12 African Americans you should know

During his lifetime the United States of America did not exist. But during the Boston massacre, an uprising against British troops, the dock worker Crispus Attucks was the first of five civilians to be killed on March 5, 1770. Henceforth, he became the black martyr of the American Revolution. Attucks was the son of an African and an Indian woman and an escaped slave.

The mathematician and astronomer is considered the first African American scientist. But he was also a passionate abolitionist and criticized the later president Thomas Jefferson for his view that blacks were mentally inferior to whites. In doing so, Banneker compared the situation of blacks with that of the US under the "tyranny of the British crown" before the War of Independence.

She was born on the banks of the Gambia River in Africa before she was sold into slavery at the age of seven. Her "owners" taught her to read and write. She published her first poem at the age of 13, and in 1773 she was the first African American to publish an entire volume of poetry. For this she was also praised by George Washington, who invited her to his home.

Free-born James Forten first went to sea and then trained as a sailmaker in Philadelphia. In 1798, he purchased the sail business where he did his apprenticeship and soon became a wealthy man. He never sold a sail to a slave ship. He used his wealth and prestige to advocate for abolition and civil rights for blacks in the US. His name is on the list of the 100 greatest African Americans.

Born into slavery as Isabella Bomfree, she faced harsh punishment until escaping with her child and being freed by an abolitionist family in 1827. As a travelling preacher known as Sojourner Truth, she became a roving advocate for women's rights and the abolition of slavery. Her famous 1851 speech "Ain't I a Woman?" called for racial and gender equality, and she later opposed segregation.

A free-born woman who became a journalist, abolitionist, lecturer and women's rights advocate, Maria W. Stewart was the first African American to address an audience of men and women who were both black and white. "It is not the color of the skin that makes the man or the woman, but the principle formed in the soul," she famously said. "Brilliant wit will shine, come from whence it will."

Having escaped slavery in 1849, the abolitionist famously became a "conductor" on the "Underground Railroad," a series of safe houses through which liberated slaves on southern plantations could travel to freedom in the Union in the north. Later, she helped former slaves overcome poverty. Tubman will replace slaveholder and former president Andrew Jackson on a new 20 dollar bill.

The civil war brought him freedom from slavery before he became an influential educator, author and advisor to several US presidents. He encouraged African Americans to improve their status through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to fight segregation and the disenfranchisement of blacks in the Jim Crow South. He was the first African American to dine with a president in 1901.

Born to parents who were slaves before the civil war, Ida B. Wells-Barnett became an influential journalist, educator, civil rights leader and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She famously documented widespread lynchings in the South, and a justice system that "takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons."

A diplomat under president Theodore Roosevelt's service and the first African American professor at New York University, Johnson was also managing director of the NAACP and fought against racism and ongoing black lynchings. He was also a key member of the Harlem Renaissance as a writer and poet. His poem "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" was later adopted as an African American "national anthem."

Also a founder of the NAACP, the journalist, historian and civil rights activist became in 1895 the first black man to receive a doctorate from Harvard; he wrote his thesis on the slave trade. Despite his academic achievements, he was denied a career at the top US institutions. In 1919 he organized the first Paris "Exhibit of American Negroes" in which he challenged racist stereotypes.

Her story sparked the civil rights movement in the US. Parks was arrested in 1955 because she refused to vacate her seat on the bus for a white passenger. The arrest triggered the "Montgomery Bus Boycott," which ultimately brought Martin Luther King to the forefront of the civil rights struggle. She has been immortalized as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement."