WOctavia Victoria Rogers Albert was an African-American author and biographer. She documented slavery in the United States through a collection of interviews with ex-slaves in her book The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, which was posthumously published in 1890.
WCarol Anderson is an American academic. She is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses on public policy with regards to race, justice, and equality.
WHenry Edwin Baker Jr. was the third African American to enter the United States Naval Academy. He later served as an assistant patent examiner in the United States Patent Office, where he would chronicle the history of African-American inventors.
WYosef Alfredo Antonio Ben-Jochannan, referred to by his admirers as "Dr. Ben", was an American writer and historian. He was considered to be one of the more prominent Afrocentric scholars by some Black Nationalists, while most mainstream scholars dismissed him because of the basic historical inaccuracies in his work, as well as disputes about the authenticity of his educational degrees and academic credentials.
WLerone Bennett Jr. was an African-American scholar, author and social historian, known for his analysis of race relations in the United States. His best-known works include Before the Mayflower (1962) and Forced into Glory (2000), a book about U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
WDaina Ramey Berry is an American historian. She is Chair of the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin. She is also the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History, a Fellow of Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and the George W. Littlefield Professorship in American History. She was formerly the Associate Dean of The Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin. She studies gender and slavery, as well as Black women's history in the United States. She has written books about the connection between the idea of skilled work and the gender of enslaved people in antebellum Georgia, the economic history of slavery in the United States, and the historical contributions of African American women to the politics and governance of the United States and to securing their own rights.
WAncella Radford Bickley is an American historian born in Huntington, West Virginia on July 4, 1930. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from West Virginia State College, now West Virginia State University in 1950, a master's degree in English from Marshall University in 1954, and an Ed.D. in English from West Virginia University in 1974. She is involved in the preservation of African American history in West Virginia.
WJohn Wesley Blassingame (1940–2000) was an American historian and pioneer in the study of American slavery. He was the former chairman of the African-American studies program at Yale University.
WCharles L. Blockson is an American historian, author, bibliophile, and collector of books, historical documents, art, and other materials related to the history and culture of African Americans, continental Africans, and the African diaspora throughout the rest of the world. He curated two university collections related to the study of African-American history and culture: the Charles L. Blockson Collection of African-Americana and the African Diaspora at Pennsylvania State University and the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University.
WClaudine K. Brown was an American museum director and educator and nonprofit executive. She was best known for her work at the Smithsonian Institution, where she was Director of Education, responsible for directing its work to help educate K-12 students. She was also a specialist in African-American history.
WLetitia Woods Brown was an African American researcher and historian. Earning a master's degree in 1935 from Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in 1966 from Harvard University, she served as a researcher and historian for over four decades and became one of the first black woman to earn a PhD from Harvard University in history. As a teacher, she started her career in Macon County, Alabama between 1935 and 1936. Later in 1937, she became Tuskegee Institute's instructor in history but left in 1940. Between 1940 and 1945 she worked at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tennessee as a tutor. From 1968 to 1971, she served as a Fulbright lecturer at Monash University and Australia National University followed by a period in 1971 working as a consultant at the Federal Executive Institute. Between 1971 and 1976 she served as a history professor in the African-American faculty of George Washington University and became the first full-time black member. She also served as a primary consultant for the Schlesinger Library’s Black Women Oral History project during the course of her professional career. Aside from teaching history, Brown wrote and contributed to books on Washington DC such as Washington from Banneker to Douglas, 1791 – 1870 and Washington in the New Era, 1870 – 1970.
WArabella Chapman (1859–1927) was an African-American woman who is best remembered for being the first student to graduate from upstate New York's Albany School for Educating People of Color, later known as Albany High School.
WIdella Jones Childs was an American educator, historian and civil rights activist. Childs worked as a teacher for 35 years in Perry County in Alabama. During the civil rights movement, her home was a meeting place for activists. She was the mother of Jean Childs Young, who later married Andrew Young who went on to become mayor of Atlanta. Childs worked as historian, helping to put two places in Alabama on the National Register of Historic Places. She also became the first black woman to sit on the city council in Marion. Childs was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 2002. An award named after Childs is given out from the Alabama Historical Commission for the recognition of those who have contributed to the preservation of historic African American places.
WAnna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history.
WJohn Wesley Cromwell was a lawyer, teacher, civil servant, journalist, historian, and civil rights activist in Washington, DC. He was among the founders of the Bethel Literary and Historical Society and the American Negro Academy, both based in the capital. He worked for decades in administration of the US Post Office.
