BlackFacts.com: Learn/Teach/Create Black History

On March 17, Maurice Ashley became the first African American to earn an International Grandmaster chess title. 

Ashley was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica, and then moved to the United States when he was 12. He soon took up chess and excelled at the game, becoming a national master in 1986 and an International Master in 1993.

From 1991 to 1997 Ashley was the chess director of the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, Inc., where he led teams to three scholastic national championships.

BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.

Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.

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Phillis Wheatley Peters, whose name was also spelled Phyllis Wheatly, was the first African-American author of a published book of poetry.

Born in West Africa in 1753, she was sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America. She was enslaved by the Wheatley family of Boston.

The family afforded Phillis an education strongly influenced by the books of Milton, Homer, Horace, and Virgil. With the publication of Wheatley's book, Poems on Various Subjects, she "became the most famous African on the face of the earth.” 

BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.

Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.

Learn Black History. Teach Black History.

For more Black Facts, join Black Facts Nation at BlackFacts.com/join.

Because Black History is 365 Days a Year, and Black Facts Matter!

March 16 is the Birthday of Rebecca Cole. In 1867, Rebecca J. Cole became the second African American woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.

Cole was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she attended the Institute for Colored Youth, graduating in 1863.  Cole practiced medicine for fifty years, unfortunately, only a few records and photos of her have survived.

BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.

Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.

Learn Black History. Teach Black History.

For more Black Facts, join Black Facts Nation at BlackFacts.com/join.

Because Black History is 365 Days a Year, and Black Facts Matter!

Dorothy Irene Height was an American civil rights and women’s rights activist. She focused on the issues of African American women, including, illiteracy and voter awareness.

Height earned an undergraduate degree and a master's degree in educational psychology at New York University. She pursued further postgraduate work at Columbia University.  

She became President of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) in 1958 and remained in that position until 1990. Height received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1994.  

BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.

Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.

Learn Black History. Teach Black History.

For more Black Facts, join Black Facts Nation at BlackFacts.com/join.

Because Black History is 365 Days a Year, and Black Facts Matter!

March 15 is the Birthday of writer Ben Okri.

He is a Nigerian novelist, short-story writer, and poet who used magic realism to convey the social and political chaos in the country of his birth.

His novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1991, making him the youngest ever winner of the prize at the age of 32.

His first-hand experiences of civil war in Nigeria are said to have inspired many of his works. He has been compared favorably to authors such as Salmon Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.

BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.

Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.

Learn Black History. Teach Black History.

For more Black Facts, join Black Facts Nation at BlackFacts.com/join.

Because Black History is 365 Days a Year, and Black Facts Matter!

On March 14, Fannie Lou Hamer passed away.

The youngest of 20 children, Fannie Lou was working the fields with her sharecropper parents at the age of six. Amid poverty and racial exploitation, she received only a sixth-grade education.

Her civil rights activism began in August 1962, when she answered a call by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for volunteers to challenge voter registration procedures that excluded African Americans.

BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.

Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.

Learn Black History. Teach Black History.

For more Black Facts, join Black Facts Nation at BlackFacts.com/join.

Because Black History is 365 Days a Year, and Black Facts Matter!

Claudette Colvin is a retired American nurse aide who, on March 2, 1955, was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus.

This occurred nine months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP, helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.

Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.

Learn Black History. Teach Black History.

For more Black Facts, join Black Facts Nation at BlackFacts.com/join.

Because Black History is 365 Days a Year, and Black Facts Matter!

Septima Poinsette Clark was an African American educator and civil rights activist. Martin Luther King Jr. commonly referred to Clark as "The Mother of the Movement."

Clark graduated from high school in 1916. She was able to return to school in Columbia to complete her B.A. at Benedict in 1942 and then she received her M.A. from Hampton. 

In 1956, she became Vice President of the Charleston NAACP branch. Clark claimed that women being treated unequally was “one of the greatest weaknesses of the civil rights movement." 

BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.

Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.

Learn Black History. Teach Black History.

For more Black Facts, join Black Facts Nation at BlackFacts.com/join.

Because Black History is 365 Days a Year, and Black Facts Matter!

March 13 is when the first Black Daily Newspaper was published.

Founded by William A. Scott III in August 1928 as semi-weekly publication, the Atlanta Daily World would become the first successful African-American daily newspaper in the United States. 

On March 13, 1932, the Atlanta Daily World newspaper began running as a daily publication and was the first paper to send an assigned correspondent to the White House. 

Reporter Harry S. Alpin became the first person of African American descent to cover the White House on February 8, 1944.

BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.

Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.

Learn Black History. Teach Black History.

For more Black Facts, join Black Facts Nation at BlackFacts.com/join. 

Because Black History is 365 Days a Year, and Black Facts Matter!

Mary Church Terrell was one of the first Black-American women to earn a college degree, and became known as a national activist for civil rights and suffrage.

Terrell majored in Classics at Oberlin College, the first college in the United States to accept African- American and female students. She began her career in education in 1885, teaching modern languages.  

In 1892, Terrell along with some other prominent women, formed the Colored Women's League in Washington, D.C. 

Terrell's, autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, accounts her personal experiences with racism. She died at the age of 90, on July 24, 1954 in Highland Beach, Maryland.

BlackFacts.com is the Internet's longest running Black History Encyclopedia. Our podcast summarizes the vast stories of Black history in daily episodes known as Black Facts Of The Day™.

Since 1997, BlackFacts.com has been serving up Black History Facts on a daily basis to millions of users and followers on the web and via social media.

Learn Black History. Teach Black History.

For more Black Facts, join Black Facts Nation at BlackFacts.com/join.

Because Black History is 365 Days a Year, and Black Facts Matter!