Classroom
A free, printable lesson for every person in our archive — discussion questions, a primary-source activity, and standards alignment.
Era quizzes
Five ten-question quizzes with explanations.
Primary Source Library
The documents themselves, with discussion questions.
Family history
A guide to tracing African American ancestry.
Revolution & Early Republic
Benjamin Banneker
Banneker offered his own scientific work as evidence against claims of Black intellectual inferiority, and his letter to Jefferson confronted the new nation with the gap between its founding ideals and slavery.
Prince Hall
Prince Hall used the language of the American Revolution and the institutions of free Black Boston to demand abolition, schooling, and protection under the law at the moment the new nation was defining who belonged.
Elizabeth Freeman
Elizabeth Freeman showed that the Revolution’s language of natural rights could be turned into a legal claim to freedom by the people slavery excluded.
Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley’s poems founded the African American literary tradition, and the proof demanded before they could be published reveals the burden placed on Black writers to establish their own humanity and authorship.
Richard Allen
Richard Allen and the free Black Philadelphians around him built independent institutions, a church, mutual-aid societies, and a national convention, to claim dignity and citizenship in a nation that denied them both.
James Forten
James Forten, a Revolutionary veteran and prosperous sailmaker, argued from the nation’s founding documents that free Black Americans were citizens entitled to equal rights.
19th Century
David Walker
Words can threaten unjust power: Walker’s Appeal so alarmed slaveholding states that they rewrote their laws to stop it from spreading.
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth insisted that abolition and women’s rights were one cause, yet her most famous words reached us through other people’s pens, so studying her means asking who records a speaker’s voice and how.
Nat Turner
Nearly everything we know about Nat Turner’s motives passed through the pen of a white lawyer, so understanding the 1831 revolt means weighing a powerful but compromised source against the record of what the revolt changed.
Daniel Alexander Payne
Payne believed that freedom required education, and he spent his life building schools — even after South Carolina made keeping them a crime.
Martin R. Delany
Delany argued that Black Americans formed a nation within a nation, and his shifting strategies, from emigration to Union service, show how activists adapted to changing chances for freedom.
Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Jacobs exposed the sexual exploitation at the heart of slavery and, by telling her own story on her own terms, claimed authority that slavery and prejudice denied her.
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass turned the nation’s founding ideals into a weapon against slavery, insisting that American principles demanded Black freedom and citizenship.
William Still
William Still’s careful records show that the Underground Railroad was run largely by free Black communities and by freedom seekers themselves, and that keeping records could itself be an act of resistance.
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman’s documented record as liberator, spy, and soldier is remarkable enough without legend, and historians have worked to separate the two.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper used poetry, fiction, and public speech to argue that freedom for Black Americans and rights for women could not be separated.
Hiram Revels
The fight over seating Hiram Revels in 1870 was a fight over whether Black Americans were citizens, and his election showed how far Reconstruction reached before it was rolled back.
Robert Smalls
Robert Smalls’s life links an act of wartime self-liberation to the Reconstruction effort to secure schools, offices, and ballots for freedpeople, and to the deliberate campaign that took the ballot away.
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells used evidence, much of it drawn from white newspapers, to prove that lynching was organized terror rather than punishment for crime.
Turn of the Century
Booker T. Washington
Washington and his critics shared the goal of Black advancement but disagreed sharply about strategy, and their debate over accommodation, education, and political rights still shapes arguments about how change happens.
Daniel Hale Williams
When institutions shut Black doctors and nurses out, Williams built new ones, and those institutions trained generations of Black medical professionals.
Anna Julia Cooper
Cooper argued that a people’s progress must be measured by the condition of its women, and she spent her life proving through education that Black women belonged in the highest ranks of learning.
Mary Church Terrell
Terrell’s sixty-year career links the Black women’s club movement, the suffrage struggle, and the direct-action protests of the 1950s, showing how long campaigns for civil rights were built.
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver’s real achievement was practical science for poor Southern farmers, a record historians have worked to separate from the peanut legend that made him famous.
Maggie Lena Walker
Walker treated savings, homeownership, and jobs for Black women as forms of civil rights activism, building institutions that gave Black Richmonders economic power under Jim Crow.
Matthew Henson
Henson’s essential role in Peary’s expeditions, and the decades before he was recognized, show how the achievements of Black and Indigenous people were written out of the heroic age of exploration.
Madam C. J. Walker
Walker built a national business owned and staffed by Black women and used its profits and networks to fund Black civic and political life.
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois used rigorous scholarship as a weapon against the color line, and his debate with Booker T. Washington framed a lasting question about how an oppressed people should pursue freedom.
Arturo Schomburg
Collecting and preserving records is itself a historical act: Schomburg gathered the evidence that Black people had a history worth studying, and in doing so changed what historians could write.
Mary McLeod Bethune
Bethune built institutions, from a Florida school to a national council of women, and used her access to the White House to win concrete resources for Black communities.
Carter G. Woodson
History is not simply handed down; people choose what to research, teach, and celebrate, and Woodson built the institutions that made Black history a subject every student could learn.
Marcus Garvey
Garvey built the largest Black mass movement of his era by linking racial pride, economic enterprise, and Pan-African politics, and his ideas outlasted the collapse of his organizations.
A. Philip Randolph
Organized, disciplined mass pressure — even the credible threat of it — can compel government action, and Randolph insisted that civil rights and economic rights could not be separated.
Bessie Coleman
Coleman refused the limits placed on her by race and sex, and she used her fame as a flier to challenge segregation and to open aviation to other Black Americans.
Civil Rights Era
Septima Clark
Septima Clark understood literacy as political power, and her Citizenship Schools showed that ordinary community members could teach one another to claim the vote that Jim Crow laws were designed to deny.
