192 Fun Facts About Black History Month

Who was the first African American to earn a Harvard PhD?

W.E.B. Du Bois finished it in 1895, and his dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade was published the next year as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies series.

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

Lift Every Voice and Sing began as a poem that Johnson, then a school principal in Jacksonville, wrote for 500 of his pupils to perform; his brother Rosamond set it to music.

In which German city did the Black community begin holding Black History Month events in 1990?

Berlin members of the Initiative of Black Germans organised the first one in 1990; it lasted about a week, and the events later spread to Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich.

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

October falls near the start of the British school year, and the organisers of the first event in 1987 wanted the month to reach Black pupils early in the term.

Black History Month is in February partly to mark which two figures' birthdays?

Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass both had February birthdays that Black communities already celebrated; Douglass, born enslaved, never knew his real date and chose February 14 for himself.

Gerald Ford recognized Black History Month in 1976 during which national anniversary?

The US Bicentennial year was also the fiftieth anniversary of Negro History Week; Ford urged Americans to honor 'the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans'.

Black students and educators at which Ohio university held the first Black History Month in 1970?

Kent State University's Black United Students proposed it in 1969 and held the first one from January 2 to February 28, 1970, months before the shootings that made the campus known worldwide.

Which institution opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington in 2016?

The Smithsonian was told by Congress to create the museum in 2003; at its 2016 dedication a 99-year-old daughter of a man born into slavery helped President Obama ring the opening bell.

In Jamaica, Black History Month shares February with which celebration timed to Bob Marley's birthday?

Reggae Month was declared by Jamaica's government in 2008 and fills February because Bob Marley was born on the 6th and Dennis Brown, the 'Crown Prince of Reggae', on the 1st.

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

Jean Augustine's motion passed the House of Commons unanimously in December 1995; a Grenada-born former school principal, she had entered Parliament only two years earlier.

The UK's first Black History Month event in 1987 hosted Maulana Karenga, the creator of which holiday?

Kwanzaa was created by Karenga in 1966, in the aftermath of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, as a week-long celebration of African American culture modelled on African harvest festivals.

Which sailor of African and Native American descent is remembered as the first to die in the 1770 Boston Massacre?

Crispus Attucks lay in state at Faneuil Hall before his burial, yet the future president who defended the British soldiers in court blamed his 'mad behavior' for the bloodshed.

Which three colors make up the Pan-African flag adopted by the UNIA in 1920?

Red, black and green were chosen for a flag meant to answer a hit song of 1900 that jeered that every race had a flag except Black Americans.

Which 1977 miniseries, based on Alex Haley's book, traced Kunta Kinte's family from his capture to emancipation?

Roots was shown on eight consecutive nights because a nervous ABC wanted it over quickly; instead more than half of all Americans watched at least part of it.

Which Black Canadian businesswoman, now on the $10 bill, refused to leave a whites-only cinema section in 1946?

Viola Desmond was convicted of dodging one cent of amusement tax, the difference between the two ticket prices; she was pardoned in 2010, 45 years after her death.

Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, who founded the UK's Black History Month in 1987, came from which country?

Ghana-born Addai-Sebo had coordinated special projects at the GLC, the capital's council under Ken Livingstone; after his 1987 launch other boroughs began adopting the month.

Which US president issued the 1986 proclamation designating February as 'National Black (Afro-American) History Month'?

Ronald Reagan's proclamation answered a request from Congress; he wrote that the month's 'foremost purpose' was to make all Americans aware of the struggle for freedom and equal opportunity.

Which Canadian city issued the country's first Black History Month proclamation, in 1979?

Toronto acted on a petition from founders of the Ontario Black History Society; the province followed with its own proclamation in 1993 and the House of Commons in 1995.

In what year did Carter G. Woodson establish the Negro History Bulletin?

In 1937, at the urging of Mary McLeod Bethune, Woodson established the Negro History Bulletin, which focused on the annual theme.

Which Negro leagues pitching legend finally reached the major leagues in 1948 as a 42-year-old rookie?

Satchel Paige helped Cleveland win the 1948 World Series, then returned in 1965 to pitch three scoreless innings for Kansas City at the age of 59.

Which formerly enslaved writer's 1789 autobiography became a weapon for Britain's abolitionists?

Olaudah Equiano travelled widely to promote his Interesting Narrative, which helped the abolitionist cause and made its author, once sold to a Royal Navy officer, a wealthy man.

The 'Lost Cause' myth, which played down slavery, recast the Civil War as a war of what?

Northern aggression was the Lost Cause's charge against the Union, alongside the claim that secession rather than slavery caused the war; the phrase 'War of Northern Aggression' itself was hardly used until the 20th century.

Which Brooklyn-born artist went from spraying cryptic 'SAMO' graffiti to 1980s art-world stardom?

Jean-Michel Basquiat left home as a teenager and tagged Manhattan walls with a friend, Al Diaz, under the name SAMO; he died of an overdose at 27.

Which actor and director said 'I don't want a Black history month', calling Black history American history?

Morgan Freeman said it to Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes in 2005, then offered a deal: 'I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.'

The very first Black History Month celebration, in 1970, opened on which date?

Kent State's first Black History Month opened on January 2, 1970, and ran to February 28, organised by the university's Black United Students.

Which musician's song 'Happy Birthday' campaigned to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday?

Stevie Wonder's hit helped build support alongside a petition with millions of signatures; the holiday became law in 1983, and he headlined the concert marking its first observance in 1986.

Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison on which island?

Robben Island held Mandela until 1982; the former prison is now a World Heritage Site, and two more of its inmates went on to become South Africa's president.

Which 1961 campaign sent Black and white activists through the South on interstate buses to challenge segregation?

The Freedom Rides were met by a mob that burned a bus near Anniston, Alabama; the outcry pushed federal regulators to ban segregation in interstate terminals that November.

Which West African country grew from a colony set up in the 1820s for freed Black Americans?

Liberia named its capital, Monrovia, after US president James Monroe, who backed the project; it declared independence in 1847, yet Washington withheld recognition until 1862.

Which ship brought hundreds of Caribbean migrants to Britain in 1948 and gave its name to their generation?

Empire Windrush began life as a German cruise liner, the Monte Rosa, seized by Britain as a prize of war; in 1948 she docked at Tilbury with more than 800 Caribbean passengers.

Which Jamaican-born nurse, turned away by the War Office, paid her own way to tend British troops in Crimea?

Mary Seacole opened her British Hotel near Balaclava, meant as 'comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers', and tended the wounded; in 2004 she was voted the greatest Black Briton.

Before starting high school at 20, Carter G. Woodson spent years working in which industry?

Coal mining in West Virginia kept Woodson, the son of formerly enslaved parents, out of school through his teens; once enrolled he finished the diploma in under two years.

Which former US president argued the Amistad captives' case for freedom before the Supreme Court in 1841?

John Quincy Adams, then 73, spoke for eight and a half hours; the court freed the captives, and abolitionists paid for their voyage home to Sierra Leone.

Who in 1983 became the first Black woman crowned Miss America?

Vanessa Williams had to give up the crown ten months later when nude photographs of her were published without her consent, yet she went on to a long career as a singer and actress.

Which Canadian province, where 3,000 Black Loyalists settled in the 1780s, calls February 'African Heritage Month'?

Nova Scotia's premier declared African Heritage Month in January 1996, choosing the name to honor the history and culture of people of African descent everywhere, not only in Canada.

Which university awarded Carter G. Woodson his doctorate in history in 1912?

Harvard made Woodson only the second African American to earn its PhD, an unlikely finish for a man who had not started high school until he was 20.

The UK's first Black History Month in 1987 fell in the centenary year of which Pan-African leader's birth?

Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica in August 1887 and died in England in 1940; his body was later brought home, where he was declared the country's first national hero.

Which Caribbean country won independence in 1804 after enslaved people defeated their French colonial rulers?

Haiti paid dearly for it: in 1825 French warships arrived to demand 150 million francs in compensation for the former slaveholders, a debt that weighed on the country for generations.

Carter G. Woodson also launched which scholarly publication in 1916?

Woodson launched The Journal of Negro History in January 1916, a year after founding the ASNLH; it was renamed The Journal of African American History in 2002.

Carter G. Woodson worked from 1903 to 1907 as a school supervisor in which US-run territory?

The Philippines had only recently come under American rule when Woodson went there to supervise schools; he travelled home by way of Asia and Europe before taking up graduate study.

What name did Berry Gordy give the Detroit house that became Motown's first headquarters and studio?

Hitsville U.S.A. was a two-family house: Gordy moved his wife and son in upstairs and ran the label below, cutting the records in a converted photography studio at the back.

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

Mexico City's podium protest got both men suspended from the US team and put out of the Olympic Village; they had shared one pair of gloves, which is why each raised a different hand.

Which 1989 film tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts, one of the Union Army's first Black regiments?

Glory's regiment really did protest over pay: offered $10 a month when white soldiers got $13, the men refused any wages until Congress granted equal pay in 1864.

Which US president issued the proclamation declaring February 1996 'National African American History Month'?

Bill Clinton's 1996 proclamation spotlighted Black women, from Sojourner Truth's sermons to Toni Morrison's novels; later presidents have not all kept its wording, and the 2021 proclamation was for 'National Black History Month'.

The all-Black 369th Infantry spent 191 days in combat under French command during which war?

The First World War found the US Army keeping Black and white units apart, so the 369th was assigned to a French division; the whole regiment was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Which 1939 Billie Holiday song, written as a poem by a schoolteacher, protested the lynching of Black Americans?

Strange Fruit was written by Abel Meeropol, a white Jewish teacher from the Bronx, after a photograph of a lynching haunted him for days.

Which singer's 'A Change Is Gonna Come', issued as a single days after his 1964 death, became a civil rights anthem?

Sam Cooke wrote it after he was turned away from a Holiday Inn in Louisiana, and after hearing Bob Dylan's 'Blowin' in the Wind', a song he loved but wished a Black writer had written.

Who was the first Black player to win a Grand Slam tennis singles title?

Althea Gibson won the French title in 1956, then Wimbledon and the US Nationals in both 1957 and 1958; with little money in tennis, she later became the first Black woman on the LPGA golf tour.

Which choreographer founded the American dance company whose signature work is 'Revelations'?

Alvin Ailey drew Revelations, first danced in 1960, from what he called 'blood memories' of his Texas childhood and the Baptist church; his company had given its first performance two years earlier.

Which magazine twice named Aretha Franklin the greatest singer of all time?

Rolling Stone put her first on both of its greatest-singers lists, and in 2021 named her version of 'Respect', written and first recorded by Otis Redding, the greatest song of all time.

