Michaelle Jean, the Governor General of Canada, was born in Port au Prince, Haiti in 1957. At an early age Jean and her family fled the Papa Doc Duvalier dictatorship and settled in Montreal, Canada. Jean later attended the University of Montreal where she received … Read MoreMichaelle Jean (1957- )
Since 1965, the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC) has operated as the key antipoverty agency in South Central Los Angeles. Union members and community activists established the WLCAC largely because of the failure of the city and county of Los Angeles to establish a … Read MoreWatts Labor Community Action Committee (1965- )
Born into poverty and racial segregation in Meridian, Mississippi in 1912, Ted Watkins became a civil rights and union activist and led an anti-poverty agency in Los Angeles, the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC). Watkins left Mississippi as a young man to avoid a … Read MoreTed Watkins (1912-1993)
Caroline Snowden (she later changed her first name to Carolynne), known as “California’s Josephine Baker,” was born on January 16th, 1900, in Oakland, California. From an early age, Snowden knew that she wanted to be a performer and, despite the lack of opportunities for African … Read MoreCarolynne Snowden (1900-1985)
A successful business owner and real estate investor, Charles Owens became one of the most prominent African Americans in Los Angeles by the end of the nineteenth century. Born into slavery in Texas, Charles’s father, Robert Owens, purchased his family’s freedom and migrated to Los … Read MoreCharles Owens (?-1882)
Johanna July, a black Seminole, was born around 1857 in Nacimiento de Los Negros, the settlement established in northern Mexico following the emigration of Indian and black Seminoles from the Indian Territory in 1849. By 1870, the U.S. Army, desperate for translators and scouts familiar … Read MoreJohanna July (ca. 1857-ca. 1946)
Thomas Fleming was a founding editor and columnist of one of the leading African American newspapers in California, the San Francisco-based Sun-Reporter. Born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1907, Fleming migrated to Chico, California in 1918 to live with his mother upon her divorce from Thomas’s … Read MoreThomas Courtney Fleming (1907-2006)
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”
The black presence in Alaska has been severely under recorded. This is particularly the case for the role of African American women. One of the most remarkable black leaders was Blanche Louise Preston McSmith, a native of Marshall, Texas, who, like the majority of African … Read MoreBlanche McSmith (1920-2006)
The self-trained historian and journalist Drusilla Dunjee Houston was born in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia in 1876. Her parents were Rev. John William and Lydia Taylor Dunjee. Drusilla’s younger brother Roscoe was a journalist and Civil Rights activist in Oklahoma City. In 1915 he founded … Read MoreDrusilla Dunjee Houston (1876-1941)
