97 Fun Facts About African American History

Who refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking a Civil Rights milestone?

Rosa Parks later insisted she had not been physically tired that day: 'the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.' Her arrest on December 1, 1955, set off the Montgomery bus boycott.

Which 1896 Supreme Court case established the 'separate but equal' precedent?

Plessy v. Ferguson began as a planned test case: Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, deliberately boarded a whites-only train car in 1892 so that he would be arrested.

Who authored the influential autobiography 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'?

Maya Angelou's 1969 memoir of her childhood made her name; in 1993 she recited her poem 'On the Pulse of Morning' at Bill Clinton's presidential inauguration.

Which 1863 Lincoln document declared enslaved people in rebelling states free?

The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the ten states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, so it freed no one in the loyal border states.

Who was the first African American to play Major League Baseball in the modern era?

Jackie Robinson debuted at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, breaking the modern color barrier; MLB retired his number 42 across every team in 1997.

Which African American scientist developed hundreds of uses for the peanut and sweet potato?

George Washington Carver's 1921 testimony to Congress in support of a tariff on imported peanuts made him nationally famous, and the tariff passed the following year.

At which August 1963 event did Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his 'I Have a Dream' speech?

The March on Washington drew about 250,000 people; near the end of his speech King left his prepared text and improvised the 'dream' passage.

Who was the first African American Supreme Court Justice?

Thurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education, and served as a Justice from 1967 to 1991.

Which amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States?

The 13th Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865, abolished slavery nationwide but carved out an exception for involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.

Which 1920s African American cultural movement produced Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay?

The Harlem Renaissance was the artistic flowering of the wider New Negro movement, and it lost much of its vitality when the Great Depression set in.

Which president signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law?

Lyndon B. Johnson signed it at the White House on July 2, 1964; Kennedy had proposed the bill a year earlier, and it survived a long Senate filibuster led by Georgia's Richard Russell.

Which 1961 campaign challenged segregated interstate travel and saw a Greyhound bus firebombed outside Anniston, Alabama?

The Freedom Rides pushed the Kennedy administration to act: the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation in interstate bus terminals from November 1, 1961.

Who was the first African American woman to travel into space?

Mae C. Jemison flew aboard Endeavour in September 1992 on STS-47, a joint US-Japan Spacelab mission, where she ran experiments on space motion sickness and bone cells.

Who delivered the 'Ain't I a Woman?' speech in Ohio in 1851?

Sojourner Truth's famous refrain comes from Frances Gage's version, published twelve years later in 1863; the transcript printed weeks after the speech reads quite differently.

The Stono Rebellion of 1739, the largest slave uprising in Britain's mainland colonies, began in which colony?

South Carolina's rebels marched south toward Spanish St. Augustine, where fugitives had been promised freedom; after the revolt was crushed, the colony passed a harsher slave code, the Negro Act.

Which group of African American pilots famously flew in World War II despite segregation?

The Tuskegee Airmen painted the tails of their fighters red, earning the nickname Red Tails; the long-told claim that they never lost a bomber they escorted was a myth, as later research counted at least 25 shot down.

Which Chief Justice, once California's governor, wrote the unanimous 1954 ruling against school segregation?

Earl Warren delivered the 9-0 opinion in his first term on the Court; it set no timetable, and a second ruling a year later asked only for 'all deliberate speed'.

Which scholar and author of The Souls of Black Folk helped found the NAACP and edited its magazine, The Crisis?

W. E. B. Du Bois edited The Crisis from 1910 until 1934, when he resigned after a rift with NAACP leaders over his changing stance on segregation.

Which holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas were told they were free?

Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when General Gordon Granger's order reached Galveston; it became a federal holiday in 2021 after years of campaigning by activist Opal Lee.

In 1968, who became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress?

Shirley Chisholm won her Brooklyn seat in 1968 with the slogan 'Unbought and unbossed', and four years later ran for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Guinness names which hair-care entrepreneur as America's first self-made woman millionaire?

Guinness World Records lists Madam C. J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove, as America's first self-made woman millionaire; she built her fortune on hair-care products for Black women and funded NAACP anti-lynching work.

Hiram Revels, the first African American in Congress, was elected to the Senate from which state?

