The first African American mayor of Long Beach, California, Rex Richardson was born at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois on August 18, 1983. His parents divorced when Rex was a toddler. Over the next few years, Rex, his mother, and siblings moved numerous times from Illinois to Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Alabama. When Rex was 11, the family settled […]

Aminatou Ali Ahmed Haidar is a Sahrawi human rights activist and a supporter of the independence of Western Sahara. Haidar was born on July 24, 1966 to Ali Haidar and Darya Mohamed in Akka, Morocco. Growing up, seven-year-old Haidar was introduced to the Sahrawi Liberation Movement when it began to fight for independence from Spanish colonial rule in the Western […]

Charles Remond Douglass, born on October 21, 1844, in Lynn, Massachusetts, was the fourth child and youngest son of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He worked as a soldier, journalist, and real estate developer. Douglass served as a government clerk to the Santo Domingo Commission and consul to Puerto Plata, Santo Domingo. He was the husband of Mary Elizabeth Murphy and […]

Between 1970 and 1972, thousands of Haïtiens left their native land and moved to the United States.  Many of them arrived in Miami, Florida, and gathered in the Lemon City area. So many settled there, joining older Haïtien exiles, that the area was unofficially called “Little Port-au-Prince.” However, Viter Juste, a Haïtien-born American entrepreneur and activist, later coined the name, […]

Anton Vincent, President of Mars Wrigley North America & Global Ice Cream since 2019, the largest subsidiary of Mars Inc., was born Anton van Leuwenhoek Vincent on January 22, 1967, in Jackson, Mississippi, to Dr. George Monroe Vincent, Chair of the Department of Education at Jackson State University (JSU) and Pearl Meeks Vincent, Associate Professor of Child Psychology at JSU. […]

Attorney, newspaper publisher, and world-class athlete Thomas Lucius Berkley was born Thomas Lucius Berkley on August 9, 1915, in DuQuoin, Illinois. His father, Braxton B. Berkeley from Tennessee, was a coal miner and labor union organizer, and his mother, Sophia Jane Holmes, from Tennessee, was a teacher. Thomas was reared in the Imperial Valley, California, where his family moved when he […]

Damola Adamolekun is a Nigerian-American business executive and restauranteur. He was the first Black CEO of P. F. Chang’s, a major Asian-American fusion restaurant chain. Adamolekun was born in Nigeria to Yoruba parents. His father is a neurologist, and his mother is a pharmacist. He spent his early childhood in Zimbabwe and the Netherlands before moving to Springfield, Illinois, when […]

Named after the famous poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Dunbar Apartments, also known as the Paul Laurence Dunbar Garden Apartments and Dunbar Garden Apartments, is a complex of ten separate U-shaped buildings centered around an interior garden courtyard with a total of 511 apartments. The apartment complex is located on West 149th and West 150th Streets between Frederick Douglass Boulevard, […]

Mboka Mwilambwe, born 1970 in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was elected as the first African American mayor of Bloomington, Illinois, in 2021. His father was employed as an official for UNICEF, a specialized United Nations agency focused on improving the lives of children and mothers in developing countries. The youngest of seven children, his family […]

387 U.S. 369 (1967) REITMAN ET AL. v. MULKEY ET AL. No. 483. Supreme Court of United States. Argued March 20-21, 1967. Decided May 29, 1967. CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME COURT OF CALIFORNIA. Samuel O. Pruitt, Jr., argued the cause for petitioners. With him on the briefs was William French Smith. Herman F. Selvin and A. L. Wirin argued the […]