Pioneers
George Bonga one of the most successful and famous of the black voyageurs. He was the son of Pierre Bonga who joined the North West Company in 1803. George was educated in Montreal where he learned English. He spoke French and several Native languages. Like his father he married a Chippewa lady. As a voyageur, he was known for his massive size and incredible strength. He was said to carry a load of 750 pounds for a quarter of a mile. By contrast the average load carried by a voyageur was 250 pounds. He was an acknowledged expert in the songs of the French Canadian voyageurs, and a master of the art of negotiation.
Science
Born 1/4/1890, black educator and agricultural researcher. George Washington Carver was one of the best-known African Americans of his era. He was born in the Missouri town of Diamond. His mother and older brother were the only slaves of Moses and Susan Carver, successful, small-scale farmers. His mother disappeared, presumed kidnapped by slave raiders, while George was an infant. He became both free and orphaned at about the same time.
The childless Carvers raised him and his brother as their own children. Being a sickly child, George was not required to do hard labor but helped around the house. Very early his intellect and knowledge of nature awed those around him, but he was not allowed to attend the neighborhood school because of his color. Thus, at a young age, he began a series of moves through the Midwest, seeking further education. He supported himself cooking, doing laundry, and homesteading before finally enrolling at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, in 1890.
At Simpson Carver majored in art, but a teacher convinced him to transfer to Iowa State College to study agriculture. By the time he completed a master’s degree in agriculture in 1896, Carver had impressed the faculty as an extremely talented student in horticulture and mycology as well as a gifted teacher of freshman biology. Had he been white, he probably would have stayed at Iowa and concentrated on research in one of those fields. Instead he accepted an offer from Booker T. Washington to head the agricultural department at the all-black-staffed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
For nearly 20 years (1896-1915) Carver labored in the shadow of Washington. He taught classes and operated the only all-black agricultural experiment station, but he proved inept at administration, provoking frequent clashes with the principal. He was engaged, however, in some of his most significant work–seeking solutions to the burden of debt and poverty that enmeshed landless black farmers. Carver’s research and innovative educational extension programs were aimed at inducing farmers to utilize available resources to replace expensive commodities. He published bulletins and gave demonstrations on such topics as using native clays for paints, increasing soil fertility without commercial fertilizers, and growing alternative crops along with the ubiquitous cotton. To enhance the attractiveness of such crops as cow peas, sweet potatoes, and peanuts, Carver developed a variety of uses for each. Peanuts especially appealed to him as an inexpensive source of protein that did not deplete the soil as much as cotton did.
Carver’s work with peanuts drew the attention of the National Association of Peanut Growers, which invited him to testify at congressional tariff hearings in 1921. That testimony as well as several honors brought national publicity to the “Peanut Man.” A wide variety of groups adopted the professor as a symbol of their causes, including religious groups, New South boosters, segregationists, and those working to improve race relations. Some white publicists exploited Carver’s humble demeanor and apolitical posture to provide a “safe” symbol of black advancement; many, however, seem to have been genuinely captivated by his compelling personality. Carver’s fame increased and led to numerous speaking engagements, taking him away from campus frequently.
By the late 1920s much of Carver’s time was devoted to lecture tours of white college campuses, sponsored by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the YMCA. With his warm personality, he cultivated close personal relationships with dozens of young whites, opening their eyes to racial injustice, and continued to serve as a mentor and father figure to black students.
Carver developed numerous products from the peanut and sweet potato, including plastics, lubricants, facial cream, and tapioca. His ideas of sustainable agriculture based on renewable resources were out of step with his times, but perhaps not with the future. His early work enriched the lives of countless sharecroppers, and later in life he was a potent source of inspiration as a symbol of African-American achievement.
Carver died on his birthday, January 5, 1943.
Literature
(b. June 7, 1917, Topeka, Kan., U.S.), American poet whose works deal with the everyday life of urban blacks. She was the first black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1968 she was named the poet laureate of Illinois.
Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936. Her early verses appeared in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper written primarily for the black community of Chicago. Her first published collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), reveals her talent for making the ordinary life of her neighbours extraordinary. Annie Allen (1949), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, is a loosely connected series of poems related to a black girl’s growing up in Chicago. The same theme was used for Brooks’s novel Maud Martha (1953).
