Movies
Books
Sports
Inventors
Events
100
This 1988 American comedy is about an African prince who travels to New York in hopes to find a woman he can marry.
What is Coming to America?
100
This novel tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a Black American youth living in utter poverty. Bigger lived in a poor area on Chicago’s Southside in the 1930s.
What is Native Son?
100
He was the first African American quarterback to win an NFL Super Bowl.
Who is Doug Williams?
100
This person is best known for inventing a cup that fed lubricating oil to machine bearings through a small bore tube.
Who is Elijah McCoy?
100
This historic boxing event on the morning of October 30, 1974 in Zaire pitted the undefeated world heavyweight champion George Forman against challenger Muhammad Ali.
What is Rumble in the Jungle?
200
This 1995 romantic drama centers on four female friends and their relationships with men and one another. All of them are “holding their breath” until the day they can feel comfortable in a committed relationship with a man.
What is Waiting to Exhale?
200
This novel by Ralph Ellison addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African Americans early in the twentieth century, including Black Nationalism, black identity, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington.
What is Invisible Man?
200
African American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos made this act of protest during their medal ceremony at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Mexico.
What is the Black Power Salute?
200
This person received a patent for an invention called a Gong and Signal Chair for Hotels, allowing hotel customers to summon a waiter from the comfort of their chair.
Who is Miriam Benjamin?
200
Black leaders such as Paul Cuffe, Martin Delaney, and Marcus Garvey inspired men and women of African descent to participate in this movement.
What is the Back-to-Africa Movement?
300
This American drama film, directed by John Singleton, follows the changing lives of three incoming freshmen at the fictional Columbus University.
What is Higher Learning?
300
This 1979 novel by Octavia Butler tells the story of Edana (Dana) Franklin, an African American woman living in 1976 Altadena, CA who, on her twenty-sixth birthday, begins the first of six involuntary journeys back in time to Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the antebellum South.
What is Kindred?
300
As a professional, he has captured numerous world titles in the middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight, and heavyweight divisions and is the only boxer in history to start his career as a light middleweight (154 lbs) and go on to win a heavyweight title.
Who is Roy Jones, Jr.?
300
This person helped revolutionize the shoe industry by developing a shoe lasting machine that would attach the sole to the shoe in one minute.
Who is Jan Matzeliger?
300
This event was a large-scale, racially motivated conflict on May 31 and June 1, 1921, in which whites attacked a black community, where the wealthiest black metropolis in the United States was burned to the ground.
What is the Tulsa Race Riots?
400
This biographical film tells the story of a real life inner city high school principal in Patterson, NJ whose school is at risk of being taken over by the New Jersey state government unless students improve their test scores.
What is Lean on Me?
400
This novel by Toni Morrison, set after the American Civil War (1861–1865), is inspired by the story of an African American slave, Margaret Garner, who temporarily escaped slavery during 1856 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state.
What is Beloved?
400
She was an American track and field athlete, considered the “fastest woman of all time” based on setting world records in 1988 for both the 100 meters and 200 meters.
Who is Florence Griffith-Joyner?
400
Known as the Black Edison, this person invented a system for letting the engineer of a train know how close his train was to others, helping reduce accidents and collisions between trains.
Who is Granville T. Woods?
400
This event was considered the first successful bus boycott in the United States.
What is the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott?
500
This 1975 Broadway production starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The musical was an early example of Broadway's mainstream acceptance of works with an all-black cast.
What is The Wiz?
500
This book traces Black history from its origins in western Africa, through the transatlantic journey that ended in slavery, the Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.
What is Before the Mayflower?
500
She scored the first ever points in women’s Olympic basketball tournament history during the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada.
Who is Lusia Harris?
500
This person received a patent in 1980 for inventing an illusion transmitter: a futuristic invention extending the idea of television, with its images located flatly behind a screen, to having three dimensional projections appear as though they were right in your living room.
Who is Valerie Thomas?
500
This movement was formed in part as a protest to Booker T. Washington’s policy of accommodation to white society and embraced a more radical approach, calling for immediate equality in all areas of American life.
What is the Niagara Movement?
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