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 […]

Joseph Wiley Gilliam Jr. was a professional football quarterback in the National Football League (NFL). Gilliam was born on December 29, 1950, to Joseph Gilliam Sr. and Ruth Gilliam in Charleston, West Virginia. The family moved to Nashville, Tennessee where he attended Pearl High School (Now MLK Magnet School) where he played on the school football team and led his […]

Tyrone Anthony Garner, born in February 1969, is the first Black Mayor of Kansas City, Kansas. He is also the thirty-first Mayor of the city and the fifth Mayor/ Chief Executive Officer (CEO) since city/ county consolidation in 1997. Born in Portland, Maine, Garner grew up in San Jose, California, before he and his family moved to Kansas City, Kansas […]