Known today as Black History Month, the observance began as Black History Week in 1926. The commemoration was started by Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), respectfully known as the Father of Black History. Dr. Woodson initiated the then week-long celebration as a way for teachers, laypersons, churches, and organizations to educate and highlight the accomplishments and contributions made by African Americans to the history and culture of the United States of America and world. His legacy of extensive research, recording, collecting, and publishing of African American history and contributions began in 1915 when he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, known today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). The objective of ASLAH was to disseminate historically accurate information and decrease the lack of information available about African Americans. His work countered the narrative that Blacks had no history prior to slavery and were inferior to other ethnicities.
Karen Bass of California has dedicated her career to public service, first as a state legislator, then as a member of the US House of Representatives, and later as the first Black female mayor of Los Angeles. In November 2022, she was elected mayor of the nation’s second-largest city. A physician assistant by training, she burst into the national spotlight in 2008, when she became the first Black American woman to serve as speaker of a state legislature. Two years later, she was elected to the US House of Representatives; Bass was reelected to her seat four times. Known as a consensus builder and a passionate defender of foster youth and other vulnerable populations, Bass succeeded at garnering bipartisan support for many of her initiatives.
Charles Ogletree, Jr., was one of the most tenacious and successful trial lawyers in the United States. The Harvard University professor was a passionate advocate of a defendant's right to a fair trial within the American justice system--a Constitutional right one might find difficult to receive if a member of a minority group. For several years Ogletree worked in Washington, D.C.'s public defender's office, a difficult area of law which generally attracts only the most ideologically dedicated and stamina-imbued law school graduates. Those experiences were carried over to the Ivy League halls of Harvard Law School, where Ogletree single-handedly made significant inroads into how students at the country's most prestigious legal training ground view both the African-American community and the criminal justice system.
In 1986 Ogletree became director of Harvard's introduction to trial advocacy workshops, a program he founded to inject a more clinical, hands-on approach into a curriculum known to be a bit too focused on the theory of law. Through the intensive workshops, students--even if they are not planning a career in trial law--will walk away with a sense that the law can be "an instrument for social and political change...a tool to empower the dispossessed and disenfranchised...and a means to make the privileged more respectful of differences," Ogletree explained in the book I've Known Rivers.
He became the Jesse Climenko professor of law in 1998, the vice dean for Clinical Programs at Harvard in 2003, and in 2004 he was appointed director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. He also served as the co-chair of the Reparations Coordinating Committee, a group pursuing a lawsuit to win reparations for descendants of African slaves. The group of distinguished lawyers and other experts on the committee sought to reconcile the past wrongs brought by slavery. His legal work was recognized, and the National Law Journal named him one of the "100 Most Influential Lawyers in America'' in 2002.
Hakeem Jeffries was selected in 2022 as House Minority Leader and leader of the House Democratic Caucus for the U.S. House of Representatives, a historic move that made him the first Black person to lead one of the two major parties in either chamber of Congress. He is a Democratic member of the U.S. House who was elected in November 2012 to represent the 8th Congressional District of New York. A native New Yorker who began his political career as a three-term representative in the New York State Assembly, Jeffries is described in a National Journal profile as "equally comfortable in front of a Brooklyn church congregation as … with New York academics."
Dr. Eliza Atkins Gleason was awarded a Ph.D. from the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago in 1940, she became the first black American to receive a doctorate in library science. Gleason's groundbreaking dissertation was entitled "Government and Administration of Public Library Service to Negroes in the South" and greatly influenced the future development of public library service to black Americans in that region. It was later published under the title The Southern Negro and the Public Library; A Study of the Government and Administration of Public Library Service to Negroes in the South. In this study Gleason noted that public library service in the South was generally inadequate for all people, particularly blacks.
Gleason's career has been long and diverse. She began her career as assistant librarian, 1931-1932, at Louisville Municipal College. At Fisk University she headed the library's reference department from 1933 to 1937. For one year, 1936-1937, she was the library director at Talladega College. She established and became the first Dean of the School of Library Service at Atlanta University and created a library education program that trained 90 percent of all African-American librarians by 1986. Gleason was the first African American to serve on the board of the American Library Association from 1942 to 1946.
Victor Glover is an American military officer and astronaut who was one of four crew members aboard the Crew-1 SpaceX Crew Dragon mission that launched on November 15, 2020. Glover serves as the mission's pilot and second-in-command. Prior to his career as an astronaut, Glover was an accomplished officer in the U.S. Navy, where he served as a commander, a test pilot, and an aviation specialist. He became an astronaut in 2013 while simultaneously holding a legislative fellow position in the U.S. Senate.
