Black History

CARL B. STOKES (1927-1996) Carl B. Stokes, lawyer, anchorman, U.S. diplomat and the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city, was born on June 21, 1927 to Charles and Louise Stokes in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1944, Stokes dropped out of high school at the age of 17 and worked briefly for Cleveland-based aerospace and automotive company Thompson Products/TRW before enlisting in the US Army in 1945. Returning to Cleveland in 1946 after his discharge, he reentered high school and earned his diploma in 1947 before enrolling in West Virginia College. Stokes transferred to Western Reserve University and then the University of Minnesota, from which he received his BA in 1955. Stokes returned to Cleveland where he completed law school at Cleveland-Marshall Law School in 1958. He was hired as an assistant prosecutor for Cuyahoga County for four years before establishing his own firm, Stokes, Stokes, Character, and Terry in 1962 with his brother, Louis Stokes. Carl Stokes’s political career ...

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patricia R. Harris, ca. 1977 Patricia Roberts Harris was born on May 31, 1924 in Mattoon, Illinois. She excelled academically and received a scholarship to Howard University. During her time at Howard, Roberts was elected Phi Beta Kappa and graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1945. While she was in college Roberts participated in civil rights protests in Washington, D.C. In 1943, she took part in one of the earliest student sit-ins at a whites-only cafeteria.  While at Howard, Roberts served as Assistant Director for the American Council of Human Rights.  In 1955 she married William Harris, a Howard University law professor. Patricia Roberts Harris received a law degree from George Washington University in 1960.  She graduated number one in her class and was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.  Harris worked briefly for the U.S. Department of Justice and was appointed co-chair of the National Women’s Committee for C...

Jim Brown, byname of James Nathaniel Brown, (born February 17, 1936, St. Simons, Georgia, U.S.—died May 18, 2023, Los Angeles, California), outstanding American professional gridiron football player who led the National Football League (NFL) in rushing for eight of his nine seasons. He was the dominant player of his era and is considered one of the best running backs of all time. He later found success as an actor. In high school and at Syracuse University in New York, Brown displayed exceptional all-around athletic ability, excelling in basketball, baseball, track, and lacrosse as well as football. In his final year at Syracuse, Brown earned All-America honours in both football and lacrosse. Many considered Brown’s best sport to be lacrosse, and he was inducted into both the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the U.S. Lacrosse National Hall of Fame. From 1957 through 1965, Brown played for the Cleveland Browns of the NFL, and he led the league in rushing yardage every year except 1962. Sta...

Fats Waller, byname of Thomas Wright Waller, (born May 21, 1904, New York City, New York, U.S.—died December 15, 1943, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.), American pianist and composer who was one of the few outstanding jazz musicians to win wide commercial fame, though this was achieved at a cost of obscuring his purely musical ability under a cloak of broad comedy. Overcoming opposition from his clergyman father, Waller became a professional pianist at 15, working in cabarets and theatres, and soon became deeply influenced by James P. Johnson, the founder of the stride school of jazz piano. By the late 1920s he was also an established songwriter whose work often appeared in Broadway revues. From 1934 on he made hundreds of recordings with his own small band, in which excellent jazz was mixed with slapstick in a unique blend. His best-known songs include “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” and his first success, “Squeeze Me” (1925), written with Clarence Williams. He was the first jazz...

Esther Rolle Esther Elizabeth Rolle (November 8, 1920 – November 17, 1998) was a Bahamian American actress. Rolle is best known for her role as Florida Evans, on the CBS television sitcom Maude, for two seasons (1972–1974), and its spin-off series Good Times, for five seasons (1974–77, 1978–79), for which Rolle was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Television Series Musical or Comedy in 1976. Rolle is best known for her television role as Florida Evans, the character she played on two 1970s sitcoms. The character was introduced as Maude Findlay's housekeeper on Maude, and was spun off in the show's second season into Good Times, a show about Florida's family. Rolle was nominated in 1975 for the Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy Golden Globe Award for her role in Good Times. Rolle was 19 years older than the actor (John Amos) who played her husband James Evans. The James Evans character was only added after Esther Rolle fought hard for a father figure and ...

