Enlightened Free Thinking Nubian Kings And Queens

Michael Anthony Donald was a nineteen-year-old African American man who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1981 in Mobile, Alabama. His killing was one of the last known lynchings in the United States. Donald was born on July 24, 1961, in Mobile to Beullah Mae Donald and David Donald. He was the youngest of six children. In 1981, Josephus Anderson, an African American, was charged with the murder of a white police officer in Birmingham, Alabama while committing a robbery. Anderson’s case was moved from Birmingham to Mobile, Alabama in a change of venue. While the jury was struggling to reach a verdict on Anderson, members of the United Klan of America complained that the jury had not convicted Anderson because it had African American members.  One Klansman, Bennie Jack Hays, announced to his fellow Klan members that “if a black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man.” On March 20, 1981, a mistrial was declared in An...

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...

Samuel George Davis Jr. was born on December 8, 1925 in Harlem, New York. His parents, Sammy Davis Sr., an African American, and Elvera Sanchez, a Cuban American, were both vaudeville dancers.  They separated when young Davis was three years old and his father took him on tour with a dance troupe led by Will Mastin. Davis joined the act at a young age and they became known as the Will Mastin Trio. It was with this trio that Davis began a lucrative career as a dancer, singer, comedian, actor, and a multi-instrumentalist. During World War II Davis joined the army, he joined an integrated entertainment Special Services unit, and found that while performing the crowd often forgot the color of the man on stage. After his discharge from the army Davis rejoined the Will Mastin Trio and soon became known in Las Vegas as the kid in the middle.  On November 19, 1954, with the act in Las Vegas finally getting off the ground, he was involved in a serious car accident on a trip from L...

Emlen Lewis Tunnell was the first African American named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967. He was also the first pro football player to gain recognition as a defensive back, and set a record for career interceptions that would hold for two decades.  Tunnell was born to Elzie Tunnell and Catherine Adams Tunnell on March 29, 1925 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Tunnell’s mother was a domestic worker who principally raised him and his three siblings.  Tunnell grew up in Radnor, Pennsylvania, where he attended high school and played varsity football. He subsequently played on the football team at Toledo University where, during an early season game, he landed awkwardly and fractured his neck. The doctors told Tunnell that his football playing days were over. Tunnell, however, went on to make the university’s basketball team. In 1943 Tunnell volunteered to serve in World War II. Though his injuries disqualified him from enlistment in the Army, Tunnell was able to serve o...

African American sculptor, teacher, and advocate for black artists Augusta Savage was born Augusta Christine Fell in Green Cove Springs, Florida on February 29, 1892, the child of Edward Fells, a laborer and Methodist minister, and Cornelia Murphy. She retained the last name of her second husband, a carpenter named James Savage; they were divorced in the early 1920s.  After moving to Harlem in New York in 1921, Savage studied art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art where she finished the four-year program in three years . She was recommended by Harlem librarian Sadie Peterson, for a commission of a bust of W.E.B. DuBois.  The sculpture was well received and she began sculpting busts of other African American leaders. Savage’s bust of a Harlem child, Gamin (1929), brought her ...

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...

Harold Washington, the first African American mayor of Chicago, Illinois, was born on April 15, 1922, to Roy Washington, a lawyer, Methodist minister and one of the first black precinct captains in Chicago.  Washington’s mother Bertha Washington was a well-known singer in the city.  Washington attended segregated public schools including the newly completed DuSable High School where he set records as a track star.  Despite that success, Washington dropped out of high school at the end of his junior year and worked in a meat packing plant until his father helped him obtain a job at the U.S. Treasury office in Chicago.  There he met Dorothy Finch, his future wife.  The couple married in 1941 when Harold Washington was 19 and Dorothy was 17.  They divorced  ten years later . In 1942 Washington was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent overseas as part of a segregated unit of the Air Force Engineers, then part of the U.S. Army.  Washington served...

The Merikins were African-American refugees of the War of 1812 – freed black slaves who fought for the British against the USA in the Corps of Colonial Marines. freed black slaves were recruited by the British during the American Revolution. There was a similar policy and six companies of freed black slaves were recruited into a Corps of Colonial Marines along the Atlantic coast, from Chesapeake Bay to Georgia  After that war, they were settled in colonies of British Empire including Canada, Jamaica and the Bahamas. After the end of the War, the Colonial Marines were first stationed at the Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda, and on rejecting government orders to be transferred to the West India Regiments, agreed to be settled in Trinidad. The Governor of Trinidad, Sir Ralph Woodford, wanted to increase the number of small farmers in that colony and arranged for the creation of a village for each company on the Naparima Plain in the south of the island.They established as a community ...

