulletin, a monthly. Among his many books are Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (1915), History of the
Negro Church (1921), and The Rural Negro (1930).
Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and the following year
began publishing the Journal of Negro History. Through the Journal Woodson challenged the racist bias of
mainstream studies of slavery, Reconstruction, and African history. The association functioned
as a clearinghouse and information bureau, providing research assistance in black history to scholars and the
public. The annual celebration of Negro History Week, begun in 1926, was among Woodson’s most
important achievements. During his lifetime the idea, which attracted whites as well as blacks, spread to
South America, the West Indies, Africa, the Philippines, and the Virgin Islands. In 1937 Woodson also began
publishing the Negro History Bulletin, which was directed at black schoolchildren.
Channing H. Tobias
•
Presidential advisor who was born in Augusta in 1882, Channing Tobias was a
steadfast fighter for civil rights through the use of the federal courts. A 1902
graduate of Paine College, Tobias went on to Drew University and received a
degree in theology. He returned to Paine and taught there until 1911. In that
year, he went to work on the national level of the YMCA and helped get
money for the YMCA on Ninth Street (now Dyess Park Community Center).
Tobias worked on President Harry Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights and in
1948, based on the committee’s report, Truman called for laws to eliminate
wide-spread civil-rights violations.A winner of the NAACP’s Spingarn
Medical, Tobias also lobbied for the integration of the armed forces. Later, he
was appointed alternate delegate to the United Nations. Tobias criticized
Augusta’s white leaders for failure to establish a public Black high school.
Ware High School which had been the only Black public high school in
Richmond County, was closed in 1897. It was nearly 40 years before a public
high school opened in Augusta.
T. W. Josey
• Thomas Walter Josey, M.D., was born in Augusta to former
slaves and worked his way through Haines Institute, Atlanta
University and Howard Medical School. Dr. Josey was vice
president and medical director of Pilgrim Health and Life
Insurance Co.; President of the Stoney Medical Association
of Physicians and Pharmacists; regional vice president of the
National Medical Association; past basileus and charter
member of the Psi Omega Chapter of Omega Psi Phi
Fraternity; and recipient of the Silver Beaver for
Distinguished Service to Boyhood, from the Boy Scouts of
America. He died in 1956.
•
•
Charles T. Walker
One of historical Augusta’s greatest personalities, the Rev. Charles T. Walker founded
Tabernacle Baptist Church in 1885. It was while he was pastor of Tabernacle, in the early
1900s, that President William Howard Taft and millionaire John D. Rockefeller, as well as
other prominent individuals, came to hear him preach. Walker was born a slave in Hephzibah,
Georgia, in 1858. In 1874, he moved to Augusta to study at the Augusta Institute at Springfield
Baptist Church (which later became Morehouse College). While a pastor in LaGrange,
Georgia, Walker studied law for nearly two years under a judge. He also established a school
that was later named LaGrange Academy. Before his reign at Tabernacle, Walker was pastor of
Central Baptist Church in Augusta, then Beulah Baptist Church, which later became
tabernacle. In 1884, along with Prof. R. R. Wright, the Rev. Walker organized The Augusta
Sentinel, a weekly newspaper. In 1891, he traveled to Europe and the Holy Land. While in
Europe he came face to face with - and was honored by - the great evangelist Charles
Spurgeon. Rev. Walker was such a spell-binding orator that he earned the nickname “Black
Spurgeon,” after the powerful English minister who preached to packed houses in the
Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. In 1897, Walker served as a chaplain in the SpanishAmerican War and traveled to Saint Luis, Cuba, in that capacity. Today, that school, C. T.
Walker Traditional Magnet School, is named in his honor. Prof. Silas S. Floyd, author of the
definitive biography of C. T. Walker has been able to capture the essence of that great man
with the following passage from his book:
“But alone for his public spirit is he known, honored and loved by the people of
Augusta, as is no other man who has labored here, but also for the rendering of many private
acts of sympathy and help and encouragement, which the world does not know about, and
which the world cannot know about.”
John Mercer Langston
1829-1897
The first African American to win a United
States Public Office. In 1855 he won an election
to become clerk of Brownhelm Township in
Ohio. He was elected to Congress from Virginia
in 1888.
Joseph Hayne Rainey
1832-1887
In 1870 he was the first
African American to
be elected to
Congress. He was
from South Carolina.
Ralph Bunch
1904-1971
• He helped bring peace between foreign
countries in 1950. He won the world’s greatest
award, The Nobel Peace Prize.
Robert Clifton Weaver
1907-1997
• In the 1960s President Lyndon Johnson called
upon Robert C. Weaver to be one of the top
advisors. He became the first African American
to be a member of a President’s cabinet. He
worked to make American cities better places
to live for African Americans.
Shirley Chisolm
1924• The first African American woman to be
elected to the U. S. House of Representatives.
She ran for President of the United Sates in
1972.
Andrew Young
1932• Mr. Young has occupied important jobs
with the U.S. Government and has been a
fighter for civil rights alongside Dr.
Martin L. King, Jr. From 1977 to 1979 he
was the U. S. Ambassador to the United
Nations. The United Nations works for
world peace. Young was Mayor of
Atlanta, Georgia from 1982-1989.
M. Jocelyn Elders
1933• The Surgeon General of the United States, the
top health official in the United States Ms.
Elders became the first African American to
serve in this position.
Carol Moseley-Braun
1947• In 1992 she became the first African
American woman elected to the U. S. Senate.
She served in the Illinois House of
representatives before that.
Scott Joplin
1868-1917
• The musical stylist created “ragtime” which
became popular all over the country. His cong
“Maple Leaf Rag” was the most popular
piece of music of the time in 1899.
William (W.C.) Handy
1873-1958
• Known as the “father of the blues.” Many of
his famous songs, including “Memphis
Blues” and “St. Louis Blues”, are still being
played today.
Marian Anderson
1897-1993
• She became America’s most famous opera singer.
She gave an outdoor concert in Washington, D.C.
that 75,000 people attended. She was the first
African American singer to perform with the
famed Metropolitan Opera House in New York
City.
Thomas Dorsey
1899-1993
• Considered the “father of gospel music”. He
wrote more than 1,000 gospel songs. His
most famous song, “Take My Hand
Precious Lord, has been translated into
more than 50 languages.
Ella Fitzgerald
1917-1996
• She was called the “first lady of jazz”.
She is one of best-selling singers in
history. She had a great ability to sing
in a style called “scat.” In scat, a
person sings nonsense words to go with
the music.
Louis Armstrong
1901-1971
• Was the leading
trumpet player in jazz
history. He was also a
popular bandleader,
film star and
comedian.
Mahalia Jackson
1911-1972
• People in countries
around the world learned
about gospel music from
singer Mahalia Jackson.
She is one of the most
famous gospel singers of
all time. She sang at the
ceremony when John F.
Kennedy became
President of the United
States.
Dean Dixon
1915-1976
• The first African
American symphony
conductor. He
conducted the New
York Philharmonic
Symphony Orchestra
in 1941. He also led
other orchestras
throughout the world.
