African American History

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017

On May 13, 1985, a long-simmering standoff between Philadelphia police and the Black liberation group MOVE erupted into catastrophe on Osage Avenue. Police dropped a bomb from a state helicopter onto the group's rowhouse, and the fire that followed was allowed to burn — killing eleven MOVE members, five of them children, and destroying 61 homes in the surrounding Black neighborhood. It remains one of the only times an American city bombed its own residents.

Houston, TX

On the campus of Texas Southern University, generations of art students turned the walls of Hannah Hall into a living gallery. Beginning around 1950 under the direction of noted muralist Dr. John T. Biggers, students painted murals as their theses — the finest allowed to remain. Unflinching and defiant, they depict the brutality, faith, hope, and survival of African American life across many eras.

Meriwether County, GA

In the segregated rural South, Black communities were routinely denied a fair share of public school funding, so they built and sustained their own institutions through pooled money, donated land, and volunteer labor. The Odessadale Elementary School stands in that tradition of Black self-help — a community in Meriwether County, Georgia, investing directly in the education of its children when the state would not. Decades later, alumni and neighbors organized to preserve the site and honor the school's place in local memory.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

This marker recalls the beginnings of slavery along the Delaware River, where enslaved Africans—first brought by Dutch and Swedish colonists—were landed on the Philadelphia waterfront as early as 1639. Even William Penn and other Quaker founders, later associated with abolition, bought and held enslaved people, and merchants profited from the trade. Despite brutal conditions, these enslaved men and women endured and did essential labor in building Pennsylvania and the young nation.

Houston, TX

Opened on Houston's Main Street in 1951, The Playhouse Theatre was among the first buildings in the country designed specifically for "theatre in the round," seating 300 spectators encircling a revolving central stage. Producers Joanna Albus and William Rozan mounted high-quality productions here, and in 1953 the playwright Tennessee Williams himself directed a premiere on its stage. Rising costs forced the original company to close in 1954, but later owners kept the space alive as a theater and cinema until it became the National African American Museum in 2004.

Exeter, NH

In the churning politics of the early 1850s, the old party system was breaking apart under the strain of the slavery question, and anti-slavery men from rival factions were groping for common cause. According to local tradition, it was here in Exeter that Amos Tuck—a former Free Soil congressman—gathered such men and helped fix upon the name that a new coalition would carry. Within a few years that name belonged to a national party powerful enough to elect a president and reshape the country.

Indiana, PA · est. 2002

In June 1845, slave hunters seized a twelve-year-old fugitive named Anthony Hollingsworth and held him in an Indiana, Pennsylvania hotel. Armed townspeople surrounded the building and demanded his release, openly defying the federal laws that protected slave catchers. Judge Thomas White then freed the boy in the courthouse that once stood on this site, a striking act of local conscience against the machinery of slavery.

Houston, TX

Born in Alabama around 1861, the Rev. Ned P. Pullum became a leading Baptist minister in Houston's Freedmen's Town, the Fourth Ward community founded by the formerly enslaved after emancipation. He pastored Bethel Baptist after the death of the Rev. John "Jack" Yates, then founded Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in 1903, leading it for 24 years. A civic force and entrepreneur, he helped establish the segregation-era Carnegie Colored Library, supported a Black-run hospital, and built businesses including a brickworks, a shoe-repair shop, and two drugstores.

East Taylor Township, PA

On September 7, 1923, amid rising racial hostility, Johnstown Mayor Joseph Cauffiel ordered every Black and Mexican resident who had lived in the area less than seven years to leave. By some accounts more than 2,000 people were driven out under threat of jail. The episode drew national attention—much of it from Black journalists and activists—prompting a state investigation and a public backlash that helped cost Cauffiel his reelection.

Malone, TX

Three schools in this Hill County area carried the Savage name, beginning with a one-room school on land donated by George W. Savage in 1885, where classes bent around the rhythms of farm work. A second school in the Walling community later folded its students into the growing original. A third, the Savage Colored School, taught Black children of the area until they transferred to Pelham School in neighboring Navarro County, and the last Savage school closed its doors in 1950.

