African-American History

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online has compiled the following profiles of great African Americans you should know.

Born on November 9, 1731 near Elliott City, Maryland, Benjamin Banneker was one of America's greatest intellectuals and scientists. Benjamin Banneker was an essayist, inventor, mathematician, and astronomer. Because of his dark skin and great intellect he was called the "sable genius." Benjamin Banneker was a self-taught mathematician and astronomer. While still a youth he made a wooden clock which kept accurate time past the date that Banneker died. This clock is believed to be the first clock wholly made in America. In 1791, he served on a project to make a survey for the District of Columbia, helping to design the layout for our Nation's capital. Deeply interested in natural phenomena, Banneker started publishing an almanac in 1791 and continued its publication until 1802. He published a treatise on bees, did a mathematical study on the cycle of the seventeen-year locust, and became a pamphleteer for the anti-slavery movement. He was internationally known for his accomplishments and became an advisor to President Thomas Jefferson. He died on his farm on October 9, 1806.

Born on July 10, 1875 in Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary McLeod Bethune ranks high among great women in America. The last of seventeen children of sharecroppers, Mary Bethune lifted herself from the cotton field to the White House as an advisor to the President of the United States. Her greatest accomplishment, however, was almost single-handedly building Bethune-Cookman College in 1923. With only one dollar and fifty cents, nerve and determination, she set out to build a school for the Blacks who were working in the railroad labor camps in Florida. Slowly the school emerged from old crate boxes and odd rooms of old houses near the Daytona Beach City Dump. Bethune served as the school's president until 1942. Today Bethune-Cookman graduates thousands. In 1935, she received the NAACP Springarn Medal as a symbol of distinguished achievement. Also in 1935, President Roosevelt appointed her national director of the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs. She died on May 18, 1955 in Daytona Beach, Florida.

As a diplomat who accomplished the seemingly impossible by negotiating the 1949 armistice between one-year-old Israel and its Arab neighbors, Ralph Bunche demonstrated that there is more than one way to resolve an issue. For that he earned the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1950. From early in his career, he was a militant critic of American society who established himself as one of the staunchest opponents of the gradualism and conciliation urged by the NAACP. Yet, in his celebrated work for the State Department and, later, the United Nations, as a statesman and diplomat, he proved himself to be a man without color, an international civil servant of the highest rank.. For an even-tempered diplomat, he was a driven man. Orphaned at the age of 11 in thee slums of Detroit, Bunche went to UCLA on an athletic scholarship and became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard's government department, in 1934.. His research on the political status of African-Americans and the strategies off race-betterment organizations, used in Gunnar Myerdal's An American Dilemma (1944),, is an indispensable classic for any student of African-American history. From 1928 until 1942, Bunche taught political science at Howard University in Washington, DC, while traveling widely to expand his research on colonial administration and race relations. He later became the first African-American desk officer at the State Department, as head of the Division of Dependent Affairs, helping to draw up the UN Charter. He joined the UN in 1947 as director of the Trusteeship Division that helped establish guidelines for territories to achieve independence. After his Middle East triumph, he directed UN peacekeeping operations in the Suez (1956), the Congo (1960) and in Cyprus (1964). In 1968 Bunche became undersecretary general, the highest rank held by an American at the UN, and until his retirement in 1971 because of illness, was UN Secretary General U'Thant's most influential political advisor..

If an honest history of the deep South is ever written, Dr. George Washington Carver will stand out as one of the truly great men of his time. Born of slave parents in 1860 in Diamond, Missouri, Dr. Carver almost single-handedly revolutionized southern agriculture. From his small laboratory on the campus of Tuskegee Institute flowed hundreds of discoveries and products from the once neglected peanut. From the peanut Dr. Carver discovered meal, instant and dry coffee, bleach, tar remover, wood filler, metal polish, paper, ink, shaving cream, rubbing oil, linoleum, synthetic rubber, and plastics. From the soybean he obtained flour, breakfast food, and milk. It is highly doubtful if any person has done as much for southern agriculture as Dr. Carver. Dr. Carver died in 1943 and was buried next to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute. On July 17, 1960 the George Washington Carver National Monument was dedicated at Dr. Carver's birth site. This was the first U.S. federal monument dedicated to a African-American.

