Fisk Jubilee Singer and preacher Isaac Dickerson was born enslaved in Wytheville, Virginia in 1852 and orphaned by the age of five. His earliest memory was his father’s sale to a slave trader in Richmond, Virginia. Young Isaac was treated kindly by his master, a … Read MoreIsaac Dickerson (1852-1900)
Greene Evans, Fisk Jubilee Singer, Memphis City Councilman and Tennessee State Assemblyman, was born somewhere in Tennessee and emancipated after the Civil War. Evans attended night school at a Memphis freedmen’s school until it was burned down in the Memphis Riot in 1866. After working … Read MoreGreene Evans (1848-1914)
Born a slave, Thomas Rutling was one of only four Fisk Jubilee Singers who remained with the company through all three of their pioneering tours between 1872 and 1877. After completing a tour of Europe he refused to return to racist America, he lived the … Read MoreThomas Rutling (1854-1915)
Born on October 5, 1929 in Shiloh, Alabama, Autherine Lucy was one of ten children in a family of farmers. Despite this modest background, Lucy would impact history as the first African American to integrate the University of Alabama. Lucy will also be remembered as … Read MoreAutherine Juanita Lucy Foster (1929-2022)
Caesar Carpenter “C.C.” Antoine is best known as a leading African American politician in Louisiana during Reconstruction (1863-1877). Antoine was born in New Orleans to a Black father who fought the British as an American soldier at the Battle of New Orleans (1815), and to … Read MoreCaesar Carpenter Antoine (1836-1921)
James D. Lynch, a Reconstruction era politician, is best known for his position as Secretary of the State of Mississippi from 1869 to 1872. Lynch was the first African American to hold a major political office in that state. Born in 1838 in Baltimore, Maryland, … Read MoreJames D. Lynch (1838-1872)
John Roy Lynch, congressman, soldier, and author was born in Concordia Parish, Louisiana on September 10, 1847 to Patrick Lynch, an Irish immigrant and Catherine White, a slave. Lynch’s father died soon after his birth. Lynch and his mother were then traded to a plantation … Read MoreJohn Roy Lynch (1847-1939)
The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) was founded in Tyronza, Arkansas in July 1934 by black and white tenant farmers and Socialist Party members. The STFU is part of a rich tradition of labor organizing in the Depression-era South amongst mostly Black agricultural laborers. Since … Read MoreSouthern Tenant Farmers Union
A politically motivated attack by whites against the city’s leading African American citizens, the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 documents the lengths to which white Democrats went to regain political domination of the South after Reconstruction. The violence began on Thursday, November 10 in the … Read MoreWilmington Race Riot of 1898
Opened in 1923, the Cotton Club on 142nd St & Lenox Ave in the heart of Harlem, New York was operated by white New York gangster Owney Madden. Madden used the Cotton Club as an outlet to sell his “#1 Beer” to the prohibition crowd. … Read MoreCotton Club of Harlem (1923- )
