Pauli Murray (1910-1985)

Pauli Murray (1910-1985)

Pauli Murray was born on November 20, 1910 in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of Agnes and William Murray. Her father, a Howard University graduate, taught in the Baltimore public schools.  Both of Murray’s parents died when she was a child.  Her mother suffered...
J. A. Rogers (1880-1966)

J. A. Rogers (1880-1966)

Self-trained historian, novelist, and journalist Joel Augustus Rogers spent most of his life debunking pseudo-scientific and racist depictions of people of African ancestry while popularizing the history of persons of black people around the world. Rogers was born...
Ida Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)

Ida Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)

Activist and writer Ida B. Wells-Barnett first became prominent in the 1890s because she brought international attention to the lynching of African Americans in the South. Wells was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. At the age of sixteen, she became...
Claude McKay (1889-1948)

Claude McKay (1889-1948)

Harlem Renaissance writer Festus Claudius McKay was born on September 15, 1889, in Sunny Ville, in the Clarendon Hills of Jamaica, to peasant farmers Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards  and Thomas Frank McKay. Young Claude was tutored by his elder schoolmaster brother,...