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Black historical past within the U.S. dates again to 1619, when enslaved Africans have been dropped at Jamestown colony – close to present-day Williamsburg, Virginia.
Since then, Black Americans have persevered regardless of challenges all through the nation’s historical past and left their mark on American tradition.
Every February, the nation celebrates Black History Month by honoring the contributions and achievements of African Americans.
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The theme for February is “African Americans and the Arts,” with festivals and occasions occurring in neighborhood facilities throughout the U.S., in keeping with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
From trailblazing abolitionists, scientists, athletes and artists to politicians, judges and civil rights leaders, quite a few historic figures have performed their half to form America into the nation it’s right now.
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818. (iStock)
Here are 13 well-known figures and the contributions they made to American historical past.
- Sojourner Truth
- Frederick Douglass
- Harriet Tubman
- George Washington Carver
- Ida B. Wells
- W. E. B. Du Bois
- Thurgood Marshall
- Rosa Parks
- Shirley Chisholm
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- Ruby Bridges
- Claudette Colvin
- Jackie Robinson
Sojourner Truth was born in 1797 below the identify Isabella Baumfree, in Ulster County, New York – the place slavery was nonetheless authorized on the time.
She escaped to freedom in 1826 with her toddler daughter after her proprietor refused to conform with the gradual abolition of slavery legislation New York had handed, the National Parks Service experiences.
Baumfree later freed her son, who had been bought to an Alabama slave proprietor, by bringing her case to court docket.
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By 1828, she grew to become the primary Black girl to win a case towards a former slave proprietor.
Almost 20 years later, Baumfree joined a Methodist church and adjusted her identify to Sojourner Truth as she traveled the nation to advertise the abolition of slavery, the development of girls’s rights, and spiritual tolerance.
Baumfree famously delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in 1851 on the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention and met President Lincoln in 1864 by her work for the National Freedmen’s Relief Association. She additionally dictated a bunch of memoirs that have been revealed in her guide “The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave” (1850).
Frederick Douglass, an American abolitionist and orator, was born as an enslaved particular person in Feb. 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland.
He grew to become a nationwide chief within the abolitionist motion in New York and Massachusetts after escaping bondage as a disguised sailor, in keeping with the Library of Congress.
Douglass delivered transferring speeches and essays about his expertise and anti-slavery stance, together with his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech (1852) and “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass” autobiography (1881).
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Douglass additionally fought for civil reforms, together with equal remedy for Black Americans and ladies, free public schooling and the top of capital punishment.
Harriet Tubman, American abolitionist chief (1820-1913), escaped slavery by marrying a free man and led many different slaves to security by using the abolitionist community generally known as the Underground Railroad. (MPI/Getty Images)
Harriet Tubman, conductor of the Underground Railroad and a Union Army spy, was born in March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, below the identify Araminta Ross.
She modified her identify in 1844 following her marriage to John Tubman, a free man, the National Parks Service experiences. About 5 years after her marriage, Tubman escaped to freedom in Philadelphia, the place slavery was abolished.
Tubman spent the subsequent decade of her life rescuing household and buddies in what’s now generally known as the Underground Railroad.
Tubman served as an instrumental spy for the Union Army.
She personally made “about 13 trips into Maryland” to free her companions and offered a map to freedom to “about 70 more,” in keeping with the NPS.
When the Civil War broke out within the 1860s, Tubman served as an instrumental spy for the Union Army. She famously joined Col. James Montgomery and his 2nd South Carolina Infantry through the group’s 1863 raid on Combahee River plantations, the place Tubman offered scouting, nursing and cooking support.
Agriculture scientist and educator George Washington Carver was born within the early- or mid-1860s in Diamond, Missouri.
While initially enslaved with his mom and sister, Carver was separated from his household after he was kidnapped in a slave raid. The Carver household retrieved him from his captors and ultimately taught him to learn, write and look after crops after the abolishment of slavery in 1865.
George Washington Carver was the primary African American to earn a bachelor of science diploma. (Getty Images)
Carver went on to attend varied faculties within the Midwest. He was accepted into the botany program on the Iowa State Agricultural School and have become the primary African American to earn a bachelor of science diploma, in keeping with History.com.
