In 1891 Provident Hospital in Chicago, Illinois was the first African American hospital owned and operated in the United States. Founded by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, his aim was to create a hospital where black doctors and nurses could be prepared, and black patients could receive care without fear of racial bias.
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.
Charles Hobson wanted to bring that community and residential feeling to the screen with “Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant,” which premiered in April 1968. The public affairs television program, which aimed to capture a realistic portrait of the neighborhood that countered negative stereotypes in the wake of local riots in 1964. A first of its kind in the United States at the time, a television series specific to African-American audiences.
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.
In 1872 Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback a former slave born in Virginia became the first black governor of any state. He served from December 9, 1827, to January 13, 1873, while the Louisiana governor Henry Clay faced impeachment proceedings.
Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable, born in St. Marc, Sainte-Domingue (now Haiti), was a black pioneer trader and discoverer of the settlement that later became the city of Chicago.
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 1828 21 black women met in New York to draw up plans for the African Dorcas Society. This was the first black women's charitable group. Its principal objective was to aid young blacks in attending schools and supplying them with clothes, hats, and shoes.
In 1820, The Emancipator was the first anti-slavery magazine, edited and published by abolitionist Elihu Embree who was once a slave owner himself.
Recorded instances of Native American women taking contraceptives dates back to the 1700s, more than 200 years before the creation of a man-made substance by western medicine. One of the herbs used was the stone seed, employed by the Shoshone, while the Potawatomi used the herb dogbane.
In 1933 Albert Ernest Forsythe (a physician and aviator) and Charles Alfred "Chief" Anderson (known as the father of Black aviation) were the first black pilots to make a round-trip transcontinental flight. They left Atlantic City on July 17, 1933, in their Fairchild 24 plane called The Pride of Atlantic City, arrived safely in Los Angeles, and completed their first round trip on July 28, 1933.
In addition to prospecting for gold in California, many Chinese also came as contract laborers to Hawaii to work in sugarcane plantations. However, while in California, Chinese miners experienced their first taste of discrimination in the form of the Foreign Miner Tax. This was supposed to be collected from every foreign miner but in reality, it was only collected from the Chinese, despite the multitude of miners from European countries there as well.
In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act, more commonly known as the Jones Act, which made residents of Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking U.S. possession, American citizens. It replaced the Foraker Act of 1900, which established a civilian government on the island and was named after its chief sponsor, Sen. Joseph Foraker (R-Ohio).
In 1897 The American Negro Academy was founded, with the purpose of studying various aspects of black life and establishing a black intellectual tradition. A leading figure in establishing the academy was Alexander Crummel, an American scholar and minister. Its membership of 40 included W.E.B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.
On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education attempted to force the 93 Japanese students who were attending public school in San Francisco to attend the segregated Chinese school. The school board was responding to pressure from the Asiatic Exclusion Leauge in California that had the ultimate goal of ending Japanese immigration to California. Japanese Americans protested, but when they were unable to succeed in their efforts to change the School Board's decision, they alerted the Japanese media and Japanese government officials.
The President's Committee on Civil Rights was a United States Presidential Commission established by President Harry Truman in 1946. The committee was created by Executive Order 9980 on December 5, 1946, and instructed to investigate the status of civil rights in the United States and propose measures to strengthen and protect them.
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.
In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the Secretary of War to declare certain areas within the United State as military zones and to restrict access to those areas on the grounds of wartime military necessity.
Ellen Ochoa made history in 1993 when she boarded the space shuttle Discovery, thus becoming the first Latina astronaut to go to space. A pioneer in the field of spacecraft technology, she would later become the first Latina (and second female) director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. She has spent a total of 978 hours in outer space and has at least three different inventions patented today.
While teaching grammar school, Dolores Huerta noticed that many of her students showed up to class ill or malnourished. Her students’ strife inspired her to begin her lifelong crusade of correcting economic injustice.
The Greensboro Four were four young black men who staged the first sit-in at Greensboro: Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil. All four were students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College.
Sylvia Méndez was born in 1936 in Santa Ana, CA to a Puerto Rican mother and a Mexican father. As a young child, she attended a school for Hispanic children. When she was eight-years-old, her parents decided Sylvia, her brothers, and their cousins should attend a nearby Whites-only school with better resources. The school said Sylvia’s lighter-skinned cousins could attend, but she and her brothers could not.
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the only United States Iaw to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race—which restricted Chinese immigration for the next sixty years. The "Chinese Must Go" movement was so strong that Chinese immigration to the United States declined from 39,500 in 1882 to only 10 in 1887.
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.