Cleveland, TX

Burton B. Tarkington brought his family from Indiana to the Texas prairie in the 1820s, and the vast grassland took his name as scattered farming communities took root. Between 1857 and 1957 some fifteen separate schools served the prairie, and the long, contentious drive to consolidate them—marked by court fights, sectional splits, and even a suspicious fire—finally produced a unified district. Because the area had no high school for African American students, they were bussed to Cleveland until integration.

Waco, TX

Georgia settler Sterling Sims built this sturdy oak cabin in 1852 after bringing his family and seventeen enslaved people up the Trinity River from Galveston and on by ox-wagon to a 490-acre farm in Freestone County. He and an enslaved carpenter raised it as a permanent home, hewing sills fourteen inches square and eighteen feet long that each weigh more than a ton. Moved to Waco in the 1930s and damaged by fire in 1959, the cabin was later restored.

Watertown, MA

This Egyptian-revival sphinx stands at Mount Auburn Cemetery near Watertown, America's first great garden cemetery, and was raised in the years after the Civil War to honor the Union's survival and the abolition of slavery. Its inscription frames the war's outcome in monumental terms — a nation preserved and human bondage ended through popular sacrifice. Choosing the ancient form of the sphinx, its creators cast a distinctly American triumph in the timeless language of Old World monuments.

Hollywood, SC · est. 2006

On September 9, 1739, about twenty enslaved Africans gathered near the Stono River, seized weapons from a store, and marched south toward the promise of freedom in Spanish Florida, beating drums and calling out for liberty. Their ranks swelled to dozens as they moved, and in the fighting that followed roughly twenty white colonists and many more of the rebels were killed before the militia crushed the uprising. It was the largest slave insurrection in British North America.

Taylor, TX

Taylor's schooling grew from private academies in the late 1870s to the citizen-built Stock Company School in 1880, and a school for the town's Black children opened the very next year. An 1883 bond election funded a true public system under superintendent Augustus Hill, and after decades of growth and annexations, the Taylor Independent School District took control in 1950.

San Angelo, TX

After the Civil War, Congress authorized six regiments of Black soldiers, and in 1867 the Tenth Cavalry organized under Colonel Benjamin Grierson. Reassigned west to escape discrimination at Fort Leavenworth, the regiment reached Fort Concho in 1875, where its troopers endured grueling scouting and mapping expeditions across the high plains. They played a key role in the 1880 defeat of the Mescalero Apache leader Victorio before moving on to Fort Davis and, in later generations, service around the world.

Sublime, TX

For roughly fifteen years beginning about 1836, an elusive figure haunted the Navidad River bottoms of frontier Texas, slipping into settlers' kitchens by night for food yet always leaving half behind and returning borrowed tools polished bright. Enslaved people called him 'The thing that comes,' half fearing a ghost. Captured in 1851, he proved to be the son of an African chief, sold back into bondage, and lived out his days as 'Old Jimbo.' The tale blends folklore with the grim realities of slavery in antebellum Texas.

Matagorda, TX

A leading Gulf port, Matagorda thrived on cotton shipped down the Colorado River, and during the Civil War it became a busy channel for Confederate blockade runners slipping past Union ships. That same wartime traffic likely carried the Aedes aegypti mosquito into the wetland port, and in the fall of 1862 the yellow fever it spread ravaged the town. From late September to late November, the epidemic is estimated to have killed as much as a third of the population, filling Matagorda Cemetery and claiming enslaved residents and soldiers whose names largely went unrecorded.

Edgecombe County, NC

Thelonious Monk, one of the most original composers in American music and a founding architect of bebop, was born about a mile south of this marker before his family moved north to New York. His angular piano style and compositions like "'Round Midnight" (1944) reshaped modern jazz. The marker anchors a global musical legend to his eastern North Carolina roots.

