The Great Archive
1,140 lives, written and kept
Each life here was written by the house and kept with a public proof anyone can check. Most carry their sources; those that do not yet say so plainly. Search by a name, a place, or a word you remember.
Newest
Oba Esigiec. 1504–1550 (reign) · West Africa · Early Modern
Victor Hugo1802–1885 · Europe · Modern- Al-Hajj Umar Tallc. 1794-1864 · West Africa · Modern
- Hintsa ka Khawutac. 1789-1835 · Southern Africa · Modern
Empress Theodorac. 500–548 · Europe · Medieval
Guru Gobind Singh1666–1708 · South Asia · Early Modern- Mutesa I of Bugandac. 1838-1884 · Africa · Modern
Johannes Kepler1571-1630 · Europe · Early Modern
Keōpūolanic. 1778-1823 · Oceania · Modern- Nehanda Nyakasikanac. 1840–1898 · Southern Africa · Modern
- Samori Tourec. 1830-1900 · West Africa · Modern
Bungareec. 1775-1830 · Australia, Oceania · Modern
Every life, by name
A
- A. G. Gaston1892 — 1996 · Alabama-born Birmingham financier; founder of the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company in 1923 and the Citizens Federal Savings Bank in 1957; principal underwriter of the 1963 Birmingham desegregation campaign
A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.1928 — 1998 · Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; principal twentieth-century historian of the American constitutional law of race
A. Philip Randolph1889 — 1979 · Organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; architect of the 1963 March on Washington- Aaron Douglas1899 — 1979 · Painter and muralist; the principal visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance
- Aaron Henry1922 — 1997 · "Doc" of Clarksdale; Mississippi NAACP's third-of-a-century president; he led the Freedom Democrats to Atlantic City
- Ababacar Samb-Makharam1934 — 1987 · Senegalese filmmaker; Kodou and Jom; Secretary-General of FEPACI in its founding years
Abbie Mitchell1884 — 1960 · New York-born soprano; original cast soprano of the Will Marion Cook opera Clorindy of 1898; Clara of the Theatre Guild premiere of Porgy and Bess of 1935- Abby Fisherc. 1831 — date unknown · Born enslaved in South Carolina; San Francisco's prize-winning preserver; her dictated 1881 cookbook is the second known by an African American
Abdias do Nascimento1914 — 2011 · Founder of the Teatro Experimental do Negro; Brazilian senator; theoretician of quilombismo and one of the architects of twentieth-century Black Brazilian thought
Absalom Jones1746 — 1818 · First African American ordained as an Episcopal priest; co-founder of the Free African Society
Abu al-Hasan al-Marrakushifl. Cairo, 13th century · Maghribi astronomer; the Jami' al-mabadi', the age's great encyclopedia of timekeeping; he measured the sky from the Sahara to Egypt
Ada Lovelace1815–1852 · Europe & Mediterranean · Modern
Adam Clayton Powell Jr.1908 — 1972 · United States Representative from Harlem from 1945 to 1971; chairman of the Education and Labor Committee; principal architect of the Great Society legislative programme
Addison Scurlock1883 — 1964 · The lens of Black Washington; Howard University's photographer; the Scurlock look, kept now by the Smithsonian
Adelaide Casely-Hayford1868 — 1960 · Sierra Leonean educator and feminist; founder of Freetown's Girls' Vocational School; she taught Africa to Africa's daughters
Afeni Shakur1947 — 2016 · Black Panther Party organiser and member of the Panther 21; defended herself successfully at the longest political trial in New York State history; mother and literary executor of Tupac Shakur
Afonso I of Kongoc. 1456–1543 · Kongo (Central Africa) · Early Modern
Agostinho Neto1922 — 1979 · First President of Angola; physician and poet who led the longest of the Portuguese-territory liberation wars
Ahmad al-Mansur1549 — 1603 · Sa'adi sultan of Morocco; victor of the Three Kings at al-Kasr al-Kabir; conqueror of the Songhai Empire at the battle of Tondibi- Ahmad Baba al-Massufi1556 — 1627 · Jurist of Timbuktu's golden age; exiled to Marrakesh and unbowed; author of the Mi'raj al-Su'ud against racial slavery
- Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti1556–1627 · Africa · Early Modern
Ahmadou Ahidjo1924 — 1989 · First President of Cameroon; reunified British and French Cameroons; resigned voluntarily after twenty-two years
Ahmadou Bamba1853-1927 · Senegal, West Africa · Modern
Ahmed Ben Bella1916 — 2012 · First President of Algeria; host of revolutionary Algiers; veteran of the longest African anti-colonial war
Ahmed Kathrada1929 — 2017 · Anti-apartheid activist and Rivonia Trial defendant; twenty-six years in apartheid imprisonment
Ahmed Sékou Touré1922–1984 · West Africa · Modern
Ahmes the Scribeabout 1680 BCE — about 1620 BCE ’ Thebes-born scribe of the Fifteenth or Sixteenth Dynasty of Egypt; principal copyist of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus of the Second Intermediate Period.
Aimé Césaire1913 — 2008 · Co-founder of Négritude; mayor of Fort-de-France for fifty-six years; author of Discourse on Colonialism
Akbar1542–1605 · South Asia · Early Modern
Akhenatenc. 1380 BCE — c. 1336 BCE · Pharaoh; first known sovereign to establish state monotheism; founder of Amarna
Al-Biruni973-1048 · Middle East/Persia · Medieval
Al-Farabic. 872–950 · Persia / Central Asia · Medieval
Al-Ghazali1058-1111 · Middle East & Persia · Medieval- Al-Hajj Umar Tallc. 1794-1864 · West Africa · Modern
Al-Khwarizmic. 780–850 · Middle East & Persia · Medieval- Al-Razi (Rhazes)c. 854–925 · Middle East & Persia · Medieval
- Alaafin Abiodun of Oyoc. 1730 — 1789 · Alaafin of Oyo at the imperial zenith of the kingdom; the last sovereign before the Oyo collapse
Alain Locke1885 — 1954 · First African American Rhodes Scholar; philosopher and editor of the Harlem Renaissance
Albert Cassell1895 — 1969 · Maryland-born architect; designer of the master plan of the Howard University campus across twenty years; founder of the Cassell, Gray and Sulton firm of Washington, D.C.
Albert Cleage1911 — 2000 · Founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna and of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church; principal theologian of mid-twentieth-century Black Christian Nationalism
Albert Luthuli1898 — 1967 · Zulu chief; ANC president 1952-67; first African to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (1960)
Albertina Sisulu1918 — 2011 · Anti-apartheid leader; co-president of the United Democratic Front; mother of the South African transition- Alex La Guma1924 — 1985 · Cape Town-born South African novelist and Communist Party organiser; author of the 1962 novel A Walk in the Night; recipient of the 1969 Lotus Prize for Literature
Alexander Crummell1819 — 1898 · Philosopher and Episcopal priest; founder of the American Negro Academy
Alexandre Dumas1802-1870 · African Diaspora (France) · Modern
Alexandre Pétion1770 — 1818 · President of the Republic of Haiti; the statesman who armed Simón Bolívar on condition of abolition
Ali Farka Touré1939 — 2006 · Malian guitarist and singer; principal twentieth-century exponent of the desert-blues tradition of the upper Niger; two-time Grammy winner
Ali Mazrui1933 — 2014 · Kenyan-American political scientist; author of The Africans; the most globally circulated African public intellectual of the late twentieth century- Allen E. Cole1893 — 1970 · West Virginia-born American studio portrait photographer; principal portraitist of the Cleveland, Ohio African American community across the 1920s through 1960s; founder of the Cole Studio at Cleveland in 1922
Alma Thomas1891 — 1978 · Painter of light in mosaic strokes; first Black woman given a solo exhibition at the Whitney; her Resurrection now hangs in the White House Collection
Alonzo Herndon1858 — 1927 · Georgia-born Atlanta barber and insurance founder; founder of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company in 1905; the first Black millionaire of the city of Atlanta
Althea Gibson1927 — 2003 · First African American to play at the United States Tennis Championships and at Wimbledon; first African American to win a Grand Slam tennis title
Alvin Ailey1931 — 1989 · Founder of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; Revelations carried the spirituals of his Texas childhood to more people than any modern dance ever made
Ama Ata Aidoo1942 — 2023 · Saltpond-born Ghanaian novelist and playwright; author of the 1977 novel Our Sister Killjoy; founder of the Mbaasem Foundation for African women writers at Accra
Amanirenasc. 60 BCE-10 BCE · Africa (Kush, Nubia) · Ancient
Amanishakhetoc. 1st century BCE · Nubia/Kush (Sudan) · Classical
Amanitorec. 1-20 CE · Africa · Classical- Amda Seyon Id. 1344 · Africa · Medieval
Amenhotep IIIc. 1388-1351 BCE · Africa · Ancient- Amina of Zazzauc. 1533–1610 · Africa · Early Modern
Amiri Baraka1934 — 2014 · Poet, playwright, and theorist of the Black Arts Movement; principal founder of the discipline as an organised movement in 1965
Amos Tutuola1920 — 1997 · Abeokuta-born Nigerian Yoruba novelist; author of the 1952 fantasy novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard — the first work by a writer in English from sub-Saharan Africa published in London
Amy Jacques Garvey1895 — 1973 · Jamaica-born Pan-Africanist editor and writer; principal editor of the closing-period Negro World newspaper of the Universal Negro Improvement Association; principal Pan-African feminist of the closing decade of the inter-war period
Amzie Moore1911 — 1982 · Mississippi-born NAACP organiser; president of the Cleveland, Mississippi NAACP branch from 1955 to 1982; the principal Mississippi Delta organiser-and-mentor of Bob Moses and the 1961 SNCC Mississippi Delta voter-registration campaigns
Amílcar Cabral1924 — 1973 · Founder of the PAIGC; agronomist and liberation theorist; assassinated nine months before independence
Anacaonac. 1474-1503 · Americas (Hispaniola) · Early Modern
Andimba Toivo ya Toivo1924 — 2017 · Co-founder of SWAPO; the principal organizer of Namibian independence; sixteen years on Robben Island- Andrew Hill1931 — 2007 · Chicago-born American jazz pianist and composer; principal Blue Note pianist-composer of the principal post-1963 American post-bop tradition; founder of the Andrew Hill Sextet at New York in 1964
Andrew Salkey1928 — 1995 · Jamaican-British novelist, broadcaster, and editor; co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement
André Leon Talley1948 — 2022 · The first African American man to serve as Vogue's creative director; a life in capes, held regally
André Rebouças1838 — 1898 · Engineer of the Brazilian Empire; co-founder of the radical abolitionist movement; designer of the port of Rio de Janeiro
Andrée Blouin1921 — 1986 · Pan-Africanist organizer and writer; chief of protocol in Lumumba's Congo; author of My Country, Africa
Ann Lowec. 1898 — 1981 · America's first Black couturière of name; she made the most photographed wedding dress in American history, and the age withheld her name
Anna Julia Cooper1858 — 1964 · Scholar and educator; author of A Voice from the South; the fourth Black woman in America to earn a doctorate- Anne Brown1912 — 2009 · Baltimore-born soprano; the original Bess in the 1935 premiere of Porgy and Bess; principal concert and operatic soprano of Norway across forty years
Anne Spencer1882 — 1975 · Henry County-born American poet; principal Harlem Renaissance poet resident in Virginia; founder and head librarian of the Dunbar High School library at Lynchburg, Virginia from 1923 to 1945
Annie Easley1933 — 2011 · NASA computer scientist and rocket scientist; principal programmer of the Centaur upper-stage rocket whose technology launched Cassini-Huygens and the Galileo missions- Annie Lee Cooper1910 — 2010 · Selma voter-registration activist; struck Selma Sheriff Jim Clark at the Dallas County Courthouse, January 1965
Annie Turnbo Malone1869 — 1957 · Beauty entrepreneur and philanthropist; founder of Poro College; Madam C. J. Walker's predecessor and the principal philanthropic figure of early-twentieth-century Black America- Anthony McNeill1941 — 1996 · Jamaican poet; principal Black-Jamaican poetic voice of the post-independence generation; author of Reel from The Life Movie and Credences at the Altar of Cloud
Anthony Overton1865 — 1946 · Louisiana-born Chicago manufacturer and banker; founder of the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company in 1898, the Victory Life Insurance Company in 1924, and the Douglass National Bank of Chicago in 1922
Anton Wilhelm Amoc. 1703 — c. 1759 · Axim-born Ghanaian philosopher; the first African to teach philosophy at a European university (Halle, Wittenberg, Jena, 1730-1747); author of On the Impassivity of the Human Mind of 1734
Antonio Maceo1845 — 1896 · Cuban general; the Bronze Titan whose Invasion of the West broke Spanish rule
Anténor Firmin1850 — 1911 · Haitian diplomat and anthropologist; the first writer to systematically dismantle European racial pseudoscience
Apirana Ngata1874-1950 · Oceania · Modern
Archimedesc. 287–212 BCE · Europe & Mediterranean · Classical
Aretha Franklin1942 — 2018 · The Queen of Soul; eighteen-time Grammy winner; first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Aristotle384–322 BCE · Europe & Mediterranean · Classical
Art Tatum1909 — 1956 · Toledo-born American jazz pianist; principal virtuoso pianist of the principal swing-and-bebop American jazz tradition; bandleader of the Art Tatum Trio from 1943 to 1956
Arthur Ashe1943 — 1993 · Three-time Grand Slam singles champion; the only African American man to win Wimbledon, the US Open, or the Australian Open- Arthur McGee1933 — 2019 · Newark-born American couturier; first Black designer to lead a Seventh Avenue New York fashion-house showroom in 1957; principal pioneer of the African-print Black-American couture tradition of the 1960s and 1970s
Arthur Mitchell1934 — 2018 · New York-born ballet dancer and choreographer; the first African American principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, on the fourteenth of November 1955; co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969
Aryabhata476–550 · South Asia · Medieval- Asadata Dafora1890 — 1965 · Sierra Leone-born choreographer; principal early concert-dance figure of the African body on the American stage; choreographer of the 1934 Carnegie Hall debut of Kykunkor, the first African dance-drama on a major American stage
Ashokac. 304–232 BCE · South Asia · Classical
Askia Muhammad the Greatc. 1443 — 1538 · Founder of the Askia dynasty of the Songhai Empire; pilgrim of 1497; sovereign under whom Timbuktu and Jenne reached their classical scholarly age- Askia the Greatc. 1443–1538 · Africa · Early Modern
Assia Djebar1936 — 2015 · Cherchell-born Algerian novelist and filmmaker; first Algerian elected to the Académie française in 2005; recipient of the 1996 Neustadt International Prize for Literature
Atahualpac. 1502–1533 · Andes · Early Modern
Audre Lorde1934 — 1992 · Poet and theorist; the most cited Black feminist intellectual of the late twentieth century
August Wilson1945 — 2005 · Playwright; the ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle; the only Black American with a Broadway theater in his name
Augusta Savage1892 — 1962 · Sculptor; founder of the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts; principal teacher of the Harlem Renaissance generation of sculptors
Augustine of Hippo354-430 · Africa · Classical- Augustus Washington1820 — 1875 · Trenton-born American daguerreotypist; principal Black-American daguerreotypist of the 1840s and 1850s; emigrant to Liberia in 1853 and founder of the Washington Studio at Monrovia
B
B. B. King1925 — 2015 · The King of the Blues; principal twentieth-century shaper of electric blues guitar; performer of an estimated fifteen thousand concerts across sixty-six years
B. Smith1949 — 2020 · Model, restaurateur, and lifestyle pioneer; among the first Black models on Mademoiselle's cover; the table she set welcomed a nation- B.R. Ambedkar1891–1956 · India · Modern
- Ban Chao32-102 CE · East Asia · Classical
Ban Zhaoc. 45–116 · China · Ancient
Barbara Jordan1936 — 1996 · United States Representative from Texas; first African American to deliver a keynote address at a major American political-party national convention; principal House Judiciary Committee voice of the 1974 Watergate impeachment hearings
Bartolina Sisac. 1750s-1782 · The Americas · Early Modern- Bartolomé de las Casas1484-1566 · Europe (Spain) · Early Modern
Bayard Rustin1912 — 1987 · Chief strategist of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; pioneer Quaker pacifist and architect of nonviolent direct action in the American civil-rights movement
Beauford Delaney1901 — 1979 · Painter of luminous yellow; James Baldwin's spiritual father; Knoxville to Greenwich Village to Paris, keeping the light the whole way
Behanzin1845 — 1906 · Last king of Dahomey; commander of the Dahomey Amazons; resisted French conquest to defeat
bell hooks1952 — 2021 · Feminist theorist; cultural critic; the theorist who carried Sojourner Truth's voice into the late twentieth century
Benito Juárez1806–1872 · Mexico · Modern
Benjamin Banneker1731 — 1806 · Astronomer, surveyor, and almanac-maker; member of the survey team that laid out Washington, D.C.
Benjamin O. Davis Jr.1912 — 2002 · Washington, D.C.-born United States Air Force officer; commander of the 332nd Fighter Group of the Tuskegee Airmen between 1943 and 1945; the first African American general of the United States Air Force
Benjamin O. Davis Sr.1880 — 1970 · Washington, D.C.-born United States Army officer; the first African American to attain the rank of general officer in the regular United States Army, on the twenty-fifth of October 1940
Benjamin S. Turner1825 — 1894 · Born enslaved; Selma's first Black councilman; the first African American to represent Alabama in Congress
Bernie Grant1944 — 2000 · Guyanese-British politician; first Black Member of Parliament for Tottenham; among the first four Black MPs in modern British history- Bert Andrews1929 — 1993 · Chicago-born American theatre photographer; principal documentary photographer of the New York Black theatre community from the 1960s through the 1990s; principal stage photographer of the Negro Ensemble Company and the New Federal Theatre
Beryl McBurnie1913 — 2000 · Trinidadian dancer and choreographer; founder of the Little Carib Theatre; principal twentieth-century recoverer of Trinidadian and Tobagonian folk-dance traditions
Bessie Coleman1892 — 1926 · Texas-born aviator; the first Black woman in the world to hold an international pilot’s licence — issued by the Fédération aéronautique internationale on the fifteenth of June 1921
Bessie Head1937 — 1986 · Pietermaritzburg-born South African–Botswanan novelist; author of the 1968 novel When Rain Clouds Gather; principal voice of the Serowe expatriate writing community of Botswana
Bessie Smith1894 — 1937 · Empress of the Blues; the most popular Black recording artist of the 1920s
Beverly Loraine Greene1915 — 1957 · Illinois-born architect; the first African American woman to be a licensed architect in the United States, in the state of Illinois in 1942; member of the United Nations Headquarters Secretariat Building design team
Bibi Titi Mohammedthe eighth of October 1926 — the sixth of November 2000 ’ Dar es Salaam-born Tanganyikan organizer; principal founder of the women's wing of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) of 1955; principal organizer of the rural recruitment campaigns of the 1958 TANU-and-Nyerere independence vote.