Madame C. J. Walker
(1867-1919)
•
Born in Delta, Louisiana, raised on farms there and in Mississippi, married
by age fourteen and widowed at twenty, Madame C. J. Walker went on to
become a successful hair and cosmetics entrepreneur - and, by the early
twentieth century, the richest self-made woman in America. Yet, Walker
saw her personal wealth as not an end in itself, but a means to help
promote and expand economic opportunities for others, especially African
Americans. She took great pride in the profitable employment - and
alternative to domestic labor - that her company afforded many thousands
of black women who worked as commissioned agents. Walker was also
well kown for her philantrophy, supporting African American eductional
and social institutions from the national to the grassroots levels. Walker’s
daughter, A’Leila, carried on this tradition, opening her mother’s and her
homes to writers and artists of the emergent Harlem Renaissance and
becoming a catalytic figure in that movement.
Althea Gibson
(1927 - )
•
Althea gibson was a talented kd with a tennis racket growing up in New
York City during World War II. By virtue of her skill and toughness as a
competitor she would eventually rise to the top of her sport - and, amidst
the changing social climate in the United States, she would become the
player who broke the racial barrier in championship tennis. She handled
the latter difficult role with both equanimity and the same ripping serves
she used to dispatch opponents. A native of South carolina, Gibson was a
star in the Negro youth leagues in New York by 1943, and five years later
she won the women’s title for the first of five times. In 1950 she became
the first African American to play at the U. S. Open, and in 1951, at
Wimbledon. Thereafter she honored her skills while working as an athletic
instructor and playing team tennis. In 1956 her game came together, and
for the next three years she burned up the tournament circuit, sweeping
most of the majors in both 1957 and 1958. Gibson was elected to the
National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame in 1971.
Pearl Bailey
(1918-1990)
•
From singing and dancing in her father’s church at age three, she went on
to become one of the most enduring and admired personalities of the age.
Pearl Bailey’s realm of expression was indeed anywhere and everywhere,
whether she was singing with a frank, world-weary sexuality, conducting a
television cooking show, or earning a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown
University in her sixties. Bailey began her stage career as a chorus girl
before gaining fame as a singer on the nightclub circuit during the 1940s.
A unique and underrated vocal stylist, Bailey had a string of hit records
before making her Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman. She worked
extensively in movies and theater, where her biggest triumph was in a
1960s revival of Hello, Dolly, for which she won a special Tony award.
Bailey was also known for her humanitarian work, ranging from travelss
as an international goodwill envoy to AIDS fundraising. The day she died
(of a heart attack, at age seventy--two), she had been scheduled to address
the United Nations.
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington
(1899-1974)
•
Composer, pianist, and bandleader Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington
was one of the great innovators of modern American music, taking
big.band jazz into new realms of harmony, form, and tonal color. Raised in
Washington, D.C., and with a self-possession and aristocratic bearing that
gained him his nickname in childhood, Ellington turned down a
scholarship in commercial art to pursue music, organizing his first band in
1918. For the next fifty years Ellington molded his ensembles into
uniquely expressive vehicles for his musical and social visions, which
eventually came to encompass large-scale and religious works as well.
Long associated with some of jazz’s most esteemed players, such as
saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, Ellington also created
enduring popular standards that included “Sophisticated Lady,” “Mood
Indigo,” and “It don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).”
Though ever seeking to grow and expand as a musician, Ellington seldom
strayed from the heart of the matter: “If it sounds good,” he said, “it is
good.”
Madame C. J. Walker
(1867-1919)
•
Born in Delta, Louisiana, raised on farms there and in Mississippi, married
by age fourteen and widowed at twenty, Madame C. J. Walker went on to
become a successful hair and cosmetics entrepreneur - and, by the early
twentieth century, the richest self-made woman in America. Yet, Walker
saw her personal wealth as not an end in itself, but a means to help
promote and expand economic opportunities for others, especially African
Americans. She took great pride in the profitable employment - and
alternative to domestic labor - that her company afforded many thousands
of black women who worked as commissioned agents. Walker was also
well kown for her philantrophy, supporting African American eductional
and social institutions from the national to the grassroots levels. Walker’s
daughter, A’Leila, carried on this tradition, opening her mother’s and her
homes to writers and artists of the emergent Harlem Renaissance and
becoming a catalytic figure in that movement.
Edith Spurlock Sampson
(1901-1979)
•
Edith Spurlock Sampson was an achiever, a trailblazer and ultimately an
enduring example of te person who, resolutely and often without fanfare,
changes a system from within. As a child in Philadelphia she determined to get
an education and work to relieve in some way the plight of the urban poor
around her, a desire that led first to social work and then to the study of law.
As a pioneering African American female law student and then lawyer, she
racked up many firsts in her career and came to be widely known and
respected as a practicing attorney in Chicago. A natural in the courtroom, she
claimed to “speak from the heart and let the law take care of itself.” In 1962
Sampsopn became the first black female judge in America, and she later
served as an alternative delegate to the United Nations, traveling widely
abroad as a goodwill ambassador. Sampson also gave unsparingly of herself to
ensure that as many youths as possible could follow in the path she had forged.
In fact, it was her appearance at a high school career day in Texas that inspired
a young Barbara Jordan (in a process Jordan would later liken to a religious
conversion) to pursue a career in law.
William “Bill” Cosby
(1937 - )
•
The first African American to fill a staring role on network television - that
of agent Alex Scott on “I Spy” in 1965, from which the picture here dates Bill Cosby was still breaking ground on network television twenty years
later as star of The Cosby Show, one of the most successful (and
stereotype-challenging) series in the history of the medium. Cosby’s early
years as a lover of radio comedy and budding funnyman are well known to
the millions who first discovered his recorded stand-up routines in the
early 1960s; his humor, often autobiographical and child centered, struck a
universal chord and made him the first black comedian to achieve
crossover success. Since the, Cosby’s wide-ranging works has included
producing television shows such as the animated “Fat Albert” series;
earning a doctoral degree in education; and authoring a series of bestselling books. With his wife, Camille, Cosby has also been an active
philanthropist. Their 1988 donation to Spelman College in Atlanta was the
single largest gift ever made to a black college.
Mary Cardwell Dawson
(1894-1962)
• Mary Cardwell Dawson was the driving force behind the National
Negro Opera Company (NNOC)m which she founded in 1941 as a
vehicle for young African American singers, whose opportunities in
established opera companies were limited by racial discrimination.
Dawson studied at the New England Conservatory and Chicago
Musical College, and in 1927 she established the Cardwell School of
Music in Pittsburg. There she also founded and directed the Cardwell
Dawson Center, which toured often and won a number of awards in the
years preceding World War II. A woman of enormous energy and
accomplishment, Dawson for twenty-one years oversaw the NNOC
and its affiliated guilds in New York, Washington, and Chicago.
