Trailblazers

Harriet Tubman

Civil Rights & Activism

Known as the Moses of her people, Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and returned south 13 times to lead approximately 70 enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad.

Harry Belafonte

Media & Entertainment

Harold George Belafonte Jr. was an entertainer who used his fame as a weapon for justice with more consistency and courage than perhaps any other artist in American history. His 1956 album Calypso was the first LP by a single artist to sell over a million copies. But Belafonte would have traded every record sale […]

Hattie McDaniel

Arts & Culture

Hattie McDaniel became the first Black person to win an Academy Award when she received Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mammy in “Gone with the Wind” in 1940. She accepted the award at a segregated ceremony — seated at a small table at the back of the room, away from her castmates. McDaniel […]

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Hebru Brantley

Arts & Culture

Hebru Brantley creates Black superheroes. His signature characters — Flyboy, a goggled young aviator, and Lil Mama, his fearless companion — populate a vibrant Afrofuturist universe rendered in bold colors, graphic lines, and a visual language that draws equally from comic books, street art, Japanese anime, and the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen. In Brantley’s […]

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Herman J. Russell

Business & Entrepreneurship

Herman Jerome Russell built the largest Black-owned construction company in America and quietly became one of the most influential power brokers in Atlanta — a city he helped construct, literally and figuratively. H.J. Russell & Company built the Georgia Dome, Hartsfield-Jackson Airport terminals, the Carter Presidential Center, and dozens of other landmarks. At its peak, […]

Hiram Revels

Politics & Law

Hiram Rhodes Revels was the first Black member of the United States Congress — elected to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi in 1870, during Reconstruction. He occupied the seat previously held by Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, making his election one of the most symbolically powerful moments in American history. A formerly enslaved […]

Huey P. Newton

Civil Rights & Activism

Huey Percy Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966 alongside Bobby Seale in Oakland, California. What began as armed citizen patrols monitoring police brutality evolved into one of the most significant political organizations of the twentieth century, with chapters across the nation and revolutionary community programs that included free breakfasts, health […]

Ida B. Wells

Civil Rights & Activism

Investigative journalist, anti-lynching crusader, and suffragist — Ida B. Wells exposed the horror of racial violence in America and refused to be silenced when the truth needed telling.

Isabel Wilkerson

Civil Rights & Activism

Isabel Wilkerson is the author of two of the most important nonfiction books of the twenty-first century: The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), which documented the Great Migration of six million Black Americans from the South to the North and West, and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), which reframed American racism as a […]

Issa Rae

Business & Entrepreneurship

Jo-Issa Rae Diop — Issa Rae — built a media empire by starting where the gatekeepers couldn’t stop her: YouTube. Her web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, launched in 2011, resonated with millions of viewers who saw themselves in her portrayal of a young Black woman navigating life with humor, vulnerability, and a […]

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Jack Johnson

Sports

John Arthur “Jack” Johnson became the first Black heavyweight boxing champion of the world on December 26, 1908, when he destroyed Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia — and in doing so, set off a firestorm of racial terror and fascination that revealed the depths of white America’s investment in supremacy. His victory prompted a frantic […]

Jackie Joyner-Kersee

Sports

Jacqueline Joyner-Kersee is widely regarded as the greatest female athlete in history. She won three gold medals, one silver, and two bronze across four Olympic Games, and set the heptathlon world record of 7,291 points in 1988 — a mark so dominant it has stood for over 35 years. Sports Illustrated for Women named her […]

Jackie Robinson

Sports

The man who broke baseball's color barrier in 1947, Jackie Robinson changed not just a sport but the soul of a nation — proving that courage and excellence could overcome hatred.

Jacob Lawrence

Arts & Culture

Jacob Lawrence was twenty-three years old when he completed The Migration Series — sixty tempera paintings telling the story of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North. It remains one of the most important works of American art, a visual epic that did for painting what Langston Hughes […]

James Baldwin

Literature

One of the greatest writers America has ever produced — James Baldwin wrote with a searing brilliance that illuminated the intersections of race, identity, sexuality, and what it means to be human.

James Brown

Music

James Joseph Brown — the Godfather of Soul, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business — didn’t just perform music; he invented it. His rhythmic innovations in the mid-1960s created funk as a genre, and the percussive, groove-driven foundation he laid became the most sampled sound in hip-hop history. When you hear a breakbeat, you’re […]

James Weldon Johnson

Literature

James Weldon Johnson wrote the words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in 1900, a hymn so powerful it became known as the Black National Anthem. But Johnson was far more than the author of one song — he was a poet, novelist, diplomat, lawyer, and one of the most important civil rights leaders of […]

Janelle Monáe

Arts & Culture

Janelle Monáe Robinson is a genre-defying artist whose music, acting, and public persona have pushed the boundaries of what Black creativity can look like. Through concept albums built around an android alter ego named Cindi Mayweather — a metaphor for otherness, liberation, and the fight against oppression — Monáe created one of the most ambitious […]

Janet Jackson

Music

Janet Damita Jo Jackson stepped out of her famous family’s shadow and into her own spotlight with Control in 1986 — an album that was exactly what its title promised: a declaration of independence from her father’s management, her family’s expectations, and the industry’s assumptions about who she was supposed to be. She went on […]

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Janice Bryant Howroyd

Business & Entrepreneurship

Janice Bryant Howroyd is the founder and CEO of ActOne Group, the largest privately held, minority-woman-owned staffing company in the United States. Starting with 1,500 dollars, a fax machine, and a borrowed phone in 1978, she built a global enterprise generating over 3 billion in annual revenue. Growing up in Tarboro, North Carolina during segregation, […]

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Arts & Culture

A graffiti artist turned art world sensation — Jean-Michel Basquiat created raw, powerful paintings that challenged race, class, and power structures and made him one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

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Jerry Lawson

Science & Technology

Jerry Lawson is the father of modern video gaming. As lead engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor, he designed the Fairchild Channel F — the first home console to use interchangeable cartridges. Before his innovation, games were built permanently into hardware. Growing up in Queens, Lawson was a self-taught tinkerer who built his own radio station as […]

Jesse Owens

Sports

Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — right in front of Adolf Hitler, demolishing the Nazi myth of Aryan racial superiority on the world stage. It remains one of the most significant athletic achievements in history. Owens set three world records and tied a fourth in a single afternoon at […]

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Jessica Nabongo

Arts & Culture

Jessica Nabongo became the first documented Black woman to visit every country in the world — all 195 UN-recognized nations — completing her journey on October 6, 2019, in the Seychelles. Her travels, documented on social media and in her book The Catch Me If You Can, challenged the narrative that world travel is a […]