PHILADELPHIA – A new outdoor exhibit is opening in the city’s historic district after years of protests, research and debate about how to balance the stories of the nation’s battle for independence with its history of slavery.

Wichita native Barry Sanders, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, was named a 2010 Trailblazer on Saturday by the Kansas African American Museum.

NELSON MANDELA, seeing the consummation of the cause for which he sacrificed 27 years of his life, joined F W de Klerk and 19 other South African leaders Last night at a ceremony to ratify the country’s first democratic constitution. Breaking with 45 years of apartheid and three centuries of colonial injustice, the constitution starts […]

The federal government said the names of 581 black World War I veterans are missing from bronze plaques hanging outside the courthouse in Natchez.

Richard (“Dick”) Gregory was born (1932). Jesse James Payne was lynched in Madison County, Florida (1945). Forty-six Black and white sailors injured in race riot on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk of North Vietnam (1972). Basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain died at age 63 (1999). Take a look at some more moments in Black History below: […]

Jamaican national hero, Paul Bogle, leads a successful protest march to the Morant Bay Courthouse (1865). The elevator as well as safety devices for elevators where invented by Alexander Miles, Patent # 371,207 (1887). C.O. Bailiff patented the shampoo headrest (1898). NAACP organizes the Education Fund and Legal Defense (1939) Prison uprising, Washington, D.C., jail […]

I’m a native of Atlanta and a lifelong liberal. My dad was born in Birmingham. His mother’s family owned a plantation in South Carolina before the Civil War. I don’t know how many people they owned. They owned people is the important thing. I don’t know what they were like outside of those facts. They […]

African Americans replace reluctant whites on the field of battle due to rising white desertions in the Continental Army (1777). Monroe Baker, a well-to-do Black businessman, named mayor of St. Martin, Louisiana (1867). He was probably the first Black to serve as mayor of a town. First Reconstruction legislature met in Richmond, Virginia (1869). Booker […]

Fannie M. Richards was born (1841). She became an educator and civil rights activist. Black and white abolitionists smashed into a courtroom at Syracuse, NY, and rescued a fugitive slave (1851). John Mercer Langston founded and organized the Law Department of Howard University (1868), the first in a black school. Morgan State College was founded […]

Singer Johnny Mathis was born (1935). The birth of Elombe Brath: Political activist, talk show host and co-founder of the Patrice Lumumba Coalition and co-founder of the first Naturally Natural beauty contest (1936). University of Mississippi students and adults from Oxford, Miss., rioted on the university campus (1962). Large force of federal marshals escorted James […]