Edward William Brooke III
Edward William Brooke III was the first African American to be elected by popular vote to the United States Senate. Brooke, an African American, Protestant...
Category : Politics
George Edwin Taylor
01095
Born in the pre-Civil War South to a mother who was free and a father who was enslaved, George Edwin Taylor became the first African...
Dr. Carolyn L. Robertson Payton
01091
Dr. Carolyn L. Robertson Payton, born May 13, 1925, in Norfolk, Virginia, was a trailblazer as the first African American and first woman to serve...
Joseph Hayne Rainey
01030
In 1870 Republican Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African American to be elected to the United States House of Representatives and take his seat. ...
Crystal Bird Fauset
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Crystal Dreda Bird Fauset was a trailblazing civil rights activist, social worker, educator, and politician, renowned as the first African American woman elected to a...
Pierre Caliste Landry
01494
Pierre Caliste Landry, a former slave turned educator and minister, is noted as the first African American to be elected mayor of a town in...
Ralph Bunche
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Ralph Bunche was an influential figure in the field of international relations and diplomacy. Born in 1904 in Detroit, Michigan, Bunche went on to become...
The Freedmen’s Bureau
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The Freedmen’s Bureau, formally known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, was a groundbreaking federal agency established in the aftermath of the...
John Mercer Langston
01568
John Mercer Langston, the youngest of four children, was born a free black in Louisa County, Virginia in 1829. Langston gained distinction as an abolitionist,...
Matthias de Sousa
01144
Matthias de Sousa, an indentured servant, was the only black person to serve in the colonial Maryland legislature. As such he is the first African...