1900 to 1949

1900

Under the leadership of Nannie Helen Burroughs, the Women's Convention, auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, is founded at the annual meeting in Richmond, Virginia, with S. Willie Layten as the first president. Read more...

In the all-black town of Lovejoy, Illinois, Annie Minerva Turnbo-Malone begins manufacturing hair care products. She earns millions of dollars selling her Poro products around the world. Read more...

According to a study by W. E. B. Du Bois, 252 black women have obtained baccalaureate degrees; sixty-five of them are Oberlin College graduates. Read more...

Madam C.J. Walker (Sarah Breedlove) begins selling her skin and hair products door-to-door and by 1910 becomes the first female African American self-made millionaire. Read more...

George Dixon loses the featherweight title to the white boxer Terry McGovern. Read more...

W. N. Johnson plays halfback for Nebraska; James Phillips plays for Northwestern University's football team; and William Clarence Mathews plays for Harvard. Read more...

At the Paris Exposition in 1900, African Americans organize the “Exposition des Negres d'Amerique” as part of the U.S. pavilion. Daniel A. P. Murray collects works by and about black Americans for the exhibit; W. E. B. Du Bois receives a gold prize as the exhibit's organizer. Read more...

First Pan African Congress is held in London to discuss the political, economic, and social conditions confronting all people of African heritage. Booker T. Washington promotes the meeting; W. E. B. Du Bois attends. Anna H. Jones of Missouri and Anna Julia Cooper of Washington, D.C. (an official U.S. delegate and elected member of the executive committee), are the only black women to address the international gathering. Read more...

A race riot in New Orleans destroys many black homes and businesses. Read more...

In the face of continuing southern disfranchisement of blacks, the Republican Party platform declares: “It was the plain purpose of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, to prevent discrimination on account of race or color in regulating the elective franchise. Devices of State governments, whether by statutory or constitutional enactment, to avoid the purpose of this amendment are revolutionary, and should be condemned.” Read more...

Pauline Hopkins publishes Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, a forceful protest novel. Read more...

Alberta Moore-Smith founds the first women's and first black women's incorporated business club in the country in Chicago, Illinois. She serves as its first president. Read more...

Colored American begins publication, with Walter W. Wallace and Pauline Hopkins as one of the founding members and editors. Read more...

African Americans total wealth equals $700 million.

The Metropolitan Mercantile and Realty Company is incorporated. Like other building and loan associations, it plays a prominent role in financing the construction of African American homes, churches, buildings, and cultural buildings such as theaters and auditoriums.

The number of African Americans in business, both owners and employees, is 40,445.

Otelia Cromwell becomes the first black woman to graduate from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The black population of the United States is 8,833,994, or 11.6 percent of the total population. Women total 4,447,447.

The National Negro Business League is organized in Boston to promote business among African Americans and is attended by more than three hundred delegates; Booker T. Washington is the organization's president. The league passes a resolution to form local businessmen's leagues in cities across the country.

4 August 1900

Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong is born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Read more...

16 January 1901

Hiram R. Revels, first black elected to the U.S. Senate, dies. Read more...

17 October 1901

Booker T. Washington dines with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, angering Southerners who are not ready to accept African Americans as social equals, but strengthening Washington's influence among black leaders and white philanthropists. Read more...

1901

Jack Johnson (born Arthur John Johnson), whose father was born a slave in Texas, wins his first heavyweight fight against a white opponent, Joe Choynsky. Read more...

William Monroe Trotter establishes the Boston Guardian, which becomes the leading critic of Booker T. Washington and his leadership. Read more...

George H. White of North Carolina, who did not run for reelection in 1900, leaves his seat in Congress, which will have no African American members until 1929. Read more...

Grambling College (Louisiana) is founded. Read more...

In college football Sam Morrell plays halfback for Oberlin; Robert Taylor joins W. N. Johnson at Nebraska in the halfback position. Read more...

Spelman Seminary grants its first college degrees to Jane Anna Granderson and Claudia Turner White. Read more...

One hundred and five African Americans are reported lynched. Read more...

Booker T. Washington publishes his autobiography Up From Slavery. Read more...

In Jacksonville, Florida, African Americans organize the North Jacksonville Street Railway Company. All of the company's American motormen and conductors are black.

Pledging $100 each, seven African American men in Jacksonville, Florida, incorporate the Afro-American Industrial Benefit Association, with a beehive as the company's logo.

Jimmy Winkfield wins the Kentucky Derby.

John McGraw, manager of the Baltimore Orioles, a National League team, signs the black player Charlie Grant. To avoid the ban on black players, McGraw claims Grant, who is of mixed ancestry, is a full-blooded Cherokee Indian named Chief Charlie Tokohama, but the ruse is quickly exposed and Grant is forced off the team.

Alabama adopts a “grandfather clause” to curtail black voting in the state.

1902

Eighty-five African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Charlotte Hawkins Brown founds the Palmer Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina. Read more...

As a soloist with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, Ma Rainey begins to develop her distinctive style of blues singing. Read more...

Susie King Taylor's Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the U.S. 33rd Colored Troops is published. Read more...

John Mitchell organizes the Mechanics Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia. It will become one of the largest and most influential African American banks. Read more...

Joe Gans wins the world lightweight championship boxing title. Read more...

William E. Benson founds Kowaliga, Alabama, an industrial settlement that is part utopian community and part company town, near Montgomery. From 1902 to 1907, he raises $50,000 from family members and black businesspeople in the north and south to purchase 6,000 acres of rich timber and farming land.

President Theodore Roosevelt suspends postal service to Indianola, Mississippi, after white supremacists succeed in removing Minnie Cox as postmistress, claiming her appointment represents “nigger domination.”

Jimmy Winkfield wins his second Kentucky Derby in a row.

Merton Paul Robinson plays for the Oberlin College baseball team.

Gwendolyn Bennett is born. This poet, artist, and writer will later become an editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, to which she will contribute the literary gossip column “Ebony Flute.” Read more...

1 February 1902

The poet, novelist, and playwright Langston Hughes is born in Joplin, Missouri. Read more...

17 May 1903

James Thomas “Cool Papa” Bell, who will become a Negro League baseball star, is born. Read more...

1903

The Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank opens in Richmond, Virginia, with Maggie Lena Walker as president. She is the first African American woman to direct a bank. Read more...

Charles W. Follis, becomes the first black professional football player, on the Shelby Athletic Association team. Read more...

James Napier, Richard H. Boyd, and seven other African American members of the Nashville Negro Business League create the One Cent Savings Bank (renamed the Citizens Savings Bank in 1920). Read more...

Eighty-four blacks are lynched. Read more...

Known as the “Boston Riot,” a clash between supporters and opponents of Booker T. Washington at a fundraising event deepens the conflict over the leadership in the African American community and intensifies the differences between Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Read more...

W. E. B. Du Bois publishes the essay collection Souls of Black Folk, which maintains that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” and advocates a more aggressive approach to civil rights. It becomes a monumental text of African American scholarship, providing a history of blacks in the United States from slavery through segregation, as well as a psychological and sociological analysis of the black American mind. The book's popularity transforms Du Bois into a national leader. Read more...

African American businesses number about 25,000.

Georgia Anderson and other working-class women from Savannah submit a petition to the Georgia legislature, requesting $2,000 to emigrate to Africa.

Charley Lee Thomas catches for the Ohio Wesleyan baseball team. The team is managed by Branch Rickey, who plays professional football in the fall after coaching the Ohio Wesleyan baseball team in the spring, and who will later hire Jackie Robinson to break the color line in professional baseball.

Earnie Marshall plays for the Williams College football team.

Benjamin J. Davis Sr. begins publishing the Independent, a weekly newspaper that becomes known as the most militant black newspaper in the South. Though the newspaper does not gain support from black- or white-owned businesses, it survives on subscriptions and the financial backing of the District Grand Order of the Odd Fellows, the wealthiest black fraternal organization in the South. Read more...

1904

Mary Church Terrell represents the National Association of Colored Women at the International Council of Women congress in Berlin, Germany. Read more...

Seventy-six blacks are lynched, at least six of whom are women. Read more...

Mary McLeod Bethune establishes the Daytona Educational and Industrial Institute (later Bethune-Cookman College); it is the first school in Florida to provide education beyond the elementary grades for African American girls. Read more...

Charles Banks organizes the Bank of Mound Bayou, the bank plays a significant role in the all-black town's economic development. Read more...

Philip A. Payton Jr. known as the “Father of Harlem,” establishes the Afro-American Realty Company with an initial capital stock of $500,000. Read more...

Samuel Ransom, a student at Beloit College, becames the first-known black to play on an otherwise all-white college basketball team. Read more...

The Colorado Association of Colored Women's Clubs is founded. Read more...

Robert “Bobby” Marshall stars for the University of Minnesota football team. In a game against Grinnel, Marshall sets the college football record by scoring seventy-two points in one game. Read more...

George C. Poage wins the Bronze medal in the 400-meter hurdles. He is the first African American to win an Olympic medal. Read more...

The all-black town of Boley, Oklahoma, is founded. Read more...

The Metropolitan Mercantile and Realty Company opens a bank in Savannah, Georgia, and a store in Plainfield, New Jersey. The bank also operates an industrial assessment benefit association.

Virginia W. Broughton, a schoolteacher and zealous Baptist missionary from Tennessee, publishes Women’s Work, as Gleaned from the Women of the Bible, an analysis of biblical precedents for gender equality. She leads women of Tennessee in forming groups to study and analyze the Scripture in terms of gender consciousness, encouraging black Baptist women of other states to do the same.

Aaron “the Dixie Kid” Brown wins the world welterweight championship.

William Stanley Braithwaite publishes Lyrics of Life and Love, a book of poetry in the tradition of Britain’s post-romantic writers. Read more...

1905

Fifty-seven blacks are lynched. Read more...

The Memphis Players, the first modern jazz band, makes its debut in New York, with Abbie Mitchell singing and Ida Forsyne dancing. Read more...

Atlanta Life Insurance Company is founded by Alonzo F. Herndon, who owns a barbershop in Peachtree, Georgia. Atlanta Life will become second largest black-owned business in the country. Read more...

George Walter Williams plays shortstop on the University of Vermont baseball team. Read more...

Robert S. Abbott establishes the Chicago Defender, which becomes one of the nation's most influential black newspapers. By 1929, the Defender has a national circulation of 250,000. Read more...

William Craighead is the halfback and captain of the Massachusetts State football team. The other halfback is Willie Williams. Read more...

W. E. B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, and other black leaders meet in Niagara Falls, New York, to organize the Niagara Movement, a militant civil rights organization. Read more...

Eva del Vakia Bowles becomes the first black woman on the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) staff when she becomes secretary of the Colored Young People's Christian Association in New York City (later the 135th Street YWCA in Harlem). In 1913 Bowles becomes the first secretary of the National Board Subcommittee for Colored Work. Read more...

African Americans in Nashville, Tennessee, establish their own bus service—the Union Transportation Company—when the city line institutes racial segregation on its streetcars and refuses to hire black drivers and conductors. Read more...

John H. Zedricks establishes a mail-order house in Chicago. By 1907 Zedricks regularly ships goods internationally to Africa, South America, Haiti, and Cuba.

The Woman's Improvement Club of Indianapolis, Indiana, opens an outdoor tuberculosis camp, purportedly the first in the nation.

Frederick Moore joins the Colored American magazine in Boston, becoming an editor and co-owner. It will become one of the nation’s most widely distributed African American journals. Read more...

W. E. B. Du Bois founds with Harry H. Pace The Moon Illustrated Weekly, the first illustrated African American journal; Du Bois also serves as its editor. Read more...

1906

Dr. John Hope, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University, becomes the first black president of Morehouse College. Read more...

Race riots in Atlanta, Georgia, result in twelve fatalities—ten blacks and two whites. Read more...

Robert R. Church, a wealthy Memphis real estate owner, establishes the Solvent Savings Bank and Trust Company, which caters to African American businesspeople. Read more...

Charles “Doc” Baker plays halfback for the Akron Indians, an early professional football team. Read more...

Alpha Phi Alpha, the first African American Greek letter fraternity, is founded at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Read more...

Francis A. Keller founds the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, uniting the work of several state and local organizations that assist migrants to the cities. Read more...

Sixty-two blacks are lynched. Read more...

The National Negro Bankers' Association, an ancillary organization of the National Negro Business League, is formed.

The journalist Max Beber founds Voice of the Negro, which will become a leading periodical.

3 June 1906

The singer, dancer, and actress Josephine Baker is born in Saint Louis, Missouri. Read more...

14 August 1906

African American troops in Brownsville, Texas, protest racism and discrimination; President Roosevelt dismisses three companies of black soldiers with dishonorable discharges. Read more...