Glover completed multiple advanced degrees during his military career. These include a master's degree in flight test engineering, which he completed at Edwards Air Force Base's Air University in 2007. Glover also completed master's degrees in systems engineering and military operations in 2009 and 2010, respectively. A decorated naval officer, Glover distinguished himself as a top aviator during his military career. In rising to the rank of lieutenant commander, Glover accrued approximately 3,000 hours of flight experience, using more than 40 aircraft in achieving the milestone. He has also participated in 24 combat missions.
Simone Biles is an American gymnast who rose to international prominence in 2013 when she became a world champion at the age of 16. She is the first Black gymnast in the history of the sport to win an overall world title, following the trail blazed by fellow American Gabby Douglas, who became the first Black Olympic gymnastics champion when she won a gold medal at the 2012 Summer Games in London. Biles went on to win many more world championship titles. After going professional in 2015, Biles won four gold medals and one bronze medal in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, becoming the first U.S. gymnast to win four gold medals at a single Olympics. On July 7, 2022, Biles was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Joe Biden, becoming the youngest person ever to win the award.
In 2018, after taking a year off from the sport, Biles returned to gymnastics in dramatic fashion. She won every gold medal at the USA Gymnastics National Championships. Then, she won six medals at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, becoming the most decorated female gymnast in World Championships history. In 2019, the Associated Press named her the Female Athlete of the Year. In 2021 Biles became the first woman to land the Yurchenko double pike move in competition and several months later qualified for the Summer Olympic Games.
Ruth E. Carter is an Academy Award-winning costume designer. Although she had been nominated previously on two previous occasions, she won her first Academy Award in 2019 for her work on Black Panther (2018). Carter was the first black woman to win an Oscar Award in the best costuming category. She is known for her long-term collaboration with director Spike Lee, with whom she has collaborated ten times. In addition to her Oscar nominations, Carter was also nominated for an Emmy in 2016 for the period costumes she contributed to the 2016 adaptation of Roots. Her work has been praised for authentically tapping into African and Black American cultural heritage for their inspiration. Over the course of her career, she has worked on more than 40 projects in film and television.
Julian Abele (1881-1950) was the first African American architect to attain professional acclaim. He enjoyed a long and illustrious career and many of the buildings that bear his design stamp have endured to become American landmarks.
Between 1906, when he joined the all-white firm of Horace Trumbauer, until his death in 1950, Abele designed or contributed to the design of some 250 buildings, including Harvard's Widener Memorial Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Free Library, and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, originally a private residence and one of Manhattan's grandest addresses in its day.
Abele's race, coupled with his self-effacing personality, meant he would not be widely known during his lifetime, outside Philadelphia's architectural community. In 2016, Duke University renamed its main quadrangle Abele Quad to recognize his design contributions to its campus’ original academic and residential buildings.
Victorine Quille Adams (1912-2006) was the first African American woman elected to the Baltimore City Council. She served four terms from 1967 to 1983. Her tenure on the city council inaugurated the continuous presence of African American women in Baltimore City politics. A native of the city, she sought to improve political representation, civic participation, and economic opportunity for all Baltimoreans.
In 1946, five years after Maryland ratified the 19th amendment, Adams founded the Colored Women's Democratic Campaign Committee (CWDCC). Its first campaign resulted in the 1954 election of the first African American elected to the Maryland State Senate, Harry Cole. Adams and CWDCC also mobilized support for Verda F. Welcome, resulting in her 1962 election as the first African American woman in the Maryland Senate.
Adams became a successful entrepreneur in 1948 and opened Charm Center, the only black owned and operated clothing store for women in Baltimore. In 1966, she successfully ran for the Maryland House of Delegates and later won a seat on the Baltimore City Council. She created the Baltimore Fuel Fund, a public-private partnership that raised money from charitable contributions to help families needing financial assistance with heating costs. The fund humanized government assistance and its model was eventually replicated by other Maryland cities.
George Edward Alcorn Jr. is an atomic and molecular physicist. In 1984 Alcorn and his colleagues patented a device to detect extraterrestrial life: the imaging X-ray spectrometer. He has also studied missile trajectory and orbits, invented components for semiconductors, and designed instruments used in space. For his work Alcorn earned NASA's Inventor of the Year Award and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015.
After earning his Ph.D. in 1967, Alcorn began his career as a scientist in the semiconductor and aerospace industries before starting at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 1978. He helped develop technologies used for the Freedom space station, as well as identified how to promote NASA-developed technologies within government, business, and universities. Few people have the training needed to understand the implications of Alcorn's work, or the details of his eight patents. Much of his work is classified as top secret by the U.S. government.