Among the company’s celebrated productions were Verdi’s Aida and
La Traviata, Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses, and Clarence
Cameron White’s Ouango, the first production to be staged by an
outside company at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Katherine Dunham
(1909 - )
• One of the greatest innovators of twentieth-century dance, Katherine
Dunham has always regarded artistic innovation as but a means to an
end: individual, and ultimately societal, transformation. Growing up
primrily in Chicago, Dunham was exposed to music and theater via
church, friends, and relatives. Eventually she made her way to the
University of Chicago, where she studied anthropology and also began
choreographing and teaching dance. Dismayed at widespread
ignorance of the often African roots of popular dance, she vowed to
study ethnic dance in its original settings; in time she covered much of
the globe as she collected dances and folklore of Africa, Asia, and the
Americas and brought them to new and enthusiastic audiences. Still
indefatigable, inspiring, and with a wide range of interests in her
eighties, Dunham stands as one of the true legends of modern
performing art.
Zora Neale Hurston
(1891-1960)
•
Some people- perhaps the greatest people - are destined to be controversial
not only in their own lifetimes, but beyond, ever provoking even as they
uplift, gratify, and edify. Such a figure is Zora Neale Hurston, the brilliant,
multifaceted chronicler of African American life as she saw it. Hurston’s
dominant influence was her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, the first
incorporated all-black township in the United States. She grew up there
independent and self-reliant, her imagination fired by the rich oral
traditions of the rural African American South and her sense of self
undistorted by prejudice. She later studied at Howard and Columbia
University and was a lively presence in the Harlem Renaissance before
undertaking the field studies of southern black folklore that would be
documented in the classic Mules and Men (1935) and would permeate
much of her best fiction. In the mid-1930s, Hurston made two trips to
Haiti and Jamaica; the picture here shows her beating the Hountar, or
“Mama Drum.”
Jessee Owens
(1913-1980)
By virtue of the four gold medals he won at the 1936 Olympic Games in
Berlin, Jesse Owens is remembered as one of the greatest track stars
ever to compete in the Olympics. But Owens's triumphs had a
resonance hr beyond sports-and have become the stuff of modern
legend - above all for the stinging blow they delivered, before the eyes
of thc world, to the racial doctrines of Adolf Hitler. The Nazi regime
had hoped to make the 1936 games a showcase of white superiority;
but Owens, who was working his way through Ohio State University,
gave a stunning performance that. demonstrated not only black power
but the power of sport to transcend ideology and prejudice. Believing
that an African American who achieves success "should think in terms
of not only himself but also how he can reach down and grab another
black child and pull him to the top." Owens later became a celebrated
public speaker and promoter of youth sports programs
DANIEL A. P. MURRAY
(1852-1925)
Librarian, historian, and businessman Daniel A. P. Murray believed that ‘the
true test of the progress of a people is to be found in their literature.’
Determined that the written record of African American voices not be lost
in mainstream American history, Murray devoted much of his life to
collecting and documenting black literature For fifty-two years Murray
was employed by the Library of Congress, where he developed his
professional capacities as a scholar and bibliographer, making full use of
the unique perspective his position afforded him. One official duty, for
example was to secure a copy of every book and pamphlet in existence by
black author for an exhibit at the Paris Exposition in 1900. Murray also
assembled a private collection of some 1,500 books and pamphlets that are
now part of the Library's holdings and provide particularly strong
documentation of African American life during the fifty years following
emancipation. An important if quiet figure in the movement to preserve
and promote black history Daniel A. P. Murray’s legacy continues to
provide successive generations with a vital link to the past.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
(1871-1938)
James Weldon Johnson's life was a glittering reflection of his “abhorrence
of spare time.” While working as a teacher and a school principal
Johnson studied law, becoming the first African American admitted to
the Florida bar since the Civil War. He studied music as well and
became a successful songwriter and an opera librettist. He was a poet
(God's Trombones) and an influential anthologist (The Book of
American Negro Poetry). The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man,
his only novel and perhaps his best known literary work, was first
published in 1912, four years before he became field secretary of the
NAACP. Over the next sixteen years Johnson expanded NAACP
membership and coordinated its programs, resigning, finally, to accept
a professorship at Fisk University. He continued to write poetry,
essays, and magazine articles through all those years, as well as the
historical study Black Manhattan and his autobiography “Along This
Way”.
BESSIE COLEMAN
(1892-1926)
•
•
The first African American aviator was "Brave Bessie" Coleman. She let
nothing stop her from getting into the air and became a beacon of
inspiration to countless others in her brief but meteoric career as a
barnstormer. Coleman first became interested in aviation from reading
newspaper and magazine articles.. When she decided to take up flying she
found schools closed to her by restrictions of race, gender or both. On the
advice of Chicago Defender publisher Robert Abbott, Coleman went to
Europe in pursuit of her goal.
In France, Coleman was trained by French and German aviators, and in
1921 she earned her pilot's license. A year later she gained an international
pilots license. Soon thereafter she began her career in the United States as
an exhibition pilot appearing in shows all over the country and speaking
on opportunities in aviation. It was her intention to open a flying school
for black youth, but as she was nearing this goal she died in Jacksonville,
Florida, when the controls of her plane jammed and she was thrown from
the cockpit.
DAISY BATES
(B. 1914)
Civil rights activist and journalist Daisy Bates never knew her parents. Her mother
had been abducted assaulted, and murdered by three white men, and her father
grief-stricken and wary of reprisals if the murderers were prosecuted (they
never were)., fled the small town of Huttig, Arkansas, never to return. Bates,
raised by adoptive parents, learned of thc story at age eight; from it and her
own experiences with racism grew a determination to do whatever she could to
change a society that allowed such horrors to exist. As longtime coeditor (with
her husband) of the Arkansas State Press, Bates used that newspaper to fight
segregation, police brutality, and other injustices; and as president of thc
Arkansas NAACP she organized the Little Rock Nine and engineered the
desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School. Bates’s leadership in that
agonizingly violent struggle was indomitable, even when her home was
bombed and her newspaper became the target of economic reprisals. Honored
as a pillar of the civil rights movement Bates was also the only female pilot in
the Arkansas Civil Air Patrol during World War II.
