99 Fun Facts About African American History

Who refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking a Civil Rights milestone?

Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on December 1, 1955, led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a transformative event in the Civil Rights Movement.

Which 1896 Supreme Court case established the 'separate but equal' precedent?

Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, deliberately boarded a whites-only train car in New Orleans in 1892 to create the test case.

Who authored the influential autobiography 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'?

Maya Angelou, writer and poet, chronicled her young and early years in it, and the 1969 book became a seminal work in American literature.

In what year did President Abraham Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation?

Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863; it applied only to the ten states still in rebellion and freed no one in the loyal border states.

Who was the first African American to play Major League Baseball in the modern era?

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.

Which African American scientist developed hundreds of uses for the peanut and sweet potato?

George Washington Carver's 1921 testimony to Congress supporting a peanut tariff made him a national celebrity, though he patented only three of his hundreds of peanut and sweet potato products.

What major event in August 1963 saw Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his 'I Have a Dream' speech?

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held on August 28, 1963, was a massive protest where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic 'I Have a Dream' speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Who was the first African American Supreme Court Justice?

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.

Which amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States?

The 13th Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865, abolished slavery nationwide but carved out an exception for involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.

Which 1920s African American cultural movement produced Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay?

The Harlem Renaissance, centred on uptown Manhattan in the 1920s, was also called the New Negro Movement after Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro.

Which president signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law?

Lyndon B. Johnson signed it at the White House; Kennedy had proposed the bill in June 1963, and Johnson pushed it through a 72-day Senate filibuster led by Georgia's Richard Russell.

What was the primary goal of the Freedom Riders in 1961?

One of their buses was firebombed outside Anniston, Alabama; the campaign forced the Interstate Commerce Commission to ban segregated terminals that November.

Who was the first African American woman to travel into space?

Mae C. Jemison flew her only mission, STS-47, in September 1992, a joint US-Japan Spacelab flight aboard Endeavour; she later played a Starfleet officer on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In what year did Sojourner Truth deliver her 'Ain't I a Woman?' speech?

Sojourner Truth spoke at the Akron, Ohio women's rights convention in May 1851; the famous 'Ain't I a Woman?' wording comes from Frances Gage's 1863 version, absent from the report printed weeks after.

The Stono Rebellion, a significant slave revolt, occurred in what colonial state in 1739?

The Stono Rebellion was the largest slave uprising in the British mainland colonies prior to the American Revolution, beginning on September 9, 1739, in the colony of South Carolina.

Which group of African American pilots famously flew in World War II despite segregation?

The Tuskegee Airmen trained at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama, and their red-painted tails earned the fighter pilots the nickname Red Tails.

In what year did the Supreme Court unanimously decide Brown v. Board of Education?

The 9-0 ruling overturned the 'separate but equal' doctrine in public education, though it set no deadline and desegregation dragged on for years.

Which civil rights organisation did W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington and Moorfield Storey help found in 1909?

Its founding was prompted by the 1908 Springfield, Illinois race riot, and its first president, Moorfield Storey, was a white Boston lawyer.

Which holiday commemorates the 1865 announcement of emancipation to enslaved people in Texas?

Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston and announced that enslaved people in Texas were free; it became a federal holiday in 2021.

In 1968, who became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress?

Shirley Chisholm won New York's 12th district in 1968 with the slogan 'Unbought and unbossed', and four years later ran for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Guinness names which hair-care entrepreneur as America's first self-made woman millionaire?

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.

Hiram Revels, the first African American in Congress, was elected to the Senate from which state?

Hiram Revels took a Mississippi Senate seat in 1870 that had sat empty since secession, and later became the first president of what is now Alcorn State University.

Inventor Garrett Morgan sold the rights to which 1923 invention to General Electric for $40,000?

Garrett Morgan patented his three-position traffic signal in 1923 after seeing a car collide with a horse-drawn carriage; its arms could be raised halfway to warn drivers, and he sold the rights to General Electric.

