“The Pan African History is a History of Overcoming and Perseverance”

Notable African Americans

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Kyle Abraham
American dancer and choreographer

Kyle Abraham, (born August 14, 1977, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.), American contemporary dancer and choreographer who founded (2006) the company Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion (A/I/M; later A.I.M.). He was a master at mixing hip-hop, street, and modern dance styles.

Abraham grew up in a middle-class African American neighbourhood in Pittsburgh. He began dancing when he was cast in a high-school musical. Having discovered his vocation late in life—for a dancer—Abraham decided to become a choreographer rather than a performer, although he was to excel at both professions. After earning a B.F.A....more

Cannonball Adderley
American musician

Cannonball Adderley, byname of Julian Edwin Adderley, (born September 15, 1928, Tampa, Florida, U.S.—died August 8, 1975, Gary, Indiana), one of the most prominent and popular American jazz musicians of the 1950s and ’60s whose exuberant music was firmly in the bop school but which also employed the melodic sense of traditional jazz. A multi-instrumentalist, Adderley is best-known for his work on alto saxophone and for his recordings with Miles Davis and with his own small groups...more

King Sunny Ade
Nigerian musician

King Sunny Ade, original name Sunday Adeniyi, (born September 22, 1946, Oshogbo, Nigeria), Nigerian popular musician in the vanguard of the development and international popularization of juju music—a fusion of traditional Yoruba vocal forms and percussion with Western rock and roll...more

Shaun Alexander
American football player

Shaun Alexander, (born Aug. 30, 1977, Florence, Ky., U.S.), American professional gridiron football player who was one of the most prolific touchdown scorers in National Football League (NFL) history.

Named a high-school All-American by Parade magazine and USA Today in 1995, Alexander earned the nickname “Mr. Touchdown” early in his career. He went on to star at the University of Alabama (1996–99), where ...more

Gene Ammons
American musician

Gene Ammons, byname Jug, original name Eugene Ammons, (born April 14, 1925, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died August 6, 1974, Chicago), American jazz tenor saxophonist, noted for his big sound and blues-inflected, “soulful” improvising.

The son of outstanding boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons, Gene Ammons grew up in Chicago and first became nationally known as a member of Billy Eckstine’s innovative bebop big band during 1944–47; he also played in Woody Herman’s big band (1949). He and...more

Henry Armstrong
American boxer

Henry Armstrong, original name Henry Jackson, (born December 12, 1912, Columbus, Mississippi, U.S.—died October 24, 1988, Los Angeles, California), American boxer, the only professional boxer to hold world championship titles in three weight divisions simultaneously.

Armstrong fought as an amateur from 1929 to 1932. Early in his career he boxed under the name Melody Jackson. He first won the featherweight (126-pound) title by knocking out Petey Sarron in six rounds on October 29, 1937. On May 31, 1938, he took the...more

Owen Arthur
prime minister of Barbados

Owen Arthur, in full Owen Seymour Arthur, (born October 17, 1949, Barbados—died July 27, 2020, Bridgetown), Barbadian politician who served as prime minister (1994–2008) of Barbados. His economic policies significantly cut unemployment and won his party near-total control of the House of Assembly.
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Arthur was raised in the parish (subregion) of St. Peter. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and history (1971) at the University of the West Indies (UWI) campus in...more

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Pearl Bailey
American entertainer

Pearl Bailey, in full Pearl Mae Bailey, (born March 29, 1918, Newport News, Va., U.S.—died Aug. 17, 1990, Philadelphia, Pa.), American entertainer notable for her sultry singing and mischievous humour.

Bailey, Pearl Bailey was the daughter of the Rev. Joseph James Bailey, and she attributed much of her vocal ability to her childhood singing in church. At the age of 15 she quit her high school in Philadelphia for a career as a singer and dancer. She appeared in cafés, nightclubs, and theatres in northeastern American cities, and at times she sang with big bands,..more

James Baldwin
American author

James Baldwin, in full James Arthur Baldwin, (born August 2, 1924, New York, New York—died December 1, 1987, Saint-Paul, France), American essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the United States and, later, through much of western Europe.

The eldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty in the Black ghetto of Harlem in New York City. From age 14 to 16 he was active during out-of-school hours as a preacher in a...more

Benjamin Banneker
American scientist

Benjamin Banneker, (born November 9, 1731, Banneky farm [now in Oella], Maryland [U.S.]—died October 19? [see Researcher’s Note], 1806, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.), mathematician, astronomer, compiler of almanacs, inventor, and writer, one of the first important African American intellectuals.

Banneker, a freeman, was raised on a farm near Baltimore that he would eventually inherit from his father. Although he periodically attended a one-room Quaker schoolhouse, Banneker was largely self-educated and did much of his learning through the voracious reading of borrowed books. Early on he demonstrated a particular facility for mathematics...more

Amiri Baraka
American writer

Amiri Baraka, also called Imamu Amiri Baraka, original name Everett Leroy Jones, called Leroy Jones, Leroy later changed to LeRoi, (born October 7, 1934, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.—died January 9, 2014, Newark), American poet and playwright who published provocative works that assiduously presented the experiences and suppressed anger of Black Americans in a white-dominated society.

After graduating from Howard University (B.A., 1953), Jones served in the U.S. Air Force but was dishonourably discharged after three years because he was suspected (wrongly at that time) of having communist affiliations. He attended graduate school at Columbia University, New York City, and founded (1958) the poetry magazine Yugen, which published the work of Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac;...more

Janie Porter Barrett
American welfare worker and educator

Janie Porter Barrett, née Janie Porter, (born Aug. 9, 1865, Athens, Ga., U.S.—died Aug. 27, 1948, Hampton, Va.), American welfare worker and educator who developed a school to rehabilitate previously incarcerated African-American girls by improving their self-reliance and discipline.

The daughter of former slaves, Barrett grew up largely in the home of the cultured white family who employed her mother. She graduated from Hampton Institute in Hampton, Va., in 1884 and worked for five years as a teacher before establishing an informal day-care school in her home in Hampton. Her school grew rapidly, and in 1890 it was formally organized as the Locust Street Social Settlement, the nation’s first settlement house for African-Americans. In 1902 she and her husband built a separate structure on their property to house the settlement’s numerous activities, which included clubs, classes in domestic skills, and recreation; many of these activities were funded by Northern philanthropists....more

Count Basie
American musician

Count Basie, orig. William Allen Basie, (born Aug. 21, 1904, Red Bank, N.J., U.S.—died April 26, 1984, Hollywood, Fla.), U.S. jazz pianist and bandleader. Basie was influenced by the Harlem pianists James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. In Kansas City in 1936 he formed his own band, which became known as the most refined exponent of swing. Its rhythm section was noted for its lightness, precision, and relaxation; on this foundation, the brass and reed sections developed a vocabulary of riffs and motifs. Their hit recordings included “One O’Clock Jump” and “Jumpin’ at the Woodside.” Basie’s piano style became increasingly spare and economical. His soloists included singer Jimmy Rushing, trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry (“Sweets”) Edison, and saxophonist Lester Young.
​Basie’s reorganized band of the 1950s placed greater emphasis on ensemble work and developed a more powerful style built from the riffs and buoyant rhythm of the earlier group. The band achieved renewed popularity for recordings featuring vocalist Joe Williams...more

Lucius Christopher Bates
American publisher and civil rights leader

Lucius Christopher Bates, (born 1901, Mississippi, U.S.—died August 22, 1980, Little Rock, Arkansas), African American newspaper publisher and civil rights leader.

Bates was the publisher of the Arkansas State Press, a weekly pro-civil rights newspaper. In 1957, after Governor Orval Faubus called out the state’s National Guard in an attempt to thwart the racial integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, Bates and his wife, Daisy, ushered nine African American students into the school with the aid of federal troops...more

Kathleen Battle
American opera singer

Kathleen Battle, in full Kathleen Deanne Battle, (born Aug. 13, 1948, Portsmouth, Ohio, U.S.), American opera singer, among the finest coloratura sopranos of her time.

As a child and young adult Battle was both a good student and a good singer. She was awarded a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music in Ohio, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education. ..more

Robert Battle
American dancer and choreographer 

Robert Battle, (born August 28, 1972, Miami, Florida, U.S.), American dancer and choreographer who was the artistic director (2011– ) of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Battle, who was raised by his great-uncle and his cousin, studied dance under Daniel Lewis and Gerri Houlihan at the New World School of the Arts, a respected arts high school in Miami. After graduation he studied at the Juilliard School in New York City, where the former Paul Taylor Dance Company star Carolyn Adams became his mentor. ..more

Dean Baquet
American journalist

Dean Baquet, (born September 21, 1956, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.), American journalist who was the first African American to serve (2014–22) as executive editor of The New York Times.

Baquet was raised in the historic Treme neighbourhood of New Orleans. A member of one of the city’s famed restaurant families, he routinely mopped the floor of his family’s Creole diner in the mornings before attending classes at St. Augustine High School. Baquet majored in English literature (1974–78) at Columbia University, New York City, but he never graduated. Instead, during a summer break from his college studies, he took an internship with his hometown’s afternoon newspaper, the States-Item; the job eventually became a full-time position. After Baquet worked in New Orleans for nearly a decade, he moved (1984) to the Chicago Tribune as its deputy metropolitan editor and chief investigative reporter. Four years later he won a Pulitzer Prize for leading a team of three other reporters whose exposé unearthed corruption in the Chicago city council...more

Elgin Baylor
American basketball player

Elgin Baylor, (born September 16, 1934, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died March 22, 2021, Los Angeles, California), American professional basketball player who is regarded as one of the game’s greatest forwards. His graceful style enabled him to score and rebound with seeming ease.

Baylor, 6 feet 5 inches (1.96 metres) tall, was an All-American (1958) at Seattle University, where he played from 1955 to 1958, guiding the team to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship tournament finals in 1958...more

Bob Beamon
American athlete

Bob Beamon, (born August 29, 1946, Bronx, New York, U.S.), American long jumper, who set a world record of 8.90 metres (29.2 feet) at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. The new record surpassed the existing mark by an astounding 55 cm (21.65 inches) and stood for 23 years, until Mike Powell of the United States surpassed it in 1991.

Beamon began jumping at Jamaica High School (Long Island, New York). He attended North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (Greensboro), the University of Texas at El Paso, and Adelphi University (Long Island), where he also played basketball...more

Louise Beavers
American actress

Louise Beavers, (born March 8, 1902, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died Oct. 26, 1962, Hollywood, Calif.), African American film and television actress known for her character roles.

Beavers first drew attention as part of an act known as the Lady Minstrels. Despite her theatrical abilities and inclinations, she went to Hollywood not as a performer but as the maid of actress Leatrice Joy. She soon, however, appeared on the silver screen, making her feature debut in Gold Diggers (1923). She continued to act in other silent films such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927)...more

Regina Benjamin
American physician and government official

Regina Benjamin, (born October 26, 1956, Mobile, Alabama, U.S.), American physician who served as the 18th surgeon general of the United States (2009–13). Prior to her government appointment, she had spent most of her medical career serving poor families in a shrimping village on the Gulf Coast of Alabama.

Benjamin received a B.S. (1979) from Xavier University of Louisiana. After first attending (1980–82) the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, Benjamin obtained an M.D. (1984) from the University of Alabama and completed a residency in family practice at the Medical Center of Central Georgia in 1987. ...more

Chuck Berry
American musician

Chuck Berry, in full Charles Edward Anderson Berry, (born October 18, 1926, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died March 18, 2017, St. Charles county, Missouri), American singer, songwriter, and guitarist who was one of the most popular and influential performers in rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll music in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.

Raised in a working-class African American neighbourhood on the north side of the highly segregated city of St. Louis, Berry grew up in a family proud of its African American and Native American ancestry. He gained early exposure to music through his family’s participation in the choir of the Antioch Baptist Church, through the blues and country-western music he heard on the radio, and through music classes, especially at Sumner High School....more

Halle Berry
American actress

Halle Berry, (born August 14, 1966, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.), American film actress, the first African American to win the Academy Award for best actress. She received the honour for her nuanced portrayal of Leticia Musgrove, a down-on-her-luck character in Monster’s Ball (2001).

Berry was a teenage finalist in national beauty pageants, worked in modeling, and began acting on television in 1989. Film roles in Jungle Fever (1991), directed by Spike Lee, and in Boomerang (1992), starring Eddie Murphy, first brought her notice. She starred with Jessica Lange in Losing Isaiah (1995), a drama about adoption, before earning acclaim for her portrayal of film star Dorothy Dandridge, the first African American to be nominated for a best-actress Oscar, in the television film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999)....more

Beyoncé
American singer

Beyoncé, in full Beyoncé Giselle Knowles, (born September 4, 1981, Houston, Texas, U.S.), American singer-songwriter and actress who achieved fame in the late 1990s as the lead singer of the R&B group Destiny’s Child and then launched a hugely successful solo career...more

Edward Joseph Blackwell
American musician

Edward Joseph Blackwell, (born Oct. 10, 1929, New Orleans, La., U.S.—died Oct. 7, 1992, Hartford, Conn.), American jazz drummer who was known for his role in the development of free jazz beginning in the 1960s.

Blackwell played with rhythm-and-blues groups in New Orleans, where he was influenced by the city’s musical tradition and by such drummers as Paul Barbarin. From 1951 Blackwell lived in Los Angeles and performed with saxophonist Ornette Coleman, before moving to New York City in 1960 to become the regular drummer in Coleman’s quartet, which was at the forefront of the free jazz movement. Blackwell also performed with a number of other avant-garde musicians, including trumpeter Don Cherry and a group headed by trumpeter Booker Little and saxophonist Eric Dolphy...more

Art Blakey
American musician

Art Blakey, also called Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, (born October 11, 1919, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died October 16, 1990, New York, New York), American drummer and bandleader noted for his extraordinary drum solos, which helped define the offshoot of bebop known as “hard bop” and gave the drums a significant solo status. His style was characterized by thunderous press rolls, cross beats, and drum rolls that began as quiet tremblings and grew into frenzied explosions.

Blakey taught himself to play the piano while he was a teenager and performed on piano (and later drums) in jazz clubs in the evenings while working in the steel mills by day....more

Charles Bolden
American astronaut

Charles Bolden, in full Charles Frank Bolden, Jr., (born August 19, 1946, Columbia, South Carolina, U.S.), American astronaut who served as the first African American administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from 2009 to 2017.
Bolden received a bachelor’s degree in electrical science from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1968....more

Julian Bond
American politician and civil rights leader

Julian Bond, in full Horace Julian Bond, (born January 14, 1940, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.—died August 15, 2015, Fort Walton Beach, Florida), U.S. legislator and Black civil rights leader, best known for his fight to take his duly elected seat in the Georgia House of Representatives.
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Bond, who was the son of prominent educators, attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where he helped found a civil rights group and led a sit-in movement intended to desegregate Atlanta lunch counters. In 1960 he joined in creating the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and he later served as communications director for the group. In 1965 he won a seat in the Georgia state legislature, but the body refused to seat him because of his endorsement of SNCC’s statement opposing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War....more

Arna Bontemps
American writer

Arna Bontemps, in full Arna Wendell Bontemps, (born October 13, 1902, Alexandria, Louisiana, U.S.—died June 4, 1973, Nashville, Tennessee), American writer who depicted the lives and struggles of black Americans.

After graduating from Pacific Union College, Angwin, California, in 1923, Bontemps taught in New York and elsewhere. His poetry began to appear in the influential black magazines Opportunity and Crisis in the mid-1920s. His first novel, God Sends Sunday (1931), about a jockey who was good with horses but inadequate with people, is considered the final work of the Harlem Renaissance....more

Chadwick Boseman
American actor and playwright

Chadwick Boseman, in full Chadwick Aaron Boseman, (born November 29, 1976, Anderson, South Carolina, U.S.—died August 28, 2020, Los Angeles, California), American actor and playwright who became a highly respected movie star with several iconic roles, notably that of T’Challa/Black Panther in the groundbreaking film Black Panther (2018).

Boseman was the youngest of three children. His father worked for an agricultural conglomerate and did upholstery work on the side, and his mother was a nurse. He played basketball as a high-school student, but when a teammate was shot and killed, Boseman responded by writing a play and found that he felt called to become a storyteller....more

Carol Moseley Braun
United States senator

Carol Moseley Braun, née Carol Moseley, (born Aug. 16, 1947, Chicago, Ill., U.S.), Democratic senator from Illinois (1993–99), who in 1992 became the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

Carol Moseley attended the University of Illinois at Chicago (B.A., 1969) and received a law degree from the University of Chicago (1972). She married Michael Braun in 1973 (divorced 1986) and worked as an assistant U.S. attorney before her election to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1978.... more

Ruby Bridges
American civil rights activist

Ruby Bridges, in full Ruby Nell Bridges, married name Ruby Bridges-Hall, (born September 8, 1954, Tylertown, Mississippi, U.S.), American activist who became a symbol of the civil rights movement and who was, at age six, the youngest of a group of African American students to integrate schools in the American South...more

Lou Brock
American baseball player

Lou Brock, byname of Louis Clark Brock, (born June 18, 1939, El Dorado, Arkansas, U.S.—died September 6, 2020, St. Louis, Missouri), American professional baseball player whose career 938 stolen bases (1961–79) set a record that held until 1991, when it was broken by Rickey Henderson.

Brock followed his childhood interest in baseball by playing at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he both pitched and played in the outfield. He threw and hit left-handed. He was signed to a contract by the Chicago Cubs of the National League in 1961 and played on their farm teams before moving to the major leagues in 1962. With the Cubs his outfield playing was erratic, and his speed on the bases was unproductive; when he went into a hitting slump in 1964...more

Edward Brooke
United States senator

Edward Brooke, in full Edward William Brooke, (born October 26, 1919, Washington, D.C.—died January 3, 2015, Coral Gables, Florida), American lawyer and politician who was the first African American popularly elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served two terms (1967–79)....more

Big Bill Broonzy
American musician

Big Bill Broonzy, byname of William Lee Conley Broonzy, (born June 26, 1893, Scott, Mississippi, U.S.—died August 14, 1958, Chicago, Illinois), American blues singer and guitarist who represented a tradition of itinerant folk blues.
Broonzy maintained that he was born in 1893 in Scott, Mississippi, but some sources suggest that he was born in 1903 near Lake Dick, Arkansas. In any case, Broonzy grew up in Arkansas....more

Clifford Brown
American musician

Clifford Brown, byname Brownie, (born October 30, 1930, Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.—died June 26, 1956, Pennsylvania), American jazz trumpeter noted for lyricism, clarity of sound, and grace of technique. He was a principal figure in the hard-bop idiom.

Brown attended Delaware State College and Maryland State College and played in Philadelphia before joining, first, Tadd Dameron’s band in Atlantic City, New Jersey, then Lionel Hampton’s big band for a European tour, both in 1953...more

Ray Brown
American musician

Ray Brown, byname of Raymond Matthews Brown, (born October 13, 1926, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died July 2, 2002, Indianapolis, Indiana), American string bassist and one of the greatest of all jazz virtuosos.

Brown first made his mark at age 19 when he went to New York City to join Dizzy Gillespie’s band at a time when the modern jazz revolution, spearheaded by saxophonist Charlie Parker, was just getting under way...more

Ron Brown
American politician

Ron Brown, in full Ronald Harmon Brown, (born August 1, 1941, Washington, D.C.—died April 3, 1996, near Dubrovnik, Croatia), American politician, the first African American to be chairman (1989–93) of a major U.S. political party and the first to be appointed secretary of commerce (1993–96).

Brown’s father managed the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, which was frequented by celebrities, politicians, and the black social elite. His parents were successful and well-educated, and he was sent to exclusive primary and preparatory schools in New York City before enrolling at Middlebury College in Vermont (B.A., 1962).... more

Charles Brown
American singer

Charles Brown, (born Sept. 13, 1922, Texas City, Texas, U.S.—died Jan. 21, 1999, Oakland, Calif.), American blues singer of the late 1940s and early 1950s who was best known for his melodic ballads.
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One of the most influential singers of his day, Brown was an accomplished classical pianist whose career began in 1943 after he moved to Los Angeles. He played with...more

Hallie Quinn Brown
American educator

Hallie Quinn Brown, (born March 10, 1850, Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.—died Sept. 16, 1949, Wilberforce, Ohio), American educator and elocutionist who pioneered in the movement for African American women’s clubs in the United States.

