This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Jerry Rice, an American professional gridiron football player whom many consider the greatest wide receiver in the history of the National Football League (NFL). Playing primarily for the...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Joe Morgan, an American professional baseball player who won consecutive National League (NL) Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards in 1975-76, when he led the Cincinnati Reds to back-to-back...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Kathleen Battle, an American opera singer, among the finest coloratura sopranos of her time.

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Laurence Fishburne, an American actor noted for the intensity of his performances. He was the recipient of a Tony Award (1992) for his work in August Wilson's play Two Trains Running, and...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Lloyd Price, an American singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur. Price made his mark in rock music history with his exuberant tenor and his flair for recasting rhythm and blues as...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Louis Jordan, an American saxophonist-singer prominent in the 1940s and '50s who was a seminal figure in the development of both rhythm and blues and rock and roll. The bouncing, rhythmic...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Mari Evans, an African American author of poetry, children's literature, and plays.

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Nas, an American rapper and songwriter who became a dominant voice in 1990s East Coast hip-hop. Nas built a reputation as an expressive chronicler of inner-city street life.

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Nat Turner, a black American slave who led the only effective, sustained slave rebellion (August 1831) in U.S. history. Spreading terror throughout the white South, his action set off a...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Paule Marshall, a novelist whose works emphasize the need for black Americans to reclaim their African heritage.

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Pearl Primus, an American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and teacher whose performance work drew on the African American experience and on her research in Africa and the Caribbean.

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Philly Joe Jones, a black American jazz musician, one of the major percussionists of the bop era, and among the most recorded as well.

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Raymond Victor Haysbert, an American businessman born Jan. 19, 1920, Cincinnati, Ohio .

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Regina Benjamin, an American physician who in 2009 became the 18th surgeon general of the United States. Prior to her government appointment, she had spent most of her medical career...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Rosa Guy, an American writer who drew on her own experiences to create fiction for young adults that usually concerned individual choice, family conflicts, poverty, and the realities of...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Rudolph Fisher, an American short-story writer and novelist associated with the Harlem Renaissance whose fiction realistically depicted black urban life in the North, primarily Harlem.

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Samuel Ringgold Ward, a black American abolitionist known for his oratorical power.

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Shani Davis, an American speed skater, who was the first black athlete to win an individual Winter Olympics gold medal.

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Steve McNair, an American gridiron football player who threw 174 touchdown passes during his 13 National Football League (NFL) seasons (1995-2008), primarily while playing for the...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Stokely Carmichael, a West-Indian-born civil-rights activist, leader of black nationalism in the United States in the 1960s and originator of its rallying slogan, "black power.".

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Tiger Woods, an American golfer who enjoyed one of the greatest amateur careers in the history of the game and became a dominant player on the professional circuit in the late 1990s. In...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Tim Duncan, an American collegiate and professional basketball player, who led the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association (NBA) to four championships (1999, 2003, 2005,...

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Tom Bradley, an American politician, the first African American mayor of a predominantly white city, who served an unprecedented five terms as mayor of Los Angeles (1973-93).

This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Toussaint Louverture, who overran Spanish Santo Domingo in January 1801, freed the slaves, and amazed the Europeans and natives with his magnanimity.