Malcolm-Jamal Warner was a talented actor, poet, musician, director, and producer, born on August 18, 1970, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was named after the civil rights activist Malcolm X and the jazz legend Ahmad Jamal. His father, Robert Warner Jr., worked in drug intervention programs and graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. After his parents’ divorce, his mother, […]

Roscoe Dubois Draper, the last instructor of the Tuskegee Airmen, served during World War II and was a “triple-rated” Tuskegee Airmen Flight Instructor. He was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1919, to Edgar and Ethel Draper, the fourth of nine children. His siblings were Earl Draper, Cora Draper, Percy Draper, Marie Draper Pierce, Barbara Draper Newton, William Draper, […]

Gilbert H. Bradley, Jr. was a pioneering politician who became the first African American mayor of Kalamazoo, Michigan. He was born on September 16, 1940, in Hodge, Louisiana, to Gilbert and Carrie Bradley. When he was three years old, his family moved to Inkster, Michigan. While much of Bradley’s early life remains undocumented, he attended Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, […]

Born in Decatur, Alabama, in 1893, James Blaine Cashin was the youngest of Herschel Vivian Cashin and Minnie Virginia Cashin’s seven children. Herschel Cashin, himself a distinguished lawyer and Republican member of the Alabama House of Representatives during Reconstruction, was widely regarded as ‘one of the fathers of the Reconstruction in Alabama.’  James Cashin graduated from Fisk University in 1916 […]

Charles Henry Carroll was born May 10, 1877, in Tazewell, Virginia, to Charles H. and Bettee Carroll, who was already widowed by 1880. He attended Virginia State College and went on to earn a medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1906, where he was among the medical school’s first Black graduates.  A pioneering African American […]

Mary Elliott Hill, a pioneer, educator and inventor, is known as one of the earliest African American women in the field of chemistry and is responsible (with her husband, Carl McClellan Hill) for the development of ketene synthesis. Hill’s research on ketene synthesis is described as a building block and significant in the science and medical community. Elliott—born January 5, […]

George William Gore, Jr., educator and administrator, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 11, 1901, to George W. Gore, Sr., and Emma (Hambrick) Gore. By 1910, however, 8-year-old George was living with Edward W. Byrdsong and his adopted daughter, Sarah Jones. Gore’s mother, Emma, had passed away in 1902 before he was barely a year old. His widowed father […]

William C. McCard, lawyer and realtor, was one of a handful of African American lawyers in early twentieth-century Baltimore, Maryland, who leveraged their positions as officers of the Court to defend the rights of those in the Black community. William McCard was born in 1871, the second of four children of James W. McCard and Elizabeth C. (Williams) McCard in Rockford, […]

Dr. William Augustus Bell was a distinguished educator, businessman, academic administrator, and university president. Born on February 16, 1862, in Elbert County, Georgia, he was the son of Luther H.A. Bell, a farmer and real estate developer, and Mary J. Thompson. From an early age, Bell was immersed in a household that valued hard work, faith, and education—principles that would […]

James E. Payne was born on March 3, 1968, in Port Arthur, Texas, to James C. Payne and Jessie R. Payne. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Political Science with honors from the University of Houston in 1989, attending on an academic scholarship. He went on to receive his Juris Doctor from the University of Houston Law Center in […]