The Bean Eaters (1960) contains some of her best verse. Her Selected Poems (1963) was followed in 1968 by In the Mecca, half of which is a long narrative poem about people in the Mecca, a vast, fortresslike apartment building erected on the South Side of Chicago in 1891, which had long since deteriorated into a slum. The second half of the book contains individual poems, among which the most noteworthy are “Boy Breaking Glass” and “Malcolm X.” Brooks also wrote a book for children, Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956). The autobiographical Report from Part One (1972) was an assemblage of personal memoirs, interviews, and letters. Later works include Primer for Blacks (1980), Young Poets’ Primer (1980), and Blacks (1987), a collection of her published works.
In 1985-86 Brooks was Library of Congress consultant in poetry. In 1990 she became professor of English at Chicago State University.
Military
Hannibal Barca was one of the greatest military leaders in history. His most famous campaign took place during the so-called Second Punic War (218-202), when he caught the Romans off guard by crossing the Alps using elephants.
Jona Lendering has a GREAT SITE about Hannibal Barca.
Slavery
Harriet Tubman was born a slave in 1821 near the eastern shore of Maryland. When she heard that her deceased master’s property would be sold she escaped to freedom in Pennsylvania. When she discovered what it was to be free, she wanted to help other people to freedom. She knew that her efforts would require money and therefore she worked part-time jobs until she had enough money for her first mission. She traveled to Baltimore and rescued her sister and her two children. She made at least fifteen trips to the south and lead at least 200 people to freedom.
All Harriet Tubman’s trips were successful because she was a master in planning the strategy of each of her escape operations. No detail was missed by her. She planned for food, clothing, train tickets and forged passes. She even included sedatives for crying babies. She never lost a passenger. On at least one occasion, she threatened to shoot a passenger who had second thoughts about escaping. The overnight stops on what came to be know as the Underground Railroad were a network of homes and churches. The churches raised money to assist Tubman’s efforts.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Harriet Tubman supported the war effort as a nurse, a cook and a scout for the Union Army. Whatever she did, her services were always welcome. Tubman received official commendations from numerous Union Army officers. It is said that no officer failed to tip his hat when he saw her. Despite her efforts for the war, she received no veterans benefits of her own.
Her reputation for freeing slaves was known throughout the slave community. She was often compared to Moses who led the Israelites of the Bible to freedom. Her contemporaries referred to her as a heroine, saying “her likes it is probable was never known before or since.”
Throughout her life Harriet Tubman maintained an interest in the welfare of others. She raised money for schools, former slaves, destitute children and assisted the sick and the disabled. Toward the end of her life Harriet Tubman worked to establish a home for the elderly. She passed away in 1913 in the “Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People.”
The singer Paul Robeson would sing the spiritual “Go Down Moses” and explain that it was a protest song of slaves who had Harriet Tubman in mind.
‘Go down Moses, Way down in Egypt land, Tell ole pharaoh, Let my people go.’
Religion
“I am here to demand my rights and to hurl thunderbolts at the man who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood. . . .”
Henry McNeal Turner is remembered mostly as one of the first Bishops in the African American Episcopal Church, yet his occupations were many. He was an army chaplain, political organizer, magazine editor, college chancellor and preacher. From his youth Turner was active in Georgia politics. During reconstruction he worked with Georgia politicians with hopes to make life for 19th century Georgia a better place for blacks. During his political career Turner introduced bills for higher education for blacks and for the creation of a Black militia to protect black people form the Klu Klux Klan. He also introduced a bill to give women the right to vote.
Turner later became frustrated with the treatment that Black people received in the south and vigorously encouraged black people to return to Africa. He had the support of thousands of black peasants and sharecroppers in the south.
Henry McNeal Turner was a theologian and the thinking of the Black church was a major concern to him. Much of his time was spent trying to explain the relationship between God, history and the struggle of black people in America. Turner would declare that, “God is a Negro.” He told black people to reject everything that the white church said about the inferiority of blacks. Turner believed that the role of the black church was to develop racial pride and consciousness among the millions of blacks that had been beaten down by centuries of slavery and oppression. Turner played a major role in the introduction of the African Methodist Episcopal Church into South Africa.
Bishop Turner’s funeral was attended by 25,000 people. There were many dignitaries present, however most of the crowd was poor blacks. Henry McNeal Turner was an agitator and a prophet who addressed the hopes and frustrations of African-Americans struggling in the 19th century.
