Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in March 1860, Charles Henry Harvey was the youngest of nineteen children of Albert and Elsy (Brewer) Harvey. Albert and Elsy were married on Valentine’s Day in 1839 in Halifax County, North Carolina, where their first child, Jesse, was born a … Read MoreCharles Harvey (1860-1937)
Legendary baseball player Henry Louis Aaron was born February 5, 1934, in Mobile, Alabama, the third of eight children to Herbert Aaron, a shipyard worker at Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company, and his wife, Estella. Aaron decided he wanted to be a major league baseball … Read MoreHenry Louis “Hank” Aaron (1934-2021)
Born in Michigan in 1869, James David Corrothers became an important literary figure in the 1890s. Corrothers grew up in South Haven, a southern Michigan town established by abolitionists, fugitive slaves, and free blacks during the years before the civil war. For a time he … Read MoreJames David Corrothers (1869-1917)
Despite his personal and legal problems in the last two decades of his life, Michael Jackson remains one of the most widely known and successful pop stars of all time. Commercially and critically Jackson, both solo and with his brothers in The Jackson Five, dominated … Read MoreMichael Jackson (1958-2009)
Musicologist, playwright, novelist and political activist Lola Shirley Graham, born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1896, became the second wife to W.E.B. Du Bois in 1951. Lola Shirley Graham was taught at a young age to stand up to injustice. She wrote her first editorial to … Read MoreShirley Graham Du Bois (1896 – 1977)
A native of Montgomery, Alabama and grandson of slaves, Percy Lavon Julian, born April 11, 1899, was a trailblazer in the chemical sciences. His parents Elizabeth Lena Adams, a school teacher, and James Sumner Julian, a railroad mail clerk who loved mathematics, raised six children, … Read MorePercy Lavon Julian (1899-1975)
Marshall “Major” Taylor was a late 19th and early 20th century champion cyclist who became the first African American to win a world championship in sprint cycling. Between 1898 and 1899 he set numerous world records in cycling ranging from the quarter-mile to two-mile race. … Read MoreMarshall “Major” Taylor (1878-1932)
Thyra J. Edwards, born in 1897, the granddaugher of runaway slaves, grew up in Houston, Texas and started her career there as a school teacher. Eventually she moved to Gary, Indiana and later Chicago, Illinois where she was employed as a social worker. Edwards would eventually become … Read MoreThyra J. Edwards (1897-1953)
Little is known about Reverend D. A. Graham, the A.M.E. minister who delivered the speech that appears below. However the minister’s words were recorded as part of a nationwide protest in 1899 against lynchings of African Americans across the nation. In May of 1899 the … Read More(1899) Rev. D. A. Graham, “Some Facts About Southern Lynchings”
Forrest Oran Wiggins was born in 1907 to Charles and Cora Cosby Wiggins. A native of Vincennes, Indiana, Wiggins attended public schools in Vincennes and Indianapolis. In 1928 Wiggins received his B.A. from Butler University and in the following year earned a certificate in French … Read MoreForrest Oran Wiggins (1907-1982)