August Wilson's ten-play cycle chronicling Black life is named after which city?

Pittsburgh's Hill District, where Wilson was born, is the setting for all but one of the ten plays, each covering a different decade of the 20th century; the exception is Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

Which state did Barack Obama represent in the US Senate?

Illinois elected Obama to the US Senate in November 2004, months after he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic convention as a state senator; he resigned the seat in 2008 as president-elect.

Who was the principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington?

Bayard Rustin organised the 1963 March on Washington in under two months as its deputy director; he was also a pacifist, socialist and openly gay activist.

Which self-taught Black scientist published almanacs and worked as a surveyor?

Benjamin Banneker helped survey the boundaries of the new federal capital in 1791, then sent Thomas Jefferson a handwritten copy of his first almanac with a long letter challenging his views on race.

Before founding Motown, Berry Gordy co-wrote 'Lonely Teardrops' and other hits for which singer?

Jackie Wilson took 'Lonely Teardrops' to the top of the R&B chart, but Gordy wanted more than songwriting credits; in 1959 he borrowed $800 from his family to start his own label.

Turned away by American flight schools, Bessie Coleman earned her pilot's license in 1921 in which country?

France took her after a Black newspaper publisher advised her to learn French and apply to flying schools there; she came home the first African-American woman with a pilot's license.

Which musician gave Billie Holiday the nickname 'Lady Day'?

Saxophonist Lester Young, her close friend and recording partner, named Billie Holiday 'Lady Day'; she in turn dubbed him 'Prez', the president of the tenor saxophone.

Who co-founded the Black Panther Party with Huey P. Newton in 1966?

Bobby Seale met Newton at Merritt College in Oakland; before launching the party in 1966 they canvassed their neighbours' concerns and turned the answers into its Ten-Point Program.

By what nickname did the Black troopers of the US Army's 10th Cavalry, formed in 1866, become known?

Buffalo Soldiers is said to have been the Plains tribes' name for the Army's Black regiments; around 1900 hundreds of them also patrolled Yosemite and Sequoia, among the first national park rangers.

Charles R. Drew's research improved techniques for storing what?

Blood plasma that Drew's project collected and shipped to wartime Britain in 1940 set the standards for blood banking; he also attacked the policy of segregating donations by race as unscientific.

Which 1955 single was Chuck Berry's first hit?

Maybellene was reworked from an old country tune, 'Ida Red'; Leonard Chess of Chess Records thought that title too rural and had Berry rename the song before its release.

Which landmark law banned discrimination by race, religion, sex or national origin in jobs and public places?

The Civil Rights Act tied up the Senate for 60 working days before senators voted, for the first time ever on a civil rights bill, to cut off a filibuster; it became law on July 2.

In 2001 Colin Powell became the first Black American to hold which Cabinet post?

Secretary of State Powell made the case for the Iraq War at the United Nations in 2003; two years later he called that speech a 'blot' on his record that would always be painful.

Which Stanford think tank did Condoleezza Rice become director of in 2020?

Hoover Institution director since September 2020, Rice entered college as a music major hoping to be a concert pianist, until a course in international politics changed her mind.

Which activist was president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years?

Dorothy Height helped organise the 1963 March on Washington and sat on the speakers' platform, yet she was not invited to speak; at first no women were on the programme at all.

Which enslaved man's suit for freedom ended in an 1857 Supreme Court ruling that Black Americans could not be citizens?

Dred Scott lost 7-2, yet he was free within weeks: a private arrangement saw him formally freed in a St. Louis court in May 1857. He died the following year.

Radio broadcasts from which Harlem venue made Duke Ellington's orchestra nationally famous from 1927?

The Cotton Club made Ellington famous through its radio hook-ups, yet the Harlem club was whites-only: Black artists performed for an audience they could not have joined.

Ella Baker left the SCLC in 1960 to advise which newly founded civil rights group?

SNCC was born at a conference Baker called at Shaw University in April 1960, where she urged the sit-in students to run their own group; she liked to say that strong people don't need strong leaders.

Ella Fitzgerald rose to fame in the 1930s singing with which bandleader's orchestra?

Chick Webb, a drummer, took on the teenage Fitzgerald in 1935; her 1938 hit 'A-Tisket, A-Tasket' made them both famous, and when he died the next year she took over the band.

Which 14-year-old was lynched in 1955 while visiting relatives in the South?

Emmett Till's mother, Mamie, insisted on an open-casket funeral so the world could see what had been done to her son; Jet magazine published the photographs.

Fannie Lou Hamer was vice-chair of which party that challenged Mississippi's delegation in 1964?

The Freedom Democratic Party's case rested on Hamer's televised testimony; the president called a sudden press conference to pull the cameras away, but the networks aired her words that evening.

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

The Fifteenth Amendment was the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments, but from the 1890s literacy tests and grandfather clauses shut most Black Southerners out until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What was Frederick Douglass's surname at birth?

Bailey was the name he was born with; after escaping slavery in 1838 he took 'Douglass' at a friend's suggestion, from a nobleman in Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake.

Garrett Morgan wore his safety hood in 1916 to rescue workers trapped in a tunnel beneath which Great Lake?

Lake Erie, off Cleveland: gas had exploded in a waterworks tunnel and overcome the first rescuers, so Morgan and his brother went down wearing his hoods and brought men out.

George Washington Carver promoted alternatives to which crop to prevent soil depletion?

