Last month, I realized with a sense of doom that Black History Month was rapidly approaching. I knew that I had to address the month on Stereohyped, but I had no idea how to do it in a way that wouldn't be completely trite. That's where the doom came in. I figured it I was going to participate in a month-long affair whose purpose many people — myself included, sometimes — question, I should at least learn something in the process. So I decided to write a daily post that highlighted a figure in black history (usually Black American history) that got glazed over when historians decided who would and wouldn't become bold names in our text books, and crossed my fingers that it wouldn't come across as totally cheesy, uncharacteristically earnest, and boring. Well, it was often cheesy and uncharacteristically earnest, but the reception from you all, not to mention other bloggers, has been overwhelmingly positive. And I swear I wouldn't have gotten through the month if it weren't for your helpful suggestions.

CONTINUED »

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

“It’s not that I don’t like Babe Ruth, I just don’t think he was the best of his time. Satchel Paige was striking people out from his wheel chair at age 63! And he was tenth best. There were nine Negro players better than him! It’s almost like saying, 'I won the New York City Marathon this year, but no Kenyans ran.' It’s not a sport until brothers show up. It’s just a game.” — Chris Rock

Josh Gibson was probably smiling from the grave when Chris Rock made that statement recently. Gibson never had the "fortune" of playing baseball alongside Babe Ruth in the Major Leagues, but in the Negro Leagues, the 6'1 catcher was a force to be reckoned with and was known, incidentally, as the "Black Babe Ruth." Gibson, who was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972, is considered by baseball historians to be one of the best catchers and power hitters to play in any league. Ever. Just three months before Jackie Robinson made history by joining the major leagues in 1947, Gibson died of a stroke at the age of 35.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

Born in 1831 in Delaware, Rebecca Lee Crumpler was raised by an aunt who spent much of her time caring for sick people in the community. It might have been her early experiences with her ailing neighbors that inspired her to become a nurse, a job she held in Massachusetts from 1852 to 1860, when she enrolled in the New England Female Medical College with the help of the doctors she had worked under as a nurse. When she graduated, she became, not only the first African American to graduate from the New England Female Medical College but the first African American to become a licensed physician. Crumpler spent the majority of her career treating sick women and children in Richmond, Va. Few photographs or portraits of Crumpler have survived, and most of what we know about her comes from her the Book of Medical Discourses, which she published in 1883. It's one of the first medical texts written by a black person.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM. Only two more left!

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

Facts about Edmonia Lewis's early years are fuzzy. She was born some time in the 1840s to a mother who was a Chippewa Indian and a father who she described as a free black man from the West Indies. According to Edmonia, her real name was Wild Fire, given to her by her mother. As the story goes, her parents died when she was a young girl, and she lived among the Chippewa Indians. However, her wealthy brother, Samuel Lewis, said that he became her guardian after their parents died. He eventually arranged for her to attend Oberlin College, where there was a hotbed of abolitionist activity. While there, she was accused of poisoning two white female students, and was savagely beaten before her trial, at which she was represented by John Mercer Langston. After she was acquitted in 1862, many of her fellow classmates, most of them white, carried her from the courtroom on their shoulders.

Lewis left Oberlin before finishing her degree to study sculpting in Boston. She quickly found commercial success, and her earnings helped finance a trip to Italy, where she sculpted works with an abolitionist theme. Her masterwork, The Death of Cleopatra, is now on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Art. With her work, Lewis sought to dispel the myth that blacks had nothing to offer artistically and intellectually, and insisted on being photographed standing beside her work and explaining it extensively. The date of her death is unknown.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

She wasn't as well-known as Rosa Parks, but as her childhood friend, Johnnie Carr was by her side during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and succeeded Martin Luther King, Jr. as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association. She held the title until her death two days ago at the age of 97.

"Johnnie Carr is one of the three major icons of the Civil Rights Movement: Dr. King, Rosa Parks and Johnnie Carr," said Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "I think ultimately, when the final history books are written, she'll be one of the few people remembered for that terrific movement."

As the Improvement Association's president, Carr helped lead several initiatives to improve race relations and conditions for blacks. She was involved in a lawsuit to desegregate Montgomery schools, with her then-13-year-old son, Arlam, the named plaintiff.

This concludes your daily dose of Black History Month.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

Octavia Butler made her career as a science fiction writer despite the dearth of other black female authors in the genre. Butler overcame dyslexia to become a highly successful, award-winning author, publishing her first novel, Patternmaster in 1976. Butler used traditional science fiction themes to explore issues of race, sexuality, and class — in 1979's Kindred, she used time travel as a vehicle to tell a story about American slavery. In 1995, Butler became the first and only science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. She died in 2006 at the age of 58.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

So the fact that Malcolm X was killed isn't such an obscure fact, but you might not have known that today is the 43rd anniversary of his death. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated just before delivering a speech to a crowd of 400 in New York City.