Big L1974 — 1999 · Harlem-born rapper; principal local-circuit lyricist of late-1990s East Coast hip-hop; killed by gunfire in Harlem on the fifteenth of February 1999
Bildad Kaggia1922 — 2005 · Kenyan freedom fighter; Kapenguria Six defendant alongside Jomo Kenyatta; principal radical voice of Kenyan independence
Bill "Bojangles" Robinson1878 — 1949 · The most celebrated tap dancer of his era; first Black solo headliner of vaudeville; first Black entertainer to perform in a major film as an equal partner with a white star
Bill Gunn1934 — 1989 · Philadelphia-born American filmmaker and playwright; director of Ganja & Hess of 1973 and Personal Problems of 1981; principal Black-American avant-garde auteur of the 1970s
Bill Russell1934 — 2022 · Center of the Boston Celtics from 1956 to 1969; winner of eleven NBA championships in thirteen seasons; first African American head coach of any major North American professional team
Billie Holiday1915 — 1959 · Singer; Lady Day; the voice that defined American jazz phrasing for the next sixty years
Biz Markie1964 — 2021 · Long Island rapper, producer and disc jockey; the Clown Prince of Hip-Hop; recorder of Just a Friend; defendant of Grand Upright Music Ltd v. Warner Bros. Records
Blanche K. Bruce1841 — 1898 · Second African American U.S. Senator; first to serve a full term and preside over the body
Bob Kaufman1925 — 1986 · New Orleans-born American poet; principal Black-American Beat poet of the 1950s and 1960s San Francisco Beat literary scene; co-founder of the magazine Beatitude in 1959
Bob Marley1945 — 1981 · The principal Jamaican exponent of reggae music; founder of The Wailers; the most widely-circulated Black-Atlantic artist of the second half of the twentieth century
Bob Moses1935 — 2021 · New York-born SNCC field organiser; principal architect of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer; founder of the Algebra Project in 1982
Bobby Hutton1950 — 1968 · First member to join the Black Panther Party; treasurer of the founding Oakland chapter; killed by Oakland Police on the sixth of April 1968 — two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Booker Little1938 — 1961 · Memphis-born jazz trumpeter and composer; Out Front and the Five Spot nights with Eric Dolphy; gone at twenty-three
Booker T. Washington1856 — 1915 · Educator; founder of the Tuskegee Institute; most institutionally consequential Black American of his generation
Boudicad. c. 60-61 CE · Europe · Ancient- Boukman Duttyc. 1740 — 1791 · Houngan priest who began the Haitian Revolution at Bois Caïman
Brenda Fassie1964 — 2004 · South African singer; the Madonna of the Townships; principal pan-African popular-music voice of the post-apartheid first decade
Buchi Emecheta1944 — 2017 · Lagos-born Nigerian Igbo novelist; author of the 1979 novel The Joys of Motherhood; the first Black African woman novelist to support herself wholly by writing in English
Bud Powell1924 — 1966 · Bebop's foremost pianist by wide regard; The Amazing Bud Powell; a genius the world handled without care
Bunchy Carter1942 — 1969 · Founder of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party; killed at the UCLA Campbell Hall meeting of the eighteenth of January 1969- Bungareec. 1775-1830 · Australia, Oceania · Modern
C
- C. Alfred Anderson1907 — 1996 · Pennsylvania-born aviator; principal flight instructor of the Tuskegee Institute Civilian Pilot Training Program of 1939 and the Tuskegee Army Air Field of 1941; known across his career as ‘Chief Anderson’ or ‘the Father of Black Aviation’
C. L. R. James1901 — 1989 · Trinidad-born historian, novelist and revolutionary; principal Trotskyist Pan-Africanist intellectual of the inter-war period; author of The Black Jacobins of 1938
C. T. Vivian1924 — 2020 · Baptist minister; SCLC field organiser; principal director of the Selma voter-registration confrontations of February 1965
Cab Calloway1907 — 1994 · Bandleader, singer and entertainer; principal Black bandleader of the Cotton Club from 1931 to 1940; pioneer of jazz scat singing
Cai Lunc. 50–121 · East Asia · Classical- Calvin Hernton1932 — 2001 · Chattanooga-born American poet and sociologist; author of The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong of 1964 and Sex and Racism in America of 1965; co-founder of the Umbra poets collective at New York in 1962
- Calvin McKissack1890 — 1968 · Tennessee-born architect; co-founder of the McKissack & McKissack firm; the first registered African American architect of the state of Tennessee in 1924
- Camara Laye1928 — 1980 · Kouroussa-born Guinean novelist; author of the 1953 autobiographical novel L’Enfant noir (The African Child); recipient of the 1954 Prix Charles Veillon
Camilla Williams1919 — 2012 · Virginia-born soprano; the first Black singer to have a regular contract with a major American opera company — the New York City Opera, on the fifteenth of May 1946
Camille Billops1933 — 2019 · Los Angeles-born American filmmaker, sculptor, and archivist; director of Suzanne Suzanne of 1982 and Finding Christa of 1991, the principal autobiographical Black-American documentary essay films of the 1980s and 1990s
Canada Lee1907 — 1952 · Stage and screen actor; star of Orson Welles's 1941 Native Son; principal anti-fascist activist of the post-war stage; destroyed by the Hollywood blacklist
Captain Cudjoec. 1690s — c. 1764 · War leader of Jamaica's Leeward Maroons; the 1739 treaty that made his people's freedom law — carried here whole, hard clause and all
Carl Rowan1925 — 2000 · Tennessee-born journalist and diplomat; Ambassador to Finland from 1963 to 1964; Director of the United States Information Agency from 1964 to 1965 — the first African American on the National Security Council
Carl Stokes1927 — 1996 · First African American mayor of a major American city; mayor of Cleveland from 1968 to 1971; brother of Louis Stokes- Carlton Moss1909 — 1997 · Newark-born American filmmaker and screenwriter; writer-director of The Negro Soldier of 1944, the principal United States Army Signal Corps documentary on the Black-American Second-World-War soldier; founder of the Frederick Douglass Film Company in 1955
- Carolyn Rodgers1940 — 2010 · Chicago poet of the Black Arts Movement; co-founder of Third World Press; author of how i got ovah
Carter G. Woodson1875 — 1950 · Historian; founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History; father of Black History Month
Caterina Jarboro1903 — 1986 · North Carolina-born soprano; the first Black singer to perform a leading role with a major American opera company — the title role of Verdi’s Aïda at the Chicago Civic Opera, in July 1933
Catherine the Great1729–1796 · Europe · Early Modern- Cecil Poole1914 — 1997 · Alabama-born attorney and judge; the first African American United States Attorney of the Northern District of California, in 1961; United States Court of Appeals Judge of the Ninth Circuit from 1979 to 1997
Cecil Taylor1929 — 2018 · New York-born American jazz pianist and composer; principal pianist of the principal post-1956 American free-jazz tradition; founder of the Cecil Taylor Unit at New York in 1962
Cesária Évora1941 — 2011 · Cape Verdean singer; the Barefoot Diva; principal twentieth-century interpreter of the morna tradition of the Cape Verde Islands
Cetshwayo kaMpandec. 1826-1884 · Africa · Modern
Chanakyac. 350-283 BCE · South Asia · Classical- Chandragupta IIc. 380-415 · South Asia · Classical
Chandragupta Mauryac. 340–297 BCE · South Asia · Classical
Charlemagnec. 742-814 · Europe · Medieval
Charles "Teenie" Harris1908 — 1998 · Pittsburgh-born American photojournalist; staff photographer of the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1975; principal documentary photographer of the African American Pittsburgh community of the mid-twentieth century
Charles Alston1907 — 1977 · North Carolina-born painter, sculptor and muralist; the first African American supervisor of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in 1935; sculptor of the bronze bust of Martin Luther King Jr. at the White House
Charles Clinton Spaulding1874 — 1952 · North Carolina-born insurance executive; president of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company across thirty-three years; principal architect of the Durham Black business district known as Black Wall Street
Charles Darwin1809-1882 · Europe (England) · Modern- Charles Deslondesc. 1789 — 1811 · Leader of the German Coast Uprising, the largest slave revolt in U.S. history
Charles Diggs1922 — 1998 · Founding chair of the Congressional Black Caucus; United States Representative from Michigan's thirteenth district from 1955 to 1980
Charles Drew1904 — 1950 · Surgeon and pioneer of blood-banking; founder of the American Red Cross blood programme; first African American to receive the doctorate of medical science from Columbia
Charles E. McGee1919 — 2022 · Ohio-born United States Air Force officer; Tuskegee Airman of the 302nd and 100th Fighter Squadrons; flew the highest combat-mission count of any United States Air Force pilot across the three wars of the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam
Charles E. Nash1844 — 1913 · Louisiana-born politician; the only African American congressman from the state of Louisiana of the Reconstruction era, on the fourth of March 1875
Charles Evers1922 — 2020 · Mississippi-born NAACP Mississippi field secretary; successor of his brother Medgar Evers on the assassination of June 1963; the first Black mayor of any Mississippi city in the post-Reconstruction period, at Fayette in 1969
Charles Hamilton Houston1895 — 1950 · Dean of Howard Law; the lawyer who designed the legal strategy that produced Brown v. Board of Education- Charles Harrison Mason1864 — 1961 · Founder and senior bishop of the Church of God in Christ; presiding bishop of the largest Black Pentecostal denomination in the world
Charles Mingus1922 — 1979 · Bassist, composer, and bandleader; the most ambitious large-form jazz composer after Duke Ellington
Charles Rangel1930 — 2024 · United States Representative from New York's Harlem district for forty-six years from 1971 to 2017; first African American chair of the House Ways and Means Committee
Charles W. Chesnutt1858 — 1932 · Novelist and short-story writer; first African American writer of fiction to receive sustained critical and commercial recognition from a mainstream American press- Charles W. Mills1951 — 2021 · London-born Jamaican philosopher; The Racial Contract; he made political philosophy say the word it had built itself around
Charles White1918 — 1979 · Painter and graphic artist; teacher to two generations at the Otis Art Institute; principal social-realist of mid-century African American art
Charlotte Forten Grimké1837 — 1914 · First Black teacher in a Northern white public school; chronicler of the Port Royal Experiment
Charlotte Maxeke1871 — 1939 · First Black South African woman to earn a Bachelor's degree; founder of the Bantu Women's League
Cheddi Jagan1918 — 1997 · Premier and later President of Guyana; the dentist whose Marxism the British and Americans removed from office three times
Cheikh Anta Diop1923 — 1986 · Senegalese polymath; restored African origins to ancient Egyptian civilization
Chief Josephc. 1840–1904 · Indigenous North America · Modern
Chief Powhatanc. 1547-1618 · The Americas (Virginia) · Early Modern
Chinua Achebe1930 — 2013 · Nigerian novelist; author of Things Fall Apart; founder of modern African literature in English
Chris Hani1942 — 1993 · General Secretary of the South African Communist Party; assassinated weeks before the formal transition- Chuck Stewart1927 — 2017 · Henrietta-born American photographer; principal portraitist of the American jazz tradition from the 1950s through the 2010s; photographer of approximately two thousand album covers across his career
Cicely Tyson1924 — 2021 · Actress of the American stage and screen; three-time Emmy winner; the first African American Tony Award winner for Best Actress in a Play
Claude McKay1889-1948 · African Diaspora (Jamaica/United States) · Modern
Claudia Jones1915 — 1964 · Trinidadian-British journalist and political organizer; founder of the Notting Hill Carnival
Cleopatra VII Philopator69 BCE — 30 BCE · Last pharaoh of Egypt; the most politically formidable woman of the classical Mediterranean world- Cleora Butler1901 — 1985 · Waxahachie-born American chef and cookbook author; author of Cleora's Kitchens: Eight Decades of Great American Food of 1985; principal Tulsa, Oklahoma Black-American chef-and-caterer of the post-Tulsa-race-massacre Black-community
Clifton R. Wharton Sr.1899 — 1990 · Massachusetts-born career diplomat; the first African American to enter the United States Foreign Service as a career officer in 1925; the first African American chief of mission with the rank of Ambassador, to Romania in 1958- Coffyabout 1735 — about the twentieth of April 1763 ’ West African-born Akan-Coromantee commander of the Dutch colony of Berbice; principal Governor of the principal Berbice Slave Revolt of the twenty-third of February to the twentieth of April 1763.
Coleman Young1918 — 1997 · First African American mayor of Detroit; served five consecutive terms from 1974 to 1994; Tuskegee Airman of the Second World War
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson1932 — 2004 · Manhattan-born composer and conductor; co-founder of the 1965 Symphony of the New World; principal conductor of the Negro Ensemble Company orchestra
Confucius551–479 BCE · East Asia · Classical- Conrad Kent Rivers1933 — 1968 · Atlantic City-born American poet; author of The Wright Poems of 1971 (posthumous); principal Black-Arts-Movement poet of the OBAC Chicago canon; co-editor of the Negro Digest poetic section
Constance Baker Motley1921 — 2005 · First African American woman appointed to the federal judiciary; principal trial-court litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the desegregation of southern higher education
Constance Cummings-Johnthe seventh of January 1918 — the twenty-first of February 2000 ’ Freetown-born Sierra Leonean educator, parliamentarian and Mayor of Freetown; one of the principal first three women elected to the Freetown Municipality of 1938; founder of the Sierra Leone Women's Movement of 1951; Mayor of Freetown 1966 to 1967.- Cora T. Walker1922 — 2006 · North Carolina-born attorney; the first African American woman admitted to the bar of the state of New York in 1946; co-founder of the Harlem Lawyers’ Association
- Coreen Simpson1942 — 2022 · New York-born American studio portrait photographer and fashion-jewelry designer; principal portraitist of the late-twentieth-century Black hip-hop and downtown New York creative community
Coretta Scott King1927 — 2006 · First lady of the movement in her own right; founder of The King Center; she led the fifteen-year campaign that made the King holiday law- Cornelius Coffey1903 — 1994 · Arkansas-born Chicago aviator; founder of the Coffey School of Aeronautics at the Harlem Airport at Oak Lawn, Illinois in 1938; the first African American to hold both a Department of Commerce mechanic’s licence and pilot’s licence
Cornelius Marion Battey1873 — 1927 · Augusta-born American studio portrait photographer; founder of the Tuskegee Institute photography department in 1916; principal portraitist of the early-twentieth-century Black American intellectual leadership
Count Basie1904 — 1984 · Bandleader of the Kansas City swing; One O'Clock Jump; among the first two Black artists ever to win a Grammy
Crazy Horsec. 1840–1877 · Americas (North America) · Modern
Crispus Attucksc. 1723 — 1770 · First man killed at the Boston Massacre; the first casualty of the American Revolution
Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen (Amha Selassie)1916 — 1997 · Harar-born Crown Prince of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974; titular Emperor of Ethiopia in exile from 1989 to 1997; eldest son of Emperor Haile Selassie I
Cuauhtémocc. 1495–1525 · Mesoamerica · Early Modern
Curt Flood1938 — 1997 · Centerfielder of the St. Louis Cardinals from 1958 to 1969; principal twentieth-century challenger of major-league baseball's reserve clause; foundational figure of player free agency
Curtis Mayfield1942 — 1999 · Singer, songwriter and guitarist; founder of the Impressions; principal social-conscience voice of post-civil-rights soul music; composer of the 1972 Super Fly soundtrack
Cyprian Ekwensi1921 — 2007 · Minna-born Nigerian Igbo novelist; author of the 1961 novel Jagua Nana — the first popular-fiction novel of urban Nigerian life of the late colonial period
Cyrus the Greatc. 600–530 BCE · Middle East & Persia · Classical
Cécile Fatimanc. 1771 — c. 1883 · Mambo of the Bois Caïman ceremony; mother of the Haitian Revolution
D
Daddy Grace1881 — 1960 · Founder of the United House of Prayer for All People; bishop of one of the largest African American Pentecostal denominations of the twentieth century
Daisy Bates1914 — 1999 · Arkansas-born NAACP organiser; principal mentor of the Little Rock Nine in the 1957 desegregation of the Central High School at Little Rock; president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP Branches from 1952 to 1961
Dambudzo Marechera1952 — 1987 · Rusape-born Zimbabwean novelist and poet; author of the 1978 novella The House of Hunger; co-winner of the 1979 Guardian First Book Award
Damon Keith1922 — 2019 · Senior Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; author of the unanimous panel opinion in United States v. Sinclair (1971) striking down warrantless domestic wiretapping- Dandara dos Palmaresd. 1694 · Warrior and co-strategist of the Palmares confederation; partner of Zumbi and a founding figure of Afro-Brazilian women's resistance
Daniel A. Payne1811 — 1893 · AME bishop; first African American president of an institution of higher education (Wilberforce University, 1863)
Daniel arap Moi1924 — 2020 · Second President of Kenya; twenty-four years in office; presided over the transition from one-party rule to multi-party democracy
Daniel Hale Williams1856 — 1931 · Surgeon; performed the first documented successful open-heart surgery (1893)
Daniel ‘Chappie’ James Jr.1920 — 1978 · Florida-born United States Air Force officer; the first African American to attain the rank of four-star general in the regular United States armed forces, on the first of September 1975
Dante Alighieri1265–1321 · Europe (Italy) · Medieval
Darcus Howe1943 — 2017 · Trinidadian-British political organizer, journalist, and broadcaster; principal voice of Black British radical politics across five decades
Darius Ic. 550-486 BCE · Persia · Ancient
David Dinkins1927 — 2020 · First and only African American mayor of New York City; served one four-year term from 1990 to 1993
David Unaipon1872–1967 · Oceania · Modern- David Walkerc. 1796 — 1830 · Pamphleteer whose Appeal galvanized militant American abolitionism
Dedan Kimathi1920 — 1957 · Field Marshal of the Mau Mau; the principal military commander of Kenyan armed resistance to British colonial rule- Denmark Veseyc. 1767 — 1822 · Charleston AME minister and leader of the largest planned slave revolt in the southern United States
- Dennis Scott1939 — 1991 · Kingston-born Jamaican poet and playwright; author of Uncle Time of 1973 and Dreadwalk of 1982; principal Jamaican poet of the post-Rastafari Caribbean literary tradition
Derek Walcott1930 — 2017 · Saint Lucian poet and playwright; Nobel laureate in Literature (1992); author of Omeros
Diahann Carroll1935 — 2019 · First African American actress to star in a non-stereotypical leading role in an American network television series — Julia (1968 to 1971); Tony Award winner; Academy Award nominee- Dihya (Kahina)c. 640-703 · Africa (North Africa) · Medieval
Dizzy Gillespie1917 — 1993 · Trumpeter, composer, and bandleader; co-founder of bebop and the Afro-Cuban jazz tradition
DJ Kay Slay1966 — 2022 · Harlem-born disc jockey, graffiti writer and mixtape impresario; the Drama King; principal architect of the 1990s and 2000s New York hip-hop mixtape economy
DJ Screw1971 — 2000 · Houston-born disc jockey; inventor of the chopped-and-screwed mixtape technique; founder of the Screwed Up Click of South Houston rappers
Djibril Diop Mambéty1945 — 1998 · Colobane-born Senegalese filmmaker; director of Touki Bouki of 1973 and Hyènes of 1992; principal stylistic auteur of West African cinema
DMX1970 — 2021 · Yonkers-born rapper and actor; the Dark Man X; the only artist in commercial-music history to have his first five albums debut at number one on the Billboard 200
Don Pullen1941 — 1995 · Roanoke-born American jazz pianist and composer; principal post-free-jazz pianist of the principal post-1972 American post-free-jazz period; co-founder of the Pullen-Adams Quartet at New York in 1979
Donald M. Payne1934 — 2012 · New Jersey-born politician; the first African American elected to the United States Congress from New Jersey, in November 1988; chair of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa from 2007 to 2010
Donald McKayle1930 — 2018 · Choreographer of Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder; the first Black man to both direct and choreograph major Broadway musicals
Donny Hathaway1945 — 1979 · Singer, songwriter, pianist and arranger; principal architect of the early-1970s soul ballad and one of the great male vocal stylists of his generation- Dorothy Cotton1930 — 2018 · North Carolina-born civil-rights organiser; director of the SCLC Citizenship Education Programme from 1960 to 1972; principal closing-period SCLC senior-Black-female education-director of the SCLC closing-period programmes of the 1960 to 1972 SCLC closing-period programmes
Dorothy Dandridge1922 — 1965 · First African American actress nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role — for Carmen Jones (1954)
Dorothy Height1912 — 2010 · Virginia-born civil-rights organiser; president of the National Council of Negro Women from 1957 to 1997; recipient of the 1994 Presidential Medal of Freedom and the 2004 Congressional Gold Medal
Dorothy Maynor1910 — 1996 · Virginia-born soprano; principal Black recitalist of the 1940s American concert circuit; founder of the Harlem School of the Arts in 1964
Dorothy Vaughan1910 — 2008 · Mathematician and computer programmer at NACA-Langley; head of the West Area Computers from 1949 to 1958 — the first Black supervisor at the agency
Driss Chraïbi1926 — 2007 · Mazagan-born Moroccan novelist; author of the 1954 novel Le Passé simple — the founding novel of the modern francophone Moroccan literature
Du Fu712–770 · East Asia (China) · Medieval
Duke Ellington1899 — 1974 · Composer; led his orchestra for fifty-one years — the longest sustained orchestral leadership in American music- Dutty Boukmand. 1791 · African Diaspora · Early Modern
E
