Charles Henry Turner stands among the earliest African Americans to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. In 1892, he became the first...

Gertrude Hadley Jeannette became the first woman in New York City licensed to drive a motorcycle. She was the first woman licensed to drive a cab. She became...

Frank "Sugar Chile" Robinson is an American jazz pianist and singer. He became famous as a child prodigy in the mid–1940s, and this little...

In 1956, Lila Fenwick became the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Law School. Fenwick later led the United Nations’ Human Rights Division. She attended Harvard in 1954 when the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education came down, joining only a handful of women and the only black woman a one year before Ruth Bader Ginsburg started as a first-year student at the school.

In the world of costume design, Ruth Carter is a trailblazer. She has impacted the film industry as the first black woman to win...