Alcorn has encouraged others, especially minorities, to follow in his footsteps through his work as a university professor and as a youth tutor. He taught electrical engineering at both Howard University and the University of the District of Columbia.
In 1988, Patricia Bath (1942-2019) became the first African American female doctor to receive a patent for a medical invention. She developed a laser device to remove cataracts. She developed a new field called community ophthalmology, which provides quality eye care to underserved populations.
Bath earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Hunter College in 1964 and then attended Howard University Medical School. Two jobs solidified her decision to incorporate social consciousness into her career. From 1968 to 1969 she worked as an intern at the Harlem Hospital and completed an ophthalmology fellowship at Columbia University. Bath noticed the contrasts between the patients and quality of medical care at the two locations. She convinced her Columbia University colleagues to operate free of charge on blind patients at Harlem Hospital's Eye Clinic.
In 1974, Bath became the first African American woman surgeon at the University of California Los Angeles Medical Center. She was also a dedicated professor at Charles R. Drew University. Bath founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness and served as president until her death in 2019. A children's book about her life, The Doctor with an Eye for Eyes, was published in 2017.
William Wells Brown (1815-1884) escaped to freedom and became the first African American to publish a novel or play. He was also an abolitionist and an internationally acclaimed lecturer.
Born a slave, Brown taught himself to read and write. While working on a steamboat, he escaped and in 1834 settled in Canada. Brown's published first work was his memoir The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1842). He eventually became an important link in the Underground Railroad, helping slaves escape to freedom, sometimes concealing them aboard his ship until they could be put ashore in a friendly port.
In 1843, Brown was invited to lecture for the Anti-Slavery Society and soon gained renown as a public speaker. The American Peace Society chose him as their representative to the Peace Congress in Paris in 1849. Brown remained in Europe for several years. His first novel, Clotelle, or the President's Daughter published in London in 1853. His play, The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom, was published in 1858. Brown also studied medicine and was active in the temperance, women's suffrage, and prison reform movements.
Patrisse Cullors is an activist and artist based in Los Angeles, California. She is a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, which campaigns against racial injustice and violence toward black people. She also campaigns for LGBTQ rights and identifies as a queer activist. In 2018 she published When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.
In 2019, Cullors co-founded the Crenshaw Dairy Mart art space in Inglewood, Los Angeles, after she earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at the University of Southern California. At Prescott College in Arizona, she designed and founded an MFA program called Social and Environmental Arts Practice.
Black Lives Matter protests grew across the US and internationally following the May 25, 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Nearly 100,000 people attended the June 7, 2020, protest in Hollywood, California. Cullors spoke and said only radical shifts can stop police violence. "The demand of defunding law enforcement becomes a central demand in how we actually get real accountability and justice, because it means we are reducing the ability of law enforcement to have resources that harm our communities."
Ryan Coogler's first feature-length film, Fruitvale Station, received widespread acclaim, nabbing major prizes at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals in 2013 and introducing the young African-American filmmaker to the spotlight. Throughout his nascent career, Coogler has drawn from his roots growing up in the troubled neighborhoods of San Francisco's East Bay to make films that combine art with an urgent call for social change. These roots also informed his next project, Creed. The film is a spin-off of the Rocky film series and follows the rise of Adonis Creed, son of Rocky Balboa's deceased rival and friend Apollo Creed. The film was a major hit with audiences when it premiered in 2015. Following this success, studios tapped Coogler to direct Black Panther, a superhero film based on the Marvel comic book character of the same name. The film was the first Marvel film with a predominately black cast, and later became the first superhero film to be nominated for a best picture Oscar at the 2019 Academy Awards.
Born in Oakland, California, in 1986 to a strict, probation officer father and a mother who worked as a community organizer, Coogler grew up with a keen understanding of the problems facing black urban neighborhoods. Though his parents were not wealthy, they pulled together the money to send Coogler and his two younger brothers to a private Catholic school to ensure that they received a quality education. Coogler's father, Ira, also introduced his boys to sports, often driving them to Bay Area neighborhoods where they could play and practice safely. When he was eight years old, Coogler's family relocated to Richmond, a Bay Area city known for its high crime rates.
Up-and-coming actor Amandla Stenberg is best known for her breakthrough role as Rue in the 2012 film The Hunger Games. Since then, Stenberg has appeared in several films and television series, with starring roles in two 2018 releases: the dystopian sci-fi thriller The Darkest Minds and drama The Hate U Give. Stenberg also performs as one-half of the folk-rock duo Honeywater, and she is the coauthor of the Niobe fantasy comic series.
