(Updated: February 5, 2021)
Bessie Coleman (left) Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain // Shirley Chisholm (center) Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain // Dr. Lonnie Johnson (right) Office of Naval Research Flickr, CC BY 2.0
Whether they were involved in Civil Rights, politics, science, technology, sports, or music, African-American history is full of innovators, though they don't always get their due. Here are 25 unheralded Black pioneers and trailblazers you should know.
1. JESSE L. BROWN
When Jesse LeRoy Brown was a teenager, he wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to express his disappointment that African Americans weren't flying in the military. While that changed in the Air Force in the early '40s with the Tuskegee Airmen, it would be Brown himself that would break that barrier for the Navy in 1947. By 1949 he was an officer, and in 1950, the United States was at war in Korea and he was in the action. Brown and his unit were soon airborne, completing dangerous missions to take out targets and protect troops on the ground.