Unsung Heroes
This formerly enslaved man became the first known Black explorer to reach the North Pole with Robert Peary.
Who is Matthew Henson?
This formerly enslaved woman led hundreds to freedom through the Underground Railroad.
Who is Harriet Tubman?
Known as the “Queen of Soul,” she demanded respect in her 1967 hit song.
Who is Aretha Franklin?
This 1955–1956 boycott desegregated public buses in Montgomery, Alabama.
What is the Montgomery Bus Boycott?
This thriving Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma was destroyed in a 1921 massacre.
What is Tulsa Race Massacre?
She refused to give up her bus seat nine months before Rosa Parks but was not celebrated because she was a pregnant teenager.
Who is Claudette Colvin?
She was the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress in 1968.
Who is Shirley Chisholm?
This hip-hop group’s 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back became a protest soundtrack of its time.
Who are Public Enemy?
Founded in 1966, this organization advocated for self-defense and community empowerment.
What is the Black Panther Party?
This secret WWII military experiment tested untreated syphilis on Black men.
What is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study?
This chemist developed hundreds of products from peanuts and sweet potatoes, revolutionizing Southern agriculture.
Who is George Washington Carver?
This journalist led an anti-lynching crusade in the late 1800s.
Who is Ida B. Wells?
This Motown founder created a record label that launched artists like Stevie Wonder and The Supremes.
Who is Berry Gordy?
This 1963 event is where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
What is the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom?
Before Rosa Parks, this organization had already planned legal challenges to bus segregation.
What is the NAACP?
A key strategist behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott and advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., he promoted nonviolent resistance.
Who is Bayard Rustin?
She co-founded the Black Panther Party and led community survival programs like free breakfast for children.
Who is Elaine Brown?
This rapper became the first billionaire in hip-hop and expanded into business and philanthropy.
Who is Jay-Z?
This movement, founded in 2013, protests police violence and systemic racism.
What is Black Lives Matter?
This all-Black group of WWII pilots became known for escorting bombers and never losing one to enemy fire.
Who are the Tuskegee Airmen?
This Black woman was a NASA mathematician whose calculations helped send astronauts to space.
Who is Katherine Johnson?
In 2021, she became the first Black woman to serve as Vice President of the United States.
Who is Kamala Harris?
This genre, born in the Bronx in the 1970s, became a global cultural movement.
What is Hip Hop?
This 1896 Supreme Court case upheld racial segregation under “separate but equal.”
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
This Reconstruction-era amendment granted Black men the right to vote in 1870.
What is the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution?