black important figures

7/27/2019 Black Important Figures

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African-American History

THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online has compiled the following profiles of great African Americans you should know.

l Benjamin Banneker

l Mary McLeod Bethune

l Ralph Bunche

l George Washington Carver

l Frederick Douglass

l W.E.B. DuBois

l Paul Lawrence Dunbar

l Marcus Garvey

l Fannie Lou Hamer

l Matthew Alexander Henson

l Dr. Percy Lavon Julian

l Jan Ernest Matzeligerl James Weldon Johnson

l Jesse Owensl A. Philip Randolph

l Paul Robeson

l Sojourner Truthl Harriett Tubman

l Ida B. Wells

l Granville T. Woods

l Carter G. Woodson

l Phillis Wheatley

l Whitney Moore Young

Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806)Mathematician, Inventor

Born on November 9, 1731 near Elliott City, Maryland, Benjamin Banneker was one of America's greatest intellectuals andscientists. Benjamin Banneker was an essayist, inventor, mathematician, and astronomer. Because of his dark skin and greatintellect he was called the "sable genius." Benjamin Banneker was a self-taught mathematician and astronomer. While still a youthhe made a wooden clock which kept accurate time past the date that Banneker died. This clock is believed to be the first clockwholly made in America. In 1791, he served on a project to make a survey for the District of Columbia, helping to design thelayout for our Nation's capital. Deeply interested in natural phenomena, Banneker started publishing an almanac in 1791 andcontinued its publication until 1802. He published a treatise on bees, did a mathematical study on the cycle of the seventeen-yearlocust, and became a pamphleteer for the anti-slavery movement. He was internationally known for his accomplishments andbecame an advisor to President Thomas Jefferson. He died on his farm on October 9, 1806.

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875- 1955)Founder of Bethune-Cookman College

Born on July 10, 1875 in Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary McLeod Bethune ranks high among greatwomen in America. The last of seventeen children of sharecroppers, Mary Bethune lifted herself fromthe cotton field to the White House as an advisor to the President of the United States. Her greatestaccomplishment, however, was almost single-handedly building Bethune-Cookman College in 1923. Withonly one dollar and fifty cents, nerve and determination, she set out to build a school for the Blacks whowere working in the railroad labor camps in Florida. Slowly the school emerged from old crate boxesand odd rooms of old houses near the Daytona Beach City Dump. Bethune served as the school'spresident until 1942. Today Bethune-Cookman graduates thousands. In 1935, she received the NAACPSpringarn Medal as a symbol of distinguished achievement. Also in 1935, President Roosevelt appointedher national director of the National Youth Administration's Division of Negro Affairs. She died on May

18, 1955 in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Ralph Bunche

As a diplomat who accomplished the seemingly impossible by negotiating the 1949 armistice between one-year-old Israel and itsArab neighbors, Ralph Bunche demonstrated that there is more than one way to resolve an issue. For that he earned the NobelPrize for Peace in 1950. From early in his career, he was a militant critic of American society who established himself as one ofthe staunchest opponents of the gradualism and conciliation urged by the NAACP. Yet, in his celebrated work for the StateDepartment and, later, the United Nations, as a statesman and diplomat, he proved himself to be a man without color, an

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international civil servant of the highest rank.. For an even-tempered diplomat, he was a driven man. Orphaned at the age of 11 inthee slums of Detroit, Bunche went to UCLA on an athletic scholarship and became the first African American to earn a Ph.D.from Harvard's government department, in 1934.. His research on the political status of African-Americans and the strategies offrace-betterment organizations, used in Gunnar Myerdal's An American Dilemma (1944),, is an indispensable classic for anystudent of African-American history. From 1928 until 1942, Bunche taught political science at Howard University in Washington,DC, while traveling widely to expand his research on colonial administration and race relations. He later became the first African-American desk officer at the State Department, as head of the Division of Dependent Affairs, helping to draw up the UNCharter. He joined the UN in 1947 as director of the Trusteeship Division that helped establish guidelines for territories to achieveindependence. After his Middle East triumph, he directed UN peacekeeping operations in the Suez (1956), the Congo (1960) andin Cyprus (1964). In 1968 Bunche became undersecretary general, the highest rank held by an American at the UN, and until hisretirement in 1971 because of illness, was UN Secretary General U'Thant's most influential political advisor..