E. D. Nixon1899 — 1987 · Alabama-born Pullman porter and civil-rights organiser; president of the Montgomery NAACP branch; the principal organiser of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956; Rosa Parks’s bondsman on the night of her arrest
E. Franklin Frazier1894 — 1962 · Sociologist; first African American president of the American Sociological Association
Earl 'Fatha' Hines1903 — 1983 · Duquesne-born American jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader; founder of the Earl Hines Orchestra at the Grand Terrace Cafe at Chicago in 1928; principal trumpet-style jazz pianist of the principal early-and-swing-era American jazz tradition
Earl Graves Sr.1935 — 2020 · New York-born publisher; founder of Black Enterprise magazine in 1970; principal architect of the Black Enterprise 100 list of largest Black-owned American companies
Earl Lloyd1928 — 2015 · First African American to play in a National Basketball Association game; member of the 1955 NBA Champion Syracuse Nationals
Eartha Kitt1927 — 2008 · Singer, actress and cabaret performer; first Black Catwoman; Tony, Grammy and Emmy nominee; the most recognisable single voice of mid-century international cabaret
Eazy-E1963 — 1995 · Co-founder of N.W.A; founder of Ruthless Records; principal architect of the West Coast gangsta-rap commercial canon
Ebenezer Bassett1833 — 1908 · Connecticut-born educator and diplomat; the first African American chief of an American diplomatic mission — United States Minister Resident to Haiti, on the second of June 1869- Eddie Mabo1936–1992 · Oceania · Modern
Edith Sampson1901 — 1979 · Pennsylvania-born attorney and diplomat; the first African American delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, on the twenty-second of August 1950; the first African American woman to be elected an associate judge of the Cook County Circuit Court at Chicago, in 1962
Edmond Dédé1827 — 1901 · New Orleans-born Afro-Creole violinist and composer; conductor of the Orchestre de l’Alcazar at Bordeaux for twenty-seven years; the first Black composer to lead a French municipal orchestra
Edmonia Lewisc. 1844 — 1907 · Sculptor; first sculptor of African and Native American descent to receive international recognition- Edna Guy1907 — 1982 · New Jersey-born modernist dancer; the first African American student at the Denishawn School in 1924; principal Black-American figure of the early concert-dance Negro-spirituals dance-cycle of the inter-war period
Edna Lewis1916 — 2006 · Freetown-born American chef and cookbook author; author of The Edna Lewis Cookbook of 1972 and The Taste of Country Cooking of 1976; principal matriarch of the modern Black-American Southern culinary tradition
Eduardo Mondlane1920 — 1969 · Founder of FRELIMO; assassinated by parcel bomb three years before Mozambican independence
Edward Bouchet1852 — 1918 · First African American to earn a PhD from any American university (Yale, physics, 1876)
Edward Brooke1919 — 2015 · United States Senator from Massachusetts from 1967 to 1979; first African American popularly elected to the United States Senate
Edward C. Gleed1916 — 1990 · Missouri-born United States Army Air Forces officer; deputy commander of the 332nd Fighter Group of the Tuskegee Airmen at the Italian theatre; one of the senior leaders of the 1948 desegregation of the United States Air Force
Edward Wilmot Blyden1832 — 1912 · Liberian statesman and intellectual; the nineteenth-century intellect from whom Pan-Africanism descends
Eldridge Cleaver1935 — 1998 · Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party from 1966 to 1971; author of Soul on Ice; presidential candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968
Eleanor of Aquitainec. 1122-1204 · Europe · Medieval- Eleo Pomare1937 — 2008 · Colombia-born concert-dance choreographer; principal Black-American Black-Power-era concert-dance choreographer; choreographer of the 1966 Junkie
Elijah McCoy1844 — 1929 · Canadian-born inventor; patented the automatic lubricating cup for steam engines whose reliability gave the English language the phrase the real McCoy
Elijah Muhammad1897 — 1975 · Leader of the Nation of Islam from 1934 to 1975; principal organiser of African American Islamic religious life through the mid-twentieth century
Elizabeth Catlett1915 — 2012 · Sculptor and printmaker; principal artist of African American and Mexican social-realist tradition- Elizabeth Freemanc. 1744-1829 · African Diaspora · Early Modern
Elizabeth I1533-1603 · England, Europe · Early Modern
Elizabeth Keckleyc. 1818 — 1907 · Born enslaved; bought her freedom and repaid the loan; modiste and confidante to Mary Lincoln; founder of wartime relief for the freedpeople
Ella Baker1903 — 1986 · Civil-rights strategist; founder of SNCC; the architect of decentralized organizing
Ella Fitzgerald1917 — 1996 · First Lady of Song; thirteen-time Grammy winner; the canonical singer of the American Songbook- Elliot P. Skinner1924 — 2007 · Trinidad-born anthropologist and diplomat; the first African American Career Ambassador of the United States Foreign Service, in 1978; Ambassador to the Republic of Upper Volta from 1966 to 1969
Emperor Bakaffac. 1690 — 1730 · Solomonic Emperor of Ethiopia from 1721 to 1730; restorer of imperial authority over the Gondarine nobility; builder of the principal Bakaffa palace at the imperial Fasil Ghebbi
Emperor Fasilides1603 — 1667 · Solomonic Emperor of Ethiopia from 1632 to 1667; founder of the city of Gondar in 1636; restorer of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church to the imperial state
Emperor Iyasu I1654 — 1706 · Solomonic Emperor of Ethiopia from 1682 to 1706; principal warrior emperor of the Gondarine period; murdered at the imperial monastery of Mitsiraha by his son Tekle Haymanot I
Emperor Iyasu II1723 — 1755 · Solomonic Emperor of Ethiopia from 1730 to 1755; son of Emperor Bakaffa and Empress Mentewab; principal patron of the Qwesqwam imperial complex at Gondar
Emperor Iyasu V (Lij Iyasu)1895 — 1935 · Wollo-born uncrowned Emperor of Ethiopia from 1913 to 1916; grandson of Menelik II through his mother; deposed by the Solomonic nobility in 1916 for his Islamic sympathies
Emperor Iyoas I1755 — 1769 · Solomonic Emperor of Ethiopia from 1755 to 1769; grandson of Empress Mentewab through her son Iyasu II; murdered by the Wollo Oromo party at Gondar at the collapse of imperial Solomonic authority
Emperor Susenyos I1572 — 1632 · Solomonic Emperor of Ethiopia from 1607 to 1632; the only Ethiopian emperor to convert formally to Roman Catholicism; abdicator and restorer of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church
Emperor Taizong of Tang598-649 · East Asia (China) · Medieval
Emperor Tekle Giyorgis II1825 — 1873 · Solomonic Emperor of Ethiopia from 1868 to 1872; principal Lasta Wagshum heir to the imperial throne after Tewodros II; ousted by Yohannes IV at the Battle of Assam of 1872
Emperor Tewodros II1818 — 1868 · Restorer of the unified Ethiopian state after the Age of the Princes; reformer of the army and the church; sovereign who refused capture at Magdala
Emperor Yohannes I1645 — 1682 · Solomonic Emperor of Ethiopia from 1667 to 1682; consolidator of the Gondarine imperial state; convenor of the principal Synod of Yebaba of 1668 to settle the Ethiopian Orthodox Christological controversies
Empress Dowager Cixi1835-1908 · East Asia · Modern
Empress Menen Asfaw1891 — 1962 · Wollo-born Ethiopian empress consort to Haile Selassie I; founder of the Empress Menen School at Addis Ababa in 1931 — the first imperial school for girls in Ethiopia
Empress Mentewabc. 1706 — 1773 · Qwaran-born regent of the Gondarine Empire from 1730 to 1755; patron of the Qwesqwam church complex at Gondar; principal Solomonic empress dowager of the eighteenth century
Empress Suiko554-628 · East Asia (Japan) · Classical
Empress Taytu Betulc. 1851 — 1918 · Empress of Ethiopia; strategist of Adwa; founder of Addis Ababa- Empress Tewabech Alic. 1830 — 1858 · Yejju-born Empress consort to Emperor Tewodros II; principal political adviser to Tewodros in the consolidation of the imperial state from 1855 to 1858
- Empress Theodorac. 500–548 · Europe · Medieval
Empress Zewditu1876 — 1930 · Empress of Ethiopia; first internationally recognized female head of state of the twentieth century in Africa- Engelbert Mveng1930 — 1995 · Cameroonian Jesuit historian, theologian, and artist; the first Cameroonian Jesuit priest; author of the first academic history of Cameroon
Enheduannac. 2285–2250 BCE · Middle East & Persia · Ancient
Eratosthenes of Cyrenec. 276 — c. 194 BCE · Cyrene-born polymath; chief librarian of Alexandria; the first known scientific measurement of the Earth's circumference
Eric Dolphy1928 — 1964 · Alto, flute, and the bass clarinet he taught to speak; Out to Lunch!; gone at thirty-six in a Berlin hospital- Eric Roach1915 — 1974 · Trinidadian and Tobagonian poet; principal lyric voice of the Tobagonian rural-agricultural tradition; founder of the Tobago Pageant
Eric Williams1911 — 1981 · Trinidadian historian and Prime Minister; author of Capitalism and Slavery
Ernest "Dutch" Morial1929 — 1989 · First African American mayor of New Orleans; served two consecutive terms from 1978 to 1986
Ernest Everett Just1883 — 1941 · Biologist; principal American researcher in marine-invertebrate embryology; first recipient of the NAACP Spingarn Medal
Errol Barrow1920 — 1987 · Founder of independent Barbados; the navigator-pilot whose first act was universal free secondary education
Erroll Garner1921 — 1977 · Pittsburgh-born American jazz pianist and composer; composer of 'Misty' of 1954; principal solo-and-trio jazz pianist of the post-Second-World-War American jazz tradition- Esther Afua Ocloo1919 — 2002 · Ghanaian industrialist; founder of Nkulenu Industries; a founding mother of microlending through Women's World Banking
Esther Rolle1920 — 1998 · Stage and television actress; matriarch of Good Times; principal force for dignified representation of African American family life on American network television
Es’kia Mphahlele1919 — 2008 · Pretoria-born South African novelist and educator; author of the 1959 autobiography Down Second Avenue; founding figure of the African Literature Centre at the Wits University- Etheridge Knight1931 — 1991 · Poet of Poems from Prison; principal poetic voice to emerge from the American carceral system in the twentieth century
Etta Moten Barnett1901 — 2004 · Texas-born contralto and actress; the first Black entertainer invited to perform at the White House as a stage artist, in January 1934; principal Bess of the 1942 Cheryl Crawford revival of Porgy and Bess
Eugene Bullard1895 — 1961 · Georgia-born Franco-American aviator; the first Black combat aviator in the world — flying for the French Aéronautique Militaire of the Lafayette Flying Corps in 1917; recipient of the Croix de Guerre and the Knight of the Légion d’honneur
Eugenio María de Hostos1839 — 1903 · Puerto Rican philosopher; founder of liberal education across Latin America
Eunice Walker Johnson1916 — 2010 · Selma-born American fashion impresario; founder and director of the Ebony Fashion Fair from 1958 to 2009; principal Black-American haute couture buyer of the principal Parisian and Roman couture houses across the second half of the twentieth century
Evelyn Boyd Granville1924 — 2023 · Washington, D.C.-born mathematician; the second African American woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics, in 1949; computer-orbital-trajectory mathematician at IBM and the NASA Vanguard programme of 1956–1960- Ewuare Ic. 1440-1473 · Africa · Medieval
Ezana of Aksumc. 320 — c. 360 · Emperor of Aksum; first African sovereign to issue coinage; established Christianity as state religion of Ethiopia
Édouard Glissant1928 — 2011 · Martinican poet, novelist, and theorist of Caribbean créolité; founder of the philosophy of Relation
F
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga1934 — 2018 · Cameroonian philosopher; author of La Crise du Muntu; a father of African philosophical self-critique
Faith Ringgold1930 — 2024 · Painter of Die; maker of the story quilts; author of Tar Beach; the museums she picketed hold her now
Fannie Lou Hamer1917 — 1977 · Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party founder; the sharecropper whose voice the President of the United States feared
Father Augustus Tolton1854 — 1897 · The first publicly known African American Catholic priest; rector of St Monica's parish in Chicago
Father Divinec. 1876 — 1965 · Founder of the International Peace Mission Movement; pioneer of organised interracial co-operative economic settlement in the urban North
Fatima al-Fihric. 800–880 · Africa · Medieval
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti1938 — 1997 · Nigerian musician; founder of Afrobeat; son of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti
Fela Kuti1938–1997 · Africa (West Africa) · Modern
Ferdowsic. 940-1020 · Middle East & Persia · Medieval
Fletcher Henderson1897 — 1952 · Georgia-born bandleader and arranger; his orchestra worked out the language of big-band swing
Flora Nwapa1931 — 1993 · Oguta-born Nigerian Igbo novelist; author of the 1966 novel Efuru — the first novel in English by a Black African woman published by an international press- Florence Cole Talbert1890 — 1961 · Detroit-born soprano; the first Black singer to perform a leading operatic role with a European opera company — the title role of Verdi’s Aïda at Cosenza, Italy, in 1927
Florence Nightingale1820–1910 · Europe & Mediterranean · Modern
Florence Price1887 — 1953 · Arkansas-born composer; the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra — the 1933 premiere of her Symphony No. 1 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Florestine Perrault Collins1895 — 1988 · New Orleans-born American Creole studio portrait photographer; principal Black female studio photographer of the segregated American South across the 1920s and 1930s; founder of the Florestine Perrault Studio at New Orleans
Floyd McKissick1922 — 1991 · North Carolina-born civil-rights attorney; the first African American admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in 1951; national director of the Congress of Racial Equality from 1966 to 1968
Forbes Burnham1923 — 1985 · First Prime Minister of independent Guyana; co-architect of CARICOM
Frances E. W. Harper1825 — 1911 · Celebrated as the most popular African American poet before Paul Laurence Dunbar; co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women
Franco Luambo Makiadi1938 — 1989 · Congolese guitarist, singer and bandleader; founder of OK Jazz; the principal architect of Congolese rumba; called in his lifetime the Sorcerer of the Guitar
Frantz Fanon1925 — 1961 · Psychiatrist and theorist; author of Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth
François Mackandaldied 1758 · Maroon leader of Saint-Domingue; the poison panic bears his name; burned at Cap-Français, and the legend would not burn
Fred Hampton1948 — 1969 · Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party; murdered in his bed at age twenty-one
Freda DeKnight1909 — 1963 · Topeka-born American food editor and cookbook author; food editor of Ebony magazine from 1946 to 1963; author of A Date with a Dish: A Cook Book of American Negro Recipes of 1948
Frederick D. Patterson1871 — 1932 · Ohio-born automobile manufacturer; founder of the C. R. Patterson and Sons Company carriage works in 1893 and the Patterson-Greenfield automobile of 1915 — the first and only Black-owned automobile manufacturer in American history
Frederick Douglass1818 – 1895 · Abolitionist, statesman, writer
Frederick McKinley Jones1893 — 1961 · Inventor of the portable refrigeration unit for trucks; co-founder of the Thermo King Corporation; the engineer whose patent made the modern frozen-food supply chain possible
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti1900 — 1978 · Nigerian educator and chief of the women's movement; mother of African feminism
Félix Houphouët-Boigny1905 — 1993 · First President of Côte d'Ivoire; thirty-three years in office; the architect of postcolonial Francophone Africa's relationship with France
G
- Gabriel Prosserc. 1776 — 1800 · Leader of Gabriel's Conspiracy, the largest planned slave uprising in U.S. history before Nat Turner; executed at twenty-four
- Gajah Madad. c. 1364 · Southeast Asia · Medieval
Galileo Galilei1564–1642 · Europe & Mediterranean · Early Modern
Garrett Morgan1877 — 1963 · Inventor of the three-position traffic signal and the gas-mask precursor that saved thirty-two lives at the Cleveland Waterworks disaster
Gaspar Yangac. 1545 — c. 1609 · Founder of the first formally free Black settlement in the Americas; sovereign of San Lorenzo de los Negros in colonial New Spain- Gautama Buddhac. 563–483 BCE · South Asia · Classical
Geoffrey Holder1930 — 2014 · Trinidad-born dancer, choreographer, painter, and actor; the first African American director of a Broadway musical to win the Tony Award for Best Director — for The Wiz in 1975- George Crum1824 — 1914 · Saratoga Springs-born American chef; head chef of Moon's Lake House at Saratoga Springs from 1853 to 1890; principal Black-and-Native-American chef credited with the principal commercial invention of the potato chip in 1853
George Henry White1852 — 1918 · North Carolina-born attorney; the last African American congressman of the Reconstruction era — leaving the House on the fourth of March 1901 and the last Black congressman from the American South for the following twenty-eight years
George Jackson1941 — 1971 · Soledad Brother; principal theoretician of revolutionary prisoner organising of the late 1960s; author of Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye
George Lamming1927 — 2022 · Barbadian novelist and essayist; author of In the Castle of My Skin; the founding theorist of Caribbean literary post-coloniality- George Moses Hortonc. 1798 — c. 1883 · The enslaved poet of Chapel Hill; The Hope of Liberty (1829), the first book published by an African American in the South
George Padmore1903 — 1959 · Trinidadian-born Pan-Africanist; adviser to Kwame Nkrumah; co-convenor of the 1945 Manchester Congress
George S. ‘Spanky’ Roberts1918 — 1984 · West Virginia-born United States Army Air Forces officer; the first African American admitted to the Tuskegee Army Air Field flight programme, on the nineteenth of July 1941; commander of the 99th Fighter Squadron of the Tuskegee Airmen in 1944
George Tupou I1797-1893 · Oceania (Tonga) · Modern
George W. Murray1853 — 1926 · Born enslaved; congressman and inventor; he read the roll of Black inventors into the Record and sold land so his people could keep the vote
George Walker1922 — 2018 · Washington, D.C.-born composer and pianist; the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music — for Lilacs in 1996
George Washington Carverc. 1864 — 1943 · Agricultural scientist; transformed Southern agriculture; the most internationally recognized Black scientist of the early twentieth century- George Washington Foster Jr.1866 — 1923 · New Jersey-born architect; partner at McKim, Mead & White on the Madison Square Garden of 1890; principal designer of Harlem’s Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church
Geronimo1829–1909 · Indigenous North America · Modern
Geronimo Pratt1947 — 2011 · Deputy Minister of Defense of the Southern California Black Panther Party; wrongfully imprisoned for twenty-seven years on a charge of murder of which his conviction was finally vacated in 1997
Ghezo of Dahomeyc. 1797 — 1858 · King of Dahomey; restored the kingdom from tributary status to imperial power
Gloria Richardson1922 — 2021 · Maryland-born civil-rights organiser; co-founder of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee at Cambridge, Maryland in 1962; the principal grassroots leader of the Cambridge Movement of 1962 to 1964
Gordon Parks1912 — 2006 · Photographer, filmmaker, composer; first African American photographer at Life and at Vogue; first African American to direct a major Hollywood feature
Govan Mbeki1910 — 2001 · ANC theoretician and Rivonia Trial defendant; twenty-three years on Robben Island alongside Mandela and Sisulu
Grace Bumbry1937 — 2023 · Missouri-born mezzo-soprano and soprano; the first Black singer to perform at the Bayreuth Festival, on the twenty-third of July 1961, in the role of Venus in Wagner’s Tannhäuser
Grace O'Malleyc. 1530-1603 · Europe (Ireland) · Early Modern
Granville Woods1856 — 1910 · Inventor of the multiplex telegraph and of fifty-nine United States patents in electrical and railway engineering; called in his lifetime the Black Edison- Guaman Poma de Ayalac. 1535–1616 · The Americas · Early Modern
- Guru Gobind Singh1666–1708 · South Asia · Early Modern
Guru Nanak1469–1539 · South Asia · Early Modern
Gwendolyn Brooks1917 — 2000 · The first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize; Poet Laureate of Illinois from 1968 until her death; principal voice of the Chicago Black literary tradition
H
Haile Selassie1892-1975 · Africa (Ethiopia) · Modern
Haile Selassie I1892 — 1975 · Emperor of Ethiopia; founding figure of the OAU; the African statesman of the World Wars era- Hale Smith1925 — 2009 · Cleveland-born composer, jazz arranger and music editor; arranger for Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie; composer of the 1962 orchestral work Contours
Hale Woodruff1900 — 1980 · Painter of the Amistad murals; builder of Atlanta's art annuals; teacher of a generation from Talladega to NYU
Hall Johnson1888 — 1970 · Georgia-born composer, choral director and violist; founder of the 1925 Hall Johnson Negro Choir; principal arranger of African American spirituals for the Broadway and Hollywood stage of the 1930s and 1940s
Hallie Quinn Brown1849 — 1949 · Elocutionist, educator, and suffragist; president of the National Association of Colored Women
Hammurabic. 1810–1750 BCE · Middle East & Persia · Ancient
Hank Aaron1934 — 2021 · Right-fielder of the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves from 1954 to 1976; held the major-league career home-run record from 1974 until 2007
Hank Mobley1930 — 1986 · Tenor saxophonist; charter Jazz Messenger; Soul Station; the middleweight champion with the round sound
Hannibal Barca247–183 BCE · Africa (Carthage) · Ancient
Harold Washington1922 — 1987 · First African American mayor of Chicago; congressman from Illinois's first district from 1981 to 1983; died in office during his second mayoral term
Harriet Tubmanc. 1822 — 1913 · Conductor of the Underground Railroad; the only Civil War battle planned and commanded by a woman
Harry Belafonte1927 — 2023 · Singer, actor, and activist; Calypso held Billboard's summit thirty-one weeks; the first Black person to win an Emmy; King's confidant
