The last and final chapter to our Black History Month post series, as it falls on the last weekend of Black History Month, is about the lawmakers and scientists of the Black community. While not more or less important than the other topics, this section most certainly has a direct impact on Blacks in the spotlight and everyday life. Some incredible things were accomplished by the last people on this list.
Like always, there is never enough time to list everyone or their contributions, but this list is the threshold of the skill, talent, and intelligence Black men and women are capable of. On this list are ten people and their histories and sources for more research.
Vice President Kamala Harris
"Kamala Harris is the vice president of the United States, making her the first female vice president and first Black person and Asian American to hold the position.Harris' mother, Shyamala, emigrated from India to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where she met Harris' Jamaican-born father, Donald. Shyamala carved out a career as a renowned breast-cancer researcher, while Donald became a Stanford University economics professor. Her mother also ensured that Harris and her younger sister, Maya, maintained ties to their Indian heritage by raising them with Hindu beliefs and taking them to her home country every couple of years. After attending Howard University and the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, Kamala Harris embarked on a rise through the California legal system, emerging as state attorney general in 2010. Following the November 2016 elections, Harris became just the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. She declared her candidacy for the 2020 U.S. presidential election on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2019 but dropped out of the race before the end of the year. In August 2020, Joe Biden announced Harris as vice presidential running mate and after a close race, Biden and Harris were elected in November 2020."
Shirley Chisholm
"Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was the first African American woman in Congress (1968) and the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from one of the two major political parties (1972). Her motto and title of her autobiography—Unbossed and Unbought—illustrates her outspoken advocacy for women and minorities during her seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 30, 1924, Chisholm was the oldest of four daughters to immigrant parents Charles St. Hill, a factory worker from Guyana, and Ruby Seale St. Hill, a seamstress from Barbados. She graduated from Brooklyn Girls’ High in 1942 and from Brooklyn College cum laude in 1946, where she won prizes on the debate team. Although professors encouraged her to consider a political career, she replied that she faced a “double handicap” as both Black and female. Initially, Chisholm worked as a nursery school teacher. She earned a master’s degree from Columbia University in early childhood education in 1951. Ever aware of racial and gender inequality, she joined local chapters of the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, as well as the Democratic Party club in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. In 1964, Chisholm ran for and became the second African American in the New York State Legislature. After court-ordered redistricting created a new, heavily Democratic, district in her neighborhood, in 1968 Chisholm sought—and won—a seat in Congress. There, “Fighting Shirley” introduced more than 50 pieces of legislation and championed racial and gender equality, the plight of the poor, and ending the Vietnam War."
Fannie Lou Hamer
"Fannie Lou Hamer helped register Blacks to vote in Mississippi and worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which focused on racial segregation and injustice in the South. She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later became the Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that capacity. Her plain-spoken manner and fervent belief in the Biblical righteousness of her cause gained her a reputation as an electrifying speaker and constant activist of civil rights."
Stacey Abrams
"Stacey Abrams is a politician who served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2006-2017, and ran for the governor of the state in 2018. She is also the founder of Fair Fight. Abrams graduated as the first Black valedictorian from Avondale High School in DeKalb County, Georgia, before earning a magna cum laude undergraduate degree in interdisciplinary studies (political science, economics, and sociology) with a minor in theater from Atlanta’s historically Black women’s college, Spelman. She later graduated from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin with a Master of Public Affairs in public policy and received her J.D. from Yale Law School. Politician, lawyer, author and activist Stacey Abrams served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2006-2017. She became the first woman to lead either party in the Georgia General Assembly in 2010, occupying the role for her last seven years in office. The election eventually became a study in alleged voter suppression efforts. Aside from running in the race, Kemp’s office oversaw the election, cutting nearly 700,000 names from the rolls in the two years leading to the election, and more than 200 polling places were closed, primarily in poor and minority neighborhoods, according to The Washington Post. Abrams further claimed that thousands of ballots were left uncounted.
