"When I went to the movies with other black children, we had to sit in the balcony while the white kids got to sit in the better seats below. We had to walk to school while the white children rode in school buses paid for by our parents' taxes. Such messages, saying we were inferior, were a daily part of our lives." Young Coretta Scott's gift for music and enthusiasm for education led her far beyond the segregated world of her childhood, but when she met the young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,...

By age 23, John Lewis was already recognized as one of the principal leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, along with Martin Luther King Jr. The son of sharecroppers in rural Alabama, he led his first demonstrations while studying theology in Nashville, Tennessee. As Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he was a leader in many of the most dramatic campaigns of the movement: the lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Rides and the March on Washington. He suffered...

The undisputed monarch of the blues guitar, B.B. King was born on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. As a child he learned the rudiments of his instrument from his preacher and was soon performing blues and gospel songs on street corners. In 1947 he hitchhiked to Memphis, Tennessee with $2.50 in his pocket to pursue a professional music career. Within a year he was singing on the radio and in local night clubs. In 1951 he recorded his first big hit, "Three O'Clock Blues," and began...

James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer and songwriter. Eventually referred to as "The Godfather of Soul", Brown started singing in gospel groups and worked his way on up. He has been recognized as one of the most iconic figures in the 20th century popular music and was renowned for his vocals and feverish dancing. He was also called "the hardest-working man in show business". A prolific singer, songwriter, dancer and bandleader, Brown was a...

Ray Charles (1930 -2004) was born in Albany, Georgia, at the beginning of the Great Depression. He began to lose his sight in his early childhood, and was completely blind by age seven. At age 15, he was an orphan. At 16, he moved on his own to Seattle, Washington to make a career in music. A gifted pianist and singer, he easily imitated the styles of other popular entertainers, but his career only took off when he found his own unique voice and style. Although he began recording...

Aretha Franklin is known the world over as the Queen of Soul Music. In the 1960s, her hit recording "Respect" became an anthem of the civil rights struggle and a theme song for the dawning women's movement. He musical career began in the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, where her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin was the pastor. Young Aretha sang and played piano, and the passion of Gospel music has remained with her through her subsequent triumphs in secular blues, rock and...

In the rock and roll pantheon, Chuck Berry stands alone. Every element of the music existed before he ever stepped onstage, but no one can deny he was the first writer and performer to put it all together. In the 1950s, he combined stinging guitar licks with a jumping rhythm section, sly lyrics and an audacious stage presence to create a sound and style that proved irresistible to both black and white audiences at a time when radio and performance venues were still largely...

Garth Fagan is one of America’s most original and influential choreographers. Born in Jamaica, Fagan graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and studied in New York with many of the pioneers of 20th Century dance, including José Limon, Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham. Combining the traditions of Afro-Caribbean dance with classical ballet, modern and post-modern techniques, Fagan has developed a uniquely expressive dance vocabulary. He first won acclaim with works created for...

Ernest Gaines was born and raised on the same plantation where his ancestors once labored as slaves. For nearly a century, they had remained in the same corner of rural Louisiana, living in the same cabins as their forebears, worshipping in the same church, and working for the same family that had held them in bondage. Young Ernest left Louisiana as a teenager, but memories of the South haunted him, and he searched the public library for stories that evoked the sights and...

The protean musician and impresario Quincy Jones has been dubbed "a master inventor of musical hybrids," shuffling pop, soul, hip-hop, jazz, classical, African and Brazilian music into unique and extraordinary musical syntheses. He began his career as a young trumpeter with the Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie bands, at the end of the swing era, and has continued to create and thrive in the era of digital technology in music, film and television worlds. He has won international recognition...

In November 2000, Dr. Ruth J. Simmons became the 18th President of Brown University; she is the first African American to preside over an Ivy League school. The twelfth child of a sharecropper turned aircraft worker, she grew up in Houston in a home without books, or even a desk. She admits she was terrified to leave home for the first time to attend Dillard University in New Orleans, but Simmons overcame her fears, excelled in college, and went on to earn a Doctorate in Romance Languages and...

Lauryn Hill is an internationally acclaimed singer, songwriter and record producer. Born and raised in South Orange, New Jersey, she was only 13 when she joined the innovative hip-hop group the Fugees. Academically accomplished as well as musically gifted, she took time off from her musical career to attend Columbia University. The worldwide success of the Fugees’ album "The Score" thrust Lauryn Hill into the international spotlight. She exceeded her admirers' most ambitious...

