“Black history isn’t a separate history. This is all of our history. this is American history, and we need to understand that. It has such an impact on kids and their values and how they view black people.” Karyn Parsons
By the time this post becomes available we will be at the end of February and also the end of Black History Month, but that’s okay. My purpose here goes beyond just a celebration of Black History Month and outlining the achievement of African-Americans. The title of this post really reflects my purpose. I want African-American youth to continually be made aware of what their race of people have and still is contributing to make this country what it is. It is my hope that by doing that we can inspire them and help them realize that they also have a lot to offer and that this country needs them. So please step up to the plate and give all the talent and skills that God has equipped them with to help this country grow and thrive in the technologically global world we’re in today.
African-Americans have always had to overcome obstacles put in their way and I don’t want our young people to use those obstacles as excused to give up. You will see in the profiles below that even in the past, African-Americans have had others trying to prevent us from achieving but what we have done is used those challenges as motivators that enabled us to rise. I want to encourage our young people to do the same. Don’t let anyone tell you that because of the color of your skin, your family’s dynamics, your financial situation, etc., limit your possibilities and that you don’t have what it takes to make something great out of your life. Go out and show the world the greatness that God has put inside of you. You have the ability to be anything you set your mind to be –the next president, doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, astronaut, etc. Set your goal and go for it.
Parents you are front and center in this process as you need to be doing all you can to help your children be all they can be. As Africa-Americans, we are still in a struggle for survivor and that survivor should not consist of allowing drugs, violence and criminal activity to dominate our communities. We need to help our children value all the opportunities that exist out there for them today as they have so many more than what we’ve had in the past. Our children can get the same education afforded to others today but they have to go into the classroom wanting to take advantage of it and not neglecting it. It is up to you, parents, to help them understand that. Let’s help our children to grow up having a positive impact in our community, the nation and the world. That has been done so many time in our history before by men and women regardless as to where they came from or whether they were blatantly discriminated against. Please provide the guidance your children need. Their survival depends on it.
Following, I just want to profile a few African-Americans and what they have accomplished in their lifetime. What they have achieved may not be what is meant for you but I chose the following profiles just to let you know that nothing is off limits to you. You have the same opportunity to do great things just as those in the following profiles have also done.
As I was doing my research there were soooo many great stories to tell of African-Americans who have and are still doing great things. I could not fit them all in this post, so throughout the year I will continue to provide information on various individuals and their achievements, hoping that with each story I will be able to inspire some young person.
Before the profiles, I do want to give a brief background on Black History Month and it’s origin as I know that many, including many African-Americans, are offended by the concept of Black History Month. I do want to say, I am not one of them.
For black history month, we owe our thanks to a black historian, scholar, educator and publisher by the name of Carter G. Woodson. Mr. Woodson resided in Washington D.C. and in 1926 he created what was then called “Negro History Week” for the purpose of exposing school children to what people of African-American decent had contributed to the advancement of the United States. He saw it as necessary because an account of the contributions and accomplishments of African-Americans had been left out of textbooks and school curriculum. He chose the second week in February as “Negro History Week” to correlate with the birthdays of Fredrick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.
In 1969, a group of black educators and students at Kent State University in Ohio proposed the idea of expanding “Negro History Week” into Black History Month. They implemented that proposal and made it a reality on February 1, 1970. S ix years later, in 1976, President Gerald Ford officially made February Black History Month. President Ford’s position was that “the country needed to seize the opportunity to honor the too often neglected accomplishments of African-Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”
President Ford was right. we need to honor the accomplishments that we have had throughout history and shout it out for everyone to know. Below are just a few profile of some you may have or have not heard of before.
Profile of Black Americans and Their Accomplishments
In Science
(image as it appears in BlackPast.org)
Ruth Ella Moore
Ruth Ella Moore was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1903 and became the first African-American woman to gain a Ph.D. in a natural science. She received that doctorate in 1933 from Ohio State University in the field of bacteriology. Once completing her doctorial studies she went on to a teaching career at Howard University’s medical school.
