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100 Greatest African Americans is a biographical dictionary of one hundred historically great Black Americans (in alphabetical order; that is, they are not ranked), as assessed by Temple University professor Molefi Kete Asante in 2002. A similar book was written by Columbus Salley.
- Molefi Kete Asante
- 2002
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?
- Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was a pivotal leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He continues to be celebrated for his profound influence in advocating for nonviolent resistance and racial equality.
- Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) An abolitionist and political activist, Harriet Tubman is best known for helping enslaved people escape through the Underground Railroad.
- Barack Obama (b. 1961) ADVERTISEMENT. Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, made history as the first Black American to hold the office.
- Maya Angelou (1928-2014) Maya Angelou was an influential poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist, celebrated for her series of seven autobiographies.
- Famous African American Civil Rights Luminaries
- Famous African American Sportspeople
- Illustrious African American Authors
- African American Abolitionists Voices
- Famous African American Educators
- African American Inventors and Innovators
- Iconic African American Musicians
- Most Famous African American Politicians
- African Americans Who’Ve Left A Mark in Media TV and Film
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. |1929 – 1968
Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK), was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. No single African American in history is perhaps as famous as Martin Luther King, Jr. A federal holiday on the third Monday of each January celebrates his legacy. During the less than 13 years of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the modern American Civil Rights Movement, from December 1955 until April 4, 1968, African Americans achieved more genuine progress toward racial equ...
Ruby Bridges | 1954-present
At the tender age of six, Ruby Bridges advanced the cause of civil rights in November 1960 when she became the first African American student to integrate an elementary school in the South, the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana. She walked past hateful protesters to become the first Black child at the Louisiana school and was then taught alone for a year. She ate lunch alone and sometimes played with her teacher at recess, but she never missed a day of school that year....
W.E.B. Du Bois | 1868-1963
“It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.” By W. E. B. Du Bois W.E.B. Du Bois, or William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was an African American writer, teacher, sociologist and activist whose work transformed the way that the lives of Black citizens were seen in American society. Considered ahead of his time, Du Bois was an early champion of using data to solve so...
Mohammed Ali | 1942 – 2016
Ali was born on January 17, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky and his birth name was Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. He was an American professional boxer and activist. Nicknamed “The Greatest”, he is regarded as one of the most significant sports figures of the 20th century and is frequently ranked as the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time. In 1999, he was named Sportsman of the Century by Sports Illustrated and the Sports Personality of the Century by the BBC. The heavyweight boxing champion is...
Michael Jordan | 1963-present
Michael Jeffrey Jordan, more commonly known as Michael Jordan or MJ, is one of the most popular basketball players in the world. He was born on February 17, 1963. Today, Michael Jordan is the principal owner of the Charlotte Hornets NBA team. He was an instrumental figure in popularizing the sport in the last decade of the 90s. Moreover, he was part of two three-peats with the Bulls on either side of a short-lived Minor League Baseball stint. Michael Jordan is considered by many to be one of...
Kobe Bryant | 1978-2020
Drafted right out of Lower Merion High School at the age of 17, Bryant won five titles as one of the marquee players in the Los Angeles Lakers franchise. He was a member of the gold medal-winning U.S. men’s basketball teams at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2012 London Olympic Games. In 2015 Bryant wrote the poem “Dear Basketball,” which served as the basis for a short film of the same name he narrated. The work won an Academy Award for the best animated short film. A vocal advocate f...
James Baldwin | 1924-1987
Baldwin is widely known as a writer of novels, essays, short stories, plays and poetry, most of his literary work espouses racial and sexual tensions in 20th-century American society such as Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Going to Meet the Man (1965). His masterpiece, Go Tell It On The Mountain (1953) was ranked 39th on the MLA list. Though he spent most of his life living abroad to escape racial prejudice in the United States, James Baldwin is the quintessential American writer. Best known for h...
Frederick Douglass | 1818-1895
Frederick Douglass was born on a Maryland plantation as a slave who learned to read and escaped to become a popular anti-slavery speaker and amongst America’s greatest orators. He worked with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and others, published anti-slavery tracts, and wrote the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which he first published in 1845 and which sold widely. He subsequently published related titles including My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and the...
Harriet Tubman | 1820-1913
Nearly killed at the age of 13 by a blow to her head, “Minty”as she was then known recovered and grew strong and determined to be free. Nicknamed “Moses of her people,” Harriet Tubman was enslaved, escaped, and helped others gain their freedom as a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad. Tubman also served as a scout, spy, guerrilla soldier, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. She is considered the first African American woman to serve in the military. Changing her name to Har...
Sojourner Truth | 1797-1883
A former slave, Sojourner Truth became an outspoken advocate for abolition, temperance, and civil and women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Her Civil War work earned her an invitation to meet President Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Truth was born a slave in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York in 1797. She was bought and sold four times, and subjected to harsh physical labor and violent punishments. In her teens, she was united with another slave with whom she had five children, beginning in...
Booker T. Washington | 1856-1915
Booker T. Washington was an author, educator, orator, philanthropist, and, from 1895 until his death in 1915, the United States’ most famous African American. The tiny school he founded in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881 is now Tuskegee University, an institution that currently enrolls more than 3,000 students. The most famous of the several books he authored, coauthored, or edited during his lifetime, Up from Slavery (1901), has become a classic of American autobiography, drawing comparisons not...
