African American History

West Brunswick Township, PA · est. 2023

In 1972 the heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali went looking for solitude and found it on remote Sculps Hill, where he built a rustic training camp he christened 'Fighter's Heaven.' From these Schuylkill County woods he prepared for the defining bouts of his career, sharpening himself for the 'Rumble in the Jungle' against George Foreman and the brutal 'Thrilla in Manila' against Joe Frazier. Ali trained at Deer Lake through 1980, making the hillside a shrine for fans and fighters alike.

Louisville, KY

Louisville's own Cassius Clay rose from the city's West End to become Muhammad Ali — three-time heavyweight champion and one of the most recognized figures of the 20th century. Beyond the ring he was a lightning rod: he embraced Islam, refused induction during the Vietnam War at the cost of his title, and became a global symbol of conviction. He was laid to rest in his hometown in 2016, his headstone carrying his own words on service to others.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

This building was Pennsylvania's first Nation of Islam house of worship and the heart of Philadelphia's African American Muslim community through the 1950s and 60s. Under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, it drew notable teachers and administrators—including Malcolm X and Wallace D. Muhammad—during a pivotal period in Black religious and political life. The temple served as a gathering place for faith, education, and community organizing.

Dallas, TX

Galilee Baptist Church was organized in 1894 near the railroad tracks on Central Avenue, where members famously hung heavy rags in the windows to muffle the din of nearby taverns — earning it the nickname "Rag Doll Church." After relocating to Munger Avenue in 1911 and taking that name under Rev. Abraham Lincoln King, the congregation built its first permanent structure and grew steadily through the pastorates that followed. A new sanctuary was completed in 1940–41, and the church became a center for worship, education, and civic life in the community.

Mathis, TX

In 1875, San Patricio chief justice Patrick Frances Murphy and his wife Elizabeth — daughter of the empresario James McGloin — bought "The Point at Echo" and built this modest Greek Revival house on the east bank of the Nueces, using cypress hauled by oxen from Indianola. The property later passed to Margaret Mary Healy-Murphy, widow of Patrick's brother, who devoted her fortune to founding a church campus in San Antonio with a convent and a free school for Black children, established what the marker calls the first order of nuns in Texas, and used this ranch house for retreats before selling it to sustain her mission.

Slocum, TX

Muse Cemetery holds burials reaching back to 1859, when six-month-old Mary E. Gilmore was laid to rest, though a 1969 survey found some 261 unmarked graves hidden beneath the sand of its oldest section. It took its name from the pioneer Muse family who arrived after the Civil War, even though none of them appear to be buried here. To the east lies a separate plot for the community's Black citizens, its earliest marked grave that of Jackson Roach in 1882.

Alvarado, TX

Samuel Houston Myers brought his wife Patsy and six children to Texas in 1851, establishing a family farm; over the following years he outlived three wives and buried several kin on the land. The cemetery's first recorded burial came in 1873 with his granddaughter Mary, and early graves include Myers himself, a traveler who drowned in Quil Miller Creek, and a formerly enslaved woman remembered as "Aunt Rachel." A darker chapter unfolded in 1880, when young Sam Houston Myers, Jr. was hanged for a murder his brother-in-law later confessed to.

San Antonio, TX

Born in Gonzales and raised in San Antonio, Myra Hemmings became one of 22 founders of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Howard University in 1913, and days later marched in the women's suffrage procession in Washington. Returning home, she taught English and drama in San Antonio's Black high schools for more than fifty years while founding the city's Delta Sigma Theta chapter and, with her husband, a dramatic guild. She also acted in stage productions and several feature films, shaping the cultural life of Black San Antonio.

Palestine, TX

Established in 1912, Banks Elementary was the first school for African-American children living south of the I&GN tracks in Palestine's South End. It honored Nathaniel A. Banks, the Lincoln High principal who ran a summer 'normal school' that trained Black teachers from ten surrounding counties for state certification. Several of its teachers stayed more than 35 years each, and after desegregation closed the school in 1965 the building served five more years as a federal Head Start center.