In which country did Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman pilot, earn her licence?

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.

The 1960 Greensboro sit-ins began at the lunch counter of which store chain?

Four North Carolina A&T freshmen sat down at the Greensboro Woolworth's lunch counter on February 1, 1960; the building reopened in 2010 as the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

The Tulsa neighborhood destroyed in the 1921 race massacre, nicknamed 'Black Wall Street', was called what?

Greenwood, Tulsa's prosperous Black district, was burned over May 31 and June 1, 1921; more than 35 square blocks were destroyed and about 10,000 Black residents were left homeless.

Frederick Douglass began publishing which anti-slavery newspaper in Rochester, New York, in 1847?

Douglass launched The North Star in Rochester on December 3, 1847, naming it for the star that guided freedom seekers north; supporters in Britain raised the money for his printing press.

Nat Turner led the deadliest slave revolt in U.S. history in August 1831 in which state?

Nat Turner's uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, killed an estimated 55 white people over two days in August 1831 and led to harsher slave codes across the South.

Carl Stokes became the first Black mayor of which major US city in 1967?

Carl Stokes won Cleveland's mayoral race in November 1967, becoming the first Black mayor of a major US city; his brother Louis Stokes served 15 terms in the U.S. House.

Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar for her role in which 1939 film?

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.

Berry Gordy Jr. founded Motown Records in 1959 in which city?

Motown's name blends 'motor' and 'town', a nod to Detroit's auto industry; Gordy founded it as Tamla Records in January 1959 and incorporated Motown Record Corporation in 1960.

On Selma's 'Bloody Sunday' in March 1965, troopers attacked marchers after they crossed which structure?

About 600 marchers were beaten with batons and tear-gassed after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965; the outcry helped push the Voting Rights Act through Congress that August.

Which president intervened so the Little Rock Nine could attend Central High School in 1957?

Governor Orval Faubus had used the Arkansas National Guard to keep the nine students out of the school.

Who became the first African American in space, flying aboard Challenger on mission STS-8 in 1983?

Guion Bluford flew aboard Challenger on STS-8 in August 1983, the Shuttle program's first night launch and night landing, and went on to fly four missions in all.

Which NASA mathematician did John Glenn insist verify the computer's orbital calculations?

Katherine Johnson also calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 Freedom 7 flight and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2015.

Which Underground Railroad conductor was nicknamed 'Moses' and later said she 'never lost a passenger'?

Harriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross in Maryland, made about 13 rescue missions freeing roughly 70 people, and later served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army.

How many gold medals did Jesse Owens win at the 1936 Berlin Olympics?

He won the 100 m, 200 m, long jump and 4x100 m relay, and ESPN credited him with crushing Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy.

Which 1857 Supreme Court ruling held that people of African descent could not be US citizens?

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger Taney's 7–2 opinion held that Black people could not be citizens and struck down the Missouri Compromise; it is widely regarded as the Court's worst decision.

Which activist created the holiday Kwanzaa in 1966?

Karenga said the name comes from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, 'first fruits', with an extra 'a' added to make a symbolic seven letters.

Which surgeon pioneered large-scale blood banks in WWII and resigned from the Red Cross over segregated blood?

Drew argued the segregation policy had no scientific basis; the Red Cross kept it until 1950.

Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for which novel?

Morrison went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and Beloved was filmed in 1998.

Who is traditionally regarded as the first person killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre?

Attucks, a whaler of African and Wampanoag descent, became an icon of the anti-slavery movement in the 19th century.

Who was the first African American to win a Nobel Prize, taking the Peace Prize in 1950?

Bunche was honored for negotiating the 1949 armistice between Egypt and Israel while serving as a UN mediator.

Which tennis player became the first Black athlete to win a Grand Slam event, at the 1956 French Open?

Gibson then won Wimbledon and the US Nationals in both 1957 and 1958, and later became the first Black player on the LPGA tour.

Booker T. Washington became the first leader of which Alabama school in 1881?

