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Abo, Wassis Hortense Léonie  

Karen Bouwer

Congolese activist and prominent member of the Kwilu rebellion in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was born in Malungu on the banks of the Kwilu River in the Belgian Congo on 15 August 1945. In 1963 she joined the armed uprising led by Pierre Mulele, the leader of the rebellion and the former minister of education in Patrice Lumumba’s cabinet.

Her mother, Labon, died in childbirth, so Abo, whose name means “mourning” in Kimbundu, was raised by her adoptive parents, Awaka and Mabiungu. Despite the violent protestations of her grandmother Aney, Abo started attending primary school in the village of Lukamba in 1952. She transferred to a boarding school at the Totshi mission at the age of nine. There she was baptized and renamed Léonie Hortense. In 1957 Abo and thirteen other young girls made up the first class of assistant midwives and pediatric nurses at ...

Article

Acea, Isidro  

Bonnie A. Lucero

who later became a political activist in the early Cuban Republic, was born in 1876 in Cienfuegos. He joined the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898) just months after the first uprisings broke out in Cienfuegos on 4 April 1895. He initially served in Cienfuegos and Las Villas under Lieutenant Colonel Alfredo Rego. He later enlisted in the invasion force led by Máximo Gómez (Cuba’s military leader during the war) and Antonio Maceo when it passed from Oriente through Villa Clara in December 1895, and he participated in the famous battle of Mal Tiempo. Acea served under the command of Juan Eligio Ducasse, and he was wounded in a battle in early 1896 outside Ceiba de Agua After operating in the vicinity of Alquizar for several months Acea organized his own infantry regiment called the Tiradores de Maceo in the Fifth Corps of the Cuban army ...

Article

Aptheker, Herbert  

Charles Orson Cook

one of the most prolific white scholars of African American history in the twentieth century. Herbert Aptheker was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1915 and was educated at Columbia University in the 1930s, where he took an undergraduate degree in geology and an MA and a PhD in history. His first important publication, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), was based on his doctoral dissertation and challenged the prevailing wisdom that slaves were largely passive victims of white masters. In part an outgrowth of Aptheker's master's thesis on Nat Turner, American Negro Slave Revolts immediately became a controversial work and has remained so since. He was befriended by the influential African American historian Carter G. Woodson and the legendary black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, both of whom encouraged his interest in Negro history. Aptheker's other writings include a seven-volume Documentary History of the Negro People ...

Article

Batrell Oviedo, Ricardo  

Mark A. Sanders

In 1912 Batrell published his memoir Para la historia: Apuntes autobiográficos de la vida de Ricardo Batrell Oviedo, the only account of Cuba’s final war for independence written by an Afro-Cuban. Poor and uneducated, Batrell taught himself to read and write, then composed his memoir to document the participation of Afro-Cubans in the war (approximately 60 percent of the Liberation Army was black; see Ferrer, 1999, p. 2), and to present the war from the perspective of a black soldier.

Born on the Santísima Trinidad de Oviedo sugar plantation near Sabanilla, in the province of Matanzas—Cuba’s largest sugar-producing province—Batrell worked as a field hand until the age of 15. On 2 February 1896 he joined the Liberation Army that had months earlier crossed the Spanish fortified ditch (la trocha at Puerto Píncipe and invaded the western provinces Matanzas La Habana and Pinar del Rio Serving in ...

Article

Bolívar, Simón  

Marixa Lasso

known as “the Liberator,” in Venezuela, Colombia, and elsewhere in Latin America, was born on 24 July 1783 in Caracas, Venezuela. He was the son of doña María de la Concepción Palacios y Blanco and don Juan Vicente Bolívar y Ponte. Both parents died while he was a young boy, and he was raised by an uncle. His mother was descended from a family in the Canary Islands, and his father was of Basque descent. The Bolívar family had been in the Americas for seven generations and was a prominent and wealthy family of slave and plantations owners. This wealth and status gave Bolívar access to the best education available, as well as the opportunity to spend part of his formative years in Europe.

Bolívar first traveled to Europe when he was 15 years old. He returned again as a young widower, in 1803 During his second trip he ...