Raleigh, NC

From 1879 to 1930 the North Carolina Industrial Association ran the Colored State Fair to serve the state's Black citizens, who were excluded from full participation elsewhere. Held on grounds just north of here between 1891 and 1925, it showcased Black farming, industry, and achievement in the segregated New South. It was a rare public stage of Black pride and enterprise in the Jim Crow era.

Memphis, TN

Nat D. Williams broke a color barrier in 1948 as the first Black radio announcer in Memphis, taking the microphone at station WDIA. A city schoolteacher by day, he co-founded the Cotton Makers Jubilee, wrote for the Memphis World, and from 1935 ran the legendary Amateur Night on Beale Street at the old Palace Theater. Through the airwaves and the footlights he helped launch a generation of Memphis performers.

Angleton, TX

Born into slavery in Charleston in 1840 and brought to Texas by his enslaver, Nathan H. Haller rose after emancipation to become a farmer, county commissioner, and Republican political leader. Elected to the 23rd and 24th Texas Legislatures in the 1890s, he was Brazoria County's first Black legislator and authored a bill to establish a branch of the University of Texas for Black students. He and his colleague R. L. Smith were the last African Americans elected to the Texas Legislature until 1966, as the disfranchisement of the Jim Crow era closed the door behind them.

Atlanta, GA

At Atlanta's Yonge Street School in 1911, Selena Sloan Butler organized a parent-teacher group that grew, through a state body formed in 1921 and a national congress in 1926, into the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers. In an era of rigid segregation, Black parents built their own network to advocate for their children's schools when the existing PTA excluded them. Butler, elected first national president, is honored as its founder.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1994

In 1941, at the Cardwell School of Music, Mary Cardwell Dawson founded the first national Black opera company in the United States. At a time when the great opera houses were closed to Black performers, the company gave classically trained African American singers a stage worthy of their talent, touring from Pittsburgh to Washington and New York. For twenty-one years it drew acclaim for its artistry and opened doors that had long been shut.

Pittsburgh, PA

This Pittsburgh house was the home of the National Negro Opera Company from 1941 to 1962 — the first Black opera company in the United States, founded by musician and educator Mary Cardwell Dawson. From this modest residence in the Homewood neighborhood, singers who were shut out of mainstream stages built a company that toured the country and gave Black artists a place to perform grand opera. The building was recognized as a Pennsylvania historic structure in 1994 and a Pittsburgh Historic Landmark in 2008.

Chapel Hill, NC

In May 1942, as the nation mobilized for World War II, forty-four African American musicians enlisted together at Chapel Hill and broke the United States Navy's color barrier by entering at general rank. Known as the Navy B-1 Band, they were among the first Black sailors admitted beyond the messman's role the Navy had long reserved for them. Their music opened a door the service had kept shut.

Crosbyton, TX

Founded in 1905 to serve the farming families of the Pansy community, this Baptist congregation met in a schoolhouse before building its own sanctuaries, weathering fire, relocation, and the slow emptying of rural West Texas. When the last members disbanded in 1995, they gave their building to an African American congregation, and 140 volunteers moved the structure 32 miles to its new home in Floydada.

Georgetown, TX

In 1946 — two decades before Georgetown's schools integrated — Southwestern University professor Iola Bowden Chambers and three of her students began teaching piano to children in the city's African American community. Backed by the school board, the First Methodist Church, and university students, the Negro Fine Arts School grew to welcome more than 200 children, adding voice and art lessons, annual recitals, and college scholarships. Its graduates went on to earn music degrees and teach the next generation.

Brackettville, TX

When Fort Clark's aging 1870s cavalry barracks crumbled, the Army built three modern stone replacements in 1931–1932, and this fourth barracks rose on ground left vacant since the post commissary burned in 1892. Its state-of-the-art bays, mess hall, and offices were showcased to justify keeping Fort Clark as a permanent post. Over the next decade it quartered the 5th U.S. Cavalry, the Texas National Guard, the Buffalo Soldiers of the African-American 9th Cavalry, and, during World War II, 182 African-American women of the Women's Army Corps.

Lubbock, TX

Born from a 1926 split with Caldonia Baptist Church, this historically African American congregation began as Mount Calvary Baptist before taking the New Hope name around the time it moved to a new home in 1929. Through the 1930s and 1940s it stood at the center of Black community life in Lubbock, hosting Juneteenth and Armistice Day observances and a baby clinic for young children. Long-serving pastors built out its sanctuary and educational buildings, and its radio broadcasts have carried worship into local homes for decades.