Brown was the daughter of former slaves. From 1864 she grew up in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, and in 1870 she entered Wilberforce University in Ohio. After her graduation in 1873 she taught in plantation and public schools in Mississippi and South Carolina. In 1885–87 she was dean of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, and during that period, in 1886, she graduated from the Chautauqua Lecture School. After four years of teaching public school in Dayton, Ohio, she served as a principal of Tuskegee Institute (1892–93) in Alabama under Booker T. Washington...more

Ruth Winifred Brown
American librarian and activist

Ruth Winifred Brown, (born July 26, 1891, Hiawatha, Kansas, U.S.—died September 10, 1975, Collinsville, Oklahoma), American librarian and activist, who was dismissed from her job at an Oklahoma library for her civil rights activities in 1950. Brown began her career as a librarian in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1919. She became the president of the Oklahoma Library Association in 1931 and was a founding member of the Committee on the Practice of Democracy (COPD) in 1946. At that time the COPD was the only affiliate of the Congress of Racial Equality south of the Mason and Dixon Line...more

Ralph Bunche
American diplomat

Ralph Bunche, in full Ralph Johnson Bunche, (born Aug. 7, 1904, Detroit, Mich., U.S.—died Dec. 9, 1971, New York, N.Y.), U.S. diplomat, a key member of the United Nations for more than two decades, and winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize for Peace for his successful negotiation of an Arab-Israeli truce in Palestine the previous year.

Bunche worked his way through the University of California at Los Angeles and graduated in 1927. ...more

Solomon Burke
American singer

Solomon Burke, (born March 21, 1940, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died October 10, 2010, Haarlemmermeer, Netherlands), American singer whose success in the early 1960s in merging the gospel style of the African American churches with rhythm and blues helped to usher in the soul music era.

Born into a family that established its own church, Burke was both a preacher and the host of a gospel radio program by age 12....more

Tarana Burke
American activist and business executive

Tarana Burke, (born September 12, 1973, Bronx, New York, U.S.), American activist and business executive who founded (2006) the Me Too movement, which sought to assist survivors of sexual violence, especially females of colour...more

Harry Thacker Burleigh
American musician

Harry Thacker Burleigh, (born December 2, 1866, Erie, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died September 12, 1949, Stamford, Connecticut), American baritone and composer, a noted arranger of African American spirituals.

Burleigh studied under Antonín Dvořák at the National Conservatory of Music, New York City, and through his singing acquainted Dvořák with the traditional Black vocal music of the United States. He was a soloist in New York City at St. George’s Church (1894–1946) and at Temple Emanuel (1900–25). He composed more than 200 songs and became widely known for such arrangements as that for “Deep River.”...more

Ursula Burns
American executive

Ursula Burns, (born September 20, 1958, New York, New York, U.S.), American business executive who served as CEO (2009–16) and chairman (2010–17) of the international document-management and business-services company Xerox Corporation. She was the first African American woman to serve as CEO of a Fortune 500 company and the first female to accede to the position of CEO of such a company in succession after another female.

Burns was raised in a low-income housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She was the second of three children raised by a single mother who operated a home day-care centre and took ironing and cleaning jobs to earn money to pay for Burns to attend Cathedral High School, a Roman Catholic preparatory school. Excelling at math, Burns later earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering (1980) from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn. In the same year, she began pursuing a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University and joined Xerox as a summer mechanical-engineering intern through the company’s graduate engineering program for minorities, which in turn paid a portion of her educational expenses...more

Roland Burris
American politician

Roland Burris, in full Roland Wallace Burris, (born Aug. 3, 1937, Centralia, Ill., U.S.), American Democratic politician who was the first African American elected to statewide office in Illinois. His appointment as U.S. senator (2009–10) to fill the seat vacated by Pres. Barack Obama made him the fourth African American to serve in the Senate since Reconstruction.

Burris grew up in downstate Illinois, and he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Southern Illinois University in 1959...more

Kobe Bryant
American basketball player

Kobe Bryant, (born Aug. 23, 1978, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died Jan. 26, 2020, Calabasas, Calif.), U.S. basketball player. Bryant, whose father also played professional basketball, entered the NBA draft straight from high school. He was picked by the Charlotte Hornets in 1996 but was soon traded to the Los Angeles Lakers. When the 1996–97 season opened, he was the second youngest NBA player in history. Bryant, a shooting guard, helped the Lakers win five championships (2000–02; 2009–10). In 2008 he was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. He retired following the 2015–16 NBA season. In addition to his professional accomplishments, Bryant was a member of the Olympic gold medal-winning U.S. men’s basketball teams in 2008 and 2012. In 2015 he wrote the poem “Dear Basketball,” which served as the basis for a short film (2017) that he narrated. The work won an Academy Award for best animated short film. In 2020 Bryant died in a helicopter crash...more

Don Byas
American musician

Don Byas, byname of Carlos Wesley Byas, (born October 21, 1912, Muskogee, Oklahoma, U.S.—died August 24, 1972, Amsterdam, Netherlands), American jazz tenor saxophonist whose improvising was an important step in the transition from the late swing to the early bop eras...more
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Harry Howell Carney
American musician

Harry Howell Carney, (born April 1, 1910, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Oct. 8, 1974, New York, N.Y.), American musician, featured soloist in Duke Ellington’s band and the first baritone saxophone soloist in jazz.

Carney learned to play the clarinet and alto saxophone from private teachers and worked with local Boston bands until Ellington heard and hired him in 1927.... more


Ben Carson
American neurosurgeon and politician

Ben Carson, in full Benjamin Solomon Carson, Sr., (born September 18, 1951, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.), American politician and neurosurgeon who performed the first successful separation of conjoined twins who were attached at the back of the head (occipital craniopagus twins). The operation, which took place in 1987, lasted some 22 hours and involved a 70-member surgical team. Carson also refined a technique known as hemispherectomy, in which one-half of the brain is removed to prevent seizures in persons with severe epilepsy. He later became active in politics and served as U.S. secretary of housing and urban development (HUD; 2017–21) in the administration of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump...more

Betty Carter
American singer

Betty Carter, original name Lillie Mae Jones, also called Lorraine Carter or Lorene Carter, (born May 16, 1930, Flint, Michigan, U.S.—died September 26, 1998, Brooklyn, New York), American jazz singer who is best remembered for the scat and other complex musical interpretations that showcased her remarkable vocal flexibility and musical imagination.

Carter studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory of Music in her native Michigan. At age 16 she began singing in Detroit jazz clubs, and after 1946 she worked in bars and theatres in the Midwest, at first under the name Lorene Carter...more

Eugenia Charles
prime minister of Dominica

Eugenia Charles, in full Dame Mary Eugenia Charles, (born May 15, 1919, Pointe Michel, Dominica—died September 6, 2005, Fort-de-France, Martinique), lawyer and politician who served as prime minister of Dominica from 1980 to 1995. She was the country’s first woman lawyer and the first woman prime minister to serve in the Caribbean.

Charles was the granddaughter of slaves. Her father’s success as a fruit exporter and later as a banker enabled Eugenia to receive an excellent education. After completing high school in Dominica, she received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto and a law degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 1949 she returned to Dominica and practiced law in Roseau...more

Ray Charles
American musician

Ray Charles, original name Ray Charles Robinson, (born September 23, 1930, Albany, Georgia, U.S.—died June 10, 2004, Beverly Hills, California), American pianist, singer, composer, and bandleader, a leading entertainer billed as “the Genius.” Charles was credited with the early development of soul music, a style based on a melding of gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz music.

When Charles was an infant his family moved to Greenville, Florida, and he began his musical career at age five on a piano in a neighbourhood café. He began to go blind at six, possibly from glaucoma, and had completely lost his sight by age seven. He attended the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine, where he concentrated on musical studies, but left school at age 15 to play the piano professionally after his mother died from cancer (his father had died when the boy was 10)...more

Wilt Chamberlain
American basketball player

Wilt Chamberlain, in full Wilton Norman Chamberlain, bynames Wilt the Stilt and the Big Dipper, (born August 21, 1936, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died October 12, 1999, Los Angeles, California), professional basketball player, considered to be one of the greatest offensive players in the history of the game. More than 7 feet (2.1 metres) tall, Chamberlain was an outstanding centre. During his 1961–62 season he became the first player to score more than 4,000 points in a National Basketball Association (NBA) season, with 4,029, averaging 50.4 points per game...more

Dave Chappelle
American comedian and actor

Dave Chappelle, byname of David Khari Webber Chappelle, (born August 24, 1973, Washington, D.C., U.S.), American comedian and actor who was best known for cocreating, writing, and starring in the groundbreaking television sketch comedy program Chappelle’s Show (2003–06)...more

Oscar Charleston
American baseball player and manager

Oscar Charleston, in full Oscar McKinley Charleston, (born October 14, 1896, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died October 6, 1954, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), American baseball player and manager who was considered by many to have been the best all-around ballplayer in the history of the Negro leagues.... more

Alice Childress
American writer and actress

Alice Childress, (born Oct. 12, 1916, Charleston, S.C., U.S.—died Aug. 14, 1994, New York, N.Y.), American playwright, novelist, and actress, known for realistic stories that posited the enduring optimism of black Americans.

Childress grew up in Harlem, New York City, where she acted with the American Negro Theatre in the 1940s. There she wrote, directed, and starred in her first play, Florence (produced 1949), about a black woman who, after meeting an insensitive white actress in a railway station, comes to respect her daughter’s attempts to pursue an acting career.... more

Ta-Nehisi Coates
American author

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in full Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates, (born September 30, 1975, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.), American essayist, journalist, and writer who often explored contemporary race relations, perhaps most notably in his book Between the World and Me (2015), which won the National Book Award for nonfiction... more

Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr.
American lawyer

Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., (born Oct. 2, 1937, Shreveport, La., U.S.—died March 29, 2005, Los Angeles, Calif.), American trial lawyer who gained international prominence with his skillful and controversial defense of O.J. Simpson, a football player and celebrity who was charged with a double murder in 1994.

In 1949 Cochran’s family moved from Louisiana to California, where he later became one of only two dozen African American students at Los Angeles High School.... more

Cozy Cole
American musician

Cozy Cole, byname of William Randolph Cole, (born October 17, 1909, East Orange, New Jersey, U.S.—died January 29, 1981, Columbus, Ohio), American jazz musician who was a versatile percussionist. A highlight of Cole’s drumming career was the 1958 hit “Topsy,” the only recording featuring a drum solo to sell more than one million copies.

Cozy ColeAfter making his recording debut (1930) with Jelly Roll Morton, Cole performed with several major bands, including Stuff Smith’s comedy-jazz group. In 1938 he joined Cab Calloway’s band, and his drumming was featured on “Crescendo in Drums,” “Paradiddle,” and “Ratamacue.”... more

Marva Collins
American educator

Marva Collins, née Marva Delores Knight, (born August 31, 1936, Monroeville, Alabama, U.S.—died June 24, 2015, Bluffton, South Carolina), American educator who broke with a public school system she found to be failing inner-city children and established her own rigorous system and practice to cultivate her students’ independence and accomplishment.

Marva Knight attended the Bethlehem Academy, a strict school that proved to have an influence on the development of her later educational methods. She studied secretarial sciences at Clark College in Atlanta but was unable to work as a secretary because of her race. From 1957 she taught bookkeeping, typing, shorthand, and business law at Monroe County Training School. She moved to Chicago in 1959 and married Clarence Collins... more

John Coltrane
American musician

John Coltrane, in full John William Coltrane, byname Trane, (born September 23, 1926, Hamlet, North Carolina, U.S.—died July 17, 1967, Huntington, New York), American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer, an iconic figure of 20th-century jazz.

Coltrane’s first musical influence was his father, a tailor and part-time musician. John studied clarinet and alto saxophone as a youth and then moved to Philadelphia in 1943 and continued his studies at the Ornstein School of Music and the Granoff Studios. He was drafted into the navy in 1945 and played alto sax with a navy band until 1946; he switched to tenor saxophone in 1947...more

Anna Julia Cooper
American educator and writer

Anna Julia Cooper, née Anna Julia Haywood, (born August 10, 1858?, Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.—died February 27, 1964, Washington, D.C.), American educator and writer whose book A Voice From the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892) became a classic African American feminist text.

Cooper was the daughter of a slave woman and her white slaveholder (or his brother). In 1868 she enrolled in the newly established Saint Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute (now Saint Augustine’s University), a school for freed slaves.... more

John Conyers, Jr.
American politician

…the staff of Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Jr. She remained active in the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference established an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award in her honour. In 1987 she cofounded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to provide career training for young people and… more

Misty Copeland
American dancer

​Misty Copeland, (born September 10, 1982, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.), American ballet dancer who, in 2015, became the first African American female principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre (ABT).

Misty Copeland and her siblings grew up with a single mother whose several failed marriages resulted in financial instability. When young, Copeland moved with her family from Kansas City to San Pedro, California...more
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Don Cornelius
American television host and producer

Soul Train, American music variety television show, the first to prominently feature African American musical acts and dancers. Broadcast nationally from 1971 to 2006, it was one of the longest-running syndicated programs in American television history.

Soul Train was the brainchild of Chicago radio announcer Don Cornelius. It initially aired in 1970 on Chicago television station WCIU-TV. The show was produced in hour-long segments five afternoons a week and became a local television hit. It duplicated the environment of a dance club and featured a variety of noted musical performers as well as both professional and amateur dancers...more

Arthur Crudup 
American singer-songwriter  

Arthur Crudup, (born Aug. 24, 1905, Forest, Miss., U.S.—died March 28, 1974, Nassawadox, Va.), American blues singer-songwriter. Several of Crudup’s compositions became blues standards, and his song “That’s All Right” was transformed into a rockabilly classic by Elvis Presley at the start of his career...more

Alexander Crummell
American scholar and minister

Alexander Crummell, (born 1819, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 10/12, 1898, Point Pleasant?, N.J.), American scholar and Episcopalian minister, founder of the American Negro Academy (1897), the first major learned society for African Americans. As a religious leader and an intellectual, he cultivated scholarship and leadership among young blacks.

Crummell, born to the son of an African prince and a free mother, attended an interracial school at Canaan, N.H., and an institute in Whitesboro, N.Y., which was run by abolitionists and combined manual labour and the classical curriculum. Denied admission to the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal church in 1839 because of his race, Crummell studied theology privately and became an Episcopalian minister in 1844. He journeyed to England about 1848 to raise funds for a church for poor blacks and soon thereafter began a course of study at Queen’s College, Cambridge (A.B., 1853)...more

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Dorothy Dandridge
American singer and actress

Dorothy Dandridge, in full Dorothy Jean Dandridge, (born November 9, 1922, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.—died September 8, 1965, West Hollywood, California), American singer and film actress who was the first black woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for best actress.
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Dandridge’s mother was an entertainer and comedic actress who, after settling in Los Angeles, had some success in radio and, later, television. The young Dorothy and her sister Vivian began performing publicly as children and in the 1930s joined a third (unrelated) girl as the Dandridge Sisters, singing and dancing. In the 1940s and early ’50s Dorothy secured a few bit roles in films and developed a highly successful career as a solo nightclub singer, eventually appearing in such popular clubs as the Waldorf Astoria’s Empire Room in New York City...more

Ray Dandridge
American baseball player

Ray Dandridge, in full Raymond Emmett Dandridge, bynames Dandy and Hooks, (born August 31, 1913, Richmond, Virginia, U.S.—died February 12, 1994, Palm Bay, Florida), American professional baseball player who spent most of his career between 1933 and 1955 playing in the Negro leagues and on teams outside the United States.

Dandridge was an outstanding defensive third baseman. Although he had little power, he often posted batting averages of over .300. He began his career with Negro league teams in Detroit and Nashville in 1933, but after one season he moved on to the Newark Dodgers (later called the Eagles) of the Negro National League, where he was a star player for seven seasons during the 1930s and ’40s. ... more

Glenn Davis
American track and field athlete

Glenn Davis, in full Glenn Ashby Davis, byname Jeep, (born September 12, 1934, Wellsburg, West Virginia, U.S.—died January 28, 2009, Barberton, Ohio), American world-record holder in the 400-metre hurdles (1956–62) who was the first man to win the Olympic gold medal twice in that event.

Davis excelled in track for Barberton (Ohio) High School, often scoring more individually than entire opposing teams...more

Miles Davis
American musician

Miles Davis, in full Miles Dewey Davis III, (born May 26, 1926, Alton, Illinois, U.S.—died September 28, 1991, Santa Monica, California), American jazz musician, a great trumpeter who as a bandleader and composer was one of the major influences on the art from the late 1940s...more

Shani Davis
American athlete

Shani Davis, (born August 13, 1982, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American speed skater who was the first African American athlete to win an individual Winter Olympics gold medal.

Davis learned to roller-skate at age two and a year later was skating so fast that he had to be slowed by the rink’s skate guards. He switched to ice skating at age six, a few months before his mother enrolled him in a local speed-skating club. Soon thereafter Davis began to win regional competitions. .. more

Viola Davis
American actress

Viola Davis, (born August 11, 1965, Saint Matthews, South Carolina, U.S.), American actress known for her precise, controlled performances and her regal presence.
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Davis was raised in Central Falls, Rhode Island, where her father found work as a horse groom at nearby racetracks and her mother took on domestic and factory jobs. Their income was frequently insufficient to support the family, and they endured grim rat-infested apartments and occasional food shortages. ..more

Eric Dickerson
American football player

Eric Dickerson, in full Eric Demetric Dickerson, (born September 2, 1960, Sealy, Texas, U.S.), American professional gridiron football player who was one of the leading running backs in National Football League (NFL) history.

Dickerson played his college football at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in University Park, Texas, where he and Craig James formed a stellar backfield that was dubbed the “Pony Express” (after SMU’s mustang mascot). ..more

Johnny Dodds
American musician

Johnny Dodds, (born April 12, 1892, New Orleans, La., U.S.—died Aug. 8, 1940, Chicago, Ill.), African-American musician noted as one of the most lyrically expressive of jazz clarinetists.

Dodds grew up in the musically stimulating environment of New Orleans in the early years of jazz and began playing clarinet at age 17. He played in Fate Marable’s riverboat bands (1917) before becoming an integral part of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (1920–24), one of the most closely unified of all jazz ensembles. ... more 

Kenny Dorham
American musician

Kenny Dorham, byname of McKinley Howard Dorham, (born August 30, 1924, Fairfield, Texas, U.S.—died December 5, 1972, New York, New York), American jazz trumpeter, a pioneer of bebop noted for the beauty of his tone and for his lyricism.

Dorham began playing trumpet in high school, attended Wiley College (Marshall, Texas), and was on a U.S. Army boxing team in 1942. In 1945–48 he played in a series of big bands, including those of Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, and Lionel Hampton, before joining Charlie Parker’s quintet (1948–49)... more

Rita Dove
American author
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Rita Dove, in full Rita Frances Dove, (born August 28, 1952, Akron, Ohio, U.S.), American poet, writer, and teacher who was the first African American to serve as poet laureate of the United States (1993–95).

Dove was ranked one of the top hundred high-school students in the country in 1970, and she was named a Presidential Scholar. She graduated summa cum laude from Miami University in Ohio in 1973 and studied subsequently at Tübingen University in Germany. She studied creative writing at the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1977) and published the first of several chapbooks of her poetry in 1977... more

Ruby Dee
American actress

Ruby Dee, byname of Ruby Ann Wallace, (born October 27, 1922, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.—died June 11, 2014, New Rochelle, New York), American actress and social activist who was known for her pioneering work in African American theatre and film and for her outspoken civil rights activism. Dee’s artistic partnership with her husband, Ossie Davis, was considered one of the theatre and film world’s most distinguished.

scene from A Raisin in the SunAfter completing her studies at Hunter College (1945) in Manhattan, Dee served an apprenticeship with the American Negro Theatre and began appearing on Broadway. ... more

Snoop Dogg
American rapper and actor

Snoop Dogg, byname of Cordozar Calvin Broadus, Jr., also called Snoop Doggy Dogg and Snoop Lion, (born October 20, 1971, Long Beach, California, U.S.), American rapper and songwriter who became one of the best-known figures in gangsta rap in the 1990s and was for many the epitome of West Coast hip-hop culture.

Snoop DoggSnoop Dogg’s signature drawled lyrics took inspiration from his early encounters with the law. After high school he was in and out of prison for several years before seriously pursuing a career in hip-hop.... more

Fats Domino
American singer and pianist

​Fats Domino, byname of Antoine Domino, Jr., (born February 26, 1928, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.—died October 24, 2017, Harvey, Louisiana), American singer and pianist, a rhythm-and-blues star who became one of the first rock-and-roll stars and who helped define the New Orleans sound. Altogether his relaxed, stylized recordings of the 1950s and ’60s sold some 65 million copies, making him one of the most popular performers of the early rock era.