Stenberg was born on October 23, 1998 in Los Angeles. Her father, Tom Stenberg, is a Danish citizen with white and Inuit ancestry; her mother, Karen Brailsford, is African American. Amandla Stenberg's acting career began in early childhood. At age three, after learning that a friend had appeared in a commercial, Stenberg announced to her parents that she, too, wanted to act and needed an agent. At age four, she landed her first Disney catalog shoot. She appeared in a number of commercials as a child, including nationwide spots for Walmart, Kmart, and McDonald's. She also appeared in a public service announcement for BuildTheDream.org, raising funds for a national Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, which aired during President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009.
In 2011 Stenberg appeared in her first feature film, Colombiana, directed by Luc Besson. The thriller stars Zoe Saldana as Cataleya Restrepo, a hit woman seeking to avenge her parents' murder. Stenberg played the child Cataleya in the 10-minute flashback sequence that opens the film. Critics praised her performance. Mike Hale of the New York Times noted that "her portrayal of the future deadly-but-sensitive killer is such a perfect combination of trembling emotion, action chops and deadpan humor." After Colombiana, Stenberg appeared in a Hallmark Channel movie, A Taste of Romance, before landing her blockbuster role in The Hunger Games in 2012.
The poet, novelist, and teacher Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in Harlem to West Indian parents. She described herself as "a black lesbian feminist mother lover poet." The exploration of pain, rage, and love in personal and political realms pervades her writing. Perhaps because Lorde did not speak until she was nearly five years old and also suffered from impaired vision, her passions were equally divided between a love of words and imagery and a devotion to speaking the truth, no matter how painful. Her objective, she stated, was to empower and encourage toward speech and action those in society who are often silenced and disfranchised.
Lorde published her first poem while in high school, in Seventeen magazine. She studied for a year (1954) at the National University of Mexico, before returning to the United States to earn a bachelor of arts degree in literature and philosophy from Hunter College in 1959. She went on to receive a master's degree from the Columbia School of Library Science in 1960. During this time she married attorney Edward Ashley Rollins and had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. Lorde and Rollins divorced in 1970. Juggling her roles as black woman, lesbian, mother, and poet, she was actively involved in causes for social justice. Throughout this period she was a member of the Harlem Writers Guild.
Fantasy-novel writer N. K. Jemisin became the first Black writer to ever to win the coveted Hugo Award for Best Novel. In 2017 and 2018, two more installments in her acclaimed "Broken Earth" series also won Hugo honors, making Jemisin the first author ever achieve that triple feat in the seven-decade-plus history of the World Science Fiction Society prize. The initial win ranked her alongside previous honorees like Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Ursula K. Le Guin, but Jemisin is often compared to one of the trailblazing African American women in science fiction and fantasy literature, Octavia Butler. In 2020, she was awarded the MacArthur Foundation genius grant.
Nora Keita Jemisin was born in Iowa City in 1972. Her parents' paths diverged and she grew up in Mobile, Alabama, with her psychologist mother; summers were spent with her father, who settled in New York City and forged a career as a painter and sculptor. Both Jemisin and her cousin, the comedian and television host W. Kamau Bell, were only children and were accustomed to spending long stretches of time on their own; when together, the two--born just four months apart--worked on writing and drawing comic-book-style sagas.
Angela Davis has never wavered in her quest for women's rights and the eradication of poverty and oppression.
She was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama and as a young girl attended civil rights demonstrations with her mother. In 1965 Davis graduated from Brandeis University and earned her doctorate from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. The University of California at Los Angeles hired her as an assistant professor of philosophy in 1969 and she quickly became a popular teacher on campus.
Davis joined several groups, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Black Panthers, as well as the Communist Party. She was also involved in demonstrations calling for parole of the imprisoned Soledad Brothers. On August 7, 1970, a teen-aged sibling of one of the brothers staged a violent escape attempt at the Marin County Courthouse. The firearms used were traced to Davis and she fled into hiding. The FBI found her in New York City and extradited her to California, where she was held in prison for over a year. Davis was tried and acquitted of all charges in 1972.
In subsequent decades Davis has continued as a University of California professor and an activist for national health care, civil rights, and prison reform. She has written over ten books and lectures throughout the world.
