Born on the 17th of February 1944 in Georgetown, Guyana, Bernie Grant was elected to the British House of Commons in 1987 to serve as one of the country’s first black Members of Parliament (MPs). With a head teacher for a father and a teacher … Read MoreBernie Grant (1944-2000)
Tacoma, Washington labor leader Ernest Charles Tanner (Ernie) was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on June 5, 1889. His father was a trapeze performer, and his mother a nurse. Moving to Tacoma with his family in 1900, Ernie Tanner attended Stadium High School where he emerged … Read MoreErnest C. Tanner (1889-1956)
Milton Price Webster is best known as one of the founders and long-time Vice President of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (BSCP) Union. He helped organize the BSCP’s local in Chicago, one of the largest in the nation with over 15,000 … Read MoreMilton P. Webster (1887-1965)
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)
Moranda Smith was a union organizer and rank-and-file leader of tobacco workers in North Carolina, who throughout the 1940s initiated a challenge to the racial discrimination, disfranchisement, and economic exploitation of workers in the South. The first African-American woman to sit on an international union’s … Read MoreMoranda Smith (1915-1950)
Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes was the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her dissertation, Determination of Sets of Independent Conditions Characterizing Certain Special Cases of Symmetric Correspondence was advised by Aubrey Landry, a professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Haynes … Read MoreMartha Euphemia Lofton Haynes (1890-1980)
Fredi Washington was an actress and founding member of the Negro Actors Guild of America as well as a journalist for People’s Voice. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Washington moved as a child to New York and began her professional career as a chorus dancer in … Read MoreFredi Washington (1903-1994)
Although Lucy Parsons was one of the first and most important African American activists on the left, there is scanty historical documentation about her origins. It is believed that Lucy Parsons was born on a plantation in Hill County, Texas around March of 1853. Significantly … Read MoreLucy Parsons (1853-1942)
Thyra J. Edwards, born in 1897, the granddaughter of runaway slaves, grew up in Houston, Texas and started her career there as a school teacher. Eventually she moved to Gary, Indiana and later Chicago, Illinois where she was employed as a social worker. Edwards would eventually become … Read MoreThyra J. Edwards (1897-1953)
Lester Blackwell Granger was a social worker and civil rights and labor rights activist best known for leading the National Urban League (NUL) from 1941 to 1961. Granger was born on September 16, 1896, in Newport News, Virginia, to William “Ran” Randolph and Mary Louise … Read MoreLester Blackwell Granger (1896-1976)
