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- )
Internationally regarded as a thoughtful and compassionate voice for social justice, Randall C. Robinson, the son of Richmond, Virginia school teachers, was born July 6, 1941. He spent three years at Norfolk State College on a basketball scholarship and after service in the military earned … Read MoreRandall Robinson (1941- )
Joe Louis Barrow, known popularly as Joe Louis, was the second African American heavyweight boxing champion in the 20th Century. Louis was born on May 13, 1914 in Chambers County Alabama to sharecropper parents Monroe and Lilly Reese Barrow. He was the seventh of eight … Read MoreJoe Louis [Barrow] (1914-1981)
Jean Toomer was born into an elite black family in Washington, D.C. in 1894. Abandoned by his father as a newborn and losing his mother to appendicitis as a teenager, Toomer spent his formative years in the home of his grandparents, P.B.S. and Nina Pinchback. … Read MoreJean Toomer (1894-1967)
Although the facts regarding his birthplace and biological parents are inconclusive, Countee Cullen’s formative years were spent in New York City. The adopted son of Reverend Dr. Frederick A. Cullen, pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church and president of the Harlem branch of the National … Read MoreCountee Cullen (1903-1946)
Most coal mining communities are transitory due to the demands of the mining industry. However, that was not the case with Buxton, Iowa, a coal mining colony with a large black population that grew in southern Iowa at the beginning of the 20th Century. Beginning … Read MoreBuxton, Iowa (1895-1927)
Lucy Craft Laney was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1854, into a family of ten children. Taught to read and write by her mother, a domestic worker, she graduated from Macon’s Lewis High School and entered Atlanta University at the age of fifteen and graduated … Read More(1899) Lucy Craft Laney, “The Burden of the Educated Colored Woman”
York was an African American slave best known for his participation in the (Meriwether) Lewis and (William) Clark Expedition of 1804-1806. York was born in Caroline County, Virginia in 1770. York, his father, mother (Rose), and younger sister and brother (Nancy and Juba) were all … Read MoreYork (1770-1832)
Althea Gibson, a sharecropper’s daughter, entered the world of sports when segregation severely limited opportunities for African Americans. She eventually became the first black athlete to cross the color line of international tennis and golf. Althea Gibson was born on August 25, 1927, to Daniel … Read MoreAlthea Gibson (1927-2003)
Born in Hattiesburg, Virginia on November 5, 1926, Victoria Jackson Gray Adams became one of the most important Mississipians in the Civil Rights Movement. Her activities included teaching voter registration courses to domestics and sharecroppers, opening of the Freedom Schools during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of … Read MoreVictoria Jackson Gray Adams (1926-2006)
