Educators & Humanitarians

Mary McLeod was born in South Carolina on a rice and cotton farm to parents who were both former slaves. She received a scholarship to attend Scotia Seminary for Females in 1888 and then Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago. She had aspirations of becoming a missionary in Africa. Instead, she chose to go into education.

In 1898, she married Albertus Bethune. After living in Savannah, Georgia for a year, she relocated to Palatka, Florida to run a mission school. In 1904, she moved to Daytona, Florida and started the Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls. The school began with just five students. Soon, her school merged with an all male school to become today's Bethune-Cookman University.

Bethune served as the Florida chapter president of the National Association of Colored Women. She founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. She also served on the National Youth Administration under Franklin Roosevelt. While working for the Roosevelt administration, she became very close friends with the First Family. With their help, she formed a Federal Council on Negro Affairs to serve as an advisory board to President Roosevelt on issues facing African-Americans.

She was the only black woman present at the formation of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. She received numerous awards and honors from several different countries regarding her work with education and civil rights. After her death, she was inducted in the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973. In 1974, she became the first black leader and first woman to have a monument erected in Washington, DC. In 1994, she became the only black woman to have a national memorial site under the National Park Service.

Bethune was one of America's greatest educators and leaders towards racial equality. He life's work can be summed up in her pledge to the National Council of Negro Women: "It is our pledge to make a lasting contribution to all that is finest and best in America, to cherish and enrich her heritage of freedom and progress by working for the integration of all her people regardless of race, creed, or national origin, into her spiritual, social, cultural, civic, and economic life, and thus aid her to achieve the glorious destiny of a true and unfettered democracy."

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.

Fanny Jackson was born in Washington, DC in 1837 as a slave. When Jackson was 12, her aunt bought her freedom and she was sent to Rhode Island to work as a domestic servant. During her time there, she studied everything that she could get her hands on. She attended the Rhode Island Normal School before becoming one of the first black females to be admitted to Oberlin College in Ohio. She excelled at Oberlin and became the first pupil-teacher in the history of the institution.

After college, she was appointed to teach at the Institute for Colored Youth in Pennsylvania. After teaching there just four years, she became the principal. She told Frederick Douglass in a letter that she felt committed to "see my race lifted out of the mire of ignorance, weakness and degradation." While the principal of the school, she expanded the curriculum to include an Industrial Department.

In 1881, she married Reverend Levi J. Coppin, an A.M.E. minister. Together, they began to do missionary work along with education. After retiring from her school in Philadelphia in 1902, she began to do missionary work full-time in South Africa. She returned to the United States in 1907 and lived her final years in Philadelphia.

Fanny Jackson Coppin was a pioneer in education. Her life's work and devotion towards educating African-Americans made her one of the most respected educators in American history. In 1926, the faculty of the Colored School in Baltimore, Maryland changed the name of their institution in her honor. Today, it is known as Coppin State University. Fanny Jackson Coppin was truly a great American.

William Allison Davis was born in Washington, DC in 1902. Part of his childhood was spent on a farm in Virginia, however his education was in Washington, DC. He graduated from the all-black Dunbar High School as valedictorian. He decided to attend Williams College in Massachusetts and graduated summa cum laude in 1924. He then went to Harvard and earned a master’s degree in English in 1925.

After Harvard, Davis travelled to rural Virginia to teach black children. The conditions that the community lived in were so vastly different that where he was from that teaching became very difficult. It inspired Davis to resume his studies at Harvard in 1931 in the field of anthropology. His studies of the “Deep South” led him to the conclusion that southern society was composed of rigidly defined and separate social groupings, namely white and black. He also identified numerous social strata within each class. He completed his master’s in 1932.

Davis began teaching at Dillard University in New Orleans in 1935. He joined with Yale University graduate John Dollard to produce two groundbreaking books. He published “Children in Bondage” and “Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class.” His books brought to light the the vast discrepancies in the lives of Americans in the south as well as the economic and racial order of blacks and whites throughout the country.