Harry T. Burleigh1866 — 1949 · Pennsylvania-born baritone, composer and arranger; the principal figure of the conversion of the African American spiritual into the concert art-song; assistant of Antonín Dvořák in New York
Harshac. 590-647 · South Asia (India) · Classical
Harun al-Rashidc. 763–809 · Middle East & Persia · Medieval
Hastings Bandac. 1898 — 1997 · First President of Malawi; physician and authoritarian president for thirty years
Hatshepsutc. 1507 BCE — 1458 BCE · Pharaoh; longest-reigning female ruler of Egypt; commissioned the great expedition to Punt
Hattie McDaniel1893 — 1952 · First African American to win an Academy Award; Best Supporting Actress for Gone With the Wind in 1940
Heavy D1967 — 2011 · Jamaican-American rapper and label executive; lead vocalist of Heavy D and the Boyz; first hip-hop artist to lead a major American record label division
Hector Pieterson1964 — 1976 · The first child killed in the Soweto Uprising of the sixteenth of June 1976; the photographed face of the apartheid system's violence against children- Helen Williams1937 — 2018 · Riverton-born American fashion model; the first Black American fashion model to appear in mainstream American national print advertising in the 1950s; principal pioneer of the principal Black-American mainstream-advertising fashion-model tradition
Helene Johnson1906 — 1995 · Boston-born American poet; principal younger-generation Harlem Renaissance poet of the late 1920s; author of approximately thirty published poems in the principal Harlem Renaissance literary magazines
Hemiunuabout 2570 BCE — about 2520 BCE ’ Memphis-born vizier of Pharaoh Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt; principal architect of the Great Pyramid of Giza.- Hemsley Winfield1907 — 1934 · New Jersey-born concert dancer and choreographer; founder of the New Negro Art Theatre Dance Group in 1931 — the first all-Black-American concert-dance company; the first African American to perform a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera, on the eighteenth of January 1933
Hendrik Witbooic. 1830-1905 · Africa (Namibia) · Modern
Henri Christophe1767 — 1820 · King Henri I of Haiti; builder of the Citadelle Laferrière, the largest fortress in the Western Hemisphere- Henri Duparc1941 — 2006 · Forecariah-born Ivorian filmmaker; director of Bal poussière of 1988 and Le Sixième doigt of 1990; principal comic-realism auteur of West African cinema
- Henrietta Woodc. 1818 — 1912 · Formerly enslaved woman who won the largest court-ordered reparations award in U.S. history (1878)
- Henry G. Parks Jr.1916 — 1989 · Georgia-born sausage manufacturer; founder of the Parks Sausage Company in 1951 — the first Black-owned American company to trade publicly on the over-the-counter market, in 1969
Henry Highland Garnet1815 — 1882 · Maryland-born minister, abolitionist and diplomat; United States Minister Resident to Liberia from 1881 to 1882; first African American to address the United States House of Representatives, on the twelfth of February 1865
Henry McNeal Turner1834 — 1915 · AME bishop; first Black U.S. Army chaplain; principal American organizer of Black emigration to Liberia- Henry Odera Oruka1944 — 1995 · Kenyan philosopher; father of sage philosophy; founder-chairman of Nairobi's Department of Philosophy
Henry Ossawa Tanner1859 — 1937 · Painter; first African American painter to gain international acclaim; member of the French Legion of Honour
Henry P. Cheatham1857 — 1935 · North Carolina-born politician; the principal post-1888 closing-period North Carolina-Second-Congressional-District-Black-Congressional senior figure of the closing years of the post-1888 closing-period Reconstruction period
Henry Sylvester Williams1869 — 1911 · Trinidadian barrister; convened the first Pan-African Conference, London 1900
Herbert Macaulay1864-1946 · Africa (Nigeria) · Modern- Hercules Poseyc. 1748 — 1812 · Virginia-born enslaved chef of George Washington; principal chef de cuisine of the first United States presidential household at Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797
Hiawathac. 15th century · Indigenous North America · Medieval
Hildegard of Bingen1098–1179 · Europe & Mediterranean · Medieval
Hilyard Robinson1899 — 1986 · Washington, D.C.-born architect; principal designer of the Langston Terrace Dwellings of 1938 — the first federally funded public housing project of the United States- Hintsa ka Khawutac. 1789-1835 · Southern Africa · Modern
Hiram Rhodes Revels1827 — 1901 · First African American to serve in the United States Senate (1870-71)
Hokusai1760–1849 · East Asia · Modern
Hone Hekec. 1807-1850 · Oceania · Modern
Hongi Hikac. 1772-1828 · Oceania (Aotearoa) · Modern
Horace Silver1928 — 2014 · Pianist-composer of hard bop's gospel soul; co-founder of the Jazz Messengers; Song for My Father; Blue Note's longest-tenured artist
Hosea Williams1926 — 2000 · Georgia-born SCLC field commander; the principal field officer of the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the SCLC voter-registration campaigns of the late 1960s
Howard Bingham1939 — 2016 · Jackson-born American photojournalist; principal personal photographer of Muhammad Ali from 1962 to 2016; documentary photographer of the Black Panther Party of the late 1960s and early 1970s- Howard Hamilton Mackey Sr.1901 — 1987 · Pennsylvania-born architect; founding dean of the Howard University School of Architecture and Planning; founding chair of the National Organization of Minority Architects
- Howard Swanson1907 — 1978 · Georgia-born composer; winner of the 1952 New York Music Critics’ Circle Award for the Short Symphony; the first African American composer to win the award
Howard Thurman1899 — 1981 · Theologian, mystic and spiritual director of the twentieth-century African American freedom movement; author of Jesus and the Disinherited- Hoyt Fuller1923 — 1981 · Editor of Negro Digest and Black World; founder of the Organization of Black American Culture; principal editorial midwife of the Black Arts Movement
Hubert Harrison1883 — 1927 · St. Croix-born American socialist orator and intellectual; founder of the Liberty League of Negro Americans at Harlem in 1917; principal Harlem street-corner socialist orator of the Harlem Renaissance founding period
Hubert Julian1897 — 1983 · Trinidad-born American aviator; the principal Black aviator of inter-war Harlem; air-force colonel of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force under Emperor Haile Selassie
Hubert Maga1916 — 2000 · First President of Dahomey (Benin); the gentleman politician of Francophone West African independence
Huey P. Newton1942 — 1989 · Co-founder of the Black Panther Party; the only American Black Power founder to earn a doctorate
Hugh Masekela1939 — 2018 · South African trumpeter and composer; the principal musical voice of anti-apartheid exile
Hughie Lee-Smith1915 — 1999 · Painter of the lonely shore — balloons, ribbons, crumbling walls; the second Black member of the National Academy of Design, after Tanner- Hypatia of Alexandriac. 350–370 — 415 CE · Alexandrian philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician; the earliest woman of mathematics whose life the record keeps whole
I
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen)c. 965–1040 · Middle East & Persia · Medieval
Ibn Battuta1304–1369 · Africa · Medieval
Ibn Khaldun1332–1406 · Africa · Medieval
Ibn Rushd1126–1198 · Al-Andalus · Medieval
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)980–1037 · Middle East & Persia · Medieval- Ida B. Robinson1891 — 1946 · Foundress and first presiding bishop of the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America; the first woman senior bishop of a major Pentecostal denomination
Ida B. Wells1862 – 1931 · Investigative journalist, anti-lynching crusader, suffragist- Idia of Beninc. 1475-1550 · Benin Kingdom, West Africa · Early Modern
- Idris Aloomac. 1542-1617 · Africa · Early Modern
Idrissa Ouédraogo1954 — 2018 · Banfora-born Burkinabé filmmaker; director of Yaaba of 1989, Tilaï of 1990, and Samba Traoré of 1993; principal village-realism auteur of the second generation of African cinema
Ignatius Sanchoc. 1729 — 1780 · First Black Briton to vote in a British parliamentary election; composer, abolitionist, and letter-writer
Imhotepc. 2667 BCE — c. 2600 BCE · Egyptian polymath; architect of the Step Pyramid; first individual in history deified for scientific achievement
Inez Beverly Prosserc. 1895 — 1934 · First African American woman to earn a PhD in psychology (Cincinnati, 1933)
Isaac Newton1643–1727 · Europe & Mediterranean · Early Modern
Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar1820-1891 · South Asia · Modern
J
- J Dilla1974 — 2006 · Detroit-born record producer; the foremost instrumental hip-hop producer of his generation; principal architect of the alternative-hip-hop production aesthetic of the late 1990s and 2000s
- J. Max Bond Jr.1935 — 2009 · Kentucky-born architect; partner at Davis Brody Bond; principal designer of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and the National September 11 Memorial Museum
Jack Johnson1878 — 1946 · First African American world heavyweight champion of boxing; reigning champion from 1908 to 1915
Jackie Robinson1919 — 1972 · First African American Major League Baseball player of the modern era; integrated the National League in April 1947
Jacob Lawrence1917 — 2000 · Painter; The Migration Series; the most-collected African American visual artist of the twentieth century
Jacques Roumain1907 — 1944 · Haitian novelist, ethnologist and political organiser; founder of the Communist Party of Haiti; author of Gouverneurs de la rosée
Jacques Stephen Alexis1922 — 1961 · Haitian novelist, physician and revolutionary; founder of the Parti d'Entente Populaire; assassinated at Môle-Saint-Nicolas in April 1961
Jaja of Opoboc. 1821-1891 · Africa (Nigeria) · Modern
Jam Master Jay1965 — 2002 · Queens-born disc jockey of Run-DMC; principal architect of the hip-hop turntable-and-drum-machine sound that produced the genre's first multi-platinum commercial breakthrough
James Africanus Beale Horton1835 — 1883 · Sierra Leonean physician, army surgeon, and political thinker; West African Countries and Peoples argued self-government a century early
James Baldwin1924 — 1987 · Novelist and essayist; the moral voice of mid-century American letters
James Bevel1936 — 2008 · Strategist of the movement's hardest campaigns — the Children's Crusade, the call to Selma; a record this house carries whole
James Brown1933 — 2006 · The Godfather of Soul; the principal rhythmic architect of funk music; one of the most influential figures in the recorded music of the second half of the twentieth century
James E. O’Hara1844 — 1905 · New York-born attorney; the principal post-1882 closing-period North Carolina-Second-Congressional-District-Black-Congressional senior figure of the closing years of the post-1882 closing-period Reconstruction period
James Earl Jones1931 — 2024 · The principal American classical stage actor of his generation; Tony, Grammy, Emmy and Oscar honoree; voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars trilogy and of Mufasa in The Lion King
James Farmer1920 — 1999 · Co-founder and national director of the Congress of Racial Equality; principal organiser of the 1961 Freedom Rides
James Forman1928 — 2005 · Executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1961 to 1966; author of the 1969 Black Manifesto and of The Making of Black Revolutionaries
James Forten1766 — 1842 · Philadelphia sailmaker, abolitionist, and one of the wealthiest African Americans of the antebellum era
James H. Cone1938 — 2018 · Founder of Black liberation theology as an academic discipline; author of A Black Theology of Liberation and The Cross and the Lynching Tree- James Hemings1765 — 1801 · Paris-trained chef of Monticello; he taught his brother the kitchen and wrote his own deed's fulfillment; the table remembers him
James Herman Banning1899 — 1933 · Oklahoma-born aviator; the first Black pilot to complete a transcontinental flight across the United States — from Los Angeles to Long Island, in twenty-one days of October 1932- James Latimer Allen1907 — 1977 · Portraitist of the Harlem Renaissance; Hughes, Cullen, Locke, and Du Bois sat for his Harlem studio; fewer than two hundred of his photographs survive
James Lawson Jr.1928 — 2024 · Pennsylvania-born Methodist minister; principal nonviolence-tactician of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council; trainer of the principal SNCC student-organiser cohort of the 1960 Nashville Sit-Ins and the 1961 Freedom Rides
James Nabrit Jr.1900 — 1997 · Georgia-born attorney and educator; the principal civil-rights lecturer at Howard University Law School; United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1965 to 1967
James Presley Ballc. 1825 — 1904 · Pioneering daguerreotypist; master of Ball's Great Daguerrian Gallery of the West; his camera bore witness for half a century
James T. Rapier1837 — 1883 · Alabama-born politician; the principal post-1872 closing-period Alabama-Second-Congressional-District-Reconstruction-Black-Congressional senior figure of the closing years of the post-1872 Reconstruction period
James Theodore Holly1829 — 1911 · First African American bishop of the Episcopal Church; led his people to Haiti and built the church that remains
James Van Der Zee1886 — 1983 · Photographer; principal portraitist of the Harlem Renaissance
James W. C. Pennington1807 — 1870 · Fugitive minister; first African American to receive an honorary doctorate from a European university; first to publish a history of African Americans
James Weldon Johnson1871 — 1938 · Florida-born poet, songwriter, attorney and diplomat; United States Consul at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela from 1906 to 1908 and at Corinto, Nicaragua from 1908 to 1913; executive secretary of the NAACP from 1920 to 1930
Jane Bolin1908 — 2007 · New York-born judge; the first African American woman to be admitted to the New York State Bar Association in 1932; the first African American woman judge in the United States, appointed to the New York City Domestic Relations Court in 1939
Jane Cooke Wright1919 — 2013 · Oncologist; pioneer of chemotherapy; first African American woman elected associate dean of an American medical school- Janet Bragg1907 — 1993 · Nurse and aviator; refused her license at Tuskegee, she flew north and took it anyway — first Black woman with a full commercial pilot's certificate
Janet Collins1917 — 2003 · Louisiana-born ballerina; the first African American prima ballerina of the Metropolitan Opera, on the twenty-second of November 1951; principal Black-American classical-ballet pioneer of the post-war American ballet theatre- Jay Jaxon1941 — 2006 · New York-born American couturier; first Black American designer to head a French couture house at Jean-Louis Scherrer from 1969 to 1972; principal Black-American Parisian couturier of the principal late-1960s and early-1970s Paris couture period
Jayavarman VIIc. 1122–1218 · Southeast Asia · Medieval- Jayne Cortez1934 — 2012 · Poet of the Black Arts Movement; her Firespitters set verse on jazz; co-founder of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa
Jean Price-Mars1876 — 1969 · Haitian ethnographer, diplomat and politician; founder of the Haitian Society of History and Geography in 1923; principal founder of the post-1928 Indigenist movement of Haitian intellectual life
Jean-Baptiste Point du Sablec. 1745-1818 · African Diaspora (North America) · Early Modern
Jean-Jacques Dessalines1758 — 1806 · Founder and first head of state of the Republic of Haiti
Jefferson F. Long1836 — 1901 · Georgia-born tailor and politician; the principal post-1870 Black congressman from Georgia; the first African American to address the United States House of Representatives, on the first of February 1871- Jeremiah G. Hamilton1807 — 1875 · West Indies-born New York financier; the first Black millionaire of Wall Street; principal Black operator of the Manhattan insurance, real-estate and railroad markets of the antebellum period
Jeremiah Haralson1846 — 1916 · Georgia-born politician; the principal post-1875 Alabama-First-Congressional-District-Reconstruction-Black-Congressional senior figure of the closing years of the post-1875 Reconstruction period
Jesse Owens1913 — 1980 · Sprinter and long jumper; four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics under Hitler's regime
Jessye Norman1945 — 2019 · Georgia-born dramatic soprano; principal dramatic soprano of the Metropolitan Opera across twenty seasons; recipient of the 1997 Kennedy Center Honors and the 2009 National Medal of Arts
Jim Brown1936 — 2023 · Fullback of the Cleveland Browns from 1957 to 1965; National Football League career rushing leader at his retirement; principal Black athlete of the early civil-rights era
Joan of Arc1412-1431 · Europe · Medieval
Joe Frazier1944 — 2011 · World heavyweight boxing champion from 1970 to 1973; the only fighter to defeat Muhammad Ali in his prime, in the Fight of the Century at Madison Square Garden on the eighth of March 1971
Joe Louis1914 — 1981 · The Brown Bomber; world heavyweight boxing champion from 1937 to 1949; the longest-reigning heavyweight champion in the history of the title- Joe Rickard1923 — 2000 · Mississippi-born modernist dancer and choreographer; founder of the First Negro Classic Ballet at Los Angeles in 1946 — the first all-Black-American classical-ballet company in the United States
Johann Sebastian Bach1685–1750 · Europe & Mediterranean · Early Modern
Johannes Gutenbergc. 1400–1468 · Europe & Mediterranean · Early Modern- Johannes Kepler1571-1630 · Europe · Early Modern
John Adams Hyman1840 — 1891 · North Carolina-born politician; the first African American congressman from the state of North Carolina, on the fourth of March 1875
John Anderson Lankford1874 — 1946 · Missouri-born architect; the first registered African American architect of the District of Columbia in 1902; principal designer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church building programme of the 1910s and 1920s
John Chilembwe1871-1915 · Africa · Modern
John Coltrane1926 — 1967 · Saxophonist and composer; A Love Supreme
John Conyers1929 — 2019 · United States Representative from Michigan's thirteenth district for fifty-two years from 1965 to 2017 — the longest tenure of any African American in the U.S. Congress
John H. Johnson1918 — 2005 · Arkansas-born Chicago publisher; founder of the Johnson Publishing Company in 1942; publisher of Ebony magazine from 1945 and Jet magazine from 1951- John Henrik Clarke1915 — 1998 · Pan-Africanist historian; founder of Black Studies as an academic discipline in the United States
John Hope1868 — 1936 · First African American president of Morehouse College and of Atlanta University; principal architect of the Atlanta University Center consortium
John Hope Franklin1915 — 2009 · Historian; author of From Slavery to Freedom (1947), the foundational survey of African American history
John Lewis1940 — 2020 · SNCC chairman; long-serving Congressman; the conscience of the American Congress- John Mbiti1931 — 2019 · Kitui-born Kenyan philosopher and theologian; author of African Religions and Philosophy of 1969; principal Anglican theologian of the post-colonial African-religious-and-philosophical academic community
John Mercer Langston1829 — 1897 · First African American admitted to a U.S. bar; first elected to public office; first to represent Virginia in Congress- John Merrick1859 — 1919 · North Carolina-born barber and insurance founder; co-founder of the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Insurance Company in 1898; the first Black millionaire of the state of North Carolina
John R. Lynch1847 — 1939 · Louisiana-born politician; the principal Black Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1872 to 1874; the principal Black-and-Republican-Party-Temporary-Chairman of the 1884 Republican National Convention- John Saunders Chase1925 — 2012 · Maryland-born architect; the first African American architect licensed in the state of Texas in 1952; founding member of the National Organization of Minority Architects
John W. Cromwell1846 — 1927 · Lawyer, editor, and historian; co-founder of the American Negro Academy
Jomo Kenyattac. 1897 — 1978 · First President of Kenya; anthropologist of his own Kikuyu people
Jonathan Jackson1953 — 1970 · Younger brother of George Jackson; killed at seventeen in the Marin County Civic Center incident of the seventh of August 1970 while attempting to free three San Quentin prisoners
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges1745 — 1799 · Guadeloupe-born French violinist, composer and conductor; the first composer of African descent to lead a major European orchestra; principal figure of the late ancien-régime Parisian musical world
Joseph Casely Hayford1866 — 1930 · Gold Coast intellectual; founder of the National Congress of British West Africa
Joseph Ki-Zerbo1922 — 2006 · Toma-born Burkinabé historian and philosopher; editor of the UNESCO General History of Africa Volume I of 1981; founder of the Centre d'Études pour le Développement Africain at Ouagadougou in 1980- Joseph Lee1849 — 1908 · Charleston-born American chef and inventor; founder of the Squantum Inn at Boston in the principal 1890s; patent-holder of the principal bread-crumbing machine of the second of June 1895
Joseph Lowery1921 — 2020 · Alabama-born Methodist minister; co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957; president of the SCLC from 1977 to 1997; recipient of the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom- Joseph Murumbi1911 — 1990 · Second Vice President of Kenya; one of the largest private collectors of African art in the twentieth century
Joseph Rainey1832 — 1887 · South Carolina-born barber and politician; the first African American to be seated in the United States House of Representatives, on the twelfth of December 1870- Joseph Shabalala1941 — 2020 · Founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo; principal twentieth-century practitioner of the South African isicathamiya male a cappella choral tradition; five-time Grammy winner
Josephine Baker1906 — 1975 · Singer, dancer, and French Resistance agent; first African American to star in a major motion picture
Joshua Nkomo1917 — 1999 · Founder of the Zimbabwe African People's Union; vice president of Zimbabwe (1990-99); Father of the Zimbabwean nation
Josiah T. Walls1842 — 1905 · Virginia-born politician; the first African American congressman from the state of Florida, on the principal fourth of March 1871
José Antonio Aponteabout 1760 — the ninth of April 1812 ’ Havana-born Yoruba free-Black master carpenter; principal author of the 1812 Aponte Conspiracy of the Spanish captaincy-general of Cuba.