From a musical family, Domino received early training from his brother-in-law, guitarist Harrison Verrett. ...more

Kevin Durant
American basketball player

Kevin Durant, in full Kevin Wayne Durant, (born September 29, 1988, Washington, D.C., U.S.), American professional basketball player who won the 2013–14 National Basketball Association (NBA) Most Valuable Player (MVP) award and established himself as one of the best players of his generation while only in his early 20s.Durant was a basketball prodigy as a youth, becoming one of the best prospects in the thriving Washington, D.C.-area...more

W.E.B. Du Bois
American sociologist and social reformer

W. E. B. Du Bois, (born Feb. 23, 1868, Great Barrington, Mass., U.S.—died Aug. 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana), U.S. sociologist and civil-rights leader. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. Two years later he accepted a professorship at Atlanta University, where he conducted empirical studies on the social situation of African Americans (1897–1910). He concluded that change could be attained only through agitation and protest, a view that clashed with that of Booker T. Washington.

His famous book The Souls of Black Folk appeared in 1903. In 1905 Du Bois founded the Niagara Movement, the forerunner of the NAACP. In 1910 he left teaching to become the NAACP’s director of research and editor of its magazine, Crisis (1910–34). He returned to Atlanta University in 1934 and devoted the next 10 years to teaching and scholarship. After a second research position with the NAACP (1944–48), he moved steadily leftward politically. In 1951 he was indicted as an unregistered agent of a foreign power (the Soviet Union); though a federal judge directed his acquittal, he was by then completely disillusioned with the U.S. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party, moved to Ghana, and renounced his U.S. citizenship...more

Ava DuVernay
American director and screenwriter

Ava DuVernay, in full Ava Marie DuVernay, (born August 24, 1972, Long Beach, California, U.S.), American director, producer, and writer whose best-known works explore the African American experience.

DuVernay graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1995 with bachelor’s degrees in English and African American studies. After working for a few years in film publicity, she started her own company to market movies...more

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Eazy-E
American musician

…Wit Attitudes) with fellow rappers Eazy-E and Ice Cube. The group’s second album, Straight Outta Compton (1988), was a breakthrough for the nascent gangsta rap movement, featuring explicit descriptions (and often glorifications) of street violence and drug dealing. While Dre appeared prominently as a rapper in N.W.A, his most-lauded role…more

Joycelyn Elders
American physician and government official
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Joycelyn Elders, née Minnie Joycelyn Jones, (born August 13, 1933, Schaal, Arkansas, U.S.), American physician and public health official who served (1993–94) as U.S. surgeon general, the first black and the second woman to hold that post.

Elders was the first of eight children in a family of sharecroppers. At age 15 she entered Philander Smith College, a historically black liberal arts college in Little Rock, Arkansas, on a scholarship from the United Methodist Church. That year she saw a doctor for the first time in her life and subsequently determined to become a physician herself... more

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Samuel David Ferguson
American religious leader

Samuel David Ferguson, (born January 1, 1842, Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.—died August 2, 1900, Cape Palmas, Liberia), first African American bishop of the Episcopal Church.

As a young boy, Ferguson moved with his family in 1848 to Liberia. There he was educated in the mission schools of the Anglican Communion and later received theological training from missionaries in other areas of West Africa....more

Rube Foster
American baseball player

Rube Foster, byname of Andrew Foster, (born September 17, 1879, Calvert, Texas, U.S.—died December 9, 1930, Kankakee, Illinois), American baseball player who gained fame as a pitcher, manager, and owner and as the “father of Black baseball” after founding in 1920 the Negro National League (NNL), the first successful professional league for African American ballplayers...more

Aretha Franklin
American singer

Aretha Franklin, in full Aretha Louise Franklin, (born March 25, 1942, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.—died August 16, 2018, Detroit, Michigan), American singer who defined the golden age of soul music of the 1960s.

Franklin’s mother, Barbara, was a gospel singer and pianist. Her father, C.L. Franklin, presided over the New Bethel Baptist Church of Detroit, Michigan, and was a minister of national influence. ...more

E. Franklin Frazier
American sociologist

E. Franklin Frazier, in full Edward Franklin Frazier, (born September 24, 1894, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died May 17, 1962, Washington, D.C.), American sociologist whose work on African American social structure provided insights into many of the problems affecting the black community.

Frazier received his A.B. from Howard University (1916) and his A.M. in sociology from Clark University (1920). After being awarded a fellowship to the New York School of Social Work (1920–21), he accepted an American-Scandinavian Foundation grant to study folk high schools and the Cooperative Movement in Denmark (1921–22). He taught sociology at Morehouse College, a historically black institution in Atlanta, Georgia, where he organized the Atlanta University School of Social Work,..more

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
American critic and scholar

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (born September 16, 1950, Keyser, West Virginia, U.S.), American literary critic and scholar known for his pioneering theories of African and African American literature. He introduced the notion of signifyin’ to represent African and African American literary and musical history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what has come before...more

Althea Gibson
American tennis player

Althea Gibson, (born August 25, 1927, Silver, South Carolina, U.S.—died September 28, 2003, East Orange, New Jersey), American tennis player who dominated women’s competition in the late 1950s. She was the first Black player to win the French (1956), Wimbledon (1957–58), and U.S. Open (1957–58) singles championships...more

Donald Glover
American actor, writer, and musician

Donald Glover, in full Donald McKinley Glover, Jr., also known as Childish Gambino, (born September 25, 1983, Edwards Air Force Base, California, U.S.), American writer, comedian, actor, and musician who won acclaim in all his disparate arts. He was perhaps best known for the TV series Atlanta (2016–18) and for the music he released under the name Childish Gambino.
Glover grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia,...more

Joe Greene
American football player

​Joe Greene, byname of Charles Edward Greene, also called Mean Joe Greene, (born September 24, 1946, Temple, Texas, U.S.), American professional gridiron football player who is widely considered one of the greatest defensive linemen in National Football League (NFL) history.

Greene was a consensus All-American...more
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John Howard Griffin
American author

John Howard Griffin, (born June 16, 1920, Dallas, Texas, U.S.—died September 9, 1980, Fort Worth), white American author who temporarily altered the pigment of his skin in order to experience firsthand the life of a black man in the South.

Griffin described his experience of racism in the best seller Black like Me (1961). The book...more

Charlotte Forten Grimké
American abolitionist and educator

Charlotte Forten Grimké, née Charlotte Louise Bridges Forten, (born August 17, 1837, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died July 23, 1914, Washington, D.C.), American abolitionist and educator best known for the five volumes of diaries she wrote in 1854–64 and 1885–92. They were published posthumously.

Forten was born into a prominent free Black family in Philadelphia. Her father ran a successful sail-making business. Many members of her family were active in the abolitionist movement. Early in life, Forten was educated by tutors at home. Because Philadelphia’s school system was segregated, Forten’s father sent her at age 16 to secondary school in Salem, Massachusetts, which was then known for its progressive and tolerant spirit. ...more

Bob Gibson
American baseball player

Bob Gibson, in full Pack Robert Gibson, byname Hoot, (born November 9, 1935, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died October 2, 2020, Omaha), American professional right-handed baseball pitcher, who was at his best in crucial games. In nine World Series appearances, he won seven games and lost two, and he posted an earned run average (ERA) of 1.92.

At Omaha (Neb.) Technical High School Gibson was a star in basketball and track, as well as a baseball catcher. He also played basketball and baseball at Creighton University (Omaha).... more

Dick Gregory
American comedian and civil rights activist

Dick Gregory, byname of Richard Claxton Gregory, (born October 12, 1932, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died August 19, 2017, Washington, D.C.), American comedian, civil rights activist, and spokesman for health issues, who became nationally recognized in the 1960s for a biting brand of comedy that attacked racial prejudice.

By addressing his hard-hitting satire to white audiences, he gave a comedic voice to the rising civil rights movement. In the 1980s his nutrition business venture targeted unhealthy diets of Black Americans...more

Dizzy Gillespie
American musician

Dizzy Gillespie, byname of John Birks Gillespie, (born October 21, 1917, Cheraw, South Carolina, U.S.—died January 6, 1993, Englewood, New Jersey), American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader who was one of the seminal figures of the bebop movement.

Gillespie’s father was a bricklayer and amateur bandleader who introduced his son to the basics of several instruments. After his father died in 1927, Gillespie taught himself the trumpet and trombone; for two years he attended the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, where he played in the band and took music classes.... more

Brittney Griner
American basketball player

Brittney Griner, in full Brittney Yevette Griner, (born October 18, 1990, Houston, Texas, U.S.), American basketball player who is one of the game’s leading centres, especially known for her play with the Phoenix Mercury, which she helped win a WNBA championship (2014).

​Griner garnered international attention in 2022 when she was detained in Russia on a drug offense. She was later found guilty and sentenced to nine years.... more
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Adelaide Hall
American singer

Adelaide Hall, (born October 20, 1901, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 7, 1993, London, England), American-born jazz improviser whose wordless rhythm vocalizing ushered in what became known as scat singing.

The daughter of a music teacher, Hall attended the Pratt Institute in New York City. ..more

Fannie Lou Hamer
American civil-rights activist

Fannie Lou Hamer, née Townsend, (born October 6, 1917, Ruleville, Mississippi, U.S.—died March 14, 1977, Mound Bayou, Mississippi), African American civil rights activist who worked to desegregate the Mississippi Democratic Party.

The youngest of 20 children, Fannie Lou was working the fields with her sharecropper parents at the age of six. Amid poverty and racial exploitation, she received only a sixth-grade education. ..more

Fred Hampton
American activist

Fred Hampton, in full Frederick Allen Hampton, (born August 30, 1948, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—killed December 4, 1969, Chicago), American civil rights leader and deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party’s Illinois chapter who formed the city of Chicago’s first “Rainbow Coalition.” Hampton was killed during a raid on his residence by Chicago police officers.

The youngest child of Francis and Iberia Hampton, Fred was raised in the Chicago suburbs with his brother and sister....more

Frances E.W. Harper
American author and social reformer

Frances E.W. Harper, in full Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, née Frances Ella Watkins, (born September 24, 1825, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died February 22, 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), American author, orator, and social reformer who was notable for her poetry, speeches, and essays on abolitionism, temperance, and woman suffrage.

Frances Watkins was the daughter of free black parents. She grew up in the home of an uncle whose school for black children she attended...more

Kamala Harris
vice president of the United States

Kamala Harris, in full Kamala Devi Harris, (born October 20, 1964, Oakland, California, U.S.), 49th vice president of the United States (2021– ) in the Democratic administration of Pres. Joe Biden. She was the first woman and the first African American to hold the post. She had previously served in the U.S. Senate (2017–21) and as attorney general of California (2011–17).

Her father, who was Jamaican, taught at Stanford University, and her mother, the daughter of an Indian diplomat, was a cancer researcher... more

Connie Hawkins
American basketball player

Connie Hawkins, byname of Cornelius L. Hawkins, also called the Hawk, (born July 17, 1942, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died October 6, 2017), American basketball player who is widely regarded as one of the sport’s greatest talents of the 20th century but who had limited impact on the professional leagues. Hawkins was wrongly banned by the National Basketball Association (NBA) and spent his best years wandering in the proverbial wilderness, though he made it to the league before his promise had been utterly squandered. Half-full or half-empty; was Hawkins that great or just that persistent? The answer, as with all great athletes, is never that stark... more

Carla Hayden
American librarian

Carla Hayden, in full Carla Diane Hayden, (born August 10, 1952, Tallahassee, Florida, U.S.), American librarian who, in 2016, became the first woman and the first African American to serve as the Librarian of Congress. She is also known for defending library users’ privacy and for her efforts to ensure widespread access to public libraries and their resources.

Hayden attended Roosevelt University in Chicago (B.A., political science, 1973), and she earned a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Chicago Graduate Library School (1977, 1987)... .more

Bob Hayes
American athlete

Bob Hayes, byname of Robert Lee Hayes, also known as “Bullet” Bob Hayes, (born December 20, 1942, Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.—died September 18, 2002, Jacksonville), American sprinter who, although he was relatively slow out of the starting block and had an almost lumbering style of running, was a remarkably powerful sprinter with as much raw speed as any athlete in history. He also was a noted American football player.

Hayes began running as a boy with his brother Ernest, who was training to be a boxer. At Matthew W. Gilbert High School in...more

Jimi Hendrix
American musician

Jimi Hendrix, byname of James Marshall Hendrix, originally John Allen Hendrix, (born November 27, 1942, Seattle, Washington, U.S.—died September 18, 1970, London, England), American rock guitarist, singer, and composer who fused American traditions of blues, jazz, rock, and soul with techniques of British avant-garde rock to redefine the electric guitar in his own image.

Though his active career as a featured artist lasted a mere four years, Hendrix altered the course of popular music and became one of...more

Taraji P. Henson
American actress

Taraji P. Henson, in full Taraji Penda Henson, (born September 11, 1970, Washington, D.C., U.S.), American actress who was best known for playing strong female characters, notably Loretha (“Cookie”) Lyon in the television drama Empire (2015–20).

Henson grew up in Washington, D.C., and in Oxon Hill, Maryland, where she and her divorced mother moved. She entered North Carolina A&T State University to pursue a degree in electrical engineering but dropped out after failing a math class. She held several temporary jobs, including one for the Department of Defense at the Pentagon....more

DuBose Heyward
American writer

DuBose Heyward, in full Edwin Dubose Heyward, (born Aug. 31, 1885, Charleston, S.C., U.S.—died June 16, 1940, Tryon, N.C.), American novelist, dramatist, and poet whose first novel, Porgy (1925), was the basis for a highly successful play, an opera, and a motion picture.

At the age of 17 Heyward worked on the waterfront, where he observed the black Americans who were to become the subject of his writing. Heyward first wrote poems: Carolina Chansons (1922), a joint publication with Hervey Allen; Skylines and Horizons (1924);... more

Gregory Hines
American dancer, actor, and choreographer

​Gregory Hines, in full Gregory Oliver Hines, (born February 14, 1946, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 9, 2003, Los Angeles, California), American tap dancer, actor, and choreographer who was a major figure in the revitalization of tap dancing in the late 20th century.

By the age of four, Hines and his older brother Maurice were taking tap lessons with renowned dancer and choreographer Henry Le Tang. The brothers soon formed the Hines Kids, a song-and-dance act that appeared in clubs across the United States.... more

M. Carl Holman
American civil rights leader

M. Carl Holman, in full Moses Carl Holman, (born June 27, 1919, Minter City, Miss., U.S.—died Aug. 9, 1988, Washington, D.C.), American civil rights leader, president of the National Urban Coalition (1971–88), who promoted the need for a mutual partnership between industry and government to foster inner-city development.
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Holman graduated magna cum laude from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo. (1942), attended the University of Chicago (M.A. 1944), and earned a master of fine arts degree from Yale University (1954). While serving on the English and humanities faculty at Clark College in Atlanta, Ga. (1948–62), he joined students in founding the black journal The Atlanta Inquirer (1960)... more

Evander Holyfield
American boxer

Evander Holyfield, byname the Real Deal, (born October 19, 1962, Atmore, Alabama, U.S.), American boxer, the only professional fighter to win the heavyweight championship four separate times and thereby surpass the record of Muhammad Ali, who won it three times.

As an amateur boxer, Holyfield compiled a record of 160–14 and won the national Golden Gloves championship in 1984. Competing as a light heavyweight at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, he was disqualified in the semifinal bout for knocking out his opponent, Kevin Barry of New Zealand, while the referee was attempting to separate the fighters...more

Shirley Horn
American musician

Shirley Horn, in full Shirley Valerie Horn, (born May 1, 1934, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died Oct. 20, 2005, Cheverly, Md.), American jazz artist whose ballads, sung in a breathy contralto to her own piano accompaniment, earned her both critical acclaim and popular renown.

Horn was raised in Washington, D.C., and attended the Junior School of Music at Howard University, where she studied classical piano. She sang in local jazz bars and rose to prominence when Miles Davis asked her to open for his act after listening to her first album, Embers and Ashes (1960). She recorded five albums in the 1960s, including several with producer Quincy Jones, while performing in jazz clubs in New York and in Europe... more

Lugenia Burns Hope
American social reformer

Lugenia Burns Hope, née Lugenia D. Burns, (born Feb. 19, 1871, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.—died Aug. 14, 1947, Nashville, Tenn.), American social reformer whose Neighborhood Union and other community service organizations improved the quality of life for blacks in Atlanta, Ga., and served as a model for the future Civil Rights Movement.

Hope gained experience as an adolescent by working, often full time, for several charitable and settlement organizations. Between 1890 and 1893 she attended the Chicago Art Institute, the Chicago School of Design, and the Chicago Business College. In 1897 she married educator John Hope...more

Pauline Hopkins
American writer and editor

Pauline Hopkins, in full Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, (born 1859, Portland, Maine, U.S.—died Aug. 13, 1930, Cambridge, Mass.), African-American novelist, playwright, journalist, and editor. She was a pioneer in her use of traditional romance novels as a medium for exploring racial and social themes. Her work reflects the influence of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Hopkins attended Boston public schools and in 1880 joined her mother and stepfather in performing her first work, a musical entitled Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad (also called Peculiar Sam). She then spent several years touring with her family’s singing group, Hopkins’ Colored Troubadors. Her second play, One Scene from the Drama of Early Days, based on the biblical character Daniel, was also written about this time... more

John Lee Hooker
American musician

John Lee Hooker, bynames John Lee Booker, John Lee Cooker, Texas Slim, and Birmingham Sam and His Magic Guitar, (born August 22, 1917, Clarksdale, Mississippi, U.S.—died June 21, 2001, Los Altos, California), American blues singer-guitarist, one of the most distinctive artists in the electric blues idiom....more

bell hooks
American scholar

bell hooks, pseudonym of Gloria Jean Watkins, (born September 25, 1952, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, U.S.—died December 15, 2021, Berea, Kentucky), American scholar and activist whose work examined the connections between race, gender, and class. She often explored the varied perceptions of Black women and Black women writers and the development of feminist identities.

Watkins grew up in a segregated community of the American South. At age 19 she began writing what would become her first full-length book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which was published in 1981... more 

Charles Hamilton Houston
American lawyer and educator
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Charles Hamilton Houston, (born September 3, 1895, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died April 22, 1950, Washington, D.C.), American lawyer and educator instrumental in laying the legal groundwork that led to U.S. Supreme Court rulings outlawing racial segregation in public schools.

Houston graduated as one of six valedictorians from Amherst College (B.A., 1915). After teaching for two years at Howard University in Washington, D.C., he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was commissioned a second lieutenant in field artillery and served in France and Germany during World War I... more

Whitney Houston
American singer and actress

Whitney Houston, (born August 9, 1963, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.—died February 11, 2012, Beverly Hills, California), American singer and actress who was one of the best-selling musical performers of the 1980s and ’90s.

Whitney Houston,  The daughter of Emily (“Cissy”) Houston—whose vocal group, the Sweet Inspirations, sang backup for Aretha Franklin—and the cousin of singer Dionne Warwick, Whitney Houston began singing in church as a child. While still in high school, she sang backup for Chaka Khan and Lou Rawls and modeled for fashion magazines.... more

Jennifer Hudson
American actress and singer
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Jennifer Hudson, in full Jennifer Kate Hudson, (born September 12, 1981, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American actress and singer who first garnered attention on the reality television show American Idol and later earned acclaim for her music and acting. She accomplished the rare feat of winning the four major North American entertainment awards (EGOT: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony).

Hudson began singing at age seven in her Chicago church choir. As a teenager, she performed at wedding receptions and in local talent shows and musical theatre....more
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Alberta Hunter
American singer

Alberta Hunter, (born April 1, 1895, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.—died October 17, 1984, New York, New York), American blues singer who achieved international fame in the 1930s for her vigorous and rhythmically infectious style and who enjoyed a resurgence of celebrity in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

Hunter’s father abandoned the family soon after her birth. Her mother, who worked as a domestic in a brothel, remarried about 1906, but Alberta did not get along with her new family. She ran away to Chicago about the age of 11 (the reports of dates and age vary)... more

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Jesse Jackson
American minister and activist

Jesse Jackson, original name Jesse Louis Burns, (born October 8, 1941, Greenville, South Carolina, U.S.), American civil rights leader, Baptist minister, and politician whose bids for the U.S. presidency (in the Democratic Party’s nomination races in 1983–84 and 1987–88) were the most successful by an African American until 2008, when Barack Obama captured the Democratic presidential nomination. Jackson’s life and career have been marked by both accomplishment and controversy...more

Ketanji Brown Jackson
United States jurist

Ketanji Brown Jackson, née Ketanji Onyika Brown, (born September 14, 1970, Washington, D.C.), associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 2022. She was the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Early life and education Ketanji Onyika Brown was the first of two children of Johnny and Ellery Brown, both of whom were public school teachers at the time of her birth. The family then moved from Washington, D.C., to Miami, Florida, where her father earned a law degree from the University of Miami and became an attorney for the school board of Miami-Dade County. Her mother became a school principal... more

Mahalia Jackson
American singer
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Mahalia Jackson, (born October 26, 1911, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.—died January 27, 1972, Evergreen Park, near Chicago, Illinois), American gospel music singer, known as the “Queen of Gospel Song.”

