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Henry Johnson (1897-1929)

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 ...

Inoculation was introduced to America by a slave

Few details are known about the birth of Onesimus, but it is assumed he was born in Africa in the late seventeenth century before eventually landing in Boston. One of a thousand people of African descent living in the Massachusetts colony, Onesimus was a gift to the Puritan church minister Cotton Mather from his congregation in 1706. Onesimus told Mather about the centuries old tradition of inoculation practiced in Africa. By extracting the material from an infected person and scratching it into the skin of an uninfected person, you could deliberately introduce smallpox to the healthy individual making them immune. Considered extremely dangerous at the time, Cotton Mather convinced Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to experiment with the procedure when a smallpox epidemic hit Boston in 1721 and over 240 people were inoculated. Opposed politically, religiously and medically in the United States and abroad, public reaction to the experiment put Mather and Boylston’s lives in danger despite r...

William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868–1963)

Educator, essayist, journalist, scholar, social critic, and activist W.E.B. DuBois, was born to Mary Sylvina Burghardt and Alfred Dubois on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.   He excelled in the public schools, graduating valedictorian from his high school in 1884.  Four years later he received a B.A. from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1890 DuBois earned a second bachelor's degree from Harvard University.  DuBois began two years of graduate studies in History and Economics at the University of Berlin in Germany in 1892 and then returned to the United States to begin a two year stint teaching Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University in Ohio.  In 1895, DuBois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University.  His doctoral thesis,  "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America, " became the first book published by Harvard University Press in 1896.  Later that year Du...