Eddie Tolan Eddie Tolan, in full Thomas Edward Tolan, byname The Midnight Express, (born Sept. 29, 1909, Denver, Colo., U.S.—died Jan. 30, 1967, Detroit, Mich.), American sprinter, the first black athlete to win two Olympic gold medals. In his track career Tolan won 300 races, losing only 7. While attending high school in Detroit, Mich., Tolan was a city and state champion in the 100- and 200-yard dashes. At the University of Michigan, he attracted national attention in 1929 when he set a record in the 100-yard dash (9.5 seconds) and tied the record of 10.4 seconds in the 100-metre dash. The 5 foot 7 inch Tolan, who raced with his spectacles taped to his head, won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship in the 200- and 220-yard dashes and the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) championship in the 100- and 220-yard events between 1929 and 1931. He finished second to Ralph Metcalfe in the 100- and 200-metre dashes in the trials for the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles...

 Sixty years ago, a slight, neatly dressed black man stood on the corner of Seventh and Patterson Streets in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  He was playing his guitar and singing ragtimey blues. This guitar player was Blind Boy Fuller.  He would become one of four great Piedmont bluesmen who were then all making the circuit of the North Carolina tobacco towns like Winston­ Salem, Greensboro, Durham, and Raleigh, during the Depression.  The other three–Reverend Gary Davis, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGee–all had long and successful careers, especially Terry and McGee.   Blind Boy Fuller, though, was a blues musician for little more than ten years, but his influence and the memory of him and his music have lasted a long time. His real name was Fulton Allen, and he was born, probably in 1903, in Wadesboro, North Carolina.  Not many details of his early life are known.  However, by 1927, he was married and living in Winston-Salem.  It was about th...

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm, an advocate for the rights of people of color and for women’s rights, became the first black woman elected to the United States Congress in November 1968.  Four years later, she became the first black person to seek a major party’s nomination for the U.S. presidency when she ran for the Democratic Party nomination. Chisholm represented New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.  When initially elected, she was assigned to the House Agriculture Committee, which she felt was irrelevant to her urban constituency. In an unheard-of move, she demanded reassignment and got switched to the Veterans Affairs Committee. By the time she left that chamber, she had held a place on the prized Rules and Education and Labor Committees. Chisholm was born in Brooklyn as the eldest of four daughters of parents who were immigrants from Barbados. She received her B.A. from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1946, and she earned her M.A. f...

Harry Belafonte, byname of Harold George Belafonte, Jr., (born March 1, 1927, New York City, New York, U.S.—died April 25, 2023, New York City, New York), American singer, actor, producer, and activist who was a key figure in the folk music scene of the 1950s, especially known for popularizing the Caribbean folk songs known as calypsos. He was also involved in various social causes, notably the civil rights movement. Belafonte was born in the Harlem district of New York City to emigrants from the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Jamaica. When his mother returned to Jamaica in 1935, he joined her, living there until 1940. He left high school to serve in the U.S. Navy in the mid-1940s. After returning to New York City, Belafonte studied drama at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, where a singing role led to nightclub engagements and a recording contract as a pop singer. In 1950 Belafonte became a folk singer, learning songs at the Library of Congress’s American folk song archives. He...

The Bar-Kays are an American funk band formed in 1964. The band had dozens of charting singles from the 1960s to the 1980s, including "Soul Finger" (US Billboard Hot 100 number 17, R&B number 3) in 1967, "Son of Shaft" (R&B number 10) in 1972, and "Boogie Body Land" (R&B number 7) in 1980.