George Washington Carver (1860-1943)

Agricultural Scientist

If an honest history of the deep South is ever written, Dr. George Washington Carver will stand out as one of the truly great menof his time. Born of slave parents in 1860 in Diamond, Missouri, Dr. Carver almost single-handedly revolutionized southernagriculture. From his small laboratory on the campus of Tuskegee Institute flowed hundreds of discoveries and products from theonce neglected peanut. From the peanut Dr. Carver discovered meal, instant and dry coffee, bleach, tar remover, wood filler,metal polish, paper, ink, shaving cream, rubbing oil, linoleum, synthetic rubber, and plastics. From the soybean he obtained flour,breakfast food, and milk. It is highly doubtful if any person has done as much for southern agriculture as Dr. Carver. Dr. Carverdied in 1943 and was buried next to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute. On July 17, 1960 the George WashingtonCarver National Monument was dedicated at Dr. Carver's birth site. This was the first U.S. federal monument dedicated to aAfrican-American.

Paul Laurence DunbarPoet, Author

Poet and author Paul Laurence Dunbar was so talented and versatile that he succeeded in two worlds.He was so adept at writing verse in Black dialect that he became known as the "poet of his people,"while also cultivating a white audience that appreciated the brilliance and value of his work. Majors andMinors (1895), Dunbar's second collection of verse, financed by several white friends, was a remarkablework containing some of his best poems in both Black dialect and standard English. Melodic andrhythmical, his lines in this and other works often sing and swing along gloriously. When the country'sreigning literary critic, William Dean Howells reviewed majors and Minors favorably, Dunbar becamefamous. And Howells',introduction in Lyric of Lowly Life (1896) helped make Dunbar the most popularAfrican-American writer in America at the time.. Dunbar had plenty of experience bridging racial gaps.Despite being the only African-American in his class at Central high School in Dayton, Ohio, he was

well liked by teachers and classmates and was elected president of the school literary society and editor of the school paper in hissenior year.. Even though he reached a point when publications competed for anything (poems, short stories, novels, prose,sketches, plays and musical lyrics) that sprang from his fertile mind, Dunbar wrote for a living and had to please popular readingtastes for the light,, romantic, and sentimental. But he did publish a few pieces that spoke out gently against the typical treatment

of his people, including "We Wear the Mask" and "The Haunted Oak," an anti-lynching poem.. Despite worsening health from thetuberculosis he succumbed to at age 34 in 1906,, Dunbar produced four collections of short stories and a quartet of novels in acreative outpouring between 1898 and 1904. His most notable short-story collections were Folks From Dixie and The Heart ofHappy Hollow, and his novels included The Fanatics, a tale of political conflict involving two Civil War families, and The Sport ofthe Gods, about injustice suffered by an innocent African-American family..

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)Journalist, Activist, Ambassador

When Frederick A. Douglass was born in 1817 on a Maryland plantation, his given name was Frederick Augustus WashingtonBailey. Frederick Douglass constantly fought against his slave condition and was constantly in trouble with the overseer. When heescaped on September 3, 1838, and he settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he changed his name to Frederick Douglass. In1845, against the advice of his friends, Douglass decided to write an account of his life, fully aware of the possibility that thiswould mark him as the Bailey runaway slave. The autobiography was called The Narrative Of The Life and Times Of Frederick

Douglass. Besides writing his autobiography, in 1845 Douglass founded and edited the North Star newspaper. When the Civil Warbroke out, Frederick Douglass urged President Lincoln to free and arm the slaves. He was also a great spokesman for universalsuffrage, women's rights, and world peace. In 1848 Douglass participated in the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls,New York. In 1872 he ran for vice president on the Equal Rights Party ticket. In 1889 he was appointed minister to Haiti. He diedon February 20, 1895.

W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)Author, Educator, Intellectual

No single title does credit to the prodigious talents of Dr. W.E.B. DuBois. Born on February 23, 1868 inGreat Barrington, Massachusetts, he has been labeled an educator, author, historian, sociologist,philosopher, poet, leader and radical. In 1903 his famous book Souls of Black Folks was published.Perhaps his greatest fame came from his debate with Booker T. Washington over the type of educationneeded by African Americans. Washington stressed vocational education, whereas DuBois insisted ontraining in the liberal arts and in the humanities. He was one of the founders of the NAACP and editorof its famous journal The Crisis. He was also the first Black to receive a doctoral degree from HarvardUniversity. In 1919 he initiated the Pan African Conferences in Paris. On behalf of the NAACP at theUnited Nations, he tried to get a firm anti-colonial commitment from the United States in 1945 and in1947 presented a protest against the Jim Crow laws. His theme in his later years was always economic



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democracy and the channeling of Black Power through a unified Black society. He died on October 27,1963 in Accra, Ghanawhere he had established his new home.

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940)Leader and Philosopher

Among Black leaders Marcus Garvey was unique. Born August 17, 1887 in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, Marcus Mosiah Garvey'spopularity was universal. His program for the return of African people to their motherland shook the foundations of three empires.All subsequent Black power movements have owed a debt to his example. In building his Universal Negro ImprovementAssociation he sought "To improve the condition of the race with the view of establishing a nation in Africa where Blacks will begiven the opportunity to develop by themselves." In his famous Philosophies and Opinions, Marcus Garvey wrote, "Where is theBlack man's government? Where is his president, his country and his ambassadors, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?"Founded in 1914, the UNIA grew in just five years to include to include over six million followers. He built newspapers, schools,

churches, a shipping company, printing operations, food and clothing stores. In 1919, he launched the Black Star Shipping Lines.His program was one of Black self-determination and independence and set the theme for all Black development today. He diedin London, England on June 10, 1940.