Jackson was brought up in a strict religious atmosphere. Her father’s family included several entertainers, but she was forced to confine her own musical activities to singing in the church choir and listening—surreptitiously—to recordings of Bessie Smith and Ida Cox as well as of Enrico Caruso. When she was 16, she went to Chicago and joined the Greater Salem Baptist Church choir, where her remarkable contralto voice soon led to her selection as a soloist...more


Michael Jackson
American singer, songwriter, and dancer

Michael Jackson, in full Michael Joseph Jackson or Michael Joe Jackson (see Researcher’s Note), (born August 29, 1958, Gary, Indiana, U.S.—died June 25, 2009, Los Angeles, California), American singer, songwriter, and dancer who was the most popular entertainer in the world in the early and mid-1980s. Reared in Gary, Indiana, in one of the most acclaimed musical families of the rock era, Michael Jackson was the youngest and most talented of five brothers whom his father, Joseph, shaped into a dazzling group of child stars known as the Jackson 5. In addition to Michael, the members of the Jackson 5 were Jackie Jackson (byname of Sigmund Jackson; b. May 4, 1951, Gary), Tito Jackson (byname of Toriano Jackson; b. October 15, 1953, Gary), Jermaine Jackson (b. December 11, 1954, Gary), and Marlon Jackson (b. March 12, 1957, Gary)... more
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Milt Jackson
American musician

Milt Jackson, byname of Milton Jackson, also called Bags, (born January 1, 1923, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.—died October 9, 1999, New York, New York), American jazz musician, the first and most influential vibraphone improviser of the postwar, modern jazz era.
Jackson began playing the vibraphone (also called vibes or vibraharp) professionally at age 16. He attended Michigan State University and joined Dizzy Gillespie’s sextet in 1945; he then worked with Gillespie’s big band and later returned to play vibraphone and piano in Gillespie’s sextet (1950–52)...more

Mae Jemison
American physician and astronaut
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Mae Jemison, in full Mae Carol Jemison, (born October 17, 1956, Decatur, Alabama, U.S.), American physician and the first African American woman to become an astronaut. In 1992 she spent more than a week orbiting Earth in the space shuttle Endeavour.

Jemison moved with her family to Chicago at the age of three. There she was introduced to science by her uncle and developed interests throughout her childhood in anthropology, archaeology, evolution, and astronomy. While still a high school student, she became interested in biomedical engineering, and after graduating in 1973, at the age of 16, she entered Stanford University. There she received degrees in chemical engineering and African American studies (1977)...more

​Charles Spurgeon Johnson
American sociologist and editor

Charles Spurgeon Johnson, (born July 24, 1893, Bristol, Va., U.S.—died Oct. 27, 1956, Louisville, Ky.), U.S. sociologist, authority on race relations, and the first black president (1946–56) of Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn. (established in 1867 and long restricted to black students). Earlier he had founded and edited (1923–28) the intellectual magazine Opportunity, a major voice of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

After graduation from Virginia Union University, Richmond, Johnson studied under the sociologist Robert Ezra Park at the University of Chicago and then worked for the Chicago Commission on Race Relations (1919–21). His first important writing, The Negro in Chicago (1922), was a sociological study of the race riot in that city in July 1919...more

John H. Johnson
American publisher

John H. Johnson, in full John Harold Johnson, (born January 19, 1918, Arkansas City, Arkansas, U.S.—died August 8, 2005, Chicago, Illinois), magazine and book publisher, the first African American to attain major success in those fields.

Johnson and his family settled in Chicago after visiting that city during the 1933 World’s Fair. He later became an honour student at Du Sable High School in Chicago, where he was managing editor of the school paper and business manager of the yearbook. Those experiences influenced his choice of journalism as a career. While studying at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, Johnson worked for a life insurance company that marketed to African American customers...more

Katherine Johnson
American mathematician

Katherine Johnson, née Katherine Coleman, also known as (1939–56) Katherine Goble, (born August 26, 1918, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, U.S.—died February 24, 2020, Newport News, Virginia), American mathematician who calculated and analyzed the flight paths of many spacecraft during her more than three decades with the U.S. space program. Her work helped send astronauts to the Moon...more

Magic Johnson
American basketball player

Magic Johnson, byname of Earvin Johnson, Jr., (born August 14, 1959, Lansing, Michigan, U.S.), American basketball player who led the National Basketball Association (NBA) Los Angeles Lakers to five championships.

The son of an autoworker, Johnson earned his nickname “Magic” in high school for his creative and entertaining ballhandling. He was an intense competitor who led his high school team to a state championship in 1977 and led Michigan State University to the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship in 1979—handing Larry Bird and Indiana State its only defeat of that season... more

Michael Johnson
American athlete

Michael Johnson, in full Michael Duane Johnson, (born September 13, 1967, Dallas, Texas, U.S.), American sprinter, perhaps the most eminent figure in athletics (track and field) in the 1990s. For much of the decade he was virtually unbeaten in the long sprints—the 200-metre and 400-metre races—and at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta he became the first man to win gold medals at both distances; he also set Olympic marks in both events.

In high school Johnson was one of the top 200-metre runners in Texas. After entering Baylor University in Waco, Texas, in 1986, he first began competing at 400 metres. In 1989, during his junior year, he set the indoor 200-metre U.S. record to win the national collegiate title--a title that he defended his senior year, both indoors and outdoors...more

Rafer Johnson
American athlete and executive

Rafer Johnson, in full Rafer Lewis Johnson, (born August 18, 1934, Hillsboro, Texas, U.S.—died December 2, 2020, Los Angeles, California), American athlete and actor, who won a gold medal in the decathlon at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome.

Johnson competed in his first decathlon in 1954 as a sophomore at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and in 1955 he won the gold medal at the Pan American Games. Injuries forced him to settle for a silver medal in the 1956 Olympic decathlon in Melbourne, Australia, but he set a world record in 1958...more

Robert Johnson
American musician

Robert Johnson, (born c. 1911, Hazlehurst, Mississippi, U.S.—died August 16, 1938, near Greenwood, Mississippi), American blues composer, guitarist, and singer whose eerie falsetto singing voice and masterful rhythmic slide guitar influenced both his contemporaries and many later blues and rock musicians.

Johnson was the product of a confusing childhood, with three men serving as his father before he reached age seven. Little is known about his biological father (Noah Johnson, whom his mother never married), and the boy and his mother lived on various plantations in the Mississippi Delta region before settling briefly in Memphis, Tennessee, with her first husband (Robert Dodds, who had changed his surname to Spencer). The bulk of Johnson’s youth, however, was spent in Robinsonville, Mississippi, with his mother and her second husband (Dusty Willis)...more

Sargent Johnson
American artist
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Sargent Johnson, in full Sargent Claude Johnson, (born October 7, 1887, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 10, 1967, San Francisco, California), versatile American artist known especially for his paintings and sculptures of African American subjects. By his own account, he was concerned with...more

 Judy Johnson 
American baseball player and manager

Judy Johnson, byname of William Julius Johnson, (born Oct. 26, 1890, Snow Hill, Md., U.S.—died June 15, 1989, Wilmington, Del., U.S.), American professional baseball player and manager in the Negro leagues between 1918 and 1936.

A sure-handed and graceful fielder, Johnson is considered one of the best defensive third baseman ever to play baseball. He had a .309 career batting average but hit with little power. Playing with Hilldale, Johnson led the team to Eastern Colored League championships in 1923, 1924, and 1925...more

Elvin Jones
American musician

Elvin Jones, in full Elvin Ray Jones, (born September 9, 1927, Pontiac, Michigan, U.S.—died May 18, 2004, Englewood, New Jersey), American jazz drummer and bandleader who established a forceful polyrhythmic approach to the traps set, combining different metres played independently by the hands and feet into a propulsive flow of irregularly shifting accents.

Jones was mostly self-taught, though he came of a musical family that included siblings Hank and Thad, jazz pianist and trumpeter, respectively. Jones played drums in school and army bands before beginning his professional career in Detroit in 1949. In 1956 he moved to New York City, where he performed with Donald Byrd, Pepper Adams, and others, and in 1960 he joined saxophonist John Coltrane’s quartet with McCoy Tyner, pianist, and Jimmy Garrison, bassist...more

Jo Jones
American musician

Jo Jones, byname of Jonathon Jones, (born October 7, 1911, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died September 3, 1985, New York, New York), American musician, one of the most influential of all jazz drummers, noted for his swing, dynamic subtlety, and finesse.

Jones grew up in Alabama, studied music for 12 years, and became a skilled trumpeter and pianist; he toured with carnivals as a tap dancer as well as an instrumentalist. He played with Southwestern “territory bands” (i.e., those in the South, Southwest, and Midwest), including Walter Page’s Blue Devils, before joining Count Basie’s Kansas City band in 1934. With few breaks, most notably his U.S. Army service (1944–46), he remained with Basie until 1948, after which he led a freelance career. He made the first of several “Jazz at the Philharmonic” tours in 1947, occasionally led his own groups, and recorded with swing-era contemporaries such as Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Buck Clayton, and Lester Young... more

Marion Jones
American athlete

Marion Jones, (born October 12, 1975, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), American athlete, who, at the 2000 Olympic Games, became the first woman to win five track-and-field medals at a single Olympics. In 2007, however, she admitted to having used banned substances and subsequently returned the medals.

Jones early displayed talent on the track, and her family moved several times during her adolescence so that she could compete on prominent junior-high and high-school teams. By the time she was 12, Jones had begun competing internationally. She was also an accomplished high-school basketball player, winning California’s Division I Player of the Year award in 1993. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a basketball scholarship, and in 1994 she helped the women’s basketball team win the national title...more

Philly Joe Jones
American musician

Philly Joe Jones, byname of Joseph Rudolph Jones, (born July 15, 1923, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died August 30, 1985, Philadelphia), American jazz musician, one of the major percussionists of the bop era, and among the most recorded as well.
Instructed by his mother, a piano teacher, Jones began playing drums as a child. During the 1940s he accompanied visiting artists such as Dexter Gordon and Fats Navarro in local clubs and toured with Lionel Hampton and Joe Morris. Moving to New York, he worked with composer-bandleader Tadd Dameron (1953–54) and enjoyed a busy freelance career before the most important association of his career, with the Miles Davis quintet (1955–58)...more

Florence Griffith Joyner
American athlete

Florence Griffith Joyner, in full Delorez Florence Griffith Joyner, née Delorez Florence Griffith, byname FloJo, (born December 21, 1959, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died September 21, 1998, Mission Viejo, California), American sprinter who set world records in the 100 metres (10.49 seconds) and 200 metres (21.34 seconds) that have stood since 1988.

Florence Griffith JoynerGriffith started running at age seven, chasing jackrabbits to increase her speed. In 1980 she entered the University of California, Los Angeles (B.A., 1983), to train with coach Bob Kersee. At the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, she won a silver medal in the 200-metre race and quickly became a media celebrity with her 6-inch (15-cm) decorated fingernails and eye-catching racing suits. Disappointed with her performance, however, she went into semiretirement. In 1987 she rededicated herself to the sport, adopting an intense weight-training program and altering her starting technique. ..more

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Ibram X. Kendi
American author

​Ibram X. Kendi, in full Ibram Xolani Kendi, original name Ibram Henry Rogers, (born August 13, 1982, Queens, New York, U.S.), American author, historian, and activist who studied and wrote about racism and antiracism in the United States. Through his books and speeches, he asserted that racist policies and ideas are deeply ingrained in American society.

He was born Ibram Henry Rogers to parents who were student activists interested in liberation theology and the “Black Power” movement. While he was a teenager, the family moved to Manassas, Virginia. He majored in journalism at Florida A&M University and focused on sports reporting before concentrating on racial justice. In 2004 he graduated with a double major in journalism and African American studies. Rogers then worked at The Virginian Pilot newspaper before pursuing an advanced degree in African American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia...more

Alan Keyes
American diplomat, commentator, and politician

Alan Keyes, in full Alan Lee Keyes, (born August 7, 1950, New York City, New York, U.S.), American diplomat, radio commentator, and politician who was one of the most prominent African American conservatives in the late 20th and the early 21st century. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.
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Keyes received a bachelor’s degree (1972) and a doctorate (1979) in government studies from Harvard University. In 1978 he joined the U.S. State Department as a foreign service officer. In 1983 he was appointed ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council in the administration of President Ronald Reagan...more

John Oliver Killens
American writer and activist

John Oliver Killens, (born January 14, 1916, Macon, Georgia, U.S.—died October 27, 1987, Brooklyn, New York), American writer and activist known for his politically charged novels—particularly Youngblood (1954)—and his contributions to the Black Arts movement and as a founder of the Harlem Writers Guild.

From an early age Killens was exposed to African American writers and thinkers. His father encouraged him to read Langston Hughes, and his mother introduced him to the work of poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar. Growing up in Georgia under Jim Crow law had a profound impact on Killens’s political and social outlook and provided source material for his writings...more

B.B. King
American musician

B.B. King, byname of Riley B. King, (born September 16, 1925, near Itta Bena, Mississippi, U.S.—died May 14, 2015, Las Vegas, Nevada), American guitarist and singer who was a principal figure in the development of blues and from whose style leading popular musicians drew inspiration.
King, B.B.King was reared in the Mississippi Delta, and gospel music in church was the earliest influence on his singing. ..more
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Don King
American boxing promoter

Don King, in full Donald King, (born August 20, 1931, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.), American boxing promoter known for his flamboyant manner and outrageous hair styled to stand straight up. He first came to prominence with his promotion of the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
While growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, King considered becoming a lawyer. To finance his college education, he became a numbers runner (i.e., a courier of illegal betting slips), and in a short time he was one of the leading racketeers in Cleveland. King attended Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland for a year but quit to concentrate on his numbers business...more
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Willie Lanier
American football player

Willie Lanier, in full Willie Edward Lanier, (born August 21, 1945, Clover, Virginia, U.S.), American professional gridiron football player who was an outstanding defensive player for the Kansas City Chiefs in the 1960s and ’70s, overturning the stereotype that African Americans could not handle the key defensive position of middle linebacker... more

Kristin Hunter Lattany
American writer

Kristin Hunter Lattany, in full Kristin Elaine Hunter Lattany, née Kristin Elaine Eggleston, (born September 12, 1931, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died November 14, 2008, Magnolia, New Jersey), American novelist who examined black life and race relations in the United States in both children’s stories and works for adults.

Lattany began writing for The Pittsburgh Courier, an important African American newspaper, when she was 14 and continued until the year after she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. She married writer Joseph Hunter in 1952 (divorced 1962). After briefly working as a teacher, she became an advertising copywriter.  Kristin Hunter 


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Norman Lewis
American painter

Norman Lewis, in full Norman Wilfred Lewis, (born July 23, 1909, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 27, 1979, New York City), Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher who diverged from his native Harlem community of artists in choosing abstraction over representation as his mode of expression...more


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Huey P. Newton
American activist

Huey P. Newton, in full Huey Percy Newton, (born February 17, 1942, Monroe, Louisiana, U.S.—died August 22, 1989, Oakland, California), American political activist, cofounder (with Bobby Seale) of the Black Panther Party (originally called Black Panther Party for Self-Defense).... more

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Jesse Owens
American athlete

Jesse Owens, byname of James Cleveland Owens, (born September 12, 1913, Oakville, Alabama, U.S.—died March 31, 1980, Phoenix, Arizona), American track-and-field athlete who set a world record in the running broad jump (also called long jump) that stood for 25 years and who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. His four Olympic victories were a blow to Adolf Hitler’s intention to use the Games to demonstrate Aryan superiority... more

P
Brock Peters
American actor

Brock Peters, pseudonym of George Fisher, (born July 2, 1927, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 23, 2005, Los Angeles, Calif.), American actor who employed his powerful bass voice and strong presence in portrayals of a wide range of characters, notably in the role of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)....more


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Jimmy Rushing
American singer

Jimmy Rushing, byname of James Andrew Rushing, (born August 26, 1903?, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S.—died June 8, 1972, New York, New York), American blues and jazz singer who was best known for performing with the Count Basie Orchestra....more


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Diana Sands
American actress

Diana Sands, (born Aug. 22, 1934, New York City, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 21, 1973, New York City, N.Y.), American stage and screen actress who won overnight acclaim for her portrayal of the younger sister in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959)...more


Wayne Shorter
American musician and composer

Wayne Shorter, (born August 25, 1933, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.), American musician and composer, a major jazz saxophonist, among the most influential hard-bop and modal musicians and a pioneer of jazz-rock fusion music....more


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U
Doris Ulmann
American photographer

Doris Ulmann, (born May 29, 1882, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 28, 1934, New York City), American photographer known for her portraits of people living in rural parts of the American South.

Born into a well-to-do New York family, Ulmann received a progressive education at the Ethical Culture School and took courses in psychology and law at Columbia University.... more

Gene Upshaw
American football player

Gene Upshaw, byname of Eugene Thurman Upshaw, Jr., (born Aug. 15, 1945, Robstown, Texas, U.S.—died Aug. 20, 2008, near Lake Tahoe, Calif.), American professional gridiron football player and labour union director. Upshaw was a Hall of Fame offensive lineman for the Oakland Raiders of the National Football League (NFL) before serving as the executive director of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA; 1983–2008)...more

Usher
American musician

Usher, in full Usher Terry Raymond IV, (born October 14, 1978, Dallas, Texas, U.S.), American musician whose smooth vocals and sensual ballads helped establish him as a rhythm-and-blues superstar in the late 1990s.

As a youngster in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Usher sang in church choirs but sought entry into the mainstream music industry by entering talent shows. At age 12 he moved with his mother and brother to Atlanta, and two years later he secured a recording contract with LaFace Records. The album Usher was released in 1994, with the 15-year-old singer moving beyond his choirboy background by proclaiming that “it’s only a sexual thing” on the slow-groove single “Can U Get wit It.”...more
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Melvin Van Peebles
American author and filmmaker

Melvin Van Peebles, original name Melvin Peebles, (born August 21, 1932, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died September 21, 2021, New York, New York), American filmmaker who wrote, directed, and starred in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), a groundbreaking film that spearheaded the rush of African American action films known as "blaxploitation" in the 1970s. He also served as the film’s composer and editor....more

Dorothy Vaughan
American mathematician

Dorothy Vaughan, née Dorothy Johnson, (born September 20, 1910, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.—died November 10, 2008, Hampton, Virginia), American mathematician and computer programmer who made important contributions to the early years of the U.S. space program and who was the first African American manager at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which later became part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)... more



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Jimmy Yancey
American musician

Jimmy Yancey, byname of James Edward Yancey, (born February 20, 1898?, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died September 17, 1951, Chicago), American blues pianist who established the boogie-woogie style with slow, steady, simple left-hand bass patterns. These became more rapid in the work of his students Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis, who popularized the “Yancey Special” bass pattern. Yancey was also known for the unpredictable inventiveness of his right hand.