Paul Robeson--civil rights activist, singer, actor, law school graduate, athlete, scholar, author--was perhaps the best known and most widely respected black American of the 1930s and 1940s. Paul Robeson was also a Soviet apologist, and a man, later in his life, widely vilified and censored for his outspokenness and unyielding views on issues to which public opinion ran contrary. As a young man, Robeson was virile, charismatic, eloquent, and powerful. In his last two decades, he was defeated and unsure mentally, a remnant physically. He learned to speak more than 20 languages to break down the barriers of race and ignorance throughout the world, and yet, as Sterling Stuckey pointed out in the New York Times Book Review, for the last 25 years of his life his name had "been a great whisper and a greater silence in black America." Martin Baulm Duberman, in his 1989 biography Paul Robeson, asserted that Robeson ultimately was a hero wrongly accused, that his story was an "American tragedy." Barry Gewen, writing in the New Leader, felt instead that Robeson was a great man tragically flawed, "an artist of unassailable gifts and achievement who was brought low through his own political obtuseness." Such divergent views of Robeson can only be reconciled by understanding the complexity of his life from the beginning. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898, Robeson wasn't subjected to the brutalities of daily life common for black Americans after the turn of the century. But his family was not totally free from hardship. Robeson's mother died from a stove-fire accident when he was six. His father, a runaway slave who became a pastor, was removed from an early ministerial position. Nonetheless, from his father Robeson learned diligence and an "unshakable dignity and courage in spite of the press of racism and poverty." These characteristics, Stuckey noted, defined Robeson's approach in his beliefs and actions throughout his life. Having excelled in both scholastics and athletics as a youth, Robeson received a scholarship to Rutgers College (now University) where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and chosen valedictorian in his senior year. He earned varsity letters in four sports, and was named Rutgers' first All-American in football. Fueled by his class prophecy to be "the leader of the colored race in America," Robeson went on to earn a law degree from Columbia University, supporting himself by playing professional football on the weekends. After graduation he obtained a position with a New York law firm, only to have his career halted when a stenographer, as Duberman related the incident, refused to take down a memorandum: "I never take dictation from a nigg*r."
Kamala Harris was elected Vice-President of the United States in 2020, alongside her running mate Joe Biden. With the win, she became the first woman, first African American, and first South Asian American to be elected to serve as Vice-President.
Kamala Devi Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, California, a child of a mixed-race marriage. Though Harris would most often be identified as African American, she also highly valued her Indian heritage and her grandmother, who she saw on visits to the Indian city of Chennai. Harris spent her early years in Berkeley, where her parents attended college and worked in the civil rights movement.
After graduating from high school in Montreal, Canada, Harris returned to the US to attend Howard University in Washington, DC, where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1986. She received her law degree in 1989 from the University of California and went to work as a law clerk in the district attorney's office in Alameda County.
Though an experienced prosecutor by 2003, Harris was a relative newcomer to politics when she was elected San Francisco district attorney. However, her hard work, respectful leadership style, and sincere concern for the most vulnerable members of society introduced integrity and positive social change to an office that had often been controversial. In 2010, Harris made history when she became the first woman and African American elected California attorney general. In 2016, Harris became only the second African American woman to be elected to the US Senate.
Jeremiah Hawkins (1862-1940) was born in the Brandywine district of southern Prince George’s County to parents who had been enslaved. He became interested in politics and participated as a circuit court juror in all Black court cases. He was also a delegate for the Brandywine voting district at the county’s Republican Party conventions.
In 1905, he and his wife Emma Quander Hawkins moved to North Brentwood, at that time called Randallstown. They owned and operated a dairy business. He continued his political participation by leading the town’s civic organization and its efforts to become an incorporated town, which occurred in 1924. Hawkins served as the town’s first mayor and remained active in state and local politics until his death in 1940.
Carla Hayden is the first woman and the first African American to lead the Library of Congress. She is a veteran of the Chicago Public Library and Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, as well as a former president of the American Library Association (ALA).
Born in 1952, in Tallahassee, Florida, Hayden grew up in Chicago. She earned her undergraduate degree from Roosevelt University and went on to earn two advanced degrees, including a Ph.D., from the University of Chicago. She began her career with the Chicago Public Library in 1973 as a library associate and children's librarian and rose through the ranks to become deputy commissioner and chief librarian.
In 1993, she became executive director of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. In 2002, Hayden's storied career made her a natural candidate for the ALA presidency. Upon winning she announced that "equity of access" was one of her primary goals and urged her colleagues to "rededicate ourselves to maintaining that seamless web that helps our customers reach their dreams. Libraries and librarians are truly lifelines for so many."
In 2016, Hayden began her 10-year term as Librarian of Congress. She has noted that in the not-so-distant past, it was illegal for African American slaves to learn to read, a crime punishable by dismemberment. "So, to have an African American heading up the world's largest library is not quite an oxymoron, but it speaks to the history."
