Thursday, October 9, 2008 |
ERNIE DAVIS (1939 – 1963) was an American football running back and the first African-American to win the esteemed Heisman Trophy. He died at the age of 23 from complications with leukemia before he was able to play his first professional game.
Davis was born on December 14, 1939, in New Salem, Pennsylvania, to Marie Davis. His father was killed in an auto accident before Davis was born and when he was fourteen months old, his mother sent him to live with his maternal grandparents. His grandparents already had twelve children of their own but still welcomed their grandson. Continue Reading »
Thursday, October 2, 2008 |
RITA DOVE (1952-) is a poet and author, the first black and youngest Poet Laureate of the United States.
Rita Frances Dove was born August 28, 1952, to Ray and Elvira Dove in Akron, Ohio. Ray became the first black chemist to break the race barrier in the U.S. tire industry that same year, and Elvira was a former honor student who loved literature and shared that passion with her daughter.
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Thursday, September 25, 2008 |
HIRAM REVELS (1822-1901) was the first black U.S. senator.
Born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Revels was the son of a free father of mixed heritage and a black mother who was later emancipated. Since all blacks were forbidden from learning to read and write, Revels was secretly taught by a black woman.
When he was 15, his family moved to Lincolnton, North Carolina, where he worked as a barber in his brother’s shop. In 1844, he moved to Indiana and began studying at Beech Grove Seminary, a Quaker school. It was during this time that Revels became involved with the teachings of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, a significant religious and educational force in the black community. The following year, Revels began studying for the ministry in Drake County, Ohio. He was ordained a minister of the AME Church later that year and was an elder in 1849.
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Thursday, September 18, 2008 |
BESSIE COLEMAN (1892-1926) was the first black person to become an airplane pilot and the first American of any race or gender to hold an international pilot license.
Born in Atlanta, Texas, Coleman was the tenth of thirteen children. Her parents, George and Susan Coleman, were sharecroppers, and young Bessie made a vow to one day “amount to something”. She walked four miles each day to her all-black, one-room school. She loved to read and became an outstanding math student. In 1901, George grew tired of the racial barriers in Texas and went to Oklahoma, but did not take his family.
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Thursday, September 11, 2008 |
ALAIN L. LOCKE (1885-1954) was a writer, philosopher and educator. He’s also credited with defining the Harlem Renaissance.
Born into Philadelphia’s black elite, Alain Leroy Locke was the only child of Pliny and Mary Hawkins Locke, a successful attorney and well-liked public school teacher, respectively. In 1902, he graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia, second in his class. He also attended Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, a program for Central graduates who wanted to become elementary school teachers.
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Thursday, September 4, 2008 |
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (1938-) is President of Liberia and Africa’s first elected female head of state.
Born in Monrovia, Liberia, Johnson-Sirleaf is the descendant of original colonists of Liberia, Americo-Liberians, formerly enslaved African-Americans who immigrated in the 1800s to Liberia.
She married James Sirleaf at the age of 17, and traveled to America in 1961 where she earned a B.B.A. in accounting at Madison Business College in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1964, an economics diploma from the University of Colorado in 1970, and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University in 1971.
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Thursday, August 28, 2008 |
Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) was the first black woman to gain popularity and critical acclaim as a major science fiction writer.
Born in Pasadena, California, Butler was the only living child her mother, Octavia M. Butler, was able to carry to term out of five pregnancies. Her father, Laurice, a shoe shiner, died when she was just a baby and her mother and grandmother raised her in a racially mixed neighborhood where her mother worked to support the family as a maid.
Butler was very shy in school, a daydreamer, and that made school very difficult for her—as did her dyslexia, which she later overcame. Nicknamed Junie, Butler began writing at 10 to escape boredom and loneliness. A couple of years later, she had become interested in science fiction. She told the Black Scholar, “I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I’ve been writing science fiction ever since.”
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