Bethune was determined to become a missionary. She hoped to serve in Africa, but was denied because Blacks were not permitted to serve there by the Presbyterian Mission Board. Refocusing her efforts, she realized that “Africans in America needed Christ and school just as much as Negroes in Africa… my life work lay not in Africa but in my own country.”

As a young teacher in Chicago, she visited prisoners in jail, giving them inspiration through song. She worked at the Pacific Garden Mission, serving lunch to the homeless, and counseled the residents of Chicago’s slums. She was an instructor at the Presbyterian Mission School in Mayesville, S.C. in 1896, at the Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia in 1896-1897, and at the Kindell Institute in Sumpter, S.C. in 1897-1898.

Starting a School using Crates as Desks

There she met and married Albert Bethune, and together they moved to Palatka, Florida. Albert found work as a porter, while Bethune started a Sunday school program and worked again with prisoners. In 1904, the 29-year-old Bethune scraped together $1.50 to start the Daytona Educational and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls with six initial students (five enrollees plus her own son). Tuition was set at 50 cents per week, but no needy child was turned away. Crates became makeshift desks, and charcoal substituted for pencils; Bethune acted as teacher, administrator, and custodian. She and her students held bake-sales to raise funds.

Despite obstacles, and overcoming widespread objection to educating African American children, Bethune triumphed by her example and her mission to “Invest in the human soul.” In 1912 James M. Gamble of the Proctor and Gamble Company was persuaded by Bethune to contribute funds to her school. By 1922 enrollment was 300 students with a staff of 25. Bethune served as president for over 40 years, overseeing its evolution into a junior college and then its 1922 merger with the Cookman Institute for Men, resulting in Bethune-Cookman College that still thrives today. Enrollment is now nearly 3,000.

Bethune also created a high school and a hospital for Blacks. In addition, she became involved in several business ventures. She actively defied Jim Crow restrictions, and insisted on desegregated seating in all of her schools. She and her staff made a point of voting in all elections, despite threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

Bethune began to focus her attention on political and organizational issues. Her advice to Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President, Thomas Marshall, led to the Red Cross decision to integrate. She was appointed president of the Florida Federation of Colored Women in 1917. In 1924 she attained the highest office then available to an African American woman as president of the National Association of Colored Women.

She organized the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 at the age of 60. The Council’s first office was in Bethune’s living room, but soon moved to larger quarters in a Victorian townhouse in Washington D.C. In this “Council House,” she received government officials, heads of state, and leaders from around the world in her role as president. The organization grew to 800,000 members by 1955.

Advising United States Presidents

Bethune next became an advisor to U.S. Presidents and federal agencies, and served behind the scenes as a member of the “Black Cabinet.” She worked with Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt in areas such as housing, employment, education, and child welfare. She was named director of the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs in 1936, and served for eight years as the first Black woman in a federal agency at this level. She was named Vice-President of the NAACP in 1940, and served in 1951 on President Truman’s Committee of Twelve for National Defense.

She concurrently worked with many civic organizations, including the Association of American Colleges, the League of Women Voters, and the National Urban League, and campaigned for desegregation in the U.S. armed forces as a special assistant to the Secretary of War during World War II, while advising on the selection of the first female officer candidates. At this time, she also became a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and was appointed a consultant on interracial affairs and understanding at the charter conference of the United Nations.

When Bethune died on May 18, 1955, she had advanced the causes of educational opportunity and interracial cooperation immeasurably. She is honored with a statue in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park (the first Black woman to be so recognized), and her Council House is a National Parks Service Historic Site which houses the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum and the National Archives for Black Women’s History. Her many honorary awards and degrees include Commander of the Order of the Star of Africa from Liberia, and the highest award of the Haitian government, the Haitian Medal of Honor and Merit, in 1949. She is buried on the Bethune-Cookman College campus.

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Plantation Life

Alexander was born near Richmond, Virginia, sometime around 1810, on a plantation owned by a Presbyterian minister named Delaney. Both his father, Aleck, and mother, Chloe, were slaves owned by Delaney, and the family worked on the plantation until Delaney’s death in approximately 1831. At that time, Alexander became the property of Delaney’s son, Thomas, and moved with him to Missouri. Settling initially in St. Louis, Alexander was hired out as a laborer to a brickyard before moving again with his owner to a farm in St. Charles County. There, he met and married a slave named Louisa, with whom he would have 10 children.

After a period of roughly 10 years, Thomas Delaney decided to move to Louisiana, and sold Alexander to Louisa’s owner, a farmer named Hollman. Alexander worked the Hollman farm for roughly two decades, rising to a position of considerable responsibility as overseer. While slavery was legal in Missouri, it was also a controversial matter, and differing opinions rose in pitch and ferocity in the years leading up to the Civil War. During this time, Alexander was exposed to abolitionist ideas, and determined for himself that a life of freedom was his goal.

With the formal outbreak of war in 1861, lines were drawn and positions hardened. Union forces sought to prevent Missouri from seceding with the Confederate states, but local slave owners were eager to maintain their property and economy, and sympathized with the southern cause. A pro-slavery group, with Hollman among them, cut the supporting timbers under a railroad bridge in February of 1863, compromising its strength so that it would collapse under a Union troop train expected to pass through shortly. Alexander became aware of their treachery, and in the darkness of night, walked five miles to inform a Union supporter. As a result, the Union army was alerted, the bridge was repaired, and catastrophe was averted.

