225 Fun Facts About Black History

Who delivered the 'I Have a Dream' speech in August 1963?

Martin Luther King Jr. began by reading from his typescript, then set it aside: the 'dream' passage was improvised, built on a refrain he had used in earlier speeches.

Who refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, sparking a major boycott?

Rosa Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955; the boycott that followed lasted more than a year and ended only when the Supreme Court ruled Montgomery's segregated buses unconstitutional.

Which state did Barack Obama represent in the US Senate before becoming the first African American president?

Illinois: Obama lost a 2000 primary there for a seat in the US House, then won election to the US Senate from the state four years later.

What was the racial segregation system enforced by statute in the American South called?

Jim Crow laws probably took their name from 'Jump Jim Crow', a song-and-dance routine that the white performer Thomas D. Rice made famous in blackface from about 1830.

Which abolitionist's 1845 Narrative was followed by My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855, the second of his three autobiographies?

Frederick Douglass, whose Narrative was a bestseller that exposed him as a fugitive, so he left for Britain until supporters bought his freedom. Life and Times, the third book, came in 1881.

What landmark 1954 Supreme Court case declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional?

Brown v. Board of Education was decided 9-0: the new Chief Justice, Earl Warren, brought every justice round to a single opinion, which he read out himself on 17 May 1954.

Which Underground Railroad conductor is known as the 'Moses of her people'?

Harriet Tubman escaped in 1849 and went back to Maryland about 13 times to guide family and friends north; in 1863 she helped lead a Union raid on the Combahee River that freed more than 700 people.

Ava DuVernay's 2016 documentary 13th is named for the constitutional amendment that did what in 1865?

Abolished slavery, 'except as a punishment for crime': DuVernay's film argues that this exception fed convict leasing after the Civil War and, in time, mass incarceration.

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

Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, and every major league team celebrates Jackie Robinson Day on that date each season.

What 1920s New York movement celebrated African American culture, art and literature?

The Harlem Renaissance was known at the time as the 'New Negro Movement', after a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke; its most productive years ended with the Great Depression.

Which civil rights leader co-founded the NAACP in 1909?

W.E.B. Du Bois founded and edited the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, from 1910 until 1934, when he resigned after a rift with its leaders over his stance on segregation.

Who wrote the novel 'Beloved,' which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988?

Toni Morrison based Beloved on Margaret Garner, who escaped from a Kentucky plantation in 1856 and killed her daughter rather than see her taken back into slavery.

Which Tuskegee Institute scientist became famous for developing hundreds of products from peanuts?

George Washington Carver wanted poor farmers to grow peanuts and sweet potatoes on soil worn out by cotton; despite the legend, he did not invent peanut butter.

Which Maya Angelou autobiography, the first of seven, covers her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, takes its title from a line in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem 'Sympathy'.

Which 'Hidden Figures' mathematician did John Glenn ask to check the computer's numbers before his 1962 orbital flight?

Katherine Johnson re-ran the electronic computer's orbital equations by hand at Glenn's request; 'If she says they're good,' she recalled him saying, 'then I'm ready to go.'

What is the name for about six million Black Americans leaving the South between 1910 and 1970?

The Great Migration took off during the First World War, when northern factories short of workers began hiring Black Southerners, who were also escaping harsh segregation and poor prospects at home.

Who founded the Black Panther Party in 1966?

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale met as students at Merritt College in Oakland; their party began by patrolling Black neighbourhoods to monitor the police, and later ran free breakfasts for children.

Which African American inventor designed a three-way traffic signal in 1923?

Garrett Morgan patented his three-position traffic signal in 1923 and sold the rights to General Electric; his earlier safety hood was used in the 1916 Cleveland waterworks tunnel rescue.

Whose 1955 lynching in Mississippi, at age 14, galvanised the civil rights movement after his mother insisted on an open casket?

Emmett Till's mother, Mamie, wanted the world to see what had been done to her son: tens of thousands filed past his casket, and Jet magazine published the photographs.

Who was the first African American woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress?

Halle Berry won for Monster's Ball at the 2002 ceremony; three years earlier she had starred in a television film about Dorothy Dandridge, the first Black woman nominated for the award.

The 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches helped push which federal law through Congress that same year?

The Voting Rights Act, signed by Lyndon Johnson on 6 August 1965, followed the Selma marches; after Bloody Sunday he urged Congress to pass it in a televised address on 15 March.

Medgar Evers, murdered at his home in Jackson in 1963, held which post?

Medgar Evers was the NAACP's first field secretary for Mississippi from 1954; his killer, Byron De La Beckwith, escaped two hung juries in 1964 and was finally convicted in 1994.

Which Black entrepreneur does Guinness World Records list as America's first self-made female millionaire?

Madam C.J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove to parents who had been enslaved, made her fortune by training thousands of Black women as sales agents for her hair-care products.

What did a white mob destroy in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921?

Greenwood, known as 'Black Wall Street', lost some 35 blocks to fire and nearly 10,000 people were left homeless; the massacre was then barely mentioned in history books until the late 1990s.

Who was the first African American Supreme Court Justice?

Thurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court as the NAACP's lawyer, the 1954 school-segregation case among them, before Lyndon Johnson put him on its bench in 1967.

Which composer, whose 'St. Louis Blues' came out in 1914, is known as the 'Father of the Blues'?

W.C. Handy said he first heard the blues in 1903, from a man sliding a knife along his guitar strings at a Delta railway station; he used the nickname as the title of his 1941 autobiography.

Which group did Black ministers form in 1957, after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to coordinate nonviolent protest?

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference grew out of a January 1957 meeting at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church; it went on to lead the Birmingham campaign of 1963 and the Selma marches of 1965.

Which African American poet wrote the poem 'Harlem' (also known as 'A Dream Deferred')?

Langston Hughes published 'Harlem' in 1951 in Montage of a Dream Deferred; in 1925, working as a hotel busboy, he had left three poems beside the poet Vachel Lindsay's plate, and the newspapers announced a discovery.

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

Mae Jemison flew on the shuttle Endeavour in September 1992; inspired as a girl by Nichelle Nichols's Lieutenant Uhura, she later appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

What did the Supreme Court rule in Dred Scott in 1857?

Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that Black people could not be U.S. citizens and struck down the Missouri Compromise; it is widely considered the worst decision in the Court's history.

