A brand new infographic highlights just how white and male the Academy Awards really are. According to research by book publisher Lee & Low, since the…
Neil deGrasse Tyson was born October 5, 1958 in Manhattan and was raised in the Bronx. Tyson attended the Bronx High School of Science where he was captain of the wrestling team and editor-in-chief of the school’s Physical Science Journal. He obsessively studied astronomy in his teens, and eventually even gained some fame in the […]
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was born on November 30, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York. At age three Chisholm was sent to Barbados to live with her maternal grandmother where she attended the Vauxhall Primary School. She did not return to New York until roughly seven years later. Chisholm graduated from the Girls’ High School, […]
Forest Steven Whitaker was born July 15, 1961 in Longview, Texas. He was awarded The NAACP Chairman’s Award at the 45th NAACP Image Awards this past Saturday. His acceptance speech can be seen here. http://www.tvoneonline.com/shows/45th-naacp-image-awards/video/image-awards–forest-whitaker-s-amazing-speech.html. Whitaker moved to Carson, California when he was four. He attended Cal Poly Pomona on a football scholarship, but due to a […]
McKinley Jones was born in Covington, Kentucky, near Cincinnati, Ohio, on May 17, 1893. He served in France in World War I. After he returned home he worked as a garage mechanic, and with this experience, he developed a self-starting gasoline motor. His mastery of electronic devices was largely self-taught, through work experience and the […]
Edward Alexander Bouchet was born in 1852 in New Haven, Connecticut. At that time there were only three schools in New Haven open to Black children. Bouchet was enrolled in the Artisan Street Colored School which had only one teacherand she nurtured Bouchet's academic abilities. He attended the New Haven High Schoolfrom 1866 to 1868 […]
Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman was born January 26, 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, the 10th of 13 children. When Coleman was two years old her family moved to Waxahachie, Texas, where she lived until age 23. Coleman began attending school in Waxahachie at age six and had to walk four miles each day to her segregated, one-room […]
Ernest Everett Just was born on August 14, 1883 in Charleston, South Carolina. Because high schools in the South provided such poor education at that time for African-American children, Just’s mother decided to send him North to receive better schooling. Through hard work, Ernest was able to earn enough money to attend the Kimball Academy […]
Granville Woods was born on April 23, 1856 in Columbus, Ohio. He spent his early years attending school until the age of 10 at which point he began working in a machine shop repairing railroad equipment and machinery. Intrigued by the electricity that powered the machinery, Woods studied other machine workers as they attended to […]
James Cleveland “Jesse” Owens was born September 12, 1913 in Oakville, Alabama, the youngest of 10 children. J.C., as he was called, was nine years old when the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio for better opportunities. When his new teacher asked his name he said “J.C.”, but because of his strong Southern accent, she thought […]