Yancey was largely a self-taught pianist with some instruction from his brother Alonzo. He had a childhood career as a singer and dancer, touring American vaudeville circuits and European music halls, giving a command performance for King George V of England in 1913. Returning to Chicago, Yancey performed at small taverns and informal gatherings....  more

Lester Young
American musician

Lester Young, in full Lester Willis Young, byname Pres or Prez, (born Aug. 27, 1909, Woodville, Miss., U.S.—died March 15, 1959, New York, N.Y.), American tenor saxophonist who emerged in the mid-1930s Kansas City, Mo., jazz world with the Count Basie band and introduced an approach to improvisation that provided much of the basis for modern jazz solo conception....more


Z

Notable Pan Africans

A
Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola
Nigerian entrepreneur and politician

Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, (born August 24, 1937, Abeokuta, Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria—died July 7, 1998, Abuja, Nigeria), Nigerian business executive, philanthropist, and politician who is hailed as a figure of democratic change in Nigeria....more

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Usain Bolt
Jamaican athlete

Usain Bolt, (born Aug. 21, 1986, Montego Bay, Jam.), Jamaican sprinter. An athletics (track and field) prodigy, Bolt won the 200-metre event at the 2002 world junior championships at age 15. In May 2008 he set the 100-metre-dash world record, which he broke the following August while capturing a gold medal at the Beijing Olympic Games. Bolt won additional Olympic gold medals in the 200 metres and the 4 × 100-metre relay, both in world record time. At the London 2012 Olympic Games, he again won the 100-metre and 200-metre events, becoming the first person to win both races in consecutive Olympiads. He also won a gold as a member of the 4 × 100-metre relay at the London Games. Four years later, he won golds in all three of those events, at the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games, becoming the first man in history to complete the “triple triple.”...more


Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi
South African politician

Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi, (born Aug. 27, 1928, Mahlabatini, Natal, S.Af.), Zulu chief and leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party. Descended from Cetshwayo, he assumed leadership of the Buthelezi clan in 1953. He was elected head of the nonindependent black state of KwaZulu in 1972 and revived Inkatha in 1975 after breaking with the African National Congress (ANC). Rejecting full independence for KwaZulu, he worked within the white establishment to end apartheid. In 1990–94 he engaged in a fierce struggle for leadership with the ANC; thousands were killed in Inkatha-ANC clashes. Following the 1994 national elections, he was appointed minister of home affairs by Nelson Mandela; he held the post until 2004...more

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Cesaria Evora
Cabo Verdean singer

Cesaria Evora, (born August 27, 1941, Mindelo, Cape Verde—died December 17, 2011, Mindelo), Cape Verdean singer who was known for her rich, haunting voice....more


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Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara
president of The Gambia

Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara, (born May 16, 1924, Barajally, MacCarthy Island, The Gambia—died August 27, 2019, Fajara), politician and veterinarian who was The Gambia’s prime minister from 1962 to 1970 and its president from 1970 until he was overthrown in 1994...more

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Jomo Kenyatta
president of Kenya

Jomo Kenyatta, (born c. 1894, Ichaweri, British East Africa—died Aug. 22, 1978, Mombasa, Kenya), First prime minister (1963–64) and then president (1964–78) of independent Kenya. Of Kikuyu descent, Kenyatta left the East African highlands c. 1920 to become a civil servant and political activist in Nairobi. He opposed a union of the British colonial territories of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. In 1945 he helped organize the sixth Pan-African Congress, attended by such figures as W.E.B. Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah (see Pan-African movement)...more

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Festus Mogae
president of Botswana

Festus Mogae, Festus Gontebanye Mogae, (born August 21, 1939, Serowe, Bechuanaland Protectorate [now Botswana]), economist and politician who served as president of Botswana (1998–2008)....more


Jan Ernst Matzeliger
Dutch inventor

Jan Ernst Matzeliger, (born Sept. 15, 1852, Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana [now Suriname]—died Aug. 24, 1889, Lynn, Mass., U.S.), inventor best known for his shoe-lasting machine that mechanically shaped the upper portions of shoes....more


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Lynden Pindling
prime minister of The Bahamas

Lynden Pindling , in full Sir Lynden Oscar Pindling, (born March 22, 1930, Nassau, Bahamas, British West Indies—died August 26, 2000, Nassau, Bahamas), Bahamian politician who, as prime minister (1967–92), guided the Bahamas to independence in 1973 and was considered the country’s founding father...more

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R
Bayard Rustin
American civil-rights activist

Bayard Rustin, (born March 17, 1912, West Chester, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died August 24, 1987, New York, New York), American civil rights activist who was an adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., and who was the main organizer of the March on Washington in 1963....more

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Haile Selassie I
emperor of Ethiopia

Haile Selassie , orig. Tafari Makonnen, (born July 23, 1892, near Harer, Eth.—died Aug. 27, 1975, Addis Ababa), Emperor of Ethiopia (1930–74). Tafari was a son of Ras (Prince) Makonnen, a chief adviser to Emperor Menilek II. After Menilek’s daughter, Zauditu, became empress (1917), Ras Tafari (who had married Menilek’s great-granddaughter) was named regent and heir apparent to the throne. When Zauditu died in 1930, Tafari took the name of Haile Selassie (“Might of the Trinity”) to mark his imperial status. As emperor he sought to modernize his country and steer it into the mainstream of African politics. He brought Ethiopia into the League of Nations and the UN and made Addis Ababa the centre for the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union)...more


Siaka Stevens
president of Sierra Leone

Siaka Stevens, (born Aug. 24, 1905, Moyamba, Sierra Leone—died May 29, 1988, Freetown), Sierra Leonean prime minister (1967 and 1968–71) and president (1971–85) who survived in office despite attempted coups, a burdensome national debt, and almost continual charges of gross mismanagement and governmental corruption...more

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Tchicaya U Tam’si
Congolese poet

Tchicaya U Tam’si, pseudonym of Gérald Félix Tchicaya, (born August 25, 1931, Mpili, near Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa [now in Congo]—died April 21 or 22, 1988, Bazancourt, Oise, France), Congolese French-language writer and poet whose work explores the relationships between victor and victim....more

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Historical Events in African American History

CMAP Tools is the platform that allows the Pan African Cultural Heritage Institute to host the Pan African Cultural Heritage Library of history of the People of Pan Africa as a collector of digital document on the history and culture of People of African Descent.

1619

• The first recorded Africans in English North America arrive when "twenty and odd" men, women and children were brought first to Fort Monroe off the coast of Hampton, Virginia, and then to Jamestown. They had been taken as prizes from a Portuguese slave ship. The group of Africans were treated as indentured servants, and at least one was recorded as eventually owning land in the colony.[4]

 

• First Enslaved Africans Arrive in Jamestown Colony - HISTORY

1640

• John Punch, a Black indentured servant, ran away with three white servants, James, Gregory, and Victor. After the four were captured, Punch was sentenced to serve Virginian planter Hugh Gwyn for life. This made John Punch the first legally documented slave in colonial Virginia.[5][6][7][8][9]

1654

• John Casor, a Black man who claimed to have completed his term of indenture, became the first legally recognized slave-for-life in a civil case in colonial Virginia. The court ruled with his master who said he had an indefinite servitude for life.[10]

1662

• The Colony of Virginia, using the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, proclaimed that children in the colony were born into their mother's social status; therefore children born to enslaved mothers were classified as slaves, regardless of their father's ethnicity or status. This was contrary to English common law for English subjects, which held that children took their father's social status.

1664

• September 20 - The Province of Maryland passes the first law in Colonial America banning interracial marriage.[11]

1670

• Zipporah Potter Atkins, a free woman of color, becomes the first African-American landowner in Boston, and the first Black woman to own land in Colonial America.[12]

1676

• Both free and enslaved African Americans fought in Bacon's Rebellion alongside white indentured servants.[13]

1685

• French king Louis XIV issues the Code Noir ("Black Code"), a slave code which applies to France's overseas colonies, including Louisiana.[14]

1700

1705

• The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 define as slaves all those servants brought into the colony who were not Christian in their original countries, as well as Native American slaves sold by other Indians to colonists.

1712

• April 6 – The New York Slave Revolt of 1712 breaks out.[15]

1738

• First free African-American community: Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (later named Fort Mose) in Spanish Florida. [2]

1739

• September 9 – In the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina slaves gather at the Stono River to plan an armed march for freedom.[16]

1753

• Benjamin Banneker designed and built the first clock of its type in the Thirteen Colonies. He also created a series of almanacs. He corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and wrote that "blacks were intellectually equal to whites". Banneker worked with Pierre L'Enfant to survey and design a street and urban plan for Washington, D.C.[17]

1760

• Jupiter Hammon has a poem printed, becoming the first published African-American poet.[18][19]

1770

• March 5 – Crispus Attucks is among the five men killed by a detachment of the 29th Regiment of Foot in the Boston Massacre, a precursor to the American Revolution.[20][21]

1773

• Phillis Wheatley has her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral published.[22]

1774

• As part of a broader non-importation movement aimed at Britain, the First Continental Congress called on all the colonies to ban the importation of slaves, and the colonies pass acts doing so.[23]
• The first black Baptist congregations are organized in the American South: Silver Bluff Baptist Church in South Carolina, and First African Baptist Church near Petersburg, Virginia.

1775

• April 14 – The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage holds four meetings. It was re-formed in 1784 as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and Benjamin Franklin would later serve as its president.
• Thomas Paine publishes one of the earliest and most influential anti-slavery essays in the U.S., called "African Slavery in America."[11]

1776–1783 American Revolution

• Thousands of enslaved African Americans in the South escape to British lines, as they were promised freedom to fight with the British. In South Carolina, 25,000 enslaved African Americans, one-quarter of those held, escape to the British or otherwise leave their plantations.[24] After the war, many African Americans are evacuated with the British for England; more than 3,000 Black Loyalists are transported with other Loyalists to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where they are granted land. Still others go to Jamaica and the West Indies. An estimated 8–10,000 were evacuated from the colonies in these years as free people, about 50 percent of those slaves who defected to the British and about 80 percent of those who survived.[25]
• Many Black Patriots in the North fight with the rebelling colonists during the Revolutionary War.

1777

• July 8 – The Vermont Republic (a sovereign nation at the time) abolishes slavery, the first future state to do so. No slaves were held in Vermont.

1780

• Pennsylvania becomes the first U.S. state to abolish slavery.
• Capt. Paul Cuffe and six other African American residents of Massachusetts successfully petition the state legislature for the right to vote, claiming "no taxation without representation."[11]

1781

• In challenges by Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker, two independent county courts in Massachusetts found slavery illegal under state constitution and declared each to be free persons.

1783

• Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed that Massachusetts state constitution had abolished slavery. It ruled that "the granting of rights and privileges [was] wholly incompatible and repugnant to" slavery, in an appeal case arising from the escape of former slave Quock Walker. When the British left New York and Charleston in 1783, they took the last of 5,500 Loyalists to the Caribbean, who brought along with them some 15,000 slaves.[26]

1787

• July 13 – The Northwest Ordinance bans the expansion of slavery into U.S. territories north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River.

1788

• The First African Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia is organized under Andrew Bryan.[27][28]

1790–1810 Manumission of slaves

• Following the Revolution, numerous slaveholders in the Upper South free their slaves; the percentage of free blacks rises from less than one to 10 percent. By 1810, 75 percent of all blacks in Delaware are free, and 7.2 percent of blacks in Virginia are free.[29]

1791

• February – Major Andrew Ellicott hires Benjamin Banneker, an African-American draftsman, to assist in a survey of the boundaries of the 100-square-mile (260 km2) federal district that would later become the District of Columbia.

1793

• February 12 – The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 is passed. (See also Fugitive slave laws.)

1794

• March 14 – Eli Whitney is granted a patent on the cotton gin. This enables the cultivation and processing of short-staple cotton to be profitable in the uplands and interior areas of the Deep South; as this cotton can be cultivated in a wide area, the change dramatically increases the need for enslaved labor and leads to the development of King Cotton as the chief commodity crop. To satisfy labor demand, there is a forced migration of one million slaves from the Upper South and coast to the area in the antebellum period, mostly by the domestic slave trade.

 

• July – Two independent black churches open in Philadelphia: the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, with Absalom Jones, and the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, with Richard Allen, the latter the first church of what would become in 1816 the first independent black denomination in the United States.

1800 - 1859
See also: Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War

• The first Black Codes enacted.

1800

• August 30 – Gabriel Prosser's planned attempt to lead a slave rebellion in Richmond, Virginia is suppressed.

1807

• At the urging of President Thomas Jefferson, Congress passes the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. It makes it a federal crime to import a slave from abroad.

1808

• January 1 – The importation of slaves is a felony. This is the earliest day under the United States Constitution that a law could be made restricting slavery.

1816

• The first separate black denomination of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) is founded by Richard Allen, who is elected its first bishop.

• The American Colonization Society is begun by Robert Finley, to send free African Americans to what is to become Liberia in West Africa.[30]

• The Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground is established in Richmond, VA. With estimated interments of upwards of 22,000, it is likely the largest burial ground for Free People of Color and the enslaved in the United States.

1817

• The First African Baptist Church had its beginnings in 1817 when John Mason Peck and the former enslaved John Berry Meachum began holding church services for African Americans in St. Louis.[31] Meachum founded the First African Baptist Church in 1827. It was the first African-American church west of the Mississippi River. Although there were ordinances preventing blacks from assembling, the congregation grew from 14 people at its founding to 220 people by 1829. Two hundred of the parishioners were slaves, who could only travel to the church and attend services with the permission of their owners.[32]

1820

• March 6 – The Missouri Compromise allows for the entry as states of Maine (free) and Missouri (slave); no more slave states are allowed north of 36°30′.
• The British West Africa Squadron's slave trade suppression activities are assisted by forces from the United States Navy, starting in 1820 with the USS Cyane. With the Webster–Ashburton Treaty of 1842, the relationship is formalised and they jointly run the Africa Squadron.

1821

• The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church is formed.

1822

• July 14 – Denmark Vesey's planned slave rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina is suppressed (known also as "The Vesey Conspiracy").

1827

• March 16 - Freedom's Journal, the first African American newspaper in the U.S., begins publication.

1829

• September – David Walker begins publication of the abolitionist pamphlet Walker's Appeal.

1830

• October 28 – Josiah Henson, a slave who fled and arrived in Canada, is an author, abolitionist, minister and the inspiration behind the book Uncle Tom's Cabin.[33]

1831

• William Lloyd Garrison begins publication of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. He declares ownership of a slave is a great sin, and must stop immediately.

• August – Nat Turner leads the most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history. The rebellion is suppressed, but only after many deaths.

1832

• Sarah Harris Fayerweather, an aspiring teacher, is admitted to Prudence Crandall's all-girl school in Canterbury, Connecticut, resulting in the first racially integrated schoolhouse in the United States.[34] Her admission led to the school's forcible closure under the Connecticut Black Law of 1833.[35]

1833

• The American Anti-Slavery Society, an abolitionist society, is founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. Frederick Douglass becomes a key leader of the society.

1837

• February – The first Institute of Higher Education for African Americans is founded. Founded as the African Institute in February 1837 and renamed the Institute of Coloured Youth (ICY) in April 1837 and now known as Cheyney University of Pennsylvania.

1839

• July 2 – Slaves revolt on the La Amistad, an illegal slave ship, resulting in a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court (see United States v. The Amistad) and their gaining freedom.

1840

• The Liberty Party breaks away from the American Anti-Slavery Society due to grievances with William Lloyd Garrison's leadership.

1842

• The U.S. Supreme Court rules, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), that states do not have to offer aid in the hunting or recapture of slaves, greatly weakening the fugitive slave law of 1793.

1843

• June 1 – Isabella Baumfree, a former slave, changes her name to Sojourner Truth and begins to preach for the abolition of slavery.

• August – Henry Highland Garnet delivers his famous speech Call to Rebellion.

1845

• Publication of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself

1847

• Frederick Douglass begins publication of the abolitionist newspaper the North Star.

• Joseph Jenkins Roberts of Virginia becomes the first president of Liberia.

1849

• Roberts v. Boston seeks to end racial discrimination in Boston public schools.

• Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery to Philadelphia, and begins helping other slaves to escape via the Underground Railroad.

1850

• September 18 – As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which requires any federal official to arrest anyone suspected of being a runaway slave.

1851

• Soujourner Truth gives her "Ain't I a Woman" speech at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio

1852

• March 20 – Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is published.

1853

• December – Clotel; or, The President's Daughter is the first novel published by an African-American.

1854

• President Franklin Pierce signs the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed slaves to be brought to the new territories.

• In opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, the Republican Party is formed with an anti-slavery platform.

1855

• John Mercer Langston is one of the first African Americans elected to public office when elected as a town clerk in Ohio.

1856

• May 21 – The Sacking of Lawrence in Bleeding Kansas.

• May 25 – John Brown, whom Abraham Lincoln called a "misguided fanatic", retaliates for Lawrence's sacking in the Pottawatomie massacre.

• Wilberforce University is founded by collaboration between Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal representatives.

1857

• March 6 – In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds slavery. This decision is regarded as a key cause of the American Civil War.

1859

• Harriet E. Wilson writes the autobiographical novel Our Nig.

• In Ableman v. Booth the U.S. Supreme Court rules that state courts cannot issue rulings that contradict the decisions of federal courts; this decision uphold the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

• August 22 - The last known slave ship to arrive to the U.S., the Clotilde, docks in secrecy at Mobile, Alabama.[11]

1860–1874
1861

• April 12 – The American Civil War begins (secessions began in December 1860), and lasts until April 9, 1865. Tens of thousands of enslaved African Americans of all ages escaped to Union lines for freedom. Contraband camps were set up in some areas, where blacks started learning to read and write. Others traveled with the Union Army. By the end of the war, more than 180,000 African Americans, mostly from the South, fought with the Union Army and Navy as members of the US Colored Troops and sailors.

• May 2 – The first North American military unit with African-American officers is the 1st Louisiana Native Guard of the Confederate Army (disbanded in February 1862).

• May 24 – General Benjamin Butler refuses to extradite three escaped slaves, declaring them contraband of war

• August 6 – The Confiscation Act of 1861 authorizes the confiscation of any Confederate property, including all slaves who fought or worked for the Confederate military.

• August 30 – Frémont Emancipation in Missouri

• September 11 – Lincoln orders Frémont to rescind the edict.

1862

• March 13 – Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves

• April 16 – (Emancipation Day) – District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act

• May 9 – General David Hunter declares emancipation in Georgia, Florida and South Carolina.

• May 19 – Lincoln rescinds Hunter's order.

• July 17 – Confiscation Act of 1862 frees confiscated slaves.

• September 22 – Lincoln announces the Emancipation Proclamation to go into effect January 1, 1863.

1863–1877 Reconstruction Era
1863
1863 Medical examination photo of Gordon showing his scourged back, widely distributed by Abolitionists to expose the brutality of slavery.

• January 1 – The Emancipation Proclamation goes into effect, changing the legal status, as recognized by the United States federal government, of 3 million slaves in the designated areas of the South from "slave" to "free."

• January 31 – U.S. Army commissions the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a combat unit made up of escaped slaves.

• May 22 – The U.S. Army recruits United States Colored Troops. (The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment would be featured in the 1989 film Glory.)

• June 1 – Harriet Tubman the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers liberate 750 people with the Raid at Combahee Ferry.

• July 13–16 – Ethnic Irish immigrants protests against the draft in New York City turn into riots against blacks, the New York Draft Riots.

• July 18 – The Second Battle of Fort Wagner begins when the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, an African-American military unit, led by white Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, attacked a Confederate fort at Morris Island, South Carolina. The attack on Fort Wagner by the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry failed to take the fort and Gould was killed in the battle. However, the fort was abandoned by the Confederates on September 7, 1863, after many could not stand the constant weeks of bombardment and the smell of dead Union black soldiers sickening them.

1864

• April 12 – The Battle of Fort Pillow, which results in controversy about whether a massacre of surrendered African-American troops was conducted or condoned.

• October 13 – Controversial election results in approval of Maryland Constitution of 1864; emancipation in Maryland.

1865

• January 16 – Sherman's Special Field Orders, No. 15 allocate a tract of land in coastal South Carolina and Georgia for Black-only settlement.

• January 31 – The United States Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery and submits it to the states for ratification.

• March 3 – Congress passes the bill that forms the Freedman's Bureau; mandates distribution of "not more than forty acres" of confiscated land to all loyal freedmen and refugees.

• May 29 – Andrew Johnson amnesty proclamation initiates return of land to pre-war owners.

• December 18 – The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits slavery except as punishment for crime; emancipation in Delaware and Kentucky.

• Shaw Institute is founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, as the first black college in the South.

• Atlanta College is founded.

• Southern states pass Black Codes that restrict the freedmen, who were emancipated but not yet full citizens.

1866

• April 9 – The Civil Rights Act of 1866 is passed by Congress over Johnson's presidential veto. All persons born in the United States are now citizens.

• The Ku Klux Klan is formed in Pulaski, Tennessee, made up of white Confederate veterans; it becomes a paramilitary insurgent group to enforce white supremacy.

• May 1–3 – The Memphis Massacre transpires.

• July – New Orleans Riot: white citizens riot against blacks.

• July 21 – Southern Homestead Act of 1866 opens 46 million acres of land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi; African Americans have priority access until January 1, 1877.

• September 21 – The U.S. Army regiment of Buffalo Soldiers (African Americans) is formed.

• One version of the Second Freedmen's Bureau Act is vetoed and fails; another is vetoed and passed via override in July.

1867

• February 14 – Augusta Institute, now known as Morehouse College, is founded in the basement of Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia.[36]

• March 2 – Howard University is founded in Washington, D.C.

1868

• April 1 – Hampton Institute is founded in Hampton, Virginia.

• July 9 – The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution's Section 1 requires due process and equal protection.

• Through 1877, whites attack black and white Republicans to suppress voting. Every election cycle is accompanied by violence, increasing in the 1870s.

• Elizabeth Keckly publishes Behind the Scenes (or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House).

1870

• February 3 – The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the right of male citizens of the United States to vote regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

• February 25 – Hiram Rhodes Revels becomes the first black member of the Senate (see African Americans in the United States Congress).

• Christian Methodist Episcopal Church founded.

• First two Enforcement Acts.

1871

• October 10 – Octavius Catto, a civil rights activist, is murdered during harassment of blacks on Election Day in Philadelphia.

• US Civil Rights Act of 1871 passed, also known as the Klan Act and Third Enforcement Act.

1872

• December 11 – P. B. S. Pinchback is sworn in as the first black member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

• Disputed gubernatorial election in Louisiana cause political violence for more than two years. Both Republican and Democratic governors hold inaugurations and certify local officials.