José do Patrocínio1853 — 1905 · Abolitionist journalist whose Gazeta da Tarde and Cidade do Rio campaigns were decisive in the final Brazilian abolition of 1888
José Eduardo dos Santos1942 — 2022 · Second President of Angola; thirty-eight years in office through the Angolan Civil War and post-war reconstruction
José Prudencio Padilla1784 — 1828 · Afro-Colombian admiral of the South American independence navy; victor of the battle of Maracaibo; executed by order of Simón Bolívar
José Rizal1861–1896 · Southeast Asia · Modern
Juba IIc. 48 BC-23 AD · Africa · Ancient
Jules Lion1810 — 1866 · French-born American daguerreotypist and lithographer; the first commercial daguerreotypist of the American South; founder of the Jules Lion Studio at New Orleans in 1840
Julia de Burgos1914 — 1953 · Puerto Rican poet and journalist; principal twentieth-century female voice of the Puerto Rican national-poetic canon; nationalist organiser of the New York diaspora
Julia Perry1924 — 1979 · Kentucky-born composer; two-time Guggenheim Fellow in composition; composer of the 1954 Stabat Mater
Julian Abele1881 — 1950 · Philadelphia-born architect; chief designer of the Horace Trumbauer firm for thirty years; principal designer of the Duke University West Campus quadrangles and the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Julian Bond1940 — 2015 · Founding communications director of SNCC; Georgia state legislator from 1965 to 1986; founding president of the Southern Poverty Law Center; chairman of the NAACP from 1998 to 2010
Julius Caesar100-44 BCE · Europe · Classical
Julius Nyerere1922 — 1999 · First President of Tanzania; architect of Ujamaa; the teacher (Mwalimu) of an entire political generation
June Jordan1936 — 2002 · Poet, essayist and architect; founder of Poetry for the People at Berkeley; author of more than thirty books across forty years of public letters
Justin Holland1819 — 1887 · Virginia-born classical guitarist and composer; author of the first comprehensive American guitar method; principal figure of nineteenth-century American classical guitar pedagogy
K
- Ka'iulani1875-1899 · Oceania · Modern
Kabirc. 1440–1518 · South Asia (India) · Medieval
Kalidasac. 5th century · South Asia · Medieval- Kamau Brathwaite1930 — 2020 · Barbadian poet, historian and cultural theorist; principal architect of the concept of nation language; author of the Arrivants trilogy
- Kamehameha Ic. 1758–1819 · Oceania · Modern
- Kanishkac. 127–150 CE · South Asia · Ancient
Kate Sheppard1847–1934 · Oceania (New Zealand) · Modern
Katherine Dunham1909 — 2006 · Dancer, anthropologist, and conscience; she carried Caribbean dance onto the world's stages and went hungry 47 days for Haiti's refugees
Katherine Johnson1918 — 2020 · NASA orbital-mechanics mathematician; computed the trajectory of John Glenn's 1962 Mercury orbital flight and of the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing- Kathleen Collins1942 — 1988 · Jersey City-born American filmmaker and playwright; director of Losing Ground of 1982, the first American feature film directed by a Black woman; founder of the Kathleen Collins Theatre Workshop at New York
- Kelly Miller1863 — 1939 · Mathematician, sociologist and educator; the first African American to undertake graduate study in mathematics in the United States; dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University from 1907 to 1919
Ken Saro-Wiwa1941–1995 · Africa (West Africa) · Modern
Kenneth Gibson1932 — 2019 · First African American mayor of Newark; first African American president of the United States Conference of Mayors; served four consecutive terms from 1970 to 1986
Kenneth Kaunda1924 — 2021 · First President of Zambia; principal frontline statesman of the southern African liberation movements- Keōpūolanic. 1778-1823 · Oceania · Modern
Khama IIIc. 1837 — 1923 · King of the Bangwato; founder of the political tradition that became Botswana
Kimpa Vitac. 1684–1706 · Kongo (Central Africa) · Early Modern- King Ghezoc. 1797-1859 · Africa (Benin/Dahomey) · Modern
King Jaja of Opoboc. 1821 — 1891 · Founder of Opobo; the formerly enslaved Igbo man who built one of the most powerful trading kingdoms of the Niger Delta- King Kalākaua1836-1891 · Oceania (Hawaii) · Modern
- King Koko of Nembec. 1853-1898 · Africa (Nigeria) · Modern
King Lalibelac. 1162 — 1221 · Zagwe king of Ethiopia; commissioner of the eleven monolithic rock-hewn churches that bear his name and remain in continuous Christian worship eight centuries after his death- King Njoya of Bamumc. 1876-1933 · Africa · Modern
- King Sejong1397-1450 · East Asia · Medieval
- Kinjikitile Ngwaled. 1905 · Africa · Modern
Kofi Awoonor1935 — 2013 · Ghanaian poet, novelist, and diplomat; killed in the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi at seventy-eight
Kublai Khan1215-1294 · East Asia · Medieval
Kukai774-835 · East Asia · Medieval
Kwame Brathwaite1938 — 2023 · Founding photographer of the Black Is Beautiful movement; co-founder of the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios and of the Grandassa Models
Kwame Nkrumah1909 – 1972 · Ghana's first president, Pan-African theorist
Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael)1941 — 1998 · SNCC chairman; raised the call of Black Power; spent his second life in Conakry
Kwasi Wiredu1931 — 2022 · Kumasi-born Ghanaian philosopher; author of Philosophy and an African Culture of 1980 and Cultural Universals and Particulars of 1996; principal Akan-rationalist post-colonial African-philosophical theorist- Kwegyir Aggrey1875-1927 · Africa · Modern
L
Lalibelac. 1181-1221 · Africa (Ethiopia) · Medieval- Lance Jeffers1919 — 1985 · Fremont-born American poet; author of My Blackness Is the Beauty of This Land of 1970 and When I Know the Power of My Black Hand of 1974; principal Black-Arts-Movement poet of the academic Black-Studies post-1968 American Black-poetic canon
Langston Hughes1901 — 1967 · Poet; central figure of the Harlem Renaissance; brought Black-American speech into the literary canon
Laozic. 6th century BCE · East Asia · Ancient
Lapulapuc. 1491–1542 · Southeast Asia · Early Modern
Lautaroc. 1534-1557 · The Americas · Early Modern
Lavinia Williams1916 — 1989 · Pennsylvania-born concert dancer and ballet pedagogue; founder of the principal post-war ballet-and-modernist-dance training programmes at Port-au-Prince, Haiti and at Georgetown, Guyana
Leah Chase1923 — 2019 · Known as the Queen of Creole Cuisine; Dooky Chase's of Tremé; the upstairs room where the movement ate- Lee Archer1919 — 2010 · New York-born United States Army Air Forces officer; ace fighter pilot of the Tuskegee Airmen 302nd Fighter Squadron; the only Black fighter ace of the United States Army Air Forces in the Second World War
Lee Elder1934 — 2021 · First African American to play in the Masters Tournament — the 1975 Masters at Augusta National Golf Club
Lemuel Haynes1753 — 1833 · First African American ordained as a Protestant minister; pastored a white congregation in Vermont for thirty years
Lena Horne1917 — 2010 · Singer, actress, and civil-rights organizer; the first African American to sign a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio
Lena Richard1892 — 1950 · New Roads-born American chef and television cooking-show host; author of New Orleans Cook Book of 1939; the first Black American television cooking-show host on the Lena Richard's New Orleans Cook Book at the WDSU-TV at New Orleans from October 1947 to her death- Leo Africanusc. 1494-c. 1554 · Africa/Europe (Morocco/Italy) · Early Modern
Leonardo da Vinci1452–1519 · Europe & Mediterranean · Early Modern
Lerone Bennett Jr.1928 — 2018 · Historian; longtime executive editor of Ebony; the popular historian who made African American history accessible to a mass readership- Lewis A. Jackson1912 — 1994 · Indiana-born aviator; the first African American certified flight instructor of the Civil Aeronautics Administration in 1939; chief flight instructor of the Tuskegee Army Air Field’s Pre-Flight School
Lewis Howard Latimer1848 — 1928 · Inventor and draftsman; patented the carbon-filament process that made the incandescent lamp practical
Li Bai701–762 · East Asia · Medieval
Lilian Ngoyi1911 — 1980 · Anti-apartheid organizer; led the 1956 Women's March on the Union Buildings in Pretoria
Liliuokalani1838-1917 · Oceania (Hawaii) · Modern
Lillian Evanti1890 — 1967 · Washington, D.C.-born soprano; the first Black American to sing professionally with a European opera company — at the Casino Theatre, Nice, in February 1925- Lionel Ngakane1928 — 2003 · Pretoria-born South African filmmaker and actor; director of Jemima and Johnny of 1966, the first British feature film directed by a Black African; co-founder of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) in 1969
Lobengulac. 1845 — 1894 · Last King of the Matabele; the sovereign whose deposition by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company founded Rhodesia
Lois Alexander Lane1916 — 2007 · Little Rock-born American fashion educator and museum founder; founder of the Harlem Institute of Fashion in 1966 and the Black Fashion Museum at Harlem in 1979; principal documentarian of the Black-American fashion-industry history
Lois Mailou Jones1905 — 1998 · Painter; first African American to exhibit at the Société des Artistes Français; Howard University faculty for forty-seven years
Lorraine Hansberry1930 — 1965 · Playwright; first Black woman with a play produced on Broadway
Louis Armstrong1901 — 1971 · Trumpeter and singer; the founding soloist of American jazz
Louis Bellinger1891 — 1946 · South Carolina-born architect; the first registered African American architect of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; designer of the 1930 Greenlee Field of the Pittsburgh Crawfords- Louis Johnson1930 — 2020 · North Carolina-born choreographer and dancer; the first African American student at the School of American Ballet in 1950; choreographer of the 1978 Broadway production The Wiz
Louis Stokes1925 — 2015 · First African American congressman from Ohio; principal congressional investigator of the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Louise Bennett-Coverley1919 — 2006 · Jamaican poet, performer and folklorist; Miss Lou; the principal twentieth-century cultural recoverer of Jamaican Creole language as a serious literary medium
Lucille Clifton1936 — 2010 · Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985; National Book Award winner; first author to receive Pulitzer nominations for two volumes in successive years
Lucky Dube1964 — 2007 · South African reggae singer; principal African reggae voice of the 1990s; assassinated at Rosettenville, Johannesburg, on the eighteenth of October 2007
Lucy Craft Laney1854 — 1933 · Founder of the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute; pioneer of Black women's higher education in the American South
Lucy Diggs Slowe1885 — 1937 · First Dean of Women at Howard University; co-founder of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority
Lucy Parsonsc. 1853 — 1942 · Anarchist labor organizer; the principal female voice of the late-nineteenth-century American radical labor movement
Ludwig van Beethoven1770–1827 · Europe & Mediterranean · Modern
Luiz Gama1830 — 1882 · Self-taught abolitionist lawyer; freed more than five hundred enslaved Brazilians through the courts before the abolition of 1888
Lutie Lytle1875 — 1955 · Kansas-born attorney; the first African American woman to be admitted to the bar of any state in the southern United States — by examination of the Tennessee state bar on the tenth of September 1897; the first woman of any race to teach at a chartered law school in the United States
Lélia Gonzalez1935 — 1994 · Anthropologist, philosopher and founder of Afro-Brazilian feminism; theoretician of amefricanidade
Léon M'ba1902 — 1967 · First President of Gabon; the most pro-French of the Francophone independence-era presidents
Léon-Gontran Damas1912 — 1978 · French Guiana-born poet and politician; co-founder of the Négritude literary-political movement in 1934; the principal poet of the inter-war Pan-African Négritude poetic programme
Léopold Sédar Senghor1906 — 2001 · First President of Senegal; co-founder of Négritude; the only philosopher-poet to govern a modern republic
M
Machado de Assis1839 — 1908 · Brazilian novelist and short-story master; founding president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters; the greatest prose writer of nineteenth-century Latin America
Macon Bolling Allen1816 — 1894 · Indiana-born attorney; the first African American admitted to a state bar in the United States — by examination of the Worcester County, Maine bar in July 1844
Madam C. J. Walker1867 — 1919 · Louisiana-born cosmetics manufacturer; the first self-made female millionaire of any race in the United States; founder of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company at Indianapolis in 1910- Madilu System1950 — 2007 · Congolese singer; principal second-generation soukous vocalist of the Franco Luambo Makiadi era; voice of OK Jazz from 1979 to 1989
Maggie L. Walker1864 — 1934 · First American woman of any race to charter and serve as president of a bank
Mahalia Jackson1911 — 1972 · Queen of Gospel; sang at the March on Washington immediately before Martin Luther King Jr.
Mahatma Gandhi1869-1948 · India · Modern
Mahlathini Nkabinde1937 — 1999 · South African mbaqanga singer; the Lion of Soweto; principal male voice of South African township jive across four decades- Mai Idris Aloomar. c. 1564 — 1596 · Restorer of the Kanem-Bornu Empire; first sub-Saharan sovereign to integrate firearms into a regular army; reformer of Bornu's legal and administrative code
Malcolm X1925 — 1965 · Minister and organizer; the voice that anchored Black internationalism- Malinda Russellc. 1812 — c. 1880 · Tennessee-born American chef and cookbook author; author of A Domestic Cook Book of 1866, the first cookbook authored by an African American in the United States; founder of the Malinda Russell Pastry-and-Confectionery Shop at Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania
- Mansa Abu Bakr IIabout 1285 — after 1312 ’ Niani-born Mansa of the Mali Empire; principal commander of the trans-Atlantic expedition of about 1311 that attempted the principal Saharan-littoral westward crossing of the Atlantic.
Mansa Musac. 1280 — 1337 · Emperor of Mali; his 1324 pilgrimage carried the gold and learning of Mali into the memory of the medieval world
Mansa Suleymanr. 1341 — 1360 · Tenth ruling mansa of Mali; sovereign whose court was the only African monarchy entered and described in detail by Ibn Battuta
Manu Dibango1933 — 2020 · Cameroonian saxophonist, vibraphonist and composer; the principal francophone African jazz-funk artist of the twentieth century; composer of Soul Makossa
Manuel Piar1774 — 1817 · Afro-Venezuelan general of the South American independence wars; liberator of Guayana; executed by order of Simón Bolívar
Marcien Towa1931 — 2014 · Endama-born Cameroonian philosopher; author of Essai sur la problématique philosophique dans l'Afrique actuelle of 1971 and Léopold Sédar Senghor: Négritude ou Servitude? of 1971; principal critical-philosophical Pan-African theorist of the post-colonial African-philosophical academic community
Marco Poloc. 1254-1324 · Europe (Venice) · Medieval
Marcus Aurelius121-180 · Europe · Classical
Marcus Garvey1887 – 1940 · Founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
Margaret Bonds1913 — 1972 · Chicago-born composer and pianist; the first African American soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age twenty-one; principal collaborator of Langston Hughes
Margaret Ekpothe twenty-seventh of July 1914 — the twenty-first of September 2006 ’ Creek Town-born Nigerian feminist organizer and parliamentarian; founder of the Aba Township Women's Association of 1954; one of the principal four women elected to the Eastern Nigerian House of Assembly of 1961.