But the danger for Alexander had just begun. He was suspected by the pro-slavery group of having revealed their plot. Learning that they were planning to question him and certain that the outcome would be fatal, Alexander fled. He joined a band of runaway slaves he encountered, but all were taken into captivity by some of the many slave hunters active in the area, and locked up on the second floor of a tavern. Alexander alone managed to escape. He ultimately found his way back to St. Louis, where a sympathetic resident brought him to the attention of a Unitarian minister named William Greenleaf Eliot, who hired Alexander as a farmhand.

Free at Last?

Eliot, the founder of Washington University in St. Louis, was strongly opposed to slavery as an institution. He had declared publicly some years before that he would never return an escaped slave to his or her owner, and although Alexander did not tell him his status, Eliot guessed that he was a runaway. Acting on his principles, Eliot took measures to prevent his recapture, securing a certificate from the local marshal entrusting Alexander to his care for a minimum of 30 days. He then contacted Hollman, Alexander’s owner, with an anonymous offer to purchase the slave’s freedom at market price.

But the vindictive Hollman determined Alexander’s whereabouts, and at the expiration of the protected period, had him taken from Eliot’s home and beaten by bounty hunters. Eliot learned where Alexander was being held, and abetted by the martial law provisions in effect in Missouri, was able to have him returned to his home. He tried once more to come to terms with Hollman, failed, and then relocated Alexander to a friend’s farm in the non-slavery state of Illinois. When the Emancipation Proclamation began to take effect in Missouri in June of 1863 on a gradual basis, Alexander returned to Eliot’s farm. From there he was able to reach his wife, and Louisa escaped from her servitude with their teenaged daughter to join him. Full emancipation for the family and all slaves in Missouri took effect in January of 1865, the year of President Lincoln’s assassination.

In response to that tragedy, a number of former slaves worked to create a monument to Lincoln, raising money to commission a statue. Eliot, aware of their efforts, had an opportunity to speak with the selected sculptor, Thomas Ball, and gave him a photograph of Alexander for use as a model. The completed “Emancipation Memorial,” also known as the Lincoln Freedmen’s Memorial, was dedicated by Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, in 1876 at a Washington ceremony that included President Ulysses S. Grant. It shows a black man, modeled after Alexander, kneeling before Lincoln and overcome with emotion at just having been freed.

Alexander died roughly three years later in about 1879, having seen photographs of the sculpture. He was memorialized again, this time by Eliot himself, who wrote a biography published six years later in 1885 entitled The Story of Archer Alexander: From Slavery to Freedom, March 30, 1863. By Eliot’s own account, Alexander passed away thanking God that he had died in freedom, a fitting reminder of the earliest years of the struggle for African American liberty.

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Singing at a Young Age

The place of Smith’s birth, Chattanooga, Tennessee, is more certain than the date, which was not recorded at the time (likely due to her race). Her marriage certificate states 1894. She was the eighth child of a poor family, whose circumstances worsened with her mother’s death when Smith was eight years old. She began singing on street corners for pennies at the age of nine or 10, and achieved early success even at that tender age. A local club owner hired her to perform, and this is probably where Smith was first heard by her mentor-to-be, Ma Rainey, whose revue was on tour through Chattanooga in 1912. Smith joined Rainey’s road show, and learned about music and life from the greatly accomplished singer.

Smith subsequently began working small revues, tours, carnivals, and honky-tonks on her own, increasing her skill and reputation. Her first recording, “Down Hearted Blues,” appeared in 1923 and was an enormous success, selling over two million copies in its first year of release. This also marked a turning point in the music industry for Black artists. With the success of her recording, Columbia Records created a separate “race records” division for African American performers. Its success elevated Smith’s status to the point where she appeared on the finest “race” vaudeville circuits booked by the preeminent TOBA, or Theatre Owners Booking Association. Smith toured much of the U.S. during the mid to late 1920s. She became the foremost recording artist in the world and the highest paid Black entertainer of her time, earning as much as $2,000 per week for performing and $125 per recording. She recorded regularly throughout the decade with significant jazz instrumentalists, and toured in her own private railway car. Many critics believe that her rendition of “St. Louis Blues” with Louis Armstrong is one of the finest recordings of the 1920s.

Smith could be obstreperous and even violent, and at six feet and 200 pounds such encounters could turn dangerous. Smith had a keen sense of her race. While her popularity transcended racial boundaries, she shunned the company of “elite” (white) society, and disliked Blacks whom she thought were trying to act white. Despite her financial success, she continued her familiar ways based on street-life in the South and a passionate approach to all things. As the saying goes, “You gotta pay the dues if you wanna sing the blues.”

The early to mid-1930s brought changes that led to a decline in the singer’s fortunes. Musical styles were shifting; radio and movies competed for attention. The economic depression of that decade hurt the entertainment industry. And Smith’s appetite for gin, which began in her teens, grew excessive. As always, her life informed her art, and such classics as “Gin House Blues” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” recount her own experiences.