9 February 1906

Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the black poet and author, dies of tuberculosis at age thirty-three. He is the first black literary figure to be widely read by whites. Read more...

1907

Fifty-eight blacks are lynched. Read more...

The sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick becomes the first black artist to receive a federal commission; she is asked to contribute a series of tableaux on African American history for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition. Read more...

C. M. Hughes and Minnie Thomas begin publishing Colored Woman's Magazine, one of the longest-running periodicals under the editorial control of African American women. Read more...

The sprinter John Baxter “Doc” Taylor wins the national Intercollegiate Amateur Athletic Association championship. Read more...

University of Alabama pays $300 and forfeits a baseball game when it refuses to play the University of Vermont because of black players on the team, including Vermont's captain, Fenwick Watkins. Read more...

Charles Banks organizes the Mound Bayou Cotton Mill, capitalized at $100,000.

Madame C. E. Crawford organizes a training school for maids in New York, which allows women to secure jobs as maids on Pullman Cars.

The National Negro Funeral Directors' Association, an ancillary organization of the National Negro Business League, is formed.

W. E. B. Du Bois is the principal founder and editor of Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, which advocates “Negro equality and human equality.” Read more...

Wendall P. Dabney founds The Union newspaper in Cincinnati, Ohio. Read more...

1908

Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first African American sorority, is established at Howard University. Read more...

Josephine Leavell Allensworth and her husband, Allen, found the all-black “race colony” of Allensworth, California. They hope to build a community where African Americans can prosper finacially and live on a par with middle-class and wealthy whites. Read more...

The prominent real estate investor Jesse Binga organizes the Binga State Bank, the first black-owned bank in Chicago. Binga founds the bank in reaction to the difficulties African Americans face in securing loans from white banks in the city. Read more...

The Empire State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs is founded. Read more...

Henry Freeman Coleman plays on the Cornell University football team. Blacks also play for Williams, Amherst, Dartmouth, and Oberlin. Read more...

The sprinter John Baxter “Doc” Taylor becomes the first African American to win an Olympic gold medal as part of the 4 x 400-meter relay team, running with three white teammates—a team that defies the national trend toward segregation. Read more...

In Berea College v. Kentucky the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the power of Kentucky to prohibit a private college from admitting both black and white students. Read more...

The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses is founded, with Martha Franklin as first president. Read more...

Jack Johnson defeats Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, becoming the first black heavyweight boxing champion. Read more...

Eighty-nine African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Heman Perry establishes the Standard Life Insurance Company of Georgia, the first black-owned legal reserve organization in the state. Within two years the company holds $2 million in policies and over $245,000 in assets, and employs 2,500 people.

August 1908

Several months before the one hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, whites attack the black community in Springfield, Illinois; two elderly African Americans are lynched during the riot. Black and white civil rights activists call for a conference to discuss strategies for ending discrimination and racial violence. Read more...

2 July 1908

The civil rights attorney and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall is born in Baltimore, Maryland. Read more...

1909

Nannie Helen Burroughs is the founding president of the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C. Read more...

Sixty-nine African Americans are lynched; at least six victims are women. Read more...

Cumberland Posey organizes the Pittsburgh Monticellos, an all-black professional basketball team. Read more...

Mathew Henson, who is part of Commodore Robert E. Peary's expedition to the North Pole, becomes one of the first explorers to reach the North Pole. Read more...

Richard Henry Boyd, a preacher, entrepreneur, publisher, and writer, establishes the People's Savings Bank and Trust Company with a number of other leading African American citizens in Nashville, Tennessee. Read more...

Tennessee State A & I University (Nashville) is founded. Read more...

Facing bankruptcy, the Niagara Movement holds its last meeting. Read more...

In New York, the real estate agents Henry Parker and John Nails form Nail and Parker, which grows into one of the most successful African American realty companies in the city.

The National Negro Press Association, an ancillary organization of the National Negro Business League, is formed.

James H. Anderson founds the Amsterdam News in New York City. Like the Chicago Defender, the newspaper achieves wide circulation, covering events from a black perspective and regularly criticizing the failures of the U.S. government in dealing with racism. Read more...

31 May 1909

W. E. B. Du Bois and a group of predominantly white liberals call for a national civil rights conference. Meeting in New York the conference creates the National Negro Committee, with Du Bois as a founding member. Read more...

1910

Jack Johnson defeats James L. Jeffries, who had retired as heavyweight campion in 1905. Scattered race riots and incidents follow Johnson's victory as whites, especially in the South, attack blacks. Read more...

Madame C. J. Walker moves her manufacturing operations to Indianapolis, the country's largest manufacturing base, to take advantage of the city's eight major railway systems. Walker's business will peak between 1911 and 1917. Read more...

Sixty-seven blacks are lynched. Read more...

The Union of South Africa is established. Read more...

Sara Winifred Brown, Mary Church Terrell, and others establish the College Alumnae Club. Read more...

African Americans in business (owners and employees) number 56,592. Read more...

North Carolina College (Durham) is founded. Read more...

The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP begins publication; under the editorial leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois. The publication’s mission is to “defend, praise, and instruct black people”; the magazine uses on-site reporting, political analysis, commentary, art, and humor to publicize the plight of African Americans. Read more...

Chicago's American Giants, under the leadership of Rube Foster, win 123 games and lose only six in the Negro Leagues. Read more...

The first city ordinance establishing segregated black and white residential areas passes in Baltimore, Maryland. Read more...

Robert Vann becomes the editor and publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier after working as the paper's legal counsel. Under his leadership, the paper becomes one of the most influential in the nation; at its height it will publish fourteen different editions for national circulation. Read more...

At least thirty all-black towns and thirteen settlements exist throughout the country. Read more...

The National Negro Committee is reorganized as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). W. E. B. Du Bois is the only African American member on the board of directors; he is also hired as the organization's Director of Publications and Research. Read more...

Walter L. Cohen, a politician and entrepreneur, organizes the People's Benevolent Life Insurance Company, better known as People's Life Insurance Company, in New Orleans.

Black population of the United States is 9,827,763, or 10.7 percent of the total population. There are 4,941,882 women.

The librarian and biographical researcher Daniel Murray oversees the Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race Throughout the World. This comprehensive six-volume work is composed solely by blacks, including the historians Arthur Schomburg and John W. Cromwell. Read more...

1911

Sixty African Americans are reported lynched. Read more...

The National Urban League is founded in New York City; less radical in its demands than the NAACP, the organization focuses on improving the economic condition of African Americans living in U.S. cities and on helping blacks transition from rural to urban life. Read more...

1912

Charlotta Bass becomes owner and publisher of the California Eagle, a weekly newspaper in Los Angeles. Read more...

Adah B. Thoms is one of three black delegates to the International Council of Nurses in Cologne, Germany. Read more...

W. C. Handy composes “Memphis Blues” as a campaign song for a local politician. Read more...

Wendell Phillips Dabney, who published a short-lived weekly, The Union, from 1905, organizes the Royal Union Improvement Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. The company operates an African American resort, the Colored Citizens Country Club. Read more...

The Normal Vocal Institute is established in Chicago by Emma Azalia Hackley. Read more...

The sprinter Howard Porter Drew is declared “World's Fastest Human” after setting the world record in the 100-meter dash. The record stands until 1921. Read more...

Theodore Cable wins the hammer throw and broad jump for Harvard at the annual Harvard-Yale track meet. Read more...

Sixty-two blacks are reported lynched. Read more...

James Weldon Johnson publishes his novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man anonymously, anticipating the twentieth-century African American literary movement. Read more...

The sixty-four African American banks in operation have combined assets of $20 million. Virtually all of the banks are located in the south, except for three: Enterprise and Binga Banks in Illinois and the People's Savings Bank in Philadelphia. In the southern United States, Oklahoma has the most black-owned banks: five.

The Colored Intercollegiate league is formed among leading black colleges.

Horseracing organizations ban black jockeys.

Monroe N. Work, the director of records and research at Tuskegee Institute, publishes The Negro Yearbook, Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro. Read more...

1913

The conductor James Reese Europe leads an orchestra of black musicians performing symphonic music at New York's Carnegie Hall. Read more...

Fifty-one African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Ida B. Wells-Barnett is asked not to march with the white Illinois delegation at a National American Woman Suffrage Association parade in Washington, D.C. Read more...

Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, the second black Greek-letter organization for women, is founded at Howard University. Read more...

Illinois becomes the first state east of the Mississippi River to enfranchise women. Read more...

The Alpha Suffrage Club is founded in Illinois. Read more...

Claude A. Barnett, the one-time office assistant to Booker T. Washington while attending Tuskegee, establishes the Douglass Specialty Company to sell portraits of famous African Americans. Read more...

Organization of the first black-theater circuit by the black showman Sherman H. Dudley leads to the formation of the Theater Owners Booking Association in 1920. Read more...

President Woodrow Wilson begins to segregate facilities in federal government buildings. Read more...

The sprinter Howard Porter Drew wins AAU titles in the 100- and 200-meter sprints, setting a new world record in the 200. Read more...

The boxing hero Jack Johnson is convicted under the Mann Act for taking a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.” The prosecution is largely a result of Johnson's open sexual relationship with the white woman, who he later marries. Read more...

There are around 40,000 African American businesses in the United States.

Charles Ward Chappelle, an engineer and architect from Pittsburgh who has been doing business in Africa since 1910, organizes the African Union Company. He incorporates the company in New York a year later. The company leases West African timber properties (especially mahogany) and oil palm plantations. Emmett J. Scott, Booker T. Washington's secretary, is one of the company's officers.

Heman Perry establishes the Standard Life Insurance Company in Atlanta. Until his death in 1929 he uses the company's assets to underwrite a number of other businesses, such as a bank, construction companies, laundries, and drugstores.

In New York, Thomas Banks, who began by selling food from a pushcart, organizes the Banks Fried Chicken and Restaurant Company. By 1919 he owns four restaurants. He later tries to establish a chain of stores but Prohibition laws will ruin his chance for success as the majority of his sales occur between 11:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., his customers coming for food after having spent the night drinking.

John W. Lewis founds the Black Industrial Savings Bank in Washington, D.C., to allow African Americans in the city to borrow money.

The Atlanta State Savings Bank becomes the first chartered African American bank in Georgia. Among its clients are some of the largest and most successful African American businesses in the region, including Atlanta Mutual, North Carolina Mutual, Pilgrim Health and Life, and Standard Life Insurance.

The National Negro Insurance Association, an ancillary organization of the National Negro Business League, is formed.

Under the leadership of Jane Edna Hunter, the Phillis Wheatley Home in Cleveland, Ohio, opens.

The poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite publishes an Anthology of Magazine Verse; new editions are published annually until 1929. Read more...

The poet and fiction writer Fenton Johnson publishes his first volume of poetry, A Little Dreaming. Read more...

10 March 1913

Harriet Tubman dies in Auburn, New York. Read more...

1914–1918

World War I rages; French and British troops capture German Togo; Africans fight in the armies of various colonial powers. Read more...

Joel Spingarn, chairman of the NAACP board of directors, establishes the Spingarn Medal, a gold medallion to be awarded annually for “the highest and noblest achievement of an American Negro during the preceding year or years.” No woman will win the award until 1922. Read more...

Joseph Trigg plays football for Syracuse University; Gideon Smith plays at Michigan State University; and Edward Morrison plays for Tufts. Read more...

John McWorter receives two patents for his inventions, including one for a prototype of the modern helicopter. Read more...

The Jamaican Marcus Garvey establishes the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), seeking to unite people of African descent throughout the world. Read more...

Fifty-one blacks are lynched. At least eleven are women. Read more...

The Florida-based Metropolitan Realty and Investment Company (founded in 1908) starts the Ocola Textile Mill. It is one of the largest manufacturing projects organized by blacks in the early twentieth century.

North Carolina Mutual co-founders John Merrick, Asa Spaulding, and Aaron Moore establish the Durham Textile Mill; it is the first black-owned and operated hosiery mill. The business later fails.

The National Negro Retail Merchants Association, an ancillary organization of the National Negro Business League, is formed.

John W. Cromwell’s Negro in American History is published. Read more...

1915

Jack Johnson loses the heavyweight title fight when Jess Willard knocks him out in the twenty-sixth round. Read more...

Escaping racial violence, poor educational facilities, and a lack of economic opportunities, African Americans begin to leave the South for cities in the North and West in the Great Migration. Within the region, blacks leave rural areas for cities. More than six million blacks will leave the South before the migration ends in the 1960s. Read more...

Hannah Pierce Lowe, the first woman to be awarded a certificate by the American Teachers Association, creates the Organization of Teachers of Colored Children in New Jersey. Read more...

Mary Burnett Talbert becomes president of the National Association of Colored Women, serving until 1920, representing the NACW at the meeting of the International Council of Women in Norway. Read more...