Waco, TX

In the years before emancipation, some of Waco's Black residents worshiped at the city's first Baptist church. In 1866 that church's leaders — including Baylor University president Rufus Burleson — helped organize a separate congregation of eighteen members, named New Hope Baptist Church by its first pastor, the Rev. Stephen Cobb. In its early years the young congregation met in an old foundry, at the Howard Institute, and in a shared Methodist building before settling at its present site in 1923.

Wheelock, TX

Founded in the 1800s in the woods west of the Spring Creek Settlement, New Hope Missionary Baptist Church found a permanent home when member Lucy Bell Stubbs Mitchell donated land in the 1890s. In 1911 it moved to this site, rebuilt from the old church's materials. Beyond worship, it served as the social, political, and educational heart of Wheelock's African American community.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Founded in 1873 by the Reverend Nathan Oggs, himself a former slave, New Hope gathered a congregation of freedpeople who first worshiped in their pastor's home before raising their own building in 1876. Over the following decades the church grew, moved several times, and settled at its present site in 1957. Its membership traces ancestral roots back nine generations.

Port Arthur, TX

Organized in early 1906 by the Rev. Mr. Stevenson and a small group of founders, this congregation became the first Baptist church for African Americans in Port Arthur, first worshiping in a horse stable cleared out each weekend. Storms and floods repeatedly destroyed its buildings—a common hardship before the city's seawall was built—yet the congregation rebuilt again and again, forging bonds with neighboring Black churches and dedicating a new sanctuary in 1982.

Cooks Point, TX

Just five years after Emancipation, in 1870, a group of freedmen and freedwomen gathered under a brush arbor near Jim Branch to found this congregation. Like Black churches across the postwar South, it became far more than a place of worship — a school, a meeting hall, and an engine of community organization. Growing membership carried it through a series of buildings and a century of improvements, always at the heart of the Teals Prairie community.

Gladewater, TX

In 1893, members of a nearby congregation moved into downtown Gladewater seeking work and founded New Hope under a brush arbor, led by Reverend Louis Holoway and seven others. Like countless Black churches born after emancipation, it became far more than a house of worship—the first school for African American children in Gladewater met within its walls. Rebuilt and expanded across the 20th century, it has anchored its community for well over a century.

Pike County, IL

Frank McWorter was born enslaved, bought his own freedom, and in 1836 founded New Philadelphia on the Illinois frontier — the first known town platted and legally registered by an African American in the United States. He used the earnings from his land sales to purchase sixteen members of his family out of slavery. The town he built was a rare interracial community in the decades before the Civil War.

New Richmond, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River town of New Richmond became a hotbed of antislavery conviction, its citizens sheltering freedom-seekers along the Underground Railroad just across the water from slaveholding Kentucky. In 1836 the abolitionist James G. Birney chose the town as the launching point for The Philanthropist, one of the era's boldest antislavery newspapers, before moving its publication to Cincinnati. That such radical work could take root here reflects how small river communities, emboldened by Quaker and evangelical reformers, turned the borderland into a front line of the fight against slavery.

Haltom City, TX

When the Rev. Greene Fretwell, a former slave, died in 1886 there was no Black cemetery in this corner of Tarrant County. His widow Frances gathered donations, and in 1889 the trustees of Trinity Chapel Methodist Church bought two acres for a church and burial ground, worshipping under a brush arbor until a frame church could be raised. Over the following decades the grounds expanded into what is now collectively called New Trinity Cemetery.

Houston, TX

New Zion Temple began in 1933 as 'The Little Church on Ruthven Street,' a storefront Church of God in Christ congregation that Bishop Hayward W. Falls built from donated supplies in Houston's Freedmen's Town. Falls later led it out of the denomination to become nondenominational and made it the headquarters of the Worldwide Fellowship, from which affiliated churches spread across several states and abroad.

