Tagged Pioneer

"Africa will furnish a development of civilization which the world has never yet witnessed. Its great peculiarity will be its mortal element." Edward Wilmot Blyden was a Liberian educator, writer, diplomat,...

Henrietta Lacks is best known as the African-American woman who never consented to having her tissues taken but whose cancer cells have proved so important that they have been used extensively in medical resear...

Augustus Nathaniel Lushington was the first African American to earn a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M.), earning the doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1897. After practicing in Philadelphia...

Louis Tompkins Wright was an African American surgeon, war hero and civil rights activist. Wright was "the first Black physician to be appointed to the staff of a New York municipal hospital; the first Black su...

In 1903, Maggie Lena Walker (July 15, 1864-December 15, 1934) became the first woman bank president in the United States when she founded the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia. A daughter of a...

Vivian Juanita Malone Jones (July 15, 1942 – October 13, 2005) was one of the first two African American students to enroll at the University of Alabama in 1963 and the university's first African American gra...

William T. Shorey was a late 19th-century Caribbean-American whaling ship captain affectionately known to his crew as the Black Ahab, after Moby Dick’s protagonist. He was born in Barbados July 13, 1859 and s...

Civil rights pioneer, Viola Desmond, was a Black-Canadian businesswoman who was jailed and fined in 1946 for refusing to give up her seat in the whytes-only section of a Canadian movie theatre. The story of her...

Rafael Cordero, known as "The Father of Public Education in Puerto Rico", was a self-educated Puerto Rican who provided free schooling to children regardless of their race or social standing. Cordero, who wa...

Angelina Weld Grimké (Feb. 27, 1880 - June 10, 1958.), was an African-American poet and playwright, an important forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance. “I oft have dreamed the bliss Of the nectar in one...