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 […]

BlackPast.org Board Member and newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. shares his concerns about the prospect of Black history being lost from public memory. He also advances his ideas on how it can be preserved in this nation’s increasingly politically polarized atmosphere. “What happened on September 11th?” My youngest grandson—he was thirteen then—asked me that question two years ago in a […]

Professor Mary Annette Anderson was born on July 27, 1874, in Shoreham, Vermont, to William John Anderson, a formerly enslaved person from Virginia, and Philomine Langlois Anderson, a French Canadian and American Indian from Canada. She had a younger brother named William John Anderson, Jr. Anderson was educated at Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts, a coeducational school located in Franklin County. […]

Keenen Ivory Wayans is a filmmaker, actor, and comedian best known for his comedic satire and for creating the Emmy-winning show In Living Color, a variety show which featured a mostly black cast and helped to launch the careers of many prominent actors and comedians. Born on June 8, 1958, in Harlem, New York City, New York, Keenen Ivory Wayans is […]

Zumbi dos Palmares was a Brazilian Quilombola leader of a group of Afro-Brazilians who lived in maroon communities known as quilombos. He was the last king of the Quilombo dos Palmares, the largest of the quilombos founded by escaped enslaved Afro-Brazilians in what is now Alagoas, Brazil. Zumbi was born in 1655 to a woman named Sabina and an unnamed […]