(image as it appears in New York Amsterdam News)
Percy Lavon Julian
Percy Lavon Julian was born in 1899 in Montgomery, Alabama during the era of Jim Crow. He came up during a time when education for African-American was not allowed beyond the 8th grade. In spite of those limitations, Mr. Julian went on to become a renown chemist and was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Science. The work he did in deriving medicinal drugs from plants is said to have laid the foundation for the drug industry’s production of steroids, cortisone and birth control. He received over 130 chemical patents over the span of his career.
(image as it appears in Black Enterprise)
Shirley Ann Jackson
Shirley Ann Jackson is said to be the highest paid president of any university in the United States. She is currently president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, which is a world class technological research university. She has held that position since 1999.
Ms. Jackson was born in 1946 in Washington D.C. After graduating as valedictorian from her high school in 1964, she was accepted to M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). She was one of the fewer than 20 students at M.I.T. at that time where she faced bigotry and rejection from white students who did not want her to join their study group or sat by them. Also she had to deal with the discouragement of her professors who did not see the appropriateness of a black woman entering the field of science. In spite of all of that she kept her mind focused on her goal and received her B.S. degree in physics in 1968. She continued on and did her graduate work at M.I.T. and in 1973 she became the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from M.I.T.
Following her study at M.I.T., Ms. Jackson held jobs in corporate America, one of which was a position at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray, New Jersey where she was the leading developer of Caller ID and Call Waiting for telephones.
In 1999 she was chosen to be president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute making her the first African-American woman to serve in that position. Prior to this, Ms. Jackson had also achieved another milestone when in 1995, President Bill Clinton appointed her to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission making her the first woman and the first African-American to serve in that capacity.
In 2014, she was appointed by President Barak Obama as co-chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. President Obama also recognized her again in 2016 when he awarded her the National Medal of Science, which is the nation’s highest honor for contributions in science and engineering.
In Medicine
(image as it appears in Wikipedia)
Dr. Charles Richard Drew
Dr. Drew is credited with helping to develop and implement the large scale blood collection, storage and transfusion process that is currently used by today’s American Red Cross.
Dr. Drew was born in 1904 in Washington D.C. during a time when it was still racially segregated. During Dr. Drew’s formative years he was not particularly interested in the field of medicine. His interest was geared more toward sports as he excelled athletically while in high school. With such capability in sports, he was able to obtain an athletic scholarship and attend Amherst University in Massachusetts. In high school, he did develop and interest in the subject of biology but the interest in medicine was peaked when he lost one of his siblings to tuberculosis. Upon graduating from Amherst University and due to the limitation of universities in the U.S. accepting black applicants to their medical school, Dr. Drew sought admission to McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal, Canada and was accepted. While at McGill, he developed an interest in blood storage. After graduating from McGill, Dr. Drew returned to the U.S. where he worked at Howard University as well as with other physicians at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. While in New York, he received his doctorate in medical science from Columbia University in 1940.
During 1940 Dr. Drew was chosen to direct the Blood for Britain project in order to develop a method to store blood needed to save the lives of soldiers during war time. He accepted the challenge and was instrumental in developing the mobile blood donation station which today is referred to as the “bloodmobile” . At that time. Dr. Drew successful recruited over 100,000 blood donors for the U.S. Army and Navy to save the lives of wounded soldiers. The United States armed services, however, maintained a segregated blood donor system and would not allow blood from non-whites to be given to white soldiers. Dr. Drew saw this policy as unscientific and insulting to blacks and eventually resigned his post as a result of it. He returned to Howard University where he continued to train future doctors and surgeons. At Howard University he was also named as the chair of the Department of Surgery and Chief of Surgery at Freedmen’s Hospital.
(image as it appears in Healthcare IT news)
Dr. Regina Benjamin
Regina Benjamin was born in 1956 in Mobile, Alabama. She was raised by a single mother who was a domestic worker and cosmetologist.
Dr. Benjamin became the 18th Surgeon General of the United States when she was appointed to that position by President Barack Obama in 2009.
