Ricardo Scofidio, an architect and co-founder of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), was born Ricardo Merrill Scofidio on April 16, 1935, in New York City. He was the son of Earl Marco Scofidio, a talented jazz clarinetist from Hamden, Connecticut, and June May Matthews Scofidio, who embraced her African American heritage. He had one brother, Basilio Herbert Scofidio. Ricardo’s legacy […]

Chester Mornay Williams was a South African rugby union player best known for playing as a winger for the South African national rugby team and for being the only non-White player on the team during the nation’s transition from Apartheid. He was born on August 8, 1970, to Wilfred and Julene Williams in Paarl, South Africa. His father played for […]

The 1972 Olympics Black Power Salute took place when two African American track and field athletes, Vincent Matthews and Wayne Collett, staged a political protest during the medal ceremony for the Men’s 400 meters at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. This event is often referred to as “The Forgotten Protest,” as it is not as widely recognized […]

On January 23, 1948, 27-year-old Wardell Heath Henderson was executed in the Oregon State Penitentiary gas chamber for the 1945 Vanport murder of Walter Poole, a white butcher. The conviction, handed down by an all-white jury, was widely criticized as racially biased and unsupported by physical evidence. Despite local and national petitions to commute the sentence and new evidence suggesting […]

The 1968 Summer Olympics Black Power Salute occurred on October 16, 1968, in Mexico City, Mexico when two African American track and field athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised their fists during the medal award ceremony for the 200-meter sprint. They raised their fists during the playing of the United States national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner. Their gesture, the […]

Educator Rodney J. Reed was born on May 16, 1932, in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Edgar Joseph and Ursula Desvignes Reed, and was the first of their six children. He graduated from Gilbert Academy High School in New Orleans and Clark College (renamed Clark Atlanta University) in Atlanta, Georgia, where he received his B.A. degree in 1951. He later earned […]

Robert “Bobby” Hall was an African American mechanic and World War II veteran who was killed by Baker County, Georgia Sheriff Claude M. Screws on January 29, 1943. Hall’s murder was an early inspiration for the Black Lives Matter Movement that emerged in the early 21st Century. Following the killing of Hall, the case would go to the Supreme Court […]

In the article below, cultural historian Otis Alexander describes the Harlem Renaissance, the early 20th Century outpouring of literature, art, theater, and music by African American artists and writers. In the 1920s, Harlem, New York, underwent a significant transformation from its original identity as an upper-class white neighborhood, planned in the 1880s, to a vibrant cultural and entrepreneurial epicenter of […]

George Fletcher was a pioneering African American rodeo rider. He was born in 1890 in Saint Marys, Kansas, to unnamed parents. His family later moved west on the Oregon Trail and settled near Pendleton, Oregon. During his early life, Fletcher worked with horses on nearby ranches and on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeast Oregon. He entered his first rodeo […]

St. John the Baptist Church was founded on the edge of a sugarcane plantation where generations of African slaves worked, lived, and died. There a group of men and women in 1869 laid the cornerstone for the Church following its incorporated one year earlier by Reverend Basile Dorsey, who served as its founding pastor. Rev. Dorsey was a man of […]