Article

Bolívar, Simón  

Simón Bolívar was born to a family of wealthy cacao plantation landholders who owned many slaves. Educated by private tutors in Caracas and Spain, Bolívar was profoundly influenced by the thinkers of the European Enlightenment, in particular the liberal ideas of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as by the American Revolution (1775–1783), and the French Revolution (1789–1799).

With the news of Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Spain in 1808, and the consequent political weakness of the Spanish rulers in Madrid, Bolívar and other elite criollos (Creoles, people of European descent born in the Americas) started to organize local juntas (councils) in order to replace the colonial government. In 1810, with Commander Francisco de Miranda he led a revolt against the Spanish forces in Venezuela Some historians say that Miranda and Bolívar wanted to take power from the European colonizers ...

Article

Cebreco, Agustin  

Bonnie A. Lucero

was born on 25 May 1855 in the town of El Cobre in the Oriente region of Cuba to Librada Sánchez and Francisco Cebreco. He emerged as a prominent figure in the struggle for Cuban independence. Before reaching fifteen years of age, he joined Cuban forces during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878), alongside at least two of his brothers, Juan Pablo (Pedro) and Juan Bautista. He served under prominent insurgent chiefs, including José Maceo, Antonio Maceo, and Calixto García Iñíguez, ascending to the rank of commandant by 1876. In 1878, like many of his black compatriots, he signed on to the Protest of Baraguá, a demonstration of discontent with the Pact of Zanjón, in which insurgents agreed to lay down weapons without achieving independence or the abolition of slavery.

Cebreco then a lieutenant colonel along with other prominent black officers in the East including the Maceo ...

Article

Heureaux, Ulíses  

Mayda Grano de Oro

Born in poverty in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, to a Haitian father and a mother from the Antilles, Ulíses Heureaux was a principal political and military leader in the Restoration War along with Gregorio Luperón. This conflict, which significantly involved Afro-Dominicans in a fight for their sovereignty and against the reinstitution of slavery for the first time, resulted in Spain's final withdrawal from the Dominican Republic.

Heureaux, who was also known as Lilís, became one of the most important political figures of the nineteenth-century Dominican Republic. He began his political career as the military leader of Gregorio Luperón's Partido Azul (Blue Party), opposing Buenaventura Baez's Partido Rojo (Red Party) during Baez's six-year regime from 1868 to 1874. After this regime the presidency was limited to a two-year term, and between 1876 and 1882 the Blue and Red Parties alternated control of the government ...

Article

Holstein, Casper  

H. Zahra Caldwell

philanthropist, activist, and numbers banker, was born in the Danish Virgin Islands. Holstein emigrated with his mother to the United States when he was nearly 12 years old. Little is known about his early childhood in the Virgin Islands. He attended high school in Brooklyn, New York, and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1898. He was stationed, for a time, on the islands of his birth. After completing his tour of duty he settled in Harlem in New York City. Holstein began working as a porter and bellhop at a Wall Street brokerage firm. As he swept floors and carried packages he also observed the intricacies of the stock market. He had ambitions that stretched far beyond his work as a porter.

Holstein had arrived in Harlem when the numbers game known as Bolito was a waning but still popular recreational pastime for blacks ...

Article

Horton, James Africanus  

John Davidson

James Africanus Horton was a pioneer African nationalist. Largely forgotten for eighty years after his death, interest in him revived during West Africa’s advance to independence. His major works, West African Countries and Peoples (1868) and Letters on the Political Condition of the Gold Coast (1870), were republished in 1969 and 1970, respectively. Horton exemplified the contribution of the Krio elite of Sierra Leone to the development of West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. He rejected the argument that Africans were inherently biologically inferior. He argued for extended provision of education, for the building of railways, and for economic development generally. He hoped that the British colonies would expand, with a provision for African self-government and a major role for Western-educated Africans.

Horton was born in Gloucester, Sierra Leone, in 1835 His parents were Igbo recaptives from Eastern Nigeria who were rescued from a ...