Cotton had worn out Southern soil, so Carver taught farmers to rotate it with peanuts and sweet potatoes, taking the lessons out to them in a mobile classroom he called the Jesup wagon.

About how many Black Americans left the South during the Great Migration of the 1910s to 1970?

About 6 million moved in those decades, drawn by Northern factory recruiters and by Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, which printed job adverts and migrants' own success stories.

Which store chain was the main target of the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins?

Woolworth's Greensboro lunch counter is where four Black college students sat down on February 1, 1960, and kept returning with more protesters; the store later became the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

Who was the first African American to go to space?

Guion Bluford reached orbit on Challenger in 1983, sixteen years after Robert Lawrence, the first Black astronaut ever selected, died in a jet crash before he could fly in space.

Which Chicago poet became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, for 'Annie Allen' in 1950?

Gwendolyn Brooks had been in print since she was 13 and had published some 75 poems by the age of 16; Annie Allen, her second book, follows a Black girl growing into womanhood.

Which future Oscar winner was crowned Miss Ohio USA before finishing runner-up at Miss USA?

Halle Berry studied broadcast journalism at a Cleveland community college before modelling and acting took over; she went on to win the Best Actress Oscar for Monster's Ball.

Besides the Braves, which team did Hank Aaron play his final two seasons for?

Hank Aaron returned to Milwaukee, where the Braves had begun his career, to play for the Milwaukee Brewers in 1975 and 1976, closing a 23-season career with 755 home runs.

Who edited the 1925 anthology 'The New Negro'?

Alain Locke grew The New Negro out of a special Harlem issue of Survey Graphic magazine that he had edited in March 1925, adding fiction, poetry and essays by the movement's young writers.

Harriet Tubman made about 13 rescue trips back to which state's Eastern Shore?

Maryland's Eastern Shore was where Tubman had been enslaved; after escaping she went back about 13 times for family and friends, and later said she 'never lost a passenger'.

Hattie McDaniel won her Oscar for playing which character?

Mammy in Gone with the Wind won McDaniel the first Oscar given to a Black performer, two months after she and the film's other Black actors were kept out of its premiere at a whites-only Atlanta theatre.

Which federal law, as amended, defines an HBCU as a college founded before 1964?

The Higher Education Act of 1965 sets the cut-off at 1964, the year federal law provided for integrating schools; colleges founded earlier to educate Black Americans count as HBCUs.

Which HBCU was the only one rated R1, the top research tier, in the 2025 Carnegie classifications?

Howard University regained a rank it had lost: it held Carnegie's top research tier until the criteria changed in 2005, then worked for years to win the status back.

A mob destroyed Ida B. Wells's newspaper office in 1892 after her anti-lynching editorials in which Tennessee city?

Memphis was where Wells co-owned the Free Speech; after a friend and his two business partners were lynched in 1892 she attacked mob rule in print, and a mob wrecked the paper's office while she was away.

Jackie Robinson, famed as a second baseman, played which position in his 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers debut?

First base was new to Robinson: Brooklyn already had Eddie Stanky at second, so he learned the position that spring and moved over only after Stanky was traded in 1948.

Which 1953 James Baldwin novel did Time rank among the top 100 English-language novels?

Go Tell It on the Mountain drew on Baldwin's own teens: like its hero John Grimes, he was the stepson of a stern Harlem preacher and began preaching himself at 14 in a Pentecostal church.

Jesse Owens won three sprint golds and which field event in 1936?

Long jump made it four golds for Owens, yet he came home to no White House invitation and was soon racing against horses for prize money.

With which band was Jimi Hendrix inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992?

The Experience was formed in England in 1966 after Animals bassist Chas Chandler saw Hendrix play a Greenwich Village club, became his manager and flew him across the Atlantic.

John Lewis represented which state in the US House from 1987 to 2020?

Georgia sent Lewis, the son of Alabama sharecroppers, to Congress after he upset fellow activist Julian Bond, the front-runner, in a 1986 Democratic runoff in Atlanta.

Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when a Union general announced freedom for enslaved Texans in which port city?

Galveston is where Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation; Texas first marked the day as a state holiday in 1980.

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

Federal public defender was Jackson's job in Washington from 2005 to 2007; earlier she had clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, whose seat she took when he retired in 2022.

Langston Hughes's poem 'Harlem' asks what happens to what 'deferred'?

A dream deferred opens the poem, from his book Montage of a Dream Deferred; in 1925 Hughes, working as a hotel busboy, slipped his poems to the visiting poet Vachel Lindsay, who publicized them.

Lewis Latimer improved manufacturing of which light-bulb component?

Carbon filaments made by Latimer's 1882 process broke less often in production; he had learned drafting at a patent law office, where he drew the diagrams for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent.

Which Arkansas governor tried to block the Little Rock Nine in 1957?

Orval Faubus sent the Arkansas National Guard to keep nine Black students out of Central High; Eisenhower took command of that same Guard and sent the 101st Airborne to escort them in.

Which song won Louis Armstrong the 1965 Grammy for best male vocal performance?

'Hello, Dolly!' topped the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1964, displacing the Beatles, and won Armstrong the 1965 Grammy for Best Vocal Performance, Male.

Which 1967 Supreme Court case struck down bans on interracial marriage?

Loving v. Virginia began when a sheriff woke Richard and Mildred Loving in bed five weeks after their wedding; a judge suspended their jail terms only if they left the state for 25 years.