After is work in the south, Davis attended the University of Chicago where he earned his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1942. He then became the first African-American to serve as a full faculty member at a majority white university in the United States. As a faculty member, he began studies in standardized intelligence tests being used in elementary schools. In 1951, he and several other researchers published their findings that the IQ tests were biased towards middle-class children and unfairly rated lower-class children. He also showed that IQ tests were culturally weighted towards middle-class students.

Throughout his career at the University of Chicago, Davis researched a wide range of issues in education. He conducted studies in the relationship between academic performance and child development, motivations of children from different social groups, and patterns of adolescent academic achievement. His work led to the abolition of the use of IQ tests in major cities throughout the country. He was appointed as a member of the Conference to Insure Civil Rights in 1965 and the White House Task Force on the Gifted in 1968. Dr. Davis became the first person from the field of education to be elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967. He taught at the University of Chicago until 1978.

Dr. Davis’ work on improving the education of the disadvantaged across America was is most important achievement. His work on the study of social classes in America and the effects of environment on academic performance in children helped educators throughout the country reassess their approach to providing quality educational opportunities. Dr. Davis was honored by the United States Postal Service in 1994 with his image on a postage stamp. He was a great American.

Clara McBride was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina in 1905 and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother passed away when she was 16, leaving her completely orphaned. She finished her high school education on her own. After finishing high school, Clara married Thomas Hale and moved to New York City where they had three children. Clara worked as a janitor while her husband ran a business and went to college. When Clara was 33, her husband suddenly died and left her to care for the three children alone during the height of the depression.

In order to spend more time with her children, Clara left her job as a janitor and began a daycare business for parents who worked during the day. Clara's home was so warm and loving that most of the kids did not want to go to their real homes at the end of the day. Many of the children began staying full-time when their mothers would only come see them on the weekends.

Clara expanded her operation by obtaining a license to take foster children into her home. Soon, she was the mother of 7-8 children at a time, rearing them into adulthood. She began actively searching for homes for some of the children and she taught essential parenting skills to parents. By the late 1960s, she had taken in over 40 foster children.

In 1969, she retired from fostering children and changed her focus towards babies addicted to heroin. Her daughter, Lorraine, brought home a woman that was a drug addict and Clara agreed to take in her baby. She began taking in more of these children at the age of 65 years. Within months, she was taking care of 22 babies, most without mothers. In 1970, she obtained a licence to turn her home into a child-care facility and she named it "Hale House." She then purchased a much larger building in Harlem and turned it into a new Hale House.

Clara Hale became known as "Mother Hale" as her operations expanded in the 1970s and 1980s. She expanded her focus from kids of drug addicts to children infected with the HIV virus. It is estimated that Clara Hale personally took care of over 800 babies in her lifetime. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan saluted Clara Hale as a great American hero in his State of the Union Address. She was named by the President to be a member of the American Commission on Drug Free Schools.

Clara Hale was taking care of children right up until her death in 1992. She received nearly 400 awards in her lifetime for her work with children. The Women's International Center dedicated the Living Legacy Awards to her memory in 1993. Her great humanitarian efforts to help those in need made Mother Hale a truly great American.

Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes was born in Washington, DC in 1890. She went by the name the name Euphemia. Her father was a prominent black leader and dentist in Washington. She graduated from Washington's Minor Normal School in 1909 and went on to Smith College, a women's institution, in Massachusetts. There, she received her B.S. in mathematics in 1914. Three years later, she married Harold Appo Haynes who would go on to become the Washington, DC deputy superintendent of "colored" students.

Haynes decided to attend the University of Chicago in the late 1920s and she received her master's degree in education in 1930. She then returned to Washington to attend Catholic University of America and became the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics. Her dissertation was entitled, "The Determination of Sets of Independent Conditions Characterizing Certain Special Cases of Symmetric Correspondences."

