Black History Mystery

Mansa Musa, born around 1280 into the Keita dynasty, ruled the Mali Empire from 1312 to about 1337 and transformed it into one of the richest and most powerful states of the medieval world. Under his leadership, Mali’s gold and salt trade flourished, funding grand architectural projects and solidifying Timbuktu and Gao as epicenters of Islamic learning. His legendary pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, c...

Elijah McCoy -Elijah McCoy (1844–1929) was a Canadian-American inventor and mechanical engineer whose innovations revolutionized industrial lubrication. Born in Ontario to formerly enslaved parents and later apprenticed in Scotland, McCoy returned to the U.S. to work on railroad machinery. Frustrated by costly engine downtime for manual oiling, he developed an automatic lubricator that allowed tra...

Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche (1886–1912) was a Haitian-born engineer who in 1904 became the only Black student in his class at the École Centrale Paris. After graduating, racial barriers kept him from securing an engineering post in France, so he returned to Haiti and worked briefly before marrying and starting a family. In 1912, Laroche and his pregnant wife and two young daughters booked pa...

William and Ellen Craft were an extraordinary couple born into slavery in Macon, Georgia—he in 1824, she in 1826. Ellen’s very light skin allowed her to pose convincingly as a young white male “plantation owner,” while William played her enslaved valet. In December 1848 they embarked on a daring 1,000-mile journey by train and steamboat, passing through slave-holding states before reaching freedom...

Betty’s and Barney’s UFO incident of 1961

The Tulsa Race Massacre which has been historically under-taught and even silenced in schools, with some arguing that this is due to a desire to avoid acknowledging the event's painful racial implications.

Yasuke, who was a samurai of African origin who served Oda Nobunaga between 1581 and 1582, during the Sengoku period.

Bayard Rutin a key figure in the civil right era, an architect of peaceful protest, yet was he was forced to labor behind the scenes often over looked for his contributions because of his sexuality

Yaa Asantewaa—Queen Mother of Ejisu—stands at the crossroads of oral legend and written record, her voice echoing through the tangled limbs of ancient oak trees and the brick walls of colonial archives. Join us as we prepare to trace her footsteps from the mud-brick palace in Ejisu to the halls of British administration in Accra

a Black cowboy named William “Bill” Pickett traveled the country, stunning audiences by leaping from his horse and wrestling a steer to the ground with nothing but his bare hands

Tales insist that this West African warrior, once shackled and sold into bondage, escaped captivity in the swamps of Spanish Florida. They say he mastered the art of guile and subterfuge, slipping aboard unsuspecting vessels, then turning pirate against the very navies that had enslaved him

Join us as we rescue Alice Ball’s legacy from obscurity and piece together the fragments of her work on leprosy treatment.