Despite her family’s poverty, Dr. Regina Benjamin set her sites on college and attended Xavier University in Louisiana where she graduated with a B.S. degree in 1979. She then went on to Morehouse School of Medicine and to the University of Alabama in Birmingham where she received her doctorate of medicine in 1984. In order to pay for her medical school education, she received government funding which required her to work in an under-served area where medical service was not readily available to the population. In 1990, Dr. Benjamin established the BayouClinic in Bayou LaBatre, Alabama. The clinic severed the rural fishing community in the gulf coast area of Alabama.
Because of her commitment to the people in Bayou LaBatre and the dedication she showed in providing medical service to her clients, who in many instances did not have any means of paying due to lack of health insurance, Dr. Benjamin received accolades from numerous new outlets. In 1995, she was the first physician under the age of 40 and the first African-American woman to be elected to the American Medical Association’s board of trustees. In 1998, she was the United States recipient of the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights. She also received the 2000 National Caring Award, which was inspired by Mother Teresa. During that same year, she also became the first African-American female president of the Alabama state medical association.
In the summer of 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Dr. Regina Benjamin for the position of U.S. Surgeon General. It is a position she would hold until 2013. In the numerous roles she serve in today, she is still advocating for health care at the community level.
In Business
(image as it appears in Ebony Magazine)
John H. Johnson
John H. Johnson was born in 1918 in Arkansas City, Arkansas. He was the founder and CEO of the Johnson Publishing Company and the creator of Ebony and Jet magazines. By 1982, he was wealthy enough to become the first African-American to appear on Forbes 400 list.
Mr. Johnson was the grandson of former slaves and during his early years as a child in Arkansas, he was only given the opportunity to pursue an education up to the 8th grade. In an effort to improve their family’s economic status and their child’s educational opportunity, his parents moved to Chicago, Illinois. For the first 2 years in Chicago, the family existed on welfare. Mr. Johnson was able to continue his high school education once moving to Chicago, but was constantly ridiculed by other students because of his parents’ inability to provide proper clothing for him to wear to school. Motivated by the insults he received, Mr. Johnson made up in his mind that he was going to make something of his life.
Upon graduating high school, Mr. Johnson received a job from the owner of Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company as a means to help him get the money he needed for a college education. At Supreme Life he was responsible for editing articles to include in the company’s periodical. This sparked an interest in him and he came up with the idea of creating what he called the “Negro Digest” which would be patterned after Reader’s Digest. Without the necessary money to carry his idea forward, his mother allowed him to use their furniture as collateral to obtain a $500 loan. In 1942, Mr. Johnson open the Negro Digest Publishing Company using a corner, as his working space, within Supreme Life Insurance’s office .
From those humble beginnings, Mr. Johnson was able to start publication for Ebony in 1945, Jet in 1951 and eventually African American Star and Ebony Jr. He also branched out into other business ventures such as cosmetic, fashion, radio station ownership and book publication.
(image as it appears on CNBC.com)
Janice Bryant Howroyd
Janice Bryant Howroyd was born in 1952 in Tarboro, North Carolina as one of 11 children. She is the first African-American woman to own a billion dollar business in the U.S.
Ms. Howroyd is the founder and CEO of the largest privately held workforce solution company founded in the United States. That company is ACT-1 Group and it currently has offices in 19 countries with over 17,000 clients and 2.600 employees worldwide.
Ms. Howroyd is an alumni of North Carolina A&T University. Once she graduated and left North Carolina in 1976, she moved to Los Angeles, California. Upon arriving in California, she was employed by her brother-in-law at Billboard Magazine. While at Billboard, she states that she was taught attributes of the business world that she did not previously know. Armed with that knowledge, $900, and a telephone, in 1978 Ms. Howroyd started ACT-1 in a small office in Beverly Hills, California.
(image as it appears in Forbes)
Ursula Burns
Ursula Burns was born in 1958 in New York City, New York. Currently she is the chairwoman of a company called VEON and a senior adviser to Teneo. In 2009, Ms. Burns became the CEO of Xerox Corporation, making her the first black CEO to head a Fortune 500 company.