Guinness records Madam C. J. Walker as America's first woman to become what?

Guinness World Records lists Madam C. J. Walker as America's first female self-made millionaire; her fortune came from hair-care products for Black women sold by a network of 'Walker agents'.

Who was the first Black woman in space?

Mae Jemison, a doctor and former Peace Corps medical officer, grew up on Star Trek; a year after her flight she played a lieutenant in an episode of The Next Generation.

Malcolm X broke with which religious movement in 1964?

The Nation of Islam suspended Malcolm X for calling Kennedy's assassination 'chickens coming home to roost'; he quit in March 1964, made the pilgrimage to Mecca and embraced Sunni Islam.

Which two singers both performed at the 1963 March on Washington?

Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson both sang that day; for Anderson it was a return, since in 1939, barred from Constitution Hall, she had sung from the same Lincoln Memorial steps to 75,000 people.

Marcus Garvey took the title Provisional President of what in 1920?

Africa was the answer: Garvey took the title at his UNIA's first international convention in August 1920, though he never once set foot on the continent.

What was Martin Luther King Jr.'s first name at birth?

King was born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929; his father changed both their names to Martin Luther in 1934 after a trip to Germany, inspired by the Reformation leader.

Matthew Henson accompanied which explorer on Arctic voyages for nearly 23 years?

Robert Peary met Henson working in a Washington store in 1887 and hired him for a canal survey in Nicaragua; Henson then sailed with him on seven Arctic voyages.

Which was the first of Maya Angelou's seven autobiographies, published in 1969?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings came about after her friend James Baldwin urged her to write her life story; it recounts the childhood trauma after which she barely spoke for about five years.

Medgar Evers was the NAACP's first field secretary in which state?

Mississippi was where Evers was shot outside his home in 1963; two all-white juries deadlocked, and his killer was not convicted until 1994, on new evidence.

Michael Jordan left the Bulls in 1993 to play which sport professionally?

Baseball occupied Jordan for one minor-league season: he hit .202 for the Birmingham Barons in 1994, then announced his NBA return with a two-word statement, 'I'm back'.

Besides music, in which art form was Miles Davis also active?

Miles Davis took up painting and sketching in the 1980s, exhibiting his work and using it on album covers such as Amandla (1989); in music he pioneered cool jazz, modal jazz and fusion.

Which federal ruling ended the Montgomery bus boycott on December 20, 1956?

In Browder v. Gayle the Supreme Court affirmed on November 13, 1956, that Montgomery's bus segregation was unconstitutional; the order reached the city on December 20, ending the 381-day boycott.

Under what name did Berry Gordy found the company that became Motown in January 1959?

Tamla Records began on January 12, 1959, with an $800 loan from Gordy's family; he incorporated the business as Motown Record Corporation the following year.

Which unbeaten champion did Muhammad Ali knock out in the 1974 'Rumble in the Jungle'?

George Foreman, the heavy favourite, pounded away while Ali leaned back on the ropes and let him tire, then knocked him out in the eighth round; the tactic became known as rope-a-dope.

Which NAACP magazine did W.E.B. Du Bois found in 1910?

The Crisis, which Du Bois edited until 1934, became a launch pad for Black writers: in 1921 it printed 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers', the poem that won a young Langston Hughes his first acclaim.

Who led the 1831 uprising of enslaved people in Southampton County?

Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher, read a solar eclipse in February 1831 as his sign to rise up; in the aftermath Southern states passed laws against teaching enslaved people to read.

Which title did Nina Simone's stage presence earn her?

The 'High Priestess of Soul' was born Eunice Waymon, a minister's daughter; she became Nina Simone in an Atlantic City bar in 1954 to hide from her mother that she was playing in nightclubs.

Which cable network did Oprah Winfrey launch in January 2011?

OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, went on air on New Year's Day 2011; that spring Winfrey ended her talk show after 25 seasons and moved over to the channel, which struggled for viewers at first.

Percy Julian synthesized hormones such as progesterone from which crop?

Soybeans entered Julian's career by letter: denied a professorship because he was Black, he wrote to the Glidden company for soybean-oil samples and was instead hired to run its soy research.

After Boston publishers turned it down, in which city was Phillis Wheatley's 1773 poetry collection first printed?

London published the book with a countess's backing; it opened with a note signed by John Hancock and other Boston notables vouching that an enslaved young woman had written the poems.

Which doctrine did 'Plessy vs. Ferguson' establish in 1896?

'Separate but equal' grew from a planned arrest: in 1892 a New Orleans citizens' committee had Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white, sit in a whites-only rail car to test Louisiana's law.

Prince pioneered a musical style named after which city?

Minneapolis stayed Prince's base for life: he built his Paisley Park studios in nearby Chanhassen, and it was there that he died in 2016.

Who became the first Black Nobel laureate, winning the 1950 Peace Prize?

Ralph Bunche became the UN's mediator in Palestine when his chief, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated in 1948, and within a year had Israel and its Arab neighbours signing armistices.

Which Ralph Ellison novel won the National Book Award in 1953?

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel about an unnamed Black narrator's journey from the South to Harlem, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, beating Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

Which painter depicted Ruby Bridges in 'The Problem We All Live With'?

Norman Rockwell painted it for Look magazine in 1964; in 2011 it hung outside the Oval Office, where Ruby Bridges herself came to see it alongside President Obama.

About how far did the Selma to Montgomery march of March 1965 cover?