Ella Baker
Ella Baker built the freedom movement on the conviction that ordinary people, organized together, are the source of lasting change, not charismatic leaders.
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP’s lawyers dismantled the legal foundation of Jim Crow through a patient, case-by-case strategy that used the Constitution’s own promises against segregation.
Pauli Murray
Pauli Murray showed that discrimination by race and by sex could compound each other, and built legal arguments that the courts adopted years before crediting their author.
Bayard Rustin
Movements succeed through careful organizing as much as through inspiring speeches, and Rustin’s story shows how prejudice inside a movement can push its own essential people out of view.
Dorothy Height
Much of the civil rights movement’s work was done by organizations and organizers outside the spotlight, and Height showed how Black women built lasting institutions for change.
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks’s refusal on 1 December 1955 was the deliberate act of an experienced organizer, and the boycott it launched succeeded because an entire community sustained disciplined collective action for 381 days.
Daisy Bates
Desegregation at Little Rock depended not only on nine students and federal troops but on local organizers like Bates, who supported the students and bore the costs of standing with them.
Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer’s fight for the ballot in Mississippi showed that voting rights were bound up with economic survival, bodily safety, and the power of ordinary people to testify to injustice.
Constance Baker Motley
A court victory becomes real only when someone enforces it: Motley turned Brown v. Board of Education from a ruling into open doors, one case at a time.
Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm challenged the seniority system of Congress and the machines of her own party, proving that a Black woman could compete for national power on her own terms.
Malcolm X
Malcolm X repeatedly reinvented himself, and his arguments for self-determination, self-defense, and international solidarity shaped the Black Power movement and debates over strategy that continue today.
Medgar Evers
Evers did the dangerous, patient organizing that laid the groundwork for the Mississippi movement, and his assassination focused national attention on the struggle for civil rights.
Martin Luther King Jr.
King led a movement that used organized nonviolent protest to force changes in law, and his later critiques of poverty, militarism, and Northern racism show that his vision reached well beyond 1963.
Barbara Jordan
The Constitution’s promises are held in trust by each generation, including by people it once excluded, and defending them takes both knowledge and courage.
John Lewis
John Lewis practiced disciplined nonviolence from the Nashville sit-ins to the floor of Congress, linking the student movement of 1960 to the voting-rights fights of the twenty-first century.
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)
Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power grew out of years of grassroots organizing in Mississippi and Alabama, and it reframed the movement’s goal from integration toward Black political and economic self-determination.
Letters, Arts & Sciences
Lewis Latimer
Latimer’s career shows that invention depends not only on famous names but on the skilled drafters, engineers, and patent experts whose work made new technologies practical and legally protected.
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston treated the everyday speech, stories, and beliefs of Black Southerners as worthy of serious study and great art, and her fall into obscurity and later recovery show how literary reputations are made.
Augusta Savage
An artist’s work can include building institutions: through her teaching and the Harlem Community Art Center, Savage opened doors for a generation of Black artists that the art establishment had tried to keep closed.
Marian Anderson
When Anderson was barred from Constitution Hall, her 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial turned a national symbol into a public rebuke of segregation.
Paul Robeson
Paul Robeson’s career shows how fame could amplify a Black artist’s protest against segregation and colonialism, and how the Cold War state could use passports, blacklists, and surveillance to silence dissent.
Percy Julian
Percy Julian’s chemistry made important medicines cheaper and more widely available, and his career shows how racial exclusion shaped where, and how, scientific work got done.
Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington used the jazz orchestra, from Harlem nightclubs to Carnegie Hall, to argue that Black music and Black history belonged at the center of American art.
Langston Hughes
Hughes argued that the everyday speech, music, and struggles of ordinary Black Americans were worthy subjects for serious art, and that claim changed what American literature could be.
Louis Armstrong
Armstrong transformed jazz into a soloist’s art and, as an international celebrity, used his fame at key moments to challenge the nation’s treatment of Black citizens.
Charles R. Drew
Scientific knowledge does not automatically defeat prejudice: Drew helped build modern blood banking and then publicly condemned a segregation policy that the science showed to be baseless.
Jesse Owens
Jesse Owens’s victories in Nazi Berlin exposed a contradiction: a Black athlete celebrated as proof against racial supremacy returned to a country that still segregated him.
Billie Holiday
Holiday made popular song a vehicle for protest, and her life shows how the power of the state could fall hardest on a Black woman who would not be silent.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks made ordinary Black lives on Chicago’s South Side the subject of great poetry, and later chose to write for and publish within the Black community.
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson’s precise mathematics helped send Americans into space, and her career shows both the exclusion Black women faced in science and the excellence they achieved despite it.
Jackie Robinson
Jackie Robinson’s integration of Major League Baseball was a highly visible breach of Jim Crow, and he treated it as the start of a longer struggle for civil rights.
James Baldwin
James Baldwin argued that America’s treatment of Black Americans was a moral crisis for the whole nation, and that honesty about race was the price of the country’s survival.
Maya Angelou
Angelou’s autobiographies joined the craft of fiction to the obligations of testimony, making the Black woman’s memoir a central American literary form.
Lorraine Hansberry
Hansberry turned her family’s fight against housing segregation into drama, showing how private dreams and public law collide in the lives of ordinary families.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison placed Black life, memory, and language at the center of American literature, as a novelist who refused to write for an assumed white reader and as an editor who opened major publishing houses to Black authors.
Muhammad Ali
Ali’s refusal of induction, at the cost of his title and livelihood, made him the most prominent American of his generation to oppose the Vietnam War on grounds of conscience.
Mae Jemison
Jemison’s career links engineering, medicine, public health, and spaceflight, and she has used it to argue that access to science should not be limited by race, sex, or geography.