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- The 20th century poet who has been referred to as the “dean of American Negro poets” is Sterling Brown.
- The FIRST black singer to appear with the Grand Ole Opry was Charley Pride in 1967. In 1971, Charley Pride became the FIRST African American to be named country music’s ‘Entertainer Of The Year’.
- Paul Cuffe believed in sending freed slaves to live in Africa and in 1815 he paid for the settlement of 38 blacks in the British Colony of Sierra Leone.
- The FIRST African American Woman to receive an R.N. degree was Mary Mahoney in 1879.
- The FIRST black African nation to win its independence from colonial rule was Ghana in 1957 [a former British colony called “the Gold Coast”].
- In 1976, Scott Joplin received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for the ragtime opera Treemonisha, an opera that he had written 60 years earlier.
- The prizefighter who regained the heavyweight crown 20 years after Muhammad Ali took it away from him in 1974 was George Foreman. In 1994, George Foreman defeated Michael Moorer by knockout and regained the Heavyweight Champion title.
- Well known editor Robert Lee Vann edited Pittsburgh’s widely read African newspaper called The Courier.
- The youngest black artist to have a syndicated comic strip was Robb Armstrong in 1989. At age 26, Armstrong’s comic strip was called Jump Start.
- The FIRST black pro team to play basketball were the Rens. They played from 1923 to 1939, losing just 239 of their 1,827 basketball games.
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