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay made her feature directorial debut in 2008 with the acclaimed documentary This Is the Life, a behind-the-scenes look at Los Angeles's legendary Good Life Café, where West Coast rap got its start in the early 1990s. A former movie publicist, DuVernay came to filmmaking with nearly two decades of experience in Hollywood, having worked with such directors as Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood before stepping behind the camera herself. She ventured into narrative film for the first time in 2011 with the heartfelt family drama I Will Follow, earning praise from critics such as Roger Ebert. DuVernay premiered her second feature, Middle of Nowhere, at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. She earned the festival's U.S. Directing Award in the dramatic category, making her the first African American woman ever to win the prize. She next directed the 2014 film Selma and the 2016 documentary 13th. In 2019 Netflix released DuVernay's smash-hit miniseries When They See Us, and DuVernay signed a deal to create a television series about football player and activist Colin Kaepernick's life.
Ava Marie DuVernay was born on August 24, 1972, in Long Beach, California, and grew up south of the city in Compton with her mother, stepfather, and two sisters. As a girl, she fell in love with the movies thanks to an aunt who was a community theater actress. "She was a huge film buff," she recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. "We were always at the movies. So I caught the bug."
American actor Chadwick Boseman studied to become a director and writer but instead devoted much of his career to acting. While taking on a number of television and film roles, he continued to write and direct plays. Boseman received significant attention in April of 2013 when he starred as Jackie Robinson in the film 42. He later portrayed legendary soul singer James Brown in Get on Up (2014). In 2016 he took on the role of T’Challa, also known as Black Panther, in the superhero film Captain America: Civil War. Two years later, he reprised the role of T’Challa in the blockbuster film Black Panther, which went on to gross more than $1 billion worldwide in box office sales. His star was on the rise and his name in contention for high acting honors when Boseman passed away of cancer on August 28, 2020. At the 2021 Golden Globes, he won a posthumous Best Actor award for his role in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
Chadwick Boseman was born in 1977 and grew up in South Carolina, where he played Little League baseball and later basketball. He attended Howard University in Washington, DC. Although he was interested in directing and writing, he wanted to understand the acting process as well. He took a number of acting classes and caught the acting bug. He graduated in 2000 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in directing. He later graduated from the British American Drama Academy at Oxford.
The late Alex Haley gave America a bicentennial gift that will not soon be forgotten--his fact-based book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Haley's account of his ancestor Kunta Kinte, who was captured by slave traders in 1767 and brought to America against his will, won a special Pulitzer Prize and a citation from the National Book Award committee. An international bestseller published in more than 30 languages with six million copies sold, Roots made its author a millionaire celebrity. It also did more to foster interest in black history and genealogy than any novel before or since. Such critics as Essence magazine correspondent Betty Winston Baye hailed the author as "a national treasure [of lasting] importance to the world."
"Few works in the post-World War II era can match the searing impact Roots had on a racially troubled land," assessed Mark Goodman in People. Indeed, the book and the subsequent television miniseries marked a watershed for the nation. The original eight-night run of the Roots television show attracted a staggering audience. TV Guide contributor Larry L. King noted, "At least 130 million Americans, more than half the country, tuned in at least one episode." The book topped the nonfiction bestseller lists for six months and has sold briskly ever since. King maintained that in both the print and screen versions, Haley "drew on the deep, natural well-spring of familial love.... Roots hardly could have missed. Alex Haley simply had one of America's, and mankind's, most powerful stories to tell."
The path leading to the publication of that powerful story was a long and painful one. Haley labored for a dozen years on the project, beginning with only the most slender leads from his grandmother's oral history of her family. In an effort to trace that history, the author searched through dozens of archives and eventually found his way to his ancestral village on the Gambia River in West Africa. There, Haley was able to link the threads of his grandmother's stories with the history of the Kinte clan through the tale of the young man captured by white-faced traders. Meeting his relatives in Gambia was a high point for Haley. Another was the overwhelming reception his book received when it was published at long last in 1976. "Do you know what it's like to go from the YMCA to the Waldorf?" he asked a People reporter. "If I'd known I'd be this successful, I would have typed faster."
Patrick Mahomes became one of professional football's most celebrated quarterbacks before his 25th birthday. In his second year with the Kansas City Chiefs, he led the team to the 2019 American Football Conference (AFC) title game, and a year later, led his team to a Super Bowl championship--the Chiefs' first NFL title in half a century.
Mahomes had already collected the league Most Valuable Player (MVP) honor in 2018--making history as the youngest ever to win the award--and was voted MVP of Super Bowl LIV. In July 2020, the Chiefs made Mahomes the richest player in NFL history with a 10-year, $503 million contract extension. The deal was also the richest contract ever signed by a player in any North American sport.