Dr. Jeanne L. Noble |1926 – 2002
Jeanne Laveta Noble (July 18,) was an American educator who served on education commissions for three U.S. presidents. An educator and writer, Dr. Noble holds a lot of firsts to her name. She was the first African-American to study and write about the experiences of female African-Americans in college, to become a board member of the Girls Scouts of the USA, to serve the U.S. government’s Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, and to receive tenure as a professor at N...
Mary McLeod Bethune | 1875-1955
Mary McLeod Bethune was one of the most prominent African American women of the first half of the twentieth century–and one of the most powerful. Known as the “First Lady of the Struggle,” she devoted her career to improving the lives of African Americans through education and political and economic empowerment, first through the school she founded, Bethune-Cookman College, later as president of the National Council of Negro Women, and then as a top black administrator in the Roosevelt admini...
Garrett Morgan | 1877- 1963
With only elementary school education, Black inventor (and son of an enslaved parent), Garrett Morgan came up with several significant inventions, including an improved sewing machine and the gas mask. However, one of Morgan’s most influential inventions was the improved traffic light. Morgan’s was one of the first three-light systems that were invented in the 1920s, resulting in the widespread adoption of the traffic lights we take for granted today. Thanks to the successes of his other inve...
Frederick McKinley Jones |1893- 1961
Frederick McKinley Jones was born on May 17, 1893, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His mother died when he was nine, and he was forced to drop out of school. A priest in Covington, Kentucky, raised him until he was sixteen. Jones was a prolific early 20th-century black inventor who helped to revolutionize both the cinema and refrigeration industries. Between 1919 and 1945 he patented more than sixty inventions in divergent fields with forty of those patents in refrigeration. He is best known for inventi...
Michael Jackson | 1958-2009
Known as the “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson was a best-selling American singer, songwriter and dancer. As a child, Jackson became the lead singer of his family’s popular Motown group, the Jackson 5. Michael Jackson was a multi-talented musical entertainer who enjoyed a chart-topping career both with the Jackson 5 and as a solo artist. He released one of the best-selling albums in history, ‘Thriller,’ in 1982, and had other number-one hits on ‘Bad’ and ‘Off the Wall.’ The Guinness World Record...
Billie Holiday| 1915-1959
A teenage Billie Holiday began singing for tips in brothels and bars but soon got to sing regularly in a nightclub in Harlem, which led to her performances with accomplished jazz musicians like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Count Basie. When she returned to Baltimore, she was a touring musician who performed at clubs and restaurants along Pennsylvania Avenue. Taking the first name ‘”Billie”‘ from actress Billie Dove, she also changed her last name to Holiday. Although she had no formal music...
Louis Armstrong| 1901-1971
Louis Daniel Armstrong nicknamed “Satchmo”, “Satch”, and “Pops”, was an American trumpeter and vocalist. Besides playing the trumpet, Louis Armstrong was also a singer, actor, comedian, bandleader and soloist. “a hard-working kid who helped support his mother and sister by working every type of job there was, including going out on street corners at night to sing for coins.” At age 7, he bought his first real horn–a cornet. When Armstrong was 11 years old, the juvenile court sent him to the J...
Barrack Obama | 1961-present
Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States. His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others. With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton’s army, and his grandmo...
Colin Powell |1937-present
Colin Luther Powell remains the only African-American individual to be on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He retired from the United States Army as a 4-star general. He helped guide the U.S. military to victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then struggled a decade later over the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a beleaguered secretary of state under President George W. Bush. Born in New York to Jamaican immigrants, Gen. Powell rose rapidly through the Army to becom...
Condoleezza Rice |1954-present
As a child Condoleezza Rice dreamed of becoming a concert pianist. Her love for international music translated into a successful career in international diplomacy. Throughout her career, Rice became the first African American woman to hold several positions, including Secretary of State. Condoleezza Rice was the first woman and African-American to become provost at Stanford University. She was also the first black woman to become national security adviser, holding this post under President Ge...
Nat King Cole | 1919-1965
Nathaniel Adams Coles, known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American singer, jazz pianist, and actor. Cole’s music career began after he dropped out of school at the age of 15, and continued for the remainder of his life. He was the first African American entertainer with a network television series (1956–57), but, despite the singer’s great talent, his variety show had trouble attracting sponsors. In the decades following Cole’s death, many situation comedies were marketed with pred...
Oprah Winfrey | 1954-present
Oprah Winfrey is a talk show host, media executive, actress and billionaire philanthropist. She’s best known for being the host of her own, wildly popular program, The Oprah Winfrey Show, which aired for 25 seasons, from 1986 to 2011. In 2011, Winfrey launched her own TV network, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). In 1976, Winfrey moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she hosted the TV chat show People Are Talking. The show became a hit and Winfrey stayed with it for eight years, after which she...
Sidney Poitier | 1927-2022
Was a Bahamian American actor, director, and producer who broke the colour barrier in the U.S. motion-picture industry by becoming the first African American to win an Academy Award for best actor (for Lilies of the Field [1963]) and the first Black movie star. He also redefined roles for African Americans by rejecting parts that were based on racial stereotypes. When Sidney’s teenage best friend was sent to reform school, his father feared that Sidney too would fall into delinquency if he re...
The Root 100 is our annual list of the most influential African Americans, ages 25 to 45. It’s our way of honoring the innovators, the leaders, the public figures and the game changers whose...
100 Greatest African Americans is a biographical dictionary of one hundred historically great Black Americans (in alphabetical order; that is, they are not ranked), as assessed by Temple University professor Molefi Kete Asante in 2002.
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Jun 28, 2010 · Each entry includes brief biographical information, relevant dates, an assessment of the individual''s place in African American history with particular reference to a historical timeline, and...
