Blanche Kelso Bruce was born a slave in 1841 in Prince Edward County, Virginia but was raised in Missouri. Shortly after the beginning of the Civil War, Bruce fled to Kansas, becoming a free man before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. After the Civil War he returned … Read MoreBlanche Kelso Bruce (1841-1898)
Future mayor of Seattle, Norman B. Rice was born in Denver, Colorado. He migrated to Seattle in 1970 to attend college. In 1972 he earned a bachelor’s degree in communications and two years later a master’s degree in public administration both from the University of … Read MoreNorm Rice (1943- )
Championship cross country runner Edward Gardner was born in Birmingham, Alabama in December 1898. Shortly after his birth, his family moved west and eventually settled in Seattle. Gardner returned to Alabama in 1914, to attend Tuskegee Institute, where he learned a trade as a steam … Read MoreEdward Gardner (1898-1966)
Long before he became a minister, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket, Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), and founder of the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Louis Jackson impressed his family and close friends as a person destined for greatness. Born Jesse … Read MoreJesse Louis Jackson Sr. (1941- )
Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, attorney Oliver White Hill spent more than 60 years in a practice devoted to civil rights causes. He was in the forefront of the legal effort to desegregate public schools, participating in the … Read MoreOliver W. Hill (1907-2007)
Kenneth Howard Norton was born on August 9, 1943 in Jacksonville, Illinois. An all around athlete, Ken excelled in varsity track and football in high school, and earned a football scholarship to Northeast Missouri State University. He left school during his sophomore year after getting … Read MoreKen Norton (1943-2013)
Andre Watts is the subject of one of the more memorable stories in American music. In 1963, the 16 year old high school student won a piano competition to play in the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concert at Lincoln Center, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. … Read MoreAndre Watts (1946- )
Jazz great Dizzy Gillespie had a long and distinguished musical career as a trumpeter, composer, and bandleader. Unlike many jazz musicians whose lives were cut tragically short, Gillespie’s career spanned the 1930s to the 1980s, from the big band swing era of the 1930s, through … Read MoreDizzy Gillespie (John Birks Gillespie) (1917-1993)
Harold Eugene Ford, Jr. was born in Memphis, Tennessee on May 11, 1970. He is a past chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and is a former member of the United States House of Representatives from Tennessee. During his tenure in Congress Ford represented … Read MoreHarold Ford, Jr. (1970- )
William Henry Brisby was born free in New Kent County, Virginia in 1831 and lived on 32 acres of land that he inherited from his father. He later bought additional land and eventually had a 179 acre farm. Brisby worked mostly as a blacksmith and … Read MoreWilliam H. Brisby (1831-1916)
