In 1915 Frederick D Patterson was the first black to build cars between 1915-1919 and produced 150 cars in Ohio. According to advertisements, there were two models: a two-door touring car and a four-door roadster. The cars were run by a 30-horsepower, 4-cylinder engine and included a full floating rear axle, a suspension that sat on cantilever springs, electric starting and lighting and a split windshield for ventilation. The cost was around $850.
In 1922 Bessie Coleman was the first black woman to earn a pilot's license. Because flying schools in the United States denied her entry, she taught herself French and moved to France, earning her license from France's well-known Caudron Brother's School of Aviation in just seven months.
George Isidore Sanchez was a pioneer in civil rights, fighting for the rights of Mexican-Americans in New Mexico, Texas and throughout the country. He served on the faculty of the University of New Mexico, held several concurrent teaching, chair, and dean positions at The University of Texas at Austin.
In 1942 George Houser, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, and Bernice Fisher established the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). Members of CORE had been deeply influenced by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that he used successfully against British rule in India. The students became convinced that the same methods could be employed by African Americans to obtain civil rights in America.
Tydings-McDuffie Act, also called Philippine Commonwealth and Independence Act, (1934), the U.S. statute that provided for Philippine independence, to take effect on July 4, 1946, after a 10-year transitional period of Commonwealth government. The Philippines was an American colony prior to the signing of the act.
Born by the name of George Speck in 1822 in Saratoga Lake, New York, Crum was the son of an African American father and Native American mother, a member of the Huron tribe. He professionally adopted the name "Crum," as it was the name his father used in his career as a jockey. As a young man, Crum worked as a guide in the Adirondack Mountains and as an Indian trader. Eventually, he came to realize that he possessed exceptional talent in the culinary arts.
Lone Wolf was a Kiowa Indian chief, living in the Indian Territory created by the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. A provision in the treaty required that three-fourths of the adult males in each of the Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche tribes agree to subsequent changes to the terms of the treaty. In 1892, Congress attempted to alter the reservation lands granted to the tribes.
In October 1779, a force of more than 500 Haitian free blacks joined American colonist and French troops in an unsuccessful push to drive the British from Savannah in coastal Georgia.
George Edwin Taylor was born in Little Rock, Arkansas to Nathan Taylor and Amanda Hines. When the State of Arkansas passed the Free Negro Expulsion Act in 1859, Amanda Hines took young George to Alton, Illinois. However, Hines became ill and died of Tuberculosis around 1861.
In 1858 Joseph Heco was the first Japanese native to become a citizen of the United States. Heco was a key figure in the nineteenth-century relations between the U.S. and Japan, bridging the cultural and linguistic gulf between the two countries in his roles as a newspaper publisher, author, interpreter, government official, and entrepreneur.
George Henry White, lawyer, legislator, congressman, and racial spokesman was born near Rosindale in Bladen County North Carolina, the son of Wiley F. and Mary White. It is possible that he was born into slavery, although the evidence on this is contradictory. He did attend public schools in North Carolina and received training under D. P. Allen, president of the Whitten Normal School in Lumberton. In 1876 he was an assistant in charge of the exhibition mounted by the U.S. Coast Survey at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. After graduation from Howard University in 1877, he was principal of the Colored Grade School, the Presbyterian parochial school, and the State Normal School in New Bern. He studied law under Judge William J. Clarke and received a license to practice in North Carolina in 1879.
The first Hispanic American to be elected to the United States Senate, Democrat Dennis Chavez had a long and distinguished career in government service, first as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and then as a senator from the state of New Mexico. Chavez was a strong supporter of education and civil rights.
Dr. Arun Manilal Gandhi is an Indian-American socio-political activist and the fifth grandson of Mohandas Gandhi through his second son Manilal. Although he has followed in the footsteps of his grandfather as an activist, he has eschewed the ascetic lifestyle of his grandfather.
Information about the first Chinese immigrants to the United States is generally difficult to acquire, due to the scarcity and unpredictability of finding reliable records. Most sources agree, though, that the earliest woman of Chinese descent to have ever set foot in the United States was Afong Moy.
Based on an incident that grew out of tensions between whites in Brownsville, Tex., and black infantrymen stationed at nearby Fort Brown. On Aug 14, 1906, rifle shots on a street in Brownsville killed one white man and wounded another.
Young-Oak Kim, a Korean-American and United States Army officer during World War II and the Korean War and a civic leader and humanitarian. He proudly led the famed all-Japanese American 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team during World War II and volunteered to serve in the Korean War, where he fought with distinction.
By 1940, people of Mexican descent in the U.S. were twice as likely to have been born and raised in the States than not. Often the children of immigrants who had entered in previous decades, they strongly identified with the country of their birth. The result was massive Mexican American participation in World War II, the most recent estimate being that some 500,000 Mexican Americans served in the conflict.
During the 1840s, prior to the gold rush, William Leidesdorff engaged in trade and real estate. He built San Francisco’s first hotel and was the city’s first treasurer.
Cultural diversity is one of the modern Labor Movement’s greatest strengths. Labor celebrates the richness of multiculturalism and recognizes that the united voice above all else is the fabric that holds this Movement together. But the Labor Movement has not always been a bastion of racial understanding. In 1903 in the beet fields of Oxnard, a battle came to a head, not only between the workers and the employer but between those wishing to create more diversity in Organized Labor and those wishing to protect the interest of the established unions.
"Juan Crow" is a term used for laws or policies related to the enforcement of immigration statues against Latin-Americans in the United States. The term is patterned after Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation and kept African Americans as an underclass.
In 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Administration created the Works Progress Administration Federal Theatre Project (FTP) as part of the New Deal economic recovery program. Negro units, also called The Negro Theatre Project (NTP), were set up in 23 cities throughout the United States. This short-lived (1935-1939) project provided much-needed employment and apprenticeships to hundreds of black actors, directors, theatre technicians, and playwrights. It was a major boost for African American theatre during the Depression era.
Joel Augustus Rogers was a Jamaican-American author, journalist, and historian who contributed to the history of Africa and the African diaspora.
The Heart Mountain War and Relocation Center opened in 1942. The first Japanese Americans arrived by train and the camp would hold a total of 13,997 Japanese Americans over the next three years, with a peak population of 10,767 during WWII.
Because white southern school boards routinely denied black taxpayers the funds necessary to construct black schools in the 1910's and 1920's African Americans pooled their limited resources and embarked on programs of school construction. Sharecroppers who had been born slaves donated their meager life saving so their grandchildren could have an education. Even people without children mortgaged their homes and lands to fund the schools. Occasionally assisted by funds from white philanthropists such as Julius Rosenwald or sympathetic white neighbors, the outside funding never exceeded 12 percent of overall building funds.