Athens, TX

Dr. Thomas Boucher Wood earned his medical degree at Louisville in 1849, writing his thesis on pneumonia, and soon came to Henderson County to farm and practice medicine, marrying Susan Amanda Pinson in 1850. Their family cemetery began in 1851 with a stillborn daughter and filled steadily with children lost to the harsh conditions of pioneer life—and, cruelly, both the doctor and a grown son died of the very pneumonia he had studied. Enslaved people held by the family are believed buried just outside the plot; descendants restored the site in the late 1990s.

Shelby, NC

Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1946) was a North Carolina minister, politician, and best-selling author whose novel The Clansman became the basis for D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. A cinematic landmark, the film was also a notorious glorification of the Ku Klux Klan that inflamed racial hatred. His grave lies 1,500 feet north.

Temple, TX

Born in Hearne in 1890, Dr. Thomas Edison Dixon trained at Meharry Medical College and by 1927 had brought his practice to downtown Temple, where health care for African Americans was scarce. Devoted to pediatrics and obstetrics, "Tommy" Dixon also anchored the community's Black churches and civic groups, sold land cheaply to the city for schools, and contributed to the NAACP's 1954 "Fighting Fund for Freedom" against racial discrimination. At his death he was the only African American physician practicing in Bell County.

Upper Darby, PA · est. 2007

Thomas Garrett was born at Riverview in Delaware County and became one of the most fearless conductors on the Underground Railroad. A devout Quaker who moved to Wilmington in 1822, he funneled freedom seekers northward to family properties, working alongside Harriet Tubman and William Still. Though convicted and heavily fined under the fugitive slave laws, he never relented—by his own account aiding some 2,700 people on their journey out of slavery.

Hemphill, TX

Built around 1930, this Hemphill school was one of thousands across the rural South funded in part by the Rosenwald Fund, a partnership between Sears executive Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington to build schools for African American children. Over the decades it grew into the Hemphill Colored School and later the Thomas Johnson School, adding a program to train returning WWII veterans and publishing its own yearbook, 'The Hawk.' In 1966 it integrated into the local district, closing a long chapter as the cornerstone of Black education in the county.

Douglass Township, PA · est. 1982

Thomas Rutter, an ironmaster who died in 1730, built Pennsylvania's first ironworks nearby in 1716 and went on to raise Pine Forge and this mansion in the decade that followed. Remarkable for his era, he was an outspoken opponent of slavery. Generations later, in the 19th century, the house served as a stop on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers; an academy was founded on the grounds in 1945.

Forest, TX

Wiley and Cynthia Ann Thompson brought their children and a number of enslaved people from Alabama in 1847, buying a 636-acre tract along Larrison Creek and building a log home overlooking the bottomland. The community that grew nearby, called Forest, included a family-owned store, saloon, mills, and cotton gin. The cemetery began around 1850 with the burial of two of their children and holds more than thirty unmarked graves as well as veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Austin, TX

Painting contractor John W. Thompson and his wife Jennie built this Victorian home in the fashionable Robertson Hill neighborhood after their 1877 marriage, and their daughter Willie Mae lived in it until her death in 1966. The house then took on a new life: the Alpha Kappa Zeta Chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, a graduate chapter founded in 1940, acquired and restored it in 1967 as a meeting place. It became Austin's first Black Greek-letter house.

San Marcos, TX

In 1850 Dr. William Alexander Thompson struck an agreement with his neighbors to harness the San Marcos River, and he and his sons used enslaved laborers to build a gristmill, sawmill, and cotton gin. The channels dug for the waterwheel created the parcels known as "Thompson Islands." The family ran the mills until 1911, and the arrival of electricity in 1942 finally ended the site's dependence on water power.

San Marcos, TX

William A. Thompson moved his family and the people he enslaved from Louisiana to Texas in 1850, establishing plantations in Caldwell and Hays counties. Enslaved laborers built a mill on the San Marcos River whose construction reshaped the channel into three small islands still called Thompson's Islands. The mill powered local lumbering and a cotton gin, anchoring the area's antebellum economy for generations.

