Students on the Issues - Celebrating Black History: Black Firsts

Celebrating Black History: Black Firsts
Compiled by Bill Maxwell, Publisher, February 18, 2004

The following list describes the wide range of events in African-American history. These breakthroughs, great and small, tell of courageous people who refused to accept old limitations, who refused to surrender to hardship and injustice. Moreover, these firsts combine to reveal a very personal and nontheoretical chart of the progress of equal opportunity and black achievement in America.

1783	James Derham, born a slave in Philadelphia in 1762, becomes the first black physician in the United States.
1826	The first black college graduate, John Russwurm, receives his degree from Bowdoin College in Maine in 1826.
1834	First black to obtain a patent from the U.S. Patent Office is Henry Blair of Greenosa, Md. Blair invents a corn planter. He later invents a cotton seed planter.
1845	First black lawyer to be formally admitted to the bar is Macon B. Allen after he passes the state bar examination in Worcester, Mass.
1853	First novel written by a black American and published is a work by W.W. Brown, titled Clotel: A Tale of the Southern States.
1860	First African-American baseball team to tour various parts of the country is called the Brooklyn Excelsiors.
1862	Mary Patterson becomes the first black woman in the United States to earn an M.A. degree, awarded her by Oberlin College.
1865	Martin R. Delany becomes the first black to reach the rank of major in the U.S. Army.
1865	John Rock is the first black lawyer to be admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.
1872	The first black woman lawyer, Charlotte E. Roy, receives her degree from Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C.
1873	The first black municipal judge, M.W. Gibbs, is elected in Little Rock, Ark.
1873	Susan McKinney, believed to be the first black woman to enter the medical profession formally, is certified as a physician.
1875	Oscar Lewis is the first black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby. He rode Aristides.
1884	The first black professional baseball team, the Cuban Giants, is formed in New York City by Frank Thompson from a group of black waiters at a Long Island hotel.
1890	The first medical journal written for and by blacks is published in Jackson, Miss. The editor of the publication is Bandaburst Lynk, M.D. The journal lasted 18 months.
1903	Lena Walker becomes the first black woman bank president. Miss Walker was the founder and chief executive of the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Va.
1910	First black to be awarded a coveted Rhodes Scholarship is Alain Leroy Locke of Philadelphia. Locke received his B.A. degree from Howard University in 1908.
1926	First black woman lawyer to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court is Viloette M. Anderson of Chicago.
1939	First black woman to become a judge, Jane Matilda Bolin, is appointed to the bench of Court of Domestic Relations by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York City.
1940	Benjamin O. Davis Sr. is promoted to the rank of brigadier general in 1940, thus becoming the first black to hold this post in the U.S. Army.
1942	Bernard W. Robinson, a medical student at Harvard, becomes the first black to be commissioned an officer in the U.S. Navy.
1943	Dr. W.E.B. DuBois becomes the first black admitted to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. At the time of his admittance, Dr. DuBois headed the Department of Sociology at Atlanta University.
1945	First black nurse to be commissioned in the Navy Reserve Corps is Phyllis Mae Dolly.
1947	John Lee of Indianapolis, Ind., becomes the first black commissioned officer in the Regular Navy.
1949	First black pilot in the U.S. Naval Reserve is Jesse Leroy Brown from Hattiesburg, Va. On Dec. 4, 1950, at Changjin Reservoir in Korea, Jesse Brown became the first black naval pilot to be killed in action.
1950	Gwendolyn Brooks wins the Pulitzer Prize for her volume of poetry. She was the first black woman to win the award and also the first black woman elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
1958	Ruth Carol Taylor becomes the first black flight attendant.
1959	John McLendon becomes the first black to coach an integrated professional basketball team, the Cleveland Pipers of the National Industrial Basketball League.
1962	The first black warship commander, Lt. Cmdr. Samuel L. Gravely, assumes command of the USS Falgout, a destroyer escort.
1967	Bill Russell, star center of the world-champion Boston Celtics, becomes the first black to direct a major league sports team when he is named to succeed Red Auerbach as coach of the Boston basketball franchise.
1968	Martin Briscoe becomes the first black quarterback in pro football.
1969	Federal Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. is elected a trustee of Yale University, the first black to be so honored.
1971	Dr. James Allen Colston becomes the first black to head a college in New York State (and possibly the first to head a "predominantly white" college in the United States) when he is appointed president of the two-year Bronx Community College in New York City.
1975	The U.S. Navy commissions Dr. Donna P. Davis as a lieutenant in the Navy's medical corps, making Lt. Davis the first black woman physician in the corp's history.
1979	Audrey Neal becomes the first black woman or woman of any ethnic group to become a longshoreman on the Eastern Seaboard.
1980	Dr. Levi Watkins Jr. performs the first surgical implantation of the automatic implantable defibrillator in the human heart. The device corrects an ailment known as ventricular fibrillation, or arrhythmia, which prevents the heart from pumping blood.
1988	Eugene Antonio Marino becomes the first black Roman Catholic archbishop in the United States as he is named archbishop of the Atlanta archdiocese.
1989	Former St. Louis Cardinal first baseman Bill White assumes office as president of the National League, becoming the first black to head a professional sports league.
1989	Episcopal Rev. Barbara Harris, a black, becomes the first female bishop in the worldwide Anglican Communion.
1991	Harry K. Singletary becomes the first African American to head the Florida Department of Corrections.

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