Trailblazers & Firsts
First Black woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress (2002)
Who is Halle Berry?
Music genre born from African American communities in the South in the early 1900s
What is Blues?
1955 event sparked by Rosa Parks
What is the Montgomery Bus Boycott?
Year Rice admitted its first Black undergraduate students
What is the 1960s?
Global superstar behind Renaissance
Who is Beyoncé?
First Black woman to travel to space
Who is Mae Jemison?
Harlem Renaissance poet who wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Who is Langston Hughes?
March where MLK delivered “I Have a Dream”
What is the March on Washington?
Rice’s primary location for curriculum and research related to Africa and to people of African descent in the Americas and beyond
The Center for African and African American Studies
Civil rights leader and first Black woman from the South elected to Congress
Who is Barbara Jordan?
First African American to earn a bachelor of science degree in 1894, known as "The Peanut Man"
Who is George Washington Carver?
Author of Beloved
Who is Toni Morrison?
Landmark 1954 Supreme Court case ending school segregation
What is Brown v. Board of Education?
Name of the cultural center supporting Black student life
What is the Rice Multicultural Center?
Most decorated gymnast in history with multiple Olympic gold medals
Who is Simone Biles?
First Black Supreme Court Justice
Who is Thurgood Marshall?
Artist known as the “Queen of Soul”
Artist known as the “Queen of Soul”
Houston civil rights activists used boycotts and negotiations to integrate downtown businesses along this central commercial district
What is Main Street?
Rice University's first Black graduate student
Who is Dr. Raymond Johnson?
Legendary Houston Rockets center and NBA Hall of Famer
Who is Hakeem Olajuwon?
America's first female self-made millionaire, having built a haircare empire for Black women in the early 1900s
Who is Madam C.J. Walker?
2017 film directed by Barry Jenkins that won Best Picture and tells a coming-of-age story of a young Black man in Miami
What is Moonlight?
Historically Black university in Houston that served as a major hub for civil rights organizing in the 1960s
What is Texas Southern University?
Rice’s first Black administrator and its first full-time Black faculty member
Dr. Robert Bell Jr.
Acclaimed choreographer, actress, and the first Black dancer at the Houston Ballet Academy at age 14
Who is Debbie Allen?