THE SEATTLE OPEN HOUSING DEBATE, 1963 The linked audio tapes provided exclusively to TheBlackPast.org by the Seattle Municipal Archives chronicle the story of Open Housing in Seattle. The tapes linked below are of the Open Housing Hearing conducted by the Seattle City Council on October … Read MoreThe Seattle Open Housing Debate
Philadelphia Dentist John S. Rock would eventually become a medical doctor and attorney who in 1865 would become the first African American lawyer to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. In 1850, however, he was also an abolitionist and civil rights activist. … Read More(1850) John S. Rock, “Address to the Citizens of New Jersey”
Born Perle Yvonne Watson on October 5, 1932 in Los Angeles, California, Yvonne Burke became the first black woman elected to the California legislature (1966), the first black woman elected to Congress from California (1972), and the first black woman to serve as Chair of … Read MoreYvonne Braithwaite Burke (1932- )
Alyce Faye Wattleton, born in St. Louis, Missouri on July 8, 1943, became both the youngest person and the first African American president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a post she held from 1978 to 1992. As only the second woman president of … Read MoreAlyce Faye Wattleton (1943- )
Although he has served as a public school teacher, attorney, and Michigan State Supreme Court Justice, Dennis Archer is best know as the Mayor of Detroit and the first African American to become president of the American Bar Association. Born on January 1, 1942 in … Read MoreDennis Archer (1942- )
David N. Dinkins is best known as the first and, so far, only black mayor of New York City. In November 1989, he defeated his challenger, former federal prosecutor Rudolph (Rudy) Giuliani, to become the first African American mayor of New York City. Giuliani. in … Read MoreDavid N. Dinkins (1927-2020)
Lee Patrick Brown, known as “The Father of Community Policing,” became the first African American Mayor of Houston, Texas in 1997. Brown was born to sharecropper parents Andrew and Zelma Brown in the town of Wewoka, Oklahoma in 1937. He received a B.A. in criminology … Read MoreLee P. Brown (1937- )
Reverend Emanuel Cleaver II, born in Waxahachie, Texas in 1944, is best known as the first African American mayor of Kansas City, Missouri. Cleaver, who grew up in a public housing project in Wichita Falls, Texas, graduated from Prairie View A & M University in … Read MoreEmanuel Cleaver (1944- )
Best known as the first African American Mayor of Philadelphia, Woodrow Wilson Goode was born in 1938 into a family of tenant farmers near the town of Seaboard, North Carolina. Goode moved to Philadelphia with his family in 1954. In 1961, he received a B.A. … Read MoreW. Wilson Goode (1938- )
Kenneth Allen Gibson, the first African American mayor of Newark, New Jersey, was born in 1931 in the town of Enterprise, Alabama. He graduated from high school in Enterprise in 1950 and joined the U.S. Army as a civil engineer. He remained in the Army … Read MoreKenneth A. Gibson (1931- )
