Samuel L. Robinson was born in Kansas in 1896. He arrived in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in his teens, where he attended the city’s integrated high school. He joined the school’s football team and became a close friend of the team captain and the future … Read MoreSamuel L. Robinson (1896-1964?)
Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1884, Saint Elmo Brady became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in the field of chemistry when he completed his graduate studies at the University of Illinois in 1916. The eldest child of Thomas and Celesta Brady, Saint … Read MoreSaint Elmo Brady (1884-1966)
On July 31, 1966, Stokely Carmichael, the newly appointed Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), describes black power to a mostly African American audience at Cobo Auditorium in Detroit. Part of the address appears below. Now we’ve got to talk about this thing … Read More(1966) Stokely Carmichael, “Definitions of Black Power”
The following speech, a sermon Dr. Martin Luther King gave at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968, was the last public appearance before his assassination the next day. King, in Memphis to support a strike by sanitation workers, gives a poignant vision … Read More(1968) Martin Luther King, Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
Paul R. Williams was one of the most well-known 20th Century African American architects. Early in his career, Williams designed mostly houses, but in the 1950s and 1960s he designed some of the most distinctive public buildings in Los Angeles. Williams’s best-known building is probably … Read MorePaul R. Williams (1894-1980)
Born on the campus of Howard University on May 1, 1901, Sterling Allen Brown was the last of six children and the only boy born to the Rev. Sterling Nelson, a former slave and prominent professor in the Howard Divinity School, and Adelaide (Allen) Brown. … Read MoreSterling A. Brown (1901-1989)
The first African American to serve on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Terry Francois was a leading politician in that city for several decades in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Louisiana in 1921, Francois served in the Marines during World … Read MoreTerry Francois (1921-1989)
Robert James Harlan was an entrepreneur, businessman, and army officer who devoted the second half of his life to political and civic service. Among his many accomplishments, in an 1879 speech before Congress titled “Migration is the Only Remedy for Our Wrongs,” Harlan argued for … Read MoreRobert James Harlan (1816-1897)
Z. Alexander Looby was among the small cadre of African American lawyers who began practicing in the southern United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Often considered the “second generation of black attorneys,” these lawyers followed the first cadre of African Americans who began practicing … Read MoreZ. Alexander Looby (1899-1972)
George Rawles was born in South Carolina to a young slave mother owned by Benjamin Rawles II. At the age of 17 and now living in Perry County, Mississippi, he was given to his master’s son, Benjamin Rawles III to be his body servant during … Read MoreGeorge Washington Rawles (1845-1922)
