100 African Americans Who Shaped American History: Incredible Stories of Black Heroes (Black History Books for Kids)

By Chrisanne Beckner and Briana Arrington-Dengoue

Amazing stories of 100 Black Americans who everyone should know—for kids eight and up

Engaging and packed with facts, 100 African Americans Who Shaped American History is the perfect Black history book for kids!

This biography book for kids features

• 100 easy-to-read one-page biographies: Find out how these Black Americans changed the course of history!
• Illustrated portraits: Each biography includes an illustration to help bring history to life!
• A timeline, trivia questions, project ideas and more: Boost your learning and test your knowledge with fun activities and resources!

Discover artists, activists, icons, and legends throughout American history! 100 African Americans Who Shaped American History introduces kids of all ages to some of the most influential Black Americans from the very beginning of the country all the way up to present day. Learn all about the incredible lives and lasting legacies of figures like Harriet Tubman, Duke Ellington, Malcolm X, Mae Jemison, and many more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Nov 1, 1995
• ISBN: 9781728264905

Chrisanne Beckner

Chrisanne specializes in field survey and archival research. She has prepared historic contexts, historic structures reports, survey reports, cultural resources assessments, and successful historic rehabilitation tax credit applications for projects in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. Chrisanne studies African American history and lives in Washington.

Book preview

Cover: 100 African Americans Who Shaped American History by Chrisanne BecknerThe logo of the publisher “sourcebooks—eXplore” is displayed centered at the bottom of the page.

Copyright © 1995, 2023 by Sourcebooks

Text by Chrisanne Beckner

Illustrations by Briana Arrington-Dengoue

Cover and internal design © 2023 by Sourcebooks

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

All rights reserved.

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. —From a Declaration of Principles Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations

All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

Published by Sourcebooks eXplore, an imprint of Sourcebooks Kids

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

[phone]

sourcebookskids.com

Originally published in 1995 by Bluewood Books, a division of The Siyeh Group, Inc.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.Crispus Attucks

