The Rise

When the Birmingham jail held Dr. King in 1963, the money that bailed him out came from a Black-owned bank across town. The man who ran the bank did not make a press statement. He signed the check.

He raised his right hand on January 20, 2009, and did what a two hundred and twenty year arithmetic of exclusion had never produced. The oath finished. The country had a Black president.

The tenth of thirteen children in a sharecropping family in East Texas. No American flight school would accept her because she was Black and a woman. She learned French, sailed to Paris, and in 1921 became the first Black person of any gender to hold an international pilot's license.

He designed the protocol that kept Allied soldiers alive through the Second World War. Then he resigned from the program that segregated the blood supply he had built.

She walked James Meredith into the University of Mississippi. When Mississippi refused to admit her as his counsel, she sued for the right. She won that too.

He escaped slavery at twenty. He died at seventy-seven having shaken hands with three Presidents and having rewritten what a formerly enslaved man was allowed to be in the American record.

A sixth-grade education. The son of formerly enslaved parents. He patented a breathing hood that pulled men out of a 1916 tunnel disaster alive, and the three-position traffic signal that made every intersection in America a little less deadly.

He refused to patent his discoveries. He said, "God gave them to me. How can I sell them to someone else?" He left an estate of $33,000 and a lasting change to the soil of the American South.

He took the Senate seat that Jefferson Davis had held for the Confederacy. His first speech argued that Black Georgia legislators expelled by white Democrats should be reinstated. Forty-eight hours later, they were.

The Memphis mob burned her newspaper offices in May 1892 and promised to kill her on sight. She moved to New York and kept publishing. She counted the lynchings herself.

The office had been held by forty-eight white men before her. She stood behind the podium in Wilmington, Delaware on November 7, 2020, and said the words anyway. While she was the first, she would not be the last.

John Glenn would not fly the Friendship 7 until she personally verified the numbers. He said, "If she says they're good, I'm ready to go."

The Supreme Court had existed for 232 years before a Black woman sat on it. The vote to confirm was 53 to 47. She was sworn in on June 30, 2022.

Born the year after emancipation, on the plantation where her parents had been enslaved. Built the largest Black-owned business in America. Employed forty thousand women. Died the first self-made female millionaire in the United States.

Born the last year of the Civil War to a formerly enslaved mother. Daughter of a washerwoman. In 1903 she chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank and became the first woman of any race to charter and serve as president of a bank in the United States. Her bank survived the Great Depression.

The Baltimore station fired her from the news desk in 1977. They said she was unfit for television. She moved to Chicago and built a media empire that restructured American daytime television.

She invented the laser device that lets doctors remove cataracts in under a minute. Patent number 4,744,360 belonged to a Black woman from Harlem. It still does.

Built the first Black-owned billion-dollar company through the largest offshore leveraged buyout in history. At the height of Wall Street's exclusive club, he didn't ask to be let in. He bought the building.

He walked onto a stage at Morehouse College on May 19, 2019, and told the graduating class he would pay off their student debt. It cost him $34 million. He wrote the check.

The University of Maryland School of Law rejected him in 1930 because he was Black. He sued the school and won. He kept winning, all the way to the bench where that school's state was argued, and then he stayed on it for twenty-four years.

Harvard told him a Black historian would not attract students. He invented the sociology of Black America instead.