The Unhidden Minute

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...

Nat Turner was an enslaved Black American preacher who led the four-day rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831. The rebels killed between 55 and 65 people, making it the largest slave revolt in U.S. History. The uprising was put down within a few days, but Turner survived in hiding for more than two months afterwards. He was captured and executed by hanging on November 11, 1831. There w...

Born in 1800, Jordan B. Noble was enslaved to a Lieutenant in the 7th Regiment of the U.S. Army during the War of 1812 . At the age of 14 he was pressed into service as a drummer boy under the common of Major General Andrew Jackson . Almost 900 enslaved people and volunteer free men of color were among the forces marshalled to defend against the British invasion of New Orleans . As drums were used...

A pivotal figure in the Lewis & Clark Expedition of 1804 was an enslaved Black American named York . Listed among the participants as the enslaved person of William Clark , York was reported in the expedition's logs to have been a highly effective scout and hunter as well as having been crucial as a person of color in establishing peaceful relations with the native people they met along the journe...

Benjamin Banneker was a Black American scientist, astronomer and surveyor. Born free in 1731 to a mulatto mother and a formerly enslaved African father, Banneker received a private educated through the 8th grade and continued to be a self-taught scholar for the rest of his life. He created the first wooden clock in North America, successfully predicted the solar eclipse of 1789 and published a pop...

Elizabeth Freeman also known as Mumbett was the first enslaved Black American to successfully sue and win her freedom in the United States of America. Born in slavery in 1744, Freeman was a passionate and willful person with a strong sense of her own identity. Though she could not read, it is believed that she heard the words of the newly adopted Massachusetts Constitution in 1780 which read, “All...

James Armistead Lafayette (born 1748 or 1760 – died 1830 or 1832)was an enslaved Black American who served the Continental Army as a spy during the American Revolutionary War . As an agent of the Marquis de Lafayette Armistead posed as a runaway slave. He was responsible for reporting the activities of Benedict Arnold – after he had defected to the British – and of Lord Cornwallis during the run-u...

Black soldiers fought in the American Revolutionary War from the moment of the first shots at Lexington and Concord in 1775 to the decisive Battle of Yorktown in 1781. As it was difficult to recruit able-bodied men to join the Continental Army, enslaved men were sent to fight in place of their enslavers with the promise of their freedom after three years of service. The 1 st Rhode Island Regiment...

Salem Poor was born into slavery in 1747 in Andover Massachusetts. However, Poor was eventually able to purchase his freedom on July 10, 1769. In 1775 Poor enlisted in the militia, serving under Captain Benjamin Ames in the regiment of Colonel James Frye. On June 16, 1775, Frye’s soldiers and two other companies were ordered to march from Cambridge to Charlestown. The next day, the Battle of Bunke...

Crispus Attucks , born 1723, was a whaler and stevedore of African and Native American descent. He was among the first casualties at The Boston Massacre on March 5th 1770. As a seminal moment in the lead up to the Declaration of Independence and rebellion against British rule, this was considered by many to be the spark that ignited the American Revolutionary War. Attucks and those who died on thi...

Phillis Wheatley was the first Black American author of a published book of poetry . Born 1753 in West Africa , likely Gambia or Senegal, she was kidnaped, sold into slavery at the age of seven, and transported with over 95 other captives to North America. The ship was called the Phillis. Arriving in Massachusetts on July 11, 1761 the young girl was enslaved by the Wheatley family of Boston . She...

At end of August in the year 1619, an English privateer ship call the White Lion reached Point Comfort on the Virginia peninsula. There, Governor George Yeardley and his head of trade bought 20 captives from Africa and remanded them into slavery. The history of Black people had already begun in New World, but this event marks the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade conducted by subjects of...

Captain Francisco Menéndez was a free black military leader serving the Spanish Crown in the 18th-century at St. Augustine , Florida . Born in 1709 he was one of the many enslaved people from the colony of South Carolina that escaped to Spanish Florida looking for freedom since 1687. Menéndez served as a captain in the Black militia of Florida , a military body created by Black citizens and the fo...

Juan Garrido was an African conquistador , born in the Kingdom of Kongo in 1487.  As a young man he went to Portugal  and converted to Catholicism . He chose the Spanish name, Juan Garrido or "Handsome John". Garrido joined a Spanish expedition and arrived in Santo Domingo (Hispaniola) in about 1502. He participated in the invasion of present-day Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1508. In 1513, as part of J...

Pedro Alanso Niño born 1455 was a Spanish explorer of African descent. He was the pilot of the Nina, one of the three ships on the first Christopher Columbus voyage to the Americas in 1492. Niño also called by some El Negro, was born in Mugar, Spain his mother was an unidentified African woman and why Niño a Spanish sailor was his father. In his formative years Pedro Alonso Nino traveled and explo...