Personality Profile

Around 1770, Abla Pokou led her people from modern-day Ghana to the Ivory Coast, where she formed the Baoule nation. According to legend, she sacrificed her son to the river in order for her people to cross. Abla Pokou was born in the early eighteenth century. She was the niece of King Osei Tutu, the co-founder of Ghana’s Ashanti Empire. …

Hendrik Witbooi, also known as “!Nanseb Gaib Gabemab” (the snake in the grass), united his Nama people in what is now Namibia to fight a guerrilla struggle against German domination. Hendrik Witbooi was born in Pella, a province in the Northern Cape of South Africa that borders Namibia, circa 1830. Witbooi was descended from a long line of Witbooi Nama …

More than a thousand years before the foundations of Greece and Rome, proud and industrious Black men and women known as the Dravidian erected a powerful civilization in the Indus Valley. From those origins, African Kings in India drove the region’s commerce, culture, and belief systems. Dr. Clyde Winters, author of Afrocentrism: Myth or Science? writes: “Ethiopians have had very …

Originally born in the USA, Eugene had decided on his eleventh birthday that he would run away to France, where he could escape racial injustice. A boxer and talented jazz musician, he made his way to Europe and was given the French nickname “L’Hirondelle noire”, meaning Black Swallow. In 1914, when the WWI started, he served under France. Bullard received …

According to historians, he was proclaimed Emperor of Ethiopia three times. While in exile, the first occurred in 1960, the second in 1975, and the third in 1989. Amha Selassie was born Asfaw Wossen Tafari in Harar, Ethiopia, in August 1916, to Dejazmach Tafari Makonnen (later Emperor Haile Selassie) and his wife, Menen Asfaw. He is regarded as Ethiopia’s final …

Morrison, who performed under the stage name Sunshine Sammy, was most famous as one of the Dead End Kids/East Side Kids. As the oldest Our Gang cast-member Morrison earned $10,000 a year, making him the highest-paid Black actor in Hollywood. He made 28 episodes from 1922 to 1928 before he ditched Hollywood for New York’s vaudeville stages. He was featured …

Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–1913) escaped slavery to become a leading abolitionist. She led hundreds of enslaved people to freedom along the route of the Underground Railroad. Who Was Harriet Tubman? Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland and escaped to freedom in the North in 1849, becoming the Underground Railroad’s most renowned “conductor.” On this sophisticated hidden network of …

Ruby Bridges born in 1954 was the first African American child to integrate an all-white public elementary school in the South. She later became a civil rights activist. Who Is Ruby Bridges? When Ruby Bridges was six years old, she became the first African American child to attend a predominantly white Southern elementary school. Due to angry mobs, her mother …

Many people think, Washington, D.C., the U.S. headquarters. Originally designed by the white famous architects Pierre Charles L’Enfant, Andrew Ellicot finished the project in 1792 after the former left the building. U.S capital would not be the same if it wasn’t for Benjamin Banneker, the Black architect hired by George Washington, the first President of the United States, to design …

Who was Marie Van Brittan? Marie Van Brittan Brown was an African American inventor. She created the first home security system with the help of her husband Albert Brown. The patent for her invention was registered with the name of “Home Security System Utilizing Television Surveillance “ in 1966 and was accepted in 1969. The security system created by Marie …