African American Firsts
The first African American golf champion to tour on the Professional Golf Association (PGA) circuit.
Who is Tiger Woods?
This person said “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”
Who is Langston Hughes?
This Supreme Court decision decreed that public schools should be integrated.
What is Brown v. Board of Education?
This person was the main leader of the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1950's and 1960's, and won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for leading nonviolent civil rights demonstrations.
Who is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?
This person is ranked as the best-selling black female artist of the 21st century with record sales of over 37 million dollars.
Who is Beyonce Knowles-Carter?
The first African American to have his likeness portrayed on a U.S. postage stamp.
Who is Booker T. Washington?
This person said "Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise."
Who is Maya Angelou?
The first African American who was elected president of the United States in 2008 and 2012.
Who is Barack Obama?
This person's refusal to give up her seat on a public bus sparked a boycott of Montgomery, AL buses from 1955-1956.
Who is Rosa Parks? (But Claudette Colvin insipred the movement)
This woman became the first African American female millionaire with her revolutionary black hair products.
Who is Madame C.J. Walker?
The first African American to serve as the United States Secretary of State.
Who is Colin Powell?
This person said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
Who is Frederick Douglass?
This Supreme Court case stated that segregation was legal and constitutional as long as "facilities were equal."
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
This person was known as the Nation of Islam's most effective minister until he broke from the group in 1964 and formed his own group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
Who is Malcolm X?
This person made agricultural advancements and inventions pertaining to the use of peanuts and was one of the first African-Americans admitted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990.
Who is George Washington Carver?
The year the first Africans were brought to America to work as slaves.
What is 1619?
This person said, "I never run my train off the track and never lost a passenger."
Who is Harriet Tubman?
This Supreme Court case decreed a slave was his master's property and African Americans were not citizens.
What is Dred Scott v. Sandford?
This person started the Black Panther Party in order to help defend unarmed black people against police brutality in California.
Who is Huey P. Newton?
This fourteen year old black boy was lynched for whistling at a white woman.
Who is Emmet Till?
This author became the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. (Hint: Her resume includes "Sula" and "The Bluest Eye")
Who is Toni Morrison?
This person said, "There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained."
Who is W.E.B. du Bois?
The first African American woman to be on the ballot as a candidate for President.
Who is Shirley Chisholm?
The Supreme Court case that decided prohibiting interracial marriage was unconstitutional.
What is Loving v. Virginia?
This journalist documented lynching in the United States on pink paper and revealed lynching as a barbaric practice of whites in the South used to intimidate and oppress African Americans who created economic and political competition—and a subsequent threat of loss of power—for whites.
Who is Ida B. Wells?