Black History
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225 free Black History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
91 free Black history trivia questions with answers. From Harriet Tubman's daring rescues to the landmark Supreme Court decisions that dismantled segregation, Black history is woven into every chapter of the American story. This 225-question quiz, built to serve as BHM trivia questions in February and Black history trivia all year, spans centuries of resilience, creativity, and leadership — covering civil rights icons, scientific pioneers, literary giants, and the movements that transformed a nation. How much do you really know?
30 of 225 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who delivered the 'I Have a Dream' speech in August 1963?
Martin Luther King Jr.
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.
Q 02Who refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, sparking a major boycott?
Rosa Parks
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.
Q 03Which state did Barack Obama represent in the US Senate before becoming the first African American president?
Illinois
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.
Q 04What was the racial segregation system enforced by statute in the American South called?
Jim Crow laws
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.
Q 05Which abolitionist's 1845 Narrative was followed by My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855, the second of his three autobiographies?
Frederick Douglass
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.
Q 06What landmark 1954 Supreme Court case declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional?
Brown v. Board of Education
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.
Q 07Which Underground Railroad conductor is known as the 'Moses of her people'?
Harriet Tubman
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.
Q 08Ava DuVernay's 2016 documentary 13th is named for the constitutional amendment that did what in 1865?
Abolished slavery
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.
Q 09Who was the first African American to play Major League Baseball in the modern era?
Jackie Robinson
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.
Q 10What 1920s New York movement celebrated African American culture, art and literature?
The Harlem Renaissance
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.
Q 11Which civil rights leader co-founded the NAACP in 1909?
W.E.B. Du Bois
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.
Q 12Who wrote the novel 'Beloved,' which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988?
Toni Morrison
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.
Q 13Which Tuskegee Institute scientist became famous for developing hundreds of products from peanuts?
George Washington Carver
Q 21The 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches helped push which federal law through Congress that same year?
The Voting Rights Act
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.
Q 22Medgar Evers, murdered at his home in Jackson in 1963, held which post?
NAACP field secretary for Mississippi
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.
Q 23Which Black entrepreneur does Guinness World Records list as America's first self-made female millionaire?
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.
Q 14Which Maya Angelou autobiography, the first of seven, covers her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas?
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, takes its title from a line in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem 'Sympathy'.
Q 15Which 'Hidden Figures' mathematician did John Glenn ask to check the computer's numbers before his 1962 orbital flight?
Katherine Johnson
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.'
Q 16What is the name for about six million Black Americans leaving the South between 1910 and 1970?
The Great Migration
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.
Q 17Who founded the Black Panther Party in 1966?
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale
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.
Q 18Which African American inventor designed a three-way traffic signal in 1923?
Garrett Morgan
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.
Q 19Whose 1955 lynching in Mississippi, at age 14, galvanised the civil rights movement after his mother insisted on an open casket?
Emmett Till
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.
Q 20Who was the first African American woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress?
Halle Berry
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.
Madam C.J. Walker
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.
Q 24What did a white mob destroy in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921?
Greenwood, known as 'Black Wall Street'
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.
Q 25Who was the first African American Supreme Court Justice?
Thurgood Marshall
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.
Q 26Which composer, whose 'St. Louis Blues' came out in 1914, is known as the 'Father of the Blues'?
W.C. Handy
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.
Q 27Which group did Black ministers form in 1957, after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to coordinate nonviolent protest?
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
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.
Q 28Which African American poet wrote the poem 'Harlem' (also known as 'A Dream Deferred')?
Langston Hughes
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.
Q 29Who was the first African American woman to travel to space?
Mae Jemison
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.
Q 30What did the Supreme Court rule in Dred Scott in 1857?
Black people could not be U.S. citizens
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.