Booker T. Washington opened Tuskegee Institute on July 4, 1881, expanded it by having students build the campus, and his 1901 autobiography Up from Slavery became a major text.

How many Black Americans left the rural South for northern and western cities in the Great Migration?

About six million Black Americans left the South between roughly 1910 and 1970; over that span the share of Black Americans living in the South fell from about 90% to 53%.

Where was Emmett Till, the 14-year-old murdered in Mississippi in 1955, born and raised?

His mother Mamie insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago, which drew tens of thousands and galvanized the civil rights movement.

Which journalist's 1890s pamphlets, including 'Southern Horrors', documented lynching across the South?

Wells argued that lynching was used to terrorize Black Americans who posed economic and political competition to whites.

In which city was Phillis Wheatley's pioneering 1773 poetry collection published?

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was printed in London in 1773 by Archibald Bell after Boston printers declined it; the Wheatleys freed Phillis later that year.

Who became the 44th US president in 2009, the first African American to hold the office?

Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009; he had earlier been the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, a post that brought the publishing contract behind Dreams from My Father.

The Montgomery bus boycott ended in December 1956 when which Supreme Court ruling took effect?

Browder v. Gayle, affirmed by the Supreme Court in November 1956, outlawed Alabama's bus segregation; the order reached Montgomery on December 20, 1956, ending the 381-day boycott.

Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 at which Manhattan venue?

Malcolm X was shot at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights on February 21, 1965, as he began addressing about 400 people; two of the three murder convictions were vacated in 2021.

Who co-founded the Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale in October 1966?

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale met in 1962 as students at Merritt College in Oakland and founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966.

Which Black regiment spearheaded the July 1863 assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina?

The 54th Massachusetts Infantry lost roughly 40 percent of its men in the July 18, 1863 charge; its colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, was killed on the parapet, a story retold in the film Glory.

Denmark Vesey was hanged in 1822 for planning a slave revolt in which city?

Vesey's planned uprising in Charleston, South Carolina, was reportedly timed for Bastille Day, July 14, 1822; courts convicted 67 men and hanged 35, Vesey among them.

Which former president argued for the Amistad captives before the Supreme Court in 1841?

Adams, then a congressman, argued that the Africans were free people on a voyage home, not pirates or property. The Court agreed and they were freed.

Robert Smalls freed himself in 1862 by sailing which Confederate ship out to the Union blockade?

He steered the transport past the forts to the Union blockade with his crew and their families aboard. Smalls later served five terms in Congress.

Which president's 1948 executive order abolished racial discrimination in the US armed forces?

Executive Order 9981 was partly inspired by the blinding of Black veteran Isaac Woodard by police. The last all-Black unit was not disbanded until September 1954.

Doris Miller, a mess attendant at Pearl Harbor, became the first Black recipient of which medal?

Admiral Chester Nimitz pinned the Navy Cross on Doris Miller aboard USS Enterprise in May 1942; Miller was killed in November 1943 when the escort carrier Liscome Bay was torpedoed.

Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted in 1994 of murdering which NAACP field secretary?

Two all-white juries had deadlocked in the 1960s. Evers was shot in his own driveway in Jackson in June 1963, hours after a televised Kennedy speech on civil rights.

Which activist's tombstone reads 'I am sick and tired of being sick and tired'?

Fannie Lou Hamer's televised testimony at the 1964 Democratic convention described the beatings she endured for trying to register to vote; she later co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus.

The 1963 Klan bombing that killed 4 girls in Birmingham, Alabama, targeted which congregation?

At least 15 sticks of dynamite were planted under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963; Robert Chambliss was convicted only in 1977, two other Klansmen in 2001 and 2002.

Zora Neale Hurston set many of her stories in Eatonville, her childhood hometown in which state?

Florida's Eatonville was home from 1894, but Hurston was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama; her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, appeared in 1937.

Ralph Ellison's novel 'Invisible Man' won which prize in 1953?

