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"Guion Bluford on the Challenger" by sjrankin is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 Image has been cropped and tinted
5 Black Figures to Know
5 Black Figures to Know
Make sure you know these incredible Black activists and figures
Hiram R. Revels
The first Black person elected to Congress
Revels was born on September 27, 1827, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. While slavery was widespread during this time period, Revels was a member of a free family. He and his brother were apprentices to a barber from a young age, until he decided that he wanted to do something bigger with his life. He then left North Carolina to study at seminaries in Indiana and Ohio, and in 1845 he became minister of an African Methodist Episcopal Church.
"Lithographic print of Hiram Revels" by Frank Leslie's Illustrirte Zeitung, American, 1857 - 1894 is marked with CC0 1.0
When the Civil War hit, Revels organized two black regiments and even fought at one of the most important battles of the Civil War, the Battle of Vicksburg.
After the war, Revels was elected to the Mississippi State Senate, but vacated this seat quickly after being chosen to fill a vacant seat in the United States Senate. But although he was a Senator and was making momentous decisions every day, he still wasn't respected by those around him. Many of his fellow Congressmen felt that his seat was not legitimate, because according to Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford, Black people were not US citizens. After much debate, Revels and his fellow Republicans convinced Democrats that his seat was legitimate on account of his mixed heritage. He was the first Black Senator.
While in office, he fought primarily for civil rights, including desegregation of schools and equal opportunity for black workers. But he also worked on keeping peace in the country, and he was opposed to punishing the South for their wartime actions, instead arguing for immediate restoration of citizenship to all former Confederates.
Revels resigned from the Senate a year after he was voted in in order to accept the presidency of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Mississippi. This position allowed him to take a hands-on approach to what he fought for in the Senate: the intellectual enrichment of people of color.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Influential writer and sociologist focusing on Black communities
W.E.B Du Bois was born on February 23rd, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 marked the end of slavery in the United States, and Du Bois was born free.
When he graduated from high school, he went to Tennessee to attend Fisk University, and for the first time in his life he encountered Jim Crow laws. While discrimination was rampant in every state at the time, only in the South did Du Bois finally realize the true extent of the issue, and he began to analyze the deep troubles of American racism. After graduating from Fisk University, he entered Harvard University and became the first Black person to graduate from Harvard in 1895. After getting a doctorate at Harvard, he entered a university in Berlin. While a pupil in Germany, he studied with some of the most important social scientists of his day, and was exposed to political perspectives that influenced him for the rest of his life.
Upon his return to the US, he published the landmark sociological study The Philadelphia Negro. This was the first study ever conducted within a Black community, and it represented the beginning of his expansive writing career. On top of the many books and essays that he published, he also co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as the editor of The Crisis monthly magazine, an NAACP publication. On August 27, 1963, Du Bois died in the middle of working on an encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, one day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech. He continues to be regarded as one of the most influential writers and social scientists of all time.
"W. E. B. DuBois: preeminent leader after Frederick Douglas: 1900" by Washington Area Spark is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 Image has been cropped
Guion S. Bluford
The first Black person in space
Bluford was born on November 22, 1942, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The son of a mechanical engineer and a teacher, he was strongly encouraged throughout his life to succeed in school, despite the discrimination he faced on account of his race. He graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in aerospace engineering and went on to serve in the Vietnam war, winning several medals for his accomplishments.
After the war, he enrolled in the Air Force Institute of Technology, where he received his masters and a PhD. At this point in his life, he decided that he wanted to go into space, and applied to NASA.
Out of 10,000 applicants, he was chosen, and in August of 1979, he officially became an astronaut. Shortly after, he made history, becoming the first African American to experience space travel. He flew the STS-8 mission aboard the Challenger shuttle, making 98 orbits in 145 hours. The mission ended on September 5, 1983, but not even two years later, Bluford made his second trip, this time for mission STS-61-A aboard Challenger.
