Dana Albert Dorsey began his career with a single lot on which he constructed homes, rented them, and re-invested his profits, repeating the process over and over. Dorsey, a carpenter by trade, built a real estate empire in a handful of years. Thanks to his various business activities, including banking, he would become Miami’s first … Read more
James Meredith, a civil rights leader, organized the “March Against Fear” on June 5, 1966. He had enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1962, four years earlier, being the first African American student to do so. Meredith chose to take a 21-day lone march from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, to the Mississippi … Read more
In 1619, a ship carrying 20 slaves docked at Point Comfort, Virginia, kicking off the American slave trade. The arrival of 102 people on the Mayflower in 1620 is many Americans’ first introduction to American history. However, 20 enslaved Africans had been taken to the British colonies against their will a year before. A Dutch … Read more
As a leader of the Nation of Islam and afterward the New Black Panther Party, Khalid Abdul Muhammad rose to notoriety. Harold Moore Jr. was born in Houston, Texas, on January 12, 1948, to Harold Moore Sr. and Lottie B. Moore. Muhammad attended Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana after graduating from high school. In … Read more
New York City native Sylvia Vanderpool Robinson was born in 1936. Robinson would go on to work as a singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer, and executive for a record company. Robinson is well known for establishing Sugar Hill Records and serving as its CEO. She is recognized for producing two landmark hip-hop albums: the Sugar Hill … Read more
Women had been caring for the deceased for many years, cleaning and dressing bodies for home burials. Burials became a man’s work in the 1800s when the funeral home industry arose with the rise of embalming. Henrietta Bowers Duterte became America’s first female undertaker in 1858, defying gender standards at the period. In other words, … Read more
Because African-Americans were a convenient target in the 1950s and 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan — a white supremacist organization – had free rein, frightening and even murdering civil rights activists. Many civil rights workers armed themselves for self-defense as a result of the constant attacks. During the 1950s, even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s … Read more