Dr. Haynes remained in Washington, DC and taught in public school for 47 years and was the first woman to become the chair of the DC School Board. She taught elementary school, high school and college. She taught part-time at Howard University. She was heavily involved in the Catholic Church and served as the first vice president of the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women. She served on local committees of the NAACP, Urban League, United Service Organization, and the League of Women Voters. In 1959, she was awarded a Papal Medal from the Catholic Church. When she died in 1980, she set up a trust fund to support the School of Education for Catholic University. Dr. Haynes' contribution to the field of mathematics and education in her community made her a great American.

Charles Houston was born in Washington, DC in 1895. His father was an attorney. After graduating Dunbar High School, he attended Amherst College in Massachusetts. He graduated valedictorian in 1915 and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. He returned to Washington, DC to teach English at Howard University.

In 1917, he joined the US Army as a First Lieutenant. He was so horrified by the treatment that black officers received that he committed himself attend law school to "use my time fighting for men who could not strike back." After leaving the Army, he entered Harvard Law School. He earned his doctorate of law in 1923 and was the first African-American to serve as editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated Harvard cum laude.

After briefly studying in Europe, he was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1924. That same year, he became a law professor at Howard University. There, he made it his mission to create as many black lawyers as possible. One of his most promising students was a young man from Baltimore named Thurgood Marshall who would later become the first African-American on the Supreme Court. Beginning in the 1930's, he served as first special counsel for the NAACP was heavily involved with civil rights cases until his death.

Charles Houston's mission was to help engineer an end to segregation and the overturning of the landmark "Plessy v Ferguson" Supreme Court Case. He helped design strategies for attacking segregation laws across the United States. He did not live to see "Plessy" overturned, but his students, strategies and drive for racial equality made this legal champion for civil rights a great American.

Lucy Laney was born in 1854 in Macon, Georgia to parents who were former slaves. She was the seventh of ten children. He father was a Presbyterian minister. With the help of her sister, she was taught to read in a time when it was illegal for black to be educated. After the Civil War, Laney entered Atlanta University at the age of 15. She graduated with a degree in teaching in 1873.

Laney began teaching in several towns throughout Georgia for the next ten years. In 1883, she created the first school for black children in Augusta, Georgia. The school opened in the basement of the Presbyterian Church with only six students. Within two years, she had over 200 students attending. In 1886, she travelled to Minneapolis to the Presbyterian Church Convention to try to raise funds for her school. The convention rejected her request. However, one of the attendees, Francine E.H. Haines, personally donated $10,000 to the school. Laney was able to expand the school and renamed it the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in honor of her benefactor.

Laney started the first black kindergarten in Augusta. She was able to expand her school into a nursing in partnership with a neighboring nursing school. Laney influenced a young Mary McCleod Bethune to start her own school in Florida. Laney encouraged her students to learn the classics, Algebra, and Latin. Her school encouraged study in trades, arts, music and sports. In 1918, she helped to found the Augusta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was an active member of the National Association of Colored Women and the Niagara Movement. She worked closely to integrate the work of the YMCA and YWCA. She also became the director of the cultural center in Augusta.

Laney died in 1933 while still serving as the director of her school. She performed her duties there for over 50 years. In 1974, she was the first African-American woman to have her portrait hung in the Georgia State Capitol by order of Governor Jimmy Carter. She helped to educate thousands of students throughout her career in education. Her tireless work in education and civil rights made Laney a Great American.

Alain Locke was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated second in his class at Central High School. He then attended and received a Bachelor's degree from the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, a program for graduates who want to become elementary school teachers. There, he published his first work, "Moral Training in Elementary Schools."

In 1907, he attended Harvard University and received degrees in English and Philosophy. He graduated magna cum laude. While at Harvard, he became the first ever African-American Rhodes Scholar, however, he was denied admission to several Oxford colleges because of his race. Finally, he was accepted into Hertford College in Oxford where he studied literature and philosophy. He also studied at the University of Berlin.