Hiram Revels was elected by the Mississippi legislature in January 1870 to a Senate seat left empty since 1861; on leaving in 1871 he became president of the college that is now Alcorn State University.

Inventor Garrett Morgan sold the rights to which 1923 invention to General Electric for $40,000?

Garrett Morgan patented his three-position traffic signal in 1923 after seeing a car collide with a horse-drawn carriage; its third position stopped traffic in every direction, and he sold the rights to General Electric.

In which country did Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman pilot, earn her licence?

Bessie Coleman earned her licence in France in June 1921 from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale after training at the Caudron brothers' school at Le Crotoy, because American flight schools refused her.

The 1960 Greensboro sit-ins began at the lunch counter of which store chain?

Four North Carolina A&T students sat down at the Greensboro Woolworth's lunch counter on February 1, 1960; the building is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which preserves part of the counter.

The Tulsa neighborhood destroyed in the 1921 race massacre, nicknamed 'Black Wall Street', was called what?

Greenwood, Tulsa's prosperous Black district, was burned by white mobs over May 31 and June 1, 1921, leaving about 10,000 residents homeless; the massacre was barely mentioned in history books for decades.

Frederick Douglass began publishing which anti-slavery newspaper in Rochester, New York, in 1847?

Douglass launched The North Star in Rochester on December 3, 1847, under the motto 'Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color', soon after supporters in Britain had bought his freedom.

Nat Turner led a bloody slave rebellion in August 1831 in which state?

Virginia's Southampton County was the scene: Turner's rebels killed dozens of white people, and Southern legislatures answered with new laws banning the education and assembly of enslaved people.

Carl Stokes became the first Black mayor of which major US city in 1967?

Carl Stokes won Cleveland's mayoral race in November 1967 with 50.5 percent of the vote, defeating Seth Taft, the grandson of President William Howard Taft.

Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar for her role in which 1939 film?

Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind at the February 1940 ceremony, where she was seated at a segregated table apart from the film's white cast.

Berry Gordy Jr. founded Motown Records in 1959 in which city?

Motown's name is short for Motor Town, a nod to Detroit's car industry; Berry Gordy Jr. started the label there in January 1959.

On Selma's 'Bloody Sunday' in March 1965, troopers attacked marchers after they crossed which structure?

About 600 marchers were beaten with batons and tear-gassed after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965; the outcry helped push the Voting Rights Act through Congress that August.

Which president intervened so the Little Rock Nine could attend Central High School in 1957?

Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to escort the nine students in, and put the Arkansas National Guard, which Governor Orval Faubus had used to keep them out, under federal command.

Who became the first African American in space, flying aboard Challenger on mission STS-8 in 1983?

Guion Bluford, an Air Force pilot who had flown 144 combat missions in Vietnam, rode Challenger into orbit on August 30, 1983, and went on to fly four shuttle missions in all.

Which NASA mathematician did an astronaut insist check the computer's numbers before his 1962 orbital flight?

Katherine Johnson reran the equations by hand at John Glenn's request; as she recalled him saying, 'If she says they're good, then I'm ready to go.'

Which Underground Railroad conductor was nicknamed 'Moses' and later said she 'never lost a passenger'?

Harriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross in Maryland, went back south again and again to guide relatives and friends to freedom, and during the Civil War served the Union Army as a scout and spy.

In which city did Jesse Owens win four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics?

Berlin's 1936 Games saw Owens win the 100 m, 200 m, long jump and 4x100 m relay; the tale that Hitler singled him out for a snub is shaky, since Hitler had by then stopped publicly congratulating any athletes.

Which 1857 Supreme Court ruling held that people of African descent could not be US citizens?

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger Taney's 7–2 opinion held that Black people could not be citizens and struck down the Missouri Compromise; it is widely regarded as the Court's worst decision.

Which activist created the holiday Kwanzaa in 1966?

Maulana Karenga took the name from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, 'first fruits', and added an extra 'a' so that the word would have seven letters.

Which surgeon pioneered large-scale blood banks in WWII and criticised the segregation of donated blood as unscientific?

Charles R. Drew was medical director of the Blood for Britain plasma project and introduced mobile donation stations, later known as bloodmobiles.

Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for which novel?

Beloved is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1856 and killed her young daughter rather than see her returned to it.