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1979)Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement

Fannie Lou Hamer was born October 6, 1917 in the Mississippi Delta. Inspired by the fighting spirit ofher mother, Fannie Lou Hamer became widely known as the "Spirit" of the Civil Rights movement. Inthe early 1960's a Black man or woman could lose their life trying to register to vote in some towns inMississippi. But even at the risk of her life, Fannie Lou Hamer registered to vote. Because sheencouraged others to do so, Fannie Lou Hamer was evicted from the farm where she lived and herhusband was fired. Although neither her husband nor Fannie Lou could find work, they continued toorganize people to register to vote. She helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party whichwent to the 1964 Democratic National Convention and challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation.Because of these efforts an integrated delegation was eventually seated in 1968. Fannie Lou Hameralso organized cooperatives to fight hunger and joblessness. The cooperative movement allowed Blacks

to leave the plantations where they were sharecroppers and set up their own farms in a cooperative manner where they profitedfrom the farms together.

Matthew Alexander Henson (1866-1955)Arctic Explorer

Matthew Henson belongs to that hardy race of adventurers which from man's earliest history paved the way for civilization byadding to it knowledge that was hitherto unattainable. Henson's feat in reaching the North Pole holds a high place in the saga ofthese adventurers. He played a leading part in accomplishing what some of the finest and bravest men had been striving for morethan 2,000 years. Henson was born of poor parents in Charles County, Maryland. As a lad, he showed the stuff of which he was

made by shipping as a cabin boy on a ship bound for China. On the next voyage, however, he sailed as an able seaman, a gradeusually reached only after four year's apprentice. At twenty-one he attracted the attention of Robert E. Peary, then a navallieutenant, who engaged him as his personal attendant. In 1891, when Peary started on his polar explorations, Henson went withhim and had his first taste of the ice. It was not however, until eighteen years later that the Pole was to be reached. At last, onApril 6, 1909, the party made camp. All felt sure from the distance they had covered that they had reached the Pole. Pearycompletely worn out, went to sleep. Henson walked around outside to look things over. Later, when measurements were taken, itwas discovered that Henson, during his walk had been the first mortal to walk on the top of the world. "As I stood at the top ofthe world," says Henson, and "thought of the hundreds of men who had lost their lives in the effort to reach it, I felt profoundlygrateful that I, as the personal attendant of the commander, had the honor of representing my race in the historic achievement."

James Weldon Johnson

As a precursor, participant, and historian of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson had asmuch to do with the rise of that cultural movement as any one person.. Indeed, he was the epitome of

the classic Renaissance man himself--poet, composer, author, government official, teacher, andinfluential civil rights activist.

Johnson's mother sparked his early interest in drawing, literature, and music. Consequently, Johnson, aslyricist, and his brother, Rosamond, as composer, wrote and staged musical comedies and light operasfrom 1901 to 1906, producing such enduring songs as "Since You Went Away" and "Lift Every Voiceand Sing," now widely adopted as the African-American national anthem.. This remarkably versatileman crowned his contributions to society by becoming field secretary for the fledgling NAACP in 1916.

As a social thinker, Johnson was an early advocate of Booker T. Washington's self-help philosophy. But he later supported theeNAACP's frontal attacks on segregation and discrimination, organizing the 1917 silent protest parade in New York City thatcondemned the massacre of African-Americans in east St. Louis, and fighting for passage of the 1921 Dyer Anti-Lynching bill,during 144 years of NAACP service.. After becoming the first African-American man to be admitted to the bar (in 1897) toopractice law in Jacksonville, Florida, he moved to New York City to pursue a theatrical career. Campaigning for TeddyRoosevelt's successful presidential bid in 19044 earned Johnson an appointment as U.S. Consul to Venezuela (1906-8) andNicaragua (1909-12). In 1913 he returned to New York and plunged into cultural life there by writing God's Trombones: SevenNegro Sermons in Verse and The Book of American Negro Poetry. Johnson was a literature instructor at Fisk University inTennessee when he died in an automobile crash in 1938.

Dr. Percy Lavon Julian (1899-1975)Scientist, Medical Researcher



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dialects, and became a spokesman throughout the world against exploitation, injustice, and racism. Hisattacks on injustice and racism in the United States became a severe international embarrassment to theUnited States government. In 1950, Robeson's passport was revoked by the U.S. State Department, andPresident Truman signed an executive order forbidding Mr. Robeson to leave the United States underpenalty of five years in prison and a $500 fine. In 1958 Robeson left the United States for England and

did not return until 1963. Throughout his lifetime he fought against all forms of racism and oppression perpetuated on Blacks in theUnited States. He died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 23, 1976.

