Bouchet was the son of a formerly enslaved person who had moved to New Haven, Connecticut. Only three schools there accepted Black students at the time, so Bouchet's educational opportunities were limited. However, he managed to get admitted to Yale and became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. and the 6th American of any race to earn one in physics. Although segregation prevented him from attaining the kind of position he should have been able to get with his outstanding credentials (6th in his graduating class), he taught for 26 years at the Institute for Colored Youth, serving as an inspiration to generations of young African Americans.

Robert Smalls is someone that doesn't get recognized as the others. He was an African-American born into slavery in Beaufort, S.C., but during and after the American Civil War, he became a ship's pilot, sea captain, and politician.

He freed himself, his crew, and their families from slavery on May 13, 1862, when he led an uprising aboard a Confederate transport ship, the CSS Planter, in Charleston harbor, and sailed it north to freedom. His success successfully helped persuade President Abraham Lincoln to accept African-American soldiers into the Union Army.

As a politician, Smalls authored state legislation that gave South Carolina the first free and compulsory public school system in the United States.

Ella was a community organizer and political activist who brought her skills and principles to bear in the major civil rights organizations of the mid-20th century. In 1955 she co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money for the civil rights movement in the South. In 1957 she met with a group of Southern black ministers and helped form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate reform efforts throughout the South.

Bessie Coleman was one of 13 children born to a Native American father and an African American mother. They lived in Texas and faced the kinds of difficulties many Black Americans faced at the time, including segregation and disenfranchisement. Bessie worked hard in her childhood, picking cotton and helping her mother with the laundry she took in. But Bessie didn't let any of it stop her. She educated herself and managed to graduate from high school. After seeing some newsreels on aviation, Bessie became interested in becoming a pilot, but no U.S flight schools would accept her because she was a Black person and because she was female. Undeterred, she saved enough money to go to France where she heard women could be pilots. In 1921, she became the first Black woman in the world to earn a pilot's license.

Charles Henry Alston was an American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist, and teacher who lived and worked in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. Alston was active in the Harlem Renaissance; Alston was the first African-American supervisor for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Alston designed and painted murals at the Harlem Hospital and the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building. In 1990 Alston's bust of Martin Luther King Jr. became the first image of an African American displayed at the White House.

During the racially contentious period in the late '60s, she became the first Black woman elected to Congress. She represented New York's 12th District from 1969 to 1983, and in 1972, she became the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Her campaign slogan: "Unbought and Unbossed" rings even louder today. Senator Kamala Harris recently paid tribute to Chisholm in her presidential campaign announcement by using a similar logo to Chisholm's.

A minister, educator and writer, this Philadelphia native founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the United States. He opened the first AME church in Philly in 1794. Born into slavery, he bought his freedom in the 1780s and joined St. George's Church. Because of seating restrictions placed on blacks to be confined to the gallery, he left to form his own church. In 1787 he turned an old blacksmith shop into the first church for blacks in the United States.

Amelia Isadora Platts Boynton Robinson was an American activist who was a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama, and a key figure in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. In 1984, she became the founding vice-president of the Schiller Institute affiliated with Lyndon LaRouche. She was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Medal in 1990. In 2014, actress Lorraine Toussaint played Robinson in the Ava DuVernay film Selma.

An African-American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He created AAADT and its affiliated Ailey School as havens for nurturing black artists and expressing the universality of the African-American experience through dance.

Nat Turner was a slave who led a failed 1831 slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. That attempt became a reference to the justification for the Civil War. Early years Nat Turner was born on a small plantation in Virginia, owned by a slaveholder.

Robert was an American lawyer, newspaper publisher, and editor. Abbott founded The Chicago Defender in 1905, which grew to have the highest circulation of any black-owned newspaper in the country.

An American singer, songwriter, actress, pianist, and civil rights activist. Franklin began her career as a child singing gospel at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, She became the queen of soul. 

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937.

Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day.

Bayard Rustin was an American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights. Rustin worked with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement, in 1941, to press for an end to racial discrimination in employment.