JESSIE REDMON FAUSET
(1882-1961)
As literary editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine (1919-1926), Jessie
Redmon Fauset was one of three people Langston Hughes credited with
“mid wifing” the so-called New Negro literature into being. Kind and
critical…. “they nursed us along until our books were born.” Redmon,
among the first African Americans to be graduated (Phi Beta Kappa) from
Cornell University nursed along books of her own as well. She produced
four novels (There Is Confusion; Plum Bun; The Chinaberry Tree; and
Comedy, American Style) dominated by a single theme: the fundamental
importance of human relationships in a world rife with racial and sexual
barriers. They were written in the midst of other jobs and other writing
(poetry, essays, magazine articles and material for the children's magazine
Brownies' Book which she also edited), a fact that moved her to tell one
interviewer of her longing to devote a year or two solely to a novel , “just
to see what I really could do if I had my full time and energy to devote to
my work:'
MARY CHURCH TERRELL
(1863-1954)
Mary Church Terrell came from an affluent family and was light skinned enough
to "pass" (as a white person) in most situations if she so chose. Instead she
placed herself squarely in the struggle for African American empowerment and
achieved a lifetime of accomplishments in education, social service, and
politics. Terrell began her career teaching at Wilberforce University in Ohio,
then moved to secondary school teaching in Washington, D.C. Her later
appointment to the District of Columbia Board of Education was a first for an
African American woman. As the first president of the Colored Women's
League of Washington and later as president of the National Association of
Colored Women, Terrell was instrumental in local affiliates' establishment of
kindergartens, day care centers, and nursing schools. She joined Frederick
Douglass in pushing for antilynching measures and after his death continued to
pursue another common cause, woman suffrage Terrell was a pioneer in
attacking segregation in Washington. Her motto “Keep on going, keep on
insisting, keep on fighting injustice
FANNIE LOU HAMER
(1917-1977)
Fannie Lou Hamer picked cotton as a child and had worked for eighteen years as a
sharecropper when, in 1962, her unsuccessful attempt to vote in the county
seat of Indianola, Mississippi brought severe economic reprisals and physical
violence - and galvanized Hamer to civil rights activism for the rest of her life
Best known for her contributions to securing federally guaranteed voting rights
for African Americans, Hamer was also a mover in economic and community
development programs As a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party (MFDP), Hamer gained national attention during the 1964 Democratic
National Convention, when, the MFDP demanded to be seated along with the
all white regular state delegation. Hamer's dramatic leadership and oratory
turned momentary defeat into an important media victory. Beatings at the
hands of police, which caused permanent damage to her arm and kidneys,
never deterred Hamer. “Sick and tired of being sick and tired”, she embodied
the ordinary African American s defiance of racial discrimination and terror and the power that such defiance could unleash.
NANNIE HELEN BURROUGHS
(1879-1961)
"We specialize in the wholly impossible" was the motto of the National
Training School for Women. and Girls in Washington, D.C., which
Nannie Helen Burroughs opened in 1901. At a time when African
Americans were held down and hemmed in on every side, black
empowerment - let alone black female empowerment - was quite often
"impossible” Yet it was steadily and systematically accomplished in a
burgeoning network of black institutions whose dynamism embodied
that of the individuals behind them. Nannie Burroughs was a brilliant
force in many such institutions and today she stands beside such great
female African American educators as Lucy Laney and Mary McLeod
Bethune Tough minded and outspoken, Burroughs was ahead of her
time both as an exponent of the literal and figurative beauty of people
of color and is an African American feminist who refused to rank one
form of discrimination over another.
WILLARD MOTLEY
(c. 1909-1965)
“My race”; said Willard Motley, “is the human race”; and his books and
stories addressed the depersonalization and violence he saw afflicting that
race as it struggled with the problems of urbanization. Born to a middleclass family in Chicago, Motley roamed the country gathering the broad
experiences he felt he needed to be a writer. The main character in his first
novel, ‘Knock on Any Door’ (1947), was based, in part, on someone he
had met on those travels. The story of young Nick Romano’s plunge from
a secure childhood through the treacheries of poverty and crime to his
execution for murder, the book was a phenomenal success. Its sequel, ‘Let
No Man Write My Epitaph’ was not as successful, though it, like his first
novel was made into a popular film. Motley spent the last part of his life in
Mexico, where he completed ‘Let Noon Be Fair’ just before his death.
Another reflection of his concern with social justice, this novel dealt with
North American exploitation of a country Motley had come to respect and
regard as his own.
BESSIE SMITH
(1894-1937)
The 1920s in America were, among so many other things, a veritable golden
age of the powerful blues woman. And at the pinnacle stood Bessie Smith,
whose personal and musical power pushed out the boundaries of both
female and African American expression for a new mass audience. Smith
first performed at around age eight in her hometown of Chattanooga,
Tennessee, and began her professional career in earnest when she
performed in the same show as blues immortal Gertrude “Ma” Rainey in
the years between 1912 and 1915. From there she toured to minstrel and
cabaret shows until pianist (Clarence Williams brought her to New York to
record ‘Downhearted Blues’ in 1923. It quickly established her as the most
successful black recording artist of her day, and for the next five years she
recorded and toured with great success Though she made her last
recording in 1933 (with Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman), Smith
continued touring until a car accident took her life at age forty-three.
LORRAINE HANSBERRY
(1930-1965)
"I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that
destiny can eventually embrace the stars." During her brief lifetime,
Lorraine Hansberry became a commanding presence in American letters.
Her best-known work, the 1959 play ‘A Raisin in the Sun’- the first play
by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway--won the
Drama Critics' Circle Award. The story of the Younger family and their
various and conflicting dreams for escaping the stultifying life of a
Chicago ghetto, the play became a landmark in American theater and has
been published and produced in over thirty countries. Other Hansberry
works include the plays ‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window’ and ‘Les
Blancs’ and text for the photographic journal ‘The Movement: A
Documentary of a Struggle for Equality’ (1964) Excerpts from
Hansberry's diaries, journals, essays, and litters were blended by Robert
Nemiroff into a two-act drama ‘To Be Young, Gifted, and Black’ (1969),
which was also published as a book
PAULI MURRAY
(1910 - 1985)
The first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray
spent much of her activist life helping to dismantle barriers of racial
and gender discrimination. She often attributed her fighting spirit to
her upbringing in a Midwestern working-class family that put a
premium on education, character and upward mobility From
integrating Washington, D.C., lunch counters during her law school
days at Howard University in the 1940s through becoming a founder
of the National Organization for Women in the early 1970s, Murray
took challenges head-on. In discussing sexism at Howard, she said,
“The only way I could counter it was to lead my class. Which I did.
For three years.” She went on to teach at several universities and
compile a massive reference work on state race laws. In her later years
Murray turned her energies to the spiritual, attending the Virginia
Theological Seminary and serving as an Episcopal priest in Baltimore.
ROSA PARKS
(B 1913)
Rosa Park's place in history lies in a single courageous action, her refusal
to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus on
December 1, l955. Her subsequent arrest, resulted in a mass boycott of
city buses and brought thc civil rights movement and Martin Luther
King Jr. to national prominence. Yet the popular view of Parks's
catalytic action as that of a simple, tired seamstress is not altogether
accurate. Though indeed a woman of quiet dignity, Parks was also a
longtime mover in the Montgomery NAACP and a well trained,
disciplined activist, attuned in every respect to what she was setting
into motion. Parks and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in the
wake of the bus boycott, and for many years she worked in the office
of Michigan congressman John Conyers. Still lending her energies to
the struggle for equal rights, Parks remains a powerful figure of hope
and inspiration to millions.
LEONTYNE PRICE
(B. 1927)
• Regarded as one of the greatest sopranos of the century, Leontyne
Price possesses not only an extraordinary native gift but a certain inner
majesty - nothing but a mirror, in her view, of the grandeur of operatic
expression itself. In a long, distinguished, and sometimes
controversial career, Price has embodied this spirit of the artist at its
most finely developed level. Raised by proud, hardworking parents in
Laurel, Mississippi, at age nine Price heard Marian Anderson in
concert and immediately determined to pursue a music career. She won
a scholarship to Juilliard, and her first big performing break came in
1952., when Virgil Thomson cast her in a revival of ‘Four Saints in
Three Acts’. In her 1961 debut at the Metropolitan Opera, she received
an ovation that lasted forty-two minutes. Asked by an interviewer
about competitive feelings toward younger stars, she replied “Why
should I feel threatened? There'll never be another me.”