Paul Robeson becomes the first black to play on Rutgers University's football team. He also plays on the school's basketball team. Read more...

Carter G. Woodson, the only former slave to earn a PhD in history, organizes the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Much of its early support comes from black club women and churchwomen. Read more...

D. W. Griffith releases the film Birth of a Nation, which presents a racist interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction, glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, and promotes a white-supremicist vision of government and culture. The NAACP attempts, without success, to ban the showing of the film. Read more...

Anita Bush establishes a theater company in New York City to perform serious plays for black audiences; initially named for its founder, the Anita Bush Players soon change their name to the Lafayette Players. Read more...

The National Negro Business League estimates its membership at 30,000 members in more than 600 local chapters in 34 states and the Gold Coast of West Africa. Read more...

Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard beings his three-year career as a star on Brown's football team. Blacks also play for Syracuse, Michigan State, and Tufts. Read more...

Henry Binga Dismond, a student at the University of Chicago, ties the world record for 400-meter (quarter mile) race. Read more...

Cross-burning incident at Stone Mountain, Georgia, marks the reorganization of the Ku Klux Klan. Read more...

Fifty-six blacks are reported lynched. Read more...

A group of New York entrepreneurs establish the New York Colored Business Men's Association to address the obstacles confronting African American businessmen in the city.

An article in the Christian Recorder, a journal published by the American Methodist Episcopal church, highlights the opportunities available to African Americans as taxi drivers.

Frederick Douglass Patterson, whose father owned C. R. Patterson and Son Carriage Company, organizes Patterson, Sons and Company of Ohio, the first African American automobile manufacturer. Their first automobile, the Patterson-Greenfield (also known as the Greenfield touring car), debuts in 1916. Patterson's father, Charles “Rich” Patterson, may have manufactured cars at his carriage company as early as 1902.

In Muskogee, Oklahoma, T. J. Elliot owns the largest and one of the most fashionable African American department stores in the country.

Joseph E. Trigg, who is a star on the Syracuse University football team, becomes the first black known to row on a varsity crew team.

In the case of Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court rules that Oklahoma's “grandfather clause,” which exempts from state voting requirements any person whose ancestors voted prior to 1 January 1866 is unconstitutional; the case is an early victory for African Americans seeking to regain their voting rights.

The historian Carter G. Woodson, publishes Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. Woodson will later be known as the Father of Black History. Read more...

The Chicago Defender reflects the increasingly militant attitude of the black community by adopting the slogan “if you must die, take at least one with you.” Sale of the paper is banned outside of Chicago, and the following year the slogan is changed to “an eye for an eye.” Read more...

2 January 1915

John Hope Franklin, the historian and public intellectual, is born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma. After a long and distinguished career, in 1995 he will be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President William J. Clinton and the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. Read more...

14 November 1915

Booker T. Washington dies in Tuskegee, Alabama. Read more...

1916

Marcus Garvey arrives in the United States on a fundraising trip; Garvey will move the headquarters of his UNIA from Jamaica to New York City and transform the organization into a large grassroots movement. Read more...

Rachel, a play by Angelina Grimké, is the first known play in the twentieth century written by a black American and presented on stage by black actors. Read more...

Fifty blacks are reported lynched. Read more...

In Los Angeles, Lauretta Green Butler opens the first black professional dance studio for children. Read more...

Frances Elliott Davis is the first African American nurse to enroll officially in the Red Cross nursing service. Read more...

In an effort to unite civil rights leadership following the death of Booker T. Washington, Joel Spingarn and the NAACP organize the Amenia Conference. Read more...

James Weldon Johnson joins the NAACP as its field organizer, charged with increasing membership throughout the United States. Read more...

Carter Woodson publishes the first issue of the Journal of Negro History, the first scholarly journal devoted to the history of African Americans. In the next six decades the JNH will be the main outlet for scholars, both black and white, who are interested in what will later be called African American history. Read more...

In January Fritz Pollard becomes first black ever to play in the Rose Bowl. After the Fall 1916 season Pollard is named to Walter Camp's All American football team. At least seven other blacks, including Paul Robeson, play on otherwise all-white college teams that fall. Read more...

The American Tennis Association is organized in Washington, D.C., to promote tennis among African Americans. Read more...

Colonel Charles Young receives the Spingarn Medal for his work organizing the constabulary of Liberia. Read more...

First colored students' conference of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) is held at Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia. Read more...

A survey in the New York Age determines that there are 117 black-owned businesses on 135th Street between 5th and 7th Avenues in New York City, and that those businesses employ 365 people.

Walter Gordon, of the University of California at Berkeley, wins the first of three consecutive Pacific Coast Conference heavyweight wrestling championships.

1917

Marcus Garvey begins publishing Negro World, reporting on events relevant to black people throughout the world. Read more...

Thirty-six blacks are reported lynched. Read more...

Following state legislation initiating women's suffrage in Texas, black women throughout the state organize Negro women voter leagues. Read more...

Thousands of African American men, women, and children participate in a silent march down Fifth Avenue in New York City to protest the racist violence against blacks during the riot in East Saint Louis and the continuing scourge of lynchings. Read more...

Former Royal Insurance Company employees led by Frank L. Gillespie establish the Public Life Insurance Company of Illinois. Read more...

Heman Perry capitalizes the Service Company, which includes a laundry business, for $100,000. Read more...

In Buchanan v. Warley the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a Kentucky law that prevents blacks from buying houses on majority white blocks and whites from buying houses on majority black blocks. Read more...

Violence erupts in East Saint Louis, Illinois, after blacks are hired at a white-owned factory. White mobs ravage African American stores, homes, and churches; dozens of blacks are killed, including a young child whose is thrown into a burning building. Read more...

Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph begin publication of The Messenger—“the only radical Negro magazine in America”; the publication, socialist and communist in its political and economic philosophy, is highly critical of the “conservative” leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP. The magazine will publish the work of many of the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Read more...

African American soldiers mutiny in Houston, Texas, in reaction to racial discrimination and segregation; fifteen white citizens and four black soldiers are killed before order is restored. Courts martial follow, after which nineteen black soldiers are executed and sixty-three are incarcerated for life at Leavenworth; twenty black soldiers receive lesser sentences. Read more...

The United States enters World War I; an estimated 370,000 blacks will serve in the U.S. military during the war. Read more...

Domestic workers, waitresses, and tobacco stemmers form a union and organize a strike for higher wages in Norfolk, Virginia. Read more...

Ella Pete organizes the Domestic Servants Union in New Orleans, with more than 1,000 members. Read more...

Lucy Diggs Slowe becomes the first black woman athletic champion, winning the women's singles title at the first national American Tennis Association championships in Baltimore, Maryland. Read more...

Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Young, a West Point graduate and the highest-ranking black officer in the U.S. military, is declared physically unfit for service and denied command of a division as the nation prepares to send troops war. Young was next in line to command the Tenth Cavalry, made up of black enlisted men and white officers. However, white officers in the division protested against having to serve under a black commander. To prove his “fitness” Young rides on horseback from his home in Wilberforce, Ohio, to Washington, D.C. After protests Young is reinstated but sent to the African nation of Liberia as a military attaché. Read more...

Black women develop the Circle for Negro War Relief, to provide medical, recreational, and other services to black soldiers.

1918

Sixty blacks are reported lynched. Read more...

One of the most prolific female poets, Georgia Douglas Johnson publishes her first volume of poems, Heart of a Woman. Read more...

Paul Robeson is named to Walter Camp's All-American Football team while starring at Rutgers. Read more...

Fred “Duke” Slater begins the first of four years playing football for the University of Iowa. Read more...

The African Blood Brotherhood is founded, with Bertha DeBasco, Gertrude Hall, and Grace Campbell as members of the radical black nationalist organization. Read more...

The Florida Farmer's Cooperative Association is founded. Members often display produce and agricultural products at Florida state fairs. Read more...

Juliette Derricotte becomes secretary of the national student council of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). Read more...

The Women's Political Association of Harlem is one of the first African American organizations in the country to advocate birth control. Read more...

In Chicago, Evelyn Berry and Victoria Ross establish the Berry and Ross Doll Manufacturing Company, which makes “Berry's Famous Brown Skin Dolls.” The company represents one of the few manufacturing companies started and run by African American women. It is the third major manufacturing project undertaken by African Americans in the period, after the Mound Bayou and Ocala Mills. Read more...

The J. Pierpont Morgan Banking House invites the Wage Earners Savings Bank in Savannah, Georgia, to participate in the Half Billion Dollar English and French War Loan. It is the only black bank invited. A year later, the Savannah-based bank will finance the construction of a chain of African American theaters, a department store, and a hotel in Savannah.

Nora Douglas Holt is the first African American to earn an advanced degree in music, receiving a master's degree from the Chicago School of Music.

11 November 1918

World War I ends. Approximately 370,000 black soldiers fought in the war, including about 1,400 serving as officers; three black regiments—the 369th, 371st, and the 372nd—receive the Croix de Guerre from the French government. Read more...

1919

In response to D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, the African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux releases Within Our Gates, which depicts white violence against blacks. Read more...

Seventy-six blacks are reported lynched. Read more...

The writer Jessie Redmon Fauset becomes literary editor of The Crisis; this position enables her to cultivate the talents of many younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Read more...

Duke Slater is named to the All-American third team; he is the only black player on the University of Iowa football teamRead more...

Claude A. Barnett establishes the Associated Negro Press, a national African American news service modeled on the Associated Press and United Press International. ANP reporters are sent throughout the country to provide better coverage of stories of black interest. Read more...

Oscar Micheaux produces his first film, The Homesteader, based on his novel. Read more...

Delilah L. Beasley publishes Negro Trail Blazers of California, her only book. An extremely valuable tool for researchers, it is later nominated for inclusion in Guide to the Best Books. Read more...

Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), organizes the Black Star Steamship Line Corporation in an effort to cultivate international trade between African Americans and people of African descent in the West Indies, Central America, and Africa. He also organizes the Negro Factories Corporation with an initial capitalization of $1 million. Read more...

John Hope, president of Morehouse College, helps found the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta. The organization will later be renamed the Southern Regional Council. Read more...

Organized by W. E. B. Du Bois, the Pan-African Congress meets in Paris, France. Read more...

Twenty-six race riots occur in cities throughout the United States during the “Red Summer,” a period of socialist agitation and conservative backlash following the Russian revolution; federal troops are called in to bring order to Chicago, where fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks are killed in the rioting. Read more...

Known as the “Hell Fighters,” the 369th Regiment is celebrated with a parade up Fifth Avenue, through Manhattan and into Harlem. Read more...

Sarah (or Sara) Spencer Washington organizes the Apex News and Hair Company in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Read more...

Frank Gillespie founds Liberty Life in Chicago.

In Chicago, Robert Jackson, a minster at Bethel Church, opens two cooperative stores, a grocery and meat market.

In Memphis, Tennessee, African American investors organize the Citizen's Cooperative Stores.

John Whitelaw Lewis, a black businessman who founded the Industrial Savings Bank in 1913, builds the Whitelaw Hotel in Washington, D.C., the first luxury hotel built for African Americans in the city. Costing $158,000, the hotel is financed by blacks and built using African American architects and labor.

One of the earliest African American car dealers, Homer Roberts, organizes the Roberts Automobile Company in Kansas City, Missouri, and sells the cars curbside. In 1923, using his car sales profits, he will purchase a $70,000, two-story building he names the Roberts Building; it includes a garage and showroom for his “Motor Mart,” along with a restaurant, several shops, and business offices that he rents.

Reverend B. G. Shaw, pastor of the Metropolitan AME Zion Church Saint Louis, Missouri, capitalizes the Cooperative Liberty Company for $50,000.

Georgia Hill Robinson becomes the first African American policewoman in the United States, after passing the civil service exam in Los Angeles.

Under the leadership of Nora Douglas Holt, the National Association of Negro Musicians is founded to develop the highest professional standards in all types of music through lectures, conferences, conventions, and scholarships.

September 1919

Birth Control Review features Mary P. Burrill's play, They That Sit in Darkness, possibly the first black feminist drama. The play argues that every woman should have access to birth control. Read more...

1920

The Southeastern Association of Colored Women's Clubs holds its first conference at Tuskegee Institute, where Mary McLeod Bethune is elected its first president and Charlotte Hawkins Brown is elected chairperson of the executive board. Read more...

Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, the third black Greek-letter organization for women, is founded at Howard University. Read more...

The bank presided over by Maggie Lena Walker is reorganized as the Citizens Savings Bank and Trust. Read more...

James Weldon Johnson becomes the first black executive secretary of the NAACP. Read more...

African Americans in business, including owners and employees, number 74,424. Read more...

African American actor Charles Gilpin appears on Broadway in Emperor Jones, a play by Eugene O'Neill; the Drama League of New York honors Gilpin for his contribution to American theater. Read more...