Poet and author Paul Laurence Dunbar was so talented and versatile that he succeeded in two worlds. He was so adept at writing verse in Black dialect that he became known as the "poet of his people," while also cultivating a white audience that appreciated the brilliance and value of his work. Majors and Minors (1895), Dunbar's second collection of verse, financed by several white friends, was a remarkable work containing some of his best poems in both Black dialect and standard English. Melodic and rhythmical, his lines in this and other works often sing and swing along gloriously. When the country's reigning literary critic, William Dean Howells reviewed majors and Minors favorably, Dunbar became famous. And Howells',introduction in Lyric of Lowly Life (1896) helped make Dunbar the most popular African-American writer in America at the time.. Dunbar had plenty of experience bridging racial gaps. Despite being the only African-American in his class at Central high School in Dayton, Ohio, he was well liked by teachers and classmates and was elected president of the school literary society and editor of the school paper in his senior year.. Even though he reached a point when publications competed for anything (poems, short stories, novels, prose, sketches, plays and musical lyrics) that sprang from his fertile mind, Dunbar wrote for a living and had to please popular reading tastes for the light,, romantic, and sentimental. But he did publish a few pieces that spoke out gently against the typical treatment of his people, including "We Wear the Mask" and "The Haunted Oak," an anti-lynching poem.. Despite worsening health from the tuberculosis he succumbed to at age 34 in 1906,, Dunbar produced four collections of short stories and a quartet of novels in a creative outpouring between 1898 and 1904. His most notable short-story collections were Folks From Dixie and The Heart of Happy Hollow, and his novels included The Fanatics, a tale of political conflict involving two Civil War families, and The Sport of the Gods, about injustice suffered by an innocent African-American family..

When Frederick A. Douglass was born in 1817 on a Maryland plantation, his given name was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Frederick Douglass constantly fought against his slave condition and was constantly in trouble with the overseer. When he escaped on September 3, 1838, and he settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he changed his name to Frederick Douglass. In 1845, against the advice of his friends, Douglass decided to write an account of his life, fully aware of the possibility that this would mark him as the Bailey runaway slave. The autobiography was called The Narrative Of The Life and Times Of Frederick Douglass. Besides writing his autobiography, in 1845 Douglass founded and edited the North Star newspaper. When the Civil War broke out, Frederick Douglass urged President Lincoln to free and arm the slaves. He was also a great spokesman for universal suffrage, women's rights, and world peace. In 1848 Douglass participated in the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1872 he ran for vice president on the Equal Rights Party ticket. In 1889 he was appointed minister to Haiti. He died on February 20, 1895.

No single title does credit to the prodigious talents of Dr. W.E.B. DuBois. Born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he has been labeled an educator, author, historian, sociologist, philosopher, poet, leader and radical. In 1903 his famous book Souls of Black Folks was published. Perhaps his greatest fame came from his debate with Booker T. Washington over the type of education needed by African Americans. Washington stressed vocational education, whereas DuBois insisted on training in the liberal arts and in the humanities. He was one of the founders of the NAACP and editor of its famous journal The Crisis. He was also the first Black to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard University. In 1919 he initiated the Pan African Conferences in Paris. On behalf of the NAACP at the United Nations, he tried to get a firm anti-colonial commitment from the United States in 1945 and in 1947 presented a protest against the Jim Crow laws. His theme in his later years was always economic democracy and the channeling of Black Power through a unified Black society. He died on October 27,1963 in Accra, Ghana where he had established his new home.

Among Black leaders Marcus Garvey was unique. Born August 17, 1887 in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, Marcus Mosiah Garvey's popularity was universal. His program for the return of African people to their motherland shook the foundations of three empires. All subsequent Black power movements have owed a debt to his example. In building his Universal Negro Improvement Association he sought "To improve the condition of the race with the view of establishing a nation in Africa where Blacks will be given the opportunity to develop by themselves." In his famous Philosophies and Opinions, Marcus Garvey wrote, "Where is the Black man's government? Where is his president, his country and his ambassadors, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?" Founded in 1914, the UNIA grew in just five years to include to include over six million followers. He built newspapers, schools, churches, a shipping company, printing operations, food and clothing stores. In 1919, he launched the Black Star Shipping Lines. His program was one of Black self-determination and independence and set the theme for all Black development today. He died in London, England on June 10, 1940.