Tragic Ending

The late 1930s seemed to offer the possibility of a comeback. Smith had expanded her style to adapt to changing tastes with a more swing-oriented feel, and her producer, John Hammond, arranged a 1936 concert for her in New York. A number of recording sessions and concerts were planned. In 1937, as Hammond was preparing to bring Smith to New York for a recording session, she and her pianist crashed their car on the road to Memphis. Smith was badly wounded, and died. An article written by Hammond, alleging that Smith died because she’d been taken to a Whites-only hospital where she was denied treatment sensationalized the tragedy. Hammond retracted the allegation, but not before the story had fueled a post-mortem return to fame for the singer, including a stage play memorializing the incident by Edward Albee, “The Death of Bessie Smith.”

But the real legacy was in her music, which survives in over 160 recordings with the jazz greats of her time, including Sidney Bechet, James P. Johnson, Coleman Hawkins, Don Redman, Joe Smith, Fletcher Henderson, and Louis Armstrong. In the words of one critic, she had “…a huge sweeping voice, capable of strength and tenderness…. She could convey the entire meaning of a line by a subtle accent on a syllable.” Ken Burns, maker of the documentary film “Jazz,” has written: “Smith was unquestionably the greatest of the vaudeville blues singers and brought the emotional intensity, personal involvement, and expression of blues singing into the jazz repertory with unexcelled artistry.” But perhaps the epitaph on Smith’s tombstone says it most memorably: “The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing.”

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Early Promise

Brown was born in 1912 in Baltimore, Maryland, the first of four daughters of prominent physician Harry Brown, the grandson of a slave, and his wife, Mary. Music was part of the family’s history: her paternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, and mother were all accomplished singers. Brown’s own musical ability appeared very early, and family legend held that she could sing a scale by the age of nine months. Her initial encounters with discrimination also began early, as she was denied admission to a local Catholic school because of her race. Instead, she attended Frederick Douglass High School, which had a strong music program. She went on to Baltimore’s Morgan College (now Morgan State University), a historically black institution, but was rejected on racial grounds by the prestigious Peabody Institute conservatory.

With the encouragement of a Baltimore high society leader, Brown then auditioned at New York’s Juilliard School, and became the first black vocalist to be accepted at the age of 16. She married a fellow student during this period, but soon divorced. After four years of study at Juilliard, she was awarded the Margaret McGill scholarship for the school’s best female singer, and continued with a program of graduate work.

During her second year as a graduate student, in 1933, Brown became aware that the composer George Gershwin was planning an opera set in an African American community in South Carolina. She took the initiative of writing to Gershwin expressing her interest and requesting an audition, which resulted in an invitation to meet Gershwin and sing for him. This became a weekly event, with Brown singing music from all the roles in the opera for and with him, as Gershwin was composing. In the course of this work, the role of Bess evolved from the secondary character found in Porgy, the underlying novel and play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, to become a full leading role as expressed in the name of the opera. Specific changes were also made to suit Brown’s exceptional voice and interpretation, including moving the classic song “Summertime” from a subordinate character, Clara, to Bess. As for the change of title, Gershwin reportedly said to Brown: “Well, there’s Tristan and Isolde, there’s Romeo and Juliet, why not Porgy and Bess?”

But while the novel, published in 1925, and the play, which opened on Broadway in 1927 and ran for 367 performances, were both successful, a “folk opera” based on African American themes was an untested artistic exploration by Gershwin and his lyricist brother, Ira.

A Personal Role

On September 30, 1935, Brown sang Bess in the show’s first public performance at Boston’s Colonial Theatre. It soon debuted on Broadway at the Alvin Theater, on October 10 of that year, directed by Rouben Mamolian, who had also directed the play. Critical response was mixed, with some confusion as to whether the work was an opera, a musical, or an entirely new form, and negative reactions toward what was seen as “negro stereotypes” in the show. That sentiment was, unfortunately, shared by Brown’s father, but she herself felt that the characterizations were faithful depictions of a time, place, and culture. Brown’s performance was singled out by The New York Times’ reviewer and unanimously praised by critics, and the show ran for 124 performances on Broadway.

Once again, the shadow of racial discrimination trailed Brown’s success. A national tour in the spring of 1936, which went from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and then to Chicago, ended in Washington, DC. at the segregated National Theatre. The cast, led by Todd Duncan in the role of Porgy, protested, and Brown refused to sing, saying that if her friends, family, and fellow African Americans were not allowed to hear her, she wouldn’t perform. Theater management relented, and on March 21, Porgy and Bess became the first performance of any type presented to an integrated audience at the National Theatre. Sadly, the segregationist policy was immediately reinstated thereafter.

Following her initial work with the show, Brown continued performing on Broadway in several productions, including Pins and Needles, a musical review of 1937, and the play Mamba’s Daughters in 1939. She also returned to the role of Bess in several on-stage revivals, and for a recording entitled Selections from George Gershwin’s folk opera Porgy and Bess. Then in 1942, she began a European concert tour that would last until 1948, partly in response to continued racial discrimination in the United States. She performed to great acclaim as a solo classical artist, singing works from the traditional vocal repertory by such composers as Mahler, Schubert, and Brahms, which enhanced her reputation and reception as a serious artist in a way she never achieved at home.
At the end of the tour, in 1948, Brown decided to take up residence in Oslo, Norway. There, she married an Olympic medal-winning skier, Thorlief Schjelderup, and became a Norwegian citizen. This was her third marriage, and soon ended in divorce like the others. A daughter born to them was Brown’s second child, with one daughter from her second marriage. She continued singing in concerts and recitals until the early 1950s, and appeared in several operas, but her performing career was curtailed by the onset of asthma. After 1953, Brown worked as a successful vocal instructor, and also mounted operas in Europe. She was awarded the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music in America by the Peabody Institute in 1998, which ironically had refused her admission for study, and the Norway Council of Cultures Honorary Award in 2000. She remained in Oslo up to her death in 2009, and is remembered as the originator of one of the most famous and best-loved characters in African American cultural history.

