CONTENTSIntroduction 14

Chapter 1: Abolitionism and Activism 21Abolitionists 21 Martin R. Delany 22 Frederick Douglass 23 Gabriel 25 Harriet Tubman 26 Nat Turner 28 David Walker 29Activists 29 Ralph David Abernathy 30 Ella Baker 31 Julian Bond 32 Stokely Carmichael 32 Eldridge Cleaver 34 W.E.B. Du Bois 35 Medgar Evers 38 James Farmer 39 Marcus Garvey 40 Fannie Lou Hamer 41 Benjamin L. Hooks 42 Jesse Jackson 42 Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. 45 Coretta Scott King 46 Martin Luther King, Jr. 47 Malcolm X 58 James Meredith 62 Rosa Parks 62 A. Philip Randolph 63 Bobby Seale 64 Al Sharpton 65 Emmett Till 65 Booker T. Washington 66 Ida B. Wells-Barnett 68 Roy Wilkins 69 Whitney M. Young, Jr. 70 Talented Tenth 71

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Chapter 2: Protect and Serve 72 Politicians 72 Marion Barry 73 Tom Bradley 73 Edward Brooke 74 Blanche K. Bruce 75 Shirley Chisholm 77 Maynard Jackson 78 David Dinkins 79 Barbara C. Jordan 79 John R. Lynch 80 Carol Moseley Braun 81 Barack Obama 82 Michelle Obama 88 Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback 91 Hiram R. Revels 92 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. 93 Robert Smalls 94 Carl Stokes 95 Harold Washington 95 Douglas Wilder 96 Coleman Young 97Government Officials, Diplomats, and Soldiers 97 Crispus Attucks 98 Ralph Bunche 98 Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. 100 Patricia Roberts Harris 101 Colin Powell 103 Condoleezza Rice 103 Robert C. Weaver 106 Buffalo Soldier 107 Andrew Young 108 Tuskegee Airmen 108Lawyers and Jurists 109 Marian Wright Edelman 109 Charles Hamilton Houston 111 Thurgood Marshall 111 Charlotte E. Ray 114 Clarence Thomas 115

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Chapter 3: Exploration, Education, Experimentation, and Ecumenism 117

Explorers, Aviators, and Astronauts 117 Guion S. Bluford, Jr. 117 Bessie Coleman 120 Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable 120 Matthew Alexander Henson 121 Mae Jemison 121Educators and Academics 123 John Hope Franklin 123 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 124 Cornel West 126 William Julius Wilson 128 Carter G. Woodson 129Science and Medicine 130 Benjamin Banneker 130 George Washington Carver 131 Joycelyn Elders 134 Mary Mahoney 136 Charles Henry Turner 136Businesspeople 138 Kenneth Chenault 138 John H. Johnson 139 Robert L. Johnson 140 Charles Clinton Spaulding 141Religious Leaders 141 Richard Allen 142 Father Divine 142 Wallace D. Fard 144 Louis Farrakhan 144

Chapter 4: Arts and Letters 147Writers and Poets 147 Maya Angelou 148 James Baldwin 149 Octavia E. Butler 151 Charles W. Chesnutt 151 Countee Cullen 152 Paul Laurence Dunbar 153 Ralph Ellison 153

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Ernest J. Gaines 155 Nikki Giovanni 156 Alex Haley 157 Chester Himes 157 Langston Hughes 159 Audre Lorde 160 Claude McKay 161 Toni Morrison 161 Walter Mosley 163 Alice Walker 164 Phillis Wheatley 166 Richard Wright 167Journalists 168 Ed Bradley 168 Max Robinson 169 Carl Rowan 170 Bernard Shaw 170Painters and Photographers 171 Jacob Lawrence 171 Gordon Parks 172 Horace Pippin 174Dancers and Choreographers 175 Alvin Ailey, Jr. 176 Katherine Dunham 177 Savion Glover 178 Chapter 5: Stage and Screen 180Actors 181 Halle Berry 181 Ossie Davis 181 Ruby Dee 183 Jamie Foxx 184 Morgan Freeman 185 James Earl Jones 186 Hattie McDaniel 187 Eddie Murphy 188 Sidney Poitier 189 Will Smith 191 Woody Strode 193 Denzel Washington 193 Oprah Winfrey 195

