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- When it comes to pioneers in African American history, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Muhammad Ali are often mentioned—and rightfully so.
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Feb 1, 2023 · When it comes to pioneers in African American history, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Muhammad Ali are often mentioned—and rightfully so. But what do you know about other Black history heroes, like Claudette Colvin, Alice Coachman, or Shirley Chisholm?
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- Jesse L. Brown
- Jo Ann Robinson
- Mark E. Dean
- Madam C.J. Walker
- Thomas L. Jennings
- Death
- Bessie Coleman
- Jerry Lawson
- Christopher Priest
- Marie Van Brittan Brown
When Jesse LeRoy Brown was a teenager, he wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to express his disappointment that Black Americans weren’t flying in the military. While that changed in the Air Force in the early ’40s with the Tuskegee Airmen, it would be Brown himself that would break that barrier for the Navy in 1947. By 1949 he wa...
Jo Ann Robinson is an often-overlookedpart of the civil rights movement, but her contributions were crucial. Born in Georgia in 1912, Robinson focused her early life on education. She began by graduating college in 1934, and later became a public school teacher in Macon, Georgia. After receiving her master’s degree, she took a job as a college prof...
For many in the ‘80s, IBM computers were their first experience with the technology that would define the future. And a big part of what made the company so successful is thanks to Mark Dean, an engineer whose work helped create the company’s ISA bus. This hardware add-on allowed peripheral accessories like printers, disk drives, and keyboards to b...
Known as “the first Black woman millionaire in America,” Madam C.J. Walker—born Sarah Breedlove—broke the bank with her own line of hair products that she developed while trying to find a cure for her own hair loss. After experimenting with products by a Black American businesswoman named Annie Malone, Breedlove decided to strike out on her own wit...
Thomas L. Jennings is known as the first Black American to receive a patentin the United States for his invention of an early form of dry cleaning called “dry scouring.” The patent was given in 1821 but was first met with resistance on the grounds that, at the time, all enslavers legally owned the “fruits of the labor of the slave both manual and i...
The road from the pop rock acts of the ‘50s and ‘60s to the punk rock of the late ‘70s and ‘80s was bridged by what’s now known as the proto-punk movement. This loose fraternity of raw, underproduced garage rock bands was prepping listeners for what was to come in the music industry. This was a genre that replaced the slick, polished tunes of the p...
When Bessie Coleman was denied the right to learn to fly in the United States, she decided to go to school, learn French, and travel overseas to France to get her pilot's license. In seven months, she got her license and returned to the States in 1921, where she created a media stir as the nation’s first Black female pilot. Coleman soon began perfo...
Remember those video game cartridges you’d swap in and out of your console and occasionally have to blow intoto make work? That technology was made possible with the help of Jerry Lawson, the chief hardware engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor’s game division. Lawson began his life cobbling electronics together as a child and making his own radio st...
Longtime comic book fans may know the name Christopher Priest from writing Black Pantherin the late 1990s and early 2000s, and even older ones may know the name he went by earlier in his career, Jim Owsley. What most don’t know is just how groundbreaking his career has been, despite not always getting his due. Priest came on to the Marvel scene as ...
All Marie Van Brittan Brown wanted to do was feel safe at night, and along the way she reshaped how people all over the world secure their homes. Brown lived inJamaica, Queens, at a time when the crime rate in New York City was on a steady ascent and police were often unable to respond to every emergency. To help ensure the family’s safety, Brown, ...
- Jason Serafino
Feb 1, 2022 · While Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks are well-known Black figures in history, there are many lesser-known people who helped shape America.
- Claudette Colvin. Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to move to the back of a bus to give up her seat to a white person.
- Robert Sengstacke Abbott. Abbott laid the foundation for what would eventually birth many Black publications including Ebony, Jet, Essence, Black Enterprise, Right On!
- Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm kicked the door in for African American women holding major roles in government. She first served as an educational consultant for New York City’s Bureau of Child Welfare and ran for New York State Assembly in 1964.
- Johnson H. Johnson. Hailed as one of the most influential Black media publishers, Johnson got his start working for Supreme Life Insurance Company collecting weekly news clippings for his manager, which sparked his idea for his first publication, Negro Digest.
Jan 30, 2024 · While most of these pioneers are long gone, historians and surviving friends and family are working to keep their legacies alive. This Black History Month, we celebrate the unsung heroes of...
Feb 1, 2021 · One was a mystic, another was a spy who posed as a slave, and another was a brilliant but troubled poet dubbed the “Godfather of Rap.” Few were household names. All of them were pioneers.
No one has played a greater role in helping all Americans know the black past than Carter G. Woodson, the individual who created Negro History Week in Washington, D.C., in February 1926. Woodson was the second black American to receive a PhD in history from Harvard—following W.E.B. Du Bois by a few years.