Richard Samuel Roberts Richard Samuel Roberts was one of South Carolina’s most famous photographers in the 1920’s and 1930’s. However, for more than 40 years after his death in 1936, this most accomplished of photographer remained virtually unknown to all but his family and those who had been his closest friends.  A self-taught photographer, Roberts operated his own studio in Fernandina, Florida, where he gained a reputation as a portrait maker. Success was achieved as a result of long hours of study which could only be done after he had finished his day’s work as a stevedore and later as a fireman laborer.  He read books and magazines on photography, becoming familiar with the nuances of lighting, angles, shadows and backgrounds. His dream was to become a master portrait-maker, with every image a true likeness of the subject. Roberts and his wife moved to Columbia, South Carolina in 1920. Employed as a post office custodian, he rented a studio on Washington Street in 1922....

Memphis Minnie, known as the “Queen of the Blues,” was a singer, guitarist, and songwriter. Her title stems from her legacy of successfully recording music across four decades as well as being the lone female voice in a male dominated blues scene. Memphis Minnie was born Lizzie Douglas in rural Algiers, Louisiana on June 3, 1887. She was the oldest of 13 brothers and sisters. When she was ten years old, her family moved to Walls, Mississippi, about twenty miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. Minnie started playing banjo at age seven and got her first guitar a couple years later. This led to her playing on the Memphis streets and in the towns surrounding Walls. After, she joined the Ringling Brothers circus. With a powerful voice and unique guitar skills, Minnie’s career lasted from the 1920s of country blues to the electric blues in 1950s. She largely contributed to the blues’ urban transformation when she moved to Chicago in 1930. Her style was rooted in country, but she helped form the...

Jazz singer and pianist Shirley Horn was one of the leading jazz musicians of her generation. With her distinctive voice and the slow pace of her music, Horn had a long and storied career which touched both national and international audiences. Shirley Horn was born on May 1, 1934, in Washington, D.C. Her father was a General Accounting Office clerk and her mother was a homemaker. At the encouragement of her mother, who wanted Horn to become a pioneering African American classical artist, she began playing piano at age 4. She learned on her grandmother’s parlor upright piano. By age 12, she was studying classical music at Howard University’s Junior School of Music. Horn recalled her childhood was “all about music” and “going to school” and even her “mother used to say, why don’t you go and play with the kids outside?” As a teenager, Horn won a scholarship to study music at the Julliard School in New York. Deciding it was too expensive for her parents to support her living in NYC, Horn ...

Robert C. Weaver was a noted economist and administrator. From 1966 through 1968, he was the first African American cabinet official, serving as the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Weaver was born December 29, 1907 in Washington D.C. and raised in that city. From 1929 through 1934, he attended Harvard University, earning economic degrees at the Bachelor of Science, Masters’, and Ph.D. levels. As an administrator, Weaver worked as an adviser to the Secretary of the Interior (1933-37), special assistant for the Housing Authority (1937-40), and an administrative assistant with the National Defense Advisory Commission (1940). During the Second World War, he worked in several capacities concerned with mobilizing black labor into industrial employment contracted by the federal government. In the immediate postwar period, Weaver held several successive positions with the federal government. His most noted positions were serving as the Department of the Inte...

Edward William Brooke III was the first African American to be elected by popular vote to the United States Senate.  Brooke, an African American, Protestant Republican, won elective office in the overwhelmingly white, Catholic, Democratic state of Massachusetts and emerged as a leader in the U.S. Senate.  Edward Brooke III, the son of Helen (Seldon) Brooke and Edward W. Brooke, was born October 26, 1919 in Washington, D.C.  Brook’s father, Edward, earned a law degree at the Howard University School of Law and later served as an attorney with the US Veterans Administration. After his graduation from Howard University in 1941, Edward Brooke III served as an officer in the Army with the all-African American 366th Combat Infantry Regiment.  He fought in Italy during World War II and won a Bronze Star for leading an attack on a German artillery battery.  While in Italy, he met his first wife, Remigia Ferrari-Scacco. After serving as a combat officer, Brooke entered B...