Black History Your Students Should Know

This article was published in the Winter Edition of the Horizons magazine for the Missouri Council for the Social Studies.

Black history your students need to know
By Quentin Alimayu

Every February we celebrate Black History Month in our nation. While it is important to make sure students know the key names and figures in much of our understanding of Black History (names like Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Barack Obama), we must ensure that these names do not overshadow our full understanding of Black History throughout time. The names listed are important, and no one can minimize their contributions and/or importance, but too often these names become the only black history our students know or can quote. So today we want to introduce you to ten figures that we encourage you to mention in your classrooms. Figures that are sometimes not listed in textbooks but nevertheless a complete understanding of our world or our history would be lost without mention of them and their contributions.

Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable
Frontiersmen
Created with founding a settlement that later became the City of Chicago in 1779.

Carlota Lukumi
Freedom Fighter
Forced into slavery in Cuba, she used “talking drums” to communicate coded messages with other enslaved people to plan a successful revolt that inspired other uprising in Cuba.

Queen Nzingha
Queen of Angola
Best remembered for her resistance to the Portuguese and setting her people free from slavery.

Claudette Colvin
First Montgomery Bus Protestor
Nine months before Rosa Parks she refused to move from her seat on a segregated bus. Her story is not celebrated because she had a child out of wedlock. However, she did serve as a star witness alongside other plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle Case.

Rube Foster
Negro League Baseball Player/Owner/Manager
Elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981, Foster organized the first long-lasting professional league for African-America baseball players the Negro National League (NNL).

Percy Julian
Scientist
A research pioneer in chemistry, his work laid the foundation for the creation of the steroid drug industry. One of the first African-Americans to receive a Doctorate in Chemistry.  

Ella Baker
Civil Rights Activist
Considered by many to be the most influential woman of the Civil Rights Movement, she worked beside many of the figures of the day to support sit-ins, boycotts, and protests to achieve social justice in America.

Dr. Dorothy Height
Civil Rights Activist
She worked alongside several campaigns with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Co-organized the March on Washington in 1963.

Henrietta Lacks
Medical Pioneer
Her cancer cell cultures have been used since 1951 to aid in most of the important medical research gains during this time. Her cells have helped create a vaccine for polio and have been used to aid research in cancer, AIDS, virology and other medical and cosmetic products or industries.

Bessie Coleman
Aviator
The first woman of African-American and Native American descent to hold a pilot license.

Huey P. Newton
Political Activist
Co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. This party while presented as radical, had many things in their charter that benefit us all today including sponsoring one of the first free breakfast programs for children in America. They also gave out sickle-cell anemia tests, free food and shoes for the community, and created independent Afrocentric schools that taught students how to stand up and defend their civil rights and liberties.

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