SAVAGE, Gus, a Representative from Illinois; born in Detroit, Mich., October 30, 1925; attended the public schools of Chicago; graduated from Wendell Phillips High School, Chicago, Ill., 1943…
Name at birth: Roderick Leverne CoxLaverne Cox is an Emmy-nominated actress and a transgender advocate -- “the first trans woman of color to have a leading role on a mainstream scripted television…
Tommy Lee Jones won an Oscar for his supporting role in The Fugitive (1993), and got just as much attention as the movie's star, Harrison Ford. Jones played Samuel Gerard, the relentless U.S.…
Claudette Colvin was a black teenager who challenged Alabama's segregation laws in 1955 and was arrested, nine months before Rosa Parks made history for doing the same thing. Colvin was 15 years old…
Hattie McDaniel was a radio and film star of the 1930s and '40s and the first black actor to win an Academy Award. She won for her supporting role in the 1939 blockbuster Gone With the Wind. Born…
Name at birth: Anna Pauline MurrayPauli Murray was a feminist and pioneering civil rights lawyer and, later in life, the first African-American woman ordained as priest in the Protestant Episcopal…
Actor Lakeith Stanfield played informant Bill O'Neal in the film Judas and the Black Messiah and was nominated for an Oscar when he was just 29 years old. Stanfield had already racked up an…
Aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, now nicknamed the "Black Dahlia," was the victim in a notorious 1947 murder case. The name was from the newspapers, a play on Short's supposed reputation for…
(Encyclopedia) TireboluTirebolutĭrĕˈbōl&oomacr; [key], anc. Tripolis, town, N Turkey, a port on the Black Sea. Its exports include copper, manganese, and zinc. The remains of a Byzantine fortress…
(Encyclopedia) Childress, Alice, 1920–94, American playwright and novelist, b. Charleston, S.C. She moved (1925) to New York City and was raised in Harlem. Childress joined the American Negro Theatre…
