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First Africans arrive
The first Africans arrive in the new world. -
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth was an African American abolitionist and womens rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her daughter to freedom in 1826. -
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman was an american abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved people, family and friends, using the underground railroad, a system of safe houses, owned by anti-slavery activists. -
Nat Turner Revolt
Nat turner led a slave rebellion in Virginia which permanently struck fear in slave owners mind, further restricting the rights of the slaves. -
Granville Woods
Woods was an american inventor who held more than 50 patents. He is also the first American of African ancestry to be a mechanical and electrical engineer after the Civil War. Self-taught, he concentrated most of his work on trains and streetcars. -
George Washington Carver
Carver was an american agricultural scientist and inventor. He actively promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. While a professor at Tuskegee Institute, Carver developed techniques to improve soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton. -
Garrett Morgan - inventor
Garrett Morgan invented the safety hood which was worn on the head by firefighters to help them breathe in smoke. The design was the hood, with two tubes running to the back one to cool the air and one to remove the smoke, thus keeping the air clean. -
Mary McLeod Bethune
Bethune was an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, and civil rights activist, best known for starting a private school for African American students in Daytona Beach, Florida and co-founding the UNCF -
Jack Johnson
John Arthur Johnson, nicknamed Galveston Giant, was an American boxer who, at the height of the Jim Crow era, became the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion. -
Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston was an influential author of African American literature and anthropologist, who portrayed racial struggles in the early 20th century american south. -
Frederick Douglass
American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. Douglass became the leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York. -
Louis Daniel Armstrong
Armstrong, nicknamed Satchmo, Satch, and Pops, was an american trumpet player, composer, vocalist, and occasional actor who was one of the most influential figures in jazz. -
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was an American lawyer, serving as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until 1991. Marshall was the courts first African American justice. -
Rosa Parks
Rosa parks, instrumental in the US civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s. Parks began an influential boycott of segregated buses in 1955. She remained an influential figure in the Civil Rights movement, encouraging a break-down of racial barriers. -
Billie Holiday
American jazz singer, Holiday was given the title "First Lady of the Blue." Billie Holiday was widely considered to be the greatest and most expressive jazz singer of all time. Her voice was moving in its emotional intensity and poignancy. Despite dying at the age of only 44, Billie Holiday helped define the jazz era and her recordings are still sold widely today. -
Ella Jane Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald was an american jazz singer sometimes referred to as a first lady of song, queen of jazz, and lady Ella. She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing. -
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence was an African American painter known for his portrayal of African American life. As well as a painter, storyteller, and interpreter, he was an educator. -
Jackie Robinson
Jackie Robinson was an american professional baseball player who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era. -
Martin Luther King
King was a pivotal figure in the non-violent civil rights movement. During the 1950s and 60s, he sought to improve race relations and overturn discrimination in American Society. he is remembered for his powerful speeched which sought to bring about a united society, where race was not a barrier. -
Ray Charles
Charles, known professionally as Ray Charles, was an american singer, songwriter, musician, and composer. Charles preferred being called "Brother Ray" started losing his vision at the age of 5, and by 7 he was completely blind. -
Toni Morrison
Morrison is an american novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the american Book Award in 1988 for Beloved. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1988. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933 -
Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman is an american actor, producer, and narrator. Freeman won an academy award in 2005 for best supporting actor with million dollar baby, and has received Oscar nominations for his performances in Street Smart, Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption, and Invictus -
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali was an American professional boxer, activist, and philanthropist. Nicknamed "The Greatest", he is widely regarded as one of the most significant and celebrated sports figures of the 20th century, also considered one of the greatest boxers of all time. -
Robert L Johnson
Robert Louis Johnson is an American entrepreneur, media magnate, executive, philanthropist, and investor. He is the co-founder of BET, he also founded RLJ Companies, a holding company that invests in various business sectors. America's first black billionaire. -
Neil Degrasse Tyson
Neil Degrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Tyson has been the Drederick P. Rose Director of the hayden planetarium at the rose center for earth and space in New York City -
Barack Hussein Obama
American attorney and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the democratic party, he was the first African american to be elected as president. 44th U.S. President.