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Skill and Timing

Taylor was born on November 26, 1878, in Indianapolis, Indiana. One of eight children, his given name was Marshal Walter Taylor. His parents, Gilbert Taylor and Saphronia Kelter, had left rural Kentucky following the Civil War. Many Blacks were emigrating to cities at the time in search of better economic opportunities, and Taylor’s father was among the fortunate who succeeded in finding them. He was a coachman for the wealthy Southard family, which allowed the Taylors to live on the grounds of a peaceful estate and raise their children in relative comfort. The Southards were kind to Taylor and occasionally gave him gifts, including a bicycle.

Taylor quickly developed a joy for cycling, and exhibited a natural grace and fluidity atop the machine. In order to earn money, and to indulge his passion for bicycles, he worked at a local bicycle shop as early as age 12. Taylor entertained his coworkers with a surprising repertoire of tricks and stunts that he had taught himself to perform. He was so impressive that the bicycle shop paid him to perform on the street in order to draw onlookers into the store. As part of the routine, Taylor was given an old soldier’s uniform, which led to the nickname he would keep for the remainder of his life, “Major.”

At age 13, Taylor won his first bicycle race. He became a regular on the burgeoning amateur racing circuit in Indianapolis, frequently winning over white competitors with impressive reputations and better equipment. A bicycle manufacturing entrepreneur, Louis “Birdie” Munger, recognized Taylor’s significant talent and became his promoter. With Munger’s guidance, Taylor became increasingly dominant, which aggravated racial tensions in segregated Indianapolis. Cycling was becoming a hugely popular sport, and some segregationists were so upset to see a black man winning races that Taylor began to receive threats. In search of a more tolerant community and better business opportunities, Munger and Taylor moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1895. Munger opened the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company, and Taylor, welcomed into the traditionally abolitionist community, began training in earnest for a career as a professional bicycle racer.

A Global Sensation

In preparation for professional competition, Taylor returned to the Indianapolis Capital City Track in 1896 and set two unofficial world records for one-mile sprint races. His reward was a ban from the track at the behest of segregationists. Taylor’s professional debut occurred in New York City at Madison Square Garden. He managed to place eighth, but the event was a six-day endurance trial and his specialty was sprint racing up to two miles. By 1898, Taylor held seven world records for various sprint distances, but these were timed achievements: he had yet to prove his mettle in head-to-head international competition.

When the World One Mile Sprint Championship was held in Montreal, Canada, the following year, Taylor got his chance. He defeated his most ardent rival, Tom Butler from Boston, and earned the title of World Champion. The only black man to hold such a title in any sport prior to Taylor was George Dixon, who had won the bantamweight boxing title in 1890. Controversy over his race continued. Taylor was refused membership in the League of American Wheelmen, the predominant organization for cycle racing enthusiasts, and was continually denied entry into races held in southern states. In part because of the controversy surrounding him, however, he caused a commotion everywhere he traveled and racing fans adored him. For most of the country, Taylor was a national hero. In 1900, Taylor was finally allowed to compete in the United States National Championship where he captured the American Sprint Champion title as well.

With Munger’s constant support and negotiating skills, Taylor earned good money at the races he did enter, and by late 1900, he was able to marry Daisy Victoria Morris and settle in an affluent neighborhood of Worcester. The couple eventually had a daughter, Sydney, who was born in 1904. Before the birth of his child, Taylor rode to international acclaim by making several tours of Europe and Australia between 1901 and 1904. He emerged victorious in sprint competitions with the reigning champions of Belgium, Denmark, England, Germany, and Italy. His rare combination of grace and tremendous power was hailed wherever Taylor traveled and raced. After his string of successful international races, Taylor retired from competitive cycling.

Although he returned to competition sporadically until 1910, and frequently won races, the height of his career came with his national and world titles, and his undefeated overseas tours. Following his retirement, at age 32, Taylor’s savings were sapped by poor business investments. Unable to initiate a second career, he was forced to slowly sell off assets as the family dwindled into poverty. Taylor self-published an autobiography in 1929, but was unable to sell sufficient copies to earn any money from the venture. After becoming estranged from his wife, he spent his final years living at a YMCA in Chicago, Illinois. On June 21, 1932, Taylor died in the charity ward of a Chicago hospital.

Taylor and his accomplishments returned to prominence in the decades following his death. The Schwinn Bicycle Company funded a new gravesite for him, with a commemorative plaque detailing his accomplishments. In 1982, Indianapolis embraced the hero it had once shunned by dedicating the Major Taylor Velodrome for international cycling competition. Taylor’s legend and legacy were celebrated in the 1991 film, Tracks of Glory. A consistently positive attitude and good will toward his rivals accompanied Taylor’s incredible athleticism in his voyage to the pinnacle of his sport, and he continues to be celebrated for those characteristics, as much as for his long list of victories.