Andrew “Rube” Foster organizes the National Negro Baseball League with eight teams from midwestern cities with large African American populations: the Chicago American Giants, Chicago Giants, Dayton Marcos, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABCs, Kansas City Monarchs, Saint Louis Giants, and the Cuban Stars. The league enjoys great popularity until it folds in 1931 during the Great Depression. Read more...

The Universal African Black Cross Nurses, a female auxiliary of the UNIA, is organized. Read more...

Becoming the first woman to record the blues, Mamie Smith releases “Crazy Blues” and thus begins the “race record” market. Read more...

Fifty-three blacks are reported lynched. Read more...

The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives the right to vote to women, but black women in the South, like black men, remain disfranchised. Read more...

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People presents Angelina Weld Grimké's three-act play Rachel, the first successful stage drama by an African American. Read more...

In Akron, Ohio, Mr. and Mrs. G. Matthews open an eleven-room hotel. By 1955 the hotel will expand to sixty rooms, and will house a beauty and barbershop.

In an effort to regulate the banking industry, an Illinois passes a law to make private banks illegal. The move has a disastrous effect on African American banks, the majority of which are privately owned.

The black-owned Ardmore Lubricating Oil Company is organized in Oklahoma.

The National Design Model and Dressmakers' Association is organized in New York.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races is founded.

Black population of the United States is 10,463,131, or 9.9 percent of the total population.

Black women in Saint Louis, Missouri, and Cleveland, Ohio, organize selective buying campaigns that result in job opportunities in clothing and department stores that are heavily patronized by African Americans.

The clubwoman and teacher Sally Wyatt Stewart founds the black women’s newspaper Hoosier Woman in Evansville, Indiana. The publication is exclusively devoted to Indiana women’s issues and concerns. Read more...

Anne Spencer publishes her first poem, “Before the Feast of Shushan,” in Crisis magazine. Her poems are later included in every collection of black poetry from the 1920s through the 1940s. Read more...

The Harlem Renaissance begins; it becomes a major artistic awakening among African Americans, leading to experimentation in literature, the visual arts, music, and dance. The movement peaks from 1923–1929 and draws to a close in 1935. Read more...

1 August 1920

Marcus Garvey's UNIA holds its international convention in New York City; approximately 250,000 delegates attend sessions at Madison Square Garden. An estimated 50,000 parade through Harlem. Read more...

1921

Harry Herbert Pace founds the first black-owned record company, Pace Phonographic Corporation, which releases albums on the Black Swan label. The company records albums in diverse musical styles, from opera arias to spirituals and blues. Read more...

In Philadelphia, a group of beauty culturists and hair product manufacturers organize the National Beauty Culturists League to promote their interests. Read more...

Bessie Coleman earns her pilot's license from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the African American woman to do so. She returns to the United States and barnstorms for nine years, before dying in a crash while while practicing for a stunt show in Florida. Read more...

Mary Talbert's invitation to speak at a National Woman's Party (NWP) meeting is rescinded after Alice Paul, NWP president, rules that as a representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Talbert represents an organization focused on race, not sex. Read more...

Jessie Fauset is a delegate to the Second Pan-African Congress, representing the National Association of Colored Women. Read more...

Anita Bush costars with Lawrence Chenault in the first all-black Western movie, The Crimson Skull. Read more...

Paul Robeson and Fritz Pollard play professional football in the American Professional Association, the forerunner of the National Football League. Read more...

Shuffle Along, the musical by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, is produced and performed by African Americans in New York City. For more than a year, it is the most popular show on Broadway, running a record 504 performances and launching the careers of Josephine Baker, Caterina Jarboro, and Florence Mills. Read more...

Race riot erupts in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when an African American man is falsely accused of raping a white woman; death reports range from 36 to 175. A substantial portion of the city's 8,000 blacks are left homeless when their neighborhood is destroyed by white mobs. The riot destroys one of the most successful African American business districts in the nation, Greenwood Avenue (known as Black Wall Street). Read more...

The first black women to earn PhD degrees in the United States are Georgiana R. Simpson, German, University of Chicago; Sadie Tanner Mossell (Alexander), economics, University of Pennsylvania; and Eva Dykes, English philology, Radcliffe College. Read more...

Heman Perry and Alonzo Herndon establish the Citizens Trust Company in Atlanta with an initial capitalization of $250,000.

The historian and critic Benjamin Brawley publishes A Short History of English Drama. Read more...

1922

Claude McKay publishes Harlem Shadows, the first book of poetry from the emerging Harlem Renaissance and perhaps his most important collection of poems. James Weldon Johnson publishes an anthology of African American poetry, The Book of American Negro Poetry. Read more...

Egypt gains its independence. Read more...

Fifty-one blacks are reported lynched. Read more...

The Anti-Lynching Crusaders are organized under Mary Talbert's leadership. Read more...

Marcus Garvey is sent to jail for five years after being convicted on one count of mail fraud, having to do with the Black Star Line's stock sale. His second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, launches a campaign to release her husband from prison; Garvey is released in 1927. Read more...

Annie Turnbo-Malone introduces a skin care product line in addition to her hair products. Her products are sold in the United States, the West Indies, South America, Africa, and the Philippines. At its height, her sales force is made up of almost 75,000 women across the world. Read more...

Kathryn Johnson and Addie Hunton coauthor Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, detailing their work in Europe to protect the rights of black soldiers during World War I. Read more...

The boxing champion Jack Johnson patents a theft-prevention device for vehicles. Read more...

U.S. House of Representatives passes the Dyer Anti-Lynching Law, which is defeated by a filibuster in the Senate organized by southern Democrats and northern conservatives. Read more...

Robert L. (Bob) Douglas, a black entrepreneur, starts the New York Renaissance, the greatest all-black professional basketball team. Douglas owns and coaches the team from 1922 to 1949, with a record of 2,588 wins and only 539 losses. Read more...

Mary B. Talbert becomes the first woman to receive the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Spingarn Medal. Read more...

The Colorado Lincoln Hills Development Company opens a mountain resort for African Americans called the Winks Panorama; the resort caters to the desire of middle-class blacks for leisure destinations. Read more...

Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority is the fourth black Greek-letter organization for women; it is the first black sorority established on a predominantly white campus, Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. Read more...

After a protest staged by women delegates at the Universal Negro Improvement Association convention, Henrietta Vinton Davis becomes fourth assistant president general of the association. Read more...

Anthony Overton organizes the Douglass National Bank in Chicago.

Thomas M. Williams establishes the Phoenix Color and Chemical Company. During World War II, the company is contracted by the government to test high-octane gas.

Louise Evans (Briggs-Hall) is the first black woman admitted into the prestigious United Scenic Artists Association for costume, scenic, and lighting designers.

3 September 1922

Bessie Coleman, the first licensed African American aviator, gives her first exhibition on Long Island. Read more...

1923

Bessie Smith's recording of “Downhearted Blues” sells over a million copies. Read more...

Jean Toomer’s only novel, Cane, is published; it becomes his most significant work and a classic of the Harlem Renaissance. Composed of sketches, poetry, and drama, the novel evokes through innovation what it means to be “American.” Read more...

Completing the course of study at Carnegie Library School in Philadelphia, Virginia Proctor Powell (Florence) becomes the first African American woman to receive professional training in librarianship. Read more...

“Ma” Rainey (Gertrude Pridgett) and Bessie Smith record their first records. Ida Cox and Lovie Austin begin recording for Paramount Records. Read more...

George Washington Carver receives the Spingarn Medal for his contributions to agricultural science. Read more...

Garrett A. Morgan, who also invented the gas mask, is granted a patent for the automatic traffic light, which General Electric purchases for $40,000. Read more...

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that half a million African Americans migrated out of the South in the preceding year. Read more...

The Eastern Colored League is organized for black professional baseball teams on the east coast, setting the stage for a black world series. Read more...

Following widespread Ku Klux Klan violence, the governor of Oklahoma declares the state to be in a “state of rebellion and insurrection.” Read more...

Twenty-nine African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Robert T. Bess founds the R. T. Bess Company. By 1932, he will employ nine whites and six African Americans in the only black-owned stock brokerage on Wall Street.

The National Builders Association is founded.

Runnin' Wild is performed on Broadway, choreographed by the first-known African American choreographer, Elida Webb.

The jockey Jimmy Winkfield wins the Prix du President de la Republique in France.

Washington and Jefferson, a college in Pennsylvania, refuses to bench their black halfback, Charles “Prunes” West, when playing football against Washington and Lee of Virginia.

The official publication of the Urban League, Opportunity: A Journal of American Life, is founded with Charles S. Johnson as its first editor.

1924

Civic Club Dinner is organized to introduce young black poets and writers to New York City's literary community; the event helps launch the Harlem Renaissance. Read more...

Twenty-four African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Mary McLeod Bethune is elected president of the National Association of Colored Women. Read more...

Big-band pioneer Fletcher Henderson opens the Roseland Ballroom in New York City. Read more...

William DeHart Hubbard wins the Olympic gold medal in the long jump. He is the first black to win a gold medal in an individual event. Edward Gourdin wins silver in the same event. Earl Johnson takes bronze in the 10,000-meter run. Read more...

Mary Jane Watkins receives a doctor of dental surgery degree and goes on to become the first woman dentist in the military services. Read more...

Elizabeth Ross Haynes is the first black woman elected to the National Board of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), a position she holds until 1934. Read more...

The Kansas City Monarchs defeat the Phildelphia Hilldales in the first modern black World Series. Read more...

Mary Montgomery Booze becomes the first black woman elected to the Republican National Committee. Read more...

The National League of Republican Colored Women is organized. Read more...

Spelman Seminary becomes Spelman College, for the first time offering college courses on its own campus. Read more...

Henrietta Vinton Davis is the only female member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association delegation to Liberia. Read more...

Jessie Fauset’s first novel, There Is Confusion, is published. The work is a response to a white writer’s novel about a mulatto, and challenges its stereotypical depictions of black life. Read more...

Anthony Overton continues to expand his business interests and establishes the Victory Life Insurance Company in Chicago.

In Philadelphia, Richard Wright Sr. and his son Richard Jr., establish the Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company. The company encourages small-scale deposits from African Americans in the community.

The executive committee of the National Negro Business League establishes the National Negro Finance Corporation with an initial capitalization of $1 million. The primary goal of the NNFC is to fund African American entrepreneurial development by providing low interest loans and through investments in African American businesses.

The Independent National Funeral Directors Association is founded.

The National Negro Bankers Association is reorganized.

Twenty-two black race car drivers compete in a 100-mile derby in Indianapolis. The race is won by Malcolm Hannon in one hour and forty-three minutes.

The civil rights leader Walter White publishes Fire in the Flint, a novel about the responses of educated blacks, or “New Negroes,” to racial discrimination.

1925

Countee Cullen publishes his first book of poetry, Color. It will become the most renowned of his works. Read more...

Josephine Baker receives critical acclaim for her appearance with La Revue Nègre, a dance troupe, inspiring an interest in African and African American music and dance in France. Read more...

A. Philip Randolph founds the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first national black labor union; the success of the union enables Pullman porters to prosper even during the Great Depression. Read more...

Florence Mills is the first black woman to headline a Broadway show. Read more...

Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven groups make their first recordings, establishing Armstrong as the premier trumpeter of the new music, jazz. Read more...

The Hesperus Club of Harlem becomes the first ladies' auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Read more...

United States Colored Golfers Association is formed. Read more...

Sister Katherine Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament establish Xavier University in New Orleans; it is the only historically black Catholic college in the United States. Read more...

Seventeen blacks are lynched. Read more...

A consortium of African American mortuary and undertaking businesses establish the Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company to provide improved death benefits for African Americans.

The first black-owned insurance company in California, Golden State Insurance, is established days before state regulations severely limiting the ability of African Americans to form insurance companies go into effect.

Farrad Muhammad establishes what will later become the Black Muslim Movement.

Arna Bontemps wins the Aleksandr Pushkin poetry prize for his poem “Golgotha Is a Mountain.” Read more...

The librarian and biographical researcher Daniel Murray bequeaths the 1,488 volumes of his personal library to Library of Congress. The books become known, for some time, as the “Colored Author Collection.” Read more...

The New Negro: An Interpretation, an anthology of essays, fiction, and poetry edited by Alain Locke, is published. It is a showcase of the artistic innovations of the Harlem Renaissance. Read more...

March 1925

The national sociology magazine Survey Graphic publishes a special issue devoted to race under the title "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro." Alain Locke edits the edition. Read more...

19 May 1925

Malcolm Little (Malcolm X) is born in Omaha, Nebraska. Read more...

1926

Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, compiled and edited by Hallie Quinn Brown, is published. Read more...

Mordecai Johnson is named the first black president of Howard University. Read more...