Louisville, KY

Thornton and Lucie Blackburn were enslaved in Louisville in the early 1830s, and when Lucie was sold away the couple escaped north by steamboat. Reclaimed by their owners in Detroit two years later, they were freed in the dramatic "Blackburn Riots of 1833" and fled across the border to Canada, where two extradition attempts failed. In Toronto they founded Upper Canada's first taxi service while continuing to aid other freedom seekers.

Thornton, TX

Founded by the Texas Central Railroad in 1871, Thornton quickly gained churches, businesses, and schools—most notably the Thornton Male and Female Institute, or Thornton College, opened in 1877 by physician-teacher Edward Coke Chambers. The school changed hands and merged before passing to the new Thornton Independent School District in 1891, and its buildings were repeatedly rebuilt after a storm and a fire, culminating in a brick schoolhouse in 1921. As rural districts consolidated and enrollment fell, Thornton merged with Groesbeck in 1965, deeding its campus to the city as a community center.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2007

Opened in 1970 at the point where Pittsburgh's three rivers meet, Three Rivers Stadium became the shared home of the Pirates and the Steelers during a golden run of championships that earned the city its "City of Champions" nickname. Its turf saw Roberto Clemente's 3,000th career hit in 1972 and, that same year, Franco Harris's "Immaculate Reception," one of the most famous plays in football history. The multipurpose stadium was demolished in 2001.

Thurber, TX

The nine-acre Thurber Cemetery is a quiet ledger of the vanished coal-mining company town it served, laid out in separate Catholic, Protestant, and African American sections that mirror the community's many peoples. More than a thousand graves lie here, some seven hundred of them unmarked, the oldest an infant who died in 1890. That more than half the burials are children speaks to the epidemics—scarlet fever, typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough—that stalked crowded industrial towns.

Annapolis, MD

This memorial in Maryland's capital honors Thurgood Marshall, the Baltimore-born lawyer who became the twentieth century's foremost architect of civil-rights law. As lead counsel for the NAACP he argued and won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, dismantling the legal basis for segregated schools, and in 1967 he became the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Placing his likeness in Annapolis roots that national story in the state that shaped him.

Austin, TX

Founded in 1875 with the backing of the American Missionary Association, Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute was chartered in 1877 to train teachers and educate African Americans in Austin. Under president Mary Elizabeth Branch, who arrived in 1930, it grew into a full four-year, co-educational college. In 1952 it merged with Samuel Huston College to form Huston-Tillotson, which endures today.

Palestine, TX

Born in 1902 to a father who had escaped slavery, Timothy Stephen Smith earned a degree from Prairie View A&M and taught school for forty-two years. Convinced that Anderson County's voting boundaries diluted Black political strength, he and others sued in 1973; Judge William Wayne Justice agreed, striking down a "racially motivated gerrymander" and forcing a switch to single-member districts. Similar success against the City of Palestine soon followed, opening the way for the county's first Black officeholders.

Fort Mill, SC

Erected in the 1890s in Fort Mill's Confederate Park, this is one of the earliest and most striking monuments in the South to commemorate enslaved African Americans — though it does so through the lens of the 'Lost Cause,' framing the enslaved as loyal servants of the Confederate war effort. In reality, the roughly four million people held in bondage experienced slavery as coerced labor, family separation, and violence, and many thousands escaped to Union lines or took up arms for their own freedom. The monument's language of 'faithful' devotion reflects the memory its white patrons wished to preserve in the decades after Reconstruction, not the lived experience of the people it claims to honor.

Waco, TX

This congregation grew from a Sunday school class led by the Rev. I. Toliver, a respected Baptist minister and civic leader in Waco's African American community, who organized the church in his own name in 1895. After buying land in east Waco, the congregation built a sanctuary near the interurban rail line and grew to more than 1,100 members by the early 1940s. A new church rose on this site in 1948, and the congregation continues its outreach and youth work today.

Devine, TX

Washington Allen Tomerlin set aside this ground for family and neighbors when this corner of Medina County was still remote and thinly settled, the earliest marked grave dating to 1875. Beneath its stones rest veterans of four American wars, three brothers said to have ridden as Texas Rangers, and the Brackens family, freed slaves who made their home nearby. Many older markers bear only initials, their stories now half-remembered.

