Lewis Chitengwa was a Zimbabwean golfer who in 1993 became the first black person to win the South African Amateur Championship. Chitengwa was born on January 25, 1975, to Lewis Muridzo and an unnamed mother in Harare, Zimbabwe. Chitengwa’s father was an accomplished golf professional from Wingate Golf Club in Harare. He also had four other siblings: two sisters, Helga […]

Johnnie B. “Dusty” Baker Jr. is currently the baseball manager of the Houston Astros and a former major league player. Baker was born on June 15, 1949, to Johnnie B. Baker Sr. and Christine Baker in Riverside, California. Growing up, Baker played various sports, including baseball and basketball. When he was 14, his family moved to Sacramento, California. Baker attended […]

The case of the Jena Six exposed racial injustice and inequality following an incident involving six male African American teenagers. The arrest of the students, all enrolled at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, ignited a national movement to address longstanding injustices in what has often been referred to as the “school-to-prison pipeline” of policies and practices that push at-risk […]

Orchestral pianist, violinist, conductor, composer, and arranger of the Swing to Bebop eras, Teddy Wilson was born Theodore Shaw Wilson on November 24, 1912, in Austin, Texas. He and his brother Gus Wilson, however, were reared on the campus of Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), Alabama, as his father, James Wilson, was chairperson of the English department, and his mother, […]

Deion Luwynn Sanders is a college football coach, former professional football player, and baseball player. Sanders was born on August 9, 1967, to Connie and Mims Sanders in Fort Myers, Florida. Sanders’s parents divorced when he was two years old and his mother married Willie Knight, who became his stepfather. Sanders became involved with organized baseball and football at the […]

Cape Verde independence activist, women’s rights activist, and pharmacist Isaura Tavares Gomes was born on February 22, 1944, in Santiago, Praia, Sotavento Islands, Cabo Verde (Cape Verde), one of the smallest nations globally, comprising ten islands and five islets off the western coast of the African continent, near Senegal. Cape Verde is a former Portuguese colony which received independence in […]

Thérèse Sita-Bella, born Thérèse Bella Mbida in 1933, was a Cameroonian film director who is widely acknowledged as the first female filmmaker in Africa. She was born to the Beti tribe in southern Cameroon, then a French colony, and received her education from Catholic missionaries. In the 1950s, after graduating from school in the Cameroonian capital of Yaoundé, she went […]

Chuck Leonard, a pioneering disk jockey known for his rich, smooth voice, was born Charles Wesley Leonard in Chicago, Illinois, on March 30, 1937 to Alma Leonard and Charles Leon. Chuck graduated from Hyde Park High School with honors in 1955, where he ran on the 4×440-yard relay track team. He applied and was accepted into the United States Navy […]

Stella Chinyelu Okoli is a Nigerian pharmacist, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. She is the founder and current CEO of Emzor, a pharmaceutical company she started in 1977. Okoli was born on July 30, 1944, in Kano State to Felix Ebelechukwu and Margaret Modebelu. She attended All Saints Primary School in Onitsha (1954-1959), Ogidi Girls Secondary School in Ogidi from 1959-1964, and […]

Aviation pioneer Sibongile Sambo, who was born in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, South Africa in 1974, holds the distinction of being the first woman to become a South African airline executive. Sambo founded SRS Aviation in 2004. She is a graduate of the College of Zululand, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in administration and later earned her master’s degree in management […]