Fannie Lou Hamer was born October 6, 1917 in the Mississippi Delta. Inspired by the fighting spirit of her mother, Fannie Lou Hamer became widely known as the "Spirit" of the Civil Rights movement. In the early 1960's a Black man or woman could lose their life trying to register to vote in some towns in Mississippi. But even at the risk of her life, Fannie Lou Hamer registered to vote. Because she encouraged others to do so, Fannie Lou Hamer was evicted from the farm where she lived and her husband was fired. Although neither her husband nor Fannie Lou could find work, they continued to organize people to register to vote. She helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party which went to the 1964 Democratic National Convention and challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation. Because of these efforts an integrated delegation was eventually seated in 1968. Fannie Lou Hamer also organized cooperatives to fight hunger and joblessness. The cooperative movement allowed Blacks to leave the plantations where they were sharecroppers and set up their own farms in a cooperative manner where they profited from the farms together.

Matthew Henson belongs to that hardy race of adventurers which from man's earliest history paved the way for civilization by adding to it knowledge that was hitherto unattainable. Henson's feat in reaching the North Pole holds a high place in the saga of these adventurers. He played a leading part in accomplishing what some of the finest and bravest men had been striving for more than 2,000 years. Henson was born of poor parents in Charles County, Maryland. As a lad, he showed the stuff of which he was made by shipping as a cabin boy on a ship bound for China. On the next voyage, however, he sailed as an able seaman, a grade usually reached only after four year's apprentice. At twenty-one he attracted the attention of Robert E. Peary, then a naval lieutenant, who engaged him as his personal attendant. In 1891, when Peary started on his polar explorations, Henson went with him and had his first taste of the ice. It was not however, until eighteen years later that the Pole was to be reached. At last, on April 6, 1909, the party made camp. All felt sure from the distance they had covered that they had reached the Pole. Peary completely worn out, went to sleep. Henson walked around outside to look things over. Later, when measurements were taken, it was discovered that Henson, during his walk had been the first mortal to walk on the top of the world. "As I stood at the top of the world," says Henson, and "thought of the hundreds of men who had lost their lives in the effort to reach it, I felt profoundly grateful that I, as the personal attendant of the commander, had the honor of representing my race in the historic achievement."

As a precursor, participant, and historian of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson had as much to do with the rise of that cultural movement as any one person.. Indeed, he was the epitome of the classic Renaissance man himself--poet, composer, author, government official, teacher, and influential civil rights activist.

Johnson's mother sparked his early interest in drawing, literature, and music. Consequently, Johnson, as lyricist, and his brother, Rosamond, as composer, wrote and staged musical comedies and light operas from 1901 to 1906, producing such enduring songs as "Since You Went Away" and "Lift Every Voice and Sing," now widely adopted as the African-American national anthem.. This remarkably versatile man crowned his contributions to society by becoming field secretary for the fledgling NAACP in 1916. As a social thinker, Johnson was an early advocate of Booker T. Washington's self-help philosophy. But he later supported thee NAACP's frontal attacks on segregation and discrimination, organizing the 1917 silent protest parade in New York City that condemned the massacre of African-Americans in east St. Louis, and fighting for passage of the 1921 Dyer Anti-Lynching bill, during 144 years of NAACP service.. After becoming the first African-American man to be admitted to the bar (in 1897) too practice law in Jacksonville, Florida, he moved to New York City to pursue a theatrical career. Campaigning for Teddy Roosevelt's successful presidential bid in 19044 earned Johnson an appointment as U.S. Consul to Venezuela (1906-8) and Nicaragua (1909-12). In 1913 he returned to New York and plunged into cultural life there by writing God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse and The Book of American Negro Poetry. Johnson was a literature instructor at Fisk University in Tennessee when he died in an automobile crash in 1938.