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Directors, Producers, and Playwrights 198 Amiri Baraka 198 Charles Burnett 199 Lonne Elder III 200 Spike Lee 200 Oscar Micheaux 202 Ntozake Shange 203 Melvin Van Peebles 204Comedians 205 Bill Cosby 205 Whoopi Goldberg 206 Dick Gregory 207 Richard Pryor 209 Chris Rock 209 Bert Williams 212

Chapter 6: Music 213Jazz 214 Louis Armstrong 214 Count Basie 217 Buddy Bolden 219 Cab Calloway 219 Ornette Coleman 221 John Coltrane 222 Miles Davis 224 Duke Ellington 227 Ella Fitzgerald 231 Dizzy Gillespie 232 Lionel Hampton 234 Coleman Hawkins 236 Fletcher Henderson 237 Billie Holiday 238 John Lewis 240 Charles Mingus 241 Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ) 241 Thelonious Monk 242 Jelly Roll Morton 242 King Oliver 243 Charlie Parker 243 Max Roach 246 Sonny Rollins 247

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Billy Strayhorn 248 Sun Ra 248 Art Tatum 249 Sarah Vaughan 249 Fats Waller 250 Lester Young 250 Decca Records 251Folk and Blues 252 Big Bill Broonzy 252 Willie Dixon 252 W.C. Handy 253 Alberta Hunter 254 Elmore James 255 Robert Johnson 256 B.B. King 257 Leadbelly 259 Ma Rainey 260 Bessie Smith 261 Muddy Waters 262Rhythm and Blues 264 Chuck Berry 264 Ruth Brown 266 Ray Charles 267 Sam Cooke 268 Bo Diddley 269 Fats Domino 270 Jimi Hendrix 271 Howlin' Wolf 273 Etta James 274 Quincy Jones 274 Little Richard 275 Tina Turner 277 Jackie Wilson 278 Apollo Theater 279Soul 280 James Brown 280 The Four Tops 282 Aretha Franklin 283 Marvin Gaye 284

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Berry Gordy, Jr. 287 Al Green 288 Janet Jackson 290 Michael Jackson 291 Curtis Mayfield 293 Otis Redding 294 Smokey Robinson and the Miracles 296 The Supremes 297 The Temptations 299 Stevie Wonder 300Funk 302 Parliament-Funkadelic 302 Prince 303 Sly and the Family Stone 306Hip-Hop 307 Diddy 308 Jay-Z 309 Public Enemy 311 Run-D.M.C. 312 Tupac Shakur 313 Kanye West 315Cabaret, Gospel, Opera, and Show Music 316 Nat King Cole 316 Sammy Davis, Jr. 318 Thomas Andrew Dorsey 318 Lena Horne 319 Mahalia Jackson 320 Jessye Norman 321 Leontyne Price 322

Chapter 7: Sports 324Baseball 325 Hank Aaron 325 Cool Papa Bell 326 Barry Bonds 326 Lou Brock 327 Larry Doby 328 Bob Gibson 328 Josh Gibson 329

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Rickey Henderson 329 Reggie Jackson 330 Buck Leonard 332 Willie Mays 332 Buck O'Neil 334 Satchel Paige 335 Frank Robinson 336 Jackie Robinson 337Basketball 340 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 341 Kobe Bryant 342 Wilt Chamberlain 344 Cynthia Cooper 345 Julius Erving 345 Magic Johnson 346 Michael Jordan 347 Oscar Robertson 349 Bill Russell 350Boxing 351 Muhammad Ali 351 George Foreman 356 Joe Frazier 356 Marvin Hagler 357 Jack Johnson 358 Don King 360 Sugar Ray Leonard 361 Joe Louis 362 Floyd Patterson 364 Sugar Ray Robinson 365 Mike Tyson 367Football 369 Jim Brown 369 Marion Motley 370 Walter Payton 370 Jerry Rice 371 Eddie Robinson 372 O.J. Simpson 373Track and Field 375 Bob Beamon 375

