The Unhidden Minute

Sojourner Truth , born Isabella Baumfree in 1797, transcended the confines of an enslaved person to become an indomitable force in the abolitionist and women's rights movements of the 19th century. Escaping slavery in 1826, she embarked on a transformative journey, adopting the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 to reflect her mission as a teller of truth and an itinerant preacher. Known for her powerfu...

Matthew Alexander Henson (August 8, 1866 - March 9,1955) was a Black American explorer who was the first person to stand on the North Pole. Born in 1866, Henson began is travels as cabin boy on a tall sailing ship at the age of 12. He became the personal assistant to Captain Robert Peary to begin an exploration of Nicaragua in the hopes of finding a potential route for what ultimately became the P...

George Washington Carver , born into slavery around 1864, was a prominent Black American scientist, educator, and inventor. Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Carver dedicated his life to agricultural research and the betterment of Southern farmers. He rose to prominence at the Tuskegee Institute , where he taught and conducted groundbreaking research. Carver's work primarily focused...

In 1892 a man of mixed heritage named Homer Plessy , who identified as a person of color, refuse to abide to a Louisiana state law that mandated the segregation of railroad passenger cars. Siting the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of U.S. Constitution, Plessy took his case to court.  At trial his lawyers argued that judge  John Howard Ferguson  should dismiss the charges on the grou...

During the 1920s, Bessie Coleman (1892—1926) gained recognition as an aerial stunt pilot. An original barnstormer, she captivated audiences with aerobatic feats of daring at airshows across the American South. But, prior to achieving this, she faced the challenge of obtaining her pilot's license. As a Black woman no American aviation school was willing to instruct her. Determined, Coleman diligent...

Maggie Lena Walker (July 15, 1864 – December 15, 1934) was a Black American businesswoman and teacher. In 1903 she was the first Black woman to charter a bank and serve as its president in the United States. As a financial leader, Walker achieved successes by creating opportunities to make tangible improvements in the way of life for Black Americans. Disabled by paralysis and a user of a wheelchai...

Before the turn of the 20th Century, a group of 20 Black Soldiers in the United States Army were tasked with taking part in a unique experiment to see if the horse could be replaced by the bicycle. Known collectively as the Buffalo Soldier Bicycle Corps , this unit of the 25th infantry, stationed at Fort Missoula Montana, demonstrated its effectiveness during maneuvers and patrols, covering greate...

Shortly after the end of the American Civil War, the United States Congress formally approved the formation of six segregated regiments of Black soldiers in the U.S. Army. These regiments were the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st Infantry . These regiments played a significant role in the western frontier, where they were tasked with various duties, including protecting sett...

The United States presidential election of 1876 was a pivotal moment in American history. The two major candidates were Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden . The election results were contested by allegations of fraud, disputed electoral votes, and political maneuvering. Though Tilden won the popular vote but both candidates claimed victory in several key states. The dispu...

Not long after the end of the Civil War, during the era of Reconstruction seven Black men were elected to the United States Congress. These senators and representatives were sent by their constituents to Washington D.C. between 1870 and 1871 to enact legislation on behalf a nation that now included 4.3 million newly emancipated formerly enslaved U.S. Citizens. Their names were Hiram Rhodes Revels...

Hiram R. Revels was a Black American politician and minister born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1827. Ordained by the African Methodist Episcopal Church he served a teacher of religion in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri and Kansas. Formally educated in theology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois in 1857 he became the minister of a Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore,...

Madam C.J. Walker (born Sarah Breedlove) was a Black American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and social activist. She is noted as the first female self-made millionaire in America in the Guinness Book of World Records. Though other women might have been the first, their wealth is not as well-documented. Born a free woman two years after the Civil War in Delta, Louisiana in 1867, Sarah Breedlove eme...

The Pullman Porters (Circa 1865- December 31, 1968) were a group of predominately Black men hired to work as servers on railroad sleeping cars. Shortly after the Civil War, the entrepreneur George Pullman recruited formerly enslaved to provide primary services to passengers on trains traveling across the United States. Called porters the Pullman Company employees carried baggage, shined shoes and...

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931)  was a Black American investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement . She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP). Born into slavery in Holly Springs , Mississippi , Wells was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation during the American Civil War ....

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts , a racially tolerant and integrated community William Edward Burghardt Du Bois  was a Black American sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, writer and editor. After completing graduate work at the University of Berlin he attended Harvard University, where he was the first Black American to earn a doctorate.  He became a professor of histo...

After achieving freedom at the end of the Civil War , Booker Taliaferro Washington became one of the most famous Black American leaders, authors, and educators in the country. He was of the last generation born into slavery and lived through the Reconstruction Era as the freedoms gained during the War were systematical replaced with a regime of extreme political violence, racism, and legal discrim...

Robert Smalls was a Black American politician, businessman, soldier and sailor. Born into slavery in  Beaufort, South Carolina , he freed himself, his crew, and their families during the  American Civil War  by commandeering a Confederate transport ship, called the  CSS  Planter , in Charleston harbor, on May 13, 1862. Smalls sailed the ship from Confederate-controlled waters to the U.S. blockade...

Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross , c. March 1822[1] – March 10, 1913) was a Black American woman  who led enslaved people along the Underground Railroad to freedom.  Through this network of secret routes and safe houses she led 19 missions over 15 years from the slave-holding states of the Deep South to locations in the North that favored the cause of Abolition. Tubman emancipated hundreds of th...

Sgt. Major William Harvey Carney born February 29, 1840  was the first Black American whose acts of valor earned the Medal of Honor. During the Civil War as a member of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment , an all-Black unit of the Union Army, Carney was part of the 2nd failed attack on the Confederate stronghold that stood in defense of Charleston Harbor at Morris Island in South Carolina c...

Mary Smith Peake was an American teacher and humanitarian born in Hampton Virginia. Among a class of affluent free Black aristocrats during the Civil War she is best known for starting a school for the children of the formerly enslaved beginning in the fall of 1861.  Under what became known as the Emancipation Oak tree in present-day Hampton near Fort Monroe she helped to educate those who had esc...

Early in the Civil War on May 23, 1861, three men escaped enslavement and turned themselves over to the Union Army at Fort Monroe Virginia as refugees. Their names were Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend. Rather than turn them back as required by the “ Fugitive Slave Law ” of 1850 the fort’s commander General Benjamin Butler , who just happened to be a lawyer, refused, siting that he...

Frederick Douglass , born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey; c. February 1818 was a Black American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping enslavement in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitio...

Mary Ellen Pleasant was a free Black entrepreneur and abolitionist at the height of the California gold rush. Born in 1814 Pleasant wrote that her mother was a "full-blooded Negress from Louisiana" and her father was Hawaiian. Though she identified personally as Black, she passed as white among the cultural elites of the day. As a hotelier and restauranteur in San Francisco Pleasant amassed a fort...

Dred Scott (c. 1799 – September 17, 1858) was an enslaved   Black American man who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom and that of his wife, Harriet Robinson Scott , and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court case of 1857, better known as the "Dred Scott decision". Scott claimed that he and his wife should be granted their freedom because they had lived in Illinois and the...

As early as 1839 an enslaved Black man named Black man named  Stephen Bishop  lead many of the earliest explorations of Mammoth Cave in the state of Kentucky. One of the first tourist attractions in North America, this vast cavern spans more than 406 miles beneath the Earth’s surface. With a keen sense of direction and spacial acuity Bishop identified named and mapped many of the cave’s prominent...