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10 important African American historical figures you may not know

Staff Writer
The Fayetteville Observer
Eugene Jacques Bullard, the first African American combat pilot, was one of 200 Americans who flew for France in World War I. [Contributed]

A military force of some 545 Haitian "free men of color," the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue fought alongside French troops and American colonists against the British during the bloody siege of Savannah in the Revolutionary War.  The Chasseurs suffered a number of killed and wounded during the unsuccessful push  to dislodge the British forces from coastal Georgia in September and October of 1779.

Although little known here, the Chasseurs' role in helping to liberate the American colonies from British rule is a point of immense pride in Haiti. Many of their number went on to form the officer class of the rebel armies that fought to secure their own nation's independence from the French during the Haitian Revolution of 1804. 

A monument in Savannah's Franklin Square honors the sacrifices of the Chasseurs, the largest unit of soldiers of African descent to fight in the Revolutionary War.

• Elizabeth Freeman was the first enslaved African American to successfully sue for her freedom in Massachusetts. Her legal case served as the  precedent in the State Supreme Court that ultimately brought an end to slavery in the state.

Born about 1742 to enslaved parents in Claverack, New York, "Bet" or "MumBet" was given to the Ashley family of Sheffield, Massachusetts, in her early teens.

In 1780, she suffered a deep wound on her arm while trying to shield her daughter Betsy from the blow of a heated shovel wielded by Mrs. Ashley. She left the wound uncovered as it healed as evidence of her harsh treatment.

In her case, Brom and Bett v. Ashley (1781), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court  found slavery to be inconsistent with the 1780 state Constitution. 

Upon securing her freedom, she took the name Elizabeth Freeman. She later moved into her own house with Betsy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where her skills as a healer,  midwife and nurse were widely recognized.

Elizabeth Freeman died in 1829 and remains an inspiration to those who work for the freedom and safety of all.

"Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it — just to stand one minute on God's earth a free woman — I would."

• Venerable Pierre Toussaint was a former slave from the French colony of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) who was brought to New York City by his owners in 1787. There he eventually gained his freedom and became a noted philanthropist to the poor of the city. Freed in 1807 after the death of his mistress, Pierre took the surname of "Toussaint" in honor of the hero of the Haitian Revolution which established that nation.

After his marriage in 1811 to Juliette Noel, Toussaint and his wife performed many charitable works. Among those works included opening their home as an orphanage, employment bureau, and a refuge for travelers. He contributed funds and helped raise money to build Saint Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street. Considered one of the leading black New Yorkers of his day, his ghostwritten memoir was published in 1854.

Due to his devout and exemplary life, the Roman Catholic Church has been investigating his life for possible canonization and in 1996 he was declared "Venerable" by Pope John Paul II, the second step in the process. Toussaint is the first layperson to be buried in the crypt below the main altar of Saint Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, normally reserved for bishops of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

A Wall Street broker noted as "the only black millionaire in New York," Jeremiah G. Hamilton (sometimes Jerry Hamilton) amassed a fortune of $2 million (about $45 million today) by the time of his death in 1875.  Hamilton was a shrewd financial agent and the subject of much newspaper coverage in his day, although his story is virtually absent from modern historical literature.

Almost a decade later, after the 1835 Great Fire of New York destroyed most of the buildings on the southeast tip of Manhattan, Hamilton accrued about $5 million in 2013 dollars by taking  advantage of several of the fire victims' misfortunes. His business practices were controversial; where most black entrepreneurs sold their goods to other blacks, Hamilton cut a swath through the white New York business world of the mid-1830s, a domain where his depredations soon earned him the nickname of "The Prince of Darkness."

Although he circulated among the financial elite and was himself very wealthy, Hamilton was also a victim of the racism against African Americans so pervasive during his time. During the New York City draft riots in 1863, white men seeking to lynch Hamilton broke into his house, but were turned away with only liquor, cigars, and an old suit by his wife Eliza after she said her husband was not home. Eliza Hamilton was white which made her marriage to Jeremiah taboo for the time.

At the time of his death in May 1875, Jeremiah Hamilton was said by obituaries to be the richest black man in the United States. He is buried in his family lot in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

• William Drew Robeson I  was the father of actor Paul Robeson and the minister of Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey from 1880 to 1901. The church had been built for its black members by the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton.

He was born into slavery as William Drew Robeson in 1844 to Benjamin Robeson (1820 - circa 1889) and Sabra (1825 - circa 1885). They were enslaved on the Roberson  plantation near Cross Road Township in Martin County, North Carolina.

In 1860, when he was 15 years old, Robeson escaped slavery with his brother Ezekiel through the Underground Railroad and they made their way to Philadelphia.

During the Civil War, Robeson served in the Union Army as a laborer, entering in 1861 at the age of 16 to join the effort to end slavery in the South.

• Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin  was an African-American publisher, journalist, civil rights leader, suffragist, and editor of the Woman's Era, the first newspaper published by and for African-American women.

Ruffin supported women's suffrage and, in 1869, joined with Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone to form the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in Boston.

In 1895, Ruffin organized the National Federation of Afro-American Women and convened The First National Conference of the Colored Women of America in Boston, which was attended by women from 42 black women's clubs from 14 states.

• Eugene Jacques Bullard, born Eugene James Bullard, was the first African-American military pilot. 

Bullard was born in Columbus, Georgia, the seventh of 10 children born to William (Octave) Bullard, a black man who was from Martinique, and Josephine ("Yokalee") Thomas, an indigenous Creek woman. His father's ancestors had been enslaved in Haiti by French refugees who later fled during the Haitian Revolution. 

Before becoming a pilot,  Bullard served in the French Foreign Legion as member of the infantry. 

He earned his wings from an aviation school in Tours, France on May 5, 1917, and served as a pilot for the 93 SPAD Squadron of the famed Lafayette Escadrille in the French Aéronautique Militaire.

During his lifetime, Bullard was awarded fifteen French combat medals, including the Knight of the Légion d’honneur, Médaille Militaire, Croix de Guerre, Volunteer’s Cross (Croix du combattant volontaire), Wounded Insignia, World War I Commemorative Medal, World War I Victory Medal, Freedom Medal, and the World War II Commemorative Medal.

After the war, Bullard became part owner of his own nightclub, Le Grand Duc, in Paris. The Prince of Wales, novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and actress Gloria Swanson were among those who visited the popular establishment. Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Bricktop, Florence Jones and many other famous black entertainers of the day performed there. 

He returned to the U.S. by way of neutral Spain in 1940 after fighting against the Nazis in the invasion of France. He died in New York City of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, at the age of 66.

• Daisy Lee Gatson Bates was an American civil rights activist, publisher, journalist, and lecturer who played a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957. An ardent supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she was a mentor to the Little Rock Nine, the African American students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock in 1957.

Bates remained at the center of the desegregation battle on behalf of the NAACP and the civil rights movement in Arkansas until June 1960 when she moved to New York to write a memoir of her desegregation experiences in Little Rock, "The Long Shadow of Little Rock."  

Chosen to fill a vacancy on the national board of the NAACP in 1957, Bates was reelected to successive three-year terms through 1970.

Bates' prominence as one of the few female civil rights leaders of the period was recognized by her selection as the only female to speak at the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.

Born  April 17, 1912 as the youngest of twelve children in Culloden, Georgia, Jo Ann Robinson would become a successful educator and famous civil rights activist.  After graduating from Fort Valley State College in 1934, she became a public school teacher in Macon, Georgia.  She later earned an M.A. in English at Atlanta University.  She accepted a position at Alabama State College in Montgomery and joined the Women's Political Council (WPC) then headed by Mary Fair Burks. 

Robinson was verbally attacked by a bus driver in 1949.  That incident persuaded her that the city's racial structure had to change.  In 1950, she became president of the WPC and led the group's efforts to focus attention on the abuses of white bus drivers toward black passengers.

When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus on December 1, 1955, Robinson spent the entire night printing out 35,000 handbills calling for a boycott of the Montgomery bus system.  She and supporters passed the flyers out on Friday afternoon which called for a one day boycott to begin the following Monday. 

After the successful one-day boycott, other local leaders including Reverends Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr. and labor union activist E.D. Nixon joined Robinson in establishing the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) with  King as president.  

Jo Ann Robinson and other WPC members helped sustain the year-long boycott by providing transportation for numerous black residents.  Eventually a court ruling forced Montgomery to desegregate its buses.  Moreover the boycott, the first successful protest of segregation in the Deep South, inspired other civil rights demonstrations in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s.

• Amelia Isadora Platts Boynton Robinson  was a  key figure in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

Her early activism included holding black voter registration drives in Selma, Alabama, from the 1930s through the '50s.

In 1964, she became both the first African-American woman and the first female Democratic candidate to run for a seat in Congress from Alabama. 

The following year, she helped lead a civil rights march during which she and her fellow activists were brutally beaten by state troopers. The event, which became known as Bloody Sunday, drew nationwide attention to the Civil Rights movement.

In 1990, Boynton was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Medal of Freedom. She died on August 26, 2015 at the age of 104. 

In 2014, actress Lorraine Toussaint played Robinson in the Ava DuVernay film Selma.

Fort Bragg Stories is a collaboration between The Fayetteville Observer and WUNC’s American Homefront Project to commemorate a century of history at Fort Bragg through personal narratives. If you’d like to share your Fort Bragg story, you can email fortbraggstories@wunc.org.

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