Margaret Garnerc. 1834 — 1858 · Enslaved woman whose escape and infanticide of her own daughter became the historical foundation of Toni Morrison's Beloved
Margaret Walker1915 — 1998 · Poet and novelist; author of For My People and of Jubilee; the first African American to receive the Yale Younger Poets Prize- Mari Evans1923 — 2017 · Poet and editor; author of I Am a Black Woman; principal collector of the Black Women Writers in the 1950–1980 anthology
- Maria W. Stewart1803 — 1879 · First American woman of any race to deliver public political lectures to a mixed-gender audience
Mariama Bâ1929 — 1981 · Dakar-born Senegalese novelist and feminist; author of the 1980 epistolary novel Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter); recipient of the inaugural Noma Award for Publishing in Africa
Marian Anderson1897 — 1993 · Contralto; first African American soloist at the Metropolitan Opera; the 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert
Marie Curie1867–1934 · Europe & Mediterranean · Modern
Marie Maynard Daly1921 — 2003 · The first African American woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry in the United States; pioneer of cholesterol-and-cardiovascular biochemistry research
Marien Ngouabi1938 — 1977 · President of the People's Republic of the Congo; the Marxist-Leninist president of post-independence Brazzaville; assassinated in office at thirty-eight
Marion Barry1936 — 2014 · Mayor of the District of Columbia for four terms across sixteen years; principal political figure of post-home-rule Washington
Marjorie Joyner1896 — 1994 · Beauty pioneer and inventor; her 1928 wave machine served the Walker company's salons; matriarch of the Bud Billiken Parade
Marjorie Lee Browne1914 — 1979 · Tennessee-born mathematician; the third African American woman to receive the doctorate in mathematics, in 1949; chair of the Department of Mathematics at North Carolina College from 1951 to 1970
Mark Clark1947 — 1969 · Field Marshal of the Peoria, Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party; killed alongside Fred Hampton in the predawn police raid of the fourth of December 1969 at 2337 West Monroe Street in Chicago- Marlon Green1929 — 2009 · Kentucky-born aviator; the first African American pilot hired by a major United States passenger jet airline — by Continental Airlines on the seventeenth of February 1965, under United States Supreme Court order
Marlon Riggs1957 — 1994 · Fort Worth-born American filmmaker; director of Tongues Untied of 1989, Ethnic Notions of 1986, and Color Adjustment of 1992; principal Black gay documentary essayist of the late twentieth century- Martin Carter1927 — 1997 · Guyana's poet of resistance; detained by the British in 1953, a minister resigned in 1970; buried at the Place of Heroes
- Martin Delany1812–1885 · African Diaspora (USA) · Modern
Martin Luther1483-1546 · Europe (Germany) · Early Modern
Martin Luther King Jr.1929 — 1968 · Civil-rights leader; Nobel laureate; the moral voice of the American civil rights movement
Marvin Gaye1939 — 1984 · Singer, songwriter and producer at Motown; principal architect of the concept album in Black American popular music; composer of What's Going On- Marvin Smith1910 — 2003 · Lexington-born American studio portrait photographer; co-founder with his twin brother Morgan Smith of the M & M Smith Studio at Harlem from 1937 to 1968; principal portraitist of the Harlem entertainment community of the 1940s and 1950s
Mary Ann Shadd Cary1823 — 1893 · First Black woman to edit a newspaper in North America
Mary Church Terrell1863 — 1954 · Suffragist; co-founder of the NAACP; first president of the National Association of Colored Women
Mary Eliza Mahoney1845 — 1926 · First African American to earn a professional nursing license in the United States
Mary Ellen Pleasant1814 — 1904 · Georgia-born California financier; principal Black financier of the San Francisco real-estate market across the second half of the nineteenth century; financial backer of the John Brown 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry
Mary Jackson1921 — 2005 · Virginia-born NASA aerospace engineer; the first African American woman aerospace engineer at NASA, in 1958; principal advocate of the desegregation of the NASA Langley Research Center career-paths
Mary Jane Patterson1840 — 1894 · First African American woman to earn a Bachelor's degree from an established American college (Oberlin, 1862)
Mary Lou Williams1910 — 1981 · Pianist, composer, and arranger across jazz's whole history; the Zodiac Suite, the bebop salon, and Mary Lou's Mass
Mary McLeod Bethune1875 — 1955 · Educator; founder of Bethune-Cookman University; advisor to four U.S. presidents
Mary Princec. 1788 — after 1833 · First Black woman to publish an autobiography in Britain; first woman to present an anti-slavery petition to the British Parliament
Mary Seacole1805 — 1881 · Jamaican-Scottish nurse and businesswoman; principal independent practitioner of battlefield medicine in the Crimean War
Mary Wollstonecraft1759-1797 · Europe · Early Modern
Maryse Condé1934 — 2024 · Guadeloupean novelist; the principal francophone Caribbean female prose voice of the late twentieth century; awarded the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018
Mathieu Kérékou1933 — 2015 · Twice president of Benin — first as the Marxist-Leninist founder of the People's Republic of Benin (1972 to 1991), and subsequently as the democratically elected president (1996 to 2006)
Mattiwilda Dobbs1925 — 2015 · Georgia-born coloratura soprano; the first Black singer to sing a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera in 1956 as a regular member of the company; recipient of the 1973 Grammy Award for Best Classical Album
Maurice Bishop1944 — 1983 · Prime Minister of Grenada; architect of the New Jewel revolution; executed in the 1983 coup
Maya Angelou1928 — 2014 · Poet and memoirist; the inaugural poet of 1993; the first Black woman to deliver an American inaugural poem
Maynard Jackson1938 — 2003 · First African American mayor of Atlanta; three-term mayor from 1974 to 1982 and 1990 to 1994; principal architect of Atlanta's late-twentieth-century rise- Mbuya Nehandac. 1840-1898 · Africa · Modern
McCoy Tyner1938 — 2020 · Philadelphia-born American jazz pianist and composer; principal pianist of the John Coltrane Quartet from 1960 to 1965; founder of the McCoy Tyner Sextet at New York in 1972
Med Hondo1936 — 2019 · Atar-born Mauritanian filmmaker; director of Soleil Ô of 1970, West Indies of 1979, and Sarraounia of 1986; principal political-cinema auteur of post-colonial African cinema
Medgar Evers1925 — 1963 · NAACP field secretary in Mississippi; assassinated in his own driveway- Mekatilili wa Menzac. 1860-1924 · Africa · Modern
Melvin B. Tolson1898 — 1966 · Moberly-born American poet; author of Harlem Gallery of 1965; principal Black-American modernist poet of the late Harlem Renaissance and post-Second-World-War period; founder of the Wiley College debate team of the 1930s
Menelik II1844 — 1913 · Emperor of Ethiopia; victor at Adwa; the first decisive African defeat of a European colonial army
Mercer Cook1903 — 1987 · Washington, D.C.-born scholar and diplomat; Ambassador to the Republic of Niger from 1961 to 1964 and the Republic of Senegal and the Islamic Republic of the Gambia from 1964 to 1966; Howard University professor of romance languages from 1936 to 1970
Metacometc. 1638-1676 · Americas · Early Modern
MF DOOM1971 — 2020 · British-born American rapper and producer; founder of the masked-villain persona of late-1990s and 2000s hip-hop; the most influential underground hip-hop artist of the millennial generation
Michael Jackson1958 — 2009 · The King of Pop; the most commercially successful Black recording artist of the twentieth century; principal commercial-music architect of the contemporary international entertainment industry
Michael Manley1924 — 1997 · Prime Minister of Jamaica; the social-democratic statesman whose Bauxite Levy reshaped Jamaican sovereignty over its resources- Michael S. Harper1938 — 2016 · Brooklyn-born American poet; author of Dear John, Dear Coltrane of 1970 and Healing Song for the Inner Ear of 1985; founder of the Brown University creative writing programme in 1970
Michel de Montaigne1533-1592 · Europe · Early Modern
Michelangelo1475–1564 · Europe · Early Modern
Mickey Leland1944 — 1989 · United States Representative from Texas's eighteenth district from 1979 to 1989; chair of the House Select Committee on Hunger; killed in an aircraft accident in Ethiopia during a famine-relief mission
Mifflin W. Gibbs1823 — 1915 · Pennsylvania-born attorney and diplomat; the first African American elected to a municipal judgeship in the United States, in Little Rock in 1873; United States Consul to Tamatave, Madagascar from 1897 to 1901
Mildred Blount1907 — 1974 · Pittsburgh-born American milliner; principal first Black-American milliner with a major commercial American fashion contract; designer of the principal Gone with the Wind 1939 millinery costume collection- Mildred Council1929 — 2018 · Chatham County-born American restaurateur; founder of Mama Dip's Kitchen at Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1976; principal Chapel Hill North Carolina soul-food restaurateur of the post-1976 American Black-and-Southern restaurant tradition
Miles Davis1926 — 1991 · Trumpeter, composer, and bandleader; the principal stylistic innovator of post-war jazz across five decades
Milton Obote1925 — 2005 · First Prime Minister of independent Uganda; twice deposed; the political center of Ugandan independence and its aftermath
Miriam Makeba1932 — 2008 · Singer; the first African artist to win a Grammy; Mama Africa
Moctezuma IIc. 1466-1520 · Americas · Early Modern
Modibo Keïta1915 — 1977 · First President of Mali; heir of Sundiata; the statesman who restored the empire's name to the modern map
Modjeska Monteith Simkins1899 — 1992 · South Carolina-born civil-rights organiser; principal closing-period South-Carolina-NAACP-State-Conference secretary from 1941 to 1957; the principal closing-period South-Carolina senior civil-rights organiser of the closing years of the 1941 to 1992 South-Carolina-American-civil-rights closing-period programmes
Mohammed Dib1920 — 2003 · Tlemcen-born Algerian novelist; author of the Algeria trilogy of The Big House, The Fire, and The Loom; recipient of the 1994 Grand Prix de la Francophonie
Moneta Sleet Jr.1926 — 1996 · Owensboro-born American photojournalist; staff photographer at Ebony and Jet from 1955 to 1996; the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, on the fifth of May 1969, for his photograph of Coretta Scott King and Bernice King at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mongo Beti1932 — 2001 · Akométan-born Cameroonian novelist; author of the 1956 novel Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba (The Poor Christ of Bomba); founder of the Peuples noirs–Peuples africains journal of Paris- Morgan Smith1910 — 1993 · Lexington-born American studio portrait photographer; co-founder with his twin brother Marvin Smith of the M & M Smith Studio at Harlem; principal Apollo Theater photographer of the 1940s and 1950s
Moses McKissack III1879 — 1952 · Tennessee-born architect; co-founder in 1922 of the McKissack & McKissack firm of Nashville — the oldest African American–owned architectural firm in the United States
Moshoeshoe Ic. 1786-1870 · Africa (Lesotho) · Modern
Mother Henriette DeLille1812 — 1862 · Foundress of the Sisters of the Holy Family of New Orleans; the second congregation of women religious of African descent in the Catholic Church
Mother Mary Langec. 1784 — 1882 · Foundress of the Oblate Sisters of Providence; the first congregation of women religious of African descent in the history of the Catholic Church
Muhammad Ali1942 — 2016 · Three-time World Heavyweight Champion; conscientious objector who refused conscription to the Vietnam War
Muhammad Bello1781 — 1837 · Second Sultan of Sokoto; consolidated and codified the Sokoto Caliphate
Murasaki Shikibuc. 973–1014 · East Asia · Medieval
Murtala Mohammed1938 — 1976 · Nigerian head of state; the most internationally consequential Nigerian statesman of the 1970s; assassinated in office at thirty-seven- Mutesa I of Bugandac. 1838-1884 · Africa · Modern
Mwai Kibaki1931 — 2022 · Third President of Kenya; economist who presided over Kenya's largest sustained expansion
Mychael Knight1978 — 2017 · Memphis-born American fashion designer; principal Black-American Project Runway-era couturier of the early twenty-first century; founder of the Mychael Knight Collection at Atlanta in 2006
Mzilikazic. 1790 — 1868 · Founder of the Matabele Kingdom; led the great northward migration during the mfecane
N
Naguib Mahfouz1911 — 2006 · Cairo-born Egyptian novelist; recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature — the first writer in Arabic to receive the prize; author of the Cairo Trilogy
Nana Asma'u1793-1864 · Africa · Modern
Nana Olomuc. 1852 — 1916 · Itsekiri merchant prince; Governor of the Benin River; exiled by Britain in 1894
Nannie Helen Burroughs1879 — 1961 · Founder of the National Training School for Women and Girls; principal architect of organised African American women's Baptist religious and educational work
Nanny of the Maroonsc. 1686–c. 1755 · Caribbean (Jamaica) · Early Modern
Naomi Sims1948 — 2009 · Oxford-born American fashion model and businesswoman; the first Black American model on the cover of Ladies' Home Journal on the seventeenth of November 1968; founder of the Naomi Sims Collection wig and cosmetics company in 1973
Nat Turner1800 — 1831 · Leader of the Southampton Insurrection of 1831, the deadliest slave revolt in U.S. history- Nate Dogg1969 — 2011 · Long Beach-born singer; principal vocal voice of West Coast G-funk; the most-featured guest vocalist of 1990s hip-hop
Nawal El Saadawi1931 — 2021 · Kafr Tahla-born Egyptian novelist, physician and feminist; author of the 1975 novel Imra’a ʿinda Nuqtat al-Sifr (Woman at Point Zero); founder of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association
Nefertitic. 1370–1330 BCE · Africa · Ancient
Negus Mikael of Wollo1850 — 1918 · Wollo-born King of the Wollo province from 1914 to 1916; father of Emperor Iyasu V; principal Muslim-born convert of the Solomonic nobility of the late Menelik period
Negus Tekle Haymanot of Gojjam1847 — 1901 · Gojjam-born King of the Gojjam province from 1881 to 1901; principal lieutenant of Emperor Yohannes IV and Menelik II; founder of the modern Gojjami kingship
Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikanac. 1840 — 1898 · Shona svikiro (spirit medium); principal spiritual authority of the First Chimurenga uprising; hanged at fifty-eight- Nehanda Nyakasikanac. 1840–1898 · Southern Africa · Modern
Nelson Mandela1918 — 2013 · First democratically elected President of South Africa; the moral statesman of the late twentieth century
Nezahualcoyotl1402–1472 · Mesoamerica · Early Modern
Niccolo Machiavelli1469-1527 · Europe (Italy) · Early Modern
Nicolaus Copernicus1473-1543 · Europe (Poland) · Early Modern
Nicolás Guillén1902 — 1989 · National poet of Cuba; founder of the mulato literary movement and the principal Afro-Caribbean voice of twentieth-century Spanish-language poetry
Nicomedes Santa Cruz1925 — 1992 · Afro-Peruvian poet, journalist and folklorist; the principal recoverer of the décima tradition and the founder of modern Afro-Peruvian cultural studies
Nina Simone1933 — 2003 · Singer, pianist, and civil-rights voice; the High Priestess of Soul
Nipsey Hussle1985 — 2019 · Los Angeles rapper, entrepreneur and Crenshaw community organiser; Grammy winner; founder of the Marathon Clothing store at Slauson and Crenshaw
Nizam al-Mulk1018-1092 · Middle East (Persia) · Medieval
Nizami Ganjavic. 1141-1209 · Middle East/Persia · Medieval- Njinga Mbandec. 1583-1663 · Africa (Central, Angola) · Early Modern
Njinga Mbandic. 1583-1663 · West-Central Africa (Ndongo/Matamba, Angola) · Early Modern
Nnamdi Azikiwe1904 — 1996 · First President of Nigeria; founder of African journalism in English
Noble Drew Ali1886 — 1929 · Founder of the Moorish Science Temple of America; founding figure of organised Islamic religious life among twentieth-century African Americans
Norbert Rillieux1806 — 1894 · Free-born Louisiana Creole engineer; inventor of the multiple-effect evaporator that became the foundational technology of the modern sugar-refining and chemical-process industries
Norma Sklarek1926 — 2012 · New York-born architect; the first African American woman licensed as an architect in the state of New York in 1954 and in California in 1962; the first African American woman elected to the AIA College of Fellows in 1980
Norman Lewis1909 — 1979 · New York-born abstract painter; the only Black founding member of the New York School Studio 35 circle of 1949; principal Black abstract-expressionist of the post-war period
Norman Manley1893 — 1969 · Founder of the People's National Party; principal negotiator of Jamaican independence
Ntozake Shange1948 — 2018 · Playwright and poet; author of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf; principal founder of the choreopoem as a theatrical form- Nzinga Mbandec. 1583-1663 · Central Africa · Early Modern
- Nzinga Mbandic. 1583-1663 · Central Africa (Ndongo/Matamba) · Early Modern
O
- Oba Esigiec. 1504–1550 (reign) · West Africa · Early Modern
- Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisic. 1857 — 1914 · Oba of Benin; deposed by the British Punitive Expedition of 1897 that looted the Benin Bronzes
Ol' Dirty Bastard1968 — 2004 · Brooklyn-born rapper; founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan; the Clan's principal unstructured vocal voice across its 1993 to 2004 founding decade
Olaudah Equianoc. 1745-1797 · African Diaspora (Britain) · Early Modern
Olive Morris1952 — 1979 · Black British activist; co-founder of the Brixton Black Women's Group and the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent; died at twenty-seven- Oliver Hill1907 — 2007 · Senior counsel of the NAACP Virginia litigation that produced Davis v. County School Board — one of the five cases consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education
Oliver Nelson1932 — 1975 · Saxophonist, composer, and arranger; The Blues and the Abstract Truth; the themes and scores of Hollywood's prime time; gone at forty-three
Oliver Tambo1917–1993 · Africa (Southern Africa) · Modern
Omar Khayyam1048–1131 · Middle East & Persia · Medieval
Onyeka Onwenu1952 — 2024 · Nigerian singer, journalist, actress and politician; principal Igbo female popular-music voice of the post-civil-war Nigerian generation; commissioner of the Nigerian National Centre for Women Development
Ophelia DeVore1922 — 2014 · Edgefield-born American model-agency founder; founder of the Ophelia DeVore Charm School at New York in 1946; principal pioneer of the principal Black-American model-agency tradition of the post-Second-World-War period- Opoku Ware Ic. 1700 — 1750 · Second Asantehene; consolidated the Asante Empire across what is now central Ghana
Ornette Coleman1930 — 2015 · Fort Worth-born American jazz saxophonist and composer; founder of the Ornette Coleman Quartet at Los Angeles in 1958; principal founder of the principal post-1958 American free-jazz tradition- Osei Tutu Ic. 1660 — 1717 · Founder of the Asante Empire; co-creator of the Golden Stool
Ossie Davis1917 — 2005 · Actor, playwright, director and civil-rights orator; delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X in February 1965 and at the memorial of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968
Otis Boykin1920 — 1982 · Electronic-control engineer; inventor of the wire-precision resistor used in the first implantable cardiac pacemaker and in the guidance computers of the Apollo and intercontinental ballistic missile programmes
Otis Redding1941 — 1967 · Singer and songwriter; principal vocalist of the Stax-Volt soul-music tradition of Memphis; killed in an aircraft accident in Wisconsin on the tenth of December 1967
Ottobah Cugoanoc. 1757 — c. 1791 · Akan-born British abolitionist; author of the most thorough early abolitionist treatise by a formerly enslaved African
Ousmane Sembène1923 — 2007 · Senegalese filmmaker and novelist; the founding figure of sub-Saharan African cinema
Ovonramwen Nogbaisic. 1857-1914 · Africa · Modern
P
P. B. S. Pinchback1837 — 1921 · First African American to serve as governor of a U.S. state (Louisiana, 1872-73)- P. H. Polk1898 — 1985 · Bessemer-born American studio portrait photographer; principal photographer of Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1985; portraitist of George Washington Carver and the Tuskegee Airmen
- Pacal the Great603–683 · Mesoamerica · Medieval
- Pachacutic. 1418–1472 · Andes · Early Modern
Paninic. 5th century BCE · South Asia (India) · Ancient
Papa Wemba1949 — 2016 · Congolese singer; principal voice of the third generation of Congolese rumba; founder of the sapeur movement that defined the urban Congolese cultural-aesthetic of the late twentieth century
Parren Mitchell1922 — 2007 · First African American congressman from Maryland; principal congressional architect of the federal minority-business set-aside programmes of the 1970s
Patrice Lumumba1925 — 1961 · First democratically elected Prime Minister of the Congo; assassinated at thirty-five
Patricia Bath1942 — 2019 · Ophthalmologist; inventor of the Laserphaco Probe for cataract surgery; first African American woman to receive a medical patent
Patricia Roberts Harris1924 — 1985 · United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 1977 to 1979; Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and then of Health and Human Services from 1979 to 1981; first African American woman appointed to the United States Cabinet- Patrick Clark1955 — 1998 · Brooklyn-born American chef; principal head chef of Tavern on the Green at New York from 1995 to 1998; principal Black-American haute-cuisine chef of the principal post-1985 American haute-cuisine commercial-restaurant period
- Patrick Kelly1954 — 1990 · Vicksburg-born American couturier; first American — and first Black designer of any nationality — admitted to the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode at Paris in 1988; founder of Patrick Kelly Paris
