Kenneth E. Reeves, the first African American Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was born Kenneth Errol Reeves in Detroit, Michigan, on February 8, 1951. His parents were Jamaican immigrants who divorced when he was just a year old, and he was reared in a single-parent household by his mother. His older brother is Donald Reeves. Reeves’ early education began at Thirkell […]

James Young is the first African American mayor of the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, a considerable achievement considering Philadelphia’s history during the Civil Rights movement of the 1970s. Philadelphia’s population of 7,000 is now 51% African-American and 46% white. Young was one of eight children in his family. He was born in Stallo, an unincorporated area, a few miles […]

The 1949 Sun Bowl Football Game Controversy involved faculty and student protests at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, in response to the Lafayette Leopards football team being banned from participating in the Sun Bowl Football game against the Texas College of Mines (now the University of Texas, El Paso) Miners. The Sun Bowl Committee invited Lafayette College to play in […]

Civil rights activist Chester Isaac Lewis Jr. was born on August 8, 1928, in Hutchinson, Kansas, to Chester Isaac, Sr., editor of the Hutchinson Blade, a local Black newspaper, and Edna L. Anderson Lewis, a schoolteacher. He had two brothers, Alfred and John, and a sister, Mary Ellen Lewis London. Lewis graduated from Hutchinson High School in 1945, the only […]

The first African American mayor of Long Beach, California, Rex Richardson was born at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois on August 18, 1983. His parents divorced when Rex was a toddler. Over the next few years, Rex, his mother, and siblings moved numerous times from Illinois to Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Alabama. When Rex was 11, the family settled […]

Aminatou Ali Ahmed Haidar is a Sahrawi human rights activist and a supporter of the independence of Western Sahara. Haidar was born on July 24, 1966 to Ali Haidar and Darya Mohamed in Akka, Morocco. Growing up, seven-year-old Haidar was introduced to the Sahrawi Liberation Movement when it began to fight for independence from Spanish colonial rule in the Western […]

Charles Remond Douglass, born on October 21, 1844, in Lynn, Massachusetts, was the fourth child and youngest son of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He worked as a soldier, journalist, and real estate developer. Douglass served as a government clerk to the Santo Domingo Commission and consul to Puerto Plata, Santo Domingo. He was the husband of Mary Elizabeth Murphy and […]

Between 1970 and 1972, thousands of Haïtiens left their native land and moved to the United States.  Many of them arrived in Miami, Florida, and gathered in the Lemon City area. So many settled there, joining older Haïtien exiles, that the area was unofficially called “Little Port-au-Prince.” However, Viter Juste, a Haïtien-born American entrepreneur and activist, later coined the name, […]

Anton Vincent, President of Mars Wrigley North America & Global Ice Cream since 2019, the largest subsidiary of Mars Inc., was born Anton van Leuwenhoek Vincent on January 22, 1967, in Jackson, Mississippi, to Dr. George Monroe Vincent, Chair of the Department of Education at Jackson State University (JSU) and Pearl Meeks Vincent, Associate Professor of Child Psychology at JSU. […]

Attorney, newspaper publisher, and world-class athlete Thomas Lucius Berkley was born Thomas Lucius Berkley on August 9, 1915, in DuQuoin, Illinois. His father, Braxton B. Berkeley from Tennessee, was a coal miner and labor union organizer, and his mother, Sophia Jane Holmes, from Tennessee, was a teacher. Thomas was reared in the Imperial Valley, California, where his family moved when he […]