Invisible Man won the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction; in his acceptance speech Ellison called the book 'an attempt at a major novel', and he never finished a second novel in his lifetime.

Who wrote 'A Raisin in the Sun', the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway?

It opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in March 1959 and was translated into 35 languages within two years. Hansberry died of cancer at 34.

Sidney Poitier won his history-making Best Actor Oscar for which 1963 film?

Poitier won Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963), the first Black actor and first Bahamian to take the award; In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner followed in 1967.

Barred from Constitution Hall by the DAR, Marian Anderson sang on Easter Sunday 1939 at which site?

Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution over the snub, and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes arranged the open-air concert on the Lincoln Memorial steps on April 9, 1939, drawing about 75,000.

Joe Louis's 1938 rematch, framed as a blow against Nazi Germany, was against which boxer?

The fight lasted two minutes and four seconds. Schmeling's camp had brought a Nazi publicist who claimed a Black man could not win.

Jack Johnson won the heavyweight title in 1908 by beating Tommy Burns in which city?

Johnson beat Burns at Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, on December 26, 1908, after chasing him around the world for two years; the 'Galveston Giant' held the title until 1915.

How many gold medals did Wilma Rudolph win at the 1960 Rome Olympics?

She took the 100 m, 200 m and 4x100 m relay, the first American woman to do so at one Games, after overcoming childhood polio.

In 1975 Arthur Ashe became the first Black man to win the singles title at which tournament?

Ashe beat Jimmy Connors in four sets in the 1975 Wimbledon final, adding to his 1968 US Open and 1970 Australian Open titles; he was the first Black man to win any of the three.

In which city did Rube Foster found the Negro National League at a 1920 YMCA meeting?

The Negro National League was organized at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City on February 13, 1920; Foster owned the Chicago American Giants and journalist Cary B. Lewis drafted the constitution.

How old was Satchel Paige when he made his Major League debut in 1948?

Satchel Paige was 42 when he debuted for Cleveland on July 9, 1948, the oldest rookie Major League Baseball had ever seen; owner Bill Veeck tracked his disputed birth certificate to Mobile, Alabama.

Harriet Jacobs published 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl' (1861) under which pseudonym?

The narrator is called Linda Brent throughout, though abolitionist circles openly introduced Jacobs as the author.

Almanac author Benjamin Banneker helped Andrew Ellicott survey the original borders of what?

Banneker, a self-taught astronomer whose almanacs sold commercially, joined Andrew Ellicott's 1791 survey of the ten-mile square that became the District of Columbia; the Ellicotts were Quaker neighbors of his Maryland farm.

Lewis Latimer, who drafted Bell's telephone patent drawings, improved the manufacture of what?

Latimer's 1882 patent covered a cheaper way to make carbon filaments for light bulbs; he also patented an evaporative cooler and an improved railroad-car toilet, having started as a $3-a-week office boy at a patent firm.

Jan Matzeliger's 1883 patent automated the 'lasting' step in making what?

Born in Dutch Guiana (Suriname), he died at 36; the Consolidated Lasting Machine Company was built on his devices.

In 1893 Daniel Hale Williams performed pioneering surgery to repair a wound to which body part?

Williams sutured the torn pericardium of stabbing victim James Cornish in July 1893 at Provident Hospital, which he had founded in 1891 as the first non-segregated hospital in the United States.

Who in 1864 became the first African American woman to earn a US medical degree?

Rebecca Lee Crumpler graduated from the New England Female Medical College in Boston in 1864, treated poor women and children, and published A Book of Medical Discourses in 1883.

Congress chartered which historically Black school in Washington, D.C., in March 1867?

It is named for General Oliver Otis Howard, a Civil War hero who was both its founder and head of the federal agency for freed people.

SNCC was formed in April 1960 at a conference held on which campus?

Ella Baker organized the founding meeting at Shaw University in Raleigh over Easter weekend 1960, growing out of the lunch-counter sit-ins; SNCC spun off the Black Women's Liberation Committee in 1968.