The white novelist Carl Van Vechten publishes the controversial book Nigger Heaven, which explores African American life in Harlem; the book inspires white fascination with black entertainment and Harlem nightlife. Read more...

Twenty-three blacks are lynched. Read more...

Era Bell Thompson establishes five women's track records while at the University of North Dakota. Read more...

W. E. B. Du Bois visits the Soviet Union and writes several articles praising the Bolshevik Revolution as his politics turn become more radical. Read more...

Langston Hughes publishes his first book of poetry, Weary Blues. Read more...

Fire!, an avant-garde literary magazine, is founded by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and others. The first issue is the only one ever published. Read more...

Carter G. Woodson organizes the first Negro History Week, which later becomes Black History Month; Woodson receives the Spingarn Medal. Read more...

The United States Colored Golf Association holds its first national championshipRead more...

Violette N. Anderson becomes the first black woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Read more...

An interracial charter is adopted by the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) at its national convention; it commits the YWCA to involve African American women more in its organizational life. Read more...

African Americans found a national stock exchange in Detroit with the goal of trading securities in black-owned corporations. The venture does not succeed due to limited financial support, the Stock Market crash of 1929, and the resulting Great Depression.

Ralph Morgan, his brother, and twelve other black jitney-bus owners establish the Safe Bus Company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in response to Duke Power Company's refusal to extend bus lines into African American neighborhoods.

Bennett College, founded as a coeducational institution in 1873, becomes a college for women.

Selena Sloan Butler founds the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers.

The blues musician and composer W. C. Handy publishes the influential Blues: An Anthology; the book helps popularize traditional blues songs. Read more...

1927

Sixteen blacks are lynched. Read more...

Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander becomes the first black woman to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, and to be admitted to the State Bar to practice law in Pennsylvania. Read more...

Mahalia Jackson, sixteen years old, leaves New Orleans for Chicago, where she and Thomas A. Dorsey popularize gospel music and singing. Read more...

Duke Ellington and his band open at the Cotton Club, the white-owned segregated nightclub in Harlem that features African American performers and caters to a white clientele. Read more...

In Nixon v. Herndon the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Texas's “white primary” law, declaring it in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. Read more...

Marcus Garvey is released from prison and deported to Jamaica. Read more...

Abe Sapperstein, a Jewish immigrant from England, organizes the Harlem Globetrotters, an all-black basketball team. The first team is made up of players from Chicago's Wendell Phillips High School. The team competes against white professional and semi-professional teams. Once the NBA integrates, the team, known for both the incredible skill, focuses on entertaining fans with jokes, clowning, tricks, and fancy basketball playing. Read more...

James Weldon Johnson publishes God's Trombones, a book of poems modeled on the sermons of African American preachers. Illustrations by the artist Aaron Douglas are included in the work. Read more...

Anthony Overton expands his operations to New York, making Victory Life Insurance Company the first African American insurance company to operate in the state.

James A. “Billboard” Jackson is appointed the first “Advisor on Negro Affairs” in the U.S. Commerce Department. He serves until 1934.

Girl Friends, Inc., a national social, civic, charitable, and cultural organization, is formed in New York City.

Minnie Buckingham-Harper, appointed to fill her husband's unexpired term in the West Virginia legislature, becomes the first black woman to serve in a U.S. legislative body.

Richard Hudlin is named captain of the University of Chicago tennis team.

Countée Cullen receives the Harmon Foundation’s first gold medal for literature, in recognition of his poetry collection, Color. Read more...

The historian and educator Charles Wesley publishes Negro Labor in the United States, 1850–1925: A Study in American Economic History. Read more...

The University of North Carolina Press publishes Edward C. L. Adams’s Congaree Sketches, a collection of folktales about living along the Congaree River in South Carolina. Though the sketches do not challenge racial stereotypes of the South, the collection includes an introduction by the UNC professor and playwright Paul Green that demands just treatment of blacks. The Press consequently becomes known as a progressive force in the South.

1928

The National Association of Colored Women opens its national headquarters in Washington, D.C. Read more...

The novelist Nella Larsen publishes her first novel, Quicksand, a semiautobiographical account of racial and class conflict in the black community. She publishes Passing, an examination of the psychology of racial passing, the following year. Read more...

Harmon Foundation sponsors an art exhibit at the International House in New York City; it is the first exhibit to feature the works of African American artists. Read more...

Oscar DePriest, a Republican from Chicago, becomes the first African American elected to Congress from a district north of the Mason-Dixon line. Read more...

The Eastern Colored League collapses. Read more...

Ten African Americans are reported lynched. Read more...

The tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson appears on Broadway in the all-black revue Blackbirds of 1928, tapping up and down a flight of stairs, a routine that becomes his signature dance. Read more...

Claude McKay publishes his best-selling novel, Home to Harlem, a controversial celebration of lower-class blacks in Harlem. W. E. B. Du Bois condemns the novel and the work of other Harlem Renaissance writers for presenting negative stereotypes of African Americans. Read more...

A. C. Brown of Montgomery, Alabama, founds the Colored Merchants' Association, a chain of African American grocery stores in which members voluntarily band together to secure better wholesale prices.

In Georgia, Jesse Blayton became the first African American certified public accountant. He opens his own accounting firm, J. B. Blayton and Company.

Reverend A. C. Austin organizes a boycott of the white-owned South Central Department Store on State Street in Chicago. After a sharp decline in sales over the Christmas buying season, in February 1929, the store's management concedes and agrees to hire eight black sales clerks.

Charles Scribner's Sons publishes Nigger to Nigger: Character Sketches of the Negroes of South Carolina in Prose and Verse by Edward C. L. Adams.

Georgia Douglas Johnson publishes the poetry collection An Autumn Life Cycle, considered her best work. Read more...

Monroe N. Work, the director of records and research at Tuskegee Institute, publishes a Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America, one of the most extensive resources on black Americans. Read more...

Rudolph Fisher publishes Walls of Jericho, a satirical novel depicting relationships between different social classes during the late 1920s. Read more...

1929

John Hope becomes president of Atlanta University. He serves in this capacity until his death in 1936. Read more...

William Grant Still composes the Afro-American Symphony, the first symphonic work by an African American. Read more...

Black residents of Chicago organize a “Jobs for Negroes” campaign with a boycott against stores that refuse to hire African Americans; their motto, “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work,” inspires similar protests in Cleveland, New York, and Los Angeles. Read more...

Stock market crashes, plunging the nation and the world into the Great Depression; blacks in the United States are especially hard hit by the Great Depression. Read more...

Seven blacks are lynched. Read more...

Anna Julia Cooper is named president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C. Read more...

Lucy Diggs Slowe convenes the first annual conference of deans and advisers to girls in Negro schools, which gives birth to the Association of Deans of Women and Advisers to Girls in Negro Schools. Read more...

USCGA changes its name to United Golfers Association (UGA)Read more...

Baseball teams from defunct Eastern Colored League create the American Negro League. Read more...

Charles “Tarzan” Cooper begins a thirteen-year career with the all-black New York Renaissance basketball team. Read more...

Douglas Turner is runner-up in the Big Ten Tennis ChampionshipRead more...

Eddie Tolan sets a new record in the 100-meter dash. Read more...

Receiving a degree from Columbia University, Jane Ellen McAlister becomes the first African American woman in the United States to earn a PhD in education. Read more...

The first major film musical with a black cast, Hallelujah, produced by King Vidor, debuts Nina Mac McKinney, the first black actress to gain recognition on the screen. Read more...

The premier athlete Inez Patterson makes six all-collegiate teams at Temple University: hockey, tennis, basketball, track, volleyball, and dancing. Read more...

Albon Hosley, of Montgomery, Alabama, expands the Colored Merchants Association (CMA) into a national organization as part of the National Negro Retail Merchants Association. The goals of the new association include standardizing black-owned CMA grocery stores, engaging in cooperative marketing, providing retail-management training for store owners, and streamlining store operations. The organization opens executive offices in New York a year later.

In response to the stock market crash, Liberty Life and Casualty Company of Columbus, Ohio, and the Northeastern Life Insurance Company of Newark, New Jersey, merge to create the Supreme Life Insurance Company. Maggie Lena Walker served as chairwoman of the bank's board. Many black-owned banks and other insurance companies do the same. Despite such efforts many banks and insurance companies will fail.

Twenty-one black-owned banks hold total combined deposits and assets of $11 million.

New York City Board of Education rules that in the future the word “Negro” will be spelled with a capital “N,” something black activists have been demanding for years as a symbol of racial dignity.

Wallace Thurman’s first novel The Blacker the Berry is published. It is an autobiographical satire written from the point of view of Emma Lou Morgan, a character obsessed with skin color and class consciousness. Read more...

Walter White publishes Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch, a work written in protest of the lynching of blacks in the United States. Read more...

15 January 1929

Martin Luther King Jr. is born in Atlanta, Georgia. Read more...

1930

NAACP mounts a successful protest against President Herbert Hoover's nomination of John J. Parker, a North Carolina judge, to the U.S. Supreme Court, by making public Parker's record of opposing black voting rights. Read more...

African Americans in business, owners and employees, number 103,872, an increase of more than 30 percent since 1920. Read more...

Wallace D. Fard, also known as Fard Muhammad, organizes the Nation of Islam in Detroit. Read more...

Caterina Jarboro becomes the first African American to sing with a major opera company when she debuts as Aïda at the Puccini Opera House in Milan, Italy. Read more...

Twenty blacks are lynched. Read more...

Nella Larsen is the first black person to win a creative writing award from the Guggenheim Foundation. Read more...

Black population of the United States is 11,891,143, or 9.7 percent of the total population. There are 6,035,474 women.

Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes collaborate on the comedic play Mule Bone; it is never finished or produced due to artistic differences between the two authors. Read more...

1931

Twelve African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Ella Baker becomes the first national director of the Young Negroes Cooperative League. Read more...

Jane Mathilda Bolin is the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School. Read more...

Katherine Dunham founds the Negro Dance Group in Chicago. Read more...

Josh Gibson hits seventy-five home runs playing for Pittsburgh's Homestead Grays in the Negro Baseball Leagues. The National Negro League collapses at the end of its season. Read more...

Nine young black males are falsely accused of raping two white women near Scottsboro, Alabama. The plight of the “Scottsboro Boys” becomes an international cause célèbre symbolizing the racism and injustice of the American South. One of the white women accusers eventually recants her testimony, but the defendants are nevertheless retried and convicted. After several retrials, and two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court, four of the nine defendants are released after spending six years in jail. The other defendants spend many years in prison. Full vindication comes in 1976, when Governor George Wallace pardons all nine “Scottsboro boys.” Read more...

Under the leadership of player-coach Ora Mac Washington, the Philadelphia Tribune's women's basketball team is organized, traveling the country through 1940 playing black and white teams. Read more...

Walter White becomes executive secretary of the NAACP; he and W. E. B. Du Bois compete for power within the organization. Read more...

The Communist Party assists in the formation of the Alabama Sharecropper's Union. Read more...

Receiving her degree from Columbia University in New York, Estelle Massey Osborne becomes the first black nurse to earn a master's degree in nursing from a U.S. institution of higher education. Read more...

In Texas, Hobart T. Taylor starts a cab company using profits from the sale his family's farm. By the 1970s, the company will boast $5 million in revenues.

Theodore Martin Alexander Sr. starts the Alexander and Company General Insurance Agency of Atlanta, the first black-owned general insurance brokerage and risk management company in the South.

George Gregory, a student at Columbia University, becomes the first black named an All-American in college basketball.

Arna Bontemps publishes his first novel, God Sends Sunday. Though praised by most reviewers, W. E. B. Du Bois labels it “sordid” and “decadent.” Read more...

George Schuyler’s first novel Black No More is published. Considered the first full-length satire written by an African American, it focuses specifically on the myths of racial purity and white supremacy. Read more...

The Jamaican-born historian and journalist Joel A. Rogers publishes World’s Greatest Men of African Descent. Read more...

1932

Arthur G. Gaston establishes the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company from his own burial insurance company founded in the 1920s. By 1989 the insurance company will boast assets of $36.8 million. Read more...

The Cleveland Opera Company produces Shirley Graham's Tom-Toms: An Epic of Music and the Negro, with a cast of 500. Read more...

Ralph Metcalfe, of Marquette University, wins both the 100- and 200-meters dash in the national NCAA and AAU championships. Read more...

Louise Stokes and Tydie Pickett are the first black women selected for Olympic competition, when they qualify in the 100-meter race for the showpiece games in Los Angeles; they are later replaced by two white athletes. Stokes goes on to qualify for the 1936 Olympics. Read more...

Dorothy Porter is the first African American woman to earn an advanced degree in library science (MLS), from Columbia University. Read more...

