Don P. Hooper

As the Registrar of the Treasury, Blanche K. Bruce was the first African American whose signature appeared on US paper currency in 1881. He was appointed by President James A. Garfield.

William Wells Brown wrote “Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter” – the first documented published novel written by an African American.

In 1760, Jupiter Hammon became the first known “published” African American writer for his poem “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries.” He was born a slave and remained so his entire life under the ownership of the Lloyd family of Long Island, New York.

Happy Birthday Sidney Poitier, the first African American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field in 1963.

Dr. Charles Richard Drew was the first person to develop the blood bank. During his work at Columbia University he found that blood could be preserved and reconstituted at a later date.

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the 1st successful open heart surgery in 1893 and founded Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses – 1st black-owned hospital in America.

In 1958, Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie became the first African American female and male Grammy winners.

In 1989, Philip Emeagwali won the Gordon Bell Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for developing the fastest software in the world. He programmed the Connection Machine to compute a world record 3.1 billion calculations per second using 65,536 processors to simulate oil reservoirs.

Ernest Everett Just, an eminent marine biologist, was a leader and authority for his work with cell development.

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Ralph J. Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for mediating the Arab-Israeli truce. Martin Luther King, Jr., became the second African-American Peace Prize winner in 1964