In May 2004 Joeseph Micheal "Joe" Acaba became the first person of Puerto Rican heritage to be named as a NASA astronaut candidate when he was selected as a member of NASA Astronaut Training Group 19. He completed his training on February 10, 2006, and was assigned to STS-119, which flew in March 2009 to the International Space Station.
The League of United Latin American Citizens is founded in 1929 in Texas to promote equal rights for all Latinos in the United States.
In 1911 Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha was the first black folk opera written by a black composer. His first major success was "Maple Leaf Rag" which earned him the title "King of Ragtime".
Herbert Young Cho Choy was the first Asian American to serve as a United States federal judge and the first person of Korean ancestry to be admitted to the bar in the United States. He served as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Some scholars trace the first Afro-Latino in the United States to Estebanico (Mustafa Azemmouri), an explorer from Spain. Estebanico was one of the four survivors of the infamous voyage of the Spanish explorer Panfilio de Narvarez, which shipwrecked along the Florida coast in 1528 and was later immortalized in the memoirs of Cabrez de Vaca.
Girindra Mukerji was an Indian anti-British revolutionary, organizer, and agriculturist. His article "The Hindu in America" has been widely cited as an early document describing early Indian immigration to the United States. Mukerji was born in India, and according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the son of a "Judge of one of the higher courts."
David Nelson Crosthwaite Jr. studied mechanical engineering at Purdue University before taking a job with the C.A. Dunham Company (now Dunham-Bush, Inc.). At Dunham, Crosthwait conducted innovative research and designed the heating system for Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall. He held 119 patents—39 in the U.S. and 80 internationally—all in relation to heating, cooling, and temperature regulating technology.
Geronimo (Goyathle - his native name means "one who yawns") was the last warrior fighting for the Chiricahua Apache. Geronimo was his Spanish given name that he used in public.
The first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize for drama was Charles Gordone in 1970 for the dramatic work No Place To Be Somebody. Gordone took the theater world by storm and brought a new type of race consciousness to the stage. His play came on the scene in the 1960s when people embraced the emergence of long-silenced African American voices. Its truths brought many awards to Gordone and the opportunity to produce more plays, screenplays, and creative projects.
Jesus Urquides was an already successful businessman upon arriving in Boise Idaho in the 1860's. He built a community better known as the "Spanish Village" or "Urquides Village," Urquides often referred to it as his "little world." Other Mexican Americans and mule packers settled into his community which consisted of 30 cabins, stables, and corrals.
Norma Alarcon is a feminist literary scholar. Alarcon has dedicated most of her work to the representation of Latina women in all aspects of life. She is perhaps one of the most widely recognized Chicana feminist activist scholars in the world.
Harold Amos a native of Pennsauken, N.J., who graduated from Springfield College in Springfield, Mass with a baccalaureate in 1941. He had gone there on an academic scholarship, something few African Americans received at that time. He also served in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps in Europe during World War II. Following this service, he earned an MA from Harvard University and then received his Ph.D. from the HMS Division of Medical Sciences in 1952. From 1951 to 1952, he was a Fulbright scholar at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and, in 1954; he joined the Medical School faculty as an instructor in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology. From 1968 until 1971, and again from 1975 until 1978, he served as chair of the department (now the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics).
In 1895 W.E.B Du Bois was the first black to receive a doctorate from Harvard University and the first black to receive a Ph.D. Du Bois is universally recognized as an educator, writer, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist and influential leader.
John Adams Hyman, politician, state senator, and congressman, was born a slave near Warrenton, Warren County. Sold and sent to Alabama, he returned to Warren County in 1865 a free man. With the rise of African American participation in North Carolina politics, Hyman became a delegate to the second Freedman's Convention held in Raleigh during 1866.
In 1977 veteran geophysicist and seismologist Waverly Person became the first black director of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) in Colorado. He was assigned to locate earthquakes, compute their size, and disseminate his findings quickly and efficiently to specific sites throughout the world.
In 1891 Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson became the first black woman to practice medicine in Alabama and also the first woman ever admitted on examination to practice medicine in that state.
Kalpana Chawla made history as the first Indian-American /India born woman to go to space on the Space Shuttle Columbia STS-87 in 1997 as a mission specialist and primary robotic arm operator.
Sessue Hayakawa, whose given name was Kintaro Hayakawa, achieved fame and widespread recognition in the early decades of the U.S. film industry.
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.
Garrett Morgan was always interested in inventions. His tailoring business was equipped with machines that he personally designed. During the 1910s and 1920s, Morgan continued to invent new items. Most of these items were to improve safety on the streets and in the workplace. Morgan was most famous for patenting the first traffic signal in the United States. Morgan, himself an automobile owner, witnessed a crash between a car and a buggy. This event supposedly convinced the inventor to create the stoplight. On November 20, 1923, Morgan received his patent. His traffic signal was mounted on a T-shaped pole. It had three different types of signals stop, go, and stop in all directions. The stop in all directions signal was to allow pedestrians to cross streets safely. Morgan eventually patented this device in Canada and Great Britain as well. He sold his patent to General Electric Corporation for forty thousand dollars.
Wing Foon Ong was the first Chinese-American, who was not born in the United States, to be elected to a state House of Representatives when in 1946, he ran for the Arizona House of Representatives and won.
John Swett Rock, one of the first Black Americans to obtain a medical degree, also had a successful career as a teacher, doctor, dentist, abolitionist, and lawyer. Rock was born in Salem County, New Jersey, on October 13, 1825. Rock grew up in a slave-free state, but with modest means; his parents rejected the common, but often necessary, the practice of putting black children to work instead of attending school. His family encouraged his education up until the age of 18.
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.
In 1945, Elizabeth (Wanamaker) Peratrovich (Tlingit Nation) a civil rights activist was instrumental in gaining passage of America’s first anti-discrimination law. Her husband Roy (also Tlingit Nation) was mayor of their small Alaskan town for several years, but they moved to Juneau, Alaska for greater opportunities for their children.