Macon Allen was born in Indiana in 1816. While he was growing up, he learned to read and write on his own. Eventually, he became a schoolteacher. In the early 1840s, he moved to Maine and continued to teach. He also studied law as a law clerk for General Samuel Fessenden, a local attorney and abolitionist.

By 1844, Fessenden believed that Allen had enough knowledge of the law to pass the bar examination. He took Allen to the Portland District Court, but they refused to grant him a license on the grounds that he was not an American citizen. During the time, blacks were not considered citizens. Instead of giving up, Allen applied for admission to the examination through the state. He was granted the request and Allen passed the bar exam. On July 3, 1844, Macon Allen became the first African-American to be licensed to practice law in America.

Allen had trouble finding work because few people would hire a black attorney, so in 1845, he walked 50 miles to Boston, Massachusetts. He became the first African-American to pass the Massachusetts Bar Examination. He then partnered with Robert Morris, Jr., another black attorney, and opened the first black law office in the United States. Work, however, was still hard to find for a black attorney.

In 1848, Allen passed a rigorous exam to become Justice of the Peace in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. He became the first black to hold a judicial position. After the American Civil War, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina and was elected judge of a probate court in 1874. Two years later, he left South Carolina with the end of Reconstruction and moved to Washington, DC. There, he found a job with the Land and Improvement Association. He practice law there until his death in 1894.

Macon Allen overcame great odds to become the first black attorney in the United States. He helped pave the way for other attorneys to take up the cause of civil rights in the 20th century. His accomplishment in American history makes him a great American.

Anna Julia Cooper was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1858. She was the daughter of a slave mother and her slave-owning father. After the Civil War, she was sent to the newly created St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute. The school was created to help educate former slaves. At the age of nine, she began protesting at the school for equal treatment with the boys of the school. After graduating, she continued to work at St. Augustine’s and was allowed to study in all-male classes. After 14 years at the school, she attended Oberlin College and continued her protests for equal treatment with the male students. She refused to take classes that were for women only because she felt them inferior.

Cooper earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Oberlin in mathematics. After college, she moved to Washington, DC and began teaching math and science at the M Street School, also known as the Washington Colored High School, the only all-black high school in the District of Columbia.

While involved at the M Street School, she founded in the Colored Women’s League of Washington in 1892. She also help to open the first YWCA chapter for black women in the nation. She toured the nation speaking on the status of black women. Cooper became not only a voice for equal rights for blacks in America, but for women as well.

In 1902, she was promoted to principal of the school. As principal, she rejected the white supervisor’s mandate to teach trades at the school and instead, focused on college preparation. Soon, the school received accreditation from Harvard University. Her changes to the school were seen but the superintendent as a treat and she was demoted to teacher in 1910. Rather than giving in to defeat, Cooper decided to double her efforts. In 1924, she attended the University of Paris in France and became only the fourth African-American woman in the United States to receive her doctorate. All of this while she was raising five children that she adopted from her brother after he passed away.

After retiring in 1930 from the M Street School, she became the president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington, DC. She worked there are President and registrar for the next twenty years. She retired from the university at the age of 95. She continued to speak for the rights of blacks and women in America until her death in 1964 at the age of 105. Her devotion to education and equality in the United States made her a great American.