1723–1770

2.Benjamin Banneker

1731–1806

3.Elizabeth Freeman

1742–1829

4.Phillis Wheatley

1753–1784

5.Paul Cuffee

1759–1817

6.Richard Allen

1760–1831

7.James Forten

1766–1842

8.Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm

1795–1858 and 1799–1851

9.Dred Scott

c. 1800–1858

10.Sojourner Truth

1797–1883

11.Nat Turner

1800–1831

12.Martin R. Delany

1812–1885

13.Henry Highland Garnet

1815–1882

14.Frederick Douglass

1817–1895

15.Harriet Tubman

c. 1820–1913

16.Henry McNeal Turner

1834–1915

17.P. B. S. Pinchback

1837–1921

18.Robert Smalls

1839–1915

19.Elijah McCoy

1844–1929

20.Lewis Howard Latimer

1848–1928

21.George Washington Williams

1849–1891

22.Nat Love

1854–1921

23.T. Thomas Fortune

1856–1928

24.Booker T. Washington

1856–1915

25.Dr. Daniel Hale Williams

1856–1931

26.Granville T. Woods

1856–1910

27.Ida B. Wells-Barnett

1862–1931

28.Mary Church Terrell

1863–1954

29.George Washington Carver

1864–1943

30.Matthew Henson

1866–1955

31.Madam C. J. Walker

1867–1919

32.W. E. B. Du Bois

1868–1963

33.John Hope

1868–1936

34.Scott Joplin

1868–1917

35.Robert Abbott

1868–1940

36.James Weldon Johnson

1871–1938

37.Paul Laurence Dunbar

1872–1906

38.William Monroe Trotter

1872–1934

39.W. C. Handy

1873–1958

40.Arthur Schomburg

1874–1938

41.Mary McLeod Bethune

1875–1955

42.Garrett Morgan

1877–1963

43.Carter G. Woodson

1875–1950

44.Jack Johnson

1878–1946

45.Oscar Micheaux

1884–1951

46.Marcus Garvey

1887–1940

47.Claude McKay

1889–1948

48.A. Philip Randolph

1889–1979

49.Mordecai W. Johnson

1890–1976

50.Zora Neale Hurston

1891–1960

51.Bessie Coleman

1892–1926

52.Frederick McKinley Jones

1893–1961

53.Walter F. White

1893–1955

54.E. Franklin Frazier

1894–1962

55.Bessie Smith

1894–1937

56.Charles H. Houston

1895–1950

57.Benjamin E. Mays

1895–1984

58.Paul Robeson

1898–1976

59.Duke Ellington

1899–1974

60.Percy Lavon Julian

1899–1975

61.Louis Armstrong

1901–1971

62.Roy Wilkins

1901–1981

63.Marian Anderson

1897–1993

64.Langston Hughes

1901–1967

65.Ralph Bunche

1904–1971

66.Dr. Charles R. Drew

1904–1950

67.Thurgood Marshall

1908–1993

68.Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

1908–1972

69.Richard Wright

1908–1960

70.Katherine Dunham

1909–2006

71.Bayard Rustin

1912–1987

72.Rosa Parks

1913–2005

73.Jesse Owens

1913–1980

74.Kenneth B. Clark

1914–2005

75.Billie Holiday

1915–1959

76.Gwendolyn Brooks

1917–2000

77.Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee

1917–2005 and 1922–2014

78.Fannie Lou Hamer

1917–1977

79.John H. Johnson

1918–2005

80.Jackie Robinson

1919–1972

81.Daniel Chappie James Jr.

1920–1978

82.Alex Haley

1921–1992

83.Whitney M. Young Jr.

1920–1971

84.Leon Sullivan

1922–2001

85.James Baldwin

1924–1987

86.Shirley Chisholm

1924–2005

87.Malcolm X

1925–1965

88.Harry Belafonte

b. 1927

89.Maya Angelou

1928–2014

90.Lerone Bennett Jr.

1928–2018

91.Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

1929–1968

92.Lorraine Hansberry

1930–1965

93.Toni Morrison

1931–2019

94.Colin Powell

1937–2021

95.Marian Wright Edelman

b. 1939

96.John Lewis

1940–2020

97.Wilma Rudolph

1940–1994

98.Bill Gray

1941–2013

99.Muhammad Ali

1942–2016

100.Oprah Winfrey

b. 1954

Trivia Questions and Project Suggestions

Index

INTRODUCTION

AMERICAN HISTORY is full of the deeds of heroes and heroines: the great educators, the great entertainers, the great thinkers and inventors, the great athletes. What’s exciting is that some of the most fascinating historical events are also African American history, and some of the most inspiring American heroes are African American.

African American history follows the success of a people under challenging circumstances. Through the unity of Black churches, the Black press, and educational institutions like Tuskegee Institute, Howard University, and Spelman College, African Americans taught one another how to excel. Mary McLeod Bethune started the Daytona Beach Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls as a one-room schoolhouse built on a dumping ground. This tiny school grew into the Bethune-Cookman College. Thurgood Marshall started as a student of lawyer Charles Houston and went on to win a Supreme Court case against segregation in schools. He was later elected to the Supreme Court himself.

Black men and women as glamorous as Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, and Paul Robeson did more than entertain us with their voices, their Broadway talent, and their movies; they brought us honest representations of African Americans that destroyed preconceived stereotypes. Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin penned stories that developed into a nationally recognized canon.

Activist W. E. B. Du Bois edited Crisis magazine. T. Thomas Fortune advocated for militant resistance to racism. Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells-Barnett used oration and journalism to educate communities on racial violence and on opportunity.

Science and innovation have also progressed, thanks to contributions from the Black community. George Washington Carver created peanut butter. Dr. Charles Drew discovered that preservable blood plasma could save the lives of thousands via transfusions for all blood types. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first heart surgery in the U.S.

