Black History Month

History & Holidays

Trade of enslaved Africans began in the 1400s with the Portuguese capture of 12 African men. Enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas by the Spanish in 1526. Between 1525 - 1866, 12.5 million Africans were forced from their homes and sold to the New World. 

After slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, laws at a state and local level, called Jim Crow, were established in the late 19th century, legalizing segregation. Black people could not use the same facilities, live in the same area or marry white people.  

Amendments, Acts, & Rulings

• 13th Amendment: In 1865, the Amendment abolished slavery.
• 14th Amendment: In 1868, the Amendment granted Black people equal protection under the law.
• 15th Amendment: In 1870, this granted Black American men the right to vote.
• President Harry Truman in 1948, ordered integration into the military
• In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that educational segregation was unconstitutional in 1954.
• President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which legally ended the segregation from Jim Crow laws.
• In 1965, the Voting Rights Act ensured that minorities can't be kept from voting.
• The Fair Housing Act of 1968 ended discrimination in renting and selling homes.

Holidays

• Created in 1966, Kwanzaa is a weeklong holiday celebrating African-American and Pan-American culture, history, values, community, and family.
• Juneteenth marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. It became an official federal holiday on June 17, 2021

Milestones & Contributions

• Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori was a royal heir to one of Africa’s most influential kingdoms in Guinea. He was enslaved in 1788, teaching his enslaver to become one of Mississippi's leading cotton producers.
• Howard Latimer was born in 1848 and the son of fugitive slaves. As an inventor and electrical pioneer, he invented carbon filament for lightbulbs. 
• W.E.B. DuBois was a scholar, sociologist, educator, and activist who co-founded the NAACP. He was also the first African-America to graduate Harvard with a PhD in 1895.
• Fredrick Douglass was born into slavery early 1800’s before he escaped and became an orator, writer and statesman and a leader of the abolitionist movement in the north.
• Harriet Tubman was enslaved and escaped, helping others gain their freedom as a conductor on the "Underground Railroad." She is known as the "Moses of her people." 
• The Tuskegee Airmen were the first black aviators in the US Army Air Corps, earning more than 150 distinguished flying crosses.
• Garrett Morgan patented a device that later became known as the gas mask. He hired a white actor to pose as "the inventor" to market his product to bypass discrimination. Morgan disguised himself as a Native American sidekick.  
• James Wormley Jones was America's first black special agent, infiltrating U.S. paramilitary groups with radical agendas and ties to the Communist Party and Ku Klux Klan.
• Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man (1955), which led to to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the declaration of bus segregation as unconstitutional. 
• Ruby Bridges was the first black child to go to an all white school in Louisiana in 1960, her experience featured in The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell. She is now a prominent American civil rights activist. 
• Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a minister and activist, a civil rights leader who led nonviolent resistance to fight for equal rights, earning a Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
• Mary Van Brittan Brown of Queens, NY was a nurse and inventor, creating closed circuit television security in 1966.
• Shirley Chisholm, first black congresswoman, serving 7 terms and first black woman of a major party to run for President (1972). She rests at Forest lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, NY. 
• Mae C. Jemison was the first African-American female astronaut in 1992, flying on the Endeavour to become the first African-America in space. 

Resources for Conversations About Race