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Lee Evans 377 Florence Griffith Joyner 377 Carl Lewis 378 Edwin Moses 379 Jesse Owens 379 Wilma Rudolph 380Tennis, Golf, and Horse Racing 381 Arthur Ashe 382 Althea Gibson 382 Isaac Burns Murphy 383 Serena Williams 384 Venus Williams 386 Tiger Woods 386Epilogue 388

Glossary 390Bibliography 392Index 395

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Introduction | 15

Nat Turner in 1831. Turner, the seven other slaves who were his initial followers, and those who joined them sustained their uprising for two days, killing his owners’ family as well as 60 other white people before being stopped by the Virginia mili-tia. After six weeks in hiding, Turner was tried and hanged. His rebellion led to a tightening of restrictions placed on slaves in regard to education and their ability to hold meetings precisely because it had served notice that slaves were capable of and willing to organize, arm themselves, and put life and limb on the line in order to escape bondage.

Risk came in many forms for aboli-tionists, who battled slavery with words as wells as deeds. Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave, was heralded as “the Moses of her people” for her courageous work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Risking her own liberty over the course of 19 separate expeditions into the slave state of Maryland, Tubman led more than 300 slaves to freedom in Canada. Skillful stealth of another sort was employed by David Walker. His pam-phlet “Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World,” published in 1829, called for a slave uprising to end bondage in the South. A Boston clothing storeowner, Walker cleverly slipped these pamphlets into the pockets of the garments he sold to white sailors or passed them on directly to black sailors, hoping his call

For Americans, the pursuit of happi-ness has long been bound up with

striving for excellence and achieve-ment. But, although the Declaration of Independence found the fundamental equality of all people (or at least of men) to be self-evident and the right to liberty inalienable, for African Americans the pursuit of not just achievement and excel-lence but of liberty and equality was long obstructed by barriers of “race” and class and by the social and economic frame-work of life in the United States. As this book details, the black experience in America has been marked by hardship unlike that experienced by any other eth-nic group in the country. Within these pages, readers will meet or rediscover a host of African Americans who have overcome these barriers to make impor-tant contributions to American political, religious, social, economic, and cultural life. In doing so, these men and women not only improved the lot of African Americans but that of all Americans.

Slavery is the scourge of American history, a source of national shame that dates from the arrival of the first African slaves in Jamestown colony in 1619. As this “peculiar institution” persisted into the 19th century, many African Americans fought for the emancipation of their people through methods varying from written protest to violent uprising. The most effec-tive slave revolt in U.S. history was led by

From the depths of slavery to the stewardship of a nation, the 400-year-long story of African Americans has arced from extreme adversity to the ultimate in achievement. On the facing page, Pres. Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama dance at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball, their first official dance as first couple, Jan. 20, 2009. The Washington Post/Getty Images

16 | Black American Biographies: The Journey of Achievement

Washington was convinced that the way for African Americans to improve their lives was through the mastery of manual trades and agricultural skills along with the acquisition of economic power. As president of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute from 1881 to 1915, Washington took two small converted buildings and grew them into the thriv-ing learning community with a $2 million endowment at the time of his death. W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida Wells-Barnett, who were among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, considered Washington’s prag-matic approach of acquiring vocational skills “accommodation.” Instead, they called for an end to segregation and worked to ensure African Americans the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution. Winning workers’ rights was the goal of African American trade unionist A. Philip Randolph, who was founding president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Some leaders of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were more revolutionary in their approach, notably Malcolm X, a promi-nent figure in the Nation of Islam, who rejected King’s non-violent philosophies, famously calling for blacks to defend their rights “by any means necessary.” Malcolm’s life ended violently when he was gunned down in 1965 by members of the Nation after he had left it to embrace a more orthodox Islamic philosophy. Much influenced by Malcolm, Eldridge

to action would reach Southern ports. Reach the South the documents did, but not without consequences for Walker, as explained in this book.