After his time in England, he returned to the United States to become a professor of English at Howard University in Washington, DC. After four years of teaching and lecturing on race relations, he decided to return to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy. He then went back to Howard University to become the chair of the Department of Philosophy which he would hold for the next 35 years.

During his tenure at Howard University, he published his seminal work titled "The New Negro: An Interpretation" in 1925. This was an anthology of fictional stories, poetry and essays. Within the anthology were the works of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay to name a few. Most scholars consider this book to be the definitive text of the Harlem Renaissance.

Locke was considered one of the giants of philosophical thought on the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement. His works helped to expand the art, literature and ideas that were blossoming during this time period. His scholarly works spanned over four decades. His contribution to African-Americans made him a great American.

Samuel Massie, Jr. was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1919. Both of his parents were school teachers. As a young boy, he accompanied his mother while she taught. He began studying among the older children. Massie learned to read at the age of two. His intellect was such that he kept skipping grade levels until he enrolled into his father’s high school at the age of 10. Massie graduated high school in 1932 at the age of 13.

Because of his age, he was unable to enroll immediately into college. He spent a year working in a grocery store until he was able to enroll in Dunbar Junior College in Little Rock. He studied mathematics and liberal arts while at Dunbar. The students elected him to be student body president. After earning his associates degree, Massie enrolled into the Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College in Pine Bluff, majoring in chemistry and minoring in mathematics and French. He also joined the debate team and became editor of the college yearbook. In 1938, at the age of 18, he graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in chemistry.

After his bachelor’s degree, Massie earned a scholarship to attend Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. There, he earned his master’s degree in chemistry by 1940. He returned to Pine Bluff to become an associate professor of mathematics and physics. He also filled in as the head of the Math and Physics Department. In 1941, he left Pine Bluff to work on his doctorate at Iowa State University. When Massie arrived in Iowa, he discovered that he was not allowed to live on campus because of his race. Furthermore, he was not allowed a teaching assistantship in the chemistry department. While he was in Iowa, World War II began. Because Massie was enrolled in higher education, he was allowed a draft deferment. In 1943 however, the Arkansas Draft board revoked his deferment because he had “too much education for a n****r.” Massie reached out to his supervisor at Iowa State who then recruited him to work on the Manhattan Project, allowing him to keep his deferment.

Between 1943 and 1945, Massie worked with his Iowa State mentor, Dr. Henry Gilman, on the Manhattan Project as a research assistant. During his time at the Ames Laboratory, Massie did research on converting uranium isotopes into usable liquid compounds for an atomic bomb. He was awarded a patent for chemical agents effective in battling gonorrhea. He conducted pioneering work in silicon chemistry research and investigated antibacterial agents. He received awards for his research in combating malaria, meningitis, herpes, cancer, and nerve agents.

When the war ended, Massie returned to his doctoral studies and earned his PhD in organic chemistry in 1946. He was then named the chair of the Chemistry Department at Langston University in Oklahoma. In 1953, he was elected to the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences. By 1954, Dr. Massie returned to teach and chair in the Chemistry Department at Fisk University. There, he conducted research in treating psychiatric disorders as well as cancer therapy. In 1960, he was named an associate program director for special projects in science education at the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC. In this new roll, Dr. Massie helped colleagues across the nation improve their educational resources and laboratories. By 1963, he had been named the President of North Carolina College in Durham.

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Massie to be the first-ever African-American faculty member at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. There, he would teach chemistry for nearly 30 years. He became the chairman of the Maryland Board for Community Colleges and the chairman of the Maryland Science Advisory Council to the state governor. It was during his time at the Naval Academy that he received several honorary degrees. He took great pleasure in receiving an honorary degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, a university that denied his admittance when he was a young man on account of his race.

