Most Influential African-Americans
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and activist who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement. King is remembered for his masterful oratorical skills, most memorably in his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was an American educator, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist.
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was a world-famous author. Poet, dancer, singer, activist, and scholar, she was best known for her unique and pioneering autobiographical writing style.
Medgar Evers
Evers was a devoted husband and father, a distinguished World War II veteran, and a pioneering civil rights leader. He served as the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi.
Michael Jackson
Michael Joseph Jackson was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, and philanthropist. Dubbed the “King of Pop”
Michael Jordan
Michael Jeffrey Jordan, also known by his initials MJ, is an American former professional basketball player and businessman.
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali was an American professional boxer and activist. Nicknamed “The Greatest”, he is regarded as one of the most significant sports figures of the 20th century and is often regarded as the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time.
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Gail Winfrey is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and media proprietor.
Quincy Jones
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. is an American record producer, songwriter, composer, arranger, and film and television producer. His career spans 70 years, with a record of 80 Grammy Award nominations, 28 Grammys, and a Grammy Legend Award.
Richard Allen
Richard Allen was a minister, educator, writer, and one of America’s most active and influential Black leaders. In 1794, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in the United States.
Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor Sr. was an American stand-up comedian and actor. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential stand-up comedians of all time.
Robert Abbott
Robert Sengstacke Abbott was an American lawyer, newspaper publisher and editor. Abbott founded The Chicago Defender in 1905, which grew to have the highest circulation of any black-owned newspaper in the country.
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks occupies an iconic status in the civil rights movement after she refused to vacate a seat on a bus in favor of a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama.
Serena Williams
Serena Williams is famous for revolutionizing women’s tennis with her powerful style of play and for winning more Grand Slam singles titles (23) than any other woman or man during the open era.
Sidney Poitier
Sidney Poitier was a Bahamian and American actor, film director, and diplomat. In 1964, he was the first black actor and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth, a former slave, became an outspoken advocate for abolition, temperance, and civil and women’s rights in the nineteenth century.
Stevie Wonder
Stevland Morris, known professionally as Stevie Wonder, is an American singer-songwriter, who is credited as a pioneer and influence by musicians across a range of genres that include rhythm and blues, pop, soul, gospel, funk, and jazz.
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as the Supreme Court’s first African-American justice. He is best known for arguing the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional in public schools. He was
Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
W.E.B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Du Bois was already well known as one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era. The first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard University.
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Anita Chisholm was an American politician who, in 1968, became the first black woman to be elected to the United States Congress – New York’s 12th congressional district.