The 54 miles took five days: a court order let only 300 marchers walk the two-lane stretch of highway, but about 25,000 people joined them for the final leg to Alabama's capitol.

Which Brooklyn neighborhood centered Shirley Chisholm's congressional district?

Bedford-Stuyvesant anchored the district Chisholm won in 1968 over civil rights leader James Farmer, campaigning as 'unbought and unbossed' and using her fluent Spanish with its Hispanic voters.

Sidney Poitier, the first Black winner of the Best Actor Oscar, grew up in which island nation?

The Bahamas was home, but Poitier arrived early while his tomato-farming parents were visiting Miami, which made him a US citizen by birth; he grew up on Cat Island.

At which Olympics did Simone Biles withdraw from the team final with 'the twisties'?

Tokyo 2020 saw Biles lose her sense of position in mid-air and sit out most of her finals, returning only for a bronze on the beam; at Paris in 2024 she won three more golds.

Sojourner Truth, whose first language was Dutch, escaped slavery in 1826 in which state?

New York was where Truth, born Isabella, walked away from her enslaver in 1826, a year before the state's emancipation took effect; in 1828 she went to court and won back her young son, sold illegally out of state.

Which organization did Thurgood Marshall lead before joining the Supreme Court?

Thurgood Marshall founded and led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1940 to 1961, arguing Brown v. Board of Education before the Court he joined in 1967 and served on until 1991.

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

The Bluest Eye grew from a short story Morrison wrote for a university writers' group, about a Black girl who longed for blue eyes; she finished the novel while raising two sons on her own.

Which Tulsa district was destroyed in the 1921 race massacre?

Greenwood, known as 'Black Wall Street', lost some 35 blocks in under a day; the attack was then left out of history books and seldom spoken of in Tulsa until a state commission began investigating in 1997.

Which nickname did the Tuskegee Airmen earn?

Red Tails came from the crimson paint on the tails of the 332nd Fighter Group's planes; three years after the war, President Truman ordered the armed forces desegregated.

Which Black inventor patented an automatic lubricator for steam engines in 1872?

Elijah McCoy trained as a mechanical engineer in Scotland but could only get work as a railroad fireman and oiler in Michigan, so he devised a cup that oiled engines while they ran.

Which president signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965?

Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, five months after the Selma marches; it banned literacy tests and sent federal examiners to register Black voters in the South.

Which Du Bois book popularized 'double consciousness'?

The Souls of Black Folk also took on Booker T. Washington, rejecting his view that Black Southerners should give up basic rights for now in exchange for education.

Which illness left Wilma Rudolph in a leg brace as a child, years before her three Olympic golds?

Polio weakened Rudolph's left leg in early childhood; her brothers and sisters took turns massaging it, the brace was gone before her teens, and at 20 she won three sprint golds in Rome.

Which 1937 Zora Neale Hurston novel follows Janie Crawford through three marriages in Florida?

Their Eyes Were Watching God was written in Haiti during a research fellowship; long neglected, it found its readers after Alice Walker's 1975 essay 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston'.

Which Lorraine Hansberry play took its title from Langston Hughes's poem 'Harlem'?

A Raisin in the Sun echoes Hansberry's childhood: when her family moved into a white Chicago neighbourhood a mob gathered outside, and her father fought the housing covenant to the Supreme Court.

Which Suriname-born inventor's 1883 shoe-lasting machine transformed footwear manufacturing?

Jan Matzeliger's machine could last up to 700 pairs of shoes a day where a skilled worker managed about 50 by hand, and shoe prices fell by almost half.

Which Alice Walker novel made her the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer for Fiction?

The Color Purple won the 1983 Pulitzer for Fiction; a decade earlier Walker had tracked down the unmarked Florida grave of the novelist Zora Neale Hurston and placed a headstone on it.

In 1995 Octavia E. Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive which honour?

A MacArthur Fellowship, the 'genius grant', reached Butler in 1995 after years of temporary jobs, chosen so that she could get up hours before dawn each day to write.

Robert L. Johnson became the first Black American billionaire in 2001 by selling which cable network to Viacom?

BET fetched a reported $3 billion, and Johnson's share came to more than $1 billion. He went on to become the first Black majority owner of a major American sports team, the Charlotte Bobcats.

Daymond John, later an investor on Shark Tank, waited tables at Red Lobster while building which clothing brand?

FUBU started in his mother's house in Hollis, Queens, after he sewed about 90 hats and sold them for $10 each. Neighbourhood friend LL Cool J later wore the brand in a promotional campaign.

Robert F. Smith used his 2019 commencement speech to wipe out the graduating class's student debt at which HBCU?

Morehouse College's 396 graduates owed a reported $34 million, a sum that included loans taken out by their parents and guardians. Smith had already given the school $1.5 million earlier that year.

John H. Johnson borrowed $500 against his mother's furniture to start publishing, then launched which magazine in 1945?

Ebony followed his first title, Negro Digest, which the $500 loan helped launch in 1942. Forty years on, Johnson became the first African American to appear on the Forbes 400.

Maggie Lena Walker of Richmond became the first African American woman to charter what kind of business in 1903?

A bank named the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank also made Walker the first African American woman to serve as a bank president. A year earlier she had published the first issue of a newspaper, the St. Luke Herald.

Ursula Burns rose from summer intern to first Black woman chief executive of a Fortune 500 company at which firm?

