1. Mamie Till We stand strand in solidarity with the many Black mothers who, throughout American history, have endured the unspeakable — seeing their sons killed — only to further suffer pain when our justice system fails to deliver. This is Mamie Till. Her unarmed son Emmett, 14, was kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi on August […]
Memphis Slim was one of the greatest blues pianist, singers, and composers of all time. Slim made over 500 recordings and his first recording in 1947, “Every Day I Have the Blue” became a blues standard. John Len Chatman (Memphis Slim), was born in Memphis, Tennessee on September 3, 1915. For his first recordings, for […]
Cornelius Marion Battey was an African-American photographer who shot photographic portraits of black Americans in a pictorial style. His photograph of black leaders appeared on the cover of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, beginning in the 1910s. Battey was born on August 26, 1873, in Augusta, Georgia, but was raised in the North. His first […]
Minnie Tate was one the youngest member of the well-known Fisk University original Jubilee Singers. Tate was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1857 of free parents. Her maternal grandmother was a slave in Mississippi, her Master gave her and some of her children, including Minnie’s mother their freedom. After being freed, the family set out […]
Many people remember the sophisticated and fabulous Roxie Roker as Helen Willis, half of the interracial couple on ‘The Jeffersons.’ Others may know of her as Lenny Kravitz’s mom, Zoë Kravitz’s grandmother and the cousin of TV weatherman Al Roker. Roxie Albertha Roker was born in Miami on August 28, 1929 to Albert and Bessie […]
Louis Thomas Jordan was a pioneering American musician, songwriter, and bandleader who was popular from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as “The King of the Jukebox,” he was highly popular with both black and white audiences in the later years of the swing era. Jordan was born on July 8, 1908, in […]
On a sunny March day in 2005, a retired Alabama state trooper quietly drinks his morning coffee outside on his deck in southern Alabama. He granted an interview to John Fleming of Anniston, Alabama. At age 72, James Bonard Fowler is asked about Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old activist who he claimed he shot in […]
Anna Madah Hyers and Emma Louise Hyers were singers and pioneers of black musical theater. With Joseph Bradford and Pauline Hopkins, the Hyers Sisters produced the “first full-fledged musical plays in which African Americans themselves comment on the plight of the slaves and the relief of Emancipation without the disguises of minstrel comedy.” Their first […]
Patricia Roberts Harris was the first African-American woman to hold a Cabinet position, serve as U.S. ambassador, and head a law school. Harris was born on May 31, 1924, in Mattoon, Illinois, the daughter of a Pullman car waiter. Raised by her mother after her father left, she excelled at school and won a scholarship […]
George Walker and Egbert Williams were pre-eminent entertainers of the Vaudeville era and two of the most popular comedians for all audiences of their time. Walker was born around 1873 in Lawrence, Kansas. His career in show business started with him working as a member of a troupe of black minstrels who traveled throughout his […]
Floyd B. McKissick desegregated the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Law School. Years later, he became the leader of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, taking over from James L. Farmer, Jr. McKissick was born in the wealthy community of Asheville, North Carolina on March 9, 1922. The area was a summer vacation spot for many […]
In the United States, the dehumanization of Blacks by using the rhetoric of biological inferiority to describe dark skin planted its roots quite early in history. Not long after the first African had arrived in Virginia, legislators in 1622 passed laws against sexual relations between blacks and whites, citing them as evil and […]
