We’d love to have a full month profiling courageous people who broke down barriers and succeeded against all odds. But what makes stories...

If you’ve ever used the phrase “Kicking ass and taking names,” you have John Oliver Killens to thank for putting your feelings into...

When Charles Drew was born in Washington, D.C. in 1904, school attendance wasn’t required. It wouldn’t become compulsory for another...

In 1896, the Supreme Court’s Plessy vs. Ferguson decision upheld Jim Crow laws, creating the “separate but equal” doctrine that would be...

What do the homes of Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Barbara Stanwyck and the public housing project of Langston Terrace in Washington, D.C....

In 1875, Mary McLeod was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to parents Samuel and Patsy, who’d been enslaved in South Carolina....

Referred to as the “Black Thomas Edison,” Granville Woods held over sixty patents in his lifetime. Thanks to the Northwest Ordinance of...

When the letters M.D. were added to Rebecca Lee’s name in 1864, some people snarkily mused that it stood for “mule driver.” In reality,...

Mary Walker was born enslaved in Alabama in 1848. Freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, Mary married, had children, and earned a living...

If you’ve ever driven through Richmond, Virginia along I-95, you’ve no doubt noticed one of the city’s most visible landmarks: the...

Born in 1753 In West Hartford, Connecticut to a white woman “of some standing” and an unnamed African American man, Lemuel Haynes was the...

“If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in...