Willie Howard Mays Jr. was born May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama to Ann and William Howard Mays. Both of his parents had been athletes. Ann Mays was a high school track star while William Howard Mays had played semi-professional baseball in Birmingham’s Industrial League … Read MoreWillie Mays (1931- )
Legendary baseball player Henry Louis Aaron was born February 5, 1934, in Mobile, Alabama, the third of eight children to Herbert Aaron, a shipyard worker at Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company, and his wife, Estella. Aaron decided he wanted to be a major league baseball … Read MoreHenry Louis “Hank” Aaron (1934-2021)
Physician, educator, and social activist Dorothy Celeste Boulding Ferebee led efforts to improve the health care of African Americans. As a member of several civic organizations, she fought to lower the mortality rate among African Americans in southern rural communities. She also used these organizations … Read MoreDorothy Celeste Boulding Ferebee (1898-1980)
An Act in Relation to Service Sec. 1. Be it enacted by the Governor and Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah. That any person or persons coming to this Territory and bringing with them servants justly bound to them, arising from special contract or … Read More(1852) The Utah Territory Slave Code
Elizabeth Thorn Scott Flood, born a free woman in 1828, is known as the mother of desegregated education for children of color in California. Flood led the battle to open the public schools of California to her own children and paved the way for integrated … Read MoreElizabeth Thorn Scott Flood (1828-1867)
Lucy Hicks Anderson, American socialite and chef, lived the first 59 years of her life as a woman until 1945, when it was discovered that she was biologically male. Today she would be described as a transgender person, but that term did not exist during … Read MoreLucy Hicks [Tobias Lawson] Anderson (1886-1954)
In the 1980s, several racially motivated attacks dominated the headlines of New York City newspapers. On September 15, 1983, artist and model Michael Stewart died on a lower Manhattan subway platform from a chokehold and beating he received from several police officers. A year later, … Read MoreHoward Beach Incident (1986)
Bayard Rustin, a co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942 had become by the 1960s an experienced civil rights and peace activist. During much of that decade he was a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King. In this address originally printed in … Read More(1965) Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement”
In his years as a Howard University professor in the 1930s, Ralph J. Bunche subscribed to Marxist ideas. However by 1949 Bunche was Acting United Nations Mediator for Palestine and had become much more conservative. His then contemporary views were reflected in a commencement address … Read More(1949) Ralph J. Bunche, “The Barriers of Race Can be Surmounted”
Shortly after her son, James Chaney was murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 along with Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, Fannie Lee Chaney gave an address in which she vowed to continue the struggle for racial justice in her home state. She also … Read More(1964) Fannie Lee Chaney, “Meridian Awakened”
