Companies
With more than $10 billion in annual revenue and over 5,000 employees, this company is one of the largest private companies in the U.S. In 1990, Steward founded this company, a systems integrator. The 2018 revenue is estimated to be greater than $11 billion, which would rank it as one of St. Louis' largest private companies.
World Wide Technology
an American politician who served as the 44th President of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He is the first African American to have served as president.
Barack Hussein Obama II
He has won numerous accolades for his work, including two Academy Award nominations, a Student Academy Award, and an Academy Honorary Award from the He has been nominated twice for an Academy Award, but hasn't won; in November 2015, he was given the Academy Honorary Award for his contributions to filmmaking. Two of his films have competed for the Palme d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, and of the two, BlackKlansman won the Grand Prix in 2018.
Spike Lee
On March 7, 1927 the Houston Independent School District school board resolved to establish junior colleges for each race, as the state was racially segregated in all public facilities. The resolution created Houston Junior College (later became the University of Houston) and Houston Colored Junior College. The Houston Colored Junior College first held classes at Jack Yates High School during the evenings. It later changed its name to Houston College for Negroes.
Texas Southern University
This person is an American television personality, journalist, and author, who is a chief anchor for CBS News and co-host of its flagship morning program CBS This Morning, a position she has held since its debut in 2012. She is also an editor-at-large for O, The Oprah Magazine. She worked as a special correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 1991, she briefly cohosted an NBC daytime talk show with Robin Wagner called Cover to Cover, which was canceled after 13 weeks.
Gayle King
After growing up as one of six children in a rough district of Toronto, Angela Samuels found work as a plus-size fashion model and achieved success, working with some of the biggest names in retail, like Sears and Wal-Mart. But then, while working with young offenders as a youth care worker. So Samuels founded this company, and it grew into a thriving plus-size online clothing store, with sales tripling in recent years.
Voluptuous Clothing
This person is an American attorney and politician serving as the junior United States Senator from California since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as the 32nd Attorney General of California from 2011 to 2017. She officially announced her candidacy for President of the United States in the 2020 United States presidential election.
Kamala Harris
This person is the first student to receive a degree from the art department at Howard University in Washington, D.C. After teaching for more than 30 years in the Washington, D.C., public schools, she devoted herself to painting full time, creating “a highly personal style that expanded upon traditional Abstract Expressionist and Washington Color School practices through experimentations with abstraction, color, line and pattern.” In 1972, she was the first black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. She was 80.
Alma Thomas
This historically black university was founded in 1877 in Natchez, Mississippi. It became a state-supported public institution in 1940, and it is a member of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. Under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, this university is a research university with high research activity.
Jackson State University
This person is an American journalist and host of a BET program named after him. He hosted this show from 2001-2002. Having worked at the local level in Detroit and nationally at CBS News and NBC News, he is the former host of BET News and the syndicated talk show Our World with Black Enterprise. On January 25, 1996, he became the first journalist to interview former NFL star O. J. Simpson since Simpson was acquitted of murder the previous year.
Edward Lansing Gordon III
This South African investment company was founded in 2005 by four women—three black, one white—and now runs a successful portfolio of investments. But the investments aren't only about making profit—the company also invests in people and in the development of South Africa, both through partnerships with the firms it invests in and through its own mentorship program, which currently provides individual mentoring and support to 66 young black professionals.
Peotona Capital
This person is an American politician, lawyer, and romance novelist who served as minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, she is her party's nominee in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, she is the first black female major party gubernatorial nominee in the United States.
Stacey Yvonne Abrams
The first African American to serve as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [The Oscars], followed the path of her pioneering sibling as a top-tier executive in the Hollywood motion picture industry.
Cheryl Boone Isaacs
is a private historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee. The university was founded in 1866 and its 40-acre campus is a historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1930, it was the first African-American institution to gain accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). Accreditations for specialized programs soon followed. Although the university remains accredited by SACS, the university was placed on probation in June 2018. In the Antebellum era, the land on which the campus was built was owned by David McGavock. He was the brother of Randal McGavock, who owned the Carnton plantation and was mayor of Nashville from 1824 to 1825.
Fisk University
This person is an American academic, author, activist, and television personality. He is a Professor of Media Studies and Urban Education at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the host of the syndicated television show Our World with Black Enterprise and hosts the online Internet-based HuffPost Live. He is also a BET News correspondent, and a former political commentator for CNN and Fox News. He also hosts VH1 Live! and reunion shows for Basketball Wives. He was fired from his position as a commentator for CNN after remarks before the U.N. on the Arab–Israeli conflict that were perceived as anti-Semitic.
Marc Lamont Hill
founded by a group of black social leaders who pooled their own resources to create an insurance company for the underserved African-American community. One of those founders, John Merrick, was born into slavery and then built up a successful barbershop business with branches throughout the Durham area before moving into insurance
North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company
This politician was born on April 27, 1969, in Washington, D.C., to affluent civil rights activists. He attended prestigious schools, including Stanford University and Yale Law School, and went on to become a politician in the city of Newark, New Jersey. He officially announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey on June 8, 2013. With a 40-point lead over runner-up Pallone, Booker won the primary election.
Democratic nomination on August 13, 2013. He soon won the Senate seat, beating out Republican Steve Lonegan in a special election held on October 16, 2013. In 2014, election season came around again, and Booker defeated Republican challenger Jeff Bell to hold onto his Senate seat.
Cory Booker
This person became the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Production Design for her work on Black Panther. She is an American film production designer who worked on the 2015 Rocky film Creed, the Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, the movie Moonlight, and Beyoncé's 2016 TV special & visual album Lemonade. She grew up in Centerville, Ohio, and graduated from the University of Cincinnati, studying fashion design. She attended Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio where she studied film.
is the United States' first degree-granting historically black university. Founded as a private university in 1854, it has been a public institution since 1972. Its main campus is located on 422 acres near the town of Oxford in southern Chester County, Pennsylvania.
Spellman College
This person is an American entrepreneur, radio and television personality and business executive. She founded the media company Radio One (now known as Urban One), and when the company went public in 1999, she became the first African-American woman to head a publicly traded corporation. In the 1970s, she created the urban radio format called "The Quiet Storm" on Howard University's radio station WHUR with disc jockey and fellow Howard student Melvin Lindsey.
Catherine Liggins Hughes (born Catherine Elizabeth Woods)
The company was founded in 2001 by husband-and-wife team Henry and Andrea Jackson, and Andrea is now running it alone since Henry’s death in 2007. In 2014, President Barack Obama paid a visit, a sign of the firm’s success.
Millennium Steel Service
This person is an American politician serving as an at-large member of the Boston City Council in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the first woman of color elected to the council. She is the 2018 Democratic nominee for Massachusetts's 7th congressional district, having defeated incumbent Michael Capuano in the primary election.
Ayanna Pressley
This person opened his studio on the historic grounds of the former Fort McPherson army base in Atlanta, Georgia. It is one of the largest production facilities in the country with forty buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, twelve purpose-built sound stages, 200 acres of greenspace and a diverse backlot. Each soundstage was dedicated to African American actors and actresses that were inspirational to his career.
Tyler Perry
This university is a federally chartered, private, coeducational, nonsectarian, historically black university (HBCU) in Washington, D.C. It is categorized by the Carnegie Foundation as a research university with higher research activity and is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. It is classified as a Tier 1 national university and ranks second among HBCUs by U.S. News & World Report. The Princeton Review ranked the school of business first in opportunities for minority students and in the top five for most competitive students.
Howard University
the largest religion in Africa
Islam