During the 1961 Major League Baseball spring training season, Ralph M. Wimbish, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based African American physician, forced city leaders, hotel owners, and team officials to integrate its player housing and allow the entire team to live under one roof. Born on July 24, 1922, in Cordele, Georgia, Ralph Melvin … Read MoreRalph Melvin Wimbish (1922-1967)
Orange Mound is an African-American neighborhood located in the southeast part of the Memphis, Tennessee. Orange Mound is the first African American community built solely by and for African Americans. Orange Mound was built on the John George Deaderick Plantation. Deaderick purchased 5,000 acres of land … Read MoreOrange Mound, Memphis (1890- )
Drusilla Elizabeth (née Tandy) Nixon, civil rights activist, community advocate, and music educator, was born on July 15, 1899 in Toledo, Ohio, the daughter of Maud Grant Tandy and John Clifford Tandy. She attended Toledo’s Waite High where she was the only black student in her class. Drusilla wrote for the school magazine, … Read MoreDrusilla Elizabeth Tandy Nixon (1899-1990)
Retired Lt. General John D. Hopper was born in Clarksville, Tennessee in 1947. He attended Lyndon McKinley high school in Columbus, Ohio and entered the Air ForceAcademy in 1965. In high school, Hopper was an avid high school athlete, involved in basketball and track, but at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, he … Read MoreJohn D. Hopper (1947- )
Elbert Williams is the first known member of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to be murdered for his civil rights activities. Williams was born on October 15, 1908, in rural Haywood County, Tennessee, the son of farmer, Albert Williams, and … Read MoreElbert Williams (1908-1940)
Approximately 90 African Americans fought in Spain during the civil war that engulfed that nation between 1936 and 1939. The war became a proxy war for the European great powers as the Soviet Union supported the newly established Second Spanish Republic while Nazi Germany and … Read MoreAfrican American Anti-Fascists in the Spanish Civil War
George Henry Brown, Jr., the first African American appointed to serve on the Tennessee Supreme Court, was born on July 16, 1939 and grew up in in Memphis, Tennessee. Brown’s father Alfred was a car cleaner for the Illinois Central Railroad, and his mother Sara was a teacher for the … Read MoreGeorge Henry Brown, Jr. (1939- )
On the evening of Sunday, September 30, 1962, Southern segregationists rioted and fought state and federal forces on the campus of the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, Mississippi to prevent the enrollment of the first African American student to attend the university, James Meredith, a U.S. military veteran. President … Read MoreOle Miss Riot (1962)
National Football League (NFL) head coach Mike Tomlin was born on March 15, 1972 in Hampton, Virginia to Julia and Ed Tomlin. Mike Tomlin’s birth father was not an extremely prominent figure in his life due to his divorce with his mom at a young age, so he and … Read MoreMike Tomlin (1972- )
