Black History Month

Black History Month: John H. Johnson

Born in 1918 in Arkansas City, Arkansas, Johnson was the grandson of slaves. His father was killed in a sawmill accident, and his mother worked as a camp cook for two years to save the money for a train ticket north for them, because there was no high school for black students in Arkansas City. Johnson’s stepfather joined them in Chicago, and Johnson enrolled at DuSable High School, an all-black high school known for its rigorous academic program. He was elected class president and edited the school newspaper before he…

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Black History Month: W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, known as W.E.B. Du Bois, was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While growing up in a mostly European American town, he identified himself as “mulatto,” but freely attended school with whites and was enthusiastically supported in his academic studies by his white teachers. In 1885, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend Fisk University. It was there that he first encountered Jim Crow laws. For the first time, he began analyzing the deep troubles of American racism. After earning his bachelor’s…

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Black History Month: Jesse Jackson

A pioneering and controversial civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson was born as Jesse Louis Burns on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina. His parents, Helen Burns, a high school student at the time of her son’s birth, and Noah Robinson, a 33-year-old married man who was her neighbor, never married. A year after Jesse’s birth, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, a post office maintenance worker, who later adopted Jesse. In the small, black-and-white divided town of Greenville, a young Jackson learned early what segregation looked like. He and…

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Black History Month: Barack Obama

Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States. His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others. With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton’s army, and his grandmother,…

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Black History Month: Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey was born in St Ann’s Bay, Jamaica on 17 August 1887, the youngest of 11 children. He inherited a keen interest in books from his father, a mason and made full use of the extensive family library. At the age of 14 he left school and became a printer’s apprentice where he led a strike for higher wages. From 1910 to 1912, Garvey travelled in South and Central America and also visited London. He returned to Jamaica in 1914 and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In…

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