Xerox named Ursula Burns its leader in 2009, 29 years after she arrived as a mechanical engineering intern. She was also the first woman to follow another woman as head of a Fortune 500 company.

Kenneth Chenault spent 37 years at which financial company, leading it as chief executive from 2001 to 2018?

American Express made Kenneth Chenault only the third Black leader of a Fortune 500 company when it named him to the top job.

Madam C. J. Walker built a factory, salon and beauty school after moving her hair-care company to which city in 1910?

Indianapolis became the headquarters of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, and she later added a research laboratory there. The city's Madame Walker Theatre Center is a listed historic place.

Parrish Street, lined with Black-owned banks and insurers, was known as the 'Black Wall Street' of which Southern city?

Durham's Parrish Street grew around a life insurance company opened by a former barber, John Merrick. By 1910 the firm was billed as 'the world's largest Negro business'.

Reginald Lewis built the first Black-owned company with $1 billion in yearly sales by buying which food giant?

Beatrice International Foods cost Lewis $985 million, and the renamed TLC Beatrice reported $1.8 billion in revenue within a year. His first big deal had been a sewing-pattern maker bought for $22.5 million.

Which rock and roll pioneer quit the stage in 1957 to study theology at Oakwood, a Seventh-day Adventist college?

Little Richard took a red fireball over his Sydney concert as a sign from God to give up secular music. It was Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.

Which Seventh-day Adventist neurosurgeon led the first known separation of twins joined at the back of the head?

Ben Carson led that operation three years after taking charge of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins at age 33. He was the youngest person in the country to hold such a job.

Which a cappella gospel group, winners of several Grammy Awards, formed at the Adventist-run Oakwood College in 1980?

Take 6 began as a quartet put together by freshman Claude McKnight, the older brother of R&B singer Brian McKnight. The group went on to sing in local churches under the name Alliance.

Irene Morgan, raised a Seventh-day Adventist, won a 1946 Supreme Court case after refusing to give up her seat on what?

A Greyhound bus was taking Morgan home to Baltimore in 1944 when she was arrested, and she kicked the sheriff who tried to pull her from her seat. The Court then struck down segregation on interstate buses.

Sojourner Truth spent her final decades in which Michigan city, an early home of the Seventh-day Adventist Church?

Battle Creek and the nearby Spiritualist village of Harmonia were Truth's home from 1857 until her death in 1883. She is buried in the city's Oak Hill Cemetery.

Oakwood University, the Seventh-day Adventist HBCU founded in 1896 on a former plantation, is in which Alabama city?

Huntsville's Oakwood campus cost its founders $6,700. The 360-acre plantation had belonged to the enslavers of Dred Scott, the man at the heart of the 1857 Supreme Court case.

Rear Admiral Barry Black became the first African American and the first Seventh-day Adventist to hold which office?

Senate chaplain Barry Black took the job in 2003 after more than 27 years in the Navy Chaplain Corps, which he ended up leading. He is a graduate of Oakwood, the Adventist HBCU.

Oakwood professor Eva B. Dykes was in 1921 the first Black American woman to complete the requirements for what?

A doctorate from Radcliffe was hers on paper first, yet two other Black women received theirs sooner because Radcliffe held its ceremony later that spring. Dykes had joined the Adventist church in 1920.

Anna Knight, sent overseas by Seventh-day Adventists in 1901 as a Black woman missionary, served in which country?

India was her post from 1901, a first for a Black woman in Adventist missions. Her father was Newton Knight, the Confederate deserter whose revolt was filmed as Free State of Jones.

Black-administered Seventh-day Adventist church bodies, approved in 1944 after Lucy Byard's death, go by what name?

Regional conferences were approved months after Lucy Byard, a Black Adventist with cancer, was turned away from an Adventist sanitarium because of her race. Seven formed within two and a half years.

Martin Luther King Jr. talked actress Nichelle Nichols out of resigning from which 1960s television series?

Star Trek was the only show King and his wife let their three children stay up to watch, he told her. Nichols later spent decades helping NASA recruit women and minority astronauts.

Which actor played Jackie Robinson, James Brown and Thurgood Marshall on film as well as Marvel's T'Challa?

Chadwick Boseman was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2016 and went on making films. His final film, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, earned him a posthumous Oscar nomination.

Halle Berry became the first Black woman to win the Best Actress Oscar for playing a struggling widow in which film?

Monster's Ball won on a night when Denzel Washington took Best Actor and Sidney Poitier collected an honorary Oscar.

Denzel Washington won his Best Actor Oscar for playing a corrupt Los Angeles detective in which crime thriller?

Training Day made him the second Black winner of that award, after Sidney Poitier. Washington already had a supporting Oscar for playing a Civil War soldier in Glory.

Which EGOT winner became the second Black woman to win an acting Oscar, for playing a psychic in Ghost?

Whoopi Goldberg, born Caryn Johnson, won half a century after Hattie McDaniel became the first.

Which actor, the voice of Darth Vader, refused to speak for years as a child because of a severe stutter?

James Earl Jones credited a high school English teacher, Donald Crouch, with ending his silence after spotting his gift for writing poetry. He also voiced Mufasa in The Lion King.

Who became the first Black woman to win the lead drama actress Emmy, for How to Get Away with Murder?

Viola Davis won for playing lawyer Annalise Keating. The Juilliard graduate later completed an EGOT, the full set of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.

Dorothy Dandridge became the first African American nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for which 1954 musical?