Dr. Massie died in 2005. He was named one of the top six best college chemistry professors in the United States. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the White House in 1988 and a US Naval Academy Faculty Achievement Award in 1990. His portrait was hung in the National Academy of Sciences in 1995. The US Department of Energy created the Dr. Samuel P. Massie Chair of Excellence, a grant for further environmental research. Dr. Massie’s contributions to science and education over his long career earned him the title of Great American.

Henry Ransom Cecil McBay was born in Mexia, Texas, the second of five children. McBay excelled in science and mathematics and was the quarterback of the football team. He entered Wiley College in Marshall, Texas at the age of sixteen and began to excel in the area of organic chemistry. He graduated Wiley College in 1934 with academic honors. He then entered the graduate chemistry program at Atlanta University where he would receive his Master's Degree in 1936.

Due to a lack of funds, McBay had to put off working on his doctorate. He took up various teaching positions at several universities and high schools. His parents expected him, also, to finance the education of his younger siblings. However, by 1942 he obtained entrance into the University of Chicago. There, he worked with highly volatile materials and was placed in a private laboratory. For his work at the university, he twice earned the Elizabeth Norton Prize for Excellence in Chemical Research and he earned his Doctoral Degree in 1945.

After receiving his doctorate, he became a chemistry professor at Morehouse College for the next 36 years, the last 25 years of which he was the chairman of the department. Up until 1995, he had educated more African-Americans towards a Ph.D. in chemistry than any other teacher in America.

McBay was one of America's greatest teachers. His role in educating students in chemistry has shaped the entire world. In 1951, he took his talents to the Republic of Liberia to set up their first-ever education program in chemistry. He taught countless students and became one of the foremost educators of the 20th Century. McBay achieved greatness in America.

William Scarborough was born in Macon, Georgia in 1852. His father was a freeman and his mother was a slave, which made him a slave as well. Secretly, he was educated despite a law prohibiting slaves from going to school. At the end of the Civil War, he was able to attend high school in Macon, Georgia. He then attended Atlanta University in 1869 for two years before transferring to Oberlin College.

After graduation, he returned to his high school to teach classical languages. After the school was burned to the ground by arsonists, he moved to South Carolina to teach at the Payne Institute. However, his stay there was short and he decided to go back to Oberlin College to work on his Master’s Degree.

After earning his Master’s, Scarborough became a professor at Wilberforce University in Ohio. He began writing books while teaching at the university. His first book was a Classical Greek textbook. He became widely known throughout the country for his scholarly publications. He became the first black member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and one of the first black members of the American Philological Association.

Despite the respect and admiration of his peers in the academic world, he continued to suffer from racial discrimination. He was, on several occasions, barred from entering hotels to speak in front of academic conferences, despite the fact that he was invited by the organizations in the first place. On several occasions, his speeches and lectures had to be read by a white member because he was barred from the building.

Eventually, Scarborough became the president of Wilberforce University. He was considered one of the leading African-American scholars of his time. He continued to write papers on education for blacks in America as well as classical languages. President Warren Harding appointed Scarborough to a position in the Department of Agriculture. Today, the MLA has created the William Sanders Scarborough Prize for literary works. Dr. Scarborough’s scholarly work as a distinguished Man of Letters made him a great American.

Thomas Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina. His father died before he was born and he was raised by his great-aunt. He lived in Charlotte, North Carolina until he was nine years old. His family then moved to Harlem in New York City. He became the first person in his family to study beyond the sixth grade, however he dropped out of high school due to financial problems at home. Sowell worked many odd jobs until he was drafted into the Marine Corps in 1951. Sowell became a photographer in the Corps.

After his time in the military, Sowell moved to Washington, DC and earned his GED by taking night classes at Howard University. His scores on the College Board exams was so high that he gained admission to Harvard University. He graduated magna cum laude in 1958 with a B.A. in economics. He earned his M.A. at Columbia University in 1959 and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.

Sowell has been a professor of economics at several universities throughout his career. Since 1980, he has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He holds a fellowship named after his mentor and professor from the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman. He has become the leading voice of the "Chicago School of Economics," rejecting Keynesian theory and embracing free market practices. He has written numerous books about economics, including his best-seller "Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy." It is considered one of the most widely read books on economics of the 20th century.