LANGSTON HUGHES
(1902-1967)
"I like: Tristan, goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk,
boats, and bullfights; I dislike Aida, parsnips, long novels, narrative
poems cold, pretentious folk, buses, and bridge," A man of eclectic
tastes1and experiences (he worked as a ranch hand, a busboy, a cook
and a seaman), Langston Hughes forged poems, novels, plays, opera
libretti, lyrics for musicals, and a cantata out of the various themes of
his life to become one of America’s leading men of letters. His work,
vivid and strong, engages readers in heart to-heart conversation even as
in his words "I try to interpret and make a bridge between one section
of our American public and another.” The creative process itself was,
for Hughes, another sort of communication: In an envelope marked: /
Personal” / God addressed me a letter. / In an envelope marked: /
Personal” / I have given my answer.
RITA DOVE
(b.1952)
Rita Dove's twelfth-grade English teacher took her to meet poet John Ciardi.
Though Dove had already been writing creatively for years, "That day, I
realized…it was possible to be a writer, to write down a poem or story in
the intimate sphere of one's own room, and then share it with the world.”
She went on to become a college professor, an editor, the recipient of
many awards and fellowships for writing, and a judge for the Pulitzer
Prize and the National Book Award. In 1987 she won the Pulitzer for the
story, in poetry, of her maternal grandparents Thomas and Beulah, Her
other books include a poetry collection The Yellow House on the Corner(
1980); a volume of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985); a novel, Through
The Ivory Gate (1992) and a verse play The Darker Face of the Earth
(1994). In 1993 Dove was appointed US poet laureate by the Librarian of
Congress-the youngest poet, and the first African American, to receive this
honor. The engaging energy with which she served as spokesperson for
poetry throughout the country resulted in a one-year extension of her
appointment in 1994.
ARNA (ARNAUD) WENDELL
BONTEMPS
(1902-1973)
"We were heralds of a dawning day,” proclaimed Arna Bontemps in his
1972 anthology The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, The "we" were
African American writers, artists, and musicians whose creativity in
the 1920s forever transformed the way black culture was perceived in
America. Bontemps took that same heady Harlem spirit and carved his
own literary renaissance, which extended beyond New York City and
lasted nearly half a century thereafter. He produced more than twentyfive books: novels depicting aspects of black history and experience
(God Sends Sunday, 1931 Black Thunder ,1936) anthologies that
celebrated black culture (The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of
Negro Folklore, edited with Langston Hughes Great Slave Narratives),
poetry, history and black juvenilia. With consummate skill, dignity, and
thoughtfulness he became a "keeper of the flame" of African American
heritage
Madame C. J. Walker
(1867-1919)
• Born in Delta, Louisiana, raised on farms there and in
Mississippi, married by age fourteen and widowed at twenty,
Madame C. J. Walker went on to become a successful hair and
cosmetics entrepreneur - and, by the early twentieth century, the
richest self-made woman in America. Yet, Walker saw her
personal wealth as not an end in itself, but a means to help
promote and expand economic opportunities for others,
especially African Americans. She took great pride in the
profitable employment - and alternative to domestic labor - that
her company afforded many thousands of black women who
worked as commissioned agents. Walker was also well kown for
her philantrophy, supporting African American eductional and
social institutions from the national to the grassroots levels.
Walker’s daughter, A’Leila, carried on this tradition, opening her
mother’s and her homes to writers and artists of the emergent
Harlem Renaissance and becoming a catalytic figure in that
movement.
Althea Gibson
(1927 - )
• Althea gibson was a talented kd with a tennis racket growing up
in New York City during World War II. By virtue of her skill
and toughness as a competitor she would eventually rise to the
top of her sport - and, amidst the changing social climate in the
United States, she would become the player who broke the
racial barrier in championship tennis. She handled the latter
difficult role with both equanimity and the same ripping serves
she used to dispatch opponents. A native of South carolina,
Gibson was a star in the Negro youth leagues in New York by
1943, and five years later she won the women’s title for the first
of five times. In 1950 she became the first African American to
play at the U. S. Open, and in 1951, at Wimbledon. Thereafter
she honored her skills while working as an athletic instructor
and playing team tennis. In 1956 her game came together, and
for the next three years she burned up the tournament circuit,
sweeping most of the majors in both 1957 and 1958. Gibson was
elected to the National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame in 1971.
Pearl Bailey
(1918-1990)
• From singing and dancing in her father’s church at age three, she went
on to become one of the most enduring and admired personalities of
the age. Pearl Bailey’s realm of expression was indeed anywhere and
everywhere, whether she was singing with a frank, world-weary
sexuality, conducting a television cooking show, or earning a
bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University in her sixties. Bailey
began her stage career as a chorus girl before gaining fame as a singer
on the nightclub circuit during the 1940s. A unique and underrated
vocal stylist, Bailey had a string of hit records before making her
Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman. She worked extensively in
movies and theater, where her biggest triumph was in a 1960s revival
of Hello, Dolly, for which she won a special Tony award. Bailey was
also known for her humanitarian work, ranging from traveles as an
international goodwill envoy to AIDS fundraising. The day she died
(of a heart attack, at age seventy--two), she had been scheduled to
address the United Nations.
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington
(1899-1974)
• Composer, pianist, and bandleader Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington
was one of the great innovators of modern American music, taking
big.band jazz into new realms of harmony, form, and tonal color.
Raised in Washington, D.C., and with a self-possession and aristocratic
bearing that gained him his nickname in childhood, Ellington turned
down a scholarship in commercial art to pursue music, organizing his
first band in 1918. For the next fifty years Ellington molded his
ensembles into uniquely expressive vehicles for his musical and social
visions, which eventually came to encompass large-scale and religious
works as well. Long associated with some of jazz’s most esteemed
players, such as saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster,
Ellington also created enduring popular standards that included
“Sophisticated Lady,” “Mood Indigo,” and “It don’t Mean A Thing (If
It Ain’t Got That Swing).” Though ever seeking to grow and expand as
a musician, Ellington seldom strayed from the heart of the matter: “If it
sounds good,” he said, “it is good.”
Madame C. J. Walker
(1867-1919)
• Born in Delta, Louisiana, raised on farms there and in Mississippi,
married by age fourteen and widowed at twenty, Madame C. J. Walker
went on to become a successful hair and cosmetics entrepreneur - and,
by the early twentieth century, the richest self-made woman in
America. Yet, Walker saw her personal wealth as not an end in itself,
but a means to help promote and expand economic opportunities for
others, especially African Americans. She took great pride in the
profitable employment - and alternative to domestic labor - that her
company afforded many thousands of black women who worked as
commissioned agents. Walker was also well kown for her philantrophy,
supporting African American eductional and social institutions from
the national to the grassroots levels. Walker’s daughter, A’Leila, carried
on this tradition, opening her mother’s and her homes to writers and
artists of the emergent Harlem Renaissance and becoming a catalytic
figure in that movement.