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A Caribbean Childhood

Williams was born Egbert Austin Williams into a mixed-race family on November 12, 1874, in Nassau in the British colonial territory of the Bahamas. His father, Frederick Williams, Jr., was a sailor and sometime waiter. His mother, Julia Monceur, was the daughter of a clergyman from the nearby island of Antigua. Williams spent his first 11 years in Nassau where he experienced little racial discrimination but a great deal of poverty. In 1885, the family emigrated to the United States, ending up in southern California.

Williams and his family made their home about 60 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the small but fast-growing town of Riverside, a center of the state’s booming citrus industry. Riverside had been founded a little more than a decade earlier by an entrepreneurial abolitionist from Tennessee, but racism had since become widespread, and Williams was both surprised and angered by the discrimination to which he was now subject because of his heritage. He later frequently said, “I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have found it inconvenient—in America.”

An excellent student with a passion for books, Williams hoped to attend Stanford University, the “Harvard of the West.” But Stanford catered to the wealthy and the elite, and Williams was neither. After graduating high school, Williams gained entrance to the University of San Francisco in 1892. Always in search of work, he employed his wits, a talent for writing songs, and a knack for doing impressions to earn money on local stages. Williams soon met George Walker, another talented young performer looking for a break, and the two of them decided to form an act. Over the next two years, they refined and improved their routine, first in San Francisco, then in Chicago, and finally in New York.

Williams and Walker worked in the minstrel tradition, originally created by Whites wearing blackface as a vehicle for demeaning humor aimed at African Americans. On the surface, Williams and Walker were doing the same, also performing in blackface, and at one time calling themselves “The Two Real Coons” with Williams assuming the traditional role of a not-too-bright black man continually getting himself into trouble. But the stories Williams and Walker told came from the heart, and the essence of their humor consisted not in stereotypes but in actions and words persons of any race might employ in the face of a world filled with absurdities and ironies. Audiences both black and white found the results profoundly moving and hilarious.

Rise to Fame

Working clever, sophisticated songs into the mix, Williams and Walker became a vaudeville phenomenon in New York as soon as they arrived in 1894. The very next year, they received rave reviews for their performance in a Broadway musical by the famous composer Victor Herbert, and soon after that the duo could be seen on the stages of New York’s best music halls. They continued to cause a sensation, noted for a unique version of the cakewalk in which Williams played the role of an enthusiastic clod trying to follow the footsteps of the acrobatic and graceful Walker. The act was credited with making the dance a national craze.

With the turn of the century, Williams’ and Walker’s careers truly took off. The two appeared on Broadway again, in the 1902 musical comedy hit, In Dahomey, which broke ground by employing black talent at every level. Williams’ performance of the song “I’m a Jonah Man” stole the show. A successful tour of the production across Europe followed, culminating in a performance before the English royal family. On returning to the United States, Williams and Walker again began staging their own shows and productions, often performing at venues that had previously not allowed Blacks. They also began working in the new medium of recording and record albums, which helped to continue the spread of their fame throughout the United States. Williams and Walker had their first of several major hits with “Good Morning, Carrie.”

In 1906, with Walker laid low by illness, Williams had a hit record of his own with the song “Nobody,” which eventually became a classic. In 1909, Walker’s poor health forced him to give up the stage for good, but Williams continued to consider him part of his act—and paid him as if he were—until Walker died in 1911. Now a solo performer, Williams retained his success seamlessly, and appeared in the Ziegfield Follies, the pinnacle of Broadway venues. He also began working with the likes of Eddie Cantor and W.C. Fields. Fields sponsored Williams’ successful attempt to become the first African American accepted into Actor’s Equity, the guild of professional performers. By this time, Williams had honed his stage persona to perfection, the archetype of a hard-luck man facing the absurdities of life. A critic called him the black Charlie Chaplin. Fields called him the funniest man he had ever known, but at the same time, the saddest.

Williams continued his celebrated performing and recording career throughout the 1920s, turning his wit against such issues as Prohibition, for instance, with his hit “When the Moon Shines on the Moon Shine.” Rehearsing for a string of Broadway musicals in 1922, he came down with pneumonia. The illness agitated an existing heart condition, and on March 4, 1922, Williams died at age 47. The tradition and excellence of African American theater, music, comedy, and performance that has followed since his death are Williams’ legacy.

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Unusual Circumstances

Pryor was born on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois. His father, LeRoy “Buck Carter” Pryor, worked as a barman, and his mother, Gertrude Thomas, was a prostitute in her mother-in-law’s brothel. Raised in an unstable environment of alcoholism and illegal activities, Pryor kept his own company and became an astute observer of human behavior. His surroundings took a heavy toll on him, however, and his parents’ marriage ended in a bitter divorce when Pryor was 10 years old.

By age 12, he had gained attention at school plays by displaying a talent for improvisation and comedic wit. One teacher arranged talent shows for Pryor, which kept him interested in school. At age 14, however, he was expelled for unruly behavior. Afterward, Pryor held an assortment of odd jobs before joining the Army in 1958. While enlisted, he performed in amateur comedy and “open mic” shows, but continued to be personally erratic. Pryor was discharged in 1960 after stabbing another serviceman during an altercation at a base in Germany.

