Black History Facts: 10 With the Receipts

Black history facts travel fast and get bent on the way, so every one of these ten links to the record. Read them, check them, and teach them. Each one teach one.

1. Black History Month started as one week

Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week in February 1926. He picked the second week of February because it holds the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. In 1976 President Ford issued a message recognizing Black History Month.

2. Juneteenth marks news that came years late

On June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, telling the people of Texas that all enslaved people were free. That was about two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

3. Robert Smalls stole a Confederate ship to freedom

In May 1862, Robert Smalls, an enslaved pilot, took the Confederate transport Planter past Fort Sumter and surrendered it to the Union Navy. The Park Service counts 16 freedom seekers on that ship. He later served as a South Carolina legislator.

4. A Black man sat in the U.S. Senate in 1870

Hiram Revels of Mississippi was sworn in on February 25, 1870, the first African American senator. Three senators argued he had not been a citizen long enough. The Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat him. He later became president of Alcorn College.

5. A bank for freed people failed its depositors

Congress incorporated the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company in March 1865. Trustees brought in Frederick Douglass to replace the bank's president near the end, and it closed in June 1874. The closure left 61,144 depositors with losses of nearly $3 million.

6. Annie Turnbo Malone built a beauty empire

Born in Illinois in 1869, Annie Turnbo Malone became a millionaire selling hair products she developed for Black women, and founded Poro College in St. Louis in 1918. She gave away most of her money. Read her full story.

7. Bessie Coleman had to leave the country to fly

No one in the United States would train her, so Bessie Coleman went to France. She earned her license there on June 15, 1921, the first pilot's license issued to an African American woman.

8. Tulsa was a coordinated attack

The Justice Department reviewed the Tulsa Race Massacre of May 31 and June 1, 1921, and found it was a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood, not uncontrolled mob violence. Its review says the attackers looted, burned and destroyed 35 city blocks.

9. Shirley Chisholm went in unbought and unbossed

In November 1968, Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn became the first African American woman elected to Congress. In 1972 she became the first African American woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

10. Katherine Johnson checked the math by hand

NASA had electronic computers calculating the orbit for John Glenn's Friendship 7 flight. Katherine Johnson was asked to verify the results by hand. In 2015, at 97, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.