In Harlem, Lillian Hardin Armstrong organizes one of the first all-female swing bands. Read more...

Negro baseball leagues disband. Read more...

Eddie Tolan becomes first black to win two Olympic gold medals, in both the 100- and 200-meter dash. Metcalfe wins the silver in the 100 and the bronze in the 200. He sets a new record for 100 meters in one of his heats. Edward Gordon wins the gold in the long jump. Read more...

Six African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Asa Spaulding becomes the first African American actuary in the country after being encourgaed to pursue the degree by executives of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. Spaulding then joins the company and revamps its policy operations. In 1959 Spaulding will become president of the company and will later be elected to the North Carolina Business Hall of Fame.

In New York, the National Colored Merchants Association opens a warehouse to produce and distribute CMA-branded products like coffee, canned goods, and detergents to CMA stores around the country.

Hartshorn Memorial College, the first black woman's college, merges with Virginia Union University.

Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology publishes Caroline Bond Day's Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States.

Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes president; First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt becomes a champion for black civil rights.

The physician and novelist Rudolph Fisher publishes The Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, considered the first black detective novel. Read more...

Sterling Brown publishes Southern Road, a collection of poetry influenced by his admiration for the lives of black people in the rural South, and emphasizing the need for social protest. Read more...

1933

Ralph Metcalfe sets a new record for the 100-meter dash. He will set the record in this distance twice more in 1934. Read more...

Twenty-four African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Margaret Bonds is the first African American to be a guest soloist with the Chicago Symphony, performing with it at the Chicago World's Fair. Read more...

Billie Holiday records her first album. Read more...

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra premieres the composer Florence B. Price's Symphony in E-minor during the Chicago World's Fair. Read more...

Franklin Roosevelt appoints African Americans to positions in his administration, primarily dealing with minority affairs or black issues; Mary McLeod Bethune, Ralph Bunche, Robert Weaver, and William Hastie form the core of what will become known as the “black cabinet.” Although they have some access to the president, their ability to influence public policy is very limited. Read more...

Run Little Chillun by Hall Johnson is the first production on Broadway of a Negro folk opera written by a black composer. Read more...

Eugene Kinkle Jones is appointed to replace James A. “Billboard” Jackson as “Advisor on Negro Affairs” by the U.S. Commerce Department. Jones will serve in the position until 1937. Read more...

Carter G. Woodson begins publication of Negro History Bulletin to provide lessons in African American history to elementary and secondary teachers. Read more...

Jesse Binga is convicted of embezzling funds from his bank and businesses. He is sentenced to ten years in prison. Read more...

Elizabeth Lindsay Davis publishes Lifting as They Climb, the first history of the national club movement. Read more...

The second National Negro League is formed. Read more...

In basketball the original Original Celtics, an all-white team, defeats the all-black New York Rens, ending the eighty-eight game winning streak of the Rens. Read more...

NAACP files—and loses—its first suit against segregation and discrimination in education. Read more...

The Saint Louis, Missouri, nut-pickers' strike involves more than 1,200 black women. Read more...

The Citizens League in Chicago launches a “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work” campaign against white store and business owners.

The first black all-star game, the East-West game, is played in Chicago's Comiskey Park.

NAACP, the National Urban League, and other civil rights organizations form the Joint Committee on National Recovery.

Teams in the National Football League (NFL) reach a gentlemen's agreement to release all black players at the end of the season and not use blacks again. The last two blacks in the league, Ray Kemp and Joe Lillard are cut from their teams at the end of the season.

1934

The writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston publishes her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine. Loosely based on her parents, the novel is rich in folklore and references to Africa. Read more...

Mahalia Jackson makes her first recording, “God Shall Wipe Away All Tears” (Decca Records). Read more...

Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole) succeeds Wallace D. Fard (also known as Fard Muhammad) as head of the Nation of Islam, or Black Muslim faith. Read more...

Ella Fitzgerald wins the Apollo Theatre's amateur contest. Read more...

W. E. B. Du Bois's conflict with NAACP executive secretary Walter White intensifies when Du Bois questions the organization's opposition to segregation in any and all forms; Du Bois argues that there is a need for black institutions and organizations in a racist society. White and others accuse him of embracing the policies of Booker T. Washington and insist that Du Bois's statements in The Crisis align with the policies of the organization; Du Bois resigns as editor of The Crisis and returns to Atlanta University. Read more...

Josh Gibson joins the Pittsburgh Crawfords helping create one of the greatest of the Negro League teams. It includes five future members of the Baseball Hall of Fame, “Cool Papa” Bell, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, Judy Johnson, and Gibson. Read more...

Oscar dePriest loses his seat in Congress to Democrat Arthur L. Mitchell, symbolizing the movement of blacks out of the “Party of Lincoln” and into the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Read more...

Osceola Archer debuts on Broadway in the Elmer Rice play Between Two Worlds. Read more...

National Football League stops allowing black players. Read more...

Fifteen blacks are lynched. Read more...

Socialist Party organizes the Southern Tenants Farm Union, an interracial labor organization, to address the crisis in cotton agriculture facing tenant farmers in Arkansas. Read more...

The Harlem Renaissance novelist Rudolph Fisher dies. Read more...

Esso Standard Oil Company hires James A. “Billboard” Jackson (previously the “Advisor on Negro Affairs” for the Commerce Department) as a special representative, making him the first African American hired in a management position by a white-owned corporation.

Only twelve of the 134 African American banks, credit unions, building and loan associations, and industrial loan societies established since 1888 are still in operation.

Receiving a degree from the University of Minnesota, Ruth Winifred Howard becomes the first African American woman in the United States to receive a PhD in psychology.

The Domestic Workers Union, led by Dora Jones, is affiliated with the Building Service Union, local 149, in New York City.

Imitation of Life, a film based on the novel by Fannie Hurst, becomes the first motion picture with a racial theme to be nominated for an Academy Award as best picture of the year.

Langston Hughes publishes his first collection of stories, Ways of White Folks. Read more...

21 December 1934

The Harlem Renaissance novelist Wallace Thurman dies. Read more...

1935

Joe Louis defeats the Italian boxing champion Primo Carnera in a boxing match at Yankee Stadium. The fight has political overtones as Mussolini, the Italian dictator, touts Carnera as an example of the racial superiority of Italians. The fight takes places shortly after Italy invades Ethiopia, one of only two independent black African nations. Read more...

Italy invades Ethiopia. Read more...

Eighteen blacks are reported lynched. Read more...

Crystal Bird Fauset becomes director of Negro women's activities for the Democratic National Committee. Read more...

Mary McLeod Bethune begins her fifteen-year tenure as president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Read more...

John Henry Lewis wins the light heavyweight boxing championship. Read more...

Langston Hughes's The Mulatto begins a long run on Broadway. Read more...

Mary McLeod Bethune receives the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Spingarn Medal. Read more...

Rioting erupts in Harlem when a false rumor spreads that a white shop owner has beaten an African American boy for shoplifting; by the end of the riot, three blacks are dead, two hundred are wounded, and damages (mostly to white-owned property) is estimated at $2 million. Read more...

Lillie Mae Jackson, a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, organizes a “Buy Where You Can Work” national campaign to force merchants to employ African Americans. Read more...

The National Council of Negro Women is founded, with Mary McLeod Bethune serving as first president, 1935-1949. Read more...

The former NFL player Fritz Pollard organizes a black professional football team, the New York Brown BombersRead more...

George Gershwin's folk opera about the lives of African Americans, Porgy and Bess, (with libretto by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward) premieres at New York City's Alvin Theatre, with Eva Jessye as the choral director and Anne Wiggins Brown in the role of Bess. Read more...

In Pearson v. Murray, the Maryland Court of Appeals rules that the University of Maryland must either admit black students to its law school or establish a separate law school for African Americans; the university chooses to admit African Americans. Read more...

Chick Webb hires Ella Fitzgerald as a vocalist for his band and she makes her first recording. Read more...

Under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Arts Project is founded, providing employment for several African American artists, including Aaron Douglas Jr., Augusta Savage, Archibald Motley Jr., and Richmond Barthe. Read more...

President Roosevelt appoints Mary McLeod Bethune as director of the Office of Minority Affairs of the National Youth Administration; she serves for eight years as special advisor on minority affairs, overseeing the expansion of employment opportunities and recreational facilities for black youth throughout the United States. Read more...

African American purchasing power is estimated at $81 million.

Aggregate retail sales at black-owned stores is $98.6 million.

Although African Americans spend $11 million a year on grocery items, only $550,000, or 5 percent, is spent at African black-owned grocery stores.

The National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs is established.

Jessie Jarue Mark is the first African American woman to earn a PhD in botany (Iowa State University).

Zora Neale Hurston publishes Mules and Men, the first book of African American folklore written by an African American. Read more...

1936

The heavyweight boxer Joe Louis loses to German boxer Max Schmeling in a match that Hitler declares proves the superiority of the Aryan race. Read more...

In Chicago, more than 600 black organizations organize the National Negro Congress to encourage better entrepreneurial and economic opportunities for African Americans. A. Philip Randolph is elected as the first president. Read more...

Union Party in South Africa revokes the voting rights of blacks. Read more...

At the summer Olympics in Berlin the black sprinter Jesse Owens wins four gold medals, tying one world record and breaking three others. His 400-meter relay team includes the future Congressman Ralph Metcalfe, who also wins the silver (behind Owens) in the 100-meter dash. Blacks and Jews on the U.S. team embarrass Germans by demolishing notions of racial superiority. The eighteen black members of the U.S. team bring home a total of fourteen medals. Among the medal winners is Fritz Pollard Jr., the son of the first black professional football star, who wins the bronze in the 110-meter hurdles. Mack Robinson, the older brother of Jackie Robinson, wins the silver in the 200-meter sprint, losing to Jesse Owens, who takes the gold. Read more...

WPA conducts interviews with 2,194 former slaves; these oral narratives provide the most complete record of testimony about slavery in the United States by people who lived through it; the compilation continues to serve as a source of information and inspiration for scholars and writers. Read more...

Flemmie P. Kittrell is the first African American woman to earn a PhD in nutrition (Cornell University). Read more...

Eight African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Dorothy Porter’s Selected List of Books Published By and About the Negro is published by the U.S. Printing Office. This volume and others by Porter will influence the field of bibliography and black American scholarship. Read more...

Arna Bontemps publishes his novel Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia 1800, a fictional chronicle of an actual slave rebellion. The novel breaks new ground by addressing a topic previously untouched by African American writers. Read more...

1937

The boxer Joe Louis knocks out James J. Braddock in the eighth round to become the heavyweight champion of the world and a symbol of pride to African Americans. Read more...

Eight blacks are lynched. Read more...

Katherine Dunham receives a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to pursue her investigation of dance in Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Martinique. Read more...

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters signs its first contract with the Pullman Company, ending a twelve-year struggle against the company. Read more...

William H. Hastie becomes the first black federal judge in the nation's history when he is confirmed as district judge for the Virgin Islands. Read more...

A second Negro American League is created for black baseball teams. Read more...

The Southern Negro Youth Congress is founded. Read more...

William “Dolley” King of Long Island University becomes the first black to play in a National AAU Basketball Tournament. He also plays on the LIU football team. Bob Yancey and Ben Franklin play for the Boston University basketball team, while Lawrence Bleach plays basketball for the University of Detroit. Read more...

In Chicago, Minnie Lee Fellings founds the Minnie Lee Pie Company; by 1939 the company is selling 3,000 pies a day. Read more...

Zora Neale Hurston publishes Their Eyes Were Watching God, about rural black life in the South. Read more...

Charlie E. Hall is appointed “Advisor on Negro Affairs” by the U.S. Commerce Department. He serves until 1938.

The Jones Brothers use profits from their numbers business to establish the Jones Brothers' Ben Franklin store in Chicago; it is the only black-owned variety store in the city.

Anna Johnson Julian becomes the first black woman to receive a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Zelda Jackson (Jackie) Ormes initiates her first cartoon strip, “Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem,” in the Pittsburgh Courier. Ormes becomes the first nationally syndicated black woman cartoonist.

The historian and critic Benjamin Brawley publishes Negro Builders and Heroes, a collection of biographies on legendary black figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth. The work introduces young readers to the achievements of notable black Americans. Read more...

The historian Charles Wesley, an early proponent of African American studies, publishes Collapse of the Confederacy, a groundbreaking examination of the history of the American South arguing that the attempt to create a new nation primarily failed due to internal and social conflict, rather than outside force. Read more...

26 September 1937

Bessie Smith dies in an automobile accident in Mississippi. Read more...

1938

Joe Louis knocks out Max Schmeling in the first round of a championship bout. The fight makes Louis a hero throughout the nation as tensions mount between Nazi Germany and the United States. Before the fight, Hitler touted Schmeling as an example of the superior German people. Read more...