Carver’s agricultural analysis and innovations led to developments in soil well being, conservation, and rotational peanut crops, the USDA experiences.
Carver famously made quite a lot of peanut-based merchandise and natural concoctions, and later grew to become a professor on the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a traditionally Black faculty.
American journalist and civil rights advocate Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, 5 months and two weeks earlier than the supply of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Wells moved to Tennessee and have become a trainer in maturity. Wells started to put in writing political articles after she gained a lawsuit towards the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in 1887 for being forcibly faraway from a first-class practice automobile she paid for; that choice was in the end overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court, Mississippi History experiences.
Wells later moved to Chicago and took on a management position on the NAACP.
Wells went on to put in writing exposés about faculty segregation and lynching in Memphis till she was compelled to maneuver to New York City for her security. She continued her investigative experiences about disparities within the American schooling system below segregation, mistreatment that African Americans skilled, and the street to ladies’s suffrage.
Some of her well-known written works embrace “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” (1893) and “Mob Rule in New Orleans” (1900).
Wells later moved to Chicago and took on a management position on the NAACP. She additionally ran for the Illinois legislature earlier than her demise in 1931.
American sociologist and historian William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on Feb. 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Du Bois was the primary Black graduate of Searles High School in 1884 and later earned his bachelor of arts from Fisk University in Tennessee, America’s Library experiences.
He then earned a second bachelor’s diploma, a grasp’s and a doctorate in historical past from Harvard University. During his education, Du Bois additionally traveled to Germany for a fellowship on the University of Berlin, the place he studied the works of well-known social scientists, together with Gustav von Schmoller and Heinrich von Treitschke.
Du Bois grew to become a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), America’s oldest and largest civil rights group.
Du Bois used his schooling and abilities as a author and editor to handle race relations within the U.S. and advance rights for Black Americans. He revealed books on sociology, historical past and politics, together with “Black Reconstruction in America,” “The Souls of Black Folk” and “The Talented Tenth.”
Du Bois grew to become a professor of historical past, sociology and economics at Atlanta University, a traditionally Black analysis faculty with Methodist roots. He additionally grew to become a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), America’s oldest and largest civil rights group.
The NAACP characterizes itself as a grassroots group that “builds Black political power to end structural racism.”
Thurgood Marshall, the great-grandson of a slave, was the primary Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. (Getty Images)
Thurgood Marshall, the primary African American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore.
He was previously named Thoroughgood Marshall, however he legally modified his identify on the age of 6. Marshall later got interested within the legislation as a highschool scholar after he was ordered to learn the U.S. Constitution as a punishment for a prank he pulled, United States Courts experiences.
From that second, he was impressed to turn out to be a lawyer after he realized not all African Americans have been in a position to benefit from the liberties specified by the Bill of Rights.
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Marshall attended Lincoln University after which Howard University School of Law, the place he labored with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Around 1935, Marshall discovered counterarguments for segregation when he reviewed the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which acknowledged services might be divided by race in the event that they have been “separate but equal.”
Marshall discovered this doctrine flawed and created discrepancies within the schooling kids acquired, which led him to tackle and win a number of landmark instances.
His most well-known case that modified the American faculty system was Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared that segregation in public faculties was unconstitutional.
President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall as a federal decide to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1961. Four years later, Marshall was appointed as solicitor normal by President Lyndon Johnson. By 1967, Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court – the place he served as a justice till 1991.
Rosa Parks, civil rights activist, was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. (Getty Images)
Civil rights chief Rosa Parks was born on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, below the identify Rosa Louise McCauley. She married her husband, Raymond Parks in 1932 and labored as a seamstress earlier than she grew to become a member of the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Parks Service experiences.
At age 42, Parks was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat on the entrance of a bus to a White passenger and transfer to the again, a observe that wasn’t unusual through the time of Jim Crow.
The arrest impressed 17,000 African Americans to start out the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted for 13 months and damage the town bus service’s income. Parks remained an emblem of resilience throughout this time.
The boycott lastly got here to an finish in 1956 when the Supreme Court dominated that segregated buses have been unconstitutional. Parks moved to Detroit a 12 months later, working with the NAACP and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., to struggle homelessness, and even created a job coaching institute.
