Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. was born on July 10, 1943, in Richmond, Virginia. The oldest of Arthur Ashe Sr. and Mattie Cunningham’s two sons, Arthur Ashe Jr. blended finesse and power to forge a groundbreaking tennis game. Ashe would go on to achieve a number of African-American “firsts,” including becoming the first African-American male player to win the U.S. Open (1968) and Wimbeldon (1975), the first African-American player to be ranked No. 1 in the world, and the first black American to be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame (1985). Ashe’s childhood was marked by hardship and opportunity. Under his mother’s direction, Ashe was reading…

“I participated in a campaign on behalf of Dad Central for the Cord Blood Registry. I received promotional item to thank me for my participation.”       I remember many years ago when I first learned that I was going to become a father so many thoughts going through my mind and I was a little nervous and scared. The first time I learned I was going to be a father I just turned 20 years old and with everything I go through in life I started to look at the big picture, how it would affect me and how can I become the best father I can be.…

    Charles Hamilton Houston, generally known as Charles H. Houston, was born on September 3, 1895, in Washington, D.C. In 1915, he graduated from Amherst College, where he was one of six valedictorians and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He taught English at Howard University before joining the U.S. Army during World War I. While serving in a segregated military unit, Houston saw that African-American service members were treated poorly, and could be convicted of crimes without any substantial evidence against them. Witnessing this unequal and unfair treatment made him decide to become a lawyer.   Houston attended Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American editor…

  Born in Norfolk, Virginia, on December 13, 1903, Ella Baker was one of the leading figures in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. She grew up in rural North Carolina. Baker was close to her grandmother, a former slave. Her grandmother told Baker many stories about her life, including a whipping she had received at the hands of her owner. A bright student, Baker eventually went to Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. She was the class valedictorian when she graduated in 1927. After she completed her degree, Baker moved north to New York City. There she worked a number of jobs while trying to make…

      James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents, James Hughes and Carrie Langston, separated soon after his birth, and his father moved to Mexico. While Hughes’s mother moved around during his youth, Hughes was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, Mary, until she died in his early teens. From that point, he went to live with his mother, and they moved to several cities before eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio. It was during this time that Hughes first began to write poetry, and that one of his teachers first introduced him to the poetry of Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman,…

      Alex Haley was born Alexander Murray Palmer Haley on August 11, 1921, in Ithaca, New York. At the time of his birth, Haley’s father, Simon Haley, a World War I veteran, was a graduate student in agriculture at Cornell University, and his mother, Bertha Palmer Haley, was a teacher. For the first five years of his life, Haley lived with his mother and grandparents in Henning, Tennessee, while his father finished his studies. When Simon Haley completed his degree, he joined the family in Tennessee and taught as a professor of agriculture at various southern universities. Alex Haley was always remarkably proud of his father, whom he…

        On March 12, 1932, Andrew Jackson Young Jr., known as Andrew Young Jr., was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. The product of a middle-class family—his father was a dentist, his mother a teacher—he had to travel from his neighborhood to attend segregated schools. After graduating from Howard University, Young chose to study at Connecticut’s Hartford Theological Seminary. In 1955, he became an ordained minister.   Working as a pastor in Georgia, Young first became part of the Civil Rights Movement when he organized voter registration drives. He moved to New York City to work with the National Council of Churches in 1957, then returned to Georgia…