In which city did four Black college students begin the Woolworth's lunch-counter sit-in of February 1960?

Greensboro, North Carolina: four freshmen from North Carolina A&T sat down on 1 February 1960 and were refused service; that July the store gave way, serving four of its own Black employees first.

In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to achieve what?

Election to the U.S. Congress came from Brooklyn under the slogan 'Unbought and Unbossed'; four years later Shirley Chisholm ran for the Democratic presidential nomination and won 152 delegate votes.

What genre of music originated in the African American communities of Louisiana's largest port city around 1900?

Jazz blended blues, ragtime and brass-band marches around 1900; cornetist Buddy Bolden, often called its first bandleader, left no known recordings, so nobody now knows how he sounded.

Which civil rights activist and journalist led an anti-lynching campaign in the 1890s?

Ida B. Wells began her campaign after three friends were lynched in Memphis in 1892; a white mob then destroyed her newspaper's office, and she never returned to the city.

Who led the 1831 slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia?

Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher, took a solar eclipse as his sign to strike; at least 55 white people were killed, and Southern legislatures answered with laws banning the education of enslaved people.

Which president's Executive Order 9981 began the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces in 1948?

Harry S. Truman was moved to act by attacks on returning Black veterans, among them Isaac Woodard, who was blinded by a police chief in 1946 while still in his army uniform.

Which African American inventor improved and patented a process for making light bulb carbon filaments?

Lewis Latimer worked out his carbon-filament process at a lighting company run by Hiram Maxim, a rival of Edison; in 1876 he had drawn the patent drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.

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

Plessy v. Ferguson was a planned test case: a Louisiana citizens' committee chose Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white, to board a whites-only railway car in 1892 and be arrested.

Which Jamaican-born leader founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and championed a 'Back to Africa' movement?

Marcus Garvey founded the UNIA in Jamaica in 1914 and moved to New York two years later; he launched the Black Star Line shipping company, and selling its stock brought his conviction for mail fraud.

The Niagara Movement of 1905 formed to oppose which Black leader's policy of accommodation to segregation?

Booker T. Washington had urged Black Southerners in 1895 to put economic progress before civil rights; the 29 men who met on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls demanded full civil liberties instead.

Which African American physician pioneered blood plasma preservation and organized the first large-scale blood bank?

Charles Drew ran the 'Blood for Britain' plasma drive in 1940; when the US military first barred Black donors and then ordered their blood kept separate, he attacked the policy as unscientific.

In November 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz Elementary School in which city?

New Orleans parents pulled their children out of the school, so Ruby Bridges spent the year as the only pupil of Barbara Henry, the one teacher willing to take her, with federal marshals at the door.

Which organization, founded in 1960, grew out of the lunch-counter sit-ins and sent volunteers on the Freedom Rides?

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pronounced 'snick', was formed in April 1960 at a Shaw University conference called by Ella Baker, who urged the students to stay independent of older groups.

What did Robert Smalls do in May 1862 while still enslaved?

Commandeered a Confederate ship for the Union: Smalls, the Planter's enslaved pilot, put on the captain's hat, gave the right signals at each harbour fort and steamed out to the blockade fleet.

The Port Royal Experiment, begun in the Sea Islands in 1861, involved what?

Freedmen farming land planters had fled: when the Union navy took Port Royal in 1861, about 10,000 enslaved people stayed behind, and Northern missionaries came to open schools and help them buy plots.

Which labor leader organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters?

A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925 and won its first contract from the Pullman Company in 1937; he also pushed President Roosevelt into banning racial discrimination in the defense industries.

Which 1933 Carter G. Woodson book inspired the title of Lauryn Hill's 1998 solo album?

The Mis-Education of the Negro argued that schools indoctrinated Black students instead of teaching them; Woodson himself had worked in coal mines and began high school only at 20.

Bayard Rustin was the principal organizer of which 1963 civil rights event?

The March on Washington came together in under two months under Bayard Rustin; because rivals called his homosexuality and Communist past liabilities, he held only the title of deputy director.

Which African American community in Florida was destroyed by a white mob in 1923?

Rosewood was burned to the ground in January 1923 and its Black residents fled; in 1994 Florida's legislature voted to compensate the survivors, awarding $150,000 to each of those still living.

Which singer first recorded the anti-lynching song 'Strange Fruit' in 1939?

Billie Holiday first recorded 'Strange Fruit', Abel Meeropol's protest song about lynching, for Commodore Records in April 1939 after Columbia declined to release it.

Which singer wrote the hit 'Happy Birthday' to campaign for a national holiday honouring Martin Luther King Jr.?

Stevie Wonder's song kept the campaign alive after Congress first voted the holiday down; the bill was signed in November 1983 and the day was first observed in 1986.

In which city did Black Germans begin observing Black History Month in 1990?

Berlin's first celebration was organised in 1990 by members of the Initiative of Black Germans on the American model; the events have since spread to cities across Germany.

In the United Kingdom, Black History Month is celebrated in which month?

October was chosen, its organiser Akyaaba Addai-Sebo has said, because children were fresh from the summer holidays at the start of the school year and it was the traditional harvest season in Africa.

February was picked for Black History Month partly to coincide with which two figures' birthdays?

Woodson chose the second week of February to span Abraham Lincoln's birthday (12 February) and Frederick Douglass's chosen birthday (14 February), both long marked by Black communities.

Where did Navy mess attendant Doris Miller man an anti-aircraft gun he had not been trained to operate?

Pearl Harbor: Miller fired from his stricken battleship until the ammunition ran out and helped carry wounded shipmates to safety; Admiral Nimitz later presented him with the Navy Cross.

Which Black historian wrote the 1947 survey From Slavery to Freedom?

John Hope Franklin, who published the survey in 1947, later joined the research team behind the NAACP's school-segregation case that the Supreme Court decided in 1954.

Which Jamaican celebration, declared by the government in 2008, shares February with Black History Month?

Reggae Month, declared by Jamaica's government in 2008, runs through February because Bob Marley (6 February) and Dennis Brown (1 February) were both born in the month.

Which MP, the first Black woman elected to Canada's Parliament, moved the 1995 motion recognising February as Black History Month?

Jean Augustine, who was born in Grenada, saw the House of Commons adopt her motion unanimously in December 1995; the Senate took until 2008 to add its own recognition.

