
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), Abolitionist and freed slave. Hero of the Underground Railroad.

U.S. Representative Robert Smalls, circa 1850s. He was a former slave who parlayed his freedom into a pioneering role in Congress. He would go on to build the South Carolina Republican Party, and buy the house of the man who had owned him as a slave.

circa 1870: Hiram R Revels (1822 - 1901), the first African-American to sit in the United States Senate. Having served in the Union Army as a chaplain, he was elected as a Republican Party Senator from Mississippi.

Ida B. Wells in 1920. She was a civil rights advocate, investigative journalist and feminist.

Natural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver working with chemistry equipment in his laboratory at Tuskegee University.

Ralph Bunche, seen here in his office in 1944, was the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a United Nations mediator in the Palestine conflict.

African American explorer Matthew A. Henson (1866-1955) reached the Arctic on seven expeditions with Robert Peary from the 1890s until their final expedition in 1908-1909, when they reached the North Pole. Henson was the first African American to explore the Arctic regions.

NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall in front of the Supreme Court, where he made a last-ditch appeal that would permit African American children to reenter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Author and a leader in the Harlem Renaissance Zora Neale Hurston, circa 1940s.

African American novelist, playwright, essayist and activist James Baldwin.

American poet, writer and socialist Langston Hughes (1902-1967).

US Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the first African American elected to the Senate.

Grammy Award-winning jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker.

Jazz composer and saxophonist John Coltrane performs on stage at the Half Note club, New York, 1965.

Dubbed "The First Lady of Song", Ella Fitzgerald was the Grammy Award-winning, most popular jazz singer for over half a century. Seen here in 1955.

American author Ralph Ellison in New York, 1961. His novel, 'Invisible Man,' received the National Book Award in 1953.

Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer, Toni Morrison in Milan, Italy. November 1994.

Maya Angelou was the acclaimed award-winning writer of several memoirs, a poet and a civil rights activist. Her most famous book is the 1969 memoir "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin served as a spokesman for the Citywide Committee for Integration.

Katherine Johnson was a NASA space scientist and mathematician whose calculations were instrumental for NASA to achieve putting an astronaut into orbit around Earth. Virginia, 1962.