Ten days after the election, Abrams ended her bid for governor but chose not to concede to Kemp, citing her belief that voters were disenfranchised. Following an unsuccessful run for Georgia governor in 2018, she founded Fair Fight, an organization that helped register at least 800,000 new voters in Georgia ahead of the 2020 general election. In addition to her political career, she’s also published eight romantic suspense novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery."
Former President Barack Obama
"Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States and the first African American commander-in-chief. He served two terms, in 2008 and 2012. The son of parents from Kenya and Kansas, Obama was born and raised in Hawaii. He graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. After serving on the Illinois State Senate, he was elected a U.S. senator representing Illinois in 2004. Obama's advocacy work led him to run for a seat in the Illinois State Senate as a Democrat in 1996. During his years as a state senator, Obama worked with both Democrats and Republicans to draft legislation on ethics, as well as expand health care services and early childhood education programs for the poor. He also created a state earned-income tax credit for the working poor. On November 4, 2008, Obama defeated Republican presidential nominee John McCain, 52.9 percent to 45.7 percent, to win election as the 44th president of the United States—and the first African American to hold this office. His running mate, Delaware Senator Joe Biden, became vice president. Obama's inauguration took place on January 20, 2009. When Obama took office, he inherited a global economic recession, two ongoing foreign wars and the lowest-ever international favorability rating for the United States."
Michelle Obama
"Michelle Obama, née Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, (born January 17, 1964, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American first lady (2009–17), the wife of Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States. She was the first African American first lady.Michelle Robinson, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, was the daughter of Marian, a homemaker, and Frasier Robinson, a worker in the city’s water-purification plant. She studied sociology and African American studies at Princeton University (B.A., 1985) in New Jersey before attending Harvard Law School (J.D., 1988). Returning to Chicago, she took a job as a junior associate at Sidley & Austin (now Sidley Austin LLP), where she specialized in intellectual property law. In 1989, while at the firm, she met Barack Obama, who had been hired as a summer associate. Seeking a more public-service-oriented career path, in 1991 she became an assistant to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. As first lady, Michelle was involved in various causes, notably supporting military families and ending childhood obesity. In an effort to promote healthy eating, she planted a vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House in 2009. She related her experiences with the project in the book American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America (2012). In addition to her work on such issues, Michelle also garnered attention for her fashion sense."
Katherine Johnson
"Being handpicked to be one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools is something that many people would consider one of their life’s most notable moments, but it’s just one of several breakthroughs that have marked Katherine Johnson’s long and remarkable life. Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918, her intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. By 13, she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. At 18, she enrolled in the college itself, where she made quick work of the school’s math curriculum and found a mentor in math professor W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in mathematics. She graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia. She returned to teaching when her three daughters got older, but it wasn’t until 1952 that a relative told her about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. Katherine and her husband decided to move the family to Newport News, Virginia, to pursue the opportunity, and Katherine began work at Langley in the summer of 1953. Just two weeks into her tenure in the office, Dorothy Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, and Katherine’s temporary position soon became permanent. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight tests and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. As she was wrapping up this work her husband died of cancer in December 1956. When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Johnson would talk about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module. "
George Washington Carver
"George Washington Carver was an agricultural scientist and inventor who developed hundreds of products using peanuts (though not peanut butter, as is often claimed), sweet potatoes and soybeans. Born into slavery a year before it was outlawed, Carver left home at a young age to pursue education and would eventually earn a master’s degree in agricultural science from Iowa State University. He would go on to teach and conduct research at Tuskegee University for decades, and soon after his death his childhood home would be named a national monument — the first of its kind to honor an African American. At a young age, Carver took a keen interest in plants and experimented with natural pesticides, fungicides and soil conditioners. He became known as the “the plant doctor” to local farmers due to his ability to discern how to improve the health of their gardens, fields and orchards. At age 11, Carver left the farm to attend an all-Black school in the nearby town of Neosho.
