The painter and sculptor James Washington, Jr. was a leading member of the Northwest School, a group of artists, writers, and sculptors who became internationally prominent in the mid-20th Century. Washington was born on November 10, 1908 and raised in Gloster, Mississippi, one of six … Read MoreJames Washington, Jr. (1908-2000)
Poet, novelist, playwright, librettist, essayist, and translator, James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri on February 1, 1902, to parents Caroline (Carrie) Mercer Langston, a school teacher, and James Nathaniel Hughes, an attorney. His parents separated before Langston was born and he spent … Read MoreLangston Hughes (1902-1967)
A free woman of African descent living in Querétaro, Mexico, Isabel de Olvera joined a relief expedition to the recently colonized province of New Mexico in 1600. She traveled as a servant to a Spanish woman. Little is known about Olvera, except for an extraordinary … Read MoreIsabel de Olvera (?-?)
Esteban, an enslaved Moroccan, made the first contact with the native peoples of what is now the American Southwest. Fraught with misunderstandings, that encounter led to Esteban’s untimely demise in 1539 and prefigured the violence that would characterize the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonization of … Read MoreEsteban (?-1539)
Coacoochee (Ko AH koo chee), known to Americans as Wild Cat and to Mexicans as Gato del Monte, is best known as a Seminole resistance leader during the American invasion of Seminole lands in Florida in the 1830s. He led a celebrated escape from a … Read MoreCoacoochee (c. 1808-1857)
May 1880 found Colonel Edward Hatch’s 9th Cavalry buffalo soldiers campaigning in the Southwest against the wily Apache leader Victorio. A skilled practitioner of guerrilla warfare, Victorio – “The Triumphant One” – was proving difficult to catch, avoiding pursuit in Arizona and slipping into New … Read MoreBattle of Tularosa (May 14, 1880)
Although he was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in a field of the biological sciences, Alfred Oscar Coffin ended his career as Professor of Romance Languages at Langston University in Oklahoma. Born in Pontotoc, Mississippi on May 14, 1861, Coffin earned his … Read MoreAlfred O. Coffin (1861-?)
