Jackie Robinson

As a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, I get to claim some amazing history that comes with this team. Jackie Robinson became the first African American player in Major League Baseball when he started for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Robinson became the star the Dodgers were...

Those Winter Sundays

By Robert Hayden Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking....

Mavis Staples

Mavis Staples began singing with her family in churches when she was 8 years old. At almost 87, she is still out there singing. After several hit gospel albums in the 1950s, the Staple Singers became the voice of the Civil Rights movement in the1960s. Mavis marched...

Greensboro Lunch Counter

On February 1, 1960, Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond bought a few items at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then sat down at the store’s “whites-only” lunch counter and tried to place orders. Staff...

Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson was a brilliant mathematician who helped make NASA spaceflights possible. Johnson was one of the “West Area Computers,” Black, female mathematicians who did complicated calculations by hand that were essential for developments in flight and...

Fred Gray, Lawyer, Preacher

Fred Gray is a “lawyer by trade” and a Church of Christ “preacher at heart” who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022 at age 91 for his boundary-shattering Civil Rights work. Gray represented Martin Luther King Jr., Claudette Colvin and...