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...

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...

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...

Edward Lewis is the publisher of Essence magazine and the Chairman and CEO of Essence Communications, Inc. An All-City fullback at New York's DeWitt Clinton High School, he attended the University of New Mexico on a football scholarship. Inspired by a sympathetic professor, he earned degrees in political science and international relations before pursuing graduate studies at Harvard Business School. In 1968, Lewis and his partners founded Essence Communications to publish a fashion magazine...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole made history in 1987, when she became the first African-American woman to serve as President of Spelman College. Ever since it was founded, Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia has been the nation's foremost institution of higher education specifically intended for African American women. Yet, for the first century of Spelman's existence, no African American woman had ever served as president of the college. Spelman prospered under Dr. Cole's leadership. In 1992, 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...

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...

Millions of Americans have been inspired by the life story of Colin Powell, from his boyhood in the South Bronx as the son of Jamaican immigrants, through a distinguished military career, to his term as Secretary of State. General Powell was the first African-American and the youngest officer ever to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ranking officer in the United States military. Most Americans got their first vivid impressions of General Powell in this role, at his televised...

The pre-eminent playwright of his era, August Wilson (1945-2005) was the author of a monumental cycle of ten dramas, chronicling African American life in the 20th century, with each play set in a different decade. Born in Pittsburgh to a German immigrant father and an African American mother, Wilson grew up in the impoverished Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He dropped out of school after ninth grade and educated himself in the public library, supporting himself as short-order...

The arrival of Wynton Marsalis on the music scene in 1982 could not have been more unexpected. Barely out of his teens, this trumpet prodigy from New Orleans recorded jazz and classical music with seemingly equal facility. Even more startling was his dedication to a self-defined mission to restore jazz music to a central place in American life, and with it, the values he believes jazz embodies: freedom and discipline, romance and responsibility, pride and respect for both the African and the...