Madam C.J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove to former slaves, Owen and Minerva Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana on December 23, 1867. Breedlove became an orphan at age seven when her parents died. Three years later, ten-year-old Sarah and her sister moved across to river to Vicksburg, … Read MoreMadam C. J. Walker (1867-1919)
Tom Pollock, a Flagstaff, Arizona businessman, built the Apache Lumber Company on land surrounded by the Apache Indian Reservation in northeast Arizona in 1916. Pollock named the site “Cooley,” after prominent Army scout and Arizona trailblazer, Corydon E. Cooley. Despite Pollock’s early success, his business … Read MoreMcNary, Arizona
Cloves Campbell, Sr. was born in Elizabeth, Louisiana in 1931. He moved to Arizona in 1945 with his family and earned a B.A. in Education from Arizona State University. Campbell was elected to the Arizona House of Representatives in 1962, and after two terms he … Read MoreCloves Campbell, Sr. (1931-2004)
George Thompson Ruby was born in New York in 1841 but reared in Portland, Maine. After acquiring a sound liberal arts education there, he journeyed to Haiti, where he worked as a correspondent for the Pine and Palm, a New England newspaper edited by abolitionist … Read MoreGeorge Thompson Ruby (1841-1882)
Matthew Gaines, black senator and Baptist preacher, was born on August 4, 1840, to a slave mother on the plantation of Martin G. Despallier in Pineville, near Alexandria, Louisiana. He learned to read by candlelight from books smuggled to him by a white boy who … Read MoreMatthew Gaines (1840-1900)
Horace Mann Bond served as the first president of Fort Valley State College from 1939 to 1945 and president of Lincoln University from 1945 to 1957. He was a notable educator and scholar holding degrees from Lincoln University (B.A. in 1923 and a LL.D. in … Read MoreHorace Mann Bond (1904-1972)
Jean-Baptiste-Point DuSable, a frontier trader, trapper and farmer is generally regarded as the first resident of what is now Chicago, Illinois. There is very little definite information on DuSable’s past. It is believed by some historians that he was born free around 1745 in St. … Read MoreJean-Baptiste-Point DuSable (1745-1818)
Cathay Williams is the only documented African American woman who served as a soldier in the Regular U.S. Army in the nineteenth century. Cathay was born a slave around 1850 in Jackson County, Missouri. In September 1861 Union troops impressed Cathay into the Army to … Read MoreCathay Williams (1850- )
It is ironic that the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France was instigated by one of the few successful slave rebellions. Toussaint L’Overture on St. Dominique (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) so bedeviled the French that Napoleon decided to sell the Louisiana Territory to the … Read MoreLouisiana Purchase and African Americans (1803)
Noted historian, scholar, and educator Benjamin Author Quarles was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 23, 1904. His father Arthur Benedict Quarles was a subway porter, and his mother Margaret O’Brien Quarles was a homemaker. In his twenties, Quarles enrolled at Shaw University in Raleigh, … Read MoreBenjamin A. Quarles (1904-1996)
