Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was born into one of Boston’s leading families on August 31, 1842. St. Pierre’s mother was an English-born white woman and her father was from the island of Martinique, and founder of the Boston Zion Church. The St. Pierre’s sent their … Read MoreJosephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842-1924)
Jan Ernst Matzeliger was born on September 15, 1852 in Suriname (South America), the child of a biracial marriage. His father was a white engineer from Holland and his mother was a black woman in the Dutch colony. By his third birthday Matzeliger was sent … Read MoreJan E. Matzeliger (1852-1887)
Henry Walton Bibb was the eldest of the seven male children of Mildred Jackson. Henry was told that his father, whom he never met, was a man named James Bibb. He grew up in bondage in the Deep South, and claims to have been owned … Read MoreHenry Bibb (1815-1854)
Dr. George Franklin Grant was the first African American professor at Harvard. He was born in Oswego, New York to former slaves. When he was fifteen years old a local dentist, Dr. Albert Smith, hired him as an errand boy. He soon became a lab … Read MoreGeorge Franklin Grant (1847-1910)
Elizabeth Freeman was born into slavery in Claverack, New York in 1742. During the 1770s, she lived in the household of Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, a prominent citizen who at that time also served as a judge of the Berkshire Court of Common Pleas. … Read MoreElizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett) (1742-1829)
The fiery-militant David Walker was born on September 28, 1785, in Wilmington, North Carolina. His father was an enslaved African who died a few months before his son’s birth, and his mother was a free woman of African ancestry. Walker grew up to despise the … Read MoreDavid Walker (1785-1830)
Charlotte Forten Grimké grew up in a rich intellectual and activist environment. Born into a wealthy Black abolitionist family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Charlotte Louise Forten became famous in her own right as a writer and poet. Her grandparents, James, Sr. and Charlotte Forten, hosted leading … Read MoreCharlotte Forten Grimké (1837-1914)
A major figure in Harlem community politics and the Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s, Benjamin Davis, Jr. was born into a prominent African American family in Atlanta, Georgia in 1903. He migrated north to Massachusetts to attend college at Amherst, where he was … Read MoreBenjamin Davis, Jr. (1903-1964)
Trinidad-born dental surgeon and Spanish Civil War veteran Arnold Donowa was born on December 1895 in Trinidad. Very little is known about his childhood there but by the early 1920s he was living in the United States and earned his D.D.S. from Howard University in … Read MoreArnold Bennett Donowa (1896-1964)
Composer, conductor, trumpeter, producer, and civil rights activist Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., who composed scores for 33 major motion pictures, including In the Heat of the Night and In Cold Blood, was born on March 14, 1933, in Chicago, Illinois to Quincy Delight Jones Sr., … Read MoreQuincy Jones Jr. (1933- )