He was taken in by Andrew and Mariah Watkins, a childless African American couple who gave him a roof over his head in exchange for help with household chores. In 1894, Carver became the first African American to earn a Bachelor of Science degree. Impressed by Carver’s research on the fungal infections of soybean plants, his professors asked him to stay on for graduate studies. Carver worked with famed mycologist (fungal scientist) L.H. Pammel at the Iowa State Experimental Station, honing his skills in identifying and treating plant diseases. In 1896, Carver earned his Master of Agriculture degree and immediately received several offers, the most attractive of which came from Booker T. Washington (whose last name George would later add to his own) of Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama."
Edward Alexander Bouchet
"In 1876 Edward Alexander Bouchet made history by becoming the first African American PhD physicist, and the sixth person of any race to receive a PhD in physics from an American university. Bouchet went on to educate and inspire others as a science teacher at a school for black students. Edward Bouchet was born in September 1852, in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, a freed slave, worked as an unskilled laborer, like many black men in the town. His mother was a housewife, and he had three older sisters. The Bouchet family was active with their local church and the local abolitionist movement, and encouraged all the children to get an education. The local public schools were segregated, so in elementary school Edward Bouchet attended the Artisan Street Colored School, which had 30 students of all grade levels, and one teacher. In 1868 he gained admittance to Hopkins Grammar School, a prestigious private preparatory school that sent its graduates to Yale College. At Hopkins Grammar School he received a classical education, studying Latin and Greek as well as geometry, algebra and history. Bouchet graduated first in his class in 1870. He entered Yale in the fall of that year. Bouchet was not the first black student to enter Yale, but he was the first to graduate. He lived at home during his time at Yale, and was clearly devoted to his studies. In June 1874, he graduated sixth in a class of 124 students. He was the first black person to be nominated to Phi Beta Kappa. A white person with Bouchet’s credentials would have been able to obtain a university position, but even with his impressive accomplishments, not many career options were open to him as an African American. So in the fall of 1876 Bouchet went to teach at the Institute for Colored Youth, as Cope had wanted."
Book: "Edward Bouchet: The First African-American Doctorate"
Maxine Waters
"Congresswoman Maxine Waters is considered by many to be one of the most powerful women in politics today. Her work has earned her the reputation of being an outspoken advocate for women, children, people of color and poor people. Born on August 15, 1938, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Remus Moore and Velma Lee Carr Moore, Waters was one of thirteen children. In 1961, she moved to Los Angeles, California, where she found work in a garment factory and as a telephone operator. In 1966, Waters was hired as an assistant teacher with the newly formed Head Start program in Watts. Waters decided to attend college while working at Head Start, and in 1970 earned a sociology degree from California State University in Los Angeles. Waters became the voice for frustrated Head Start parents. Her efforts encouraged these parents to make federal budget requests, to contact legislators and agencies for increased funding, and to lobby for Head Start components tailored to their community. Waters' concern for parents' rights led her to become involved in local politics and in 1973, she went to work as chief deputy to city council member David Cunningham. In 1976, Waters quit her job and successfully ran for election to the California State Assembly. During her tenure in the State Assembly, Waters authored numerous pieces of legislation including: a law requiring state agencies to award a percentage of public contracts to minorities and women; tenants' rights laws; a law restricting police efforts to use strip searches; and the largest divestment of state pension funds from businesses involved in South Africa. After serving for fourteen years in the California State Assembly, in 1990, Waters successfully ran for a seat in the 29th Congressional District of California. In 1992, Waters ran in the much larger 35th District, representing South Central Los Angeles, Inglewood, Gardena, and Hawthorne, and won eighty-three percent of the votes. Waters continues to represent the 35th District and has been active on a number of issues including affirmative action, community development, women's health and welfare reform. Waters focused attention on the plight of inner city communities as well as the allegations of CIA involvement in Contra cocaine drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles in the mid-1980s."
P.S. I did not have time to list source information this time. If you're interested in a source list, please let me know! These sources are available upon request. :)
NOTE: All the links lead to the book sourced on Amazon. Of course, you can take the name and author of each book and search through other retailers if you wish. In the future, I will make a blog post about some great discount stores to buy books from.
Disclaimer: All images in this post are credited to the owners/ authors. Cherished Chapters owns and claims nothing.