Born on February 20, 1876, in Auburn, Alabama, Louis Augustus Carter was the second African American army chaplain to be promoted to colonel. Carter received his early education in a local public school, attended Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) from 1895 to 1897, and Selma University from 1897 to 1900, but he did not graduate from either institution. Then, from 1901 to 1904, he was a special student at the Virginia Union University Theological School and graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree. Carter returned home to Auburn, Alabama, to be ordained in 1904 and served as pastor for several churches in Alabama, Virginia, and Tennessee for the next eleven years. After attending the Guadalupe College of Texas, he was awarded a Doctor of Divinity degree in 1907. In 1909 Carter married Mary B. Moss, and in 1910, he enlisted into the United States Army. After his initial training, he applied for an appointment as chaplain of one of the four regular army regiments for A...

Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham was an African American entertainer. Though best known as a comedian, Markham was also a singer, dancer, and actor. His nickname came from a stage routine, in which he declared himself to be "Sweet Poppa Pigmeat". Dewey Pigmeat Markham was born April 18, 1904 in Durham, North Carolina. His family was the most prominent on their street, which was later officially renamed Markham Street. Running away from home in 1918, Markham began his career in traveling music and burlesque shows. He took up with a white showman he ambiguously referred to over the years as "Mr. Booker" owner of a "gilly carnival."  For a time he was a member of Bessie Smith's Traveling Revue in the 1920s and later appeared on burlesque bills with such comedy legends as Milton Berle, Red Buttons, and Eddie Cantor. He claims to have originated the Truckin' dance which became nationally popular at the start of the 1930s. Markham performed ...

Phyllis Hyman was born in  Philadelphia ,  Pennsylvania , and grew up in  St. Clair Village , the  South Hills  section of  Pittsburgh . Born to an Italian mother, (Louise), and African-American father, (Phillip),  Hyman was the eldest of seven children. Through her paternal great-grandparents Ishmael and Cassandra (Cross) Hyman, she was also the first cousin once removed of actor  Earle Hyman  (best known for his recurring role on  The Cosby Show  as Cliff's father, Russell Huxtable). After leaving Pittsburgh, her music training started at a music school. On graduation, she performed on a national tour with the group New Direction in 1971. After the group disbanded, she joined All the People and worked with another local group, The Hondo Beat. At this time, she appeared in the film  Lenny  (1974). She also did a two-year stint leading a band called "Phyllis Hyman and the P/H Factor". She was discovered in 1975 by...

Lucile Berkeley Buchanan-Jones was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Colorado.  Buchanan was born on June 13, 1884, on the second floor of the family’s mule and horse barn in the town of Barnum, southwest of Denver, Colorado.  She was the daughter of Sarah Lavinia and James Fenton Buchanan, emancipated slaves from adjoining plantations in northern Virginia. Sarah and James Buchanan were married in 1872.  Within ten years  of their marriage the couple, and their four Virginia-born children, migrated to Colorado. When the Buchanans arrived in Colorado in 1882, Lucile’s mother, Sarah, bought five lots of land in an unincorporated area outside the Denver city limits from P.T. Barnum of the Barnum and Bailey Circus.  The Buchanans were one of three black families in this predominately first-generation European immigrant community. In 1903, 19-year-old Lucile enrolled in the two-year teacher certification program at the Colorado...

Emmanuel Francis (E.F.) Joseph was the first professional African American photographer in the San Francisco Bay area of California. Born on November 8, 1900 on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Joseph would later move to the United States and attend the American School of Photography in Chicago, Illinois. After graduation in 1924, Joseph moved to Oakland, California, where he apprenticed in a photography studio.  In the early 1930's, Joseph began his career as a photojournalist. He worked for numerous Bay Area newspapers, including the California Voice, The Oakland Post, San Francisco Examiner, and the nationally distributed Pittsburgh Courier from Pennsylvania.   Joseph also ran a photography studio initially out of his home in West Oakland. He took photos of babies, children, men, women, couples, and families. He also captured the contours of community life, snapping photos at events held by churches, schools, nightclubs, social clubs, and lodges. He recorded c...