Enlightened Free Thinking Nubian Kings And Queens

Ada Overton Walker, buck-and-wing, cakewalk virtuoso and choreographer regarded as one of the first African American choreographers on the American stage was born Ada Wilmon Overton on February 14, 1880 in Greenwich Village, New York City, the second child of Pauline Whitfield, a seamstress, and Moses Overton, a waiter. She was a child who seemed to have danced before she walked, fond of dancing in the streets with a hurdy-gurdy, until her parents decided she would receive formal dance training. Around 1897, after graduating from Thorp's Dance School, she toured briefly then an opportunity came when a girlfriend invited her to model for vaudeville advertisement at New York's Music Hall. She eventually the cast of  Williams and Walker's Octoroons, in which once critic declared of her performance, "I have just observed the greatest girl dancer." In 1899 Overton married George Walker and they became the leading cake-walking couple of the new century; in the cake...

Alfred L. Cralle was an African American businessman and inventor who was best known for inventing the ice cream scoop in 1897. Cralle was born on September 4, 1866, in Kenbridge, Lunenburg County, Virginia, just after the end of the American, Civil War. He attended local schools and worked for his father in the carpentry trade as a young man. During that period, he also became interested in mechanics.  Cralle was sent to Washington D.C. where he attended Wayland Seminary, a branch of the National Theological Institute, one of a number of schools founded by the American Baptist Home Mission Society immediately after the Civil War to help educate newly freed African Americans. After attending the school for a few years, Cralle moved to Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania, where he worked as a porter at a drugstore and at a hotel. While working at the hotel, he developed the idea of the ice cream scoop.  It came to him when he noticed ice cream servers having difficulty trying to ge...

Henry Johnson was a World War I hero because of his remarkable performance in France. Johnson, born in 1897 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, moved to Albany, New York with his family when he was still a child.  At the age of 20, he worked as a “Red-cap” porter at the Albany train station.  On  June 5th  of that year, however, he joined the U.S. Army and was eventually assigned to the all-black New York 369th Infantry Regiment, better known as the “Harlem Hellfighters.”  Nearly four months into his Army enlistment, Johnson married Georgia Edna Jackson of Great Barrington, Massachusetts on September 17, 1917.   Johnson and the other troops were trained in segregated Camp Wadsworth, South Carolina.  On January 1, 1918, the unit arrived in Brest, France and at first were used as laborers and stevedores.  By mid-March the 369th was sent to the front and attached to the 16th Division of the French Army.  On May 1, 1918, Johnson was promoted to ...