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 ...

Photo credits: Norma Duffin/NAACP

Photo credits: National Archives & Records Administration/NAACP

Photo credits: An Introduction to Constitutional Law

Photo credits: The NAACP

Photo credits: United in Music Incorporated/NAACP

Anne Moody was an author who wrote about her experiences growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, in her book "Coming of Age in Mississippi." She was also greatly active in the Civil Rights Movement through the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC. Born Essie Mae Moody on September 15, 1940, near the town of Centreville in Mississippi's Wilkinson ...

The Battle of New Orleans (January 8, 1815) featured two Black led battalions backing Andrew Jackson in a campaign against the British. The Alabama Educational Television Commission is denied license renewal (January 8, 1975) by the Federal Communications Commission due to several cases of racial discrimination. St. Helena Parish schools ...

By Victor Trammell Photo credits: The Everett Collection Charles Hamilton Houston, the first general counsel of the NAACP, demonstrated the emptiness of the "separate but equal" theory and laid the ground for the Supreme Court decision to abolish race-based school segregation. Houston gained his "the Man Who Ended Jim Crow" nickname ...

By Victor Trammell Photo credits: Gilder Lehrman Center On January 25, 1890, Timothy Thomas Fortune officially established the National Afro-American League. It was an organization dedicated to racial harmony and self-sufficiency long before it became known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Fortune ...

James Stewart was a leader in Oklahoma City, state and national Civil Rights movement. He worked closely with Roscoe Dunjee, editor and publisher of the Black Dispatch, a newspaper which was put out weekly in Oklahoma. James Edward Stewart was born on September 6, 1912, in Plano, Texas to Zena Thomas Stewart and Mary Magedeline Fegalee ...

By Victor Trammell Photo credits: Hulton Archive / Getty Images Richard Wright (1908-1960) initially gained public prominence in the few years before and after 1940 with a collection of novels. The book "Uncle Tom's Children" (1938), a novel written by Wright, was inspired by the question: How can a Black man exist in a society that ...