Six blacks are lynched. Read more...

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a 14-16 piece all-female swing band, is formed at Piney Woods Country Life School, Piney Woods, Mississippi, to travel throughout the United States raising money for the school. Read more...

Rosetta Tharpe gains national celebrity status when she takes gospel out of the church, performing a revival show at the Cotton Club, a Harlem nightclub. Read more...

The election of Crystal Bird Fauset to the Pennsylvania State Assembly (House of Representatives) is the first election of an African American woman to major public office in the United States. Read more...

Ella Fitzgerald records “A-tisket, A-tasket.” Read more...

The International Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is founded. Read more...

Miriam Stubbs Thomas and other black women in Philadelphia establish a club to sponsor cultural events and opportunities for their children; the organization becomes Jack and Jill of America. Read more...

The U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce names John H. Johnson one of the country's “Ten Outstanding Young Men,” the first African American to receive the honor. Read more...

The National Council of Negro Women sponsors a national Conference on Governmental Cooperation in the Approach to the Problems of Negro Women and Children, held in Washington, D.C., at the Department of the Interior and the White House. Read more...

In Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada the U.S. Supreme Court orders the University of Missouri to admit Lloyd Gaines, an African American student, to its law school, arguing that scholarships to out-of-state schools do not constitute equal admission. Gaines disappears shortly after the decision and is never heard from again. Some scholars believe he was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Read more...

Louise “Mamma” Harris, a tobacco worker, leads a spontaneous strike at the I. N. Vaughn Company in Richmond, Virginia; it is the first strike in the tobacco industry since 1905.

Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of four short stories, is published. The stories each describe different forms of racial repression and ways that blacks respond to oppression. Read more...

26 June 1938

James Weldon Johnson dies in an automobile accident. Read more...

1939

Joe Louis opens the Brown Bomber Baking Company; by 1941 it is the largest black-owned bakery in the United States. Read more...

On Easter Sunday, Marian Anderson sings before a crowd of 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., after the Daughters of the American Revolution deny her the right to perform in Constitution Hall; later in the year the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awards Anderson its Spingarn Medal. Read more...

Tuskegee Institute establishes a school of nurse-midwifery. Read more...

Ethel Waters became the first black woman to star in a Broadway drama, in the lead role of Hagar in Mamba's Daughters. Read more...

Jane Mathilda Bolin of New York City is appointed justice of the Domestic Relations Court of the City of New York by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, becoming the first black woman judge in the United States. Read more...

NAACP establishes its Legal Defense and Education Fund under the direction of Charles Hamilton Houston; its objective is to mobilize legal talent in the struggle against discrimination and segregation. Read more...

The New York Rens defeat the Oshkosh All Stars of the National Basketball League in what is billed as the Chicago World Professional Basketball Tournament. Read more...

Two blacks are lynched. Read more...

During World War II, battles are fought in North Africa; Africans in British and French colonies are drafted to fight in Europe and Asia.

African Americans own 30,000 retail stores and restaurants and employ 43,000 workers. However, their combined aggregate sales of $71.5 million represents a mere 0.02 percent of national retail sales.

African American funeral directors and funeral homes number 3,000 directors and 1,258 homes, respectively.

S. B. Fuller of Fuller Products builds a factory in Chicago that manufactures thirty different types of household cleaners, personal care products, cosmetics, and hair care products.

Mary T. Washington becomes the first African American female certified public accountant after graduating from Chicago's Northwestern University.

The National Negro Bowling Association (NNBA) is organized because the constitutions of the two major professional groups, the American Bowling Congress (ABC), and the Women's International Bowling Congress (WIBC) both limit their membership to “Caucasians only..

10 June 1940

Marcus Garvey dies in London. Read more...

1940

Jackie Robinson stars for UCLA in both football and basketball. Read more...

Four African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Hattie McDaniel becomes the first African American to win an Oscar for best supporting actress for her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. Read more...

Benjamin O. Davis Sr. is appointed brigadier general; he is the first African American general in the U.S. military. Robert Weaver used his position in the Roosevelt administration to push for Davis's promotion and for the inclusion of other African Americans in efforts to prepare for war. Read more...

The American Negro Theater is formed, its players including Ruby Dee and Osceola Archer (Adams). Read more...

African Americans in business (owners and employees) number 87,475. Read more...

The Harlem Globetrotters defeat the white Chicago Bruins in the second Chicago World Professional Basketball Tournament. Read more...

The white tennis star Don Budge defeats the National Negro Champion Jimmy McDaniel in what may have been the first integrated professional tennis match. Read more...

Laura Bowman appears as Dr. Helen Jackson in Son of Ingagi, the first all-black horror film. Read more...

Receiving a degree from the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, Eliza Atkins Gleason becomes the first African American to earn a doctorate in library science. Read more...

Roger Arliner Young is the first black woman to earn a PhD in zoology (University of Pennsylvania). Read more...

President Roosevelt and representatives of the War and Navy departments meet with A. Philip Randolph, Walter White, and T. Arnold Hill to discuss better treatment of African American troops in the military. Read more...

Katherine Dunham's performances in Tropics and Le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem in New York establishes her international reputation as a dancer. Read more...

Richard Wright publishes Native Son, about the degrading treatment of black migrants in Chicago. The first work by an African American author to become a main Book-of-the-Month selection, it chronicles the life of the youth Bigger Thomas, raising moral questions of collective and personal responsibility and condemning the persistence of racial injustice in the United States. Read more...

U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of Carl Hansberry in Hansberry v. Lee when the court declares it is illegal for whites to bar African Americans from white neighborhoods. The plaintiff's daughter is Lorraine Hansberry, who will later base the award-winning play Raisin in the Sun on this incident. Read more...

Nationalist parties form in western Africa.

Emmer M. Lancaster is appointed “Advisor on Negro Affairs” by the U.S. Commerce Department, a position left vacant since 1938. He serves until 1953 and sets the precedent for President Richard Nixon's “Black Capitalism” initiative.

Joseph Bartholomew purchases the struggling Douglass Life Insurance Company and turns it into a profitable enterprise over the next several years.

Black population of the United States is 12,865,578, or 10.8 percent of the total U.S. population. There are 6,596,480 women; 60 percent of all black women in the labor force are employed in domestic service, with 10.5 percent are in other service work; only 1.4 percent work in clerical and sales positions, while 4.3 percent are in professional positions.

The historian and journalist Joel A. Rogers publishes Sex and Race; his most comprehensive and scholarly work, the book is intended to promote understanding among the races and show that interracial sexual relations have existed since prehistoric times. Read more...

Robert Hayden’s first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust, is published. Hailed as a “people’s poet,” and defining himself as a poet rather than a black poet, Hayden will become America’s first black poet laureate. Read more...

1941

Twenty-three-year-old Jacob Lawrence paints his Migration Series, laying out sixty canvases on the floor and painting them together to produce a work unified in color and style. Read more...

Four blacks are lynched. Read more...

Charlotte Hawkins Brown's The Correct Thing to Do, to Say, and to Wear is published. Read more...

Merze Tate is the first African American woman to earn the PhD in government and international relations from Harvard University. Read more...

A. Philip Randolph organizes a March on Washington, which is canceled after President Roosevelt issues Executive Order 8802, eliminating discrimination in hiring for the nation's defense industries and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to insure blacks are hired in defense industries. Read more...

The Nashville-based McKissick Brothers Construction Company (established in 1909) wins a $4 million federal defense contract to build a 2,000-acre airfield and air base at Tuskegee Institute for training the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the all-black squadron whose pilots would become known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Read more...

The War Department forms a squadron of black cadets to be trained at Tuskegee Institute; the Tuskegee program produces a fighter unit operated and maintained by African American pilots, mechanics, and clerks, who eventually become the celebrated Tuskegee Airmen, serving with distinction during World War II. General Benjamin O. Davis Sr. is given command of this unit. Read more...

Mary Lucinda Cardwell Dawson founds the National Negro Opera Company in Pittsburgh. The first permanent black opera company, it continues through 1962. Read more...

Emily and Edgar (“Dooky”) Chase Sr. open Dooky Chase Restaurant in New Orleans, with Emily Chase as the chef, a position later assumed by their daughter-in-law, Leah Chase.

Ruth Lloyd is the first African American woman to earn a PhD in anatomy (Western Reserve University).

New York City bus companies agree to hire black bus drivers.

With the help of teachers Aline Black and Melvin Alston of Norfolk, Virginia, the NAACP successfully challenges the constitutionality of race-based unequal pay for teachers.

The educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown publishes The Correct Thing to Do, to Say, and to Wear, a practical guide to manners for young people. Read more...

Negro Caravan, edited by Sterling Brown, Arthur P. Davies, and Ulysses Lee, is published. It is the most comprehensive literary anthology of black writers to date. Read more...

7 December 1941

Dorie Miller, a cook on the Arizona, becomes a hero when he shoots down three Japanese planes during the attack on Pearl Harbor that brings the United States into the war; Miller receives the Navy Cross for his heroism. Read more...

1942

Charity Adams (Earley) is the first black woman to become a commissioned officer in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later renamed the Women's Army Corps, or WAC). Read more...

Lena Horne appears in Panama Harrie, her first film role. Read more...

The August cover of Ladies' Home Journal features one of the designer Mildred Blount's hats. Read more...

The jazz singer Sarah Vaughan is discovered after winning amateur night at the Apollo Theatre. Read more...

For My People by Margaret Walker is published. Walker is the first African American poet to be included in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Read more...

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization committed to nonviolent direct action to end racial discrimination, is founded in Chicago. Read more...

John H. Johnson mortgages his mother's furniture to raise money for his first publishing venture, Negro Digest, a general-interest periodical of news reprints and feature articles. In the coming years, Johnson will establish a publishing empire that includes such popular magazines as Ebony and Jet. He will be a millionaire by 1949. Read more...

Six blacks are lynched. Read more...

Pacific Parachute Company, in Los Angeles, is one of the few black-owned manufacturers able to secure government defense contracts.

The first naval merchant ship named after a black person, the Booker T. Washington, is launched from Wilmington, Delaware. Hugh Mulzac is in command; he is the first African American captain of a U.S. merchant ship.

The National Negro Business League's annual conference theme is “Gearing Negro Business to a War-Time Economy.” The conference is held in Chicago.

Margurite Thomas is the first African American woman to earn a PhD in geology (Catholic University).

William Dawson is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Chicago. He is the only black in Congress.

1943

Three blacks are lynched. Read more...

Carol Brice is the first black American musician to win the Walter Naumburg Award. Read more...

Rioting erupts in Detroit, Michigan; Beaumont, Texas; Mobile, Alabama; and Harlem, New York; the mayor of Detroit establishes an Interracial Committee with authority to investigate complaints and to use the courts to enforce antidiscrimination laws. Read more...

The Katherine Dunham School of Arts and Research opens in New York City. Read more...

Frank Whittaker, of the University of Chicago, is the only black basketball player in the Big Ten Conference.

Eta Phi Beta, a national professional sorority for businesswomen, is established in Detroit.

William H. Hawkins establishes Union Airlines in Washington, D.C.

Anne Cooke receives a PhD in theater from Yale University.

5 January 1943

George Washington Carver dies in Tuskegee, Alabama. Read more...

15 December 1943

Legendary musician Fats Waller dies. Read more...

1944

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as the representative from Harlem. For the first time since the nineteenth century, there are now two blacks in Congress. Read more...

The United Negro College Fund is established. Read more...

Anna Arnold Hedgeman is named executive director of the National Council for the federal Fair Employment Practices Commission. Read more...

Jessie Abbott becomes Tennessee State University's first women's track coach. Read more...

W. E. B. Du Bois is forced to retire from the faculty of Atlanta University; he accepts an offer from Walter White and Arthur Spingarn to become the director of special research for the NAACP. Read more...

Two African Americans are lynched. Read more...

Oahu-based Smith Harlem Dispensary is the largest black-owned business in Hawaii.

Daisy Hill Northcross founds and becomes superintendent of Mercy Hospital in Detroit, Michigan.

In Smith v. Allwight, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that blacks cannot be barred from voting in the Texas Democratic primaries.

Harry S. McAlpin, a reporter for the Daily World in Atlanta, becomes the first black reporter authorized to attend White House press conferences. Read more...

Melvin Tobson’s first volume of poetry, Rendezvous with America, is published. The book is a celebration of American diversity during World War II. Read more...

1945

One African American is reported lynched. Read more...

Selma Burke's bronze plaque of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sponsored by the Fine Arts Commission of Washington, D.C., is installed at the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D.C. President Harry S. Truman speaks at the installation ceremonies. Read more...

Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers secretly signs Jackie Robinson, the first black player signed by a major league team since the 1890s. At the time of his signing, Robinson is playing for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues; he is assigned to the Montreal Royals, a Brooklyn farm team. Read more...