Pryor returned to Peoria and found work as master of ceremonies in a local nightclub. He married his girlfriend and fathered a son; it was the first of Pryor’s seven marriages to five different women (he remarried two of his wives), and the boy was the first of six children. After seeing Bill Cosby rise to national fame as a comedian, Pryor determined that he was talented enough to do the same. In 1963, he moved to New York City in an attempt to “make it in the mainstream,” and launched a full-time, professional standup career. Pryor quickly became a popular performer, and made it onto bills with Richie Havens and Bob Dylan.

Even among such peers as George Carlin, Joan Rivers, and Dick Gregory, Pryor distinguished himself, and earned appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Merv Griffin Show. With success, however, his dependency on cocaine increased, an addiction he had struggled with from a young age. In 1966, Pryor appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and interest in him as a film star began to escalate. He made The Busy Body, a Sid Caesar film, which was released in 1967. But his drug addiction, the death of his father, and a tumultuous personal life all conspired to lead Pryor to a panic attack during a performance in Las Vegas, Nevada. His meteoric rise to fame faltered as rapidly as it had begun.

The Rise of a Great Talent

Seeking to reinvent himself, Pryor relocated in the San Francisco Bay area of California, and although he continued to use drugs heavily, he also honed his influences and his comedic persona. When he reappeared on the standup comedy circuit, he shocked everyone with incredibly raw, profane, and hilarious routines. The 1970s served as a defining decade for Pryor. He spoke candidly about racial harassment and black culture, and tackled topics that had been too taboo for most comics of his time. His comedy albums from 1974 and 1975, That Nigger’s Crazy and Is It Something I Said? both went on to win Grammy Awards. In the film The Lady Sings the Blues, Pryor demonstrated the range of his talent by succeeding in a dramatic role and earning an Academy Award nomination.

Pryor also earned acclaim as a comedy writer, working for such television shows as Sanford and Son and The Flip Wilson Show. He earned an Emmy Award for his writing on Lily Tomlin’s show, Lily. Pryor was a guest on Saturday Night Live, worked with Mel Brooks on the script for Blazing Saddles, and even hosted his own short-lived TV show, The Richard Pryor Show. Pryor, and his comedy style, were significantly impacted by a 1979 visit to Kenya. Recalling the trip, he said, “The only people you saw were black. At the hotel, on television, in stores, on the street, in the newspapers, at restaurants, running the government, on advertisements. Everywhere.” It shifted his perspective and instilled in him a new sense of racial pride and identity.

Despite his positive experience in Africa, Pryor continued to feel pressured by his fame and began to freebase cocaine. In 1981, he poured rum over his entire body while freebasing, and lit himself on fire. What was billed as an accident by his manager, Pryor later admitted was a suicide attempt. He addressed his recent experiences, both positive and negative, in the acclaimed 1982 film Live on the Sunset Strip. In 1986, Pryor wrote, directed, and starred in Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling, an autobiographical film in which the lead character sets himself on fire in a drug-induced frenzy. Later that year, Pryor was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He had suffered from occasional heart trouble, exacerbated by drug use since 1978, and on December 10, 2005, he died from a heart attack.

Despite his personal struggles with trauma, pressure, and drug abuse, Pryor was able to capture the raw emotion of the country in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, and to integrate both black and white experience into his legendary and explosive comedy routines. In 1998, he was the first recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for Humor, and in 2004, he was chosen by Comedy Central as the number one standup comedian of all time. As his last wife, Jennifer Lee Pryor, recalled, he died “with a smile on his face.”

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A Man Who Never Gave Up

Rock was born in Salem County, New Jersey, on October 13, 1825. Living in a slave-free state but with modest means, his parents rejected the common but often necessary practice of putting black children to work instead of attending school. They continued to support their son’s diligent pursuit of education through the age of 18, and Rock returned the favor by demonstrating a deep love of learning and a brilliant intellect.

At age 19, proficient in Greek and Latin, Rock took a position as a teacher at a black public grammar school in the town of Salem. But he had greater things in mind: while teaching there during the years 1844–1848, he apprenticed himself to two white doctors, Quinton Gibbon and Jacob Sharpe, immersing himself in their libraries each day after his teaching duties. By 1848, Rock was exceptionally well versed in medicine, and sought but was refused entrance to medical school that year. Demonstrating the resolve that would characterize his entire life, he began an intense study of dentistry, again on his own. Obtaining a dentistry certificate, he opened a private practice in Philadelphia in 1850. The practice was immediately successful, but Rock had not given up on becoming a physician. He gained admission to Philadelphia’s American Medical College and received his M.D. degree at the age of 26 in 1852.

Rock made his mark in Philadelphia as a medical man of brilliance, and as a strong, eloquent advocate for African Americans. He married Philadelphia native Catherine Bowers in 1852, and the following year, having decided the northern, liberal environment in Massachusetts would be better suited to them, the couple moved to Boston’s Beacon Hill. There, Rock opened another successful practice in dentistry and medicine, and became increasingly involved in black advocacy. He served first as a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, giving free medical services to fugitive slaves, and then in 1855, as a delegate to the Colored National Convention in Philadelphia. In 1856, he was recorded as asking the Massachusetts legislature to delete the word “colored” from state documents.

