Paul Timothy Roberts Sr., an academic fellow of the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey in Celigny, Switzerland, and an activist. He was born in Stamford, Connecticut, and grew up in the United Methodist Church in Bradenton, Florida. He graduated from Southeast High School in the city in 1981. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and African American Studies from […]

Opera singer Gregory Gardner was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on July 31, 1950, to Earl Gardner, a singer from Aliceville, Alabama, and Dorothy Davis Gardner, a soprano and piano player from Norfolk; he had eight siblings. Gregory’s early education began at Titustown Elementary School in 1956. He was introduced to piano studies at 15. He attended Northside Junior High School […]

Claudia Lynn Thomas is an orthopedic surgeon, civil rights activist, and change agent. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1950 and raised in Queens, New York. She studied classical ballet with Bernice Johnson at the Bernice Johnson Cultural Arts Center in Queens. Thomas graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York City in 1967 […]

Marlin Oliver “The Magician” Briscoe was a football quarterback for the American Football League (AFL) and National Football League (NFL). When the Denver (Colorado) Broncos drafted him in 1968, Briscoe became the first African American Quarterback in professional football to start on a football team. Briscoe was born on September 10, 1945, in Oakland, California. His family relocated to Omaha, […]

Pamela Sutton-Wallace is a healthcare executive. In 2022 she was appointed COO of Yale New Haven Health, Connecticut’s largest and most comprehensive healthcare system. Wallace was born in September 1969. She received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science and African American Studies from Washington University in St. Louis and graduated from Yale University School of Public Health with […]

Dr. John Bowman (“J.B.”) Banks was the first Black physician to practice medicine in Natchez, Miss. He recruited Dr. Albert Woods Dumas, the second Black physician to practice in the city. Together with four other businessmen, they founded an African American bank in Natchez, called Bluff City Savings Bank in 1906. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Banks’ […]

John Henderson Cartwright is a minister, and university administrator, was born in Houston, Texas, on August 17, 1933, he graduated from Phillis Wheatley High School in the city in 1950. Upon graduating with honors, he enrolled in Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, where a Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude was received in 1954. Afterward, he received a Bachelor […]

José Carlos Lamartine Salvador dos Santos Costa is an Angolan musician, diplomat and statesman who played an important role in shaping contemporary music in Angola. Lamartine was born in the city of Benguela during the year 1943. At the age of ten, Carlos moved with his father and two sisters to Luanda— the capital city— in one of the city’s […]

Ask Philly basketball fans to name one of the city’s best professional teams, and they will probably say the 1967 or 1983 Sixers. A few experts might mention the 1956 Philadelphia Warriors. But even the most devoted fans probably have not heard of one of the greatest and most important Philadelphia basketball teams of all: the 1928-1929 Quaker City Elks. The Quaker City Elks, also known […]

Russian military leader, Chief Commander of the Kherson, and General-in-Chief, Ivan Hannibal, was the eldest of Abram Hannibal’s eleven children with Christine Regina von Sjöberg, and the great-uncle of Alexander Pushkin, regarded as the father of Russian literature. Enamored of his African heritage, Pushkin wrote a novel about Abram Hannibal which was published incomplete in 1837 as The Negro of […]