Article

Horton, James Africanus Beale  

David Killingray

West African medical doctor, army officer, and political writer born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the son of a liberated slave. He went to school and studied at Fourah Bay Institute with a view to entering the Christian ministry. However, along with two other men, he was selected in 1853 to study medicine in Britain with a view to returning to West Africa as an army medical officer. Horton studied first at King's College London and graduated from Edinburgh in 1859. He was very conscious that he was an African and adopted the name ‘Africanus’. Commissioned into the Army, he returned to West Africa, where he spent twenty years practising as a military doctor and occasionally serving as an administrator. He retired as a lieutenant‐colonel in 1880 Early in his career many of his white fellow doctors resented his role and they persuaded the War Office not to appoint ...

Article

McKaine, Osceola  

Steven J. Niven

soldier, journalist, businessman, and political activist, was born Osceola Enoch McKain in Sumter, South Carolina, to Selena Durant McKain. His father's name is not recorded. Selena Durant McKain was only sixteen when she gave birth to Osceola, whom she named after a Seminole Indian warrior from the 1830s. By the time that Ossie, as he was known in the family, was six, his mother was working as a self-employed laundress in Sumter and had married George Abraham, a waiter and janitor. The couple raised four sons and two daughters in addition to Osceola, but Abraham never formally adopted him. Osceola also retained his mother's surname, adding an extra “e” for a touch of individuality, just as his mother had changed her name from McCain to McKain.

From an early age Osceola worked Along with his siblings he helped his mother make her laundry deliveries ...

Article

Mukhtar, Omar al-  

Mustafa Kabha

Libyan leader of resistance to Italian colonialism, was born in the village of Janzour, in the region of Wadi al-Ashhab, east of Burqa, in eastern Libya. His father, Mukhtar Ghayth, belonged to the clan of Farhat, part of the Braidan tribe, hailing back to the Quraysh tribe of Prophet Muhammad. Omar al-Mukhtar was orphaned at an early age, his father and mother having died on the Hajj to Mecca. He was adopted by a man named Hussayn al-Ghuryani, who sent him to study at the kuttab (Qurʾanic school) of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qadir Budiya, one of the greatest thinkers of al-Tariqa al-Sanusiyya, the extremely popular Libyan Sufi order.

After completing his studies at the kuttab, al-Mukhtar was sent to the town of Jaghbub, where he studied for eight years under some of the most prominent figures in the Sanusi Tariqa first and foremost Shaykh al Sayyid al Mahdi al ...

Article

Peery, Benjamin Franklin  

Charles Rosenberg

businessman and community leader, was born to Luther C. Peery and Catherine B. Peery in St. Joseph, Missouri. His father and paternal grandparents were from Missouri, whereas his mother was born in Kentucky. Returning from military service in Europe after World War I, he lived with his parents for a few years, working as a construction laborer. His wife Carolyn, whom he married in the early 1920s, was born in Kansas to parents from Kentucky. They had seven sons between 1922 and the early 1930s: Benjamin Jr., Nelson, Alvin, Carroll, Ross, Norman, and Richard.

When Peery and another black veteran passed the civil service exam for the previously segregated Railway Mail Service a district supervisor transferred him from Missouri to Minneapolis Minnesota where another supervisor responded to complaints about discrimination by transferring him to the rural community of Wabasha His family ...

Article

Seymour, Lloyd Garrison  

Soren Henry Hough

civil war soldier, was born in Lebanon, Connecticut. His parents are unknown; however, it was noted that his maternal grandmother was a Native American from the Pequot tribe and lived in Bozrah, Connecticut. He is listed as a mulatto according to the 1880 Federal Census. In his civilian life, Seymour worked as a coachman, a gardener, a waiter at a hotel, and a janitor. He was a sergeant in the Civil War, a political activist, and an estate owner.

On 22 November 1854, Thanksgiving Day, Lloyd G. Seymour, age twenty-three, married Nancy P. Williams at the Talcott Street Congregational Church. According to an 1880 Federal Census, Nancy was also mulatto. Nancy's father “lived in the family of Roger Williams of Rhode Island Golden Wedding Her grandfather Dudley Hays was a soldier in the American Revolution and at the Seymour golden wedding anniversary celebration he was given a ...

