Harrison Williams was born enslaved on a Southampton County, Virginia, plantation in 1847, but by December 1864, he was a free man and a soldier in the Union Army. Over the next four months, he participated in the capture of Richmond, Virginia, and saw the fall of the Confederacy. Harrison was born to Solomon Sykes and Louise Williams in 1847. […]

The Dockum Drug Store Sit-Ins occurred in Wichita, Kansas, between July 19 and August 11, 1958. Ronald W. Walters, a local college student who was at the time president of the Wichita National Association for The Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council, organized the sit-ins at the Dockum Drug Store along with his 19-year-old cousin, Carol Parks-Hahn, who was […]

The Katz Drug Store Sit-Ins occurred from August 19 to August 20, 1958, at the Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The leading cause of the sit-in was the racial segregation at the lunch counter, which was the official policy of the drug store at the time. The sit-ins were organized by schoolteacher and civil rights activist Clara Luper […]

Educator Janie Porter Barrett was the founder of the first Black Settlement House in Virginia, the State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs in Virginia, and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls. Janie Porter was born in Athens, Georgia, on August 9, 1865, the daughter of Julia Porter, a formerly enslaved domestic worker in a white household. Janie’s father is […]

Lewis A. Jackson was a Black aviator, Tuskegee Airman Instructor, and later an HCBU president. Jackson was born on December 29, 1912, to unnamed parents in Angola, Indiana. At eight, Jackson started working to contribute to his family’s income. He also constructed model airplanes and read about crosswind landings in encyclopedias. In 1927, at the age of 15, he had […]

In the following article, Amy Ballard, Senior Historic Preservation Specialist Emerita, Smithsonian Institution, describes the life of Russian-born James Lloydovich Patterson, who at the age of three was propelled to stardom in the 1936 Soviet classic film TSIRK (Circus). It was, in its own way, a critique of racial discrimination in the United States and other capitalist nations. It also […]

The founder and long-time owner of Taylor Electric Company, Samuel “Sam” Taylor, was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 9, 1896, the son of Rufus and Martha Taylor. His father and two brothers, William and Martin, and later Sam himself, worked in the coal mines in Pratt City, Alabama, a notoriously rough company town near Birmingham, memorialized by Bertha “Chippie” […]