She earned a Congressional Gold Medal in 1991.
Shirley Chisholm, the primary African American girl to serve within the United States Congress, was born in Brooklyn, New York, on Nov. 30, 1924, below the identify Shirley Anita St. Hill.
In her youth, Chisholm was partially raised by her grandparents in Barbados earlier than her household settled in Brooklyn, the U.S. House of Representatives experiences.
Chisholm earned a bachelor’s diploma in sociology from Brooklyn College and a grasp’s in elementary schooling from Columbia University. She labored as a trainer, day care heart director and academic guide earlier than coming into politics.
Chisholm was elected to the New York state legislature in 1964 after which the U.S. House of Representatives in 1968, when she represented Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant district for seven phrases. Chisholm made waves within the House when she appealed her preliminary committee project in agriculture to discover a committee extra related to her district.
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She was reassigned to the Veterans Affairs Committee and moved as much as the Education and Labor Committee, the place she devoted herself to advancing equal schooling and employment alternatives. In 1972, Chisholm, a Democrat, additionally grew to become the primary African American to run for a significant political occasion’s nomination for president.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Getty Images)
Civil rights chief Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta. Post-college, King devoted his life to combating racial inequality with peaceable resistance to unjust legal guidelines.
He notably protested segregation in public faculties, eating places and resorts with nonviolent sit-ins, America’s Library experiences. King additionally delivered transferring speeches that challenged the mistreatment that African Americans confronted below Jim Crow legal guidelines and referred to as for equality.
King delivered his most well-known speech, “I Have a Dream,” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial through the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
King’s notable accomplishments through the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968) included the Montgomery Bus Boycott; pleading for peace when U.S. marshals have been referred to as in to disperse the Freedom Riders (segregation protesters driving on interracial buses) in Montgomery; and main the Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, which was met with violent resistance.
However, it confirmed the world the assaults that African Americans confronted throughout peaceable protests by pictures and video.
Ruby Bridges began her civil rights work at a really younger age.
On Sept. 8, 1954, Bridges was born in Tylertown, Mississippi. A few years after her beginning, her household picked up and moved to New Orleans, Louisiana.
When the federal court docket ordered Louisiana to desegregate in 1960, Bridges was the one African American to attend the all-White faculty, William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans.
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Bridges’ first 12 months in class was met with challenges. She was escorted by 4 federal marshals upon coming into the varsity every day. Every day of the varsity 12 months, she made it by the threats and anger directed towards her.
There was just one trainer, Barbara Henry, who was keen to show younger Bridges, who was taught by one-on-one instruction.
Bridges paved the way in which for a lot of who adopted her within the coming years, with extra African American college students enrolling.
Bridges saved up her civil rights work all through her life. In 1999, she established The Ruby Bridges Foundation to create change in schooling and a extra inclusive society.
In 2001, she was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Bill Clinton.
Claudette Colvin has a narrative much like one usually heard about Rosa Parks, though it occurred 9 months prior.
On March 2, 1955, when Colvin was 15 years outdated, she was driving the bus when the motive force advised her to surrender her seat and transfer to the again.
Colvin refused, expressing that she paid for her ticket, and it was her constitutional proper to be within the seat she was in.
Colvin was put in handcuffs and brought off the bus by two law enforcement officials for her refusal to surrender her seat.
Colvin was one of many 4 plaintiffs who have been a part of the case Browder v. Gayle. This case dominated Montgomery’s segregated bus system unconstitutional.
Jackie Robinson was born on Jan. 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Jackie Robinson was the primary African American baseball participant in fashionable years to play within the Major Leagues.
He was born on Jan. 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia. He performed sports activities at each Pasadena Junior College and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the place he excelled in soccer, baseball and observe.
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It was April 15, 1947, when he first performed for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He acquired lots of heckling from followers whereas enjoying for the workforce, with a few of his teammates refusing to play with Robinson.
He performed for the Dodgers till he retired in 1956. He grew to become the primary African American to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962 and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Cortney Moore and Philip Nieto contributed reporting.
For extra Lifestyle articles, go to www.foxnews.com/life-style.
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