Edith Spurlock Sampson
(1901-1979)
•
Edith Spurlock Sampson was an achiever, a trailblazer and ultimately an
enduring example of te person who, resolutely and often without fanfare,
changes a system from within. As a child in Philadelphia she determined to get
an education and work to relieve in some way the plight of the urban poor
around her, a desire that led first to social work and then to the study of law.
As a pioneering African American female law student and then lawyer, she
racked up many firsts in her career and came to be widely known and
respected as a practicing attorney in Chicago. A natural in the courtroom, she
claimed to “speak from the heart and let the law take care of itself.” In 1962
Sampsopn became the first black female judge in America, and she later
served as an alternative delegate to the United Nations, traveling widely
abroad as a goodwill ambassador. Sampson also gave unsparingly of herself to
ensure that as many youths as possible could follow in the path she had forged.
In fact, it was her appearance at a high school career day in Texas that inspired
a young Barbara Jordan (in a process Jordan would later liken to a religious
conversion) to pursue a career in law.
William “Bill” Cosby
(1937 - )
• The first African American to fill a staring role on network television that of agent Alex Scott on “I Spy” in 1965, from which the picture
here dates - Bill Cosby was still breaking ground on network television
twenty years later as star of The Cosby Show, one of the most
successful (and stereotype-challenging) series in the history of the
medium. Cosby’s early years as a lover of radio comedy and budding
funnyman are well known to the millions who first discovered his
recorded stand-up routines in the early 1960s; his humor, often
autobiographical and child centered, struck a universal chord and made
him the first black comedian to achieve crossover success. Since the,
Cosby’s wide-ranging works has included producing television shows
such as the animated “Fat Albert” series; earning a doctoral degree in
education; and authoring a series of best-selling books. With his wife,
Camille, Cosby has also been an active philanthropist. Their 1988
donation to Spelman College in Atlanta was the single largest gift ever
made to a black college.
Mary Cardwell Dawson
(1894-1962)
• Mary Cardwell Dawson was the driving force behind the National
Negro Opera Company (NNOC)m which she founded in 1941 as a
vehicle for young African American singers, whose opportunities in
established opera companies were limited by racial discrimination.
Dawson studied at the New England Conservatory and Chicago
Musical College, and in 1927 she established the Cardwell School of
Music in Pittsburg. There she also founded and directed the Cardwell
Dawson Center, which toured often and won a number of awards in the
years preceding World War II. A woman of enormous energy and
accomplishment, Dawson for twenty-one years oversaw the NNOC
and its affiliated guilds in New York, Washington, and Chicago.
Among the company’s celebrated productions were Verdi’s Aida and
La Traviata, Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses, and Clarence
Cameron White’s Ouango, the first production to be staged by an
outside company at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Katherine Dunham
(1909 - )
• One of the greatest innovators of twentieth-century dance, Katherine
Dunham has always regarded artistic innovation as but a means to an
end: individual, and ultimately societal, transformation. Growing up
primrily in Chicago, Dunham was exposed to music and theater via
church, friends, and relatives. Eventually she made her way to the
University of Chicago, where she studied anthropology and also began
choreographing and teaching dance. Dismayed at widespread
ignorance of the often African roots of popular dance, she vowed to
study ethnic dance in its original settings; in time she covered much of
the globe as she collected dances and folklore of Africa, Asia, and the
Americas and brought them to new and enthusiastic audiences. Still
indefatigable, inspiring, and with a wide range of interests in her
eighties, Dunham stands as one of the true legends of modern
performing art.
Zora Neale Hurston
(1891-1960)
• Some people- perhaps the greatest people - are destined to be
controversial not only in their own lifetimes, but beyond, ever
provoking even as they uplift, gratify, and edify. Such a figure is Zora
Neale Hurston, the brilliant, multifaceted chronicler of African
American life as she saw it. Hurston’s dominant influence was her
hometown of Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-black
township in the United States. She grew up there independent and selfreliant, her imagination fired by the rich oral traditions of the rural
African American South and her sense of self undistorted by prejudice.
She later studied at Howard and Columbia University and was a lively
presence in the Harlem Renaissance before undertaking the field
studies of southern black folklore that would be documented in the
classic Mules and Men (1935) and would permeate much of her best
fiction. In the mid-1930s, Hurston made two trips to Haiti and Jamaica;
the picture here shows her beating the Hountar, or “Mama Drum.”
Jessee Owens
(1913-1980)
By virtue of the four gold medals he won at the 1936 Olympic Games in
Berlin, Jesse Owens is remembered as one of the greatest track stars
ever to compete in the Olympics. But Owens's triumphs had a
resonance hr beyond sports-and have become the stuff of modern
legend - above all for the stinging blow they delivered, before the eyes
of thc world, to the racial doctrines of Adolf Hitler. The Nazi regime
had hoped to make the 1936 games a showcase of white superiority;
but Owens, who was working his way through Ohio State University,
gave a stunning performance that. demonstrated not only black power
but the power of sport to transcend ideology and prejudice. Believing
that an African American who achieves success "should think in terms
of not only himself but also how he can reach down and grab another
black child and pull him to the top." Owens later became a celebrated
public speaker and promoter of youth sports programs
DANIEL A. P. MURRAY
(1852-1925)
Librarian, historian, and businessman Daniel A. P. Murray believed that ‘the true
test of the progress of a people is to be found in their literature.’ Determined
that the written record of African American voices not be lost in mainstream
American history, Murray devoted much of his life to collecting and
documenting black literature For fifty-two years Murray was employed by the
Library of Congress, where he developed his professional capacities as a
scholar and bibliographer, making full use of the unique perspective his
position afforded him. One official duty, for example was to secure a copy of
every book and pamphlet in existence by black author for an exhibit at the
Paris Exposition in 1900. Murray also assembled a private collection of some
1,500 books and pamphlets that are now part of the Library's holdings and
provide particularly strong documentation of African American life during the
fifty years following emancipation. An important if quiet figure in the
movement to preserve and promote black history Daniel A. P. Murray’s legacy
continues to provide successive generations with a vital link to the past.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
(1871-1938)
James Weldon Johnson's life was a glittering reflection of his “abhorrence
of spare time.” While working as a teacher and a school principal
Johnson studied law, becoming the first African American admitted to
the Florida bar since the Civil War. He studied music as well and
became a successful songwriter and an opera librettist. He was a poet
(God's Trombones) and an influential anthologist (The Book of
American Negro Poetry). The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man,
his only novel and perhaps his best known literary work, was first
published in 1912, four years before he became field secretary of the
NAACP. Over the next sixteen years Johnson expanded NAACP
membership and coordinated its programs, resigning, finally, to accept
a professorship at Fisk University. He continued to write poetry,
essays, and magazine articles through all those years, as well as the
historical study Black Manhattan and his autobiography “Along This
Way”.
BESSIE COLEMAN
(1892-1926)
•
•
The first African American aviator was "Brave Bessie" Coleman. She let
nothing stop her from getting into the air and became a beacon of inspiration
to countless others in her brief but meteoric career as a barnstormer. Coleman
first became interested in aviation from reading newspaper and magazine
articles.. When she decided to take up flying she found schools closed to her
by restrictions of race, gender or both. On the advice of Chicago Defender
publisher Robert Abbott, Coleman went to Europe in pursuit of her goal.