WWilliam Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
WHelen Grey Edmonds was an American historian, scholar, and civic leader. She was the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from Ohio State University, the first to become a graduate school dean, and the first to second the nomination of a United States presidential candidate.
WRuth Anna Fisher was an American historian, archivist, and teacher who played a major role in collecting sources from British archives for the Carnegie Institution and Library of Congress.
WNicole R. Fleetwood is an American academic and author. She is a professor of American studies and art history at Rutgers University.
WJohn Hope Franklin was an American historian of the United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
WHenry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels, long forgotten, and has published extensively on appreciating African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
WRuth Evelyn Hodge is an American archivist, author, educator, and community activist who has furthered the advancement of African-American and United States military history research and writing during the 20th and early 21st centuries. “African-Americans played a great part in building America,” she said during a newspaper interview in 2000. “The more people know, the better they understand and the better they get along.”
WNathan Irvin Huggins was a distinguished American historian, author and educator. As a leading scholar in the field of African American studies, he was W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University as well as director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. Born in Chicago, he died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 62.
WCudjoe Kazoola Lewis, born Oluale Kossola, and also known as Cudjo Lewis, was the third to last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States. Together with 115 other African captives, he was brought to the United States on board the ship Clotilda in 1860. The captives were landed in backwaters of the Mobile River near Mobile, Alabama, and hidden from authorities. The ship was scuttled to evade discovery, and was not found again until 2019.
WWilliam Manning Marable was an American professor of public affairs, history and African-American Studies at Columbia University. Marable founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He authored several texts and was active in progressive political causes. At the time of his death, he had completed a biography of human rights activist Malcolm X titled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011), for which Marable won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History.
WAdrian Miller is an American culinary historian, lawyer and public policy advisor. He is the author of Soul Food, which won the 2014 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Scholarship, and The President’s Kitchen Cabinet, which was nominated for a 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Nonfiction. He also served as a White House advisor to U.S. president Bill Clinton.
WDaniel Alexander Payne Murray (1852-1925) was an American bibliographer, author, politician, and historian. He also worked as an assistant librarian at the Library of Congress.
WWilliam Cooper Nell was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, publisher, author, and civil servant of Boston, Massachusetts, who worked for integration of schools and public facilities in the state. Writing for abolitionist newspapers The Liberator and The North Star, he helped publicize the anti-slavery cause. He published the North Star from 1847 to 18xx, moving temporarily to Rochester, New York.
WNell Irvin Painter is an American historian notable for her works on United States Southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University as the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and as president of the Southern Historical Association.
WLouis Rayfield Purnell, Sr. was a noted curator at the National Air and Space Museum and earlier in life, a decorated Tuskegee Airman. At the museum, he became expert in space flight artifacts, particularly spacesuits, and was instrumental in curating artifacts related to space exploration, during the 1960s and into the 1980s. Purnell was the first African-American to become a curator at the Smithsonian Institution. As a captain in the Army Air Corps and a fighter pilot, he served in the European and North African theater during World War II. For his service during the war, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with six Oak Leaf Clusters.
WBernice Johnson Reagon is a song leader, composer, scholar, and social activist, who in the early 1960s was a founding member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) Freedom Singers in the Albany Movement in Georgia. In 1973, she founded the all-black female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, based in Washington, D.C. Reagon, along with other members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, realized the power of collective singing to unify the disparate groups who began to work together in the 1964 Freedom Summer protests in the South.“After a song,” Reagon recalled, “the differences between us were not so great. Somehow, making a song required an expression of that which was common to us all.... This music was like an instrument, like holding a tool in your hand.”
WPaul Wilbur Stewart was an American historian, best known for founding Black American West Museum and Heritage Center in 1971.
WRoger Wilkins was an African-American civil rights leader, professor of history, and journalist.
WGeorge Washington Williams was an American Civil War soldier, Baptist minister, politician, lawyer, journalist, and writer on African-American history.
WCarter Godwin Woodson was an American historian, author, journalist, and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora, including African-American history. A founder of The Journal of Negro History in 1916, Woodson has been called the "father of black history". In February 1926 he launched the celebration of "Negro History Week", the precursor of Black History Month.
WPauline Alice Young was an African-American teacher, librarian, historian, lecturer, community activist, humanitarian, and individualist.