Black Leaders in History

Sam Cooke rose to prominence from his gospel roots in Mississippi and had the courage to do what no other black music artist had done before. In 1959 he formed his own music publishing company (Kags) so that he could own the copyrights to his songs...

Major Taylor rose to international prominence as a dominant bike racer in the early 1900’s and was only the second Black American to be a world champion in any sport...

Katherine Johnson was a pioneering mathematician for 33 years at NASA, starting from a segregated “Colored Computer” department in 1953 to becoming the key person that calculated the trajectories of Alan Shepherd’s first mission to space and later Apollo 11 and 13...

Toni Morrison was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She enjoyed success both critically and commercially and her 1987 novel Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Her writing style, through characters that were not leaders but everyday black Americans living through the most difficult of times, brought her acclaim...

Bryan Stevenson is perhaps the least known, most powerful force for social justice in America. Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, the Montgomery, Alabama based non-profit criminal defense organization that has was won the relief or reversals for more than 130 prisoners since it opened in 1989...

Marian Anderson was one of the finest opera voices of all time and was the first black American to perform at the White House and the first black woman to perform at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1955...

Lewis Hayden experienced it all in the 1800’s – slavery, tragedy, escape, freedom - and sought to bring about that same freedom for others through offering his home as a safe house to refugee slaves and being an outspoken voice of the abolitionist movement...

Just a few years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, Althea Gibson did the same in tennis. After being raised in Harlem, she was the first Black American to be invited to the U.S. Nationals (now the U.S. Open) in 1950 and later won the French Open, and then Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in back to back years (1957 & 1958)...

In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to the Unites States Congress. She served 7 terms for her New York district and in 1972 became the first black candidate for a major party’s nomination for President of the United States...

For 25 years, radio legend Tom Joyner hosted a nationally syndicated radio talk show aimed specifically for the black community. According to Roy Wood Jr, Joyner was the original black Twitter, uniquely fostering open conversations on the radio that mirrored the conversations that were happening in the living rooms of African American families across the country...

Thurgood Marshall was the first black Supreme Court Justice in the United States, serving from 1967 to 1991. Prior to being named to the Supreme Court, Marshall was an unsung hero in the Civil Rights era, leading the NAACP Legal Defense Fund where he won 29 of 32 cases he argued before the United States Supreme Court, including Brown v Board of Education. As an appointed circuit judge in the Second Court of Appeals between 1961 and 1965, all 112 rulings that went to the Supreme Court were upheld...

Harriet Tubman was an American icon of freedom by being the most famous and successful “conductor” of the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was the symbolic name given to the routes, transportation, safe houses and people that enabled slaves to escape north before the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Upon daringly earning her own freedom on the railroad in 1849, she committed herself to helping her family and close friends achieve that same freedom...