Trailblazers

Opal Lee

Civil Rights & Activism

Opal Lee — the “Grandmother of Juneteenth” — walked from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., at the age of 89 to campaign for making Juneteenth a federal holiday. She walked two and a half miles each day — symbolizing the two and a half years it took for enslaved people in Texas to learn […]

Opal Tometi

Civil Rights & Activism

Opal Ayo Tometi co-founded the Black Lives Matter Global Network alongside Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors in 2013 — building the digital infrastructure and organizational framework that transformed a hashtag into the largest social movement in American history. As a writer, strategist, and human rights advocate, Tometi brought her experience in immigration justice and international […]

Oprah Winfrey

Media & Entertainment

From rural poverty to media mogul — Oprah Winfrey became the most influential woman in television history, building a billion-dollar empire while lifting millions through the power of storytelling and empathy.

Oscar Micheaux

Media & Entertainment

Oscar Devereaux Micheaux was the first major Black filmmaker in America — a self-taught writer, director, producer, and distributor who made over 40 films between 1919 and 1948, creating a parallel Black cinema industry when Hollywood offered nothing but degrading stereotypes. His 1919 film The Homesteader was the first feature-length film produced by a Black […]

Ossie Davis

Media & Entertainment

Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were the first couple of Black theater — artists, activists, and partners whose work on stage, screen, and in the civil rights movement spanned six decades. Davis was an actor, director, playwright, and activist whose eulogy for Malcolm X in 1965 remains one of the most powerful pieces of oratory […]

Otis Boykin

Science & Technology

Otis Frank Boykin invented the precision resistor that made the implantable cardiac pacemaker possible — a device that has saved millions of lives worldwide. His improved electrical resistors were also used in guided missiles, computers, and radios, making him one of the most consequential Black inventors of the twentieth century, even as his name remained […]

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Pat McGrath

Arts & Culture

Dame Pat McGrath is the most influential makeup artist in the world — a self-taught artist from Northampton, England, whose work has defined the look of fashion for three decades. Vogue called her “the most influential makeup artist in the world.” Her cosmetics company, Pat McGrath Labs, launched in 2015 and was valued at over […]

Patrisse Cullors

Civil Rights & Activism

Patrisse Khan-Cullors co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, creating the hashtag and organizational framework that would become the largest social movement in American history. What began as a Facebook post in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the killing of Trayvon Martin grew into a global network of chapters, a rallying cry for […]

Paul Robeson

Arts & Culture

Renaissance man, radical voice — Paul Robeson was an All-American athlete, acclaimed actor, concert singer, and fearless activist who sacrificed his career rather than stay silent about racism and injustice.

Pauli Murray

Politics & Law

A legal theorist whose arguments laid the groundwork for both Brown v. Board of Education and the fight against sex discrimination — Pauli Murray was decades ahead of every movement they touched.

Percy Julian

Science & Technology

A brilliant chemist who synthesized life-saving drugs from plants — Percy Julian overcame segregation to become one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.

Pharrell Williams

Music

A genre-defying producer, musician, and creative director whose fingerprints are on some of the biggest songs of the 21st century — Pharrell Williams has shaped the sound of modern pop, R&B, and hip-hop while expanding into fashion and philanthropy.

Phillis Wheatley

Literature

Phillis Wheatley was the first Black person to publish a book in America — Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in London in 1773 — and only the third American woman to do so. She accomplished this while enslaved, in a language she had only begun learning at age seven when she was […]

Phylicia Rashad

Media & Entertainment

Phylicia Rashad is an actress, singer, and stage director who became one of the most beloved figures in American television as Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show. Her portrayal of a strong, intelligent, loving Black mother and successful attorney changed the way Black families were represented on television, offering millions of viewers an image of […]

Prince

Music

Prince Rogers Nelson was a once-in-a-generation force who played 27 instruments, wrote thousands of songs, and defied every category the music industry tried to place him in. From Purple Rain to Sign o’ the Times to the vault of unreleased recordings that may never be fully catalogued, Prince produced a body of work so vast […]

Quincy Jones

Music

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. did everything. Trumpeter, arranger, composer, producer, record executive, film scorer, television pioneer, magazine founder, humanitarian — he touched nearly every corner of American popular culture across seven decades and left each one better than he found it. He produced the three best-selling albums of all time: Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, […]

Quinta Brunson

Media & Entertainment

Quinta Brunson created, wrote, and stars in Abbott Elementary — the most acclaimed network comedy of the 2020s and a show that has revitalized the broadcast sitcom at a moment when everyone had declared it dead. The series, set in an underfunded predominantly Black elementary school in Philadelphia, won three Emmy Awards in its first […]

Ralph Bunche

Civil Rights & Activism

Ralph Johnson Bunche became the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for successfully mediating the 1949 Arab-Israeli armistice agreements. A diplomat, scholar, and key architect of the United Nations, Bunche demonstrated that Black excellence had no borders — operating on the world stage at a time when he couldn’t eat […]

Ralph Ellison

Literature

Ralph Waldo Ellison wrote one novel — Invisible Man, published in 1952 — and it was enough to secure his place as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. The book won the National Book Award and has been consistently ranked among the greatest American novels ever written. Its opening line […]

Ray Charles

Music

Ray Charles Robinson — Ray Charles — invented soul music by fusing the sacred sounds of the Black church with the secular rhythms of blues and jazz, a combination so audacious that some called it blasphemous and others recognized it as genius. His 1954 hit “I Got a Woman” took a gospel melody and put […]

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Reginald Lewis

Business & Entrepreneurship

The first African American to build a billion-dollar company — Reginald Lewis executed the largest leveraged buyout of an international company by a Black businessman and proved that Black excellence has no ceiling in the world of high finance.

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Richard Wright

Literature

Richard Nathaniel Wright wrote with a fury that forced white America to confront the reality of Black life in ways it had never been forced to before. His 1940 novel Native Son was the first book by a Black author to be selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and it sold 250,000 copies in its first […]

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Richelieu Dennis

Business & Entrepreneurship

Richelieu Dennis built Sundial Brands — the parent company of SheaMoisture and Nubian Heritage — from a folding table on 125th Street in Harlem into a natural beauty empire that he sold to Unilever in 2017 for an estimated $1.6 billion. Then he did something unusual: he used the proceeds to create the New Voices […]

Rihanna

Business & Entrepreneurship

Robyn Rihanna Fenty transcended music stardom to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs of her generation. Through Fenty Beauty, Savage X Fenty, and her broader portfolio, she built an enterprise valued over 1 billion dollars. Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 with 40 foundation shades, immediately exposing how the beauty industry had ignored darker skin […]