The profound religious and political sojourn of Malcolm X was hardly noticed in the immediate aftermath of his assassination. The New York Times editorialized that Malcolm was “an irresponsible demagogue” and “an extraordinary and twisted man,” who had utilized his “true gifts to evil purpose.” Time magazine declared that the dead leader was “an unashamed demagogue” whose “gospel was hatred.” But others saw Malcolm X more clearly. President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana sent a telegram of condolence to Malcolm’s widow, saying that “your husband lived a life of dedication for human equality and dignity so that the Afro-American and people of color everywhere may live as man. His work in the cause of freedom will not be in vain …”

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

During World War I, Bessie Coleman was a 20-something manicurist in Chicago who was tantalized by tales of fighter pilots returning home from Europe. Inspired by their stories, Coleman longed to go to flight school, but American schools wouldn't admit her because she was a black woman. Sponsored by a wealthy real estate mogul, Coleman went to school to learn French and, in 1920, moved to Paris, where she became the first African American woman in the world to earn her pilot's license.

In the following years, Coleman made a name for herself doing exhibition flying in air shows, where her daredevil stunts earned her the name Queen Bess. Her dream was to establish an American aviation school for blacks, but she never got to fulfill it. She died in a plane crash in 1926 at the age of 34.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

When John Mercer Langston, the son of a Virginia slave and her white master, was elected as town clerk in Oberlin Ohio in 1855, he became the first African American elected official. By the age of 14, Langston had enrolled at Oberlin College, where he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees, and, despite being rejected from law school, he passed the Ohio bar in 1854.

In his adult life, Langston was active in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. After recruiting blacks for the Union army during the Civil War, Langston was appointed inspector general of the Freedman's Bureau. Shortly after, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he established Howard University's Law School. In 1888, Langston ran for Congress as a Republican. When he finally won his seat after a prolonged battle with the incumbent Democrat, he became the first black man elected to U.S. Congress from Virginia, and the last for another century.

Langston, the great uncle of the infamous Langston Hughes, died in 1897.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!
Barbara Jordan accomplished many firsts in her years as a legislator. In 1966, she became the first black person to serve in the Texas state senate since 1883 and the first black woman to ever hold the position. In 1972, she became the first black woman from a Southern state to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1976, she was the first black woman to deliver the keynote speech, considered by many to be one of the best in modern history, at the Democratic National Convention. Jordan is famous for another speech, which she delivered before the House Judiciary Committee in support of the impeachment of President Nixon. Jordan also had a strong shot at being Jimmy Carter's running mate.

Jordan's story is especially important on President's Day, as we reflect on our past heads of state and get ready for a new one. If either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama win the presidency, they would have walked at least part of the way in Barbara Jordan's footsteps.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

Wilma Rudolph was an Olympic track and field star who overcame significant odds to become the first American woman to win three gold medals at the Olympics.

Rudolph was born in Tennessee in 1940. She was diagnosed with polio as a young girl, but by the age of 12 she had shed her braces and become a basketball and track star. She won a bronze medal in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, but it was during hte 1960 Rome Olympics that she broke the record with three gold medals. After retiring from sports, Rudolph became a teacher and sports commentator. She died of brain cancer in 1994.

This concludes your daily dose of Black History Month.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

Oscar Micheaux is responsible for the first movie produced, written and directed by an African American. Micheaux, born in 1893 to parents who were former slaves, produced, wrote and directed 44 films between 1919 and 1948. Known for his "race" films, Micheaux started out as a novelist and fell into filmmaking when he turned his novel, The Homesteader into a movie, which grossed $5,000. Micheaux used his power as a filmmaker to tackle race issues, dispel stereotypes. The black people playing the servants in white films were leading men and women in his.

This concludes your daily does of BHM.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

William Wells Brown was born a slave in Kentucky in 1815. According to legend, he's the grandson of Daniel Boone. As a boy working on a steamboat in the Mississippi River, Brown escaped to Canada, where he made a living as a steward on a ship that sailed the Great Lakes. During this time, he taught himself to read and write, married a free black woman, and became active in th Underground Railroad.

Through his work as an abolitionist, he became a renowned public speaker and a writer. He published several works — including an autobiography called The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave and Three Years in Europe, a travel memoir. With his 1853 novel, Clotel (or President's Daughter), which was based on the love affair of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson and published in England, he became and became the first African American to publish a novel. He was also the first African American to publish a play. He died in Massachusetts in 1884.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

On this day 215 years ago, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, which made it illegal for anyone to assist a runaway slave and set up a system by which runaway slaves could be seized, even in states that did not allow slavery, and returned to their masters. Although slaves already had no constitutional rights, the law stripped freed slaves of their rights, too, and they were often forbidden from showing proof of their freedom in court. By passing the law, congress made runaway slaves and their children fugitives for life. The Fugitive Slave Law prompted the development of the Underground Railroad.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

Alexandre Dumas is one of the most famous writers in French history. He popularized the serial novel with his books, the most famous of which are the Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844, The Three Musketeers) and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844-45, The Count of Monte-Cristo). Alexandre Dumas was also black.

The grandson of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave, Dumas left his village for Paris to find work at a young age. He soon became a playwright and then segued into serialized novels. His writing made him a fortune, which he quickly spent. Called the "King of Paris," Dumas had a reputation for his liberal spending habits and penchant for mistresses and parties.

Although he rarely addressed his black heritage, but his books were very popular with 19th century black audiences, who saw The Count of Monte Cristo as pro-emancipation.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM.

Send tips to lauren AT stereohyped.com!