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)Orator, Women's Rights Activist

Born Isabella in 1797 in Ulster County, New York, she ran away from slavery in 1843 and changed hername to Sojourner Truth. At a time when oratory was fine art, Sojourner Truth, through her strong

character and acid intelligence, was among the best and most famous anti-slavery speakers of her day.Her deep, bass voice, her fierce intelligence, sense of drama, and the utter sincerity of her speechesquickly spread her fame throughout the North and astounded the unbelieving South. Frequently, effortswere made to silence her. She was beaten and stoned, but nothing could stop her. Her speeches touchedthe hearts of many and led to the strengthening of the abolitionist movement in the United States. One ofher most famous lines was delivered in response to a man who questioned her womanhood. Recountingthe trials and tribulations that the slave woman suffered and speaking as a mother of children, SojournerTruth asked, "Ain't I a woman!" In October, 1864 she addressed an audience with President Abraham

Lincoln at the White House. She died on November 23, 1883 at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Harriett Tubman (1821-1913)Leader of the "Underground Railroad"

Born in 1821 in Dorchester County, Maryland, one of eleven children, Harriett Tubman escaped fromslavery in 1849 and joined the abolitionist movement. She became a conductor of the "undergroundrailroad," and was frequently referred to as "Moses" of ancient times. The underground railroad wasneither a railroad nor underground, but a system for helping slaves to escape. Strong, brave as a lion,cunning as a fox was Harriett Tubman, who made at least nineteen journeys into the deep South and ledover three hundred slaves to freedom. Although she could not read or write, Harriett Tubman was oneof the leading conductors of the underground railroad. During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman servedboth as a nurse and a spy for the Union Army. When she died on March 10, 1913 in Auburn, NewYork, Harriett Tubman was buried with full military honors.

Ida B. Wells

Courageous and outspoken, Ida B. Wells has been equaled by few Americans in her fiery denunciationof discrimination, exploitation, and brutality. At a time when to do so was literally life-threatening, thiscommitted crusader and journalist attacked social wrongs on all fronts, conducted anti-lynchingcampaigns,, investigated race riots and exposed the oppressive living conditions off African-Americans..Orphaned at age 14, Wells first became a teacher. She lost her job and found her calling in Memphiswhen she became involved in a lawsuit after refusing to give up her seat in a railroad car designed for"whites only"--more than 60 years before Rosa Parks ignited the modern Civil Rights Movement with asimilar gesture.. After purchasing an interest in the Free Speech, a Memphis weekly, Wells had herpress and office demolished by a mob of angry whites, when she published the details of the lynching ofthree African-American grocers by their white competitors. Fleeing to New York, she began anti-

lynching lecture tours and published Southern Horrors and The Red Record, the first statistical study of lynching, which won heran international reputation.. In 1893, Wells attended the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where she joined FrederickDouglass and other leaders in condemning the Exposition for failing to honor the contributions of African-Americans. Settling inChicago in 1895, she continued too contribute to newspapers and periodicals; founded a settlement house to assist migrantAfrican-Americans in finding jobs and homes; helped organize the NAACP, and devoted much of her later years to promotingvoting rights for women through marches and other lobbying activities. Usually determined to move faster and farther than heractivist colleagues, Wells often found herself on the fringes of movements for equality for African-Americans and women. Butshe noted she simply had a vision of a society in which "human beings.... pay tribute to what they believe one possesses in the

way of qualities of mind and heart,, rather than to the color of the skin."

Granville T. Woods (1856-1910)Electrical Inventor

Born on April 23, 1856 in Columbus, Ohio, Granville Woods was the individual most responsible for modernizing the railroad.During his lifetime, Granville T. Woods earned over thirty-five patents ranging from a steam boiler furnace in 1884, an incubatorin 1900, to the automatic airbrake in 1902. Many of his electrical inventions were sold to the American Bell Telephone Companyand the General Electric Company. The Westinghouse Air-break Company eventually obtained his Air-break patent. His mostnoteworthy device in the area of electric railway travel was his induction telegraph, a system of communication for moving trains.Because of the many accidents and collisions which were occurring on the railways, Granville T. Woods invented his synchronousmultiple railway telegraph for the purpose of averting accidents by keeping each train informed of the whereabouts of the oneimmediately ahead of it or following it, in communicating with stations from moving trains, and in promoting general social andcommercial intercourse. The inventions of Granville T. Woods revolutionized the railway industry. He died on January 30, 1910 in

Harlem Hospital, New York City.

Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950)Founder of Black History Month



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