Curated Video
Harriet Tubman: the "Moses" of Her Time
Aside from helping her family (and thousands more) escape slavery, she led troops in combat, cured a disease, and was generally way more of a rebel than history generally portrays her as. She lived a remarkably full life, especially for...
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Alice A Dunnigan
Alice Allison Dunnigan was an African-American journalist, civil rights activist, and author born on the 27th of April 1906 in Kentucky. She was the first African-American female correspondent to receive White House credentials and the...
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Eugene Bullard: the First African American Military Pilot
Eugene Bullard was born October 9, 1895, in Columbus, Georgia. At the age of 11, he ran away for good, and for the next six years, he wandered the South in search of freedom. After World War I, he enlisted in the French Foreign...
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Lucy Stanton: the First Black Woman to Earn a College Degree
Lucy Stanton was an American abolitionist and feminist figure, notable for being the first African-American woman to complete a four-year course of a study at a college or university. She completed a Ladies Literary Course from Oberlin...
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Ruth Carol Taylor: the First African American Flight Attendant
Ruth Carol Taylor was the first African-American flight attendant in the United States. She was born in Boston, on December 27th, 1932, and attended Elmira College graduating as a registered nurse from the Bellevue School of Nursing in...
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Sophia Danenberg: the Mountain Climber
This is Sophia Danenberg, the first African American and the first black woman from anywhere in the world to climb Mount Everest. Dannenberg's first major climb was up Mount Rainier in Washington State in 2002. In 2005, she scaled five...
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The Waco Horror: the Unjust Killing of Jesse Washington
The body of Fryer, a fifty-three-year-old white woman, was found by her children on the family’s property in Robinson, seven miles southeast of Waco. Jesse Washington, a laborer on Fryer’s farm, was arrested and charged with Fryer’s...
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Anna Louise James
Anna Louise James was the first African American woman to be licensed as a pharmacist in Connecticut. The daughter of a former slave, Anna was raised in Connecticut and graduated from Brooklyn College of Pharmacy. When her brother-in-law...
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Robert Morris Sr.: First Black Lawyer in the U.S. to Win a Lawsuit
Robert Morris Sr. was the second African-American to be sworn into the Massachusetts bar, but the first to practice actively. Born in Salem, Massachusetts on June 8, 1823, he received formal education at Master Dodge’s School in Salem....
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White Mob Lynches Frank Embree Hours Before Trial in Missouri
Frank Embree was nineteen when he was accused of raping a 14-year-old white girl. Embree was from the state of Missouri, and Black men convicted of rape of a White woman were sentenced to death by lynching. His horrifying story shows the...
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Young Coretta Scott King
Correta Scott King is often known for being the wife of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., but she was so much more than that. She was an activist in her own right and came from a family that valued education above all else....
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Thaddeus Stevens: an Abolitionist Who Championed the Rights of Blacks
Born on the 4th April 1792, in Danville, Vermont, United States, Thaddeus Stevens was known to be a fearsome reformer, who never backed down from a fight. Having witnessed the oppressive slave system at close range, he developed a fierce...
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The Brutalisation Story of Abner Louima
Abner Louima is an activist against police brutality. In the summer of 1997, he was arrested and severely brutalized by New York police while leaving a club. The Louima case was one of the few times in which a jury trial resulted in...
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Alex Haley: Author of 'Roots' and 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X'
Alex Haley served in the U.S. Coast Guard for two decades before pursuing a career as a writer. He eventually helmed a series of interviews for Playboy magazine and later co-authored The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The following decade,...
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10 things we never knew about Aretha Franklin
Multiple Grammy winner and "Queen of Soul" Aretha Franklin was known for such hits as "Respect," "Freeway of Love" and "I Say a Little Prayer." The fourth of five children, Aretha Louise Franklin was born on March 25, 1942, in Memphis,...
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The Story of Earl Simmons aka DMX
Rapper DMX was one of America's biggest stars in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and his achievements secured him a spot in music history when he became the first artist to see his first five albums ranked at number one. In the United...
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Mary Turner: A Young Black Woman Dehumanized
On May 16, 1918, a plantation owner was murdered, prompting a manhunt which resulted in a series of lynchings in May 1918 in southern Georgia, United States. White people killed at least 13 black people during the next two weeks. Among...
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The Little Rock Nine: Separate and Unequal
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in the United States that permitted segregation in everything water fountains to buses to schools. Services were definitely separate in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, but...
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Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century born on the 20th March 1915 in Arkansas, U.S. She was a talented singer, songwriter, and recording artist who attained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s...
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Della Reese: the First Black Woman to Host a Talk Show
Decades before Oprah, Della Reese was the first Black Woman to host a talk show. Born in Michigan in 1931, Della Reese began making records and performing on television variety shows in the 1950s. Reese was the first black woman to host...
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Akai Gurley
Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old man, was fatally shot on November 20, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York City, United States, by a New York City Police Department officer. The two police officers were patrolling stairwells in the New York City...
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Anna Arnold Hedgeman
Anna Arnold grew up in Anoka, Minnesota. Even though veryone was white except her family, she did not experience segretation growing up. However, when she went out into the world, she found that she had to fight for people to see her and...
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What are Sundown Towns?
A sundown or sunset town was a city, town or neighborhood in the US that excluded non-whites after dark. The term sundown came from the signs that were posted at the towns borders stating "Negro, Don't Let the Sun Set On You Here." A...
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Doris Miller: Hero of Pearl Harbour
Doris Miller was a United States Navy cook third class who was killed in action during World War II. He was the first Black American to be awarded the Navy Cross. In this episode, we take a brief look at his heroic life and his amazing...