They were written up while it was happening.

Astronomer and mathematician, born free in Maryland. Published almanacs computed by his own hand, helped survey the boundaries of the district that became Washington, D.C., and sent Thomas Jefferson a letter putting the case against slavery to the man who had written that all men are created equal.

Born in Paramaribo. His shoe-lasting machine did in a minute what a skilled hand-laster did in an hour, and halved the price of shoes. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-seven and never saw what it earned.

Born in Ontario to parents who had escaped slavery in Kentucky. More than fifty patents, most famously an automatic lubricator that let a steam engine be oiled without being stopped.

Nearly sixty patents. His induction telegraph let moving trains send messages to each other and to the station, which is the difference between two trains on one track being a schedule and being a collision.

Son of people who had escaped slavery. He drafted the patent drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, and his carbon filament made the electric light last long enough to be worth wiring a building for.

Performed one of the first successful heart surgeries in 1893, and founded Provident Hospital in Chicago because Black doctors were not permitted to practice elsewhere and Black nurses were not permitted to train.

Invented the three-position traffic signal — the caution phase between stop and go — and a smoke hood he used himself to pull men out of a collapsed tunnel under Lake Erie in 1916.

Born to parents who had been enslaved, orphaned at seven, washing laundry at twenty. She developed a hair-care line, built the factory and the sales force to carry it, and trained thousands of Black women as agents — most of whom had never earned their own money before.

Cell biologist whose work on the surface of the egg cell overturned how fertilisation was understood. American laboratories would not give him a serious appointment, so he did much of his work in Europe.

Born into slavery in Missouri. At Tuskegee he taught crop rotation to farmers whose soil had been ruined by cotton, and made peanuts and sweet potatoes worth planting instead. He refused to patent most of what he found, on the grounds that it belonged to everyone.

His work on storing blood plasma made blood banking possible and saved uncountable lives in the Second World War. He resigned from the Red Cross program he had helped build when it agreed to segregate donated blood by race.

Grandson of a man born into slavery. He synthesised physostigmine for glaucoma and worked out how to make steroid hormones cheaply from plants, which is why cortisone became a medicine ordinary people could afford.

Born into slavery in New York and freed herself. She sued a white man for the return of her son and won — one of the first Black women in America to do so — and spent the rest of her life speaking for abolition and for women.

Escaped slavery at twenty, then published his own newspaper, The North Star, when a Black man printing his own opinions was itself the argument. The most photographed American of the nineteenth century, deliberately: he understood what an image did.

Went back. Roughly nineteen times, into the country that legally owned her, to bring other people out. In the war she scouted for the Union and guided the Combahee River Raid, which freed more than seven hundred people in a night.

The first Black man to sit in the United States Senate, seated in 1870 in the chair Jefferson Davis had left. The Senate argued for two days about whether to let him take it.

Born into slavery in Virginia; elected to the Senate from Mississippi in 1875 and the first Black senator to serve a full term. No Black senator was seated again for eighty-five years.

Investigated lynching as a reporter — names, dates, places — and proved it was a tool of economic terror rather than a response to crime. A mob destroyed her Memphis press. She kept publishing, and helped found the NAACP.

First African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. Co-founded the NAACP and edited The Crisis. He wrote that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, and then spent the century proving it.

Built the largest Black mass movement in history out of Harlem — millions in the UNIA across the Americas, the Caribbean and Africa — and the Black Star Line, a shipping company owned by Black shareholders.

Fifteenth of seventeen children born to formerly enslaved parents. She opened a school for Black girls with five students and a rented house; it is now a university. She advised Franklin Roosevelt and founded the National Council of Negro Women.

Organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters into the first Black-led union to win a contract with a major American corporation, and threatened a march on Washington in 1941 that forced an order desegregating the defense industry.

Rebuilt Howard Law School into a machine for dismantling segregation and taught the lawyers who did it, Thurgood Marshall among them. He mapped the strategy that ended in Brown and died four years before the ruling.

Organized for the NAACP, ran the office at Martin Luther King's conference, and then helped young people found SNCC and told them to lead it themselves. Strong people, she said, do not need strong leaders.

Broke the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947 under an agreement not to answer back, which he kept for two seasons and then stopped keeping. He spent the rest of his life on civil rights and on Black-owned banking.

Negotiated the 1949 armistice agreements in the Middle East for the United Nations and became the first Black person of any nationality to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Argued Brown v. Board of Education and won, ending legal school segregation. He had already won twenty-eight other cases before the Supreme Court, and became its first Black justice in 1967.

Fourteen years old, killed in Mississippi for a lie. His mother insisted on an open casket so the country would have to look at what had been done. The citation below is from the week an all-white jury acquitted the men who did it.

