The St. Martin De Porres Club was founded in 1947 by Father John P. Markoe, S.J., a priest, and Creighton University students interested in local civil rights issues in Omaha, Nebraska. Father Markoe was assigned to St. Benedict the Moor Parish at 2423 Grant Street … Read MoreSt. Martin De Porres Club (1947- )
Moddie Daniel Taylor, a chemist by training, was a member of the small, elite group of African American scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the code name for the top-secret effort to create an atomic bomb during World War II. Taylor was born in … Read MoreModdie Daniel Taylor (1912-1976)
Harris-Stowe University is a historically black college in St. Louis, Missouri. It was also the first public teacher education institution west of the Mississippi River. Harris-Stowe was originally two separate institutions: Harris Teachers College and Stowe Teachers College, which were merged together in 1954 to … Read MoreHarris-Stowe University (1857- )
Vernon Jarrett was a Chicago journalist and advocate for education. Born on June 19, 1921 in Paris, Tennessee, Jarrett received his undergraduate training from Knoxville College where he was editor of the campus newspaper. He graduated from Knoxville College in 1941 and soon afterwards joined … Read MoreVernon D. Jarrett (1918-2004)
Grace Bumbry was one of the most successful opera singers of the late 20th century. She had a long career as a performer, spanning over four decades. A Grammy-award-winning mezzo-soprano and the first Black singer to perform at the Bayreuth festival in Germany. Bumbry, along … Read MoreGrace Bumbry (1937-2023)
J.C. Vaughn, Ernest Ikoli, H.O. Davies, and Samuel Akinsanya founded the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) in 1934. Although based in Lagos, the NYM was the first Nigerian nationalist organization to promote politics outside of the capital. Furthermore, the NYM was also the first organization to … Read MoreThe Nigerian Youth Movement (1934-1951)
Image Ownership: Courtesy Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 3.0) Herman Cain, Republican Party activist and 2012 Presidential candidate was also a newspaper columnist, popular radio talk show host in Atlanta, and former chairman and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, a Pillsbury subsidiary. Cain was born on December … Read MoreHerman Cain (1945-2020)
As Harper’s Ferry would prove, John Brown’s preferred method of battling slavery was to free hundreds of enslaved people at a time in a single attack. However, the week of Christmas 1858, he made an exception and successfully rescued eleven Missouri slaves, throwing the region … Read MoreJohn Brown’s Christmas Raid into Missouri 1858
Born into slavery in 1854, Fr. Augustine (nicknamed Augustus) Tolton was one of the country’s first African American Roman Catholic priests. Tolton shares early black Catholic history with three brothers of Irish-African American ancestry: James, Sherwood, and Patrick Healy. The Healy brothers were ordained two … Read MoreAugustine (Augustus) Tolton (1854-1897)