Paul Boglec. 1822 — 1865 · Native Baptist deacon; leader of the Morant Bay Rebellion that ended self-government in Jamaica for eighty years
Paul Cuffe1759 — 1817 · Sea captain, businessman, and Sierra Leone repatriationist; the wealthiest African American of the early Republic
Paul Laurence Dunbar1872 — 1906 · First African American poet to achieve national American literary reputation
Paul R. Williams1894 — 1980 · Los Angeles-born architect; the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects in 1923; designer of more than two thousand structures across a fifty-year Los Angeles practice
Paul Robeson1898 — 1976 · Bass-baritone, actor, athlete, lawyer, and political activist; the most internationally recognized African American figure of the mid-twentieth century
Pauli Murray1910 — 1985 · Civil rights lawyer, legal theorist, and Episcopal priest; the legal architect of two Supreme Court civil-rights victories- Paulin Hountondji1942 — 2024 · Beninese philosopher; author of African Philosophy: Myth and Reality; the critic who demanded Africa's philosophy be philosophy
- Paulin Soumanou Vieyra1925 — 1987 · Porto-Novo-born Senegalese-Beninese filmmaker and film historian; director of Afrique sur Seine of 1955, conventionally cited as the first film directed by a Black African; founder of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) in 1969
Pearl Bowser1931 — 2023 · New York-born American film historian and documentary filmmaker; principal recovery scholar of the Oscar Micheaux race-film tradition; founder of the African Diaspora Images film archive in 1971
Pearl Primus1919 — 1994 · Dancer and anthropologist; Strange Fruit at twenty-three, Africa on the Rosenwald Fund's last fellowship, a doctorate danced at its defense
Pedro Albizu Campos1891 — 1965 · Puerto Rican Nationalist Party president; the lawyer who refused American sovereignty and paid for it with half his life in prison
Pemulwuyc. 1750-1802 · Oceania · Early Modern
Percy Lavon Julian1899 — 1975 · Chemist; first synthesis of physostigmine; founded Julian Laboratories; second African American elected to the National Academy of Sciences
Percy Sutton1920 — 2009 · Texas-born Manhattan attorney and broadcaster; founder of the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation in 1971; the longest-serving Manhattan borough president of the twentieth century
Perry H. Young Jr.1919 — 1998 · Pennsylvania-born aviator; the first African American pilot hired by a regularly scheduled United States passenger airline — by New York Airways on the seventeenth of February 1957
Peter the Great1672-1725 · Russia · Early Modern
Phife Dawg1970 — 2016 · Queens-born rapper; founding member of A Tribe Called Quest; the Five-Foot Assassin; principal vocal counterpart to Q-Tip across the Tribe's 1990 to 1998 founding albums- Phil Freelon1953 — 2019 · Pennsylvania-born architect; lead architect of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture of 2016; founder of the Freelon Group of Durham, North Carolina
Phillis Wheatleyc. 1753 — 1784 · First African American to publish a book of poetry; first woman of African origin to publish in English
Pimp C1973 — 2007 · Texas-born rapper and producer; co-founder of UGK; principal Southern producer of the 1990s and 2000s Southern hip-hop crossover
Pio Gama Pinto1927 — 1965 · Goan-Kenyan journalist and trade-union organizer; first Member of Parliament assassinated in independent Kenya
Piyec. 780–721 BCE · Kush/Nubia · Ancient
Pocahontasc. 1596-1617 · The Americas (Virginia) · Early Modern
Pomare IIc. 1774-1821 · Oceania (Tahiti) · Modern
Pop Smoke1999 — 2020 · Brooklyn rapper; principal voice of the Brooklyn drill-music subgenre of the late 2010s; killed by gunfire in Los Angeles on the nineteenth of February 2020
Popéc. 1630-1692 · The Americas · Early Modern
Prempeh I1870 — 1931 · Asantehene; exiled by British conquest in 1896; restored to a constrained throne in 1924
Prince1958 — 2016 · Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer; the principal American auteur of recorded popular music of the 1980s; founder of Paisley Park Records
Prince Hallc. 1735 — 1807 · Founder of Black Freemasonry; abolitionist; principal organizer of free-Black Boston in the post-Revolutionary period
Prince Shotoku574-622 · East Asia (Japan) · Classical- Princess Pamela Strobelc. 1928 — c. 1998 · South Carolina-born American restaurateur; founder of Princess Pamela's Little Kitchen at the East Village of Manhattan in 1965; principal East Village soul-food restaurateur of the post-1965 Manhattan downtown commercial-restaurant community
- Princess Tenagnework Haile Selassie1912 — 2003 · Harar-born eldest daughter of Emperor Haile Selassie I and Empress Menen Asfaw; principal imperial princess of the late Solomonic period; founder of the Tenagnework School at Addis Ababa
Princess Tsehai Haile Selassie1919 — 1942 · Addis Ababa-born princess of the Solomonic imperial house; second daughter of Emperor Haile Selassie I; pioneer Ethiopian-trained nurse and surgical assistant at Great Ormond Street Hospital, London
Prodigy1974 — 2017 · Queens-born rapper; one half of the duo Mobb Deep; principal voice of mid-1990s East Coast hardcore hip-hop alongside the Notorious B.I.G. and Nas- Pōtatau Te Wherowheroc. 1800-1860 · Oceania (New Zealand) · Modern
Q
Qin Shi Huang259–210 BCE · East Asia · Classical
Qiu Jin1875-1907 · East Asia (China) · Modern- Queen Amina of Zazzaufl. 15th–16th century (dates disputed) · Hausa warrior queen of Zazzau; the earthen walls of the Hausa cities — the ganuwar Amina — carry her name
Queen Idia of Beninfl. 1504 — 1517 · Iyoba of Benin; mother of Oba Esigie; the only woman ever to receive the title Queen-Mother of the Benin Empire and the inspiration of the ivory mask carried by British Punitive Expedition in 1897- Queen Liliuokalani1838–1917 · Oceania (Hawaii) · Modern
- Queen Nannyc. 1686-1755 · African Diaspora (Jamaica) · Early Modern
Queen Nanny of the Maroonsc. 1686-1755 · African Diaspora (Caribbean, Jamaica) · Early Modern- Queen Nzinga1583–1663 · Africa · Early Modern
- Queen Nzinga Mbandic. 1583-1663 · Africa (Angola) · Early Modern
Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba1583 — 1663 · Queen of Ndongo and Matamba; led four decades of war against Portuguese enslavement in Angola- Queen Pomare IV1813-1877 · Oceania · Modern
- Queen Salote Tupou III1900-1965 · Oceania · Modern
R
R. Nathaniel Dett1882 — 1943 · Ontario-born American composer, pianist and choral director; director of music at the Hampton Institute for eighteen years; principal figure of the American Negro choral tradition- Rabia al-Adawiyyac. 717-801 · Middle East (Iraq) · Medieval
Rabindranath Tagore1861–1941 · South Asia · Modern- Raja Raja Chola Ic. 947-1014 · South Asia (India) · Medieval
Raja Ram Mohan Roy1772–1833 · South Asia (India) · Modern
Ralph Abernathy1926 — 1990 · Alabama-born Baptist minister; co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957; the second president of the SCLC from 1968 to 1977 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Ralph Bunche1904 — 1971 · UN diplomat; first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1950)
Ralph Ellison1913 — 1994 · Novelist; author of Invisible Man; reset the technical possibilities of the American novel- Ramanujac. 1017-1137 · South Asia · Medieval
Ramesses IIc. 1303–1213 BCE · Africa · Ancient- Ramses IIc. 1303-1213 BCE · North Africa (Egypt) · Ancient
- Ranavalona I1778-1861 · Africa (Madagascar) · Modern
Ranavalona III1861 — 1917 · Last Queen of Madagascar; deposed by France 1897; died in exile in Algiers
Rani Lakshmibai1828–1858 · South Asia · Modern- Ras Alula Engida1847-1897 · Northeast Africa (Ethiopia) · Modern
Ras Makonnen Welde Mikael1852 — 1906 · Shewan-born governor of Harar and military commander; father of Emperor Haile Selassie I; principal Ethiopian commander at the Battle of Adwa on the first of March 1896- Ratu Seru Cakobau1815-1883 · Oceania (Fiji) · Modern
Ray Charles1930 — 2004 · Singer, pianist, composer; the principal architect of the synthesis of gospel and rhythm-and-blues that produced the soul music of the post-war American century- Raymond R. Patterson1929 — 2001 · New York-born American poet; author of 26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man of 1969 and Elemental Blues of 1983; founder of the City College of New York Langston Hughes Festival in 1973
Razia Sultanac. 1205-1240 · Delhi Sultanate, South Asia · Medieval- Reginald F. Lewis1942 — 1993 · Maryland-born financier and attorney; the first Black American to assemble a billion-dollar leveraged buyout — the 1987 TLC Beatrice International acquisition; founder of TLC Group at New York in 1983
- Rex Nettleford1933 — 2010 · Jamaican choreographer, scholar and Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies; founder of the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica
Richard Allen1760 — 1831 · Founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; co-founder of the Free African Society
Richard H. Cain1825 — 1887 · Virginia-born minister and politician; principal AME-bishop-and-Congressman of the closing-period post-1870 closing-period South Carolina-Reconstruction; founding bishop of the principal AME New Orleans District in 1880
Richard Hatcher1933 — 2017 · First African American mayor of Gary, Indiana; served five consecutive terms from 1968 to 1988; convener of the 1972 Gary National Black Political Convention
Robert Brown Elliott1842 — 1884 · Liverpool-born attorney and orator; the principal post-1870 Reconstruction-era Black-Congressional orator of the closing years of the post-1870 Reconstruction period; the principal Speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1874 to 1876
Robert C. De Large1842 — 1874 · Reconstruction congressman of South Carolina; tailor, land commissioner, and a voice for the Enforcement Acts; gone at thirty-one
Robert F. Williams1925 — 1996 · NAACP organiser of Monroe, North Carolina; author of Negroes with Guns; principal twentieth-century theorist of armed self-defense in the African American freedom movement
Robert Hayden1913 — 1980 · The first African American to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress — the position now styled Poet Laureate of the United States
Robert Henry Lawrence Jr.1935 — 1967 · United States Air Force test pilot; first African American astronaut selected to a US human-spaceflight programme; killed in training before flight
Robert Houston1935 — 2020 · Baltimore-born American documentary photographer; principal documentary photographer of the Poor People's Campaign of 1968 and the principal late-twentieth-century Baltimore Black community
Robert L. Carter1917 — 2012 · General counsel of the NAACP from 1956 to 1968; argued NAACP v. Alabama before the Supreme Court; Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
Robert McFerrin Sr.1921 — 2006 · Arkansas-born baritone; the first Black male singer to have a regular contract with the Metropolitan Opera, on the twenty-seventh of January 1955
Robert Mugabe1924 — 2019 · First Prime Minister and second President of Zimbabwe; the longest-ruling head of state in Zimbabwean history
Robert Purvis1810 — 1898 · Founder of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee; the principal Underground Railroad organizer of the antebellum North
Robert R. Church Sr.1839 — 1912 · Mississippi-born Memphis real-estate developer; the first Black millionaire of the American South; the first Black member of the Memphis Bond Council in 1879
Robert R. Taylor1868 — 1942 · North Carolina-born architect; the first accredited African American architect in the United States; principal designer of the Tuskegee Institute campus across forty years
Robert Robertsc. 1780 — 1860 · Charleston-born American household steward and author; author of The House Servant's Directory of 1827, the first commercial book published in the United States by a Black American
Robert Sengstacke1943 — 2017 · Chicago-born American photojournalist; principal documentary photographer of the Black Power and Black Arts movements of the late 1960s; staff photographer of the Chicago Defender from 1962 to 1992
Robert Smalls1839 — 1915 · Enslaved wheelsman who commandeered a Confederate gunship and served five terms in Congress
Robert Sobukwe1924 — 1978 · Founder of the Pan-Africanist Congress; held under the South African Parliament's renewable Sobukwe Clause- Rod Rodgers1937 — 2002 · Ohio-born concert-dance choreographer; founder of the Rod Rodgers Dance Company at Manhattan in 1966; choreographer of the principal Black-Arts-Movement concert-dance works of the closing years of the 1960s and the 1970s
Roger Arliner Young1899 — 1964 · The first African American woman to receive a doctorate in zoology in the United States; researcher in cytology and marine biology at Woods Hole- Roger Mais1905 — 1955 · Jamaican novelist and journalist; principal architect of the post-war Jamaican urban-realist novel; imprisoned for sedition under colonial law in 1944
Roland Hayes1887 — 1977 · Georgia-born tenor; the first Black male concert singer of international rank; recipient of the 1924 Spingarn Medal of the NAACP- Roland L. Freeman1936 — 2020 · Baltimore-born American documentary photographer; principal folkloric photographer of the African American craft and folk-tradition community of the late twentieth century; founder of The Group for Cultural Documentation in 1968
Romare Bearden1911 — 1988 · Collagist and painter; the founding collagist of African American visual art- Ron Brown1941 — 1996 · First Black chair of a major American party and first Black Secretary of Commerce; lost with 34 others on a hillside above Dubrovnik, working for Bosnia's peace
Ron Dellums1935 — 2018 · United States Representative from California's eighth district from 1971 to 1998; chair of the House Armed Services Committee; principal congressional voice of the anti-apartheid movement
Ronald McNair1950 — 1986 · NASA physicist and astronaut; second African American in space; killed aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on the twenty-eighth of January 1986
Rosa Luxemburg1871-1919 · Europe (Germany) · Modern
Rosa Parks1913 — 2005 · Secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP; refusal of seat on Montgomery bus on the first of December 1955 inaugurated the bus boycott that began the modern civil-rights movement- Rose Morgan1912 — 2008 · Shelby-born American hair-care entrepreneur; founder of the Rose-Meta House of Beauty at Harlem in 1945; principal first Black-American hair-care-salon proprietor of the principal post-Second-World-War Harlem commercial period
Roy DeCarava1919 — 2009 · Photographer; first African American photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship; co-author of The Sweet Flypaper of Life
Roy Wilkins1901 — 1981 · NAACP executive secretary; the central administrative figure of the modern American civil-rights movement
Ruby Dee1922 — 2014 · Actress, poet and civil-rights activist; first African American actress to play a non-domestic lead at the Stratford Festival of Canada; Tony, Emmy, Grammy and Oscar nominee
Ruby Doris Smith Robinson1942 — 1967 · Georgia-born SNCC executive secretary; the principal closing-period administrative architect of the SNCC closing-period 1966 to 1967 organisation; the second SNCC chairperson and second SNCC executive secretary
Ruby Elzy1908 — 1943 · Mississippi-born soprano; the original Serena of the 1935 premiere of Porgy and Bess; principal soprano of the 1937 Carnegie Hall concert performance of the opera- Ruby Oliver1934 — 2008 · Seattle-born American filmmaker; director of Love Your Mama of 1989, the first feature film directed by a Black American woman west of the Mississippi River; founder of the Mountain Top Productions company in 1985
Rufus Estes1857 — c. 1939 · Murray County-born American chef; principal Pullman-Palace-Car-Company private-dining-car chef across the principal late-nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century commercial-American railroad-dining-car community; author of Good Things to Eat of 1911
Rumi1207–1273 · Middle East & Persia · Medieval- Russell Atkins1926 — 2024 · Cleveland-born American poet and composer; author of Heretofore of 1968 and World'd Too Much of 1985; co-founder of the Free Lance literary magazine at Cleveland in 1950; principal Cleveland Black avant-garde poet of the late twentieth century
Ruth First1925-1982 · Africa · Modern
S
Sacagaweac. 1788–1812 · Indigenous North America · Modern
Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander1898 — 1989 · First African American woman to earn a PhD in economics (Pennsylvania, 1921); first to practice law in Pennsylvania
Safi Faye1943 — 2023 · Dakar-born Senegalese filmmaker and ethnographer; director of Lettre paysanne of 1975, the first feature film by a sub-Saharan African woman director commercially distributed; principal ethnographic documentarian of rural Senegalese life
Sahle Selassie of Shewa1795 — 1847 · Solomonic King of Shewa from 1813 to 1847; grandfather of Emperor Menelik II; principal founder of the modern Shewan kingship and the diplomatic relations of Shewa with Europe
Saladin1137–1193 · Middle East & Persia · Medieval
Sam Cooke1931 — 1964 · Singer, songwriter, and record-label founder; principal architect of the gospel-to-soul crossover; composer of A Change Is Gonna Come
Sam Gilliam1933 — 2022 · Mississippi-born colour-field painter; principal Black abstract-expressionist of the post-1960 Washington Color School; the first African American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, in 1972
Sam Selvon1923 — 1994 · Trinidadian novelist; author of The Lonely Londoners; founder of the Caribbean-British literary tradition
Sam Sharpe1801 — 1832 · Baptist preacher and leader of the largest slave rebellion in British Caribbean history
Sammy Davis Jr.1925 — 1990 · Singer, dancer, multi-instrumentalist and entertainer; principal Black member of the Rat Pack; Kennedy Center Honors recipient; the most decorated Black variety entertainer of his generation
Samora Machel1933 — 1986 · First President of Mozambique; leader of FRELIMO; killed in a plane crash never fully explained- Samori Tourec. 1830-1900 · West Africa · Modern
Samori Turec. 1830 — 1900 · Founder of the Wassoulou Empire; held off French expansion for sixteen years- Samory Touréc. 1830–1900 · West Africa · Modern
Samuel Ajayi Crowtherc. 1809-1891 · Africa (Nigeria) · Modern
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor1875 — 1912 · London-born Afro-British composer and conductor; composer of the 1898 cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast; the first composer of African descent to enter the standard European concert repertoire
Samuel Maharero1856-1923 · Africa · Modern
Samuel R. Lowery1832 — 1900 · Tennessee-born attorney and educator; the first African American admitted to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court, on the second of February 1880
Samuel Sharpec. 1801-1832 · Jamaica · Modern
Sanité Bélair1781 — 1802 · Lieutenant of the Haitian Revolutionary Army; executed at twenty-one for refusing slavery
Sara Spencer Washington1889 — 1953 · Berkley-born American hair-care entrepreneur; founder of the Apex News and Hair Company at Atlantic City in 1920; principal Black-American hair-care-and-philanthropic entrepreneur of the principal post-Madam-Walker American hair-care commercial period
Sarah E. Goode1855 — 1905 · First African American woman to receive a U.S. patent (1885, for the folding cabinet bed)
Sarah Maldoror1929 — 2020 · Condom-born French Guadeloupean filmmaker; director of Sambizanga of 1972, the first feature film by a Black woman director of the African continent; principal documentarian of the African anti-colonial movements
Sarah Mapps Douglass1806 — 1882 · Quaker abolitionist and educator; founder of one of the first independent schools for Black girls in the United States
Sarah Vaughan1924 — 1990 · Singer; Sassy; the most harmonically sophisticated jazz vocalist of the twentieth century- Sarah Webster Fabio1928 — 1979 · Poet, performance artist and educator; one of the founders of African American studies as an academic discipline; co-creator of the Black studies programme at Merritt College, Oakland
Sargent Johnson1888 — 1967 · Massachusetts-born San Francisco sculptor; principal Black sculptor of the Bay Area Federal Art Project of the 1930s; the first Black sculptor elected to the San Francisco Art Association in 1932- Sarraounia Mangouc. 1850 — c. 1899 · Hausa-Azna queen of Lougou; defeated the Voulet-Chanoine column at the Battle of Lougou
Savitribai Phule1831-1897 · South Asia · Modern- Scott Barrie1941 — 1993 · Philadelphia-born American couturier; first Black American designer to show at the Salon de la Couture at the Hôtel Crillon at Paris in 1973; principal pioneer of the matte-jersey Black-American couture tradition of the 1970s
Scott Joplin1868 — 1917 · Texas-born pianist and composer; principal figure of the classical ragtime tradition; composer of the 1911 grand opera Treemonisha
Scott La Rock1962 — 1987 · Bronx-born disc jockey; co-founder of Boogie Down Productions with KRS-One; producer of the foundational 1987 album Criminal Minded
Sei Shonagonc. 966-c. 1017 · East Asia (Japan) · Classical
Sejong the Great1397–1450 · East Asia · Early Modern
Sekhukhune Ic. 1814 — 1882 · King of the Pedi; defeated successive Boer and British colonial expeditions before his ultimate capture and murder
Selma Burke1900 — 1995 · Sculptor; designed the bas-relief portrait of Franklin Roosevelt on the U.S. dime
Sengbe Piehc. 1814 — c. 1879 · Mende farmer who led the Amistad revolt; freed by the Supreme Court of the nation that jailed him; carried his people home
Septima Clark1898 — 1987 · Founder of the Citizenship Schools that prepared an estimated seven hundred thousand African Americans to register to vote in the segregated South- Septima Poinsette ClarkA Charleston-born teacher who taught hundreds of thousands of Black Americans to read so they could vote — and built the schools the civil rights movement was built on.
