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Miriam Makeba (1932-2008), also known as Mama Afrika and the Empress of African Song, was one of the most visible and outspoken opponents of South Africa’s apartheid regime from the 1960s till its dismantling in the early 1990s.

A Grammy Award winning Afrobeat artist, Makeba died recently. She was 76.

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DR. DANIEL HALE WILLIAMS (1856 – 1931) was the first black heart surgeon.

Williams was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to Daniel and Sarah Price Williams, a middle-class free black family. When his father died of tuberculosis, his mother realized she could not manage seven children and sent some of them to live with relatives. Daniel went to Baltimore and apprenticed to a shoemaker but ran away to join his mother who had moved to Rockford, Illinois. He later moved to Edgerton, Wisconsin, where he joined his sister and opened his own barber shop. After moving to nearby Janesville, Williams became fascinated with a local physician and decided to follow his career path.

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ETHEL WATERS (1896 – 1977) was a blues/jazz singer and actress.

Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, on October 31, 1896, to a thirteen-year-old mother who had been raped at knifepoint. She had a rough childhood, raised in a violent, impoverished home. She said of her childhood in the opening of her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow, “I was never a child. I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family. I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider…. Nobody brought me up.”

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PAUL ROBESON (1898 – 1976) was an actor, athlete, civil rights activist, singer and one of the most gifted men of the 20^th century.

Born on April 9, 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey, Paul was the eighth child of Quaker abolitionist Maria Luisa Bustill and former slave and minister William Drew Robeson.

In 1915, Robeson graduated high school and received a scholarship to Rutgers College. He was the third black student accepted and the only black student during his time on campus. He excelled academically, becoming a junior-year Phi Beta Kappa, a champion debater, class valedictorian and gaining admission into Cap and Skull, Rutgers’ honor society in 1919. He also triumphed on the athletic field, earning 15 varsity letters in football, baseball, basketball and track and field. He was named All-American twice in football (1917 and 1918).

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