Sowell has also become active in the world of politics and civil rights. A self-described libertarian, Sowell has become a syndicated columnist for several conservative publications. He has spoken about his support for gun rights, his opposition to affirmative action and his opposition to the Federal Reserve System.

Today, Sowell continues to teach and speak out on his conservative political views. He has authored nearly 40 books in his career and received numerous awards for his work in economics. In 2002, he was awarded with the National Humanities Medal for work in merging history, political science and economics. His continued contributions in these areas make Dr. Sowell a great American.

Francis Cecil Sumner was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1895. During his youth, he moved to Virginia and New Jersey and attended primary schools. However, he was unable to attend high school because of his race. Therefore, he was homeschooled by his father, who subjected him to rigorous reading and writing assignments. At the age of 15, he applied to Lincoln University in Jefferson City, MO. He had to take a written exam to prove he was able attend college because he lacked a high school diploma.

At the age of 20, Sumner graduated magna cum laude from Lincoln University with a degree with special honors in English, modern languages, Greek, Latin and philosophy. He continued at the university as a graduate student and instructor in German and psychology. He earned his M.A. in psychology. Afterward, he began looking at schools to work on his Ph.D., but was rejected by the University of Illinois and American University due to his race. He then contacted president of Clark University in Atlanta and was accepted on a senior scholarship in the field of psychology. However, just as he had started his program in 1918, he was called into military service during World War I. After the Armistice, Sumner returned to Clark University and became the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology on American soil.

In 1920, he began work as a professor at Wilberforce University. A year later, he transferred to Southern University in Louisiana and then to West Virginia Collegiate Institute. He taught in West Virginia for seven years, writing many articles about the problems with the treatment of African-Americans in universities. In 1928, he was appointed chairman of the Department of Psychology at Howard University in Washington, DC.

Throughout his career, he did many studies on the treatment of blacks in America. He became a part of several organizations, including the American Psychological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He helped lay the groundwork for other African-Americans to pursue a career in psychology. Today, he is known as the Father of Black Psychology. His contributions to science made Dr. Sumner a great American.

Vernie Merze Tate was born in Blanchard, Michigan in 1905. She began her education in a one-room school house at the age of five. She attended Blanchard High School until the building was destroyed by fire. She graduated valedictorian and only completed the tenth grade. Not satisfied with the level of education that she received, Tate would walk eight miles a day to Battle Creek High School. Despite being a straight “A” student, she was not allowed to graduate as the valedictorian of Battle Creek.

After high school, she attended Western Michigan Teacher’s College in Kalamazoo. She became the first African-American to earn a bachelor’s degree there as well as graduating first in her class. Despite this, she was barred from teaching high school in the state of Michigan, so she left and began teaching at Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis. After a short time teaching, she attended Columbia University and earned her Master’s Degree in 1930. In 1932, she became the first African-American woman to enroll at Oxford University in England. She studied European diplomatic history, advanced economics, world trade, international relations and international law. Before leaving, she was invited by the White House to attend the opening of the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. In 1935, she became the first black American to earn a degree from Oxford. Afterward, she studied a short time at the University of Berlin and the Geneva School of International Studies before returning to the United States. She briefly took the position of Dean of Women at Barber-Scotia College in North Carolina before returning to college and earning a Ph.D. in Government at Harvard University (at the time known as Radcliffe College).

After Harvard, she taught briefly at Morgan State College in Baltimore before becoming the first woman to teach in the history department at Howard University in Washington, DC. She taught there until 1977. While a professor, she had frequent visits to the White House and met regularly with Eleanor Roosevelt. She would publish five volumes on international affairs as well as forty articles about her travels throughout the world. In 1950, she was a Fulbright Scholar in India. She met with numerous world leaders. She was even rumored to be spy for the US State Department during the Cold War. She became an international relations advisor to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. She mastered five languages, became the National Bridge Champion, earned numerous honorary doctorates and was a journalist and photographer for a black newspaper in Baltimore. Dr. Tate was one of America’s great scholars of the 20th century. She was a great American.

Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia in 1856 to a slave mother and a white plantation owner. He grew up in West Virginia working in salt furnaces and coal mines. Determined to become educated, he walked 500 miles to Hampton Roads, Virginia to attend the new Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (today known as Hampton University). He was one of the top students of this new institute for African-American and he caught the eye of Hampton's founder, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong.

Washington embraced the educational style and philosophy of General Armstrong. After Hampton, Washington attended Wayland Seminary in Washington, DC before returning to Hampton as a member of the faculty. While teaching in Hampton, General Armstrong was contacted by group in Alabama about finding a principal for their new normal school that was formed. Armstrong immediately suggested Washington. Washington travelled to Alabama to become the first principal of the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, which in time would become the Tuskegee Institute.

Washington began the school in a run-down church on the outskirts of town. In 1882, he bought a plantation and began construction of campus buildings. Some of the students helped build the campus as part of their work-study. While building the school and promoting it throughout Alabama, he had to convince white people that the Tuskegee program would not threaten the white supremacy of the area or cause economic competition for whites.

The new school prospered, and he accepted racial subordination in order to protect the school and its mission. The school's focus was on an industrial education that would teach blacks skills that could help them earn a living. In 1895, he was invited to speak at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. He publicly accepted disenfranchisement and segregation as long as whites would allow black economic progress and justice in the courts. It was the price he had to pay for helping to keep his school alive. Because of this public "admission" to subordination, Washington was seen as a national hero.

He became a national celebrity and the most famous black person in America. He became an adviser to President Theodore Roosevelt and President William Howard Taft. He was the first black man invited to the White House to dine with the President. He was a guest of Queen Victoria in England. He found public funding from Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman, Henry Huttleston Rogers and John D. Rockefeller. Pennsylvania Quaker Anna T. Jeanes donated $1,000,000 to Washington to help him form elementary schools for black children. Although he urged blacks to abide by segregation codes, he spoke out against lynchings. He worked to make the "separate" facilities in segregated America more "equal." He even created the National Negro Business League to help promote African-American businesses across America.

Booker T. Washington was a controversial figure during his time. Knowing the perils of educating blacks in the South, Washington was forced to be the "Great Accommodator" in order that his schools and educational philosophy would survive. His work in education and his sacrifice to help others made him a great American.

Carter Woodson was born in New Canton, Virginia to former slaves. Both of his parents were illiterate. Because of the need to provide income for the family, Carter was not able to attend much school, therefore he was largely self-educated. Wanting desperately to receive an education, he and his brother moved to Huntington, West Virginia. He worked in a coal mine to earn a living and was able to graduate high school in 1895 at the age of twenty.

Carter began teaching in Fayette County, West Virginia and then returned to Huntington to become the principal of his former high school. He received a Bachelor of Literature degree from Berea College in Kentucky. From there, he travelled the world. First, he supervised a school in the Philippines. Later he studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris. In 1908, he received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and in 1912, he received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. Dr. Woodson helped found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. He started the Journal of Negro History, which is one of the oldest scholarly journals in the United States. In 1926, he developed Negro History Week and in 1937 he published the first issue of the Negro History Bulletin. Throughout his endeavors, he believed that Negro History Week would become obsolete because all Americans would willingly recognize the contributions of Black Americans as an integral part of the history of the United States. He wrote numerous books and became the first in America to study and publish the history of blacks in the United States.

Carter Woodson once said, "if a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated." His life's ambition was to document and disseminate the history of black Americans and their contributions to the nation. The National Park Service honors his contributions with the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site in Washington, DC. Numerous schools and libraries throughout the nation have been named in his honor. It is without dispute that Carter Woodson was a great American.