Boston, MA

In the early 1950s, Boston's Back Bay was home to a remarkable pair of young students: a Georgia-born theology doctoral candidate at Boston University and an Alabama-raised singer training at the New England Conservatory. Their 1952 introduction and the courtship that followed — carried on between rooming houses along Massachusetts Avenue — would join two lives that reshaped a nation. The League of Women for Community Service, where Coretta boarded, was itself a pillar of Black Boston, a reminder that this romance unfolded within a close, striving community.

Newport, PA · est. 2015

In July 1841, three enslaved men from Maryland—Alick, Tom, and Ben—fled north and were tracked to Newport by bounty hunters. Ben drowned trying to cross the Juniata River, and the other two were seized, but several Newport residents helped them get away. Six of those citizens were convicted in federal court in 1842 for aiding the escape.

Uvalde, TX

Built in 1938, the Nicolas Street School is the last surviving school telling the story of African American education in Uvalde. Its creation owed much to teacher Susie Harris, who — after the school board reneged on promised new facilities for Black students — wrote directly to Uvalde resident and U.S. Vice President John Nance Garner for help, and won a new campus. In an era of "separate but seldom equal" schooling, two teachers taught eight grades here, and the school served the community until 1965, a full decade after the district voted to integrate.

Apple Springs, TX

After emancipation, African Americans in northeastern Trinity County founded the freedom colony of Nigton, where families worked as laborers, sharecroppers, and increasingly as landowners. By the 1880s the community thrived with well-kept farms, fine livestock, churches, lodges, and shops, and it prized education, winning a Rosenwald grant for a school and drawing dedicated teachers who taught for decades. Barred from white celebrations, residents built their own, including Juneteenth barbecues each June.

Yeadon, PA · est. 2021

In 1959, after three Black families were turned away from a local swim club in the Philadelphia suburb of Yeadon, they refused to accept exclusion and pooled community resources to buy land and build their own. The result, the Nile Swim Club, became the first private swim club in the nation owned and operated by African Americans. In an era when public and private pools were flashpoints of segregation, the Nile offered families a place to swim, gather, and build community on their own terms.

Tryon, NC

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon in 1933, the woman the world came to know as Nina Simone was a classically trained pianist who fused gospel, jazz, blues, and classical traditions into a sound unlike anyone else's. As her fame grew through the mid-twentieth century, she poured that artistry into the civil rights struggle, becoming one of its most fearless musical voices. This bronze monument, sculpted by Zenos Frudakis and cast at Laran Bronze Studios in 2010, stands in the small Blue Ridge foothills town where her story began, its inscription carrying her own conviction that an artist has a duty to reflect the times.

Hempstead vicinity, TX

Norris Wright Cuney was born into slavery on a Texas plantation in 1846, sent north to school as a boy, and returned after the Civil War to build a wharf-contracting business in Galveston. He organized Black longshoremen into a labor association and rose to lead the Republican Party in Texas, serving as a city alderman, school board member, and U.S. Customs collector. When the party stripped his delegation of its seat in 1896, it silenced Black political power in the state for more than half a century.

Galveston, TX

Born into slavery in 1846 on his white father's Waller County plantation, Norris Wright Cuney was educated in Pennsylvania and worked Mississippi River steamboats before settling in Galveston after the Civil War. He rose to become one of Texas's most powerful Black political leaders — the state's Republican chairman, a national convention delegate, Galveston's first Black alderman, and, under President Benjamin Harrison, Collector of Customs. A Galveston park was dedicated to his memory in 1937.

Durham, NC

In 1910, at the height of the Jim Crow era, educator James E. Shepard founded this Durham institution to give Black North Carolinians access to higher learning that segregation otherwise denied them. It became a state-supported liberal arts college in 1925 — one of the first publicly funded liberal arts colleges for African Americans in the nation — before growing into today's regional university.

Canaan, NH

In the years before the Civil War, the small town of Canaan, New Hampshire, briefly hosted one of the boldest educational experiments in the country. Chartered in 1834 and opened in 1835, Noyes Academy welcomed Black and white students together at a time when higher learning was almost universally closed to African Americans. The experiment was short-lived: within months, a mob of enraged neighbors hitched teams of oxen to the schoolhouse and hauled the building off its foundation, dragging it away to shut the academy down. Some of the young Black scholars who had traveled from across the Northeast to study there went on to become leading voices in the abolition movement.