Which Chicago newspaper, founded by Robert Abbott in 1905, urged Black Southerners to move north?

The Chicago Defender, founded by Robert S. Abbott in 1905, reached Southern readers through Pullman porters and travelling entertainers, who carried copies across the Mason-Dixon line, sometimes in defiance of local laws.

Which singer became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1987?

Aretha Franklin took 'Respect' from Otis Redding, who had released it two years earlier, and made her rearranged 1967 version her signature song.

Which hymn, written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900, is often called the Black national anthem?

Lift Every Voice and Sing was first sung in 1900 by a choir of 500 schoolchildren in Jacksonville, Florida, where Johnson was a school principal; his brother Rosamond composed the music.

Which Canadian, jailed in 1946 for sitting in a cinema's whites-only section, was put on the $10 note in 2018?

Viola Desmond was convicted not of breaking a colour bar but of evading one cent of tax on the dearer seat; she was granted a free pardon only in 2010, long after her death.

Which district of Britain's capital gave its name to the Caribbean street carnival first held there in 1966?

Notting Hill's first outdoor festival began as a children's street party organised by local resident Rhaune Laslett; it built on indoor Caribbean carnivals that Claudia Jones had staged in halls since 1959.

Which US President signed the 1986 resolution designating February as Black History Month?

Ronald Reagan's proclamation that February said the 'foremost purpose' of Black History Month was to make all Americans aware of the struggle for freedom and equal opportunity.

Who founded Ebony magazine in 1945?

John H. Johnson launched Ebony in 1945 as a general-interest magazine for a Black audience, and its first press run of 25,000 copies sold out completely.

Which city issued the first Black History Month proclamation in its country, in 1979?

Toronto became Canada's first municipality to proclaim Black History Month in 1979, after two founders of the Ontario Black History Society petitioned the city.

Which St. Louis-born star of 1920s Paris later smuggled secrets for the French Resistance in invisible ink on her sheet music?

Josephine Baker used her fame as cover to carry intelligence across borders; in 2021 she became the first Black woman honoured in the Panthéon in Paris.

Where were the 1968 Olympics at which sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists on the podium?

Mexico City: Smith had just won the 200 metres and Carlos the bronze; for their silent protest during the anthem, both were ordered out of the Olympic Village within 48 hours.

Black History Month Ireland began as a 2010 pilot in which southern city, rather than in Dublin?

Cork was a fitting start: in the 19th century the city was a centre of anti-slavery campaigning and welcomed Black abolitionist lecturers; the programme went national in 2014.

Which society, founded in 1816, settled free Black Americans in what became Liberia?

The American Colonization Society counted President James Monroe among its backers, and Liberia's capital, Monrovia, was named for him; the colony declared its independence in 1847.

Which composer of 'Maple Leaf Rag' and 'The Entertainer' was known as the 'King of Ragtime'?

Scott Joplin was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave in 1917; his rags came back when the 1973 film The Sting used them, and in 1976 he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

Which actor said he did not want a Black history month because 'Black history is American history'?

Morgan Freeman made the remark in a 2005 interview on 60 Minutes, adding that the only way to end racism was to 'stop talking about it'.

In which South African township did students rise up in June 1976 against being taught in Afrikaans?

Soweto's schoolchildren marched on 16 June 1976 and police opened fire; the photograph of the dying Hector Pieterson went round the world, and South Africa marks the date as Youth Day.

Who in 1975 became the first Black man to win the Wimbledon singles title?

Arthur Ashe had lost all three of his earlier matches against Jimmy Connors, the defending champion and heavy favourite, yet beat him in four sets in the final.

The Benin Bronzes, looted by British troops in 1897, come from a kingdom in which modern country?

Nigeria: the pieces were taken from the royal palace in Benin City, and in 2022 Germany signed ownership of more than 1,000 of them over to the country.

Which South African won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize and later chaired the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Desmond Tutu also gave post-apartheid South Africa its nickname, popularising 'the Rainbow Nation' as an image of its many peoples living side by side.

Who broke Babe Ruth's career home run record in April 1974 despite a flood of racist hate mail?

Hank Aaron was to be rested on the road so the record would fall in Atlanta, but the commissioner ruled he must play; he tied Ruth in Cincinnati and passed him at home four days later.

Which American diplomat became the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1950, for mediating in Palestine?

Ralph Bunche took over as the UN's mediator when Count Folke Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948, and went on to arrange the ceasefire between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

Which Canadian province, settled by thousands of Black Loyalists in the 1780s, marks February as 'African Heritage Month'?

Nova Scotia took in more than 3,000 Black Loyalists, who had sided with Britain in the American Revolution in return for promises of freedom and land.

In which North Carolina city did a white mob overthrow the elected biracial government in 1898?

Wilmington's coup of 10 November 1898 saw white supremacists led by Alfred Waddell burn the Black-owned Daily Record, kill at least 14 Black residents and perhaps many more, and force the elected city government to resign.

Which English city saw a 1963 bus boycott that ended the colour bar on its buses?

Bristol's boycott, led by Paul Stephenson, lasted four months before the bus company dropped its ban on Black crews; some credit it with helping to bring about Britain's Race Relations Act of 1965.

Which Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2004?

Wangari Maathai's movement mobilised women to plant trees in their own communities; it spread to other African countries and helped plant more than thirty million of them.

Who was the first Black woman to serve in the United States Senate?

Carol Moseley Braun ran in 1992 because her own senator had voted to confirm Clarence Thomas despite Anita Hill's testimony; she beat him in the primary in what became the 'Year of the Woman'.

Which record label did Berry Gordy found in 1959?

Motown took its name from 'Motor Town', a nickname for Detroit, the car-making city where Berry Gordy founded the label in January 1959.

Which free Black New Yorker, kidnapped in 1841, told his story in the memoir Twelve Years a Slave?

Solomon Northup, a violinist, was lured south with the offer of a music job, drugged and sold into slavery; the 2013 film of his memoir won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Which New York borough is called the birthplace of hip hop, after a 1973 party where DJ Kool Herc played?

The Bronx party, on 11 August 1973 at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, was thrown by Herc's sister Cindy to raise money for school clothes; he stretched the drum breaks by switching between two copies of a record.

Which US President proclaimed February 1996 as 'National African American History Month'?

Bill Clinton's proclamation gave February 1996 that title; the following year he formally apologised on the nation's behalf to the survivors of the Tuskegee study.

