Thomas Fountain Blue, the first African American to head a public library in the United States, was also a civic, educational, and religious leader. Blue was born in Farmville, Virginia, on March 6, 1866, to Noah Blue, a carpenter, and Henry Ann Crawley Blue. They were parents of two other children, Alice Blue and Charles Blue. Blue enrolled in Hampton […]

Journalist, publisher, farmer, legal advisor, and political activist Ralph D. de Magne de Chabert, the son of Louis de Chabert and Laura de Chabert, was born in Saint Croix, Danish West Indies, on January 12, 1890. However, the 1940 US Census indicates his date of birth about 1893 in Saint Croix. De Chabert was interested in agriculture and spent much […]

On October 1, 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom chose well-known labor organizer and political strategist Laphonza Butler to be the next US Senator from California, following the death of long-serving Senator Dianne Feinstein on September 29, 2023. Butler, who was sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris at the US Capitol on October 3, 2023, is the first openly LGBT […]

On the night of June 16, 1966, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Chair Stokely Carmichael (Later Kwame Ture) proclaimed to the crowd, “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we got to start saying now is Black Power! We want Black Power.” With these words Carmichael addressed 1,500 people at a rally in Greenwood, […]

In the article below historian Kathleen Thompson describes Taylor Electric Company, founded in 1922 and has the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating Black-owned business in Chicago and one of the oldest in the United States. Taylor Electric Company is one of the oldest family-owned Black businesses in the United States. It is also Chicago’s oldest continuously operating Black-owned […]

The Greenville (South Carolina) Library Desegregation Crisis involved eight African American students who protested the segregated library system in Greenville, South Carolina, from March 1, 1960, to September 9, 1960. The eight students included future civil rights leader and presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, Dorris Wright, Hattie Smith Wright, Elaine Means, Willie Joe Wright, Benjamin Downs, Margaree Seawright Crosby, and Joan […]

The Lycée Victor-Schœlcher is a secondary school located in Fort-du-France, Martinique. Initially built in 1902, the Lycée Victor-Schœlcher has served as the foundational home for significant intellectual figures of Caribbean literary, political, and philosophical traditions including Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Frantz Fanon. It is considered the first high school of Martinique. The school’s name refers to nineteenth-century French abolitionist […]