Editor’s note: For Black History Month, The Root is spotlighting less famous figures from the African American National Biography, whose stories cast a light on hidden or barely remembered episodes from the African-American past. William T. Shorey, a whaling captain known as the Black Ahab, after Moby Dick’s protagonist, was born in Barbados in 1859,…

Editor’s note: For Black History Month, The Root is spotlighting less famous figures from the African American National Biography, whose stories cast a light on hidden or barely remembered episodes from the African-American past. Gladys Bentley, a blues singer and lesbian icon, claimed to have been born in the Caribbean. Appearing on the hit 1950s game show You Bet…

There is a painting from 1920 of New Orleans Vodou priestess Marie Laveaux. The solemn woman in the portrait gazes, almost mournfully, at us with just a hint of the power and mayhem that resided behind those eyes. It was in 1830s New Orleans that Marie Laveaux emerged as a prominent spiritualist and healer. She…

In the late 1940s, a historian predicted that one day all of Mississippi’s schoolchildren, black and white, would come to know the name of Charles Caldwell, who gave his life during the Reconstruction struggle for black citizenship, economic opportunity and equal rights for women. It was a bold prediction at a time when the textbooks of…

Editor’s note: For Women’s History Month, The Root is spotlighting less famous figures from the African American National Biography, whose stories exemplify the extraordinary, and often unsung, accomplishments of African-American women from our past. With their combined 26 tennis grand-slam singles titles and 30 grand slams in doubles, few could deny that Venus and Serena Williams are the…

Editor’s note: For Women’s History Month, The Root is spotlighting less famous figures from the African American National Biography, whose stories exemplify the extraordinary, and often unsung, accomplishments of African-American women from our past. Regular readers of The Root are likely familiar with the fact that a small number of African Americans owned slaves, from the earliest days…

Editor’s note: For Women’s History Month, The Root is spotlighting less famous figures from the African American National Biography, whose stories exemplify the extraordinary, and often unsung, accomplishments of African-American women from our past. In modern wars, including the Civil War, women have taken on key assignments at the heart of the action as soldiers or nurses or performed supportive…

The idea that in order to succeed an artist must first suffer is one with a long history. In that sense, the life and work of Edmonia Lewis, the first black sculptor to gain an international reputation, is instructive, since art historians have judged that “the obstacles [she] overcame are unparalleled in American art.” She…

In the 1920s and 1930s, Ada “Bricktop” Smith reigned as the grande dame of the Paris nightclub scene. T.S. Eliot wrote a poem for her, and she was a muse to the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who boasted, “My greatest claim to fame is that I discovered Bricktop before [songwriter] Cole Porter.” It was under…