Who is traditionally regarded as the first person killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre?

Crispus Attucks is generally thought to have been of African and Native American descent and may have escaped slavery; he probably worked on whaling ships before he fell in Boston.

Who was the first African American to win a Nobel Prize, taking the Peace Prize in 1950?

Ralph Bunche took over as UN mediator in Palestine when Count Folke Bernadotte was assassinated in 1948, then negotiated the 1949 armistices between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

Which tennis player became the first Black athlete to win a Grand Slam event, at the 1956 French Open?

Althea Gibson was admitted to the US Nationals only in 1950, after former champion Alice Marble lobbied publicly for her; she later became the first Black woman on the professional golf tour.

Booker T. Washington became the first leader of which Alabama school in 1881?

Tuskegee Institute opened in 1881 with very little money, in two small converted buildings; twenty years later Booker T. Washington dined with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.

What do historians call the 20th-century exodus of six million Black Americans from the South to northern and western cities?

The Great Migration redrew the map of Black America: around 1900 about 90 percent lived in the South, and by 1970 nearly half lived outside it.

Where was Emmett Till, the 14-year-old murdered in Mississippi in 1955, born and raised?

His mother Mamie insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago, which drew tens of thousands and galvanized the civil rights movement.

Which journalist's 1890s pamphlets, including 'Southern Horrors', documented lynching across the South?

Ida B. Wells began investigating lynchings in 1892 after a friend, Memphis grocer Tom Moss, and two of his associates were murdered by a mob, and she risked her own life reporting across the South.

Phillis Wheatley crossed the Atlantic in 1773, when her poems were published in which city?

London saw Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral into print in September 1773; weeks later Wheatley wrote that her master had freed her 'at the desire of my friends in England'.

Before politics, Barack Obama was elected the first Black president of which student-run law journal in 1990?

Harvard Law Review's choice of Obama in 1990 made national headlines; five years later he published his memoir, Dreams from My Father.

The Montgomery bus boycott ended in December 1956 when which Supreme Court ruling took effect?

Browder v. Gayle was filed in federal court by lawyer Fred Gray on behalf of four Black women mistreated on city buses; once the Supreme Court's order arrived, the 381-day boycott ended on December 20, 1956.

Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 at which Manhattan venue?

Malcolm X was shot at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, as he was about to address a meeting; two of the three men convicted of his murder were exonerated in 2021.

Who co-founded the Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale in October 1966?

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale had met as students at Oakland's Merritt College; they founded the party in October 1966, at first to patrol Black neighborhoods and monitor the police.

Which Black regiment spearheaded the July 1863 assault on Fort Wagner, retold in the film Glory?

The 54th Massachusetts Infantry lost its colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, in the assault; Sergeant William Carney, wounded several times, carried the US flag back and said it 'never touched the ground'.

Denmark Vesey was hanged in 1822 for planning a slave revolt in which city?

Charleston's Denmark Vesey was a free carpenter who had bought his own freedom with a lottery prize; he was hanged with dozens of other men accused in the plot.

Which former president argued for the Amistad captives before the Supreme Court in 1841?

John Quincy Adams, by then a congressman, argued that the Africans were free people, not property; the Court agreed, and the survivors were able to sail home to West Africa.

Which enslaved pilot sailed a Confederate steamer to the Union blockade in 1862 and later sat in Congress?

Robert Smalls put on the captain's hat and gave the correct signals to steam the Planter past the harbor forts, delivering the ship, his crew and their families to the Union fleet.

Which president's 1948 executive order abolished racial discrimination in the US armed forces?

Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in July 1948, two years after Black veteran Isaac Woodard, still in uniform, was beaten and blinded by police, an attack that helped move him to act.

Doris Miller, a mess attendant at Pearl Harbor, became the first Black recipient of which medal?

The Navy Cross was pinned on Doris Miller by Admiral Chester Nimitz in May 1942 for manning an anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to use; he died in 1943 when the carrier Liscome Bay was torpedoed.

Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted in 1994 of murdering which NAACP field secretary?

Medgar Evers was shot in his own driveway in June 1963, hours after President Kennedy's televised address on civil rights; two trials in the 1960s ended in hung juries before the 1994 conviction.

