black history

NASA Astronaut Stephanie Wilson was born in 1966 in Boston, MA. She graduated with her Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Harvard (1988 )  and Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas (1992). Her  graduate research focused on control and modeling of large, flexible space structures. Selected by NASA in Read more

About seven years before the birth of Phillis Wheatley, Lucy Terry penned the earliest known work of literature by an African-American (and her only poem). She was born in Africa in 1724. Kidnapped as an infant, she was sold into slavery in around 1730. Upon her marriage, in 1756, to a free black named Obijah Read more

Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African American woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, was born in 1833 in Richmond, VA. She graduated in 1864 with her MD (after working as a nurse for several years) from the New England Female Medical College in Boston and worked extensively with the Freedmen’s Bureau Read more

Rebecca J. Cole (born March 16, 1846 in Philadelphia, PA) was the second African-American woman to obtain a medical degree in the United States. She graduated from the Woman’s Medical College in Pennsylvania (now administered by Drexel University) in 1867.  Over the course of her medical career, which spanned over fifty years, she fought for Read more