Which ship's arrival at Tilbury in June 1948 came to symbolise post-war Caribbean migration to Britain?

Empire Windrush, a former German liner taken over by Britain after the war, reached Tilbury on 21 June 1948 and landed its passengers the next day; newcomers with nowhere to stay were housed in a Clapham air-raid shelter.

Over what did Sojourner Truth successfully sue a white man in 1828?

Recovering her son: Truth sued after her five-year-old son Peter was illegally sold to Alabama and won his return, one of the first such victories by a Black woman against a white man.

Booker T. Washington's 1901 autobiography carries what title?

Up from Slavery, serialised in Outlook magazine and published in book form in 1901, recounts Washington's rise from enslavement to leading Tuskegee Institute.

Which president did Booker T. Washington dine with at the White House in 1901?

Theodore Roosevelt hosted Washington for dinner on 16 October 1901, weeks after taking office; the invitation drew furious condemnation from Southern politicians and newspapers.

After failing to find backing in Boston, Phillis Wheatley had her 1773 book of poems published in which city?

London: the Countess of Huntingdon paid for the book, which opened with a statement signed by John Hancock and other Boston notables vouching that an enslaved young woman had really written the poems.

Benjamin Banneker helped Major Andrew Ellicott survey the borders of what?

The District of Columbia: Banneker helped Ellicott fix the federal district's boundaries in 1791, then sent Thomas Jefferson a handwritten copy of his first almanac with a long letter challenging him over slavery.

Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native American descent, is regarded as the first person killed in which 1770 event?

The Boston Massacre, which makes him, by tradition, the first American killed in the Revolution. John Adams, defending the British soldiers in court, won acquittals for most of them.

John Brown was hanged in 1859 after being convicted of murder, inciting a slave revolt and which other crime?

Treason against the state was one of three charges that followed Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry; the actor John Wilkes Booth joined a militia company so that he could watch the hanging at Charles Town.

Which Union general ordered final enforcement of emancipation in Texas on June 19, 1865?

Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 two months after Lee's surrender, telling about 250,000 enslaved Texans they were free; the date became Juneteenth, a federal holiday since 2021.

Who commanded the famed 54th Infantry Regiment of Black soldiers as its colonel?

Robert Gould Shaw, aged 25, died leading the 54th against Fort Wagner in July 1863; Confederates buried him in a trench with his men as an insult, and his father said there was no holier place for him to lie.

Which nickname was given to the Black cavalry regiments the US Army formed in 1866?

Buffalo Soldiers, a name said to have come from the Native Americans they encountered; around 1900 some also patrolled Yosemite and Sequoia, making them among the first national park rangers.

Which nickname did the Tuskegee Airmen's fighter group earn from its aircraft's paint?

Red Tails: the 332nd Fighter Group painted its fighters' tails red for identification while escorting bombers over Europe; the airmen's first squadron, the 99th, had gone to North Africa in April 1943.

General Sherman's Field Order No. 15, issued in January 1865, gave rise to which famous phrase?

Forty acres and a mule: Sherman set aside a strip of the southern coast in 40-acre plots for freed families, and the army lent some of them mules; Andrew Johnson handed the land back to its former owners that autumn.

Which president's disputed 1876 election ended Reconstruction with federal troops leaving the South?

Rutherford Hayes lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden, but a commission split 8 to 7 to hand him every disputed electoral vote; Southern Democrats are said to have accepted the result in an informal bargain for the troops' withdrawal.

Which amendment to the US Constitution barred denying the vote on account of race?

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified 3 February 1870, was the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments; Southern states later evaded it with poll taxes and literacy tests.

Zora Neale Hurston's most popular novel, published in 1937, is titled what?

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) follows Janie Crawford through three marriages in Florida; Hurston wrote it in seven weeks while doing fieldwork in Haiti.

Duke Ellington gained a national profile through his orchestra's appearances at which Harlem venue?

The Cotton Club: Ellington's orchestra became its house band in December 1927, and the club's radio broadcasts carried his music nationwide before he left in 1931.

Louis Armstrong won a 1965 Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance for which song?

'Hello, Dolly!' topped the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1964, knocking the Beatles off number one, and won Armstrong the Grammy for Best Vocal Performance, Male at the 1965 awards.

Jesse Owens rewrote several world records within 45 minutes at a 1935 meet while competing for which university?

Ohio State: the 'Buckeye Bullet' did it at the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor on 25 May 1935 with a sore back from a fall down stairs, a year before he won four Olympic gold medals.

Which heavyweight champion knocked out Max Schmeling in the first round in 1938?

Joe Louis took two minutes and four seconds to avenge his first professional defeat, a 1936 knockout by Schmeling; he held the title from 1937 to 1949 and defended it 25 times.

Which boxer lit the cauldron at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics?

Muhammad Ali, shaking from Parkinson's, took the flame from swimmer Janet Evans; during those Games he was also handed a replacement for the light-heavyweight gold he won in Rome in 1960 as Cassius Clay and later lost.

Wilma Rudolph overcame which childhood disease before winning three golds at the 1960 Olympics?

Polio: Rudolph, one of 22 children, wore a leg brace for years and was told she would never walk again; in Rome in 1960 she won the 100 m, the 200 m and the sprint relay.

Who became the first Black player to win a Grand Slam tennis title, at the 1956 French Championships?

Althea Gibson won the French title in 1956, then Wimbledon and the US Nationals in both 1957 and 1958; she went on to become the first Black player on the women's professional golf tour.

Arthur Ashe is believed to have contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during what 1983 procedure?

Heart bypass surgery: Ashe had a repeat operation in 1983, learned he was HIV-positive in 1988, and went public in April 1992 only because a newspaper was about to break the story.

Which organisation barred Marian Anderson from singing at its Constitution Hall in Washington in 1939?

The Daughters of the American Revolution refused her the hall; the First Lady resigned from the DAR in protest, and on Easter Sunday Anderson sang to 75,000 people from the Lincoln Memorial steps instead.

Paul Robeson was twice named a consensus All-American in which sport at Rutgers?

Football: Robeson was named All-American end in 1917 and 1918 at Rutgers, graduated as valedictorian, and earned a Columbia law degree while playing in the NFL.

Hattie McDaniel won her Oscar for playing which character in Gone with the Wind?