Carmen Jones was an all-Black musical whose director, Otto Preminger, at first could not picture Dandridge as its femme fatale. Halle Berry later played her in a 1999 biopic.

Who was the first Black winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, as a drill instructor in An Officer and a Gentleman?

Louis Gossett Jr. had already won an Emmy for the miniseries Roots. He landed his first Broadway role at 17, after a high school teacher pushed him to audition.

Which actor and singer, twice an All-American footballer at Rutgers, later played Othello on Broadway?

Paul Robeson was the only African American student at Rutgers, where he was also elected class valedictorian. The State Department later voided his passport over his political views.

Lonnie Johnson, a NASA engineer on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, invented which hit toy of the early 1990s?

Super Soaker sales reached $200 million in 1991 alone. Johnson hit on the idea while working on a heat pump system, and the toy first went on sale as the Power Drencher.

Margot Lee Shetterly's book about the Black women 'computers' behind NASA's early spaceflights became which 2016 film?

Hidden Figures grew from stories Shetterly heard from her childhood Sunday school teacher, who had been a NASA computer herself. The film was nominated for three Oscars.

Gladys West's mathematical models of Earth's shape, built for the US Navy, became a foundation of which technology?

GPS draws on the satellite geodesy models West programmed on an IBM computer from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. She was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2018.

Which physicist and astronaut, lost in the 1986 Challenger disaster, had planned to record a saxophone solo in orbit?

Ronald McNair had worked on the piece with French composer Jean-Michel Jarre, who dedicated an album track to him. As a boy, McNair refused to leave a segregated library until he could borrow its books.

NASA renamed its Washington headquarters in 2021 after which woman, the agency's first Black female engineer?

Mary Jackson took engineering classes to earn the title and rose to the most senior engineering rank available. She then switched to a job pushing the hiring and promotion of women.

Which former shuttle astronaut and Marine general became the first African American to lead NASA on a permanent basis?

Charles Bolden flew four shuttle missions, including the 1990 flight that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. He ran the agency from 2009 to 2017.

Ed Dwight, passed over for NASA's astronaut corps in the 1960s, finally flew to space in 2024 with which company?

Blue Origin carried Dwight, then 90, on a flight lasting just under ten minutes. In between, the former Air Force test pilot had become a sculptor of public monuments.

Dorothy Vaughan, first Black supervisor at NASA's forerunner, taught herself and her staff which programming language?

Fortran readied Vaughan's team for the arrival of electronic computers in the early 1960s. She had led the segregated West Area Computers unit since 1949.

Chemist Alice Ball, who died at 24, turned chaulmoogra oil into the first effective treatment for which disease?

Leprosy patients could finally take the oil by injection once Ball made it water-soluble. She died before publishing her findings, and others took credit for the method.

George Carruthers designed a gold-plated ultraviolet camera that in 1972 became the first telescope set up where?

On the Moon, the crew of Apollo 16 stood the camera beside their lander. An earlier Carruthers instrument had made the first detection of molecular hydrogen in space.

Which poet, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, read 'The Hill We Climb' at the 2021 presidential inauguration?

Amanda Gorman was 22 that day, the youngest poet to read at a presidential inauguration in United States history.

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

Boston Massacre victim Attucks became an icon of the anti-slavery movement in the mid-19th century. The five dead were buried as heroes in the Granary Burying Ground.

Which heavyweight champion, nicknamed the Brown Bomber, beat Germany's Max Schmeling in a famous 1938 rematch?

Joe Louis needed just two minutes and four seconds, knocking Schmeling down three times. He went on to make 25 consecutive title defenses, a record for all weight classes.

Henry Brown escaped slavery in Richmond in 1849 and reached Philadelphia abolitionists by what method?

Mailing himself in a box marked 'dry goods' took 27 hours by wagon, railroad and steamboat, and earned him the name Henry 'Box' Brown. He sang a song based on a psalm when he was let out.

Which American-born dancer spied for the French Resistance and became the first Black woman honoured in the Panthéon?

Josephine Baker carried secrets in notes pinned inside her clothing and written on her hands and arms. Her grave stayed in Monaco, so the Panthéon holds a cenotaph for her instead.

Who became the first Black man to win the Wimbledon singles title by beating defending champion Jimmy Connors in 1975?

Arthur Ashe was seeded sixth and days short of his 32nd birthday, and Connors was suing him for $5 million at the time. Ashe had also been the first Black player picked for the US Davis Cup team.

Nine months before Rosa Parks, which 15-year-old was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her bus seat?

Claudette Colvin went on to be one of four plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit that ended bus segregation in the city. Campaigners had dropped her own case because she was unmarried and pregnant.

Which educator opened a Daytona Beach school for Black girls and helped form Franklin Roosevelt's 'Black Cabinet'?

Mary McLeod Bethune rented a small house for $11 a month to start the school, which grew into Bethune-Cookman University. She later headed a division of the National Youth Administration.

Which enslaved ship's pilot seized the Confederate steamer Planter in 1862 and sailed his family to Union lines?

Robert Smalls wore the captain's straw hat and copied his manner to fool Confederate lookouts in Charleston Harbor. He later won election to the US House of Representatives.

Which mess attendant manned an anti-aircraft gun at Pearl Harbor and became the first Black recipient of the Navy Cross?

Doris Miller had no gunnery training; mess attendant was one of the few ratings then open to Black sailors. Admiral Chester Nimitz presented the medal in May 1942.