Which activist's tombstone reads 'I am sick and tired of being sick and tired'?

Fannie Lou Hamer's televised testimony at the 1964 Democratic convention described the beatings she endured for trying to register to vote; she later co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus.

The 1963 Klan bombing that killed four girls in Birmingham, Alabama, targeted which congregation?

The 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed on September 15, 1963, and justice came slowly: Robert Chambliss was convicted only in 1977, and two other Klansmen in 2001 and 2002.

Zora Neale Hurston set many of her stories in Eatonville, her childhood hometown in which state?

Florida's Eatonville was home from the age of three, but Hurston was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama; her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, appeared in 1937.

Ralph Ellison's novel 'Invisible Man' won which prize in 1953?

Invisible Man won the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction; Ellison worked on a second novel for the rest of his life and left it unfinished when he died in 1994.

Who wrote 'A Raisin in the Sun', the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway?

Lorraine Hansberry drew on her own childhood: her family moved into a white neighborhood in defiance of a restrictive covenant, a fight that went all the way to the US Supreme Court.

Sidney Poitier won his history-making Best Actor Oscar for which 1963 film?

Lilies of the Field, in which he helps a group of nuns build a chapel, won Poitier the Oscar; no Black actor won Best Actor again until Denzel Washington, 38 years later, on the night Poitier took an honorary award.

Barred from Constitution Hall by the DAR, Marian Anderson sang on Easter Sunday 1939 at which site?

Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution over the snub, and the open-air concert on the Lincoln Memorial steps on April 9, 1939, drew about 75,000 people.

Joe Louis's 1938 rematch, framed as a blow against Nazi Germany, was against which boxer?

Max Schmeling was knocked out in the first round; though the bout was sold as democracy against Nazism, Schmeling himself never joined the Nazi Party.

Jack Johnson won the heavyweight title in 1908 by beating Tommy Burns in which city?

Sydney staged the fight on December 26, 1908, after years in which racial discrimination had kept Johnson from a title shot; he held the crown until Jess Willard beat him in Havana in 1915.

In 1975 Arthur Ashe became the first Black man to win the singles title at which tournament?

Wimbledon's 1975 final was an upset: Ashe, seeded sixth, beat top seed and heavy favourite Jimmy Connors, adding to his 1968 US Open and 1970 Australian Open titles.

Where did Rube Foster and other Black team owners found the Negro National League at a YMCA meeting in 1920?

Kansas City hosted the owners' meeting; Foster ran the baseball league until his health broke down, and it folded in 1931, the year after his death.

Which Negro leagues star became the majors' oldest rookie at 42 in 1948?

Satchel Paige went 6-1 for the Indians that summer and helped them win the World Series, after more than twenty years of pitching in the Negro leagues.

Almanac author Benjamin Banneker helped Andrew Ellicott survey the original borders of what?

The District of Columbia survey of 1791 had Banneker assisting Ellicott, by some accounts with the astronomical observations; that same year he sent Thomas Jefferson his almanac with a letter challenging him over slavery.

Lewis Latimer, who drafted Bell's telephone patent drawings, improved the manufacture of what?

Latimer's 1882 patent covered a better way to make carbon filaments for light bulbs, which helped make electric light affordable; he also patented a toilet for railroad cars and a forerunner of the air conditioner.

Jan Matzeliger's 1883 patent automated the 'lasting' step in making what?

Shoes had their uppers shaped and attached by skilled hand lasters until Matzeliger's machine, patented in 1883, took over the work; he died only six years later, aged 36.

In 1893 Daniel Hale Williams performed pioneering surgery to repair a wound to which body part?

The pericardium is the sac around the heart; Williams stitched a wound in it in July 1893, working without antibiotics or blood transfusions, and the patient recovered.

Who in 1864 became the first African American woman to earn a US medical degree?

Rebecca Lee Crumpler moved to Richmond after the Civil War to care for people newly freed from slavery, and in 1883 published A Book of Medical Discourses.

Congress chartered which historically Black school in Washington, D.C., in March 1867?

Howard University is named for General Oliver Otis Howard, who helped found it while heading the Freedmen's Bureau, the federal agency set up to aid formerly enslaved people.

Which veteran organizer called the Easter 1960 student conference that founded SNCC?

