Black History Month may be over but there's still plenty to learn and reflect upon, regardless of what month it is. Watershed Voice's Aundrea Sayrie tells the story of Dick Rowland and one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.
Henrietta Duterte was a funeral home owner, philanthropist, and abolitionist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the first American woman to own a mortuary, and her business operated as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
James Weldon Johnson's legacy is eclectic as he moved with passion from one role to the next. He was an educator, a lawyer, an author, a civil rights activist, poet, and songwriter.
Joseph Douglass, the grandson of Frederick Douglass, was a classically trained and internationally renowned violinist.
On March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin became the first person arrested for resisting bus racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks did the same.
Dr. John Morton-Finney was a veteran, serving as a member of The Buffalo Soldiers from 1911-1914. He later became one of the longest practicing lawyers in the history of the United States upon his retirement at the age of 107.
Lovingly referred to by her community as "Stagecoach Mary," Mary Fields was born into slavery around 1832. Fields was the first African-American woman employed as a mail carrier in the United States.
Zora Neale Hurston is most famous as a fiction writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Her most famous book became the 2005 movie of the same name: Their Eyes Were Watching God. Yet this remarkable, and controversial woman was also a notable cultural anthropologist — and a student of the “father of American anthropology” Franz Boas — whose contributions have only recently begun to be appreciated.
Charlotta Bass is believed to be the first African-American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the United States, and was the first African-American woman nominated for vice president.
Fred Hampton was an American civil rights leader, deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party Illinois chapter, and founder of the City of Chicago's first Rainbow Coalition.
A NOTE FROM OUR EDITOR
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