Mahomes was a gifted athlete at a young age. He played baseball and football and excelled at basketball too. In March 2014, Mahomes committed to playing football for Texas Tech University. In 2017, he declared his eligibility for the NFL Draft and the Kansas City Chiefs took him as the 10th pick. Mahomes became their starting quarterback in the 2018 season and finished the year with 50 TD passes--tied for second-most in a single season in NFL history.
"I didn't decide to become a science fiction writer," Octavia Butler claimed in an interview with Frances M. Beal in the Black Scholar. "It just happened." Butler--the most recognized black woman writer in the genre--became one of sci-fi's leading lights with a career that included publishing the Patternmaster series, the Xenogenesis Trilogy, the celebrated historical fantasy Kindred, and the highly praised dystopian saga The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents, among other works. Along with "cyberpunk" novelist William Gibson, Terri Sutton of the LA Weekly listed Butler among "science fiction's most thoughtful writers." Vibe magazine's Carol Cooper declared that what Gibson "does for young, disaffected white fans of high tech and low life, Octavia Estelle Butler does for people of color. She gives us a future." The Washington Post went further, declaring Butler to be "one of the finest voices in fiction period."
Butler's work helped put race and gender into the foreground of speculative fiction, exploring these and other social and political issues with a developed sense of ambiguity and difficulty. Such explorations, Cooper noted in Vibe, were previously absent from science fiction: "In the '70s, Butler's work exploded into this ideological vacuum like an incipient solar system." As the award-winning author told Black Scholar, "A science fiction writer has the freedom to do absolutely anything. The limits are the imagination of the writer."
Walter Dean Myers (1937-2014) was one of the best-known African American writers of children's and young adult literature. Starting in the late 1960s, Myers published dozens of books for young readers seeking realistic stories and recognizable characters who tackled issues such as teen pregnancy, crime, imprisonment, drug abuse, and school shootings. He also addressed historical topics in both fiction and nonfiction books and wrote many biographies of notable African Americans. Myers often collaborated with his son Christopher Myers, a respected illustrator.
The author of more than ninety books, Myers’ most famous titles were Fallen Angels, Monster, and Scorpions. He received numerous awards and honors, including the Coretta Scott King Award. As the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature from 2012-2014, he spoke at schools and libraries throughout the US encouraging children to read. Myers told Marti Parham in Jet, "I'm never going to stop writing. It's my hobby as much as it is my profession...I do this because I love it. I'll write until I die."
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry ushered in a new era of U.S. theater history. She brought to the stage the realistic portrayal of urban, working-class African American life. Writer James Baldwin offered insights into the impact of her work through his description of the staging of her landmark 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun: "I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater," he related in a 1969 introduction to Hansberry's adapted autobiography To Be Young, Gifted and Black. "And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage."
But Hansberry did more than just expand the content of realistic stage drama to include African Americans. When her additional writings became available in the 1980s, several literary critics argued for an even broader recognition of her stature. In his 1991 book Hansberry's Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity, Steven R. Carter commented: "When Lorraine Hansberry died at 34, she left a wide and rich dramatic heritage, although only a small part of it was visible then, and some parts have yet to become known. When all of her work is brought into view, she should be seen as one of the most important playwrights of this century, not simply on the basis of the one play already considered a classic, but on her collective work." In recognition of her accomplishments, Hansberry was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2017. Impressive as her achievement is in the field of literature, she has now become recognized as a pioneering defender of lesbian relationships, as part of a wider campaign to apply the principles of the U.S. Constitution to all disadvantaged groups. Hanberry was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 1999.
Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was an educator and political activist who dedicated her life to improving social conditions for black Americans. She helped to start the National Association of Colored Women and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Both former slaves, Mary’s parents instilled in her the importance of religion and education. In 1879, she was accepted at Oberlin College, one of the few integrated universities in the US, where she earned a bachelor's degree. She and educator/lawyer Robert Terrell married in 1891.
In 1892, Terrell led a local Washington, DC club, the Colored Women's League, which later merged with other black women's organizations to become the National Association of Colored Women. Terrell was elected its first president. NACW’s agenda of social reform included establishing day care centers for children of black working mothers, as well as campaigning for female suffrage, equal rights for blacks, and repeal of Jim Crow laws.
In 1895, Terrell became the first black female elected to the Washington, DC Board of Education. She also participated in the 1901 founding of the NAACP. She published her autobiography A Colored Woman in a White World in 1940. Although nearly 90 years old, Terrell led demonstrations in 1949 at segregated local restaurants and she was part of a small group that sued one that refused to serve them. The case went to the Supreme Court, where she testified. Their case won in 1953 and DC began desegregating.