Newspapers also played an important role in the struggle. From 1846 to 1849 the abolitionist weekly the North Star, published in Rochester, N.Y., benefited from the combined talents of two of the mid-19th century’s most gifted African American writers and activists, Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass.

Activism thrived in the black com-munity then, as it would for the generations to come. Foremost among the many African American activists who have worked to address civil rights issues was the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who came to prominence as the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Following the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was sparked by Rosa Parks’s famous refusal to give up her bus seat for a white man, King and the SCLC sought change through non-violent protest. Throughout the 1960s he travelled the country to lead demonstrations and deliver speeches, railing against segregation and injustice, the most famous of his orations being his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered as part of the 1963 March on Washington. Five years later, while in Memphis sup-porting a sanitation workers’ strike, he was assassinated.

Among the host of groundbreaking activists who preceded King was Booker T. Washington. Born shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War,

Cleaver, author of Soul on Ice, joined the Black Panther party and sought to spread its radical message.

At the same time, advances were made for and by African Americans within the system. In 1967, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, the first African American to hold the post. Famous for having successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the liberal-leaning Marshall rigorously continued his work of guaranteeing the constitutional rights of all citizens. More recently, Colin Powell served as the first African American chair-man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93). In 2001 he would go on to become the first African American secretary of state. When Condoleezza Rice replaced him in 2005, she became the first African American woman to hold that position.

But undoubtedly the culmination of years of struggle by African Americans to find true representation within govern-ment was the election as president in 2008 of Barack Obama, an African American senator from Illinois. A black man had become the leader of the free world.

Boundless talent and tremendous effort have been at the root of the accom-plishments of many famous African Americans, not least those of George Washington Carver, whose pioneering agricultural science helped take the pea-nut from a footnote in America’s ledger to the South’s number two cash crop by 1940. Carver studied legumes, includ-ing peanuts, as a way to renew soil and provide a cheap, plentiful source of

Introduction | 17

protein. His research revived the lagging Southern farm economy, upon which many African Americans depended. Far above the fields, in 1921, aviator Bessie Coleman became the first black woman to earn an international pilot’s license. Soon after she began performing in aerial shows in the United States, though, she refused to fly for segregated audiences. Coleman used her fame to encourage other African Americans to follow her into the sky and to raise money to estab-lish a school to train black aviators.

In the business world, black entrepre-neurs made great strides, as well. From 1980 to 1991 Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, over-saw the transformation of a small cable station into the first African American-controlled company to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2001, Johnson’s sale of BET made him the first black American billionaire. He used his earnings to become the first African American majority owner of a franchise in the National Basketball Association, when he bought the Charlotte Bobcats. Another captain of industry, Kenneth Chenault, helped revive the sagging for-tunes of American Express in the 1990s on the way to becoming its chief execu-tive officer and the first African American CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He then steered the company through hard times after the September 11 attacks, which dam-aged its headquarters and in which 11 of its employees were killed.

It is hard to imagine American cul-ture without the contributions of the

18 | Black American Biographies: The Journey of Achievement

multitude of gifted black artists who have helped shape it. Among the many African Americans who have left indelible marks on American literature are a pair of women, Toni Morrison, who earned a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved (1987), based on the true story of a run-away slave, and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993; and Maya Angelou, considered by many a national treasure for her poetry and prose, especially 1970’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. Broadway is home for the talents of choreographer Savion Glover, who devel-oped the tap style known as “hitting,” featured in his Tony Award-winning show Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk. In print journalism, Gordon Parks bore witness to the civil rights movement and ghetto life with memorable images during his tenure (1948-72) as the first African American staff photographer for Life magazine. On the air, in 1978 Max Robinson became the first African American to anchor a nightly network news program, a major feat at a time when most Americans looking for tele-vision news turned to the three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS.