Tatum, TX

Albert Tatum, a wealthy Alabama planter, settled in the 1840s where Trammel's Trace crossed the Grand Bluff Road, building a plantation home with enslaved labor that became a social center of the area. His family gave land for a railroad station in 1882, and his son Paul—"Uncle Fox"—laid out the townsite in 1892, after which farming and lumbering carried the community forward. A lake and power plant brought a fresh wave of growth in the 1970s.

Bedford, KY

Erected around 1850 on the site of an earlier lockup and given a second story in 1899, this Bedford stone jail stood as a symbol of law and order for some 133 years, until 1983. Its most famous prisoner was ardent abolitionist Delia Webster, briefly held here in 1854 for her antislavery activity. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Trinity, TX

Founded as a mission in 1882 under its first pastor, the Reverend W.M. Apling, Trinity Chapel took root among freedpeople building independent institutions in the decades after emancipation. Its congregation raised a one-room sanctuary by 1890 and steadily enlarged it, adding a bell tower and hand-hewn pews, while supporting education through Dallas's historically Black Paul Quinn College. For well over a century it has anchored African American faith, scholarship, and mutual aid in the town of Trinity.

Dallas, TX

This cemetery is all that remains of the community that lived and labored on the Dallas County Trinity Farms, a 3,000-acre commercial operation — also called Rancho Grande — that ran from about 1915 to 1946. The farm provided housing, schools, and a commissary for its workers, who were largely Mexican citizens, many fleeing the Mexican Revolution, and a sizable number of African Americans. In keeping with the era's segregation, the children attended separate schools and the dead were buried in separate sections.

Houston, TX

This congregation began as an 1848 mission for the enslaved members of Houston's Methodist church and received a sanctuary of its own around 1851. Officially organized in 1865 as freedom arrived, it grew to 100 members within a year and laid a downtown cornerstone in 1869. One of Houston's earliest Black congregations, it took part in founding Wiley College and helped give rise to Texas Southern University.

Madisonville, TX

Born in the tiny Madison County community of Cottonwood in 1918, Truman Kimbro was drafted in 1941 and shipped to Europe with the 2nd Engineer Battalion, landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day. In December 1944 he was killed while laying anti-tank mines directly in the path of advancing German troops — a final act of courage that earned him the Medal of Honor. He rests in the American military cemetery at Henri-Chapelle, Belgium.

Dallas, TX

Educated at Wiley College and Prairie View Normal, Tueria Dell Marshall taught across Dallas before becoming principal of Lincoln, the city's second high school for African American students, in 1939, a post he held until 1955. Beyond the classroom he co-founded the Dallas Star Post newspaper and organized a Wiley College extension school. He was buried near his beloved Lincoln High in 1960, though the exact site of his grave is now lost.

Houston, TX

Born on the banks of Buffalo Bayou after emancipation in 1865, Freedman's Town flourished into the 20th century as the center of Black Houston. Its streets filled with hundreds of homes, many the narrow "shotgun" cottages whose form scholars trace through Haiti back to West Africa, along with the larger houses of leaders like the Rev. Jack Yates and his son Rutherford. By the 1930s it held much of the city's Black-owned business, but from 1940 onward urban renewal and highway building steadily eroded it—until residents' persistence won a National Register listing in 1985.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2006

When the great "Grand Review of the Armies" paraded through Washington in May 1865, the United States Colored Troops who had fought and bled for the Union were pointedly left out. In answer, Black regiments from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts assembled here at State and Filbert Streets on November 14, 1865, for their own triumphant review. Grand Marshal T. Morris Chester led them through Harrisburg to Senator Simon Cameron's home, where leaders including Octavius Catto and William Howard Day honored their service.

San Marcos, TX

Born in San Marcos in 1884 to formerly enslaved parents, Ulysses "Boots" Cephas learned the blacksmith's trade from his father and grew into one of the county's most respected craftsmen, prized for his skill at shoeing horses and building wagons and farm tools. He owned his own shop and gave back to his community as a church member and organizer of the San Marcos Independent Band. His life traces one family's path from bondage to skilled independence in a single generation.