A Brilliant Orator

During this period, Rock earned his lifelong reputation as a brilliant abolitionist orator. He argued in favor of black self-improvement and began speaking of the “inherent beauty” of African people and their culture. In 1858, the 33-year-old Rock delivered one of his most famous speeches in which he likely became the first person—and perhaps the last until the civil rights movement of the next century—to assert that “black is beautiful.” In these and all his speeches, Rock urged his listeners to take direct action. He demonstrated his own commitment by joining with other Blacks in organizing for the new, antislavery Republican Party.

For several years, a chronic illness, the precise nature of which is unknown, had seriously threatened Rock’s health. Using his knowledge of the latest medical developments, Rock made contact with a renowned group of physicians in Paris who agreed to take him on as a patient. Getting to France, however, proved an ordeal. The administration of President James Buchanan ruled that Rock could not be granted a passport because in the infamous Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court had ruled that Blacks could never be considered full citizens, free or not. Massachusetts, however, took the unprecedented step of issuing him a passport of its own, and Rock sailed for France in the summer of 1858.

After undergoing surgery, Rock toured France and studied the French language and literature, returning to Boston in February 1859. But his prognosis was poor, and he was advised to give up his medical and dental practices. It seems unlikely that Rock’s physicians intended him to replace medicine with a new, equally strenuous career as a lawyer, but this is what he did, and in 1861, he opened his own law practice. His offices soon became a favorite haunt of abolitionist activists and politicians. As a lawyer, Rock at first expressed impatience at the slow pace of newly elected President Lincoln’s actions on behalf of Blacks, but when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he changed his mind. When Congress authorized the creation of all-black regiments to help fight the south, Rock became one of the main recruiters for Massachusetts regiments.

In 1865, Rock made his greatest mark in history when in a widely celebrated breakthrough, he was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court. Again, progress had not come easy. The previous year, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, had blocked Rock’s admission. But Taney died in October 1864, and was replaced by Salmon P. Chase who assented to Rock’s presence. In a stark reminder of reality as he boarded a train for the trip back to Boston, Rock was briefly placed under arrest because he lacked the travel pass still required of Blacks in the nation’s capital.

Still in chronically poor health, Rock had caught cold during the Washington ceremonies and never recovered. His health continued to deteriorate, and in December 1866, he died in Boston. His short life was a trailblazing combination of intellectual brilliance, professional success, and political action. The inscription on his tombstone reads:

John S. Rock, Oct. 13, 1825, Died Dec. 3rd, 1866. The 1st
colored lawyer admitted to the Bar of the United States
Supreme Court at Washington; On motion made by Hon.
Charles Sumner, Feb. 1st, 1865.

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To the Church Born

Powell was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 29, 1908, the son of the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and Mattie Fletcher Shaffer. The year after his birth, his father was appointed minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, where the family took up residence and Powell attended school. In 1923, Reverend Powell moved his church and family uptown, to Harlem, where the church grew to become the largest congregation in America and a major force in the black community.

After the Great Depression began in 1929, the young Powell ran a soup kitchen serving hard-hit Harlem. There, he earned a reputation for tremendous compassion. It was said, for instance, that Powell gave his own shoes to a man unable to find the right size in the church shoe bin. Following a brief stint at the City College of New York, Powell entered Colgate University in upstate New York in 1930. His plan was to become a surgeon, but on graduation, he decided to follow his father’s footsteps—and advice—and study for the ministry, eventually earning a degree in religious education from Columbia University in 1932. In 1933, ever active in Harlem’s late-night social scene, he married a dancer from the famed Cotton Club, Isabel Washington. He succeeded his father at the helm of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1937.

Before and after assuming leadership of the church, Powell was active in the world of politics. In 1935, he helped found the National Negro Congress, a coalition of black leaders, preachers, labor organizers, workers, businessmen, and politicians. Powell also wrote a column for a Harlem weekly called the Amsterdam News, and took the first steps to increase employment opportunities for African Americans by pressuring New York’s telephone and utility companies, its transit system, its colleges and universities, and even the 1939 World’s Fair to hire Blacks. During the 1940s, in the midst of war, Powell published his own weekly newspaper, The People’s Voice. He also moved easily in traditional political circles, gaining appointment to positions in the New York Office of Price Administration and the Manhattan civil defense committee. In the midst of all this, he published a history of the African American struggle for freedom and equal rights.

Powell was elected to the New York City Council in 1941. After serving for just three years, with the Council seat and his church as twin political bases, he won election to become Harlem’s first representative in Congress. Powell was outraged when he arrived in Washington to find that Jim Crow House rules banned even a member of Congress from its dining rooms, barbershops, and other facilities. He effectively ended this segregationist practice, however, by simply ignoring such bans and encouraging his staff to do the same. He also put an end to the tradition of excluding black reporters from the House press gallery.

New Deal Dealer

Powell’s years in Congress were marked by a direct, confrontational style and unwavering support for progressive causes. He never missed an opportunity to back equal employment opportunities for Blacks, and repeatedly introduced legislation to eliminate discrimination in federal agencies and by federal contractors. In 1956, impatient with the influence of the southern segregationists who made up a significant wing of the Democratic party, Powell shocked his fellow Democrats by endorsing Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in the President’s successful bid for reelection.

