Elbert Frank Cox, who perhaps most famous for exploring and expanding the Boole summation formula based on the work of the Danish mathematician and astronomer Niels Erik, was born in Evansville, Indiana, on December 5, 1895. His father, Johnson D. Cox, was principal and teacher at the segregated Third Avenue School, and his mother was Eugenia Talbot Cox. The Coxs […]

Attorney Charles H. Calloway was born in Bradley County, Tennessee, on June 16, 1878. He graduated from the public school system in Bradley County and earned a Bachelor of Arts from HBCU Fisk University in Nashville in 1903. After graduation, he pursued legal studies at the University of Minnesota Law School in Minneapolis. Dean William S. Patte and William R. […]

Robert Vernon Franklin, Jr. was a retired Lucas County Common Pleas Court judge who presided over trials and hearings in over 25 counties throughout Ohio. He was born on January 6, 1926, in Toledo, Ohio, to Josephine Beard Franklin and Robert V. Franklin, Sr. As the youngest child, he had two sisters, Lucille Franklin Odom and Flora Mae Franklin Mudd, […]

In 1836, 27 years before President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, a group of literate African American men gathered in a brick schoolhouse on South Division Street to establish the Second Baptist Society of Buffalo. This meeting led to the creation of the Michigan Street Baptist Church (MSBC) located at 511 Michigan Avenue in Buffalo, New York. […]

Herbert T. Miller, a distinguished social services and religious leader, organizer, and fundraiser, was born Herbert Tise Miller on July 16, 1900, in Ford, Kentucky. He spent his formative years in Cincinnati, Ohio, alongside his sister, Bertha Miller Anderson. His parents, Cyrus D. Miller and Georgie C. Hampton Miller, instilled in him the value of community service, shaping his future […]

Maria Louise Baldwin, a pioneering educator, made history in 1881 by becoming a teacher at the Louis Agassiz School, an all-white school for the children of Harvard University professors and white citizens of Cambridge, Massachusetts. She supervised 12 white teachers and educated over 500 white students. By 2004, the Cambridge School Committee renamed the Agassiz School, the Maria L. Baldwin […]

Scientist, inventor, and activist William Conan Davis, the first African American to earn a doctorate from the University of Idaho, was born on August 22, 1926, in Waycross, Georgia. His father, Kince Charles Davis, was an Ethiopian Jew and a railway construction engineer, and his mother was Laura Jane Cooper. His siblings included the legendary actor and civil rights activist […]

Emmanuel W. Onunwor, was the first African-born American politician to be elected mayor of an American city when he in 1997 was elected mayor of East Cleveland, Ohio. Onunwor was born on May 24, 1954, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He was the son of an Ikwerre regional ruler and began his early and secondary academic training in his hometown of […]

Alyia Gaskins, born May 1, 1989, is an American public health professional, urban planner, and politician who assumed office as the first Black female mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, on January 1, 2025. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, her single mother and grandmother raised Mayor Gaskins. She has siblings born to her father but was raised as an only child. In […]

Martin G. “Marty” Barnes, the first African American mayor of Paterson, New Jersey, was born on March 15, 1948, and reared in the impoverished Riverside Projects of Paterson. He had two brothers, Tyrone and Ronald Barnes. Martin Barnes attended public schools in Paterson, including Eastside High School, where he graduated in 1966. He then continued his education at Seton Hall […]