Lauryn Hill is an internationally acclaimed singer, songwriter and record producer. Born and raised in South Orange, New Jersey, she was only 13 when she joined the innovative hip-hop group the Fugees. Academically accomplished as well as musically gifted, she took time off from her musical career to attend Columbia University. The worldwide success of the Fugees’ album "The Score" thrust Lauryn Hill into the international spotlight. She exceeded her admirers' most ambitious...

From a segregated elementary school in Alabama, Keith Black emerged as an award-winning scientific prodigy, practicing transplant surgery on laboratory animals and publishing his first scientific paper while still in his teens. In medical school, he discovered his life's passion, the human brain. Although it is famously regarded as the most difficult specialty in medicine, Keith Black has excelled in brain surgery, not only through his fantastic dexterity, but through a series of visionary...

Stanley Crouch is a critic, novelist, social commentator and syndicated columnist. A onetime jazz drummer, he first became well-known for his writings on music and popular culture. Although he was originally associated with the avant-garde, he later become an outspoken champion of jazz tradition and was an early supporter of the return to jazz fundamentals led by his longtime friend, musician Wynton Marsalis. In recent years he has attracted controversy for his criticism of gangsta rap and...

Young Coretta Scott's gift for music and enthusiasm for education led her far beyond the segregated world of her childhood, but when she met the young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the two resolved to return to the Deep South together and pursue the cause of justice in her own home state of Alabama. The Montgomery bus boycott thrust the young couple to the forefront of a revitalized civil rights movement, even as it exposed their growing family to the retaliation of those who opposed any...

Sean John Combs, also known by his stage name, Diddy (formerly Puff Daddy or P. Diddy), is an American rapper, singer, record producer and record company executive. Combs was born in Harlem, New York. His father, who had underworld ties, was shot to death when Sean was only three. The rest of the family remained in Harlem until Sean was 11. Sean Combs attended a private Catholic school, Mount St. Michael Academy, in Mount Vernon, New York, where he played football and acquired the nicknames...

William Julius Wilson is an award-winning sociologist and one of only 22 University Professors at Harvard University (the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member). He is Past President of the American Sociological Association. Wilson has received 44 honorary degrees as well as the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States. He is the author of numerous publications, including "The Declining Significance of Race" which argues that the...

John Hope Franklin (1915 - 2009) was a distinguished American historian. Author of more than dozen books, he is best known for his definitive history of the African American experience, From Slavery to Freedom. He was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, the son of an attorney and a schoolteacher. He earned his undergraduate degree at Fisk University in Nashville, where he found a mentor in Professor Theodore Currier, who provided a generous loan to pursue his doctorate at Harvard, a story...

When a five-year-old James Earl Jones moved with his grandparents from rural Mississippi to frosty Michigan, he developed a stutter so severe that he refused to speak aloud, even in school. One day in high school, an understanding teacher, impressed by a poem Jones had written, dared him to recite it in front of the class. When he recited without faltering, teacher and students were amazed by the power of the voice Jones had kept bottled up inside him. Today that voice is one of the best...

Rosa Parks, the "mother of the civil rights movement" was one of the most important citizens of the 20th century. Mrs. Parks was a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama when, in December of 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The bus driver had her arrested. She was tried and convicted of violating a local ordinance. Her act sparked a citywide boycott of the bus system that lasted more than a year. The boycott raised an unknown clergyman named Martin Luther...

Today, Whoopi Goldberg is one of America's best known and most cherished entertainers. Her films, The Color Purple, Ghost and Sister Act have won her an international following. Her appearances as host of the annual Oscar broadcast and as a regular on such television programs as Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Hollywood Squares have brought her into the homes of millions of Americans. Over the course of a turbulent early life, she survived poverty, drug addiction, single...

Rita Dove is one of America's best-known and most honored poets. Her collection of poems, Thomas and Beulah, based on the lives of her grandparents, earned her the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was only the second African-American to win this prize. In 1993, she was appointed to a two-year term as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She was the youngest person, and the first African-American, to receive this highest official honor in...

Marian Wright Edelman is the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund and one of the most respected voices for children in the nation. The youngest daughter of a Baptist minister, she developed a sense of mission while growing up in a small segregated South Carolina town. Edelman later entered Spelman College and became involved in the civil rights movement and realized that "helping others would be the very purpose of life." After being arrested for her activism, she decided to...

Judith Jamison is the Artistic Director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the best-known and most popular modern dance company in the United States. The daughter of a sheet metal worker and teacher, Jamison was sent to classical dance classes at the age of six. Jamison later attended the Philadelphia Dance Academy, where she was recruited Agnes de Mille for the American Ballet Theatre. When the dance production closed, she did a stint as an amusement ride operator at the 1964 World’s...