Olympic athlete Jesse Owens made the U.S. world famous by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany. Muhammad Ali became the world champion in boxing. Wilma Rudolph overcame polio to win three gold medals in the 1960 Olympics.

Courage led women like Harriet Tubman to risk their lives leading enslaved people north to freedom, and it led women like Fannie Lou Hamer to risk their lives in the struggle for Black women’s voting rights.

Men like Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated in pursuit of civil rights and equality in America. They remain incredibly important role models in the current struggle for an improved society. All one hundred of the Black individuals in this book keep the spirit of diversity alive.

CRISPUS ATTUCKS

1723–1770

Portrait sketch of Crispus Attucks in formal attire wearing a neck scarf and a coat.

CRISPUS ATTUCKS, one of the first patriots to lose his life in the struggle for American independence, was born in Massachusetts in 1723. With African and Native American ancestors, Attucks’s only chance for freedom from his enslavement was to escape. At the age of twenty-seven, Attucks ran away and joined the crew on a boat sailing away from the Boston Harbor. For the next twenty years, Attucks was a man of the sea.

As a sailor on cargo ships and whalers, Attucks developed an independence that not only made him a brave leader among sailors but also a leader of revolutionaries. On the night of March 5, 1770, at the age of forty-seven, Attucks’s dedication to liberty made American history.

Tension between the Boston patriots and the British soldiers was boiling that spring. British forces were installed to impose order, and the ubiquitous threat of violence kept colonists in a high state of agitation. Hugh Montgomery, one of the British soldiers, was guarding the customs house when a young boy came up and insulted him.

Montgomery struck and injured the boy, whose cries rang through the streets, calling people from their homes. Crispus Attucks came forward. Society was already on the verge of revolt, and Attucks decided immediately that this act of violence would not be tolerated.

Within minutes, a crowd had gathered behind Attucks, who was heading straight for the customs house. He approached Montgomery personally, insults were exchanged, and soon the crowd took up chunks of ice and snowballs and threw them at the British soldier.

Twelve other soldiers appeared, armed and ready. Attucks, wielding a heavy stick, yelled, Don’t be afraid. Knock ’em over. They dare not fire. It was the first cry of the coming revolution.

The soldiers responded with panic, firing wildly into the crowd, killing Attucks and his supporter, Samuel Gray, immediately. Nine other men were shot in the ensuing massacre. Three of them died.

The crowd was soon subdued, but news of the massacre was electric. It ignited rage and shock, along with a new sense of purpose. Thousands came to Attucks’s funeral, and seven British soldiers were brought to trial for murder, though each was exonerated.

This first revolt would come to be known as the Boston Massacre, one of the first battles to mark the beginning of the American Revolution. Founding father John Adams later said, On that night, the foundations of American independence were laid.

It was Crispus Attucks who cared enough about personal freedom to risk his life for its reward, even if that reward would only be available to those who came after him.

BENJAMIN BANNEKER

1731–1806

Portrait sketch of Benjamin Banneker wearing a neck scarf and a robe.

BENJAMIN BANNEKER was one of America’s first and finest astronomers, as well as one of Thomas Jefferson’s great influences. He was born in 1731 to the daughter of Molly Welsh, a former indentured servant in her native England.

Banneker loved learning to read and write from Welsh’s family Bible, but once he began attending a Quaker school, he knew his great love was mathematics. He studied so passionately that he would create his own problems just for the joy of solving them.

His early interest in math made him a wise inventor when he decided to recreate a pocket watch he saw on a traveling salesman. Since no watches existed in America, Banneker used all his mathematical skill to develop blueprints, make the right calculations, and personally carve each gear of the first American watch. Made entirely of wood, Banneker’s watch ran perfectly for over 40 years.

Banneker’s passion for exactness also extended to the study of astronomy. In 1789, he surprised skeptical astronomers when he predicted a solar eclipse, and it occurred just as he’d said it would on April 14.