South Holland, IL

This memorial honors Jan Ton and his wife Aagje, Dutch immigrants who farmed near the Little Calumet River and helped found the area's First Reformed Church and Dutch settlements. Their farm became a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers escaping slavery on their way toward Canada. Faith and conscience led this immigrant community to risk much for others' liberty.

Lewisburg, PA · est. 1954

This old stable served as a station on the Underground Railroad, the secret network of safe houses that helped enslaved people escape north toward freedom in the decades before the Civil War. Here freedom seekers were hidden, fed, and helped on their way to the next station in a chain that stretched, hand to hand, toward Canada. Aiding fugitives was dangerous and illegal work, carried out quietly by people who risked prosecution to defy slavery.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2000

In the 1850s a Harrisburg neighborhood known as Tanner's Alley served as a vital link on the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers found shelter a block apart in the homes of Joseph Bustill and William Jones, while the nearby Wesley Union AME Zion Church hosted the era's fiercest voices against slavery—Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison both spoke there. It was a hub of Black community and antislavery organizing on the road north.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 2003

In the years before the Civil War, the mountainous country around Chambersburg sheltered a network of Underground Railroad stations where people fleeing slavery could pause on their journey north. One local agent was Henry Watson, a free Black barber who helped guide fugitives past the slave-catchers and bounty hunters hunting them. His work turned an ordinary trade into a lifeline to freedom.

Maywood, IL

In the decades before the Civil War, enslaved people escaping the South followed the secret network of routes and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad toward freedom in the North. This memorial recalls a "Ten Mile Freedom House" that once stood here, offering shelter to those making the dangerous journey. The site ties the Chicago area into that clandestine web of resistance.

Lisbon, IL

Founded in 1835-36 by abolitionists who had migrated west from Oneida County, New York, the Lisbon Colony carried the fervor of the burning-over district's reform movements onto the Illinois prairie. These settlers made their community an active center of the anti-slavery cause, part of the network of sympathizers who resisted slavery in the decades before the Civil War.

Bastrop, TX

Local tradition holds that enslaved people gathered at this site even before freedom, and in 1864 — as the Civil War drew to its close — a small group organized this Baptist church with the help of Rev. Joshua Brice, baptizing new members in the Colorado River. By 1900 the congregation numbered about twenty, and a family deeded it nine acres in the early 1900s. New buildings in 1976 and 1988 carried its worship and schooling into the present.

Manor, TX

Oral tradition traces this congregation to outdoor worship services begun in 1874, with the church formally organized in 1884 after Leonard Eck donated land and the B. J. Lee family gave a building. The congregation moved to its present property in 1916, and in 1928–1929 a Rosenwald school was built on the church's land to serve students in rural Travis County. Through education and community assistance, Union Lee Missionary Baptist Church has remained a cornerstone of the area.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993

Chartered in 1935 after African-American musicians were shut out of Philadelphia's white musicians' union, Local 274 became a home and advocate for Black performers. Its rolls included giants of modern jazz such as John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, whose innovations reshaped American music. When it dissolved in 1971, it was the last predominantly Black local of the American Federation of Musicians in the country.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2012

Organized in 1908, Local 471 of the American Federation of Musicians was one of Pennsylvania's first African American musicians' unions, giving Black performers a foothold in an industry that often shut them out. As Pittsburgh became a powerhouse of the mid-century jazz world, the local counted greats like Mary Lou Williams, Art Blakey, Ray Brown, and George Benson among its members. A contentious merger with the white local in the 1960s ended one of the oldest Black union organizations in the country.

Fannin, TX

Union Missionary Baptist Church traces its beginnings to the 1880s among Baptists in Cologne, a freedmen's colony whose members are believed to have built their first church, St. John, along Perdido Creek in 1884. Known for a time as Mt. Carmel, the congregation split and then reunited in Fannin under the name Union Missionary after a storm damaged their building in the 1930s. Since restoring the Fannin church in 1950, members have worshiped in the same building, sustaining a community of faith for well over a century.