Article

Sostre, Martin Ramirez  

Garrett Felber

was born in Harlem to Puerto Rican parents. He grew up admiring the street corner orators of 125th Street and Lewis Michaux’s African National Memorial Bookstore on Seventh Avenue. After leaving high school after the tenth grade to help the family earn money during the Depression, he was drafted into the army in 1942 and dishonorably discharged four years later after getting into a fight in Georgia. Later that year he was arrested in San Diego and sentenced to six to twelve years for heroin possession.

While incarcerated at The Tombs (as the Manhattan jail is known), Sostre was mentored by Puerto Rican nationalist Julio Pinto Gandia. He arrived at Sing Sing the night that notorious spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in June 1953 And after three years at Clinton Prison in Dannemora New York Sostre met Teddy Anderson a Muslim of the Ahmadiyya faith Anderson loaned ...

Article

Taylor, James Thomas Sammons  

Brian Neumann

was born free in Berryville, Virginia, to Fairfax Taylor and Ellen Sammons. His father, a free Black shoemaker, had moved the family from northern Virginia to Charlottesville by 1850 and became a leader in the town’s African American community. Fairfax hired a private tutor to teach James to read and write, and he later trained him as a shoemaker. During the Civil War Fairfax and other Black leaders withdrew from the First Baptist Church and established an independent African American congregation, and he later became a prominent minister and Republican orator.

James T. S. Taylor, however, fled from Charlottesville in 1862 after Confederate officials ordered him to perform manual labor for the military He escaped through northern Virginia to Washington D C and later described his ordeal in a letter to President Abraham Lincoln After leaving home to Avoid the Rebel service he wrote my Journey was All most ...

Article

Trotter, James Monroe  

Eric S. Yellin

soldier, music historian, and government officeholder, was born to a slave woman named Letitia and her white owner, Richard S. Trotter, in Grand Gulf, Mississippi, near Vicksburg. After escape or manumission, Letitia settled with her children in the free city of Cincinnati around 1854. Trotter completed his secondary school education and attended the Albany Manual Labor University, near Hamilton, Ohio, where he majored in art and music. During his school vacations and summers he worked as a cabin boy on shipping boats running on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. After graduating from Albany, Trotter taught school in Chillicothe, Ohio, until June 1863.

In that year Negro regiments were created for the Union army and he enlisted in Company K of the Fifty fifth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry While in the army Trotter continued to teach holding class sessions for his fellow soldiers ...

Article

Trotter, James Monroe  

Stephen R. Fox

James Monroe Trotter was born on February 7, 1842, in Grand Gulf, Mississippi, the son of a white man, Richard S. Trotter, and his slave Letitia. When Richard Trotter was married in 1854, Letitia, her son, and two younger daughters from the union were sent to live in the free city of Cincinnati. Here Trotter attended the Gilmore school for freed slaves and worked as a hotel bellboy and as cabin boy on a riverboat. Later he briefly attended academies in Hamilton and Athens, Ohio, but according to his son he was largely self-educated. When the Civil War came, he was a schoolteacher in Pike County, southwestern Ohio.

In 1863 Trotter was recruited by black lawyer and activist John Mercer Langston and traveled to Boston to join the Fifty fifth Massachusetts Regiment a black unit with mostly white officers Trotter rose through the ranks ...

Article

Trotter, James Monroe  

Robert Stevenson

(b Grand Gulf, MS, Nov 8, 1842; d Hyde Park, Boston, Feb 26, 1892). American music historian. He was the son of a slave owner, Richard S. Trotter, and a black slave named Leticia. He studied music with William F. Colburn in a school for Negroes in Cincinnati run by the Methodist minister Hiram S. Gilmore, working between terms as a cabin boy on a steamer plying the Cincinnati–New Orleans run. About 1856 he moved to Hamilton, Ohio. Between 1857 and 1861 he attended Albany Manual Labor University near Athens, Ohio, and then taught in Muskingum and Pike Counties, Ohio. After service in the Civil War he worked in the Boston post office (1866–83), and on 3 March 1887 President Cleveland appointed him Recorder of Deeds in Washington this being the highest office in the nation reserved by custom for Negroes ...