A trained investigator for the NAACP who had spent years documenting sexual violence against Black women before she refused to move. She was not tired; she was organized.

Published her own newspaper in Arkansas and guided the nine students who integrated Little Rock Central High through a year of it, with a mob outside her house and her paper's advertisers pulled out from under her.

Led the Montgomery boycott at twenty-six and the movement that produced the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. He was working on a campaign about poverty and a strike by sanitation workers when he was killed.

A Mississippi sharecropper who tried to register to vote, lost her home and her job for it, and was beaten nearly to death in a jail cell in Winona. She then went to the 1964 Democratic convention and said so on television.

The NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, investigating murders nobody else would touch. He was shot in his own driveway in June 1963; the citation below is from that week. His killer was not convicted until 1994.

Wrote the brief in Brown v. Board as a young lawyer, argued ten cases before the Supreme Court and won nine, and became the first Black woman appointed to the federal bench.

Ran the National Council of Negro Women for forty years and was on the platform at the March on Washington, where none of the women were invited to speak. She kept organizing anyway, for another fifty years.

Harlem's congressman for a quarter century. As chairman of the education and labor committee he moved dozens of major bills — minimum wage, school funding — and attached to them the clause barring federal money from segregated programs.

Led the National Urban League through the 1960s and argued the case for Black employment in the boardrooms that could actually do something about it, which made him useful and unfashionable at the same time.

Taught himself to read in a prison library and became the most exacting critic of the country in his lifetime. After Mecca he was building an argument about human rights and Africa that he did not live to finish.

Born enslaved in Saint-Domingue and led the only slave revolt in history to found a state. France took him by trickery and he died in a cell in the Jura; Haiti was independent within a year.

When Italy invaded in 1935 he went to the League of Nations and told it exactly what it was choosing. Ethiopia's resistance became a cause in Black America — the citation below is from the winter of the invasion.

Jailed by the British for seven years on evidence a judge was later shown to have been paid to accept, and released to become the first president of an independent Kenya.

Led Ghana to independence in March 1957, the first sub-Saharan African colony to get out, and spent the rest of his life arguing that no African country was free until all of them were. The citation below is from that month.

The Congo's first elected prime minister, in office for eleven weeks before he was deposed and then murdered with foreign hands in it. He was thirty-five.

Twenty-seven years in prison for trying to end apartheid; walked out and became the first president elected by all South Africans. He chose truth and reconciliation over reprisal, which is a harder thing than winning.

The highest-paid Black entertainer in America in the 1920s, singing about money, work, sex and leaving in a voice that did not ask permission. She sold records in numbers the industry had not believed existed.

Left St. Louis for Paris and became the most famous entertainer in Europe. She smuggled intelligence for the French Resistance in her sheet music, and refused to play segregated houses at home.

Put ordinary Black speech on the page as poetry without apologizing for it, across forty years, and asked in print what happens to a dream deferred.

Trained anthropologist who went back to the South and to Haiti to collect what people actually said and believed, then wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God. She died in obscurity and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Lawyer, All-American footballer, and the most celebrated bass-baritone of his day, who used every stage to say what he thought about colonialism and Jim Crow. His country took his passport for eight years.

Wrote for the specific players in his own orchestra for fifty years and produced a body of American music nobody has matched. He toured the segregated South in a private railway car so his musicians would not have to ask anyone for a bed.

Grew up in the poorest quarter of New Orleans and changed what a soloist was — the reason improvisation sits at the center of American music. Every trumpet player after him is answering him.

Barred from Constitution Hall because she was Black, she sang instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday 1939 to seventy-five thousand people. The citation below is from the week after.

Sang Strange Fruit — a lynching described plainly, in a nightclub, in 1939 — and kept singing it under federal pressure to stop for the rest of her life.

Bought a camera in a pawnshop and became Life magazine's first Black staff photographer, then the first Black director of a major Hollywood film. He called the camera his choice of weapon.

Wrote the most precise sentences anyone has written about America and why it lies to itself, from Harlem and from France, and would not let either country off.

The first Black heavyweight champion of the world, and unforgivable to white America for enjoying it. His win over Jeffries in 1910 set off riots in dozens of cities, and Congress banned fight films.

Won four gold medals in Berlin in 1936 in front of Hitler. He came home to a country where he still could not ride in the front of a bus, and was never invited to the White House. The citation below is from that August.

Heavyweight champion for twelve years. When he knocked out Schmeling in 1938 the whole of Black America was listening on the radio at once, which had never happened before about anything.

The first Black player to compete at the US National Championships and the first to win Wimbledon, in 1957. She had learned the game on a Harlem street with a paddle.

Had polio as a child and was told she would not walk unaided. She won three gold medals at the Rome Olympics in 1960 and refused to attend a segregated homecoming parade, so her town held its first integrated one.