Born in 1899 in Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. Percy Julian was one of the most famous Black scientists. Just as George Washington Carver demonstrated what could be done with the ordinary peanut, Dr. Julian took the soybean, which was until this time just another bean, and extracted from it an ingredient to relieve inflammatory arthritis. Until the late thirties Europe had a monopoly on the production of sterol, the basis of Dr. Julian's research. These sterol were extracted from the bile of animals at a cost of several hundreds of dollars a gram. Substituting sterol from the oil of soybean, Dr. Julian reduced the cost of sterol to less than twenty cents a gram, thus making cortisone, a sterol derivative, available to the needy at a reasonable cost. In 1954 he founded Julian Laboratory, Inc. With research centers in Chicago, Mexico City, and Guatemala, where he successfully developed synthetic cortisone. Before his death of liver cancer, Dr. Julian found a way to mass produce the drug physostigmine, used to treat glaucoma, and perfected the mass production of sex hormones which led the way to birth control pills. Dr. Julian died in 1975.

In at least one branch of industry, America owes its supremacy to an African American, Jan Ernest Matzeliger. A pioneer in the art of shoemaking, he enriched America and other nations by billions of dollars, made a dozen or more millionaires, created work for hundreds of thousands, and contributed enormously to what is regarded as one of the distinct features of civilization, namely, the wearing of shoes. With no other capital but his meager wages, he was forced to make use of such material as he could get hold of. He used mainly pieces of wood and old cigar and packing boxes. For six months he toiled strenuously until he had constructed a model which though crude, gave him confidence that he was on the road to success. Four years later he perfected a machine that would work. He was offered $1,500 for his invention of pleating the leather around the toe, which sum he refused. Greatly encouraged by the widespread interest his model created, he started to build a better one. With his new model it was easy for him to convince practical men that his invention would work successfully. A company was formed, consisting of himself, those who had advanced him money from time to time, and some others with large capital. With this new invention, the United Shoe Machinery Company rapidly drove competitors out of the shoe business until, a few years later, it controlled 98 percent of the shoe machine business. A tremendous expansion in the shoe industry followed. Shoe stocks proved a gold mine for investors. Earnings increased more than 350 percent and the price of footwear decreased. Matzeliger died in obscurity in 1889.

World record-holder Jesse Owens had one qualifying jump left at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. He had fouled on four of his first five tries. And he was angry because Nazi ruler Adolf Hitler, with his misguided notions of Aryan supremacy, had just delivered an insult by departing from the stadium as Owens began his jumps. Suddenly, quietly, his chief rival, German long jumper Luz Long, said to Owens, "...remeasure your steps... take off six inches behind the foul board." Thus was an unlikely friendship born between an African-American and a German. And thus was Jesse Owens inspired to capture an unprecedented four Olympic gold medals with record performances in the long jump, the 100- and 200-meter dashes, and the 400-meter relay. Positive experiences such as the Olympic Games revelation by Luz, seemed to balance the racial-prejudice negatives in Jesse Owens' life as an African American, leading too his moderate ideology and his admiration of the principles and practices of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Owens parlayed his international track-star reputation into jobs helping his people--such as national director of physical education for African-Americans with the Office of Civilian Defense (1940-42), which he called"the most gratifying work I've ever done."" But for all his desire to help others, Jesse Owens was largely a self-made man. A frail,, sickly child, he developed into a strong runner, winning national high school titles inn three events. Dozens of colleges pursued Owens, but he chose to go to Ohio State,, where he had to work his way through school. Owens stunned the nation in 1935 when he set three world records and equaled another in one day, running a 20.3-second 220-yard dash, 22.6 in the 220-yard low hurdles, a record-tying 9.4-second 100 yard dash, and long-jumping 26'-8-1/4... a mark that was not surpassed for 25 years.. And amid all his deserved adulation, Jesse Owens maintained his perspective. "Life,"" he said, "is the real Olympics."