Cameron, TX

Education for Cameron's African American children began in church instruction at the "Little Rocky" Church in the Marlow community until Oscar John Thomas arrived in 1923 as principal and teacher. Under his leadership the district drew on the Julius Rosenwald Fund to build a new school in 1925, later renamed in his honor. The building became Cameron Junior High during integration, regained the O.J. Thomas name by petition in 1974, and after closing was sold in 1998 to an alumni group for use as a community center.

Felicity, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River formed the border between slavery and freedom, and Clermont County sat squarely on the paths that freedom seekers followed north out of Kentucky. Oliver Perry Spencer Fee turned his Felicity store into a quiet refuge, feeding and clothing escapees while sending pursuing slave-hunters off in the wrong direction. Small, deliberate, and dangerous acts like his formed the human network later remembered as the Underground Railroad.

Weld County, CO

This marker honors O.T. Jackson, a Colorado entrepreneur and messenger to three governors, who filed a desert-land claim in 1910 to found Dearfield — one of the most ambitious African American agricultural colonies on the High Plains. Backed by boosters like Dr. Joseph H.P. Westbrook of Denver, Dearfield grew into a striving farming community of Black homesteaders before drought and the Depression emptied it into a ghost town.

Nacogdoches, TX

Once called the "American Cemetery," Oak Grove sits on land granted in 1826 to empresario Haden Edwards, leader of the Fredonian Rebellion, who is buried here. Its graves read like a roster of the Texas Republic: signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, veterans of San Jacinto, Sam Houston's secretary of war and personal physician, early millionaires, a master architect, and formerly enslaved men and women. Burials relocated from an older Spanish cemetery reach back to a stone marked "Father Mendoza, 1718."

Richmond, TX

In 1915, eighteen African American residents of Richmond, led by the Rev. A. C. Ray, gathered to found their own congregation, building a brush arbor on an oak-covered rise and worshipping in a member's home until they could buy the land. By 1916 they owned the site and had raised a sanctuary. Oak Hill Baptist Church grew into a center of worship, music, and outreach for the surrounding community.

Waxahachie, TX

Founded in 1887 as an elementary school for Black children, Oak Lawn moved to this site in 1893 and soon added high school classes. Early graduates Prince Goldthwaite and Robert Davis returned to serve as principals. The school grew through the twentieth century, splitting its elementary and high schools in 1952 and continuing until it closed in 1970.

Sulphur Springs, TX

After their Alabama church was burned during Reconstruction, Willis and Nannie Stewart sought a place to worship freely and moved to Hopkins County in 1882 with their seven children and two formerly enslaved people, Abraham and Chloe. Their evening singing and Bible study drew neighbors, and a circuit rider's 1883 baptism in the Stewart home grew into a congregation that met first in Oakland School and then, on land donated in 1896, in a meetinghouse the community built by hand. Rebuilt after a 1944 fire, Oakland Cumberland Presbyterian Church still serves the area.

Oakland, TX

Founded in 1882, the Oakland Normal School spent three decades training Black schoolteachers, meeting during spring and summer vacations so working teachers could attend. Its first principal was G. R. Townsend, but it was long led by Robert L. Smith, a respected educator and member of the Texas Legislature. Drawing students from seven southeast Texas counties, it was regarded as one of the finest institutions of its kind in the state.

Honey Grove, TX

Begun in 1846 as the Walcott Graveyard around the grave of Kentucky-born pioneer James G. Gilmer, this ground became a public cemetery when the Walcott family deeded it to the Honey Grove community. Beneath its oaks lie the town's founding families and more than 275 veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, some memorialized because their bodies never came home. Members of the area's pre-Civil War enslaved community and later freed Black citizens are buried here as well.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth pioneer John Peter Smith — later a mayor, civic leader, and philanthropist — founded this cemetery in 1879 with a gift of 20 acres, since grown to 100. Bringing together the Oakwood, Calvary, and Trinity grounds, it holds many of the city's and county's notable dead, with plots held by lodges, unions, and churches, and separate tracts for Union and Confederate soldiers. Its chapel dates to 1914.

