Harry Lew: The first African-American professional basketball player
Harry Lew is best known for becoming the first African-American professional basketball player when he joined the New England League in 1902. Lew played basketball...
Tag : Black Firsts
Carter G. Woodson: The Father of Black History
Carter G. Woodson, known as The Father of Black History, was the African American historian who first opened the long-neglected field of Black studies to...
Benjamin O. Davis, Jr: The First African American General in the U.S. Air Force
Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., born December 18, 1912 in Washington, D.C., was a pilot, officer, and administrator who became the first African American general in...
Maria W. Stewart: Powerful Public Orator for Black Women’s Rights
Maria W. Stewart, essayist, teacher, and political activist, is thought to be the first woman in America and the first African-American woman to make public...
Henry Armstrong: First Boxing Champion in Three Separate Divisions
Henry Armstrong was the first boxer to hold simultaneous world championship titles in three different divisions: the featherweight, welterweight and lightweight world champion in 1938....
Lewis Hayden: Heroic Abolitionist
Lewis Hayden was an African-American leader who escaped with his family from the Maafa (slavery) in Kentucky to Boston, where he became an abolitionist and...
Jerry Lawson: Inventor of the video game cartridge
“The whole reason I did games was because people said, ‘You can’t do it.’ I’m one of the guys, if you tell me I can’t...
Marshall “Major” Taylor: The Black Cyclone
“It is my thought that clean living and a strict observance of the golden rule of true sportsmanship are foundation stones without which a championship...
Cathay Williams: The first African American woman to enlist in the U.S. Army
Cathay Williams (1844 – 1892), a.k.a. William Cathay, was the first known African American woman to enlist in the United States Army, and the only...
Sarah Jane Woodson Early: The first African American woman professor
Sarah Jane Woodson Early was an African American educator, author and temperance activist. For 30 years Early was a teacher and school principal in Ohio,...