In France, Coleman was trained by French and German aviators, and in 1921
she earned her pilot's license. A year later she gained an international pilots
license. Soon thereafter she began her career in the United States as an
exhibition pilot appearing in shows all over the country and speaking on
opportunities in aviation. It was her intention to open a flying school for black
youth, but as she was nearing this goal she died in Jacksonville, Florida, when
the controls of her plane jammed and she was thrown from the cockpit.
DAISY BATES
(B. 1914)
Civil rights activist and journalist Daisy Bates never knew her parents. Her mother
had been abducted assaulted, and murdered by three white men, and her father
grief-stricken and wary of reprisals if the murderers were prosecuted (they
never were)., fled the small town of Huttig, Arkansas, never to return. Bates,
raised by adoptive parents, learned of thc story at age eight; from it and her
own experiences with racism grew a determination to do whatever she could to
change a society that allowed such horrors to exist. As longtime coeditor (with
her husband) of the Arkansas State Press, Bates used that newspaper to fight
segregation, police brutality, and other injustices; and as president of thc
Arkansas NAACP she organized the Little Rock Nine and engineered the
desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School. Bates’s leadership in that
agonizingly violent struggle was indomitable, even when her home was
bombed and her newspaper became the target of economic reprisals. Honored
as a pillar of the civil rights movement Bates was also the only female pilot in
the Arkansas Civil Air Patrol during World War II.
JESSIE REDMON FAUSET
(1882-1961)
As literary editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine (1919-1926), Jessie Redmon
Fauset was one of three people Langston Hughes credited with “mid wifing”
the so-called New Negro literature into being. Kind and critical…. “they
nursed us along until our books were born.” Redmon, among the first African
Americans to be graduated (Phi Beta Kappa) from Cornell University nursed
along books of her own as well. She produced four novels (There Is
Confusion; Plum Bun; The Chinaberry Tree; and Comedy, American Style)
dominated by a single theme: the fundamental importance of human
relationships in a world rife with racial and sexual barriers. They were written
in the midst of other jobs and other writing (poetry, essays, magazine articles
and material for the children's magazine Brownies' Book which she also
edited), a fact that moved her to tell one interviewer of her longing to devote a
year or two solely to a novel , “just to see what I really could do if I had my
full time and energy to devote to my work:'
MARY CHURCH TERRELL
(1863-1954)
Mary Church Terrell came from an affluent family and was light skinned enough
to "pass" (as a white person) in most situations if she so chose. Instead she
placed herself squarely in the struggle for African American empowerment and
achieved a lifetime of accomplishments in education, social service, and
politics. Terrell began her career teaching at Wilberforce University in Ohio,
then moved to secondary school teaching in Washington, D.C. Her later
appointment to the District of Columbia Board of Education was a first for an
African American woman. As the first president of the Colored Women's
League of Washington and later as president of the National Association of
Colored Women, Terrell was instrumental in local affiliates' establishment of
kindergartens, day care centers, and nursing schools. She joined Frederick
Douglass in pushing for antilynching measures and after his death continued to
pursue another common cause, woman suffrage Terrell was a pioneer in
attacking segregation in Washington. Her motto “Keep on going, keep on
insisting, keep on fighting injustice
FANNIE LOU HAMER
(1917-1977)
Fannie Lou Hamer picked cotton as a child and had worked for eighteen years as a
sharecropper when, in 1962, her unsuccessful attempt to vote in the county
seat of Indianola, Mississippi brought severe economic reprisals and physical
violence - and galvanized Hamer to civil rights activism for the rest of her life
Best known for her contributions to securing federally guaranteed voting rights
for African Americans, Hamer was also a mover in economic and community
development programs As a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party (MFDP), Hamer gained national attention during the 1964 Democratic
National Convention, when, the MFDP demanded to be seated along with the
all white regular state delegation. Hamer's dramatic leadership and oratory
turned momentary defeat into an important media victory. Beatings at the
hands of police, which caused permanent damage to her arm and kidneys,
never deterred Hamer. “Sick and tired of being sick and tired”, she embodied
the ordinary African American s defiance of racial discrimination and terror and the power that such defiance could unleash.
NANNIE HELEN BURROUGHS
(1879-1961)
"We specialize in the wholly impossible" was the motto of the National
Training School for Women. and Girls in Washington, D.C., which
Nannie Helen Burroughs opened in 1901. At a time when African
Americans were held down and hemmed in on every side, black
empowerment - let alone black female empowerment - was quite often
"impossible” Yet it was steadily and systematically accomplished in a
burgeoning network of black institutions whose dynamism embodied
that of the individuals behind them. Nannie Burroughs was a brilliant
force in many such institutions and today she stands beside such great
female African American educators as Lucy Laney and Mary McLeod
Bethune Tough minded and outspoken, Burroughs was ahead of her
time both as an exponent of the literal and figurative beauty of people
of color and is an African American feminist who refused to rank one
form of discrimination over another.
WILLARD MOTLEY
(c. 1909-1965)
“My race”; said Willard Motley, “is the human race”; and his books and stories
addressed the depersonalization and violence he saw afflicting that race as it
struggled with the problems of urbanization. Born to a middle-class family in
Chicago, Motley roamed the country gathering the broad experiences he felt
he needed to be a writer. The main character in his first novel, ‘Knock on Any
Door’ (1947), was based, in part, on someone he had met on those travels. The
story of young Nick Romano’s plunge from a secure childhood through the
treacheries of poverty and crime to his execution for murder, the book was a
phenomenal success. Its sequel, ‘Let No Man Write My Epitaph’ was not as
successful, though it, like his first novel was made into a popular film. Motley
spent the last part of his life in Mexico, where he completed ‘Let Noon Be
Fair’ just before his death. Another reflection of his concern with social justice,
this novel dealt with North American exploitation of a country Motley had
come to respect and regard as his own.
BESSIE SMITH
(1894-1937)
The 1920s in America were, among so many other things, a veritable
golden age of the powerful blues woman. And at the pinnacle stood
Bessie Smith, whose personal and musical power pushed out the
boundaries of both female and African American expression for a new
mass audience. Smith first performed at around age eight in her
hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and began her professional
career in earnest when she performed in the same show as blues
immortal Gertrude “Ma” Rainey in the years between 1912 and 1915.
From there she toured to minstrel and cabaret shows until pianist
(Clarence Williams brought her to New York to record ‘Downhearted
Blues’ in 1923. It quickly established her as the most successful black
recording artist of her day, and for the next five years she recorded and
toured with great success Though she made her last recording in 1933
(with Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman), Smith continued touring
until a car accident took her life at age forty-three.