Orlando, FL · est. 2019

On Election Day 1920, Black residents of Ocoee who owned land and businesses sought to vote and were turned away; after Mose Norman persisted, white mobs unleashed days of terror. They surrounded and burned July Perry's home, and the next morning a lynch mob took the wounded Perry from the Orange County Jail and hanged him within sight of Judge Cheney's home. Mobs burned some two dozen Black homes, two churches, and a lodge, and within a year Ocoee's entire Black community was driven out.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Octavius V. Catto was a rising leader of Black Philadelphia in the Civil War and Reconstruction years—an early graduate of the Institute for Colored Youth who became an educator, a military officer, and a tireless organizer for equal rights. On election day in 1871, as he urged Black citizens to exercise their newly won right to vote, he was assassinated by rioters. His death was mourned across the city as the loss of a brilliant champion of equality.

Paris, TX

On land once owned by George Washington Wright, founder of Paris, this was the town's primary burial ground from 1845 to 1865, its oldest grave said to be that of a free Black man who worked for Wright. When the newer Evergreen Cemetery opened in 1866, many graves were moved, yet Wright himself was buried here in 1877, and a granite marker honors soldiers of the 9th Texas Infantry, C.S.A., who died in a measles epidemic in 1862. Of roughly 325 graves, about a hundred stones survive, most from 1870 to 1910.

Lampasas, TX

Raised in 1855 from native stone and cedar, this Lampasas landmark was built with enslaved labor in the years before the Civil War. Later known as the "Snap" Bean Ranch House, it survives as one of the area's early substantial dwellings. Its walls testify both to antebellum craftsmanship and to the coerced labor that produced it.

Queen City, TX

The Enon Primitive Baptist Church was organized near Old Havana in 1845 and, like many frontier congregations, met in homes, schools, and brush arbors before Anderson Miles deeded four acres here in 1861. The wood-frame church stood beside a cemetery of roughly 200 marked graves and as many unmarked, many shown only by piles of rocks. Oral tradition holds that the northwest corner was set aside for enslaved people, and church records confirm at least two Black members during the Civil War.

Moulton, TX

The earliest documented grave in this Lavaca County cemetery is that of a teenage girl who died in 1857, though local memory holds that older burials predate her. Early settlers deeded the land, and those laid to rest here span the full sweep of Texas history: pioneers and former slaves, a heartbreaking number of children, and victims of the diseases and epidemics that swept the 19th-century countryside. Its veterans served in conflicts from the Texas Revolution and Civil War through both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam.

Nacogdoches, TX

Set aside as a community graveyard in 1838—the same spring the Union Baptist Church, later the Old North Church, was organized—this burial ground reads like a ledger of early East Texas. Its more than 950 graves hold veterans of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Texas Revolution, alongside forty-seven Confederate and twenty-one Union soldiers, many of the latter lost to a Reconstruction-era dysentery epidemic. The cemetery was long divided, with an east section for the burials of enslaved people, many of them church members, which grew into a separate graveyard.

West Point, TX

This ground began as a family plot when Texas pioneer John Y. Criswell—part of Stephen F. Austin's Third Colony—buried his wife Eleanor here, with the oldest grave dating to 1835. In 1839 the Plum Grove Baptist Church, one of the earliest Baptist congregations in Texas, took shape nearby, and in 1851 John Click deeded land for church and cemetery alike. As the town of West Point grew, the burial ground served the wider community, with separate sections that reflected the segregation of the era.

Marshall, TX

This ground first served a Confederate gunpowder factory, and its burials began with enslaved people laid to rest on the mill's acreage. After the factory fell with the Confederacy in 1865, the land passed into private hands, and by 1880 a local mortician began recording graves here. The cemetery became the resting place of many of Marshall's Black leaders — educators, ministers, businesspeople, war veterans, and legislator David Abner among them.

Trinity, TX

Education in Trinity began humbly in 1872 with a one-room log schoolhouse near Cedar Grove Cemetery. The sturdy brick building known as "Old Red" rose here beginning in 1911 under Superintendent J. Woolam Bright, opening by 1915 in a prairie-style, T-plan form that housed every grade until a high school was added in 1928. An earlier frame schoolhouse on the site was relocated to serve the town's African American students—a reminder of segregated schooling. When demolition loomed in the 1990s, former students and citizens rallied to save the building for continued use.