Sixty-three years before Jackie Robinson made his debut on the Brooklyn Dodgers, Moses Fleetwood “Fleet” Walker became the first African-American to play in a major league baseball game, when he played for an American Association team, the Toledo Bluestockings, on May 1, 1884. The game was played in Louisville, Kentucky. Walker, a catcher, played in 42 games for the Bluestockings. Source: Fleet Walker by Jon R. Husman...

“Twenty-fifth.—The effects of the last fall operated in some degree upon the feelings of Cribb, from its severity; yet the Champion endeavoured to remove this impression by making play, and striving (as in the former round) to put in a hit on Molineaux’s left eye, but the Moor, aware of the intent, warded it off, and in return knocked Cribb down.” — from Boxiana; or, Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism, from the Days of the...

Alice Coachman from Albany, Georgia, clears the bar 5 feet, 6-1/8 inches breaking the previous record at the 1948 Olympics held in London in front of 65,000 spectators. The last member of the team to compete, Coachman said in a 2003 interview for the National Visionary Leadership Project, that her coach criticized her for not working out the day before her jump, fearful that she would not medal, like most of the 11-member team. “I let her do...

Few of the fans filling the Montreal Forum on the night of January 18, 1958, knew they were witnessing history. There was enough for the crowd to be excited about. This was Hockey Night in Canada, a nationally broadcast weekly confrontation; that night’s competition pitted the Montreal Canadiens, the most dominant team in the history of the sport, against their archrivals the Boston Bruins. Few noticed a dark-complexioned left winter playing...

In the wake of the black history “remarks” about the abolitionist Frederick Douglass that we were treated to at the start of this Black History Month, we were reminded that not all black people have accepted their lot and meekly submitted to enslavement and whatever brutal treatment came with it. Frederick Douglass himself broke bad and beat the tar out of a “slave breaker” named Mr. Covey, who never tried to whip him again. Douglass was...

Oney Judge was born around 1773 on Mount Vernon, the Virginia plantation of the most celebrated hero of the American Revolution: George Washington. She was the daughter of Betty, a black seamstress (enslaved), and Andrew Judge, a white tailor (an indentured servant). We have no images of the girl, but she was described as having a light complexion. Oney spent her early years in the slave quarters on the plantation until age ten, when she was...