Anne Moody was a writer and civil rights activist best known for her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968). In the early 1960s, while a student at Tougaloo College, she worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student … Read MoreAnne Moody (1940-2015)
Katherine Carper Sawyer is one of the nearly-forgotten plaintiffs in the famous Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. While most attention was focused on Linda Brown’s central role in the most important school desegregation case in the nation’s history, Carper in … Read MoreKatherine Carper Sawyer (1942- )
McKinley Langford Burnett was a little-known but significant figure in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that theoretically desegregated public schools across the United States. Burnett was born in Oskaloosa, Kansas, a racially integrated small town, in 1897 to parents who … Read MoreMcKinley Langford Burnett (1897-1968)
When the U.S. Army was reorganized on July 28, 1866 for peacetime service after the American Civil War, six regiments were set aside for black enlisted men. These included four infantry regiments, numbered 38th through 41st. The 25th Infantry was created during a reduction in March 1869 by … Read More25th Infantry Regiment (1866-1947)
Scipio Africanus Jones was a prominent Arkansas African American defense attorney in the late 19th and early 20th century. He opposed Arkansas’s Jim Crow laws and successfully argued cases before the United States Supreme Court between 1913 and 1925. Known for his pro bono work for impoverished African American defendants, Jones … Read MoreScipio Africanus Jones (1863–1943)
Image Ownership: Public domain Thomas Day, master cabinetmaker and entrepreneur, was born in 1801 in Dinwiddie County in southern Virginia to free African American parents. He had an outstanding career and achieved remarkable social standing during the state’s antebellum period. By 1850, he operated the largest furniture business … Read MoreThomas Day (1801—ca.1861)
Lucy Craft Laney, educator, school founder, and civil rights activist, was born in Georgia on April 13, 1854 in Macon, Georgia to free parents Louisa and David Laney. David Laney, a Presbyterian minister and skilled carpenter, had purchased his freedom approximately twenty years before Lucy Laney’s birth. He purchased Louisa’s freedom shortly … Read MoreLucy Craft Laney (1854-1933)
“Image Ownership: Public Domain” Nineteenth Century political leader George T. Downing was born on December 30, 1819 in New York, New York. The son of restaurateur Thomas Downing, he was introduced to politics at a young age. His father owned the Oyster House, which was a … Read MoreGeorge T. Downing (1819-1903)
Image Ownership: Public domain At a time in when educated, skilled, and ambitious African Americans were systematically excluded from even middle management positions in large white-controlled businesses, for decades Charles H. Dodge remained one of the extremely rare persons in the nation to occupy a … Read MoreCharles H. Dodge (1868-1942)
Image Ownership: Public domain Joseph Kwame Kyeretwei Boakye Danquah (Dankwa) was a Ghanaian lawyer, politician, and leader in that nation’s independence movement. He was born on December 18, 1895, to Emmanuel Yao Boakye and Lydia Okom Korantemaa in the town of Bepong in the Eastern … Read MoreJ.B. Danquah (1895-1965)