Black Firsts

Josiah Henson, was a spiritual leader, author and founder of the Black community settlement at Dawn in Ontario, Canada. He is widely believed to be the model for "Uncle Tom" in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Unc...

Ella Fitzgerald, known as the First Lady of Song, Queen of Jazz, and Lady Ella was an extraordinary jazz and song vocalist, who won 13 Grammys. In all, Fitzgerald recorded more than 200 albums and some 2,000 so...

Juan Garrido was an African-Spanish conquistador, who is the first documented Black person to arrive in the United States. African by birth, he went to Portugal as a young man, and in converting to Christianity...

"My desires were to be free as soon as I learned that there had been slavery of human beings." Rosa Parks was nationally recognized as the “mother of the civil rights movement” in America. Her refusal to s...

I dream a world... where wretchedness will hang its head, and joy like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world! Langston Hughes, best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance,...

"We cannot undo the damage that was done to her. But at least we can summon the courage to speak the naked but healing truth that must comfort her wherever she may be." --Thabo Mbeki Sarah Baartman, the "first...

"I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there, I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself into the business of manuf...

Ernest Fredric "Ernie" Morrison was the first Black child movie star. Morrison, who performed under the stage name Sunshine Sammy, was most famous as one of the Dead End Kids/East Side Kids. Morrison was...

William Augustus Hinton was the first Black professor at Harvard Medical School and the first African American to publish an academic textbook. As a bacteriologist, pathologist and educator, he was a pioneer in...

Phillis Wheatley was the first published African-American female poet. She was born in West Africa around 1753, before she was kidnapped and sold into the Maafa (slavery) at the tender age of seven or eight. He...