Mammy: McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar, yet at the ceremony, in a hotel that barred Black guests, she sat at a small table against the wall, apart from her co-stars.

Sidney Poitier grew up in the Bahamas but was born in which US city?

Miami: Poitier arrived more than two months early while his Bahamian parents were visiting the city, and they stayed until he was strong enough for the journey home to Cat Island.

Which 1958 film earned Sidney Poitier the first Best Actor Oscar nomination for a Black performer?

The Defiant Ones chained Poitier to Tony Curtis as escaped convicts; Curtis insisted that Poitier share top billing, both were nominated, and Poitier won five years later for Lilies of the Field.

After his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm X became known by which name?

El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz: 'El-Hajj' marks a Muslim who has made the journey; having just broken with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X came home a Sunni Muslim ready to work with the mainstream civil rights movement.

Fannie Lou Hamer was vice-chair of which group at the 1964 national convention in Atlantic City?

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sent Hamer to Atlantic City, where her testimony about a beating in a Winona jail was cut off by a hastily called presidential press conference, then replayed in full on that night's news.

Which Arkansas governor initially prevented the Little Rock Nine from entering Central High in 1957?

Orval Faubus sent the Arkansas National Guard to block the nine on 4 September 1957; President Eisenhower responded by federalising the Guard and sending the 101st Airborne.

Outside which Alabama town was a Freedom Riders' Greyhound bus firebombed on 14 May 1961?

Anniston: the mob slashed the tyres, firebombed the stalled bus and held its doors shut; the riders got out, and newspaper photographs of the blaze pushed Washington to ban segregation in interstate travel.

Which Birmingham church did Klansmen bomb in 1963, killing four girls?

16th Street Baptist Church: the deaths of four girls aged 11 to 14 built support for the Civil Rights Act, yet no bomber was convicted until 1977, and the last only in 2002.

Which future congressman had his skull fractured on Selma's 'Bloody Sunday' in 1965?

John Lewis was at the front of about 600 marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on 7 March 1965; televised footage of troopers beating them drew supporters from across the country to the 54-mile march to Montgomery two weeks later.

Richard and Mildred Loving's 1967 Supreme Court victory struck down state laws against what?

Interracial marriage: a sheriff woke the Lovings in bed in 1958 and a judge banished them from their home state for 25 years; the unanimous ruling voided such laws in the 16 states that still had them.

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on April 4, 1968, at which Memphis lodging?

The Lorraine Motel, where King was shot on its second-floor balcony outside room 306, is now the National Civil Rights Museum; James Earl Ray was arrested at Heathrow that June.

Titles VIII and IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 are commonly known as what?

The Fair Housing Act had stalled in the House until King's assassination; the chamber passed it within a week and Johnson signed it on 11 April 1968, barring bias in selling or renting homes.

Angela Davis was fired from UCLA in 1969 for membership in which organisation?

Communist Party USA: the UC Regents, urged on by California's governor, dismissed Davis in 1969, but a judge ruled that membership was no grounds and she got her job back; she later ran twice as the party's vice-presidential candidate.

Shirley Chisholm spent part of her childhood on which Caribbean island?

Barbados: Chisholm lived on her grandmother's farm there until 1934 and later said its strict British-style schools were the main reason she spoke and wrote with ease.

Barbara Jordan became the first African American and first woman to give a keynote at which event, in 1976?

A Democratic National Convention: Jordan was picked after her televised defence of the Constitution at the 1974 Nixon impeachment hearings made her nationally known; she gave the party's keynote again in 1992.

Guion Bluford became the first African American in space in 1983 aboard which orbiter?

Challenger: Bluford flew on STS-8, the shuttle's first night launch, in August 1983; a Cuban cosmonaut, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, had become the first Black person in space aboard a Soviet Soyuz three years earlier.

Who in 2001 became the first Black US secretary of state?

Colin Powell, a retired four-star general, was confirmed unanimously; he later called his 2003 UN speech making the case for war in Iraq a 'blot' on his record, and Condoleezza Rice followed him in 2005.

Kamala Harris graduated from which historically Black institution?

Howard University: Harris studied political science and economics there in the 1980s, and in November 2024 she returned to the campus to concede the presidential election.

Ketanji Brown Jackson is the first Supreme Court justice with what prior job?

Federal public defender: Jackson represented clients who could not afford a lawyer in Washington from 2005 to 2007; in 2022 she took the seat of Stephen Breyer, the justice she had once clerked for.

Toni Morrison's first novel, published in 1970, was titled what?

The Bluest Eye, set in Morrison's Ohio hometown, appeared when she was 39; she wrote it while raising two sons on her own and working as a book editor at Random House.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man won which honour in 1953?

The National Book Award went to Invisible Man over Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck's East of Eden; it was the only novel Ellison published in his lifetime.

Which 1953 debut novel by James Baldwin drew on his own boyhood as a teenage preacher in Harlem?

Go Tell It on the Mountain follows a Harlem teenager and his stern preacher stepfather; Baldwin finished it far from home, in a small village in Switzerland.

The 1977 miniseries Roots was adapted from which author's book?

Alex Haley's family saga won a special Pulitzer in 1977; ABC, fearing viewers would recoil, ran the series on eight consecutive nights to cut its losses, and instead more than half the country tuned in.

Which tennis player won 23 Grand Slam singles titles between 1999 and 2017?

Serena Williams won her first major at the 1999 US Open and her 23rd, passing Steffi Graf's Open-era record, at the 2017 Australian Open, where she played while pregnant with her daughter.

Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight champion, was nicknamed after which Texas city?

Galveston: Johnson was born there in 1878 and fought as the 'Galveston Giant'; he held the title from 1908 to 1915 and was posthumously pardoned in 2018 over a Mann Act conviction.

Which NBA centre won 11 championships and became the league's first Black head coach?

Bill Russell took over from Red Auerbach as the Celtics' player-coach in 1966 and won two more titles while doing both jobs, the last of his 11 coming in 1969.

Which battle in September 1862 gave Lincoln the opening to announce the Emancipation Proclamation?

Antietam: five days after the battle Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation; it took effect on 1 January 1863 and freed people only in Confederate-held areas, leaving the loyal border states untouched.

The 1839 revolt aboard La Amistad was led by which Mende captive?

Joseph Cinqué, born Sengbe Pieh, led the July 1839 uprising; former president John Quincy Adams argued the captives' case before the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1841 that they were free.

Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, was born enslaved in which French colony?

Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti; Louverture rose to Governor-General for life in 1801 before Bonaparte's expedition captured him in 1802.

Which West African empire reached its greatest extent under Mansa Musa in the 14th century?

Mali: Mansa Musa's empire grew rich on gold and salt, and on his 1324 pilgrimage he is said to have handed out so much gold in Cairo that its value slumped there for years.

The Kushite kings who ruled Egypt as its 25th Dynasty came from a kingdom in which modern country?

Sudan: from Napata, on the Nile, the Kushite king Piye marched north and conquered Egypt in the 8th century BC; the kingdom later moved its capital to Meroë, where its royal pyramids still stand.

Great Zimbabwe, the largest stone structure in precolonial Southern Africa, was built by ancestors of which people?

Shona: ancestors of the Shona built Great Zimbabwe from the 11th century; colonial rulers long insisted outsiders must have built it, and the independent country took its name from the ruins in 1980.

In which city did Mansa Musa have the Djinguereber mosque built after his pilgrimage?

Timbuktu: the earthen mosque still stands, and the scholars Musa drew to the city helped turn a trading town into a centre of Islamic learning.

Which nation carried more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic than any other?

Portugal: its ships worked the direct run between Angola and Brazil, the busiest route in a trade that forced about 12.5 million Africans aboard; Britain ranked second.

Olaudah Equiano was known for most of his life by what name?

Gustavus Vassa: the Royal Navy officer who bought the boy renamed him after Sweden's King Gustav Vasa and cuffed him until he answered to it; his 1789 autobiography carried both names.

Mary Seacole was famous for nursing during which war?

The Crimean War: Seacole built her 'British Hotel' near Balaclava in 1855 to feed and nurse soldiers, and published Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands in 1857.

Kwame Nkrumah led which colony to independence from Britain in 1957?

The Gold Coast became independent as Ghana in 1957 with Nkrumah as prime minister; in 1966 he was overthrown in a coup while away on a trip to China and spent the rest of his life in exile.

Kwanzaa was created by Maulana Karenga in the aftermath of which 1965 event?

The Watts riots led Karenga to create Kwanzaa in 1966 as a way to bring Black Americans together; its name comes from the Swahili phrase 'matunda ya kwanza', meaning first fruits.

Which is the oldest HBCU, founded in 1837 as the Institute for Colored Youth?

Cheyney University of Pennsylvania traces to 1837, when Quaker Richard Humphreys' $10,000 bequest founded the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia; it moved to Cheyney in 1902.

The Washington HBCU founded in 1867 is named for a general who also headed which agency?

The Freedmen's Bureau's commissioner, a Union general who had lost an arm in battle, helped found the university in 1867; the bureau itself set up schools across the South before Congress shut it down in 1872.

Spelman College in Atlanta is named for the abolitionist family of which tycoon's wife?

John D. Rockefeller met the school's founders at a Cleveland church in 1882 and became its great patron; in 1884 it took the family name of his wife, Laura Spelman, whose parents had been abolitionists.

Nine Black teenagers falsely accused of rape in 1931 were named after which Alabama town?

Scottsboro: the youths, aged 13 to 19, were rushed to trial there and eight were sentenced to death; in 1932 the Supreme Court overturned the verdicts because they had been denied proper lawyers.

The Tuskegee Study withheld treatment from hundreds of Black men with which disease?

Syphilis: the Public Health Service left 399 infected men untreated even after penicillin became the standard cure in 1947; a 1972 press report ended the study, and the government apologised in 1997.

At which hospital were Henrietta Lacks's 'immortal' HeLa cells taken in 1951?

Johns Hopkins: researcher George Gey grew cells from Lacks's tumour into a line that kept dividing in the lab, without her knowledge; her family learned of it only in the 1970s.

In 1893 surgeon Daniel Hale Williams saved a stabbing victim with a pioneering operation on which organ?

The heart: Williams stitched the torn sac around James Cornish's heart at Provident, the racially integrated hospital he had founded in 1891, and Cornish walked out about seven weeks later.

Chemist Percy Julian mass-produced hormones such as progesterone from a compound in which crop?

Soybeans: at the Glidden Company, Julian found a way to pull the sterol stigmasterol out of soybean oil in bulk and turn it into hormones; in 1935 he had been first to synthesise the glaucoma drug physostigmine.

Mark Dean holds three of the nine original patents for which 1981 product he helped create?

The IBM PC: Dean holds three of its nine original patents and co-invented the ISA bus that let printers and disk drives plug into it; he later led the IBM team behind the first one-gigahertz chip.

In 1949 Dorothy Vaughan became acting supervisor of which group at Langley?

West Area Computers, the segregated unit of Black women mathematicians at Langley; Vaughan led it from 1949, and when electronic computers arrived she taught herself and her staff the FORTRAN programming language.

Bessie Coleman earned her pilot's licence in 1921 from which body?

The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale issued Coleman's licence on 15 June 1921 after she trained at the Caudron school in Le Crotoy, France, no US school having accepted a Black woman.

Matthew Henson accompanied which explorer on seven Arctic voyages?

Robert Peary called Henson his 'first man': Henson learned the Inuit language and their Arctic survival skills, and in 1909 the two men and their Inuit companions claimed to have reached the North Pole.

York, the only African American on the 1804–06 expedition to the Pacific, was enslaved by whom?

William Clark inherited York, who crossed the continent with the Corps of Discovery and had a say in the 1805 vote on where to winter; back home, Clark took those freedoms away and for years refused to free him.

Estevanico, an enslaved Moroccan, was one of four survivors of a 1528 Spanish expedition sent to colonise which present-day state?

Florida: the Narváez expedition collapsed, and Estevanico and three Spaniards spent eight years crossing the continent to Mexico City; in 1539 he was killed at a Zuni pueblo while scouting for another expedition.

The first Africans in Virginia landed at Point Comfort in 1619 aboard which ship?

The White Lion, an English privateer sailing under a Dutch commission, traded '20 and odd' Africans for food at Point Comfort in late August 1619; it had seized them from a slave ship bound for Mexico.

Elizabeth Freeman's 1781 lawsuit found enslavement inconsistent with which state's constitution?

Massachusetts: Freeman's suit, Brom and Bett v. Ashley, argued that the 1780 state constitution's declaration that all men are born free and equal outlawed slavery; she won in August 1781.