The 2001 Academy Awards ceremony was an important moment in black his-tory. That night, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won the awards for best actress and actor, becoming, the second and third African Americans to receive best-acting honours in leading roles. Sidney Poitier, who had been the first African American to take the top acting Oscar, for his performance in Lilies of the

Field (1963), made a point of choosing characters that defied black stereotypes throughout his long career. Another Oscar winner, Whoopi Goldberg (best supporting actress in 1990 for her role in Ghost), is also well known as a comedian. Other African American comedians such as Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, and Eddie Murphy have enjoyed tremendous suc-cess on both the big and small screens.

American music has been much defined and frequently dominated by African American artists. Most genres of popular music from rock to soul to pop have been greatly influenced by black musicians. Jazz, an original American style of music has both European and African roots, but was the exclusive domain of black artists in its early days. The long list of African Americans who pushed the boundaries of the genre has to include Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis. Similarly vital to the development of the blues were the legendary B.B. King and Muddy Waters, who, among others, added electric guitar to the acoustic blues of the South.

In the 1950s, rhythm and blues caught the imagination of both young blacks and whites, leading to development of both rock and roll and soul music, the lat-ter of which, in effect, was a secularized version of the deeply emotional gospel music. During the 1960s and ‘70s, in the hands of a stable of immensely talented writers, producers, and performers at Detroit’s Motown Record Corporation (among them Smokey Robinson, Stevie

Introduction | 19

Wonder, the Supremes, the Temptations, the Jackson 5), soul, too, crossed over to become the “Sound of Young America.” Soul begat disco, but it also led the way to funk. By the 1980s, the dominant form of music in the African American commu-nity was hip-hop, popularized by artists such as Public Enemy and Run-D.M.C. As hip-hop moved into the new century, popular performers Jay-Z and Diddy were nearly as renowned as music execu-tives and entrepreneurs as they were as rappers.

On the baseball diamond, basketball court, football field, and beyond, the contributions of African American ath-letes have been game changing. Most famously, Jackie Robinson spectacularly broke major league baseball’s colour bar-rier as the National League’s Rookie of the Year in 1947. Two years later he won the League’s batting championship with .342 average and its Most Valuable Player award. In 1966, Willie Mays, widely regarded as the best all-around player in baseball history, became the game’s high-est paid player to that date. Barry Bonds broke the record for career home runs with his 756th in 2007, surpassing the total amassed by Hank Aaron in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. In basketball, although Michael Jordan is generally recognized as the greatest player in NBA history, the efforts of Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Magic Johnson kept many a sports fan in spectator heaven. As for the grid-iron, dozens of African American players have been enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, including a

pantheon of great running backs headed by Jim Brown and Walter Payton.

In the boxing ring, Muhammad Ali, who proclaimed himself to be “the Greatest,” was the first fighter to win the world heavyweight championship on three separate occasions over his 20-year career. George Foreman was the heavy-weight champion twice and, at age 45 in 1994, the division’s oldest title holder. In track and field, Jesse Owens triumphed in the Olympics of 1936 in Berlin, win-ning four gold medals and embarrassing Adolf Hitler, for whom the Olympics were meant to prove Aryan superiority. Sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner—“FloJo”—who won three gold medals and one silver medal at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, also set records for the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes that have lasted for decades. Among the world’s best-known athletes at the beginning of the 21st cen-tury were tennis superstar sisters Venus and Serena Williams, and Tiger Woods, who, at age 21 in 1997, was the first black golfer to win the Masters Tournament, and in 2001 became the first player to win all four major professional golf tourna-ments in one year.

In this book, readers will find the often dramatic, heroic, inspiring, and human stories of hundreds of African Americans who have made history. From popular artists to politicians, ath-letes to activists, these men and women from all over America have contributed to the legacy of the black American experience—and the American experi-ence as a whole.