• Elijah McCoy patented his first invention, an automatic lubricator that supplied oil to moving parts while a machine was still operating.[37]

1873

• April 14 – In the Slaughter-House Cases the U.S. Supreme Court votes 5–4 for a narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court also discusses dual citizenship: State citizens and U.S. citizens.

• Easter – The Colfax Massacre; more than 100 blacks in the Red River area of Louisiana are killed when attacked by white militia after defending Republicans in local office – continuing controversy from gubernatorial election.

• The Coushatta Massacre transpires. Republican officeholders are run out of town and murdered by white militia before leaving the state – four of six were relatives of a Louisiana state senator, a northerner who had settled in the South, married into a local family and established a plantation. Five to twenty black witnesses are also killed.

1874

• Founding of paramilitary groups that act as the "military arm of the Democratic Party": the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts in Mississippi, and North and South Carolina. They terrorize blacks and Republicans, turning them out of office, killing some, disrupting rallies, and suppressing voting.

• September – In New Orleans, continuing political violence erupts related to the still-contested gubernatorial election of 1872. Thousands of the White League armed militia march into New Orleans, then the seat of government, where they outnumber the integrated city police and black state militia forces. They defeat Republican forces and demand that Gov. Kellogg leave office. The Democratic candidate McEnery is installed and White Leaguers occupy the capitol, state house and arsenal. This was called the "Battle of Liberty Place". The White League and McEnery withdraw after three days in advance of federal troops arriving to reinforce the Republican state government.

1875–1899

• March 1 – Civil Rights Act of 1875 signed.

• The Mississippi Plan to intimidate blacks and suppress black voter registration and voting.

1876

• Lewis Latimer prepared drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's application for a telephone patent.[38]

• July 8 – The Hamburg Massacre occurs when local people riot against African Americans who were trying to celebrate the Fourth of July.

• varied – White Democrats regain power in many southern state legislatures and pass the first Jim Crow laws.

1877

• With the Compromise of 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes withdraws federal troops from the South in exchange for being elected President of the United States, causing the collapse of the last three remaining Republican state governments. The compromise formally ends the Reconstruction Era.

1879

• Spring – Thousands of African Americans refuse to live under segregation in the South and migrate to Kansas. They become known as Exodusters.

1880

• In Strauder v. West Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that African Americans could not be excluded from juries.

• During the 1880s, African Americans in the South reach a peak of numbers in being elected and holding local offices, even while white Democrats are working to assert control at state level.[citation needed]

1881

• April 11 – Spelman Seminary is founded as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary.

• July 4 – Booker T. Washington opens the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama.

1882

• Lewis Latimer invented the first long-lasting filament for light bulbs and installed his lighting system in New York City, Philadelphia, and Canada. Later, he became one of the 28 members of Thomas Edison's Pioneers.[38]

• A biracial populist coalition achieves power in Virginia (briefly). The legislature founds the first public college for African Americans, Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, as well as the first mental hospital for African Americans, both near Petersburg, Virginia. The hospital was established in December 1869, at Howard's Grove Hospital, a former Confederate unit, but is moved to a new campus in 1882.

1883

• October 16 – In Civil Rights Cases, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as unconstitutional.

1884

• Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published, featuring the admirable African-American character Jim.

• Judy W. Reed, of Washington, D.C., and Sarah E. Goode, of Chicago, are the first African-American women inventors to receive patents. Signed with an "X", Reed's patent no. 305,474, granted September 23, 1884, is for a dough kneader and roller. Goode's patent for a cabinet bed, patent no. 322,177, is issued on July 14, 1885. Goode, the owner of a Chicago furniture store, invented a folding bed that could be formed into a desk when not in use.

• Ida B. Wells sues the Chesapeake, Ohio & South Western Railroad Company for its use of segregated "Jim Crow" cars.

1886

• Norris Wright Cuney becomes the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, the most powerful role held by any African American in the South during the 19th century.

1887

• October 3 – The State Normal School for Colored Students, which would become Florida A&M University, is founded.

1890

• Mississippi, with a white Democrat-dominated legislature, passes a new constitution that effectively disfranchises most blacks through voter registration and electoral requirements, e.g., poll taxes, residency tests and literacy tests. This shuts them out of the political process, including service on juries and in local offices.

• By 1900 two-thirds of the farmers in the bottomlands of the Mississippi Delta are African Americans who cleared and bought land after the Civil War.[39]

1892

• Ida B. Wells publishes her pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.

1893

• Daniel Hale Williams performed open-heart surgery in 1893 and founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, the first with an interracial staff.[40]

1895

• September 18 – Booker T. Washington delivers his Atlanta Compromise address at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia.

• W. E. B. Du Bois becomes the first African-American to be earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University.[41]

1896

• May 18 – In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds de jure racial segregation of "separate but equal" facilities. (see "Jim Crow laws" for historical discussion).

• The National Association of Colored Women is formed by the merger of smaller groups.

• As one of the earliest Black Hebrew Israelites in the United States, William Saunders Crowdy establishes the Church of God and Saints of Christ.

• George Washington Carver is invited by Booker T. Washington to head the Agricultural Department at what would become Tuskegee University. His work would revolutionize farming – he found about 300 uses for peanuts.

1898

• Louisiana enacts the first statewide grandfather clause that provides exemption for illiterate whites to voter registration literacy test requirements.

• In Williams v. Mississippi the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the voter registration and election provisions of Mississippi's constitution because they applied to all citizens. Effectively, however, they disenfranchise blacks and poor whites. The result is that other southern states copy these provisions in their new constitutions and amendments through 1908, disfranchising most African Americans and tens of thousands of poor whites until the 1960s.

• November 10 – Coup d'état begins in Wilmington, North Carolina, resulting in considerable loss of life and property in the African-American community and the installation of a white supremacist Democratic Party regime.

1899

• September 18 – The "Maple Leaf Rag" is an early ragtime composition for piano by Scott Joplin.

1900
​1900–1949[edit]1900

• Since the Civil War, 30,000 African-American teachers had been trained and put to work in the South. The majority of blacks had become literate.[42]

1901

• Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up from Slavery is published.
• Benjamin Tillman, senator from South Carolina, comments on Theodore Roosevelt's dining with Booker T. Washington: "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again."[43]

1903

• September – W. E. B. Du Bois's article The Talented Tenth published.
• W. E. B. Du Bois's seminal work The Souls of Black Folk is published.

1904

• May 15 – Sigma Pi Phi, the first African-American Greek-letter organization, is founded by African-American men as a professional organization, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• Orlando, Florida hires its first black postman.[citation needed]

1905

• July 11 – First meeting of the Niagara Movement, an interracial group to work for civil rights.[44]

1906

• The Brownsville Affair, which eventually involves President Roosevelt.[44]
• December 4 – African-American men found Alpha Phi Alpha at Cornell University, the first intercollegiate fraternity for African-American men.

1907

• National Primitive Baptist Convention of the U.S.A. formed.

1908

• December 26 – Jack Johnson wins the World Heavyweight Title.
• Alpha Kappa Alpha at Howard University; African-American college women found the first college sorority for African-American women.

1909

• February 12 – Planned first meeting of group which would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an interracial group devoted to civil rights. The meeting actually occurs on May 31, but February 12 is normally cited as the NAACP's founding date.
• May 31 – The National Negro Committee meets and is formed; it will be the precursor to the NAACP.
• August 14 – A lynch mob moves through Springfield, Illinois burning the homes and businesses of black people and black sympathisers, killing many.

1910

• May 30 – The National Negro Committee chooses "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People" as its organization name.
• September 29 – Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes formed; the next year it will merge with other groups to form the National Urban League.
• The NAACP begins publishing The Crisis.

1911

• January 5 – Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity was founded at Indiana University.
• November 17 – Omega Psi Phi fraternity was founded at Howard University.

1913

• The Moorish Science Temple of America, a religious organization, is founded by Noble Drew Ali (Timothy Drew).
• January 13 – Delta Sigma Theta sorority was founded at Howard University

1914 January 9 – Phi Beta Sigma fraternity was founded at Howard University

• Newly elected president Woodrow Wilson orders physical re-segregation of federal workplaces and employment after nearly 50 years of integrated facilities.[45][46][47]

1915

• February 8 – The Birth of a Nation is released to film theaters. The NAACP protests in cities across the country, convincing some not to show the film.
• June 21 – In Guinn v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court rules against grandfather clauses used to deny blacks the right to vote.
• September 9 – Professor Carter G. Woodson founds the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in Chicago.
• A schism from the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. forms the National Baptist Convention of America, Inc.

1916

• January – Professor Carter Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History begins publishing the Journal of Negro History, the first academic journal devoted to the study of African-American history.
• March 23 – Marcus Garvey arrives in the U.S. (see Garveyism).
• Los Angeles hires the country's first black female police officer.[citation needed]
• The Great Migration begins and lasts until 1940. Approximately one and a half million African Americans move from the Southern United States to the North and Midwest. More than five million migrate in the Second Great Migration from 1940 to 1970, which includes more destinations in California and the West.

1917

• May–June – East St. Louis Riot
• August 23 – Houston Riot
• In Buchanan v. Warley, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rules that a ban on selling property in white-majority neighborhoods to black people and vice versa violates the 14th Amendment.

1918

• Viola Pettus, an African-American nurse in Marathon, Texas, wins attention for her courageous care of victims of the Spanish Influenza, including members of the Ku Klux Klan.
• Mary Turner was a 33-year-old lynched in Lowndes County, Georgia who was Eight months pregnant. Turner and her child were murdered after she publicly denounced the extrajudicial killing of her husband by a mob. Her death is considered a stark example of racially motivated mob violence in the American south, and was referenced by the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

1919

• Summer – Red Summer of 1919 riots: Chicago, Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Indianapolis, and elsewhere.
• September 28 – Omaha Race Riot of 1919, Nebraska.
• October 1–5 – Elaine Race Riot, Phillips County, Arkansas. Numerous blacks are convicted by an all-white jury or plead guilty. In Moore v. Dempsey (1923), the U.S. Supreme Court overturns six convictions for denial of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.

1920

• February 13 – Negro National League (1920–1931) established.
• Fritz Pollard and Bobby Marshall are the first two African-American players in the National Football League (NFL). Pollard goes on to become the first African-American coach in the NFL.
• January 16 – Zeta Phi Beta sorority founded at Howard University

1921

• May 23 – Shuffle Along is the first major African-American hit musical on Broadway.
• May 31 – Tulsa Race Riot, Oklahoma
• Bessie Coleman becomes the first African American to earn a pilot's license.

1922

• November 12 – Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, was founded at Butler University

1923

• Garrett A. Morgan invented and patented the first automatic three-position traffic light.[48]
• January 1–7 – Rosewood massacre: Six African Americans and two whites die in a week of violence when a white woman in Rosewood, Florida, claims she was beaten and raped by a black man.
• February 19 – In Moore v. Dempsey, the U.S. Supreme Court holds that mob-dominated trials violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• Jean Toomer's novel Cane is published.

1924

• Knights of Columbus commissions and publishes The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America by civil rights activist and NAACP cofounder W. E. B. Du Bois as part of the organization's Racial Contribution Series.
• Spelman Seminary becomes Spelman College.

1925–1949[edit]1925

• Spring – American Negro Labor Congress is founded.
• August 8 – 35,000 Ku Klux Klan members march in Washington, D.C. (see List of protest marches on Washington, D.C.)
• Countee Cullen publishes his first collection of poems in Color.
• Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is organized.
• The Harlem Renaissance (also known as the New Negro Movement) is named after the anthology The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke .

1926

• The Harlem Globetrotters are founded.
• Historian Carter G. Woodson proposes Negro History Week.
• Corrigan v Buckley challenges deed restrictions preventing a white seller from selling to a black buyer. The U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of Buckley, stating that the 14th Amendment does not apply because Washington, DC is a city and not a state, thereby rendering the Due Process Clause inapplicable. Also, that the Due Process Clause does not apply to private agreements.

1928

• Claude McKay's Home to Harlem wins the Harmon Gold Award for Literature.

1929

• The League of United Latin American Citizens, the first organization to fight for the civil rights of Latino Americans, is founded in Corpus Christi, Texas.
• John Hope becomes president of Atlanta University. Graduate classes are offered in the liberal arts, and Atlanta University becomes the first predominantly black university to offer graduate education.
• Unknown – Hallelujah! is released, one of the first films to star an all-black cast.

1930

• August 7 – Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were African-American men lynched in Marion, Indiana, after being taken from jail and beaten by a mob. They had been arrested that night as suspects in a robbery, murder and rape case. A third African-American suspect, 16-year-old James Cameron, had also been arrested and narrowly escaped being killed by the mob. He later became a civil rights activist.[49]
• The League of Struggle for Negro Rights is founded in New York City.
• Jessie Daniel Ames forms the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. She gets 40,000 white women to sign a pledge against lynching and for change in the South.[50]

1931

• March 25 – Scottsboro Boys arrested in what would become a nationally controversial case.
• Walter Francis White becomes the executive secretary of the NAACP.

1932

• The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male begins at Tuskegee University.

1933

• Hocutt v. Wilson unsuccessfully challenged segregation in higher education in the United States.

1934

• Wallace D. Fard, leader of the Nation of Islam, mysteriously disappears. He is succeeded by Elijah Muhammad.

1935

• June 18 – In Murray v. Pearson, Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston of the NAACP successfully argue the landmark case in Maryland to open admissions to the segregated University of Maryland School of Law on the basis of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.

1936

• August – American sprinter Jesse Owens wins four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

1937

• Zora Neale Hurston writes the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Southern Negro Youth Congress founded.
• Joe Louis becomes first African-American heavyweight boxing world champion since Jack Johnson.

1938

• October – Negro National Congress meets at the Metropolitan Opera House in Philadelphia, Pa.
• Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada

1939

• Easter Sunday – Marian Anderson performs on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. at the instigation of Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes after the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused permission for Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall and the federally controlled District of Columbia Board of Education declined a request to use the auditorium of a white public high school.
• Billie Holiday first performs "Strange Fruit" in New York City. The song, a protest against lynching written by Abel Meeropol under the pen name Lewis Allan, became a signature song for Holiday.
• The Little League is formed, becoming the nation's first non-segregated youth sport.
• August 21 – Five African-American men recruited and trained by African-American attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker conduct a sit-in at the then-segregated Alexandria, Virginia, library and are arrested after being refused library cards.[51]
• September 21 – Followers of Father Divine and the International Peace Mission Movement join with workers to protest racially unfair hiring practices by conducting "a kind of customers' nickel sit down strike" in a restaurant.[52]

1940s to 1970

• Second Great Migration – In multiple acts of resistance and in response to factory labor shortages in World War II, more than 5 million African Americans leave the violence and segregation of the South for jobs, education, and the chance to vote in northern, midwestern, and western cities (mainly to the West Coast).

1940

• February 12 – In Chambers v. Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court frees three black men who were coerced into confessing to a murder.
• February 29 – Hattie McDaniel becomes the first African-American to win an Academy Award. She wins Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind.
• October 25 – Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. is promoted to be the first African-American general in the U.S. Army.
• Richard Wright authors Native Son
• NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is formed.

1941

• January 25 – A. Philip Randolph proposes a March on Washington, effectively beginning the March on Washington Movement.
• early 1941 – U.S. Army forms African-American air combat units, the Tuskegee Airmen. The Tuskegee Airmen were involved in 15,000 combat sorties, winning 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 744 Air Medals, 8 Purple Hearts, and 14 Bronze Stars.[53]
• June 25 – President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issues Executive Order 8802, the "Fair Employment Act", to require equal treatment and training of all employees by defense contractors.
• Mitchell v US – the Interstate Commerce Clause is used to successfully desegregate seating on trains.

1942

• Six non-violence activists in the Fellowship of Reconciliation (Bernice Fisher, James Russell Robinson, George Houser, James Farmer, Jr., Joe Guinn and Homer Jack) found the Committee on Racial Equality, which becomes the Congress of Racial Equality.

1943

• Doctor Charles R. Drew developed techniques for separating and storing blood. He was the head of an American Red Cross effort to collect blood for American armed forces. He was the chief surgeon of Howard University's medical school and professor of surgery. His achievements were recognized when he became the first African-American surgeon to serve as an examiner on the American Board of Surgery.[54]
• The 1943 Detroit race riot erupts in Detroit, Michigan.
• Lena Horne stars in the all African-American film Stormy Weather.

1944

• April 3 – In Smith v. Allwright, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the whites-only Democratic Party primary in Texas was unconstitutional.[55]
• April 25 – The United Negro College Fund is incorporated.
• July 17 – Port Chicago disaster, which led to the Port Chicago mutiny.
• August 1–7 – The Philadelphia transit strike of 1944, a strike by white transit workers protesting against job advancement by black workers, is broken by the U.S. military under the provisions of the Smith-Connally Act
• September 3 – Recy Taylor kidnapped and gang-raped in Abbeville by six white men, who later confessed to the crimes but were never charged. The case was investigated by Rosa Parks and provided an early organizational spark for the Montgomery bus boycott.[56]
• November 7 – Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Harlem, New York.
• Miami hires its first black police officers.

1945–1975 The Civil Rights Movement.
1945

• April 5–6 – Freeman Field Mutiny, in which black officers of the U.S. Army Air Corps attempt to desegregate an all-white officers' club in Indiana.
• August – The first issue of Ebony.[57]

1946

• June 3 – In Morgan v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidates provisions of the Virginia Code which require the separation of white and colored passengers where applied to interstate bus transport. The state law is unconstitutional insofar as it is burdening interstate commerce – an area of federal jurisdiction.[58]
• In Florida, Daytona Beach, DeLand, Sanford, Fort Myers, Tampa, and Gainesville all have black police officers. So does Little Rock, Arkansas; Louisville, Kentucky; Charlotte, North Carolina; Austin, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio in Texas; Richmond, Virginia; Chattanooga and Knoxville in Tennessee
• Renowned actor/singer Paul Robeson founds the American Crusade Against Lynching.

1947

• April 9 – The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sends 16 men on the Journey of Reconciliation.
• April 15 – Jackie Robinson plays his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first black baseball player in professional baseball in 60 years.
• John Hope Franklin authors the non-fiction book From Slavery to Freedom

1948

• United Nations, Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights bans slavery globally.
• January 12 – In Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla., the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the State of Oklahoma and the University of Oklahoma Law School could not deny admission based on race ("color").
• May 3 – In Shelley v. Kraemer and companion case Hurd v. Hodge, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the government cannot enforce racially restrictive covenants and asserts that they are in conflict with the nation's public policy.
• July 12 – Hubert Humphrey makes a controversial speech in favor of American civil rights at the Democratic National Convention.
• July 26 – President Harry S. Truman issues Executive Order 9981 ordering the end of racial discrimination in the Armed Forces. Desegregation comes after 1950.
• Atlanta hires its first black police officers.

1949

• January 20 – Civil Rights Congress protests the second inauguration of Harry S. Truman.

1950–1959[edit][59]
1950

• June 5 – In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents the U.S. Supreme Court rules that a public institution of higher learning could not provide different treatment to a student solely because of his race.
• June 5 – In Sweatt v. Painter the U.S. Supreme Court rules that a separate-but-equal Texas law school was actually unequal, partly in that it deprived black students from the collegiality of future white lawyers.
• June 5 – In Henderson v. United States the U.S. Supreme Court abolishes segregation in railroad dining cars.
• September 15 – University of Virginia, under a federal court order, admits a black student to its law school.
• The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is created in Washington, DC to promote the enactment and enforcement of effective civil rights legislation and policy.
• Orlando, Florida, hires its first black police officers.
• Dr. Ralph Bunche wins the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize.
• Chuck Cooper, Nathaniel Clifton and Earl Lloyd break the barriers into the NBA.

1951

• February 2 and 5 – Execution of the Martinsville Seven.
• February 15 – Maryland legislature ends segregation on trains and boats; meanwhile Georgia legislature votes to deny funds to schools that integrate.
• April 23 – High school students in Farmville, Virginia, go on strike: the case Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County is heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 as part of Brown v. Board of Education.
• June 23 – A Federal Court ruling upholds segregation in SC public schools.
• July 11 – White residents riot in Cicero, Illinois when a black family tries to move into an apartment in the all-white suburb of Chicago; National Guard disperses them July 1.
• July 26 – The United States Army high command announces it will desegregate the Army.
• December 17 – "We Charge Genocide" petition presented to United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress accuses United States of violating the Genocide Convention
• December 24 – The home of NAACP activists Harry and Harriette Moore in Mims, Florida, is bombed by KKK group; both die of injuries.
• December 28 – The Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) is founded in Cleveland, Mississippi by T. R. M. Howard, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, and other civil rights activists. Assisted by member Medgar Evers, the RCNL distributed more than 50,000 bumper stickers bearing the slogan, "Don't Buy Gas Where you Can't Use the Restroom." This campaign successfully pressured many Mississippi service stations to provide restrooms for blacks.