His brilliance accompanied him into the realm of human rights. He read Thomas Jefferson’s Monroe Doctrine that states all men are created equal…they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Knowing that Jefferson held enslaved persons on his property, Banneker was moved to respond. In an extremely eloquent letter, Banneker told Jefferson that African Americans were equal to white Americans in intelligence and therefore were equally entitled to rights and privileges. As proof, he included a copy of his almanac, a yearly publication documenting holidays, coming eclipses, and the hours of sunrise and sunset. Banneker’s almanac included essays on the abolition of slavery as well.

Jefferson wrote back with a new egalitarian stand on the issue of race. A respectful friendship formed and remained strong even after Jefferson became the president of the United States.

Banneker went on to become one of the foremost astronomers of his age, as well as one of the men chosen to lay out the new capital city of Washington, DC in 1791. After Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French city planner, quit and took all his plans back to France, it was Banneker who reproduced them from memory.

In October, 1806, after a lifetime of scientific discovery, Benjamin Banneker died, leaving Americans a more accurate vision of freedom for all.

ELIZABETH FREEMAN

1742–1829

Portrait sketch of Elizabeth Freeman wearing a hood and a cape. She is also wearing a beaded necklace.

ELIZABETH FREEMAN, also known as Mum Bett, was one of the most successful abolitionists of the eighteenth century. She was raised in Massachusetts during very reformative times. As a young enslaved woman in the house of Colonel John Ashley, Freeman heard the frequent family discussions of a possible freedom from British rule. As the tension between the colonists and the British continued to grow, and the Declaration of Independence became the topic of everyone’s conversation, Freeman became convinced that she, too, was free.

In 1781, Freeman decided to prove her theory. She ran away from the Ashley House and contacted a young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick. She explained that, since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the passage of the Massachusetts Constitution, she, too, was a free woman. Though she knew it was dangerous, she refused to return to Ashley. Sedgwick was won over by Freeman’s argument and agreed to represent her in court.

That same year, Freeman and Sedgwick gave statements to the county court in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. They were so persuasive that not only was Elizabeth Freeman granted her freedom but, based on the state constitution, slavery was also declared illegal. Elizabeth Freeman was given thirty shillings in damages from the Ashley family, as ordered by the judge, and went to work for the Sedgwick family. Earning her own living as a free woman, she stayed on until her death in 1829.

Because of Freeman’s courage and commitment, slavery was outlawed in the state of Massachusetts and, later, in the rest of the nation. It was women and men like Elizabeth Freeman and Theodore Sedgwick who finally validated the Declaration of Independence in the United States. Without them to begin the fight for equality, the essential truth of the document might have been lost.

PHILLIS WHEATLEY

1753–1784

Portrait sketch of Phillis Wheatley wearing a head scarf with a bow and a cloak.

PHILLIS WHEATLEY was a celebrated poet. She was born in Africa and stolen by slave traders at the age of seven or eight. Deposited in rags from a slave ship in Boston, she was purchased by John Wheatley as a companion for his wife Susannah.

From the beginning, Phillis was a great lover of words. Susannah taught her to read and write, and, within a year and a half, Phillis Wheatley was a fluent master of the English language. She devoured all the books she could find and preferred Alexander Pope to all others. At 14, Phillis Wheatley wrote her first poem, which historian Lerone Bennett called a blank verse eulogy of Harvard University. Printed in Boston in 1770, it began her life as an internationally celebrated writer.

In 1772, due to her frail health, the Wheatleys freed Phillis and sent her to England, where she was hailed as a prodigy. Her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published with a forward signed by men such as John Hancock. Phillis was invited to meet the Queen, but word reached her that Susannah was ill, and Phillis returned to Boston at once. Susannah Wheatley died in 1774, and Phillis remained at the Wheatley house to care for John, never ceasing to write.

In 1775, she