LORRAINE HANSBERRY
(1930-1965)
"I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny
can eventually embrace the stars." During her brief lifetime, Lorraine
Hansberry became a commanding presence in American letters. Her bestknown work, the 1959 play ‘A Raisin in the Sun’- the first play by an African
American woman to be produced on Broadway--won the Drama Critics' Circle
Award. The story of the Younger family and their various and conflicting
dreams for escaping the stultifying life of a Chicago ghetto, the play became a
landmark in American theater and has been published and produced in over
thirty countries. Other Hansberry works include the plays ‘The Sign in Sidney
Brustein’s Window’ and ‘Les Blancs’ and text for the photographic journal
‘The Movement: A Documentary of a Struggle for Equality’ (1964) Excerpts
from Hansberry's diaries, journals, essays, and litters were blended by Robert
Nemiroff into a two-act drama ‘To Be Young, Gifted, and Black’ (1969),
which was also published as a book
PAULI MURRAY
(1910 - 1985)
The first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray
spent much of her activist life helping to dismantle barriers of racial
and gender discrimination. She often attributed her fighting spirit to
her upbringing in a Midwestern working-class family that put a
premium on education, character and upward mobility From
integrating Washington, D.C., lunch counters during her law school
days at Howard University in the 1940s through becoming a founder
of the National Organization for Women in the early 1970s, Murray
took challenges head-on. In discussing sexism at Howard, she said,
“The only way I could counter it was to lead my class. Which I did.
For three years.” She went on to teach at several universities and
compile a massive reference work on state race laws. In her later years
Murray turned her energies to the spiritual, attending the Virginia
Theological Seminary and serving as an Episcopal priest in Baltimore.
ROSA PARKS
(B 1913)
Rosa Park's place in history lies in a single courageous action, her refusal
to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus on
December 1, l955. Her subsequent arrest, resulted in a mass boycott of
city buses and brought thc civil rights movement and Martin Luther
King Jr. to national prominence. Yet the popular view of Parks's
catalytic action as that of a simple, tired seamstress is not altogether
accurate. Though indeed a woman of quiet dignity, Parks was also a
longtime mover in the Montgomery NAACP and a well trained,
disciplined activist, attuned in every respect to what she was setting
into motion. Parks and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in the
wake of the bus boycott, and for many years she worked in the office
of Michigan congressman John Conyers. Still lending her energies to
the struggle for equal rights, Parks remains a powerful figure of hope
and inspiration to millions.
LEONTYNE PRICE
(B. 1927)
• Regarded as one of the greatest sopranos of the century, Leontyne
Price possesses not only an extraordinary native gift but a certain inner
majesty - nothing but a mirror, in her view, of the grandeur of operatic
expression itself. In a long, distinguished, and sometimes
controversial career, Price has embodied this spirit of the artist at its
most finely developed level. Raised by proud, hardworking parents in
Laurel, Mississippi, at age nine Price heard Marian Anderson in
concert and immediately determined to pursue a music career. She won
a scholarship to Juilliard, and her first big performing break came in
1952., when Virgil Thomson cast her in a revival of ‘Four Saints in
Three Acts’. In her 1961 debut at the Metropolitan Opera, she received
an ovation that lasted forty-two minutes. Asked by an interviewer
about competitive feelings toward younger stars, she replied “Why
should I feel threatened? There'll never be another me.”
LANGSTON HUGHES
(1902-1967)
"I like: Tristan, goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk,
boats, and bullfights; I dislike Aida, parsnips, long novels, narrative
poems cold, pretentious folk, buses, and bridge," A man of eclectic
tastes1and experiences (he worked as a ranch hand, a busboy, a cook
and a seaman), Langston Hughes forged poems, novels, plays, opera
libretti, lyrics for musicals, and a cantata out of the various themes of
his life to become one of America’s leading men of letters. His work,
vivid and strong, engages readers in heart to-heart conversation even as
in his words "I try to interpret and make a bridge between one section
of our American public and another.” The creative process itself was,
for Hughes, another sort of communication: In an envelope marked: /
Personal” / God addressed me a letter. / In an envelope marked: /
Personal” / I have given my answer.
RITA DOVE
(b.1952)
Rita Dove's twelfth-grade English teacher took her to meet poet John Ciardi.
Though Dove had already been writing creatively for years, "That day, I
realized…it was possible to be a writer, to write down a poem or story in the
intimate sphere of one's own room, and then share it with the world.” She went
on to become a college professor, an editor, the recipient of many awards and
fellowships for writing, and a judge for the Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Award. In 1987 she won the Pulitzer for the story, in poetry, of her
maternal grandparents Thomas and Beulah, Her other books include a poetry
collection The Yellow House on the Corner( 1980); a volume of short stories,
Fifth Sunday (1985); a novel, Through The Ivory Gate (1992) and a verse play
The Darker Face of the Earth (1994). In 1993 Dove was appointed US poet
laureate by the Librarian of Congress-the youngest poet, and the first African
American, to receive this honor. The engaging energy with which she served
as spokesperson for poetry throughout the country resulted in a one-year
extension of her appointment in 1994.
ARNA (ARNAUD) WENDELL BONTEMPS
(1902-1973)
"We were heralds of a dawning day,” proclaimed Arna Bontemps in his
1972 anthology The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, The "we" were
African American writers, artists, and musicians whose creativity in
the 1920s forever transformed the way black culture was perceived in
America. Bontemps took that same heady Harlem spirit and carved his
own literary renaissance, which extended beyond New York City and
lasted nearly half a century thereafter. He produced more than twentyfive books: novels depicting aspects of black history and experience
(God Sends Sunday, 1931 Black Thunder ,1936) anthologies that
celebrated black culture (The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of
Negro Folklore, edited with Langston Hughes Great Slave Narratives),
poetry, history and black juvenilia. With consummate skill, dignity, and
thoughtfulness he became a "keeper of the flame" of African American
heritage
Dr. Vivien Thomas
Pioneer Heart Surgery
Vivien T. Thomas was a key player in pioneering the anastomosis of the subclavian artery to the
pulmonary artery.The surgical work he performed with Alfred Blalock paved the way for the successful
outcome of the Blalock-Taussig shunt.
In January 1930, Vivien Thomas, a young African-American who was forced for lack of funds to leave his
first year of college, came to work for Blalock in his laboratory. At that point Blalock's increasing
obligations were cutting into the time he could spend in the laboratory and he needed a surgical assistant.
A more fortunate choice could not have been made. Vivien Thomas learned to perform the surgical
operations and chemical determinations needed for their experiments, to calculate the results, and to
keep precise records; he remained an invaluable associate throughout Blalock's career.
Blalock and Thomas worked closely in the surgical laboratories. Thomas was a major contributor in the
development of operative techniques. He and Dr. Blalock also collaborated on the design of surgical
equipment. Shown here is a clamp for the temporary occlusion of the pulmonary artery, which was
devised for Blalock's use by Vivien Thomas and William Longmire, working with the local surgical supply
house Murray Baumgartner & Co. It became known as the "Blalock" clamp.
Thomas supervised the surgical laboratories at Hopkins for over 35 years, and in 1976 he was appointed
instructor in surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 1979, upon his retirement, he
became instructor emeritus of surgery. Vivien Thomas's achievements were widely recognized by his
colleagues. In 1976, he was awarded the honorary degree Doctor of Laws, by the Johns Hopkins
University. Thomas with Helen Taussig, and Steven Muller, President of The Johns Hopkins
University at graduation ceremonies in 1976, during which Thomas was honored.