Act of August 30, 1890, ch. 841, 26 Stat. 417, 7 U.S.C. 322 et seq. Chap. 841.–AN ACT To apply a portion of the proceeds of the public lands to the more complete endowment and support of the colleges for the benefit of agriculture and … Read More(1890) Second Morrill Act
Calvin Littlejohn was an African American photographer in Fort Worth, Texas, who documented the black community for more than forty years, between the 1940s and the early 1990s. Through his photographs he celebrated the richness and complexity of black culture in segregated Fort Worth. Calvin … Read MoreCalvin Littlejohn (1909-1993)
Guitarist, pianist, arranger, singer, and lyricist Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born Rosetta Nubin on March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas to Pentecostal Pastor Willis B. Atkins from Arkadelphia and Katie Bell Harper Nubin, a musician and pastor from Princeton, Arkansas. At three Tharpe’s mother … Read MoreRosetta Atkins [Sister Rosetta] Tharpe (1915-1973)
Concert bass-baritone singer, actor, and teacher William Caesar Warfield was born on January 22, 1920 in West Helena, Arkansas to a family of sharecroppers. When Warfield was a young child, his family moved to Rochester, New York, where his father served as a pastor for … Read MoreWilliam Warfield (1920-2002)
In 1953 baritone Robert McFerrin Sr. made history as the first African American to win the Metropolitan Opera House’s Auditions of the Air radio contest. On January 27, 1955, in the role of Ethiopian King Amonasro in Verdi’s Aida, McFerrin made history again by becoming … Read MoreRobert Keith McFerrin, Sr. (1921-2006)
Florence Beatrice Smith, the first black woman composer to garner an international reputation, was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, to James H. Smith, a dentist, and Florence Gulliver Smith, a former school teacher and private lesson piano teacher who also managed several local … Read MoreFlorence Beatrice Smith Price (1887-1953)
Jefferson August Beaver, banker, businessman, local politician, and civil rights activist, was born in Warren, Arkansas on May 20, 1908 to parents Rev. Robert Jefferson Beaver, a minister with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and Ethel Jordan. Beaver’s family resided in Monticello, Arkansas before … Read MoreJefferson A. Beaver (1908-1991)
Tommy Johnson is one of the most exemplary of all the Delta bluesmen. Though he recorded only fourteen titles between 1928 and 1930, almost all of these compositions became classics: for example “Big Road Blues,” “Cool Drink of Water,” and “Slidin’ Delta.” One of them, … Read MoreTommy Johnson (1896-1956)
Pioneering African-American Aviators Featuring the Tuskegee Airmen of Arkansas is a study of little known black women and men who participated in the first four decades of U.S. aviation history. The book began originally in 2006 as a biography of Milton Pitts Crenchaw, a native … Read MoreArkansas Pioneers in Flight: African Americans in Aviation from the Natural State, 1932 to 1953.
Image Courtesy of Carl Lender (CC BY-SA 2.0) Delta blues and boogie-woogie piano master Willie “Pinetop” Perkins was born on the Honey Island plantation near Belzoni, Mississippi on July 7, 1913. During his career, Perkins played with some of the best known blues and rock … Read MoreJoseph William “Pinetop” Perkins (1913–2011)
