Melody Barnes was chosen by then President-elect Barack Obama to serve as the Director of Domestic Policy Council shortly after the presidential election in 2008, a position she held until her resignation at the end of 2011. Born in Richmond, Virginia to Charles and Mary … Read MoreMelody Barnes (1964- )
Howard Drew at the 1912 Olympics Image Ownership: Bain News Service (Fair Use) Howard P. Drew, schoolboy Olympian, original “World’s Fastest Human,” scholar, soldier, lawyer, first African American judge in Connecticut, was born to David and May Drew in Lexington, Virginia on June 28, 1890. … Read MoreHoward Porter Drew (1890–1957)
Alan Gilbert, University of Denver political scientist and anti-racist activist, is the author of Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence, one of the few works that examines the free and enslaved blacks who joined the American Patriots and the … Read MoreFighting for Freedom on Both Sides of the American Revolution
Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1906, Thomas Nelson Baker was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry from The Ohio State University. The third child of Rev. Dr. Thomas Nelson Baker, Sr. and Elizabeth (Lizzie) Baytop Baker, Thomas had one brother, Harry … Read MoreThomas Nelson Baker Jr. (1906-1977)
Archer Alexander was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation around the year 1810. His likeness, in face and figure, immortalizes all American slaves on a monument to emancipation that stands in Lincoln Park in Washington, D. C. The bronze monument “Emancipation,” also known as … Read MoreArcher Alexander (ca. 1810-1879)
Jennie R. Patrick became the first African American woman to earn a PhD in chemical engineering when she completed graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1979. Patrick was born in Gadsden, Alabama on January 1, 1949. Her parents only had sixth … Read MoreJennie R. Patrick (1949- )
George Sherman Carter, research chemist, was born on May 10, 1911 in Gloucester County, Virginia. Carter, called Sherman, was one of four boys and one girl born to George Peter and Emily Maude Carter. Not much is known of Carter’s childhood or of his move … Read MoreGeorge Sherman Carter (1911-1998)
In the account below Edith Lee-Payne recalls the day she was photographed as a 12 year old participant in the March on Washington, and the curious history of that photograph through 2011. My grandparents, Marie and John Spencer Lee, left Culpeper, Virginia for Washington, D.C. … Read MoreMarch on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963: One Participant Remembers
Many historians and legal scholars consider the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to be one of the most important and far reaching pronouncements in the history of the Court. On December 8, 1953 Thurgood Marshall, the chief legal counsel … Read More(1953) Thurgood Marshall, “Argument Before the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education”
Abram Lincoln Harris, Jr., the grandson of slaves, was the first nationally recognized black economist. Harris was highly respected for his work that focused primarily on class analysis, black economic life, and labor to illustrate the structural inadequacies of race and racial ideologies. Harris’s major … Read MoreAbram Lincoln Harris Jr. (1899-1963)
