"If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated."
Alain LeRoy Locke, widely known as the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance,” was a trailblazing philosopher, educator, writer, and advocate for African American culture and art. Born on September 13,…
Lorraine Hansberry, born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois, was a trailblazing playwright, author, and activist who left an indelible mark on American literature and the civil rights movement.…
Can you imagine a life without blood banks, traffic lights, security systems, cloth dryers, and automatic elevator doors? These remarkable creations and a lot more wouldn’t exist today if it…
Elijah Muhammad, born Elijah Robert Poole on October 7, 1897, in Sandersville, Georgia, was a pivotal figure in the history of Islam in America. He was the leader of the…
June 12th, 1963 — 37-year-old civil rights organizer Medgar Evers was assassinated in the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. In the early 1960s Evers served as the first…
On July 24, 1972, the Washington Star newspaper broke the story about the Tuskegee Institute syphilis experiment. From 1932 until 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service, in partnership with Tuskegee,…
Opened in 1920, Harlem’s Cotton Club was a red-hot venue. However, despite its location, the club’s audience was whites-only, in stark contrast to its cast of all-Black performers that for…
100 years ago, a white mob destroyed an American neighborhood called “Black Wall Street,” murdering an estimated 300 people in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That incident — known as the 1921 Tulsa…
In 1916, 32 men were trapped in a mine near Lake Erie. Garrett Morgan saw an opportunity to prove his fireproof hood worked – and went in to rescue them.
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams was one of the few African-American surgeons of the early 1890s. He performed the first successful open-heart surgery at Provident Hospital in Chicago in 1893. James…