Raised in abolitionist traditions by his minister father, A. Philip Randolph mirrored those beliefs for more than 60 years as a champion of equal rights. He came to national prominence by organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and achieved the first union contract signed by a white employer and an African American labor leader (in 1937). In 1941 he conceived a march on Washington, DC, to protest exclusion of African American workers from defense jobs. Faced with the public relations threat of 100,000 marchers, President Franklin Roosevelt established the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee. Randolph founded the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, which in 1948 pressured President Harry Truman into ending segregation in the armed forces. Although in later years he became less militant, Randolph was a dedicated socialist from his college days in New York. His lifelong belief in unionism and integration flowed from that philosophy, and he went into action in 1917 by co-founding The Messenger, a weekly magazine of African-American protest, and lecturing across the country. For his outspoken leadership, Randolph's opponents characterized him as "the most dangerous Negro in America" because of his proven power to create change. He was still the acknowledged patriarch into the early 1970s and into his 80s, after his key role in organizing the historic, 250,000 strong March on Washington in 1963.

Paul Robeson was one of the most gifted men in the history of the world. He was an athlete, actor, author, attorney, a scholar and concert singer. Born in Princeton, New Jersey on April 9, 1898, Paul Robeson showed that he was a man of many talents. He gave 296 performances as Othello on Broadway. He was subsequently recognized as an internationally famous singer and performed on concert stages throughout the world. Robeson spoke and performed in over twenty languages and dialects, and became a spokesman throughout the world against exploitation, injustice, and racism. His attacks on injustice and racism in the United States became a severe international embarrassment to the United States government. In 1950, Robeson's passport was revoked by the U.S. State Department, and President Truman signed an executive order forbidding Mr. Robeson to leave the United States under penalty of five years in prison and a $500 fine. In 1958 Robeson left the United States for England and did not return until 1963. Throughout his lifetime he fought against all forms of racism and oppression perpetuated on Blacks in the United States. He died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 23, 1976.

Born Isabella in 1797 in Ulster County, New York, she ran away from slavery in 1843 and changed her name to Sojourner Truth. At a time when oratory was fine art, Sojourner Truth, through her strong character and acid intelligence, was among the best and most famous anti-slavery speakers of her day. Her deep, bass voice, her fierce intelligence, sense of drama, and the utter sincerity of her speeches quickly spread her fame throughout the North and astounded the unbelieving South. Frequently, efforts were made to silence her. She was beaten and stoned, but nothing could stop her. Her speeches touched the hearts of many and led to the strengthening of the abolitionist movement in the United States. One of her most famous lines was delivered in response to a man who questioned her womanhood. Recounting the trials and tribulations that the slave woman suffered and speaking as a mother of children, Sojourner Truth asked, "Ain't I a woman!" In October, 1864 she addressed an audience with President Abraham Lincoln at the White House. She died on November 23, 1883 at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Born in 1821 in Dorchester County, Maryland, one of eleven children, Harriett Tubman escaped from slavery in 1849 and joined the abolitionist movement. She became a conductor of the "underground railroad," and was frequently referred to as "Moses" of ancient times. The underground railroad was neither a railroad nor underground, but a system for helping slaves to escape. Strong, brave as a lion, cunning as a fox was Harriett Tubman, who made at least nineteen journeys into the deep South and led over three hundred slaves to freedom. Although she could not read or write, Harriett Tubman was one of the leading conductors of the underground railroad. During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman served both as a nurse and a spy for the Union Army. When she died on March 10, 1913 in Auburn, New York, Harriett Tubman was buried with full military honors.