Ella Baker, then running the SCLC's office, gathered the sit-in students at Shaw University, her old college, and urged them to build 'group-centered' leadership rather than follow one famous leader.

Six-year-old Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz Elementary in 1960 in which city?

Federal marshals escorted Ruby Bridges into New Orleans's William Frantz Elementary on November 14, 1960, a scene Norman Rockwell later painted; white parents pulled their children out, and she was taught alone for a year.

The immortal HeLa cell line came from which Johns Hopkins patient in 1951?

Henrietta Lacks's tumor cells were taken without her knowledge and became the first immortal human cell line; for years her identity was hidden behind made-up names such as Helen Lane.

From 1932 to 1972 the Public Health Service watched hundreds of Black men go untreated for which disease?

Syphilis went untreated in hundreds of Black men for forty years; the study's exposure in 1972 led Congress to pass the 1974 National Research Act, which set rules to protect people in medical studies.

Who wrote the words of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing', first recited by 500 schoolchildren in 1900?

James Weldon Johnson wrote the words for a Lincoln's birthday celebration in Jacksonville in 1900 and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson set them to music; the NAACP later adopted it, and it is often called the Black national anthem.

Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week in 1926 during which month?

February was chosen because it holds the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; the week grew into Black History Month, which President Ford recognized in 1976.

Which constitutional amendment, ratified in 1870, barred denying the vote on account of race?

The 15th Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870, but by the 1890s poll taxes, literacy tests and violence had undone much of it across the South, and real enforcement took nearly another century.

Which blackface stage character did white performer Thomas D. Rice make famous with a song-and-dance act around 1830?

Jim Crow, Rice's caricature, was copied so widely that by 1838 the name had become a slur for Black Americans, and it later attached itself to the South's segregation laws.

Who called the 1995 Million Man March on the National Mall?

Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, called the march for October 16, 1995; the Park Service counted about 400,000 marchers, while other estimates ran to more than twice that.

Who in June 2022 became the first Black woman to sit on the US Supreme Court?

Ketanji Brown Jackson took her seat on June 30, 2022, the day Stephen Breyer, the justice she had once clerked for, retired; earlier in her career she had worked as a federal public defender.

Who was the first Black American to serve as US Secretary of State, from 2001 to 2005?

Colin Powell, a four-star general, had earlier been the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, overseeing Operation Desert Storm in 1991; Condoleezza Rice followed him as secretary of state.

Edward Brooke, the first Black senator elected by popular vote (1966), represented which state?

A Republican, Brooke had been Massachusetts attorney general since 1963 and served two Senate terms for the state, from 1967 to 1979.

Who in 1989 became the first African American ever elected governor of a US state?

Douglas Wilder, the grandson of enslaved people, won by less than half a percentage point after late polls had shown him comfortably ahead.

Marcus Garvey's UNIA launched which shipping company in 1919 to link the Americas and Africa?

Black Star Line was meant to carry passengers and goods between Black communities and Africa, but it failed within three years; Garvey was convicted of mail fraud over it and deported to Jamaica in 1927.

Which 15-year-old was arrested in Montgomery in March 1955 for keeping her bus seat?

Claudette Colvin was arrested nine months before the case that launched the boycott; local leaders decided against building their challenge around a teenager, but she became a plaintiff in the suit that ended bus segregation.

Alice Coachman, the first Black woman to win Olympic gold (1948), competed in which event?

Coachman won the high jump at the 1948 Games by clearing 1.68 m on her first attempt, a height Britain's Dorothy Tyler matched only on her second; she was the only American woman to win athletics gold that year.

Hip-hop's 'birth' is dated to a 1973 party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in which New York borough?

At his sister Cindy Campbell's August 1973 back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc stretched drum breaks by switching between two copies of the same record.

The 'Board of Education' in Brown versus Board of Education ran the public schools of which city?

Topeka's school board had turned away the children of 13 Black parents, lead plaintiff Oliver Brown among them, from white schools; the Supreme Court heard the case bundled with four others.

Gordon Parks, first Black director of a major-studio feature, made which 1971 detective hit?

Richard Roundtree's John Shaft spawned a series of films later labeled blaxploitation. Parks was also a celebrated Life magazine photographer.