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Posted by: Malea Walker
Althea Gibson dominated women's tennis in the 1950s, winning titles at all of the major tournaments. But as the first African American woman to win those events, and in some cases, the first to be allowed to play in them, the road was rough.
Posted in: African American History, Biography, Digitized Newspapers, Sports, Women's History
Posted by: Malea Walker
The following is a guest post by Arlene Balkansky. Arlene recently retired from being a librarian in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, and was a regular writer for Headlines and Heroes. One hundred years ago, Greenwood, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, described as Black Wall Street, was destroyed by white mobs in …
Posted in: African American History, Digitized Newspapers, Journalism, Newspapers
Posted by: Malea Walker
The following is a guest post by Arlene Balkansky. Arlene recently retired from being a librarian in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, and was a regular writer for Headlines and Heroes. On May 29, 1851 at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth delivered what would …
Posted in: African American History, Digitized Newspapers, Journalism, Newspapers, Women's History
Posted by: Megan Halsband
In 1966, Bertram A. Fitzgerald began publishing an educational comic series on Black history in the hopes of inspiring students in much the same way he had been inspired by comics series like Classics Illustrated and Black writers such as Alexandre Dumas, author of the Three Musketeers, and Alexander Pushkin, a Russian poet, playwright, and …
Posted in: African American History, Comic Books, Let's Talk Comics
Posted by: Heather Thomas
The amount of people who owe their lives to Dr. Charles R. Drew is beyond measure. The African American physician and surgeon pioneered the preservation of blood and plasma at the start of World War II and remained a leading authority on the subject for the rest of his career. He is responsible for America's first major blood banks and introduced the use of mobile blood donation and transport stations—later known as “bloodmobiles.”
Posted in: African American History, Biography, Digitized Newspapers, Newspapers