Andrew Brimmer was born in Newellton, Louisiana in 1926. His family were sharecroppers. After high school, Brimmer served in the US Army from 1945 to 1946 as a staff sergeant. After his service in the military, he attended the University of Washington in Seattle and earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in economics. He studied for a short time at the University of Bombay in India before returning to the United States and earning a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University in 1957.

After Harvard, he worked as a staff economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most powerful of the twelve Federal Reserve banks. He promoted the idea of reducing the national deficit and he argued that racial discrimination hurt the US economy by marginalizing productive workers. While at the Federal Reserve, he was sent to the newly created Republic of Sudan in Africa to help set up their central bank. In 1958, he accepted a teaching position at Michigan State University and in 1961 transferred to the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy appointed Brimmer as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Policy. His big opportunity came in 1966, when President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve Bank. He was the first African-American to serve on the board. He served for an eight year term.

After serving on the Board of Governors, he began teaching at Harvard. In 1976, he started his own consulting firm in Washington, DC. In 1995, he was named by President Bill Clinton to a financial control board to oversee the financial crisis in the government of the District of Columbia.

Brimmer wrote numerous articles about the effects of racial discrimination on the nation’s economy. He promoted African-American self-help and education. He was a member of numerous economic associations and councils. He won awards from the National Economic Association, One Hundred Black Men, and the New York Urban Coalition. Andrew Brimmer was a great American.

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. Her father was a janitor and her mother was a school teacher and trained as a classical pianist. When Brooks was an infant, her family moved to Chicago. When she was a teenager, she attended three different high schools, a mostly white high school, an all-black school, and an integrated school. After high school, she attended Wilson Junior College, graduating in 1936.

She began writing poetry at an early age and published her first poem at the age of 13. By the time she was 17, she frequently published poems in the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Brooks also did work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She attended poetry workshops in Chicago and was noted by the likes of James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. By 1945, she published her first book of poetry, “A Street in Bronzeville.” She earned critical acclaim for her work and in 1946, she received her first Guggenheim Fellowship. Mademoiselle Magazine featured her predominantly in their publication. Her second book, “Annie Allen” was published in 1949 and she won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry as well as the Eunice Tietjens Prize.

In 1953, she published “Maud Martha,” her only narrative publication. The book details the suffers of prejudice not only from whites, but from blacks who have lighter skin than hers. Her later work became much more political. In 1968, she met with with other black-activist writers throughout the country at Fisk University in Nashville to discuss politics and civil rights. That same year, she published “In the Mecca,” a poem about a mother searching for her daughter in an apartment building. Her poem was nominated for the National Book Award.

Throughout her life, she also taught creative writing and poetry. She taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, CIty College of New York, and several others. She even taught gang members in Chicago creative writing in order to help them find a more peaceful voice.

Brooks continued to write until her death in 2000. In 1968, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois. In 1976, she became the first black woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1988 and she was the Robert Frost Medal in 1989. In 1995, she won the National Medal of Arts and in 1999, she was a fellowship with the Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she was featured on a US postage stamp for her contributions to poetry. She also served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Her literary work made her a Great American.