Richard Allen founded which denomination in 1816, the first independent Black one in the US?

African Methodist Episcopal: Allen left Philadelphia's St George's church after Black worshippers were pulled from their knees at prayer; he opened Bethel in 1794 and in 1816 became the new denomination's first bishop.

Denmark Vesey bought his freedom in Charleston after doing what?

Winning a lottery: Vesey won $1,500 in a Charleston lottery in 1799, paid $600 for his freedom and set up as a carpenter; in 1822 he was hanged, accused of planning a slave uprising in the city.

Gabriel, who planned an 1800 slave rebellion near Richmond, worked as what?

A blacksmith: Gabriel, enslaved by Thomas Prosser, was a literate blacksmith hired out in Richmond; after rain and informers foiled the August 1800 plot, he and 25 others were hanged.

The 1739 Stono Rebellion took place in which colony?

South Carolina: the rebels marched south toward the Spanish fort at St Augustine, where fugitives were promised freedom; the colony answered with the Negro Act of 1740, tightening its control over enslaved people.

Mary McLeod Bethune founded which organisation in 1935?

The National Council of Negro Women grew out of a 1935 meeting Bethune called to unite Black women's groups; three decades earlier she had opened her own school in Daytona with $1.50 and five girls as pupils.

Who became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, for the poetry collection Annie Allen?

Gwendolyn Brooks won for the follow-up to her debut collection; from the late 1960s she left Harper, her New York publisher, to bring out her books with small Black-owned presses such as Broadside.

Which Lorraine Hansberry play made her the first Black American woman with a play on Broadway?

A Raisin in the Sun (1959) drew on Hansberry's childhood, when her family moved into a white neighbourhood and fought a whites-only housing covenant up to the Supreme Court; at 29 she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award.

Which poet read 'The Hill We Climb' at the 2021 presidential inauguration?

Amanda Gorman, then 22, was the youngest poet to read at a presidential inauguration; a childhood speech impediment that made some sounds hard to say was one reason she turned to poetry.

The Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group earned a nickname by painting their planes' tails which colour?

Red paint on the tails of their P-47s gave the pilots the name 'Red Tails'. The Allies also called the group the 'Red-Tail Angels'.

Which Atlanta Braves slugger endured hate mail and death threats while chasing Babe Ruth's career home run record?

Hank Aaron hit home run number 715 off Dodgers pitcher Al Downing in April 1974. He stayed the career leader for 33 years, until Barry Bonds passed his total of 755.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists on the medal podium at the 1968 Olympics, held where?

Mexico City's podium also held Australian silver medallist Peter Norman, who wore a human-rights badge beside them. Carlos had left his gloves behind, so Norman suggested the Americans share one pair.

Which travel guide, launched by a New York mail carrier in 1936, listed businesses that welcomed Black motorists?

The Green Book took its name from its founder, Victor Hugo Green, and was last published in 1966. Fellow postal workers scouted listings for him by asking around on their routes.

Which free Black violinist from New York was drugged and kidnapped in 1841, then wrote Twelve Years a Slave?

Solomon Northup regained his freedom in 1853 after a Canadian carpenter helped get word to New York. The 2013 film of his memoir won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Which St. Louis-born entertainer carried secrets for the French Resistance written in invisible ink on her sheet music?

Josephine Baker was awarded the Croix de Guerre for her wartime work. In 2021 she became the first Black woman inducted into the Panthéon in Paris.

Which president sent the 101st Airborne Division to escort Black students into an Arkansas high school in 1957?

Dwight D. Eisenhower also federalised the Arkansas National Guard, taking it out of the governor's control. No federal troops had enforced the Constitution in the South since Reconstruction.

Which singer, whose voice Michigan declared a natural resource, was the first woman in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Aretha Franklin turned 'Respect', an Otis Redding song, into her signature hit, later hailed as a civil rights and feminist anthem.

Which anti-apartheid leader walked out of Victor Verster Prison in February 1990 after 27 years behind bars?

Nelson Mandela spent 18 of those years on Robben Island, where prisoners lectured each other in an informal 'university'. In 1994 he became South Africa's first Black head of state.

The Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 by two Merritt College students in which California city?

Oakland was also where the party's best-known programme began, with free breakfasts for children first served out of a local church.

Which novelist became the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Color Purple?

Alice Walker also tracked down the unmarked Florida grave believed to be Zora Neale Hurston's in 1973 and had a marker placed on it.

Which name is given to the Atlantic crossing that carried millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas?

Middle Passage was the second side of a trade triangle. Ships left Europe with manufactured goods, crossed the ocean with captives, then carried sugar, tobacco and rum home.

Which Union general's Special Field Order No. 15 is the origin of the phrase 'forty acres and a mule'?

William Sherman issued it in Savannah four days after meeting twenty local Black ministers and lay leaders. The order never mentioned mules, but his army later lent some out.

Which nickname is given to the 369th Infantry, the Black New York regiment that fought under French command in 1918?

Harlem Hellfighters spent 191 days in front-line trenches, more than any other American unit. France awarded the whole regiment the Croix de Guerre.

Which 15-year-old was arrested in Montgomery in March 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman?

Claudette Colvin went on to be one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal case that struck down bus segregation in Alabama.

Which American diplomat won the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for mediating armistices between Israel and its neighbours?

Ralph Bunche was the first Black person awarded a Nobel Prize. He took over the talks on the island of Rhodes after the UN's chief mediator was assassinated in Jerusalem.

Which African empire routed an invading Italian army at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 under Emperor Menelik II?

Ethiopia's victory forced Italy to recognise its sovereignty by treaty. It ended the century as the only African country to owe its independence to a military win.

Which historically Black men's school in Atlanta counts filmmaker Spike Lee among its graduates?

Morehouse College began in 1867 as the Augusta Institute, housed at Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, and moved to Atlanta in 1879.

Which businesswoman on Canada's ten-dollar bill refused to leave a whites-only cinema section in 1946?

Viola Desmond was convicted of evading one cent of tax, the difference between the balcony ticket she bought and the floor seat she took.

Which Air Force veteran's 1962 enrollment at Ole Miss sparked a riot that took 31,000 servicemen to quell?

James Meredith was shot and wounded four years later, on the second day of his solo March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson.

