Category: History

Contralto, pianist, pedagogist, administrator, and advocate Lulu Vere Childers had a profound impact on African American Spirituals and European classical music. Childers was the seventh child of 12 born in…

Jane Serepta “Jennie” Dean, a former slave, missionary, and pioneering educator, founded the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth in Northern Virginia in October 1894. The Manassas School existed for…

Abyssinian Meeting House is a historic church building at 73-75 Newbury Street, Portland, Maine. It is considered to be Maine’s oldest African American church building. The Abyssinian Meeting House was…

James Robert Ford was a politician, businessman, and the first African American mayor of Tallahassee, Florida. That election also made him the first Black mayor of a US state capital…

Frances Thompson, a transgender woman and anti-rape activist became one of five Black women to testify before a congressional committee that, at the time, was investigating what occurred during the…

Kenneth E. Reeves, the first African American Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was born Kenneth Errol Reeves in Detroit, Michigan, on February 8, 1951. His parents were Jamaican immigrants who divorced…

Basil Dorsey, born enslaved in Maryland, became famous for his role in successfully freeing himself. Dorsey was born in 1808 to unnamed parents in Libertytown, Frederick County, Maryland. Much of…

Douglas Palmer, the first Black mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, was born Douglas Harold Palmer on October 19, 1951, in the city, to George H. Palmer, a native of Charleston,…

Elizabeth Mason Harden Gilmore was a trailblazing figure, a distinguished entrepreneur, and a significant civil rights leader. She was the first black woman to serve as a licensed funeral director…

James Perkins Jr. became the first African American mayor of Selma, Alabama on September 13, 2000. Perkins was born on January 15, 1953. His parents were James Perkins, Sr., an…