African American History
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97 free African American History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
These 36 African American trivia questions with answers run from the colonial era to the Space Shuttle. The early questions cover the ground most people know: the Underground Railroad, the Emancipation Proclamation, Jackie Robinson, the March on Washington and Brown v. Board of Education. Then the quiz digs deeper into Reconstruction and the first Black senator, the Greensboro sit-ins, Bloody Sunday in Selma, the Tulsa massacre, Frederick Douglass's newspaper, Nat Turner's revolt and the Little Rock Nine. It also makes room for firsts beyond politics: the first Black Oscar winner, the first African American woman to earn a pilot's license, the first Black American in space, the NASA mathematician John Glenn trusted over the computer, and the entrepreneur Guinness credits as America's first self-made female millionaire. It suits Black History Month classrooms, church and community quiz nights, and anyone who wants more than the same ten names. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and reference sources, and each question shows the sentence that confirms it once you have answered.
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Q 01Who refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking a Civil Rights milestone?
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks later insisted she had not been physically tired that day: 'the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.' Her arrest on December 1, 1955, set off the Montgomery bus boycott.
Q 02Which 1896 Supreme Court case established the 'separate but equal' precedent?
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson began as a planned test case: Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, deliberately boarded a whites-only train car in 1892 so that he would be arrested.
Q 03Who authored the influential autobiography 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'?
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou's 1969 memoir of her childhood made her name; in 1993 she recited her poem 'On the Pulse of Morning' at Bill Clinton's presidential inauguration.
Q 04Which 1863 Lincoln document declared enslaved people in rebelling states free?
Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the ten states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, so it freed no one in the loyal border states.
Q 05Who was the first African American to play Major League Baseball in the modern era?
Jackie Robinson
Jackie Robinson debuted at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, breaking the modern color barrier; MLB retired his number 42 across every team in 1997.
Q 06Which African American scientist developed hundreds of uses for the peanut and sweet potato?
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver's 1921 testimony to Congress in support of a tariff on imported peanuts made him nationally famous, and the tariff passed the following year.
Q 07At which August 1963 event did Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his 'I Have a Dream' speech?
The March on Washington
The March on Washington drew about 250,000 people; near the end of his speech King left his prepared text and improvised the 'dream' passage.
Q 08Who was the first African American Supreme Court Justice?
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education, and served as a Justice from 1967 to 1991.
Q 09Which amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States?
13th
The 13th Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865, abolished slavery nationwide but carved out an exception for involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.
Q 10Which 1920s African American cultural movement produced Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay?
The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was the artistic flowering of the wider New Negro movement, and it lost much of its vitality when the Great Depression set in.
Q 11Which president signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson signed it at the White House on July 2, 1964; Kennedy had proposed the bill a year earlier, and it survived a long Senate filibuster led by Georgia's Richard Russell.
Q 12Which 1961 campaign challenged segregated interstate travel and saw a Greyhound bus firebombed outside Anniston, Alabama?
The Freedom Rides
The Freedom Rides pushed the Kennedy administration to act: the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation in interstate bus terminals from November 1, 1961.
Q 13Who was the first African American woman to travel into space?
Mae C. Jemison
Q 21Guinness names which hair-care entrepreneur as America's first self-made woman millionaire?
Madam C. J. Walker
Guinness World Records lists Madam C. J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove, as America's first self-made woman millionaire; she built her fortune on hair-care products for Black women and funded NAACP anti-lynching work.
Q 22Hiram Revels, the first African American in Congress, was elected to the Senate from which state?
Mississippi
Hiram Revels was elected by the Mississippi legislature in January 1870 to a Senate seat left empty since 1861; on leaving in 1871 he became president of the college that is now Alcorn State University.
Q 23Inventor Garrett Morgan sold the rights to which 1923 invention to General Electric for $40,000?
Mae C. Jemison flew aboard Endeavour in September 1992 on STS-47, a joint US-Japan Spacelab mission, where she ran experiments on space motion sickness and bone cells.
Q 14Who delivered the 'Ain't I a Woman?' speech in Ohio in 1851?
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth's famous refrain comes from Frances Gage's version, published twelve years later in 1863; the transcript printed weeks after the speech reads quite differently.
Q 15The Stono Rebellion of 1739, the largest slave uprising in Britain's mainland colonies, began in which colony?
South Carolina
South Carolina's rebels marched south toward Spanish St. Augustine, where fugitives had been promised freedom; after the revolt was crushed, the colony passed a harsher slave code, the Negro Act.
Q 16Which group of African American pilots famously flew in World War II despite segregation?
The Tuskegee Airmen
The Tuskegee Airmen painted the tails of their fighters red, earning the nickname Red Tails; the long-told claim that they never lost a bomber they escorted was a myth, as later research counted at least 25 shot down.
Q 17Which Chief Justice, once California's governor, wrote the unanimous 1954 ruling against school segregation?
Earl Warren
Earl Warren delivered the 9-0 opinion in his first term on the Court; it set no timetable, and a second ruling a year later asked only for 'all deliberate speed'.
Q 18Which scholar and author of The Souls of Black Folk helped found the NAACP and edited its magazine, The Crisis?
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois edited The Crisis from 1910 until 1934, when he resigned after a rift with NAACP leaders over his changing stance on segregation.
Q 19Which holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas were told they were free?
Juneteenth
Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when General Gordon Granger's order reached Galveston; it became a federal holiday in 2021 after years of campaigning by activist Opal Lee.
Q 20In 1968, who became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress?
Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm won her Brooklyn seat in 1968 with the slogan 'Unbought and unbossed', and four years later ran for the Democratic presidential nomination.
A traffic signal
Garrett Morgan patented his three-position traffic signal in 1923 after seeing a car collide with a horse-drawn carriage; its third position stopped traffic in every direction, and he sold the rights to General Electric.
Q 24In which country did Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman pilot, earn her licence?
France
Bessie Coleman earned her licence in France in June 1921 from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale after training at the Caudron brothers' school at Le Crotoy, because American flight schools refused her.
Q 25The 1960 Greensboro sit-ins began at the lunch counter of which store chain?
Woolworth's
Four North Carolina A&T students sat down at the Greensboro Woolworth's lunch counter on February 1, 1960; the building is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which preserves part of the counter.
Q 26The Tulsa neighborhood destroyed in the 1921 race massacre, nicknamed 'Black Wall Street', was called what?
Greenwood
Greenwood, Tulsa's prosperous Black district, was burned by white mobs over May 31 and June 1, 1921, leaving about 10,000 residents homeless; the massacre was barely mentioned in history books for decades.
Q 27Frederick Douglass began publishing which anti-slavery newspaper in Rochester, New York, in 1847?
The North Star
Douglass launched The North Star in Rochester on December 3, 1847, under the motto 'Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color', soon after supporters in Britain had bought his freedom.
Q 28Nat Turner led a bloody slave rebellion in August 1831 in which state?
Virginia
Virginia's Southampton County was the scene: Turner's rebels killed dozens of white people, and Southern legislatures answered with new laws banning the education and assembly of enslaved people.
Q 29Carl Stokes became the first Black mayor of which major US city in 1967?
Cleveland
Carl Stokes won Cleveland's mayoral race in November 1967 with 50.5 percent of the vote, defeating Seth Taft, the grandson of President William Howard Taft.
Q 30Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar for her role in which 1939 film?
Gone with the Wind
Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind at the February 1940 ceremony, where she was seated at a segregated table apart from the film's white cast.