1952

• January 5 – Governor of Georgia Herman Talmadge criticizes television shows for depicting blacks and whites as equal.
• January 28 – Briggs v. Elliott: after a District Court had ordered separate but equal school facilities in South Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear the case as part of Brown v. Board of Education.
• March 7 – Another federal court upholds segregated education laws in Virginia.
• April 1 – Chancellor Collins J. Seitz finds for the black plaintiffs (Gebhart v. Belton, Gebhart v. Bulah) and orders the integration of Hockessin elementary and Claymont High School in Delaware based on assessment of "separate but equal" public school facilities required by the Delaware constitution.
• September 4 – Eleven black students attend the first day of school at Claymont High School, Delaware, becoming the first black students in the 17 segregated states to integrate a white public school. The day occurs without incident or notice by the community.
• September 5 – The Delaware State Attorney General informs Claymont Superintendent Stahl that the black students will have to go home because the case is being appealed. Stahl, the School Board and the faculty refuse and the students remain. The two Delaware cases are argued before the Warren U.S. Supreme Court by Redding, Greenberg and Marshall and are used as an example of how integration can be achieved peacefully. It was a primary influence in the Brown v. Board case. The students become active in sports, music and theater. The first two black students graduated in June 1954 just one month after the Brown v. Board case.
• Ralph Ellison authors the novel Invisible Man which wins the National Book Award.

1953

• June 8 – The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down segregation in Washington, DC restaurants.
• August 13 – Executive Order 10479 signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower establishes the anti-discrimination Committee on Government Contracts.
• September 1 – In the landmark case Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, WAC Sarah Keys, represented by civil rights lawyer Dovey Roundtree, becomes the first black to challenge "separate but equal" in bus segregation before the Interstate Commerce Commission.
• James Baldwin's semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain is published.

1954

• May 3 – In Hernandez v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Mexican Americans and all other racial groups in the United States are entitled to equal protection under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
• May 17 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules against the "separate but equal" doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans. and in Bolling v. Sharpe, thus overturning Plessy v. Ferguson.
• July 11 – The first White Citizens' Council meeting takes place, in Mississippi.
• July 30 – At a special meeting in Jackson, Mississippi called by Governor Hugh White, T.R.M. Howard of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, along with nearly one hundred other black leaders, publicly refuse to support a segregationist plan to maintain "separate but equal" in exchange for a crash program to increase spending on black schools.
• September 2 – In Montgomery, Alabama, 23 black children are prevented from attending all-white elementary schools, defying the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
• September 7 – District of Columbia ends segregated education; Baltimore, Maryland follows suit on September 8
• September 15 – Protests by white parents in White Sulphur Springs, WV force schools to postpone desegregation another year.
• September 16 – Mississippi responds by abolishing all public schools with an amendment to its State Constitution.
• September 30 – Integration of a high school in Milford, Delaware collapses when white students boycott classes.
• October 4 – Student demonstrations take place against integration of Washington, DC public schools.
• October 19 – Federal judge upholds an Oklahoma law requiring African-American candidates to be identified on voting ballots as "negro".
• October 30 – Desegregation of U.S. Armed Forces said to be complete.
• November – Charles Diggs, Jr., of Detroit is elected to Congress, the first African American elected from Michigan.
• Frankie Muse Freeman is the lead attorney for the landmark NAACP case Davis et al. v. the St. Louis Housing Authority, which ended legal racial discrimination in public housing with the city. Constance Baker Motley was also an attorney for NAACP: it was a rarity to have two women attorneys leading such a high-profile case.

1955

• January 7 – Marian Anderson (of 1939 fame) becomes the first African American to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera.
• January 15 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs Executive Order 10590, establishing the President's Committee on Government Policy to enforce a nondiscrimination policy in Federal employment.
• January 20 – Demonstrators from CORE and Morgan State University stage a successful sit-in to desegregate Read's Drug Store in Baltimore, Maryland
• April 5 – Mississippi passes a law penalizing white students who attend school with blacks with jail and fines.

Rosa Parks pictured in 1955

• May 7 – NAACP and Regional Council of Negro Leadership activist Reverend George W. Lee is killed in Belzoni, Mississippi.
• May 31 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in "Brown II" that desegregation must occur with "all deliberate speed".
• June 8 – University of Oklahoma decides to allow black students.
• June 23 – Virginia governor and Board of Education decide to continue segregated schools into 1956.
• June 29 – The NAACP wins a U.S. Supreme Court suit which orders the University of Alabama to admit Autherine Lucy.
• July 11 – Georgia Board of Education orders that any teacher supporting integration be fired.
• July 14 – A Federal Appeals Court overturns segregation on Columbia, SC buses.
• August 1 – Georgia Board of Education fires all black teachers who are members of the NAACP.
• August 13 – Regional Council of Negro Leadership registration activist Lamar Smith is murdered in Brookhaven, Mississippi.
• August 28 – Teenager Emmett Till is killed for whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi.
• November 7 – The Interstate Commerce Commission bans bus segregation in interstate travel in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, extending the logic of Brown v. Board to the area of bus travel across state lines. On the same day, the U.S. Supreme Court bans segregation on public parks and playgrounds. The governor of Georgia responds that his state would "get out of the park business" rather than allow playgrounds to be desegregated.
• December 1 – Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus, starting the Montgomery bus boycott. This occurs nine months after 15-year-old high school student Claudette Colvin became the first to refuse to give up her seat. Colvin's was the legal case which eventually ended the practice in Montgomery.
• Roy Wilkins becomes the NAACP executive secretary.

1956

• January 2 – Georgia Tech president Blake R. Van Leer stands up to Governor Marvin Griffin threats to bar Georgia Tech and Pittsburgh player Bobby Grier over segregation.
• January 9 – Virginia voters and representatives decide to fund private schools with state money to maintain segregation.
• January 16 – FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover writes a rare open letter of complaint directed to civil rights leader Dr. T. R. M. Howard after Howard charged in a speech that the "FBI can pick up pieces of a fallen airplane on the slopes of a Colorado mountain and find the man who caused the crash, but they can't find a white man when he kills a Negro in the South."[60]
• January 24 – Governors of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia agree to block integration of schools.
• February 1 – Virginia legislature passes a resolution that the U.S. Supreme Court integration decision was an "illegal encroachment".
• February 3 – Autherine Lucy is admitted to the University of Alabama. Whites riot for days, and she is suspended. Later, she is expelled for her part in further legal action against the university.
• February 24 – The policy of Massive Resistance is declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr.
• February/March – The Southern Manifesto, opposing integration of schools, is created and signed by members of the Congressional delegations of Southern states, including 19 senators and 81 members of the House of Representatives, notably the entire delegations of the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia. On March 12, it is released to the press.
• February 13 – Wilmington, Delaware school board decides to end segregation.
• February 22 – Ninety black leaders in Montgomery, Alabama are arrested for leading a bus boycott.
• February 29 – Mississippi legislature declares U.S. Supreme Court integration decision "invalid" in that state.
• March 1 – Alabama legislature votes to ask for federal funds to deport blacks to northern states.
• March 12 – U.S. Supreme Court orders the University of Florida to admit a black law school applicant "without delay".
• March 22 – Martin Luther King Jr. sentenced to fine or jail for instigating Montgomery bus boycott, suspended pending appeal.
• April 11 – Singer Nat King Cole is assaulted during a segregated performance at Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama.
• April 23 – U.S. Supreme Court strikes down segregation on buses nationwide.
• May 26 – Circuit Judge Walter B. Jones issues an injunction prohibiting the NAACP from operating in Alabama.
• May 28 – The Tallahassee, Florida bus boycott begins.
• June 5 – The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) is founded at a mass meeting in Birmingham, Alabama.
• September 2–11 – Teargas and National Guard used to quell segregationists rioting in Clinton, TN; 12 black students enter high school under Guard protection. Smaller disturbances occur in Mansfield, TX and Sturgis, KY.
• September 10 – Two black students are prevented by a mob from entering a junior college in Texarkana, Texas. Schools in Louisville, KY are successfully desegregated.
• September 12 – Four black children enter an elementary school in Clay, KY under National Guard protection; white students boycott. The school board bars the 4 again on September 17.
• October 15 – Integrated athletic or social events are banned in Louisiana.
• November 5 – Nat King Cole hosts the first show of The Nat King Cole Show. The show went off the air after only 13 months because no national sponsor could be found.
• November 13 – In Browder v. Gayle, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Alabama laws requiring segregation of buses. This ruling, together with the ICC's 1955 ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach banning "Jim Crow laws" in bus travel among the states, is a landmark in outlawing "Jim Crow" in bus travel.
• December 20 – Federal marshals enforce the ruling to desegregate bus systems in Montgomery.
• December 24 – Blacks in Tallahassee, Florida begin defying segregation on city buses.
• December 25 – The parsonage in Birmingham, Alabama occupied by Fred Shuttlesworth, movement leader, is bombed. Shuttlesworth receives only minor scrapes.
• December 26 – The ACMHR tests the Browder v. Gayle ruling by riding in the white sections of Birmingham city buses. 22 demonstrators are arrested.
• Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission formed.
• Director J. Edgar Hoover orders the FBI to begin the COINTELPRO program to investigate and disrupt "dissident" groups within the United States.

1957

• February 8 – Georgia Senate votes to declare the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution null and void in that state.
• February 14 – Southern Christian Leadership Conference is formed; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is named its chairman.
• April 18 – Florida Senate votes to consider U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation decisions "null and void".
• May 17 – The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington, DC is at the time the largest nonviolent demonstration for civil rights, and features Dr. King's "Give Us The Ballot" speech.
• September 2 – Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, calls out the National Guard to block integration of Little Rock Central High School.
• September 6 – Federal judge orders Nashville public schools to integrate immediately.
• September 15 – New York Times reports that in three years since the decision, there has been minimal progress toward integration in four southern states, and no progress at all in seven.
• September 24 – President Dwight Eisenhower federalizes the National Guard and also orders US Army troops to ensure Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas is integrated. Federal and National Guard troops escort the Little Rock Nine.
• September 27 – Civil Rights Act of 1957 signed by President Eisenhower.
• October 7 – The finance minister of Ghana is refused service at a Dover, Delaware restaurant. President Eisenhower hosts him at the White House to apologize October 10.
• October 9 – Florida legislature votes to close any school if federal troops are sent to enforce integration.
• October 31 – Officers of NAACP arrested in Little Rock for failing to comply with a new financial disclosure ordinance.
• November 26 – Texas legislature votes to close any school where federal troops might be sent.

1958

• January 18 – Willie O'Ree breaks the color barrier in the National Hockey League, in his first game playing for the Boston Bruins.
• June 29 – Bethel Baptist Church (Birmingham, Alabama) is bombed by Ku Klux Klan members, killing four girls.
• June 30 – In NAACP v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the NAACP was not required to release membership lists to continue operating in the state.
• July – NAACP Youth Council sponsored sit-ins at the lunch counter of a Dockum Drug Store in downtown Wichita, Kansas. After three weeks, the movement successfully got the store to change its policy of segregated seating, and soon afterward all Dockum stores in Kansas were desegregated.
• August 19 – Clara Luper and the NAACP Youth Council conduct the largest successful sit-in to date, on drug store lunch-counters in Oklahoma City. This starts a successful six-year campaign by Luper and the council to desegregate businesses and related institutions in Oklahoma City.
• August – Jimmy Wilson sentenced to death in Alabama for stealing $1.95; Secretary of State John Foster Dulles asks Governor Jim Folsom to commute his sentence because of international criticism.
• September 2 – Governor J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia threatens to shut down any school if it is forced to integrate.
• September 4 – Justice Department sues under Civil Rights Act to force Terrell County, Georgia to register blacks to vote.
• September 8 – A Federal judge orders Louisiana State University to desegregate; 69 African Americans enroll successfully on September 12.
• September 12 – In Cooper v. Aaron the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the states were bound by the Court's decisions. Governor Faubus responds by shutting down all four high schools in Little Rock, and Governor Almond shuts one in Front Royal, Virginia.
• September 18 – Governor Lindsay closes two more schools in Charlottesville, Virginia, and six in Norfolk on September 27.
• September 29 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that states may not use evasive measures to avoid desegregation.
• October 8 – A Federal judge in Harrisonburg, VA rules that public money may not be used for segregated private schools.
• October 20 – Thirteen blacks arrested for sitting in front of bus in Birmingham.
• November 28 – Federal court throws out Louisiana law against integrated athletic events.
• December 8 – Voter registration officials in Montgomery refuse to cooperate with US Civil Rights Commission investigation.
• Publication of Here I Stand, Paul Robeson's manifesto-autobiography.

1959

• January 9 – One Federal judge throws out segregation on Atlanta, GA buses, while another orders Montgomery registrars to comply with the Civil Rights Commission.
• January 12 – Motown Records is founded by Berry Gordy.
• January 19 – Federal Appeals court overturns Virginia's closure of the schools in Norfolk; they reopen January 28 with 17 black students.
• February 2 – A high school in Arlington, VA desegregates, allowing four black students.
• April 10 – Three schools in Alexandria, Virginia desegregate with a total of nine black students.
• April 18 – King speaks for the integration of schools at a rally of 26,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.
• April 24 – Mack Charles Parker is lynched three days before his trial.
• November 20 – Alabama passes laws to limit black voter registration.
• A Raisin in the Sun, a play by Lorraine Hansberry, debuts on Broadway. The 1961 film version will star Sidney Poitier.[57]

1960–1969[edit]1960

• February 1 – Four black students sit at the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, sparking six months of the Greensboro sit-ins.
• February 13 – The Nashville sit-ins begin, although the Nashville students, trained by activist and nonviolent teacher James Lawson, had been doing preliminary groundwork towards the action for two months. The sit-in ends successfully in May.
• February 17 – Alabama grand jury indicts Dr. King for tax evasion.
• February 19 – Virginia Union University students, called the Richmond 34 stage sit-in at Woolworth's lunch counter in Richmond, Virginia.[61]
• February 22 – The Richmond 34 stage a sit in the Richmond Room at Thalhimer's department store.
• March 3 – Vanderbilt University expels James Lawson for sit-in participation.
• March 4, 1960 – Houston's first sit-in, led by Texas Southern University students, was held at the Weingarten's lunch counter, located at 4110 Almeda in Houston, Texas. [3]
• March 7 – Felton Turner of Houston is beaten and hanged upside-down in a tree, initials KKK carved on his chest.
• March 19 – San Antonio becomes first city to integrate lunch counters.
• March 20 – Florida Governor LeRoy Collins calls lunch counter segregation "unfair and morally wrong".
• April 8 – Weak civil rights bill survives Senate filibuster.
• April 15–17 – The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is formed in Raleigh, North Carolina.
• April 19 – Z. Alexander Looby's home is bombed, with no injuries. Looby, a Nashville civil rights lawyer, was active in the cities ongoing sit-in movement.
• May – Nashville sit-ins end successfully.
• May 6 – Civil Rights Act of 1960 signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
• May 28 – William Robert Ming and Hubert Delaney obtain an acquittal of Dr. King from an all-white jury in Alabama.[62]
• June 24 – King meets Senator John F. Kennedy (JFK).
• June 28 – Bayard Rustin resigns from SCLC after condemnation by Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
• July 11 – To Kill a Mockingbird published.
• July 31 – Elijah Muhammad calls for an all-black state. Membership in the Nation of Islam estimated at 100,000.
• August – Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker replaces Ella Baker as SCLC's Executive Director.
• October 19 – Dr. King and fifty others arrested at sit-in at Atlanta's Rich's Department Store.
• October 26 – Dr. King's earlier probation revoked; he is transferred to Reidsville State Prison.
• October 28 – After intervention from Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), King is free on bond.
• November 8 – John F. Kennedy defeats Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.
• November 14 – Ruby Bridges becomes the first African-American child to attend an all-white elementary school in the South (William Frantz Elementary School) following court-ordered integration in New Orleans, Louisiana. This event was portrayed by Norman Rockwell in his 1964 painting The Problem We All Live With.
• December 5 – In Boynton v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court holds that racial segregation in bus terminals is illegal because such segregation violates the Interstate Commerce Act. This ruling, in combination with the ICC's 1955 decision in Keys v. Carolina Coach, effectively outlaws segregation on interstate buses and at the terminals servicing such buses.

1961

• January 11 – Rioting over court-ordered admission of first two African Americans (Hamilton E. Holmes and Charlayne Hunter-Gault) at the University of Georgia leads to their suspension, but they are ordered reinstated.
• January 31 – Member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and nine students were arrested in Rock Hill, South Carolina for a sit-in at a McCrory's lunch counter.
• March 6 – JFK issues Executive Order 10925, which establishes a Presidential committee that later becomes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
• May 4 – The first group of Freedom Riders, with the intent of integrating interstate buses, leaves Washington, D.C. by Greyhound bus. The group, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), leaves shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court has outlawed segregation in interstate transportation terminals.[63]
• May 14 – The Freedom Riders' bus is attacked and burned outside of Anniston, Alabama. A mob beats the Freedom Riders upon their arrival in Birmingham. The Freedom Riders are arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, and spend forty to sixty days in Parchman Penitentiary.[63]
• May 17 – Nashville students, coordinated by Diane Nash and James Bevel, take up the Freedom Ride, signaling the increased involvement of SNCC.
• May 20 – Freedom Riders are assaulted in Montgomery, Alabama, at the Greyhound Bus Station.
• May 21 – Dr. King, the Freedom Riders, and congregation of 1,500 at Reverend Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church in Montgomery are besieged by mob of segregationists; Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sends federal marshals to protect them.
• May 29 – Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, citing the 1955 landmark ICC ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company and the U.S. Supreme Court's 1960 decision in Boynton v. Virginia, petitions the ICC to enforce desegregation in interstate travel.
• June–August – U.S. Department of Justice initiates talks with civil rights groups and foundations on beginning Voter Education Project.
• July – SCLC begins citizenship classes; Andrew J. Young hired to direct the program. Bob Moses begins voter registration in McComb, Mississippi.
• September – James Forman becomes SNCC's Executive Secretary.
• September 23 – The Interstate Commerce Commission, at RFK's insistence, issues new rules ending discrimination in interstate travel, effective November 1, 1961, six years after the ICC's own ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company.
• September 25 – Voter registration activist Herbert Lee killed in McComb, Mississippi.
• November 1 – All interstate buses required to display a certificate that reads: "Seating aboard this vehicle is without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin, by order of the Interstate Commerce Commission."[64]
• November 1 – SNCC workers Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon and nine Chatmon Youth Council members test new ICC rules at Trailways bus station in Albany, Georgia.[65]
• November 17 – SNCC workers help encourage and coordinate black activism in Albany, Georgia, culminating in the founding of the Albany Movement as a formal coalition.[65]
• November 22 – Three high school students from Chatmon's Youth Council arrested after using "positive actions" by walking into white sections of the Albany bus station.[65]
• November 22 – Albany State College students Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall arrested after entering the white waiting room of the Albany Trailways station.[65]
• December 10 – Freedom Riders from Atlanta, SNCC leader Charles Jones, and Albany State student Bertha Gober are arrested at Albany Union Railway Terminal, sparking mass demonstrations, with hundreds of protesters arrested over the next five days.[66]
• December 11–15 – Five hundred protesters arrested in Albany, Georgia.
• December 15 – King arrives in Albany, Georgia in response to a call from Dr. W. G. Anderson, the leader of the Albany Movement to desegregate public facilities.[63]
• December 16 – Dr. King is arrested at an Albany, Georgia demonstration. He is charged with obstructing the sidewalk and parading without a permit.[63]
• December 18 – Albany truce, including a 60-day postponement of King's trial; King leaves town.[67]
• Whitney Young is appointed executive director of the National Urban League and begins expanding its size and mission.
• Black Like Me written by John Howard Griffin, a white southerner who deliberately tanned and dyed his skin to allow him to directly experience the life of the Negro in the Deep South, is published, displaying the brutality of "Jim Crow" segregation to a national audience.

