The 100th Infantry Battalion initially made up almost entirely of Japanese Americans from Hawaii already in the army prior to World War II, represented the first group of Japanese Americans to see combat during World War II.
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.
In 1898, Wong Kim Ark, a Chinese American, won a landmark Supreme Court case, which established the precedent of birthright citizenship.
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.
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.
During the 1960's an important component of El Movimiento Chicano was the involvement of artists in this socio-political movement. As artists began to actively participate in the efforts to redress the plight of Mexicans in the United States, there emerged a new iconography and symbolic language which not only articulated the movement but became the core of a Chicano cultural renaissance.
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.
Margarete Bagshaw was a featured lecturer and has spoken across the country – including the Smithsonian N.M.A.I. in Washington DC for “Women’s History Month” to San Jose State University to the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Bagshaw was the opening speaker for the National Association of Art Educators first-ever Leadership Conference in 2014 and was scheduled to be one of their keynote speakers at their National Conference in New Orleans, LA in March of 2015. Her memoirs "Teaching My Spirit To Fly" was published in 2012.
The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was the most decorated unit of its size in the U.S. Army during World War II, with a roughly 4000-strong unit consisting of Japanese-Americans, mostly from Hawaii and some recruited from the internment camps where Japanese were incarcerated during the war.
The U.S. Life-Saving Service was formed in 1871 to assure the safe passage of Americans and International shipping and to save lives and salvage cargo. Station 17 located on the desolate beaches of Pea Island, North Carolina and manned by a crew of seven, bore the brunt of this dangerous but vital duty.
Miné Okubo is well known for her representations of daily life and humanity. She is most famous for her drawings depicting Japanese and Japanese American internment during World War II.
In 1916 The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was the first movie company organized by black filmmakers.
Wilma Mankiller was the first woman to serve as chief of the Cherokee Nation and she fought for the rights of women and Native Americans.
Many consider Isaac Murphy the greatest American jockey of all time. The son of a former slave, Murphy rose to prominence in a field that was dominated by African American jockeys at the time. Murphy set a standard that no other jockey has met.
Katherine Sui Fun Cheung was born in Canton, China in 1904 (a year after the Wright brothers’ first flight). When she was 17 she moved with her father to California to study music at the Los Angeles Conservatory. After graduating, she continued her studies at Cal Poly Pomona and the University of Southern California.
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.
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.
Born as a slave in 1849 on a plantation in Woodland, Alabama, Andrew Beard was a farmer, carpenter, blacksmith, railroad worker, businessman, and an inventor. He was a self-educated farmer in Alabama when he thought up the idea of inventing a plow. In 1881, he patented one of his plows, which he sold for $4,000 three years later. In 1887, he invented another plow, sold it and used the proceeds to finance a profitable real estate business and a taxi company. In 1892, he patented his rotary engine.
In 1885 Mary Fields also known as "Stagecoach Mary", was the first African-American woman star route mail carrier in the United States. Fields obtained the star route contract for the delivery of U.S. mail from Cascade, Montana to Saint Peter's Mission in 1885. She drove the route with horse and wagon, not a stagecoach, for two four-year contracts: from 1885 to 1889 and from 1889 to 1893.
"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 November 1944, the War Department acquiesced. Despite slow recruitment of volunteers, a battalion of 817 (later 824) enlisted personnel and 31 officers, all African-American women drawn from the WAC, the Army Service Forces, and the Army Air Forces, was created and eventually designated as the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, nicknamed “Six Triple Eight.”
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.
Born LeRoi Jones, Imamu Amiri Baraka changed his name after becoming a Muslim. Baraka is a poet, playwright, essayist, political activist, and founder of the Black Arts Repertory Theater in New York.
John Charles Robinson, nicknamed the Brown Condor, was an African American aviator who fought with the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force against Benito Mussolini and Italy during the Second Italian-Ethiopian War, 1935–1936. He is also known as the Father of the Tuskegee Airmen for his contributions to the aviation programs he began at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in the early 1940s.