Aerospace engineer Lonnie Johnson dreamed up which bestselling toy while tinkering at home with a new kind of heat pump?

Super Soaker water guns brought in $200 million in sales in 1991 alone. Johnson's NASA work included the nuclear power source for the Galileo mission to Jupiter.

Which Ontario-born engineer patented an automatic lubricator that spared steam locomotives frequent stops for oiling?

Elijah McCoy had trained as a mechanical engineer in Edinburgh, yet could find work only as a railroad fireman and oiler, the very chore his invention automated.

Mathematician Gladys West spent years computing the precise shape of the Earth, work later built into which technology?

GPS satellites would make huge errors without an accurate model of the planet. West refined hers from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, programming ever more precise calculations.

Jerry Lawson led development of the Fairchild Channel F home console, earning him the title 'father of' what?

The game cartridge let players swap titles on one machine, an idea the Atari 2600 made a hit a year later. Lawson's machine also had the first pause button on a home console.

Sarah Boone, a New Haven dressmaker born into slavery, won an 1892 patent for improving which household item?

The ironing board she designed was narrow and curved, shaped to press the sleeves and bodies of women's garments.

Marie Van Brittan Brown, a Queens nurse, co-invented a closed-circuit television version of which household device?

The home security system she devised with her husband in 1966 slid a camera between several peepholes and included a push button to alert the police.

Frederick McKinley Jones's cooling units for long-haul trucks were the founding product of which company?

Thermo King units kept blood, medicine and food cold for army hospitals in World War II. Jones earned 61 patents, 40 of them for refrigeration.

Jan Matzeliger's 1883 lasting machine did the work of several skilled hand-workers and halved the price of which goods?

Shoes came off his machine at up to 700 pairs a day, when a skilled hand laster managed about fifty.

Thomas Jennings, a New York tailor, became the first African American patent holder in 1821 for an early form of what?

Dry cleaning, which he called 'dry scouring', earned Jennings a fortune, and he put much of it into the abolitionist movement.

Which inventor twice defeated Thomas Edison's patent claims over a telegraph linking stations with moving trains?

Granville Woods then turned down a job at the Edison Company. He collected more than 50 patents, among them an automatic brake and an egg incubator.

Which legal term for an exemption from new rules began with laws shielding white Southerners from voting barriers?

Grandfather clause laws excused men whose ancestors could vote before the Civil War, sparing poor white voters from rules that kept Black citizens off the rolls.

Smith v. Allwright in 1944 ended the 'white primary' that shut Black voters out of Democratic contests in which state?

Texas was taken to court by Lonnie Smith, a Black dentist from Houston. The ruling reached every other state where the party used the same rule.

On 'Bloody Sunday' in March 1965, Alabama state troopers beat voting-rights marchers on a bridge named for whom?

Edmund Pettus was a Confederate general who became Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan and later a US senator.

Which future Georgia congressman's skull was fractured as he led marchers on 'Bloody Sunday' in March 1965?

John Lewis went on to serve 17 terms in the House, where he came to be called the 'conscience of Congress'.

Which president quoted the protest anthem 'We Shall Overcome' in a televised address to Congress in March 1965?

Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session eight days after Bloody Sunday to demand a law protecting Black voters. One activist quipped that he had 'spoiled a good song'.

Which 2013 Supreme Court ruling ended federal pre-clearance of election law changes in states with a history of bias?

Shelby County v. Holder was decided 5 to 4. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the formula choosing which places needed approval rested on data over 40 years old.

Which president used the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 to prosecute Klansmen who terrorised Black voters?

Ulysses S. Grant and Congress also created the Justice Department in 1870, giving the attorney general the means to take the Klan to court.

Which party held the loyalty of most Black voters until Franklin Roosevelt won them over in 1936?

Republicans had held most Black voters since the Civil War, and still did in 1932. Four years later the New Deal coalition pulled them into the other camp.

Which Georgia politician launched the voting-rights group Fair Fight Action after losing the 2018 governor's race?

Stacey Abrams had been the first Black woman nominated for governor by a major party in any US state.

Which voter screening device did Congress suspend in much of the South in 1965 and ban across the country in 1970?

Literacy tests were run by white clerks who could pass or fail anyone at will. Identical answers were often marked right for white applicants and wrong for Black ones.

Which movement began as a hashtag in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin?

Black Lives Matter was coined online by three friends, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Ayọ Tometi. The phrase went on to name a slogan, a network of chapters and a worldwide protest movement.

Which holiday marking the end of slavery was signed into federal law by Joe Biden in 2021?

Juneteenth was the first federal holiday added since 1983. Opal Lee, the activist called its 'grandmother' after decades of campaigning, stood beside the president as he signed.

Which San Francisco 49ers quarterback began kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality?

Colin Kaepernick sat through the anthem at first, then switched to a knee after talking with Nate Boyer, a military veteran who had played in the NFL.

Whose videotaped beating by Los Angeles police led, after the officers' acquittal in 1992, to six days of riots?

Rodney King's beating was filmed from a nearby balcony by George Holliday, a plumbing salesman with a camcorder. During the riots King went on television to ask, 'Can we all get along?'

Which 1990s gathering on the National Mall, called by Louis Farrakhan, set off a row over the official crowd count?

Million Man March organisers claimed 1.5 to 2 million people, the Park Police said 400,000, and Farrakhan threatened to sue.

Which talk show host did Forbes list as the world's only Black billionaire from 2004 to 2006?

Oprah Winfrey opened her 2004 season by giving every member of the studio audience a new Pontiac G6, a giveaway worth about $8 million.

Which 22-year-old poet read 'The Hill We Climb' at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration in 2021?

Amanda Gorman became the first poet to perform at a Super Bowl only weeks later, introducing the game's three honorary captains.

Which former Stanford provost became the first Black woman to serve as US secretary of state, under George W. Bush?

Condoleezza Rice trained to be a concert pianist before turning to Soviet studies, and Chevron once named a 129,000-ton supertanker after her.

Which body opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture on Washington's National Mall in 2016?

The Smithsonian won approval for the museum in 2003, after a legislative push that began in 1988. The bronze-coloured screen around the building echoes a crown from Yoruba culture.

Which singer, the first Black woman to headline Coachella, built her 2018 set around a full marching band?

Beyoncé's set paid tribute to historically Black colleges, with majorette dancers and a step show, and became the Netflix film Homecoming.