Powell divorced his first wife in 1945, and married pianist and singer Hazel Scott. This second marriage also ended in divorce, and in 1960, he married Yvette Flores, daughter of the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the same year, he made an error that haunted him to the end of his life. During a radio interview, he made inflammatory, off-the-cuff comments about another resident of Harlem, an action that led to a successful libel suit. When he refused to pay the judgment, Powell was cited for contempt of court, and this eventually led to an investigation of all his affairs by a Congressional committee.

From 1961 to 1967, as Chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, Powell secured the passage of a series of groundbreaking laws promoting equality and equity in employment and education. These included acts establishing the federal minimum wage, vocational training programs, and the expansion of student loan and grant programs. But in 1967, after the investigative committee issued its findings, the House took the unprecedented, and it was later determined, unconstitutional step of voting to expel Powell from Congress. Harlem voters, though, refused to elect anyone else to fill his seat, which sat empty until 1969 when the House allowed his return. By this time, however, Powell had little influence or power, and in the 1970 primary, he was defeated by Charles Rangel. Exhausted and seriously ill, he resigned as minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and retired to Miami, Florida, where he died on April 4, 1972, at the age of 63. Powell’s life had extreme highs and lows, but he nevertheless left a legacy of historic proportions in the struggle for equal rights.

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Diverse Origins

Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii, where his black father and white mother had met. His mother, Ann Dunham, moved there with her parents from Kansas following World War II. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., grew up in rural Kenya, and earned a scholarship that enabled him to study at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where Ann was also a student. They married in 1961, and had one child.

The couple separated when Obama was two years old, and in 1964, they divorced. Barack Senior returned to Kenya, leaving Ann to raise her son. Her struggles as a working single mother made an early impression on the boy, as did her values of service and compassion. She remarried, and the family moved to her husband’s home country of Indonesia in 1967 where Obama remained until he was 10 years old. He then returned to Honolulu and was subsequently raised by his maternal grandparents. After graduating from high school, he studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years, then transferred to Columbia University in New York City where he majored in political science and graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Obama spent several years working in New York, and relocated to Chicago in 1985. There, he began working with the Developing Communities Project, a church-based organization, as a community organizer, committed to destitute areas affected by high unemployment and crime. His achievements were significant, but as a result of the experience, he came to understand that effecting real change would require action at the level of the political and legal systems. Obama visited Kenya in 1988, where he met many of his deceased father’s relatives for the first time. He was accepted at Harvard Law School that year, graduating in 1991 after serving as the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. This resulted in a contract for him to write a book about race relations, which became the memoir Dreams from My Father.

Returning to Chicago shortly thereafter, Obama began teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, while practicing as a civil and neighborhood rights attorney and serving on numerous social action boards of directors. In 1992, he married Michelle Robinson, whom he’d met in 1989 as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm where she worked. They would have two daughters, Malia born in 1999 and Natasha (nicknamed Sasha) born in 2001. Following his path of progressive social action, Obama then ran for and was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996. He served there for three terms and eight years, often reaching out to unify Republicans and Democrats to achieve important goals and progressive policies in areas such as taxation, welfare reform, and education.

Higher Office

Obama had run unsuccessfully in the Illinois Democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000. Nevertheless, in 2003, he began campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was exposed to a national audience for the first time when he delivered the keynote address. The response was immediate, with political insiders citing his presidential potential, and ordinary Americans resonating with his message of unity and promise as expressed by the speech’s title, “The Audacity of Hope.” Propelled by this electrifying debut, he won the primary and general election for the Senate in 2004 by the largest margin in Illinois history, and became only the third African American so honored since Reconstruction.

Acknowledged by his Senate peers as an exceptionally promising freshman, Obama continued to work with leaders from both parties in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation to create important legislation. He served on the Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works, and Veterans’ Affairs Committees, and worked on arms proliferation, climate change, and ethics reform among other notable achievements. In 2006, he published a second book titled The Audacity of Hope, which climbed to the top of the best-seller lists.

On February 10, 2007, with Senator Hillary Clinton the self-described presumptive Democratic nominee for President in the 2008 election, Obama announced his unlikely candidacy for the office at the site of President Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of 1858. Shattering fund-raising records and enlisting a vast army of small contributors, Obama emerged victorious in June of that year despite controversies over his former pastor that led to Obama’s historic speech on race entitled “A More Perfect Union.” In a difficult, and frequently acrimonious general campaign against Republican nominee Senator John McCain, Obama distinguished himself with his poise and articulate focus on key issues affecting all Americans, and continued to raise record-breaking sums from a growing grassroots base of support. His choice of Senator Joe Biden, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as running mate offered a stark contrast to the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, as did his constant message of hope and unity epitomized by the hugely popular refrain, “Yes we can.”

Over the course of the campaign, Obama steadily established and widened a leading margin in polls, which accelerated with the deterioration of the U.S. economy in the fall of 2008. Toward the end of the contest, he campaigned actively in Republican strongholds, seeking a broad mandate from the electorate to enact his theme of “The change we need.”

On November 4, 2008, history was made. Obama became the 44th President-Elect of the United States with a landslide victory of 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 162, the first Black elected to the highest office in the land. One hundred and forty-six years after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans’ march toward freedom, civil rights, equity, and full participation culminated in the leadership of this nation. A dream too long deferred had been realized. A new chapter in American history had begun.

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