Of course, after these missions, the Challenger shuttle experienced a fatal explosion, resulting in the deaths of seven crewmen. But despite the explosion and a herniated disk disease that nearly made his doctor ground him, he returned to space in 1991 aboard the orbiter Discovery and once again in 1992 on the same craft. After retiring from the air force and NASA, Bluford became vice president of NYMA Inc., a company providing engineering and IT services, and operated in some leadership roles as part of Northrop Grumman. With a total of 688 hours in space, this incredible astronaut took his place in the International Space Station Hall of Fame in 1997, and the US Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2010. Retired now, he is living a peaceful life with his wife and two children. But while his space career may be over, Bluford continues to advocate for space exploration through his speeches and his presidency of the Aerospace Technology Group in Ohio.
Fannie Lou Hamer
Influential activist for Black suffrage
Born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Michigan, this future activist was the youngest of 20 children. Her parents were poor sharecroppers and so she began working the fields when she was six.
At age 12, she quit the school she was attending and started to work full time to help finance her family. In 1944, she married Perry Hamer, and she worked with her new husband on a cotton plantation in Ruleville, Michigan.
Hamer was unable to have children because she was sterilized without her consent during a surgery to remove a uterine tumor. This forced sterilization was unfortunately rather common among the Black population in the United States at the time. Doctors would sterilize Black women because they believed that Black people shouldn't reproduce. Due to her inability to have biological children, Hamer and her husband adopted two daughters.
In 1962, Hamer attended a meeting of the SNCC, an organization that aimed to enable more Black people to vote. Bolstered by her collaboration with other Black activists, Hamer, among others, went to the Indianola Courthouse in August of 1962 in order to fill out a voting form. Most of these Black potential voters were forcibly stopped by law enforcement; out of the 17 people who went to fill out the forms, only Hamer and one other person were able to vote.
For Hamer, this event was life-changing. She was fired from her job and kicked out of the plantation at which she had worked for 20 years. She decided that she would spend the rest of her life fighting for Black suffrage.
But this bravery came at a great cost. She was threatened, arrested, beaten, and even shot at during the course of her activist career. When she was arrested in 1963, she was beaten so badly that she suffered permanent kidney damage.
Not only was she part of activist groups, she also helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, one which opposed the all-white delegation in the state at the time. Through her influence with this party, her voice was magnified, and she was able to inspire many others to fight alongside her.
She was so persistent that even when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1976, she continued to fight for equality. A year later, she died in a hospital in Mississippi.
Today, Hamer is considered one of the most influential activists of the 20th century. She is now buried at the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden in Ruleville, with a tombstone covered with one of her most famous quotes: "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."
Phillis Wheatley
First Black American to publish a book of poems
Born in 1753 in Senegal/Gambia, Wheatley was kidnapped and brought to Boston aboard a slave ship at the age of eight. When she arrived in the "new world," she was immediately "purchased" by John Wheatley as a servant for his wife. But unlike most slaves at the time, she was actually educated during her enslavement, learning to read and write in English, Latin, and even Greek. She wrote her first poem at the age of 13.
Wheatley continued to write poems and slowly gained fame. But some people still doubted that she wrote them, especially when she published her first and only book of verses: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Publishing this book was a landmark achievement for US history, as Wheatley became the first African American and enslaved person to publish a book of poems, as well as only the third woman to do so.
When the colonies began to hum with the spirit of independence, Wheatley immediately supported the cause, writing several poems honoring George Washington and the other Continental soldiers. Washington, in turn, invited her to see him in his headquarters in Massachusetts. And while the injustice of the persistence of slavery during this newfound period of "independence" would come to be appreciated later, Wheatley remained enslaved during this revolutionary era.
Shortly after the colonies declared independence, John Wheatley and his wife, who had originally "purchased" Phillis, died. She was freed from slavery at last.
In 1778, Phillis married a free Black person, John Peters, with whom she had three children. Devastatingly for Wheatley and her husband, all three of these children died in infancy.
After being freed, Wheatley was desperately poor. Eventually, Wheatley was forced to find work as a maid, despite continuing to write her beautiful poems. She was never able to publish her second volume of poetry before her death on December 5th, 1784.
This is Jamie’s second year at Edgewood and her first year on The Edge team. When she is not writing stories for The Edge, Jamie enjoys going on adventures, traveling and crafting. This year, she hopes to improve her interviewing skills.
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