Terrell lived just long enough to learn of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which effectively ended segregation in public schools. She died on July 24, 1954.
In January 2021, Raphael Warnock became the first Democratic African American US Senator elected from a southern state since Reconstruction. In 2005 Warnock became senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, the spiritual home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Born in Savannah, Georgia in 1969, Warnock earned his Master of Divinity and Ph.D. in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York. He served as youth pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York and as senior pastor at Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore. Warnock came to prominence in Georgia politics in 2014 as a leader of the campaign to expand Medicaid in the state.
Warnock authored the 2014 book The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness, in which he investigates whether the true mission of the black church is to save souls or to transform the social order. He argued that there is room for both approaches to work in harmony.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) was a woman ahead of her time--courageous, independent, assertive, and outspoken. The eldest of eight children, she was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. She later became the owner and editor of her own Southern newspaper, crusading at great personal risk against the illegal lynching of Black people and injustices of segregation.
Devoting herself to Black progress and racial equality, Wells-Barnett played a leading role in the Black women's club movement, as well as the creation of national organizations like the NAACP. Her reputation as a fearless activist was secured by her tenure at the Memphis weekly Free Speech and Headlight. She purchased a one-third ownership and became its editor in 1889. Never one to shun controversy, her militant editorials added to her growing reputation for fearlessness. Wells-Barnett died in 1931. In 2020, she was recognized for her vital journalistic role with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
August Wilson (1945-2005) was a modern–day griot who eloquently chronicled black American life. His ten plays, including Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, and Seven Guitars, have been performed across the US, transporting audiences on odysseys of black life through Wilson's focus on identity, culture, and history. He was the first African American to have two plays running simultaneously on Broadway and is one of seven American playwrights to win two Pulitzer Prizes.
When Wilson began writing his plays, he had little experience with theater, having only seen two plays, and no formal training. He had no particular method of writing his plays but admitted to relying on what he called the "4 Bs"--the blues; fellow playwright Amiri Baraka; author Jorge Luis Borges; and painter Romare Bearden--to help him craft his stories. Wilson claimed, "When I saw [Bearden’s] work, it was the first time that I had seen black life presented in all its richness, and I said, 'I want to do that--I want my plays to be the equal of his canvases.'"
August Wilson carved his signature on American theater by capturing the changing texture of black life with his plays, each covering a different decade of the 20th century. The skill with which he did this earned him two Pulitzers, a Tony Award, and seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, in addition to 23 honorary degrees.
Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was born on December 19, 1875 in New Canton, Virginia, to parents who were former slaves. He officially began high school at 20 years old after securing enough money to care for himself. He graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in Huntington, West Virginia in two years and went on to earn both bachelor’s and master's degrees. In 1912, he became the second African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University and was the first descendant of slavery to do so.
One of Woodson’s most significant accomplishments was the establishment of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, known today at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASLAH). To disseminate scholarly work on Black history and culture, he also created The Journal of Negro History, today known as The Journal of African American History.
Woodson discovered that all Americans were miseducated and lacked knowledge of the extraordinary accomplishments and contributions African Americans made to the world. His solution was development of a curriculum and kits for educators, laypersons, churches and organizations to utilize during a week-long celebration known as Black History Week.
Black History Week was celebrated in February because it coincided with the birthdates of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. In 1976, it became Black History Month. Woodson’s life and legacy are honored locally in Washington, DC with ASALH’s headquarters, with his home a National Park Service historic site and with a life-sized statue of him.
American physician Jane Cooke Wright (1919-2013) was a prominent cancer researcher who made many contributions to the early field of chemotherapy.
Wright graduated from Smith College in 1942 and New York Medical College in 1945. She trained at Harlem Hospital, where she served as a resident in internal medicine for several years. In 1948, Wright's father founded the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation to investigate the possibilities for and effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs in cancer treatment. Wright joined the staff as a clinician in 1949.
In 1952 after her father’s death, Wright became the head of the foundation. Because the drugs used in chemotherapy could be harmful to patients, Wright worked to develop treatment guidelines with maximum benefit to patients. She had the joy of seeing some of her patients with advanced stages of cancer recover and live for years after treatments.
In 1967, Wright became associate dean and professor of surgery at New York Medical College. At a time when African American women physicians numbered a few hundred in the US, Wright was the highest ranked African American woman at a nationally recognized medical institution. She developed a program of study into cancer, heart diseases, and stroke, as well as a program to teach doctors how to use chemotherapy. Wright retired from the college and active cancer research in 1987.