Six-year-old Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz Elementary in 1960 in which city?

Ruby Bridges walked past federal marshals into New Orleans's William Frantz Elementary on November 14, 1960, a scene Norman Rockwell painted in The Problem We All Live With; her father lost his job.

The immortal HeLa cell line came from which Johns Hopkins patient in 1951?

Henrietta Lacks's cervical-tumor cells were cultured by George Otto Gey at Johns Hopkins in 1951 and became the first immortal human cell line; she died that October, aged 31, without knowing.

The Public Health Service's untreated-syphilis study of Black men, begun in 1932, ended when?

The Tuskegee study ended in November 1972, months after whistleblower Peter Buxtun's leak led to Jean Heller's July 1972 Associated Press story; nearly 400 infected men had been observed rather than treated.

Who wrote the words of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing', first recited by 500 schoolchildren in 1900?

James Weldon Johnson wrote the words for a Lincoln's birthday celebration in Jacksonville in 1900 and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson set them to music; the NAACP adopted it as its official song in 1919.

Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week in 1926 during which month?

Woodson chose the second week of February because it spans the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and Frederick Douglass (February 14); Kent State students expanded it to a full month in 1970.

Which constitutional amendment, ratified in 1870, barred denying the vote on account of race?

The 15th Amendment, ratified February 3, 1870, was the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments; New York ratified it in 1869, then voted to rescind in January 1870.

The term 'Jim Crow' most likely comes from a blackface minstrel act by which white performer?

Thomas D. Rice's blackface song-and-dance 'Jump Jim Crow', first performed around 1828, was widely copied by other minstrel performers before the name attached to Southern segregation laws.

Who called the 1995 Million Man March on the National Mall?

Held on Monday, October 16, 1995, it was framed as a day of atonement. Farrakhan threatened to sue the Park Service over its low crowd estimate.

Who in June 2022 became the first Black woman to sit on the US Supreme Court?

Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in at noon on June 30, 2022, the moment Stephen Breyer's retirement took effect, becoming the first former federal public defender to sit on the Court.

Who was the first Black American to serve as US Secretary of State, from 2001 to 2005?

Colin Powell, an Army general, was the 65th secretary of state; his successor, Condoleezza Rice, was the second, and he had earlier been the first Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Edward Brooke, the first Black senator elected by popular vote (1966), represented which state?

A Republican, Brooke had been Massachusetts attorney general since 1963 and served two Senate terms for the state, from 1967 to 1979.

Who in 1989 became the first African American ever elected governor of a US state?

Wilder won by less than half a percentage point and received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for 1990. He was also the first Black governor since Reconstruction.

Marcus Garvey's UNIA launched which shipping company in 1919 to link the Americas and Africa?

Black Star Line deliberately answered the White Star Line; its failure led to Garvey's 1923 mail-fraud conviction and eventual deportation to Jamaica.

Claudette Colvin was how old when arrested in Montgomery in March 1955 for keeping her bus seat?

Her arrest came nine months before the better-known December incident. She was later a plaintiff in the suit that ended bus segregation.

Alice Coachman, the first Black woman to win Olympic gold (1948), competed in which event?

Coachman won the high jump in London by clearing 1.68 m on her first attempt, beating Britain's Dorothy Tyler on countback; she had won ten straight national titles from 1939 to 1948.

Hip-hop's 'birth' is dated to a 1973 party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in which New York borough?

At his sister Cindy Campbell's August 1973 back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc stretched drum breaks by switching between two copies of the same record.

Brown v. Board of Education arose from the public school system of which city?

Oliver Brown's daughter had been refused enrollment at the school closest to home; twelve other families joined the class action.

Gordon Parks, first Black director of a major-studio feature, made which 1971 detective hit?

Richard Roundtree's John Shaft spawned a series of films later labeled blaxploitation. Parks was also a celebrated Life magazine photographer.