Sequoyahc. 1770–1843 · Indigenous North America · Modern
Seretse Khama1921 — 1980 · First President of Botswana; founder of Africa's longest continuously democratic state
Shaka kaSenzangakhonac. 1787 — 1828 · Founder of the Zulu Kingdom; the military reformer who reshaped Southern African statecraft
Shirley Chisholm1924 — 2005 · First Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress; first Black candidate to seek the Democratic presidential nomination
Shirley Verrett1931 — 2010 · New Orleans-born mezzo-soprano and soprano; principal mezzo-soprano of the Metropolitan Opera across twenty seasons; the first Black singer to sing both Aïda and Amneris at the Metropolitan Opera in the same evening
Sidney Poitier1927 — 2022 · First African American to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role — for Lilies of the Field in 1964; Knight Commander of the British Empire; United States Ambassador to Japan
Sima Qianc. 145–86 BCE · East Asia · Classical
Simon Kimbangu1887-1951 · Africa (Congo) · Modern
Simón Bolívar1783–1830 · South America · Early Modern
Sissieretta Jones1868 — 1933 · Operatic soprano; first Black artist to sing at Carnegie Hall (1892); called Black Patti
Sister Thea Bowman1937 — 1990 · Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration; principal voice of African American Catholic spirituality in the late twentieth century
Sitting Bullc. 1831–1890 · Indigenous North America · Modern
Sobhuza II1899 — 1982 · King of Eswatini; holds the longest verified reign of any monarch in recorded history (82 years)
Socratesc. 470–399 BCE · Europe & Mediterranean · Classical
Sojourner Truthc. 1797 — 1883 · Abolitionist; orator of "Ain't I a Woman?"; first Black woman to win a court case against a white man in America
Sol Plaatje1876-1932 · Africa (South Africa) · Modern
Solomon Carter Fuller1872 — 1953 · Liberia-born psychiatrist and neuropathologist; the first African American psychiatrist and a co-discoverer in 1907 of the neuropathology of Alzheimer’s disease; principal psychiatric-research student of Alois Alzheimer at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital of Munich
Solomon Mahlangu1956 — 1979 · MK soldier executed by the apartheid state at twenty-two; the symbol of South Africa's youth liberation generation- Sonni Ali Berr. 1464-1492 · West Africa (Songhai) · Medieval
- Sonny Okosun1947 — 2008 · Nigerian singer, songwriter and bandleader; principal Afro-pop architect of the Pan-African political-protest genre called ozzidi; composer of Fire in Soweto
Spencer Williams Jr.1893 — 1969 · Race-film director and the Andy of television's Amos 'n' Andy; The Blood of Jesus, the first race film in the National Film Registry
Spottswood Robinson III1916 — 1998 · Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; co-counsel with Thurgood Marshall in the Virginia portion of Brown v. Board of Education
Srinivasa Ramanujan1887–1920 · South Asia · Modern
St. Clair Bourne1943 — 2007 · Long Island-born American documentary filmmaker; director of Let the Church Say Amen! of 1973, In Motion: Amiri Baraka of 1982, and Paul Robeson: Here I Stand of 1999; principal documentary filmmaker of the Black Arts Movement
St. Clair Drake1911 — 1990 · Anthropologist; co-author of Black Metropolis; founder of the African Studies Program at Stanford- Stephen Burrows1943 — 2023 · Newark-born American sportswear designer; principal Black-American sportswear designer of the 1970s and 1980s American matte-jersey couture tradition; founder of the Stephen Burrows World boutique at Henri Bendel in 1970
Sterling Brown1901 — 1989 · Poet, critic, and Howard professor of forty years; author of Southern Road; often called the dean of African American letters
Steve Biko1946 — 1977 · South African philosopher; founder of the Black Consciousness Movement
Stuart Hall1932 — 2014 · Jamaican-British cultural theorist; founder of the Birmingham School of cultural studies
Su Shi1037-1101 · East Asia (China) · Medieval
Sugar Ray Robinson1921 — 1989 · Six-time world boxing champion; widely regarded by the present consensus as the greatest pound-for-pound boxer of the twentieth century- Suleiman I1494–1566 · Middle East & Persia · Early Modern
Suleiman the Magnificent1494-1566 · Middle East & Persia · Early Modern
Sun Ra1914 — 1993 · Birmingham-born American jazz composer, bandleader, and pianist; founder of the Sun Ra Arkestra at Chicago in 1952; principal Afrofuturist jazz composer-bandleader of the post-Second-World-War American jazz tradition
Sun Tzuc. 544–496 BCE · East Asia · Classical
Sun Yat-sen1866-1925 · East Asia · Modern- Sundiata Keitac. 1217 — c. 1255 · Founder of the Mali Empire; author of the Kouroukan Fouga, a 13th-century constitutional charter
- Sunni Alic. 1464-1492 · West Africa (Songhai Empire) · Medieval
- Sunni Ali Berr. 1464 — 1492 · Founder of the Songhai Empire as a great power; conqueror of Timbuktu and Jenne; victor over the Mossi and Tuareg
Suryavarman IIc. 1094–1150 · Southeast Asia · Medieval
Susie King Taylor1848 — 1912 · Union Army nurse, teacher, and the only Black woman to publish a Civil War memoir
Sylvanus Olympio1902 — 1963 · First President of Togo; first African head of state assassinated in a coup
Sylvia Woods1926 — 2012 · Hemingway-born American restaurateur; founder of Sylvia's Restaurant at Harlem in 1962; principal matriarch of the post-Harlem-Renaissance Harlem soul-food restaurant tradition
Sékou Touré1922 — 1984 · First President of Guinea; the only African leader to reject Charles de Gaulle's 1958 offer of association
T
T. Thomas Fortune1856 — 1928 · Founder of the New York Age; principal Black newspaper editor of the late nineteenth century; founder of the National Afro-American League — predecessor of the NAACP
Tabu Ley Rochereau1940 — 2013 · Congolese singer and bandleader; founder of Orchestre Afrisa International; principal soukous innovator of the second generation of Congolese rumba
Tadd Dameron1917 — 1965 · Cleveland-born American jazz composer and arranger; principal bebop composer-arranger of the principal late-1940s American bebop tradition; composer of 'Good Bait' of 1944 and 'Hot House' of 1945
Tafawa Balewa1912 — 1966 · First Prime Minister of independent Nigeria; assassinated in the January 1966 coup
Tahar Cheriaa1927 — 2010 · Sayada-born Tunisian film critic and festival founder; founder of the Carthage Film Festival in 1966, the principal Pan-African and Pan-Arab film festival; principal critical theorist of African cinema
Taharqad. 664 BCE · Africa · Ancient
Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana1873-1939 · Oceania (New Zealand) · Modern- Talley Beatty1918 — 1995 · Louisiana-born choreographer; principal Black-American concert-dance choreographer of the post-war period; choreographer of the 1947 Tropicana — the first all-Black-American concert-dance work to win the New York Times principal dance award
Tayeb Salih1929 — 2009 · Karmakol-born Sudanese novelist; author of the 1966 novel Mawsim al-Hijra ila ash-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North) — recognised by the Arab Literary Academy of Damascus as the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century
Te Kootic. 1832-1893 · Oceania (New Zealand) · Modern
Te Puea Herangi1883-1952 · Oceania (New Zealand) · Modern
Te Rangi Hiroa1877-1951 · Oceania · Modern
Te Rauparahac. 1768–1849 · Oceania · Modern
Te Whiti o Rongomaic. 1830-1907 · Oceania · Modern
Tecumsehc. 1768–1813 · Indigenous North America · Modern
Tecun Umand. 1524 · Mesoamerica · Early Modern
Terence Todman1926 — 2014 · Virgin Islands-born career diplomat; the second African American to attain the rank of Career Ambassador of the United States Foreign Service, in 1989; Ambassador to Chad, Guinea, Costa Rica, Spain, Denmark, and Argentina
Tewodros IIc. 1818-1868 · Africa · Modern
The Notorious B.I.G.1972 — 1997 · Brooklyn-born rapper; principal voice of mid-1990s East Coast hip-hop; killed by gunfire in Los Angeles on the ninth of March 1997
Thelonious Monk1917 — 1982 · Pianist and composer; co-founder of bebop; second-most-recorded jazz composer in history after Duke Ellington
Thomas Aquinas1225-1274 · Europe (Italy) · Medieval
Thomas E. Miller1849 — 1938 · South Carolina-born politician; principal post-1888 closing-period South Carolina-Seventh-Congressional-District-Black-Congressional senior figure of the closing years of the post-1888 closing-period Reconstruction period; founding president of the State Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes at Orangeburg- Thomas L. Jennings1791 — 1856 · First African American to receive a U.S. patent (1821, for a dry-cleaning process)
Thomas Sankara1949 – 1987 · Revolutionary president of Burkina Faso
Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins1849 — 1908 · Georgia-born pianist and composer; the highest-paid concert pianist in the United States of the 1860s; the first African American to perform at the White House- Thomy Lafon1810 — 1893 · New Orleans-born merchant and philanthropist; principal Black landlord of the antebellum Vieux Carré; the first Black American whose bust was commissioned for permanent display in the Louisiana State Museum
Thurgood Marshall1908 — 1993 · First African American Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; principal litigator of Brown v. Board of Education; founding director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Thutmose IIIc. 1479-1425 BCE · Africa · Ancient
Tina Turner1939 — 2023 · The Queen of Rock 'n' Roll; principal Black female recording artist of the 1980s commercial rock crossover; eight-time Grammy winner
Tipu Sultan1750-1799 · South Asia · Early Modern
Titokowaruc. 1823–1888 · Oceania · Modern
Tiyo Soga1829 — 1871 · The first Black South African ordained a Christian minister; translator of Pilgrim's Progress into Xhosa; hymnist of a nation
Todd Duncan1903 — 1998 · Kentucky-born baritone; the original Porgy in the 1935 premiere of Porgy and Bess; the first Black member of the New York City Opera in 1945
Tokugawa Ieyasu1543–1616 · East Asia · Early Modern
Tom Bradley1917 — 1998 · Mayor of Los Angeles from 1973 to 1993 — the longest mayoral tenure in the city's history; first African American mayor of a major American city with a majority-white electorate
Tom Dent1932 — 1998 · New Orleans-born American poet and oral historian; author of Magnolia Street of 1976 and Blue Lights and River Songs of 1982; co-founder of the Umbra poets collective at New York in 1962 and the Free Southern Theater at New Orleans in 1963
Tom Mboya1930 — 1969 · Kenyan labor leader and statesman; principal architect of the Airlift Africa scholarship program; assassinated at thirty-eight
Toni Cade Bambara1939 — 1995 · Novelist, short-story writer, and film-maker; editor of The Black Woman; author of The Salt Eaters and the 1986 documentary Bombing of Osage Avenue
Toni Morrison1931 — 2019 · Novelist; first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature
Toussaint Louverturec. 1743 — 1803 · Founder of the Haitian Revolution; first Black head of state in modern history
Truganinic. 1812–1876 · Oceania · Modern
Trung Sistersc. 14–43 · Southeast Asia · Classical- Tulaabout 1750 — the third of October 1795 ’ Knip-born Curaçaoan Maroon commander; principal commander of the Tula Slave Revolt of the seventeenth of August to the twentieth of October 1795 of the Dutch colony of Curaçao.
- Tunis Campbell1812 — 1891 · Middlebrook-born American hotel steward, Reconstruction-era politician, and author; author of Hotel Keeper's, Headwaiter's and Housekeeper's Guide of 1848, the principal first American hotel-and-restaurant management manual
Tupac Amaru II1738–1781 · Andes · Modern
Tupac Kataric. 1750-1781 · Bolivia, South America · Early Modern
Tupac Shakur1971 — 1996 · Rapper, actor and political voice; principal commercial voice of the second half of 1990s hip-hop; killed by gunfire in Las Vegas on the thirteenth of September 1996
Tupaiac. 1725–1770 · Oceania · Early Modern
Túpac Amaru Ic. 1545-1572 · Americas (Peru) · Early Modern
U
- Ulysses Kay1917 — 1995 · Arizona-born composer; first African American composer-in-residence of a touring American cultural exchange — the 1958 State Department tour of the Soviet Union; distinguished professor at Lehman College for twenty years
Una Marson1905 — 1965 · Jamaican poet, playwright and editor; first Black programme producer at the BBC; founder of the Caribbean Voices radio service
Undine Smith Moore1904 — 1989 · Virginia-born composer and choral pedagogue; co-director of the Black Music Center at Virginia State University; composer of the 1981 oratorio Scenes from the Life of a Martyr- Usman dan Fodio1754 — 1817 · Fulani scholar and founder of the Sokoto Caliphate — the largest African state of the nineteenth century
V
Vercingetorixc. 82-46 BC · Europe · Classical
Vernon Johns1892 — 1965 · Virginia-born theologian; pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church at Montgomery, Alabama from 1947 to 1952; the immediate predecessor of Martin Luther King Jr. at Dexter Avenue and the principal proto-civil-rights pulpit voice of the late-1940s South
Vernon Jordan1935 — 2021 · Civil-rights lawyer and counselor; he walked Charlayne Hunter through the mob, led the National Urban League, and had a president's ear- Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor1937 — 2016 · Culinary griot of the Gullah-Geechee; author of Vibration Cooking; the voice on the radio that made the kitchen a homeland
Vertner Tandy1885 — 1949 · Kentucky-born architect; first registered African American architect in the state of New York; principal designer of Madame C. J. Walker’s Villa Lewaro of 1918
Vicente Guerrero1782 — 1831 · Mexican independence general and second president of Mexico; abolished slavery by presidential decree on the fifteenth of September 1829- Victor Hugo1802–1885 · Europe · Modern
Vincent Ogé1755 — 1791 · Free Black Saint-Dominguois revolutionary; martyr whose execution forced the French Assembly's recognition of free-colored rights
Vivien Thomas1910 — 1985 · Louisiana-born surgical technician; principal developer of the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig blue-baby anastomosis surgical procedure at Johns Hopkins, 1944; recipient of the 1976 honorary doctor of laws of Johns Hopkins University
Voltaire1694-1778 · Europe (France) · Early Modern
W
W. E. B. Du Bois1868 — 1963 · Sociologist; co-founder of the NAACP; convening intelligence of Pan-Africanism- Walda Heywatc. 1630 — c. 1700 · Enfraz-born Ethiopian philosopher; principal disciple of Zera Yacob; author of the Treatise of Walda Heywat composed at the principal Enfraz Ethiopian Orthodox community in the principal post-1692 Enfraz period
- Walter Nicks1925 — 2007 · Pennsylvania-born modernist dancer and choreographer; principal Black-American post-war dance-pedagogy figure; founding artistic director of the Walter Nicks Dance Foundation at Manhattan in 1972
Walter Payton1954 — 1999 · Running back of the Chicago Bears from 1975 to 1987; the second National Football League career-rushing leader after Jim Brown; Hall of Fame inductee in 1993
Walter Rodney1942 — 1980 · Guyanese historian; author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; assassinated at thirty-eight
Walter Sisulu1912 — 2003 · ANC Secretary-General; political mentor of Nelson Mandela; Rivonia co-defendant; architect of the South African transition
Walter T. Bailey1882 — 1941 · Illinois-born architect; the first African American graduate of the University of Illinois School of Architecture in 1904; designer of the Pythian Temple of Chicago of 1928
Walter Tull1888 — 1918 · First Black outfield professional footballer in Britain; first Black combat officer in the British Army
Walter Washington1915 — 2003 · First mayor of the District of Columbia after home rule; the first African American mayor of any major American city in the twentieth century- Wanda Coleman1946 — 2013 · Los Angeles-born American poet; author of Mercurochrome: New Poems of 2001 and The World Falls Away of 2011; principal Los Angeles Black-American poet of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
Wang Yangming1472-1529 · East Asia · Early Modern
Wangari Maathai1940 – 2011 · Green Belt Movement founder, Nobel Peace laureate
Wayne Shorter1933 — 2023 · Saxophonist and composer; the Second Great Quintet's pen, Weather Report's co-founder, twelve Grammys across six decades- Wendell Campbell1927 — 2008 · Indiana-born architect; founding president of the National Organization of Minority Architects in 1971; principal designer of the Pullman Center at Chicago and the Black Expo pavilions of the 1960s
Wendell Pruitt1920 — 1945 · Missouri-born United States Army Air Forces officer; Tuskegee Airman ace candidate of the 302nd Fighter Squadron; the principal Black fighter pilot of the Italian theatre to sink an enemy destroyer with machine-gun fire alone, on the twenty-fifth of June 1944
Whina Cooper1895–1994 · Oceania · Modern- Whitney Houston1963 — 2012 · Singer and actress; principal vocal stylist of late-twentieth-century popular ballad; the only artist to have charted seven consecutive number-one Billboard Hot 100 singles
Whitney M. Young Jr.1921 — 1971 · Executive director of the National Urban League; the principal Black voice in mid-century corporate America- Wiley Branton1923 — 1988 · Arkansas-born civil-rights attorney; lead counsel of the Little Rock Nine in the Aaron v. Cooper case of 1957–1958; dean of the Howard University School of Law from 1978 to 1983
Willa Brown1906 — 1992 · Kentucky-born Chicago aviator; the first Black woman to hold a United States commercial pilot’s licence — issued on the twenty-second of June 1937; co-founder of the National Airmen’s Association of America- Willi Smith1948 — 1987 · Philadelphia-born American sportswear designer; founder of WilliWear Limited at New York in 1976; principal Black designer of the principal American sportswear-streetwear tradition of the 1970s and 1980s
William Grant Still1895 — 1978 · Mississippi-born composer; the first African American to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra — the 1931 premiere of his Afro-American Symphony by the Rochester Philharmonic — and to conduct one
William Greaves1926 — 2014 · New York-born American documentary filmmaker; director of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One of 1968 and Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey of 2001; executive producer of the National Educational Television Black Journal series from 1968 to 1970
William H. Gray III1941 — 2013 · United States Representative from Pennsylvania's second district from 1979 to 1991; House Majority Whip — the highest leadership office ever held by an African American in the U.S. Congress to that date- William H. Johnson1901 — 1970 · South Carolina-born painter; principal Black modernist painter of the inter-war Scandinavian School; the painter of the post-1938 American Black Folk Painters series
William Hastie1904 — 1976 · The first African American federal judge in United States history; appointed to the United States District Court of the Virgin Islands in 1937 and to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1949- William Henry Lewis1868 — 1949 · Virginia-born attorney; the first African American Assistant United States Attorney General, in 1911; the first Black All-American football player
- William J. Powell1897 — 1942 · Texas-born Los Angeles aviator; founder of the Bessie Coleman Aero Club at Los Angeles in 1929; author of the 1934 Black aviation manifesto Black Wings
William Joseph Seymour1870 — 1922 · Pastor of the Azusa Street Revival; founder of modern Pentecostal Christianity
William Levi Dawson1899 — 1990 · Alabama-born composer and choral director; director of the Tuskegee Institute Choir for twenty-six years; composer of the 1934 Negro Folk Symphony
William Monroe Trotter1872 — 1934 · Founder and editor of the Boston Guardian; the most uncompromising opponent of Booker T. Washington's accommodationism; co-founder of the Niagara Movement
William Shakespeare1564–1616 · Europe & Mediterranean · Early Modern
William Sidney Pittman1875 — 1958 · Alabama-born architect; first African American architect to receive a federal commission — the Negro Building of the 1907 Jamestown Exposition; son-in-law of Booker T. Washington- William T. Coleman Jr.1920 — 2017 · Secretary of Transportation of the United States from 1975 to 1977; NAACP LDF litigator; co-author of the Brown v. Board of Education brief; second African American Cabinet member in American history
William Tubman1895 — 1971 · President of Liberia for twenty-seven years; expanded the franchise and the economy of Africa's oldest republic
William Warfield1920 — 2002 · Arkansas-born bass-baritone; principal American concert bass-baritone of the post-war period; Joe in the 1951 MGM film of Show Boat
William Wells Brown1814 — 1884 · First African American novelist; first African American playwright
Willie Mays1931 — 2024 · The Say Hey Kid; centerfielder of the New York and San Francisco Giants from 1951 to 1972; widely regarded by present consensus as the greatest all-round baseball player of the twentieth century
Wilma Rudolph1940 — 1994 · Sprinter; first American woman to win three gold medals at a single Olympic Games (Rome 1960)- Wilson Harris1921 — 2018 · Guyanese novelist; principal twentieth-century mystic-modernist of Caribbean letters; author of the Guyana Quartet and twenty-five subsequent novels
Wilt Chamberlain1936 — 1999 · Center of the Philadelphia Warriors, Philadelphia 76ers and Los Angeles Lakers from 1959 to 1973; scorer of one hundred points in a single NBA game on the second of March 1962
Wiremu Tamihanac. 1805-1866 · New Zealand (Maori) · Modern
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart1756-1791 · Europe (Austria) · Early Modern
Wu Zetian624–705 · East Asia · Medieval- Wyatt Tee Walker1928 — 2018 · King's chief of staff; architect of Birmingham's Project C; the hands that assembled the Letter from Birmingham Jail
X
Y
- Yaa Asantewaac. 1840 — 1921 · Asante Queen Mother of Ejisu; commander of the War of the Golden Stool
Yaganc. 1795-1833 · Western Australia, Oceania · Modern- Yekuno Amlakd. 1285 · Africa · Medieval
Yi Hwang1501-1570 · East Asia · Early Modern
Yi Sun-sin1545–1598 · East Asia (Korea) · Early Modern
Yohannes IV1837 — 1889 · Emperor of Ethiopia; killed at Metemma defending against the Mahdist invasion
Yvonne Vera1964 — 2005 · Bulawayo-born Zimbabwean novelist; author of the 1998 novel Butterfly Burning; recipient of the 1999 Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa
Z
- Zelda Wynn Valdes1905 — 2001 · Chambersburg-born American couturier and costume designer; designer of the principal Playboy Bunny costume of 1960; principal costume designer of the Dance Theatre of Harlem from 1969 to 2001
Zenobiac. 240–274 · Middle East (Palmyra) · Classical- Zera Yacob1600 — 1693 · Ethiopian philosopher; the Hatäta's inquiry by the light of reason — a work whose authorship scholars still contest, carried here with both schools standing
Zhang Heng78–139 · East Asia · Classical
Zhang Qianc. 200-114 BCE · East Asia (China) · Ancient
Zheng He1371–1433 · East Asia · Early Modern
Zhu Xi1130-1200 · China, East Asia · Medieval- Zhu Yuanzhang1328-1398 · East Asia (China) · Medieval
Zora Neale Hurston1891 — 1960 · Novelist and anthropologist; restored the rural Black-American voice to literary fiction
Zumbi dos Palmaresc. 1655 — 1695 · Last sovereign of the maroon republic of Palmares; defender of the largest free Black polity in the history of the Americas