Gwendolyn Brooks's first collection of poetry, Street in Bronzeville, is published. Read more...

John H. Johnson began publishing Ebony magazine; it becomes the flagship publication of his company. Modeled after Life magazine, Ebony is dedicated to black American life and culture. Within a year Ebony begins running ads from large white corporations such as Chesterfield and Kimberly Clark. Read more...

World War II ends; records show that 1,154,720 blacks were inducted into the military during the war. Read more...

The Arab League is formed in Cairo.

The number of African American banks grows to eleven, but the number of credit unions drops to sixty-five.

Maida Springer (Kemp) is the American Federation of Labor's delegate to the United States Division of Psychological Warfare to Observe Wartime Conditions among English Workers.

Mary Elizabeth Carnegie becomes the first dean of the School of Nursing at Florida A & M University.

Nora Douglas Holt becomes the first black person accepted into the Music Critics Circle of New York.

An estimated 1,000 students stage a walkout to protest integration in Gary, Indiana.

The activist and writer Eslanda Goode Robeson publishes African Journey, a diary of her trip to Africa. Read more...

B. A. Botkin publishes Lay My Burden Down, a collection of nearly three hundred narratives of African Americans born under slavery and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Read more...

Chester Himes publishes his first novel, If He Hollers, Let Him Go, about racial discrimination and labor issues. Read more...

Richard Wright publishes Black Boy; a major work of autobiography, it becomes a best-seller. Read more...

10 June 1946

The boxer Jack Johnson dies. Read more...

1946

Pearl Bailey wins the Donaldson Award for Most Promising Newcomer when she makes her Broadway theater debut as Butterfly in St. Louis Woman, a musical extravaganza. Read more...

While studying in Mexico in 1946 and 1947, Elizabeth Catlett completes her graphic series on the “Negro Woman”—fifteen linocuts that configure real images of black women. Read more...

The New York Philharmonic Symphony performs Mary Lou Williams's Zodiac Suite (“Aquarius,” “Scorpio,” and “Pisces”) in Carnegic Hall. Read more...

Sugar Ray Robinson wins the welterweight boxing champsionship. Read more...

Thurgood Marshall receives the Spingarn Medal. Read more...

Brooklyn Dodgers announce they have signed Jackie Robinson, at the time playing for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues. Later that summer Robinson stars for Montreal Royals, winning the International League batting championship, and scored the winni. Read more...

Camilla Williams is the first black woman to perform with the New York City Opera. Read more...

Jackie Robinson becomes the first black since the nineteenth century to play on an otherwise all-white professional baseball team when he appears on opening day for the Montreal Royals. In his first game for Montreal, Robinson hits a home run. At the end of the season he wins the International League batting championship and scores the winning run of the final game in the Little World Series. The Dodgers also sign two other black players, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, who play for a Class AA team at Nashua, New Hampshire. Read more...

Two blacks, William “Pop” Gates and William “Dolly” King, play for teams in the Basketball Association of America, a rival to the then-segregated National Basketball Association (NBA). They are released at the end of the season. Dolly King will move over to the NBA to play for the Rochester Royals. Read more...

Kenny Washington, who played football with Jackie Robinson at UCLA, is signed by the Los Angeles Rams, and becomes the first black to play in the National Football League since 1933. Read more...

William H. Hastie becomes governor of the Virgin Islands. He is the first black governor of any state or territory since 1872, when P.B.S. Pinchback served as the acting governor of Louisiana for forty-two days. Read more...

The Indianapolis Clowns form as a new team in the Negro Leagues. The team will fold in 1962. Read more...

The National Beauty Culture League, an African American organization, reports at its anual convention that African American beauty operators did $40 million worth of business during World War II. Read more...

Lucille Dixon, jazz bassist, forms the Lucille Dixon Orchestra. Read more...

Gladys Hampton founds Hampton Records, also known as Hamp-Tone Records, Inc. It is the first record company owned by an African American woman. Read more...

President Harry S. Truman establishes the Committee on Civil Rights to determine how law enforcement “may be strengthened and improved to safeguard the civil rights of people.” Read more...

Asserting that as an interstate traveler she is not bound by the laws of the state of Virginia, Irene Morgan refuses to sit at the back of a Greyhound bus heading from Gloucester County, Virginia, to Baltimore, Maryland. The case comes before the Supreme Court, which rules in Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia that states cannot require segregation on interstate buses. Read more...

There are 205 African American insurance companies.

Dr. Joseph E. Walker (who was president of the National Negro Business League in 1943) and Antonio M. Walker establish the Tri-State Bank in Memphis for working-class and less fortunate African Americans.

Herman Roberts of Chicago, a WWII veteran, founds a cab company. By the early 1950s, Roberts boasts his own garage, thirty-six radio-dispatched cabs, and 125 drivers and mechanics.

The first black-owned cab company in Seattle is established.

The Links is founded in Philadelphia by Margaret Roselle Hawkins and Sarah Strickland Scott.

The Street is published by the novelist Ann Petty and later receives the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award; 1.5 million copies are sold.

Frank Yerby publishes The Foxes of Harrow, a historical romance that chronicles the life of the Irish immigrant Stephen Fox as he rises from rags to riches in New Orleans. The novel becomes a best-seller and later a movie. Read more...

1947

Enduring taunts and jeers from white racist spectators, Jackie Robinson starts the season as the Brooklyn Dodger's second baseman, becoming first black to play in the major leagues in the modern era. At the end of the season Robinson is chosen as the first ever “Rookie of the Year” for all of major league baseball (at the time each league chose its own Rookie of the Year). Robinson brings a dramatic style to the game, using speed and daring; he leads the league in stolen bases, with more than twice as many as the player with the second highest total. Read more...

Rosa Lee Ingram, a Georgia tenant farmer and widowed mother of twelve, along with two of her sons, is convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a neighboring white tenant farmer who she alleged had assaulted her. The case spurs a national defense campaign that includes the organization of the National Committee to Free Rosa Ingram and Her Sons, chaired by Mary Church Terrell, and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, initiated by Charlotta Bass, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Louise Thompson Patterson, Alice Childress, and Rosalie McGee. A worldwide amnesty campaign results in Ingram's pardon in 1959. Read more...

Receiving a degree from Columbia University, Marie M. Daly becomes the first African American woman to earn a PhD in chemistry. Read more...

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) tests the Supreme Court's ruling by staging the Journey of Reconciliation. A biracial group of thirteen men travel by bus to challenge segregated seating arrangements; four protestors are arrested, catapulting the organization to national attention. Read more...

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) presents to the United Nations “An Appeal to the World,” a petition against racism. Read more...

A cosmetic industry market survey reveals the growing importance of African American women's buying power, showing that African American women spend an estimated $300 million each year on cosmetics.

S. B. Fuller of Chicago-based Fuller Products buys white-owned Boyer International Laboratories, a pioneering move among black entrepreneurs. Not until the 1960s do Fuller's white employees and consumers discover that he is black, by which time the company's revenues had grown to $10 million. The white employees quit their jobs and spearheaded a boycott against the company among white consumers.

Larry Doby is signed by the Cleveland Indians. He joins the team in July and plays in twenty-nine games, breaking the color line in the American League. Read more...

The historian John Hope Franklin publishes From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. It is widely proclaimed to be the definitive work on the subject. Read more...

Louis Lautier, Washington Bureau Chief of the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association, is the first black reporter to obtain credentials for both the U.S. Senate and House press galleries.

The novelist Willard Motley publishes Knock on Any Door, the story of an altar boy’s descent into a life of crime and conflict with the law. The book is Motley’s greatest critical and commercial success and is turned into a film starring Humphrey Bogart. Read more...

1948

Ralph Bunche is appointed acting mediator for the U.N. Special Commission on Palestine; he negotiates an armistice and receives the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. Read more...

A. Philip Randolph tells a Senate committee that he will encourage African Americans to resist induction into the military as long as the armed forces remain segregated; President Harry S. Truman issues Executive Order 9981, ending segregation in the military and ordering “equal treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” Read more...

Apartheid policy is established in South Africa. Read more...

California Supreme Court voids a statute banning interracial marriage; the U.S. Supreme Court rules in the case of Ada Lois Sipuel v. Board of Regents that a state cannot require an African American to postpone his or her education until separate graduate and professional schools for blacks are established. Read more...

Thurgood Marshall argues the case of Shelley v. Kraemer in the U.S. Supreme Court; the justices rule that state courts may not enforce restrictive housing covenants that exclude African American residents. Read more...

President Truman urges Congress to adopt antilynching legislation. Read more...

The Brooklyn Dodgers sign Roy Campanella to play catcher; Cleveland Indians sign the aging Negro League star pitcher Satchel Paige, who wins six games and loses one. However, most major league teams remain segregated. Read more...

Six blacks sign to play for teams in the Basketball Association of America, a rival to the then-segregated National Basketball Association (NBA). Nonetheless, the BAA is not permanently integrated. Read more...

Democratic Party adopts a strong Civil Rights Plank is its platform and many southern democrats, led by Strom Thurmund of South Carolina, walk out to form the Dixiecrat Party. Despite losses in the “solid South,” Truman is reelected with strong support from blacks. Read more...

The black golfer Bill Spiller shoots a 68 to tie the superstar golfer Ben Hogan for second place in the first round of the Los Angeles Open. Spiller ends up 20 shots behind Hogan, but his score and ranking qualifies him for the next PGA-sanctioned tournament. He arrives with Madison Gunter, who also qualifies, but both men are barred from playing by the PGA. Read more...

The Harlem Globetrotters defeat the segregated Minneapolis Lakers of the NBA. The Globetrotters are also featured in two movies, Go Man Go and Globetrotters Story. Read more...

Negro American League absorbs the National Negro League, as organized black baseball begins to collapse as a result of the integration of the major leagues. Read more...

For the first time since the 1936 Berlin Olympics, black athletes win eight gold medals, one silver, and one bronze in track and field. Alice Coachman becomes the first black woman Olympic champion when she wins the gold medal in the high jump and sets a new Olympic record of 5'6-1/4''. Don Barksdale wins a gold medal as part of the basketball team. John Davis wins a gold medal as a weightlifter. Read more...

Reginald Ware, a New York physician, becomes first African American to compete in an event sanctioned by the U.S. Tennis Association. Read more...

Pepsi Cola launches ad campaigns that feature prominent blacks such as Ralph Bunche, a delegate to the United Nations. Read more...

Edward Brandford, a commercial artist, founds Brandford Advertising Agency in New York. The company attracts white corporate accounts and quickly becomes one of the top black-owned advertising agencies in the country.

Edith Irby Jones is the first African American student to attend the University of Arkansas School of Medicine (now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences).

Lloyd Robinson, the left wing on Boston University's hockey team, is the first black to play in the NCAA hockey playoffs.

Alice Dunnigan, a reporter for the Associated Negro Press, travels from Washington to California with Harry S. Truman to cover his presidential election campaign. Read more...

The historian Benjamin Quarles publishes his first book, Frederick Douglass, an expansion of his PhD dissertation; it is the first definitive study of the great man. Read more...

Frank Yerby publishes The Golden Hawk; like his earlier book, The Foxes of Harrow, and the later novel The Saracen Blade, it is later made into a successful film. Read more...

1949

The Women's Political Council, Montgomery, Alabama, an organization of professional black women, is founded by Mary Fair Burks to address racial discrimination in the city; the WPC is instrumental in the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott. Read more...

The popular music industry replaces the term “race records” with “rhythm and blues.” Read more...

Jackie Robinson is named Most Valuable Player of the Year for the National League, signaling the growing acceptance of blacks in major league baseball. The black pitcher Don Newcombe is named National League Rookie of the Year. Read more...

Juanita Hall becomes the first black woman to win a Tony award for her performance as Bloody Mary in the Broadway production of South Pacific. Read more...

Joe Louis retires from boxing after holding the heavyweight crown for twelve years. Read more...

WERD, the first black-owned radio station, begins broadcasting in Atlanta, Georgia. Read more...

CORE organizes sit-ins at lunch counters in Saint Louis, Missouri. Read more...

Dorothea Towles, the first African American woman to earn her living entirely as a professional model, begins her career in Europe in Christian Dior's showroom. Read more...

Flemmie Pansy Kittrell is a U.S. delegate to the International Congress of Home Economics in Stockholm, Sweden. Read more...

Lawrence Lewis, a broker with the white-owned firm Abraham and Company, is reportedly the first African American to sell stocks and bonds on Wall Street; African Americans had been otherwise involved with Wall Street since the 1920s.

Eleanora Figaro becomes the first black woman to receive the papal honor Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice.

Marjorie Lee Brown (University of Michigan) and Evelyn Boyd Granville (Yale University) become the first African American women to earn a PhD in mathematics.