1962

• January 18–20 – Student protests over sit-in leaders' expulsions at Baton Rouge's Southern University, the nation's largest black school, close it down.
• February – Representatives of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP form the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). A grant request to fund COFO voter registration activities is submitted to the Voter Education Project (VEP).
• February 26 – Segregated transportation facilities, both interstate and intrastate, ruled unconstitutional by U.S. Supreme Court.
• March – SNCC workers sit-in at U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's office to protest jailings in Baton Rouge.
• March 20 – FBI installs wiretaps on NAACP activist Stanley Levison's office.
• April 3 – Defense Department orders full racial integration of military reserve units, except the National Guard.
• April 9 – Corporal Roman Duckworth shot by a police officer in Taylorsville, Mississippi.
• June – Leroy Willis becomes first black graduate of the University of Virginia College of Arts and Sciences.
• June – SNCC workers establish voter registration projects in rural southwest Georgia.
• July 10 – August 28 SCLC renews protests in Albany; King in jail July 10–12 and July 27 – August 10.
• August 31 – Fannie Lou Hamer attempts to register to vote in Indianola, Mississippi.
• September 9 – Two black churches used by SNCC for voter registration meetings are burned in Sasser, Georgia.
• September 20 – James Meredith is barred from becoming the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
• September 30-October 1 – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black orders James Meredith admitted to Ole Miss.; he enrolls and a riot ensues. French photographer Paul Guihard and Oxford resident Ray Gunter are killed.
• October – Leflore County, Mississippi, supervisors cut off surplus food distribution in retaliation against voter drive.
• October 23 – FBI begins Communist Infiltration (COMINFIL) investigation of SCLC.
• November 7–8 – Edward Brooke selected Massachusetts Attorney General, Leroy Johnson elected Georgia State Senator, Augustus F. Hawkins elected first black from California in Congress.
• November 20 – Attorney General Kennedy authorizes FBI wiretap on Stanley Levison's home telephone.
• November 20 – President Kennedy upholds 1960 presidential campaign promise to eliminate housing segregation by signing Executive Order 11063 banning segregation in Federally funded housing.

1963

• January 18 – Incoming Alabama governor George Wallace calls for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" in his inaugural address.
• April 3–May 10 – The Birmingham campaign, organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights challenges city leaders and business owners in Birmingham, Alabama, with daily mass demonstrations.
• April – Mary Lucille Hamilton, Field Secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality, refuses to answer a judge in Gadsden, Alabama, until she is addressed by the honorific "Miss". It was the custom of the time to address white people by honorifics and people of color by their first names. Hamilton is jailed for contempt of court and refuses to pay bail. The case Hamilton v. Alabama is filed by the NAACP. It was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1964 that courts must address persons of color with the same courtesy extended to whites.
• April 7 – Ministers John Thomas Porter, Nelson H. Smith and A. D. King lead a group of 2,000 marchers to protest the jailing of movement leaders in Birmingham.
• April 12 – Dr. King is arrested in Birmingham for "parading without a permit".
• April 16 – Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail is completed.
• April 23 – CORE activist William L. Moore is murdered in Gadsden, Alabama.
• May 2–4 – Birmingham's juvenile court is inundated with African-American children and teenagers arrested after James Bevel launches his "D-Day" youth march. The actions spans three days to become the Birmingham Children's Crusade.[68]
• May 9–10 – After images of fire hoses and police dogs turned on protesters are televised, the Children's Crusade lays the groundwork for the terms of a negotiated truce on Thursday, May 9 puts an end to mass demonstrations in return for rolling back oppressive segregation laws and practices. Dr. King and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth announce the settlement terms on Friday, May 10, only after King holds out to orchestrate the release of thousands of jailed demonstrators with bail money from Harry Belafonte and Robert Kennedy.[69]
• May 11–12 – Double bombing in Birmingham, probably conducted by the KKK in cooperation with local police, precipitates rioting, police retaliation, intervention of state troopers, and finally mobilization of federal troops.
• May 13 – In United States of America and Interstate Commerce Commission v. the City of Jackson, Mississippi et al., the United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit rules the city's attempt to circumvent laws desegregating interstate transportation facilities by posting sidewalk signs outside Greyhound, Trailways and Illinois Central terminals reading "Waiting Room for White Only — By Order Police Department" and "Waiting Room for Colored Only – By Order Police Department" to be unlawful.[70]
• May 24 – A group of Black leaders (assembled by James Baldwin) meets with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to discuss race relations.
• May 29 – Violence escalates at NAACP picket of Philadelphia construction site.[71]
• May 30 – Police attack Florida A&M anti-segregation demonstrators with tear gas; arrest 257.[72]
• June 9 – Fannie Lou Hamer is among several SNCC workers badly beaten by police in the Winona, Mississippi, jail after their bus stops there.
• June 11 – "The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door": Alabama Governor George Wallace stands in front of a schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama in an attempt to stop desegregation by the enrollment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. Wallace only stands aside after being confronted by federal marshals, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, and the Alabama National Guard. Later in life he apologizes for his opposition to racial integration then.
• June 11 – President Kennedy makes his historic civil rights address, promising a bill to Congress the next week. About civil rights for "Negroes", in his speech he asks for "the kind of equality of treatment which we would want for ourselves."
• June 12 – NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers is assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi. (His murderer is convicted in 1994.)[73]
• Summer – 80,000 blacks quickly register to vote in Mississippi by a test project to show their desire to participate.
• June 19 – President Kennedy sends Congress (H. Doc. 124, 88th Cong., 1st session) his proposed Civil Rights Act.[74] White leaders in business and philanthropy gather at the Carlyle Hotel to raise initial funds for the Council on United Civil Rights Leadership
• August 28 – Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Northwest Baltimore, County, Maryland is desegregated.
• August 28 – March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is held. King gives his I Have a Dream speech.[75]
• September 10 – Birmingham, Alabama City Schools are integrated by National Guardsmen under orders from President Kennedy.
• September 15 – 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham kills four young girls. That same day, in response to the killings, James Bevel and Diane Nash begin the Alabama Project, which will later grow into the Selma Voting Rights Movement.
• September 19 - Iota Phi Theta fraternity was founded at Morgan State College (now Morgan State University)
• November 10 – Malcolm X delivers "Message to the Grass Roots" speech, calling for unity against the white power structure and criticizing the March on Washington.
• November 22 – President Kennedy is assassinated. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, decides that accomplishing Kennedy's legislative agenda is his best strategy, which he pursues.[76]

1964

• All year – The Alabama Voting Rights Project continues organizing as Bevel, Nash, and James Orange work without the support of SCLC.
• January 23 – Twenty-fourth Amendment abolishes the poll tax for Federal elections.
• Summer – Mississippi Freedom Summer – voter registration in the state. Create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to elect an alternative slate of delegates for the national convention, as blacks are still officially disfranchised.
• April 13 – Sidney Poitier wins the Academy Award for Best Actor for role in Lilies of the Field.
• June 21 – Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, three civil rights workers disappear, later to be found murdered.
• June 28 – Organization of Afro-American Unity is founded by Malcolm X, lasts until his death.
• July 2 – Civil Rights Act of 1964[77] signed, banning discrimination based on "race, color, religion, sex or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations.[76]
• August – Congress passes the Economic Opportunity Act which, among other things, provides federal funds for legal representation of Native Americans in both civil and criminal suits. This allows the ACLU and the American Bar Association to represent Native Americans in cases that later win them additional civil rights.
• August – The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates challenge the seating of all-white Mississippi representatives at the Democratic national convention.
• December 10 – Martin Luther King Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest person so honored.[78]
• December 14 – In Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[77]

The Edmund Pettus Bridge on "Bloody Sunday" in 1965.1965

• February 18 – A peaceful protest march in Marion, Alabama leads to Jimmie Lee Jackson being shot by Alabama state trooper James Bonard Fowler. Jackson dies on February 26, and Fowler is indicted for his murder in 2007.
• February 21 – Malcolm X is assassinated in Manhattan, New York, probably by three members of the Nation of Islam.
• March 7 – Bloody Sunday: Civil rights workers in Selma, Alabama, begin the Selma to Montgomery march but are forcibly stopped by a massive Alabama State trooper and police blockade as they cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Many marchers are injured. This march, initiated and organized by James Bevel, becomes the visual symbol of the Selma Voting Rights Movement.
• March 15 – President Lyndon Johnson uses the phrase "We Shall Overcome" in a speech before Congress on the voting rights bill.[79]
• March 25 – After the completion of the Selma to Montgomery March a white volunteer Viola Liuzzo is shot and killed by Ku Klux Klan members in Alabama, one of whom was an FBI informant.
• June 2 – Black deputy sheriff Oneal Moore is murdered in Varnado, Louisiana.
• July 2 – Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opens.
• August 6 – Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed by President Johnson. It eliminated literacy tests, poll tax, and other subjective voter tests that were widely responsible for the disfranchisement of African Americans in the Southern States and provided Federal oversight of voter registration in states and individual voting districts where such discriminatory tests were used.[79]
• August 11–15 – Following the accusations of mistreatment and police brutality by the Los Angeles Police Department towards the city's African-American community, Watts riots erupt in South Central Los Angeles which lasted over five days. Over 34 were killed, 1,032 injured, 3,438 arrested, and cost over $40 million in property damage in the Watts riots.
• September – Raylawni Branch and Gwendolyn Elaine Armstrong become the first African-American students to attend the University of Southern Mississippi.
• September 15 – Bill Cosby co-stars in I Spy, becoming the first black person to appear in a starring role on American television.
• September 24 – President Johnson signs Executive Order 11246 requiring Equal Employment Opportunity by federal contractors.

1966

• January 10 – NAACP local chapter president Vernon Dahmer is injured by a bomb in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He dies the next day.
• June 5 – James Meredith begins a solitary March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi. Shortly after starting, he is shot with birdshot and injured. Civil rights leaders and organizations rally and continue the march leading to, on June 16, Stokely Carmichael first using the slogan Black power in a speech.
• Summer – The Chicago Open Housing Movement, led by King, Bevel,[80][81] and Al Raby, includes a large rally, marches, and demands to Mayor Richard J. Daley and the City of Chicago which are discussed in a movement-ending Summit Conference.
• September – Nichelle Nichols is cast as a female black officer on television's Star Trek. She briefly considers leaving the role, but is encouraged by Dr. King to continue as an example for their community.
• October – Black Panther Party founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California.
• November – Edward Brooke is elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. He is the first black senator since 1881.

1967

• January 9 – Julian Bond is seated in the Georgia House of Representatives by order of the U.S. Supreme Court after his election.
• April 4 – King delivers his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, calling for defeat of "the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism".
• June 12 – In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that prohibiting interracial marriage is unconstitutional.
• June 13 – Thurgood Marshall is the first African American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
• July 23–27 – The Detroit riot erupts in Detroit, Michigan, for five days following a raid by the Detroit Police Department on an unlicensed club which celebrated the returning Vietnam Veteran hosted by mostly African Americans. More than 43 (33 were black and ten white) were killed, 467 injured, 7,231 arrested, and 2,509 stores looted or burned during the riot. It was one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in United States history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit's 1943 race riot.
• August 2 – The film In the Heat of the Night is released, starring Sidney Poitier.
• November 17 – Philadelphia Student School Board Demonstration, 26 demands peacefully issued by students, but event became a police riot.
• December 11 – The film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is released, also with Sidney Poitier.
• In the trial of accused killers in the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, the jury convicts 7 of 18 accused men. Conspirator Edgar Ray Killen is later convicted in 2005.
• The film The Great White Hope starring James Earl Jones is released; it is based on the experience of heavyweight Jack Johnson.
• The book Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools is published.

1968

• February 1 – Two Memphis sanitation workers are killed in the line of duty, exacerbating labor tensions.
• February 8 – The Orangeburg massacre occurs during university protest in South Carolina.
• February 12 – First day of the (wildcat) Memphis sanitation strike
• March – While filming a prime time television special, Petula Clark touches Harry Belafonte's arm during a duet. Chrysler Corporation, the show's sponsor, insists the moment be deleted, but Clark stands firm, destroys all other takes of the song, and delivers the completed program to NBC with the touch intact. The show is broadcast on April 8, 1968.[82]
• April 3 – King returns to Memphis; delivers "Mountaintop" speech.
• April 4 – Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee.
• April 4–8 and one in May 1968 – In response to the killing of Dr. King, over 150 cities experience rioting.
• April 11 – Civil Rights Act of 1968 is signed. The Fair Housing Act is Title VIII of this Civil Rights Act – it bans discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. The law is passed following a series of contentious open housing campaigns throughout the urban North. The most significant of these campaigns were the Chicago Open Housing Movement of 1966 and organized events in Milwaukee during 1967–68. In both cities, angry white mobs attacked nonviolent protesters.[83][84]
• May 12 – Poor People's Campaign marches on Washington, DC.
• June 6 – Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a Civil Rights advocate, is assassinated after winning the California presidential primary. His appeal to minorities helped him secure the victory.
• September 17 – Diahann Carroll stars in the title role in Julia, as the first African-American actress to star in her own television series where she did not play a domestic worker.
• October 3 – The play The Great White Hope opens; it runs for 546 performances and later becomes a film.
• October – Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists to symbolize black power and unity after winning the gold and bronze medals, respectively, at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games.
• November 22 – First interracial kiss on American television, between Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner on Star Trek.
• In Powe v. Miles, a federal court holds that the portions of private colleges that are funded by public money are subject to the Civil Rights Act.
• Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African-American woman elected to Congress.

1969

• January 8–18 – Student protesters at Brandeis University take over Ford and Sydeman Halls, demanding creation of an Afro-American Department. This is approved by the University on April 24.
• February 13 – National Guard with teargas and riot sticks crush a pro-black student demonstration at University of Wisconsin.
• February 16 – After 3 days of clashes between police and Duke University students, the school agrees to establish a Black Studies program.
• February 23 – UNC Food Worker Strike begins when workers abandon their positions in Lenoir Hall protesting racial injustice
• April 3–4 – National Guard called into Chicago, and Memphis placed on curfew on anniversary of MLK's assassination.
• April 19 – Armed African-American students protesting discrimination take over Willard Straight Hall, the student union building at Cornell University. They end the seizure the following day after the university accedes to their demands, including an Afro-American studies program.
• April 25–28 – Activist students takeover Merrill House at Colgate University demanding Afro-American studies programs.
• May 8 – City College of New York closed following a two-week-long campus takeover demanding Afro-American and Puerto-Rican studies; riots among students break out when the school tries to reopen.
• June – The second of two US federal appeals court decisions confirms members of the public hold legal standing to participate in broadcast station license hearings, and under the Fairness Doctrine finds the record of segregationist TV station WLBT beyond repair. The FCC is ordered to open proceedings for a new licensee.[85]
• September 1–2 – Race rioting in Hartford, CT and Camden, NJ.
• October 29 – The U.S. Supreme Court in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education orders immediate desegregation of public schools, signaling the end of the "all deliberate speed" doctrine established in Brown II.
• December – Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, is shot and killed while asleep in bed during a police raid on his home.
• United Citizens Party is formed in South Carolina when Democratic Party refuses to nominate African-American candidates.
• W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research founded at Harvard University.
• The Revised Philadelphia Plan is instituted by the Department of Labor.
• The Congressional Black Caucus is formed.

1970–2000[edit]1970

• January 19 – G. Harrold Carswell's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court is rejected following protests from the NAACP and feminists.
• April 23 – Black Panther Marshall "Eddie" Conway arrested in Baltimore, MD.
• May 27 – The film Watermelon Man is released, directed by Melvin Van Peebles and starring Godfrey Cambridge. The film is a comedy about a bigoted white man who wakes up one morning to discover that his skin pigment has changed to black.
• August 7 – Marin County courthouse incident.
• August 14 – Hoover adds Angela Davis to FBI Most Wanted list.
• October 13 – Angela Davis captured in New York City.
• First blaxploitation films released.

1971

• April 20 – The U.S. Supreme Court, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upholds desegregation busing of students to achieve integration.
• April 27 – FBI officially ends COINTELPRO
• June – Control of segregationist TV station WLBT given to a bi-racial foundation.
• June 4 – Angela Davis acquitted of all charges.
• August 21 – George Jackson shot to death in San Quentin Prison.
• Ernest J. Gaines's Reconstruction-era novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is published.

1972

• January 25 – Shirley Chisholm becomes the first major-party African-American candidate for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
• November 16 – In Baton Rouge, two Southern University students are killed by white sheriff deputies during a school protest over lack of funding from the state. The university's Smith-Brown Memorial Union is named as a memorial to them.
• November 16 – The infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment ends. Begun in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service's 40-year experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis has been described as an experiment that "used human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone."

1973

• May 8 – Nelson Rockefeller signs the Rockefeller Drug Laws for New York state with draconian indeterminate sentences for drug possession, as well as sale.
• July 31 – FBI ends Ghetto Informant Program
• Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist group, is established in Boston, out of New York's National Black Feminist Organization.

1974

• July 25 – In Milliken v. Bradley, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision holds that outlying districts could only be forced into a desegregation busing plan if there was a pattern of violation on their part. This decision reinforces the trend of white flight.
• Salsa Soul Sisters, Third World Wimmin Inc Collective, the first "out" organization for lesbians, womanists and women of color formed in New York City.

1975

• April 30 – In the pilot episode of Starsky and Hutch, Richard Ward plays an African-American supervisor of white American employees for the first time on TV.

1976

• February – Black History Month is founded by Professor Carter Woodson's Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History.
• The novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley is published.

1977

• Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist group, publishes the Combahee River Collective Statement.
• President Jimmy Carter appoints Andrew Young to serve as Ambassador to the United Nations, the first African American to serve in the position.

1978

• June 28 – Regents of the University of California v. Bakke bars racial quota systems in college admissions but affirms the constitutionality of affirmative action programs giving equal access to minorities.

1979

• United Steelworkers of America v. Weber is a case regarding affirmative action in which the U.S. Supreme Court holds that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not bar employers from favoring women and minorities.
• November 2 – Assata Shakur escapes from prison.

1981

• December 9 – Mumia Abu-Jamal arrested.

1982

• Charles Fuller writes A Soldier's Play, which is later made into the film A Soldier's Story.
• November 30 – Michael Jackson releases Thriller, which becomes the best-selling album of all time.

1983

• May 24 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that Bob Jones University did not qualify as either a tax-exempt or a charitable organization due to its racially discriminatory practices.[86]
• August 30 – Guion Bluford becomes the first African-American to go into space.
• November 2 – President Ronald Reagan signs a bill creating a federal holiday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr, fifteen years after his death.[87]
• Alice Walker receives the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple.

1984

• September 13 – The film A Soldier's Story is released, dealing with racism in the U.S. military.
• The Cosby Show begins, and is regarded as one of the defining television shows of the decade.[57]
• First contract for complete privatization of a prison is awarded to Corrections Corporation of America, beginning a new era of racially disproportionate mass incarceration.

1985

• May 13 – Bombing of MOVE house in Philadelphia

1986

• January 20 – Established by legislation in 1983, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is first celebrated as a national holiday.
• October 27 – Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 establishes 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine

1987

• The Public Broadcasting Service's six-part documentary Eyes on the Prize is first shown, covering the years 1954–1965. In 1990 it is added to by the eight-part Eyes on the Prize II covering the years 1965–1985.
• Dr. Benjamin Carson became the first person in history to separate conjoined twins that were joined at the head.[88]

1988

• Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988.
• December 9 – The film Mississippi Burning is released, regarding the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.

1989

• February 10 – Ron Brown is elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, becoming the first African American to lead a major United States political party.
• October 1 – Colin Powell becomes Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• December 15 – The film Glory is released: it features African-American Civil War soldiers.

1990

• January 13 – Douglas Wilder becomes the first elected African-American governor as he takes office in Richmond, Virginia.

1991

• March 3 – Four white police officers are videotaped beating African-American Rodney King in Los Angeles.
• October 15 – Senate confirms the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.
• November 21 – Civil Rights Act of 1991 enacted.
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr. becomes Harvard University's Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

1992

• April 29 – The 1992 Los Angeles riots erupt after the officers accused of beating Rodney King are acquitted.
• September 12 – Mae Carol Jemison becomes the first African-American woman to travel in space when she goes into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
• November 3 – Carol Moseley Braun becomes the first African-American woman to be elected to the United States Senate.
• November 18 – Director Spike Lee's film Malcolm X is released. [4]

1994

• March 29 – Cornel West's text Race Matters is published.

1995

• June 30 – In Miller v. Johnson the U.S. Supreme Court rules that gerrymandering based on race is unconstitutional.
• October 16 – Million Man March in Washington, D.C., co-initiated by Louis Farrakhan and James Bevel.

1997

• 16 May – President Bill Clinton apologizes to victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
• July 9 – Director Spike Lee releases his documentary 4 Little Girls, about the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
• October 25 – Million Woman March in Philadelphia.

1998

• June 7 – James Byrd, Jr. is brutally murdered by white supremacists in Jasper, Texas. The scene is reminiscent of earlier lynchings. In response, Byrd's family create the James Byrd Foundation for Racial Healing.
• October 23 – The film American History X is released, powerfully highlighting the problems of urban racism.

1999

• Franklin Raines becomes the first black CEO of a fortune 500 company.
• February 4 – Amadou Diallo shooting by New York Police (precursor to Daniels, et al. v. the City of New York)

2000

• May 3 – Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist South Carolina private institution, ends its ban on interracial dating.[89]

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