Courageous and outspoken, Ida B. Wells has been equaled by few Americans in her fiery denunciation of discrimination, exploitation, and brutality. At a time when to do so was literally life-threatening, this committed crusader and journalist attacked social wrongs on all fronts, conducted anti-lynching campaigns,, investigated race riots and exposed the oppressive living conditions off African-Americans.. Orphaned at age 14, Wells first became a teacher. She lost her job and found her calling in Memphis when she became involved in a lawsuit after refusing to give up her seat in a railroad car designed for "whites only"--more than 60 years before Rosa Parks ignited the modern Civil Rights Movement with a similar gesture.. After purchasing an interest in the Free Speech, a Memphis weekly, Wells had her press and office demolished by a mob of angry whites, when she published the details of the lynching of three African-American grocers by their white competitors. Fleeing to New York, she began anti-lynching lecture tours and published Southern Horrors and The Red Record, the first statistical study of lynching, which won her an international reputation.. In 1893, Wells attended the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where she joined Frederick Douglass and other leaders in condemning the Exposition for failing to honor the contributions of African-Americans. Settling in Chicago in 1895, she continued too contribute to newspapers and periodicals; founded a settlement house to assist migrant African-Americans in finding jobs and homes; helped organize the NAACP, and devoted much of her later years to promoting voting rights for women through marches and other lobbying activities. Usually determined to move faster and farther than her activist colleagues, Wells often found herself on the fringes of movements for equality for African-Americans and women. But she noted she simply had a vision of a society in which "human beings.... pay tribute to what they believe one possesses in the way of qualities of mind and heart,, rather than to the color of the skin."

Born on April 23, 1856 in Columbus, Ohio, Granville Woods was the individual most responsible for modernizing the railroad. During his lifetime, Granville T. Woods earned over thirty-five patents ranging from a steam boiler furnace in 1884, an incubator in 1900, to the automatic airbrake in 1902. Many of his electrical inventions were sold to the American Bell Telephone Company and the General Electric Company. The Westinghouse Air-break Company eventually obtained his Air-break patent. His most noteworthy device in the area of electric railway travel was his induction telegraph, a system of communication for moving trains. Because of the many accidents and collisions which were occurring on the railways, Granville T. Woods invented his synchronous multiple railway telegraph for the purpose of averting accidents by keeping each train informed of the whereabouts of the one immediately ahead of it or following it, in communicating with stations from moving trains, and in promoting general social and commercial intercourse. The inventions of Granville T. Woods revolutionized the railway industry. He died on January 30, 1910 in Harlem Hospital, New York City.

Carter Godwin Woodson, the father of "Black History," was born on December 19, 1875 in New Canton, Virginia. Despite the pioneering efforts of many Black writers and scholars, the systematic treatment of Black history was not achieved until 1915 when Carter G. Woodson, an ex-coal miner and school teacher, organized the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Over the years, the still thriving association has published many important volumes in the field of Black history. In 1916, Dr. Woodson started The Journal of Negro History, a scholarly repository of research which is used by students of history throughout the world. He initiated the observance of Black History Week in 1926. Eleven years later the association began the publication of The Negro History Bulletin, a more popular vehicle for disseminating the findings for scholars and researchers. "Dr. Woodson firmly believed that the achievements of Blacks properly set forth will crown him as a factor in the early human progress and a maker of modern civilization." His life and work are eloquent testimonies to that belief. He died on April 13, 1950.

Born in 1753 in Senegal, West Africa but sold into slavery at eight year old, Phillis Wheatley became the most famous female poet of the eighteenth century. At age thirteen years old and while still in slavery, Phillis Wheatley's poems were being circulated throughout England. In 1770 her first poem was published in London entitled Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral. In 1772, she was freed by her master, Mrs. S. Wheatley, and went to England. On both sides of the Atlantic her poems won widespread admiration. In 1776, she wrote a poem entitled "To His Excellency General Washington." After he read it, George Washington invited her to visit him at Cambridge. The abolitionists pointed to her skill as a poet as proof that Blacks were not inferior and should be freed. She died on December 5, 1784 in Boston, Massachusetts.

A civil rights leader who urged African Americans to work within the system, Whitney Moore Young, as executive director of the National Urban League from 1961 to 1971, played a leading role in persuading America's corporate elite to provide better opportunities for African Americans. Young worked with President Lyndon Johnson on civil rights and anti-poverty programs during the 1960s, while calling for a "domestic Marshall Plan" (similar to U.S. aid to revive Europe after World War II). He was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington and in 1964 he organized the Community Action Assembly to fight poverty in African-American communities. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1969. Two years later at the age of 49, Young drowned in Lagos, Nigeria while participating in an annual African-American dialogue on relations between the two continents.

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