Ms. Burns was raised by a single mother in the housing project in New York City. After graduating high school she went on to obtain a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from New York University and a Masters of Science in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. She says that people told her she had 3 strikes against her; she was black, she was a girl and she was poor. She also states that her mother dispelled those negative words and always reminded her that “where she currently was did not define who she was”.
Ms. Burns began her career at Xerox as a summer intern in 1980 after completing her graduate studies and was eventually chosen as president of Xerox in 2007 and then CEO of the company in 2009. She held the position of CEO until 2016.
(image as it appears on pbs.org)
Reginald F. Lewis
Reginald F. Lewis was born in 1942 in Baltimore, Maryland. He passed away in 1993 as a result of cancer, but while he was with us, he definitely made an impact on the business world.
Mr. Lewis was the first African-American billion dollar deal maker which came as a result of leverage buyouts of companies.
Mr. Lewis grew up in a middle-class family in Baltimore and after completing high school went on to attend and graduate from Virginia State University. While at Virginia State, he was selected as one of the African-American students to attend summer school at Harvard where they would be introduced to legal studies. At the end of the summer program, it is said that Harvard was so impressed with him that they invited him to attend Harvard Law School — making him the only person in the 148-year history of Harvard Law to be admitted before applying to the school. Mr. Lewis did attend Harvard and graduated in 1968.
Within 2 years of graduating Harvard, Reginald Lewis opened his own law firm on Wall Street, making him the first African-American to do so.
In 1983, Mr. Lewis made his first major leverage buyout when he bought McCall Pattern Company for $22.5 million. Prior to that buyout, the company was struggling to make a profit, but under Mr. Lewis’s leadership the company had it’s most profitable year in it’s 113-year history. Mr. Lewis sold McCall in 1987 for $90 million, making a profit of $50 million.
In 1987, Mr. Lewis made his next major deal when he bought the international division of Beatrice Food. He bought the company for $985 million, making it the largest leveraged buyout at the time of overseas assets by an American company. By 1992, Beatrice Food had sales of over $1.5 billion. Mr. Lewis was list on Forbes list of 400 in 1992 with a net worth of $400 million.
Mr.Lewis always believed in giving back to his community and in 1987 he established the Reginald Lewis Foundation. He also made known his desire to have a museum of African American culture. Today in Baltimore the Museum of Maryland African-American History and Culture stands in his honor.
Politics & Government
(image as it appears in famous Biographies)
Amelia Boynton Robinson
Amelia Boynton Robinson was a civil rights activist who was involved in the fight for voter rights for African-Americans in the state of Alabama. She was born in 1911 in Savannah, Georgia as one of 10 children.
After graduating from Tuskegee Institute , Ms. Boynton Robinson eventually took a job with the U.S.Department of Agriculture in Selma, Alabama. There she was responsible for educating rural citizens on food production, food processing , food preservation. nutrition, etc. as an Extension Agent. In Selma, she became concerned with the conditions African-Americans were subject to in regards to voting rights and property ownership.
Mrs. Boynton-Robinson involved herself in trying to get more African-Americans registered to vote in Selma. As a result, she invited Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to join her in that effort. The work they did together, led to the organization of the March 7, 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where they would walk from Selma to Montgomery in a petition for voting rights for African-Americans .
On March 7, 1965, the Edmund Pettus Bridge march became known as Bloody Sunday, as 600 marchers were tear gassed and beaten by Alabama State Troopers. During that march, Mrs. Boynton-Robinson was beaten to unconsciousness. The picture of her lying on the ground bloody and unconscious was made available by the new media for the whole world to see. The event led President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mrs. Boynton-Robinson was invited to the white house by President Johnson to witness that signing.
What Mrs. Boynton-Robinson and others did during the civil rights movement benefited every African-American person in this country. It gave all us the privilege to participate in every aspect of government, education, business, etc. It even gave us the opportunity to come together to elect an African-American president on November 4, 2008. That is why President Barack Obama, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma hand-in-hand with Mrs. Boynton-Robinson on March 7, 2015.
What I want young people to know is that Mrs. Boynton-Robinson and others have given them the opportunity to be everything they can possibly be. Honor her and others who have made that sacrifice by going out and doing great things.
(image as it appears in Doug Mills/New York Times)
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