African-American Role Models - #2 Quiz

Answer: "Goose" Tatum

"Goose" Tatum was born Reece Tatum in May, 1921, in El Dorado, Arkansas, the fifth of seven children. He was a man who excelled at both baseball and basketball, and by 1937 he was playing baseball in the Negro leagues where he was seen by Abe Saperstein, the founder of the Harlem Globetrotters. With his 6'4" height and his 84" arm span, his comedy routines were set off against those attributes. He played basketball in 1941 and 1942 with the Globetrotters but then was drafted to the Army. After the War he returned to playing for the Globetrotters, while still playing baseball where he played in an all-star game.

During Tatum's time with the Globetrotters he invented the hook shot for which a later player, named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, became well-known. He played with the Globetrotters for another ten years after the War and then branched out with his own teams. His #50 jersey was retired in February 2002, at the same time in which he became a Globetrotters' "Legend".

Answer: Andrew Brimmer

Andrew Felton Brimmer, born in September, 1926, in Louisiana where his father was a sharecropper, was an economist and author who attended the University of Washington for both his undergraduate and his master's degrees, after which he went to India on a Fulbright Scholarship. Upon his return he enrolled in Harvard and received his Ph.D. degree in 1957.

President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1966, on which he served for eight years. In 1974 he resigned, first to teach at Harvard and then to branch out into business on his own as a consultant. In 1962, while a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Brimmer published a book entitled "Life Insurance Companies in the Capital Markets".

Answer: Chicago

Very little is known of Point du Sable's antecedents, including even his date or place of birth. However, the consensus is that he was born in Haiti, circa 1745, to a French man and a Haitian woman, and thus he was of African descent.

Sometime probably in the late 1780s he settled on the north bank of the Chicago River, near to its mouth. He was known to be there in 1790 because a Hugh Heward bought supplies from him on his way west. In 1794 he was described as a large man as well as a wealthy trader by another person who'd traded with him. In 1800 he sold his farm and property and moved to St. Charles, Missouri. The reason for the move is, also, not known, with scholars disagreeing with each other. It could have been because of the death of his wife, a Potowatomie by the name of Kittihawa, otherwise known as Catherine. In 1968 the state of Illinois acknowledged du Sable as the founder of the city of Chicago.

Answer: Sojourner Truth

Isabella Baumfree was born a slave about 1797 in New York state. Her last name was that of her father's owner. After being sold a number of times, she was married to another slave by the name of Thomas, by whom she had five children.
In 1827 New York freed all the slaves. Isabella had left Thomas and taken their youngest child with her, going to work for a family named Van Wagenen. While working for that family, she found that another of her children had been sold to a slave owner in Alabama. Since this child had been freed under New York law, she didn't feel he could be a slave in Alabama and took the matter to court, where she won.

About that time she had a religious moment and moved to New York city and into a religious commune. She still worked as a household servant while living there, but the commune fell apart in a few years because of defamations. Isabella was accused of poisoning. She again went to court, this time for libel, and won that case, too.

In 1843 she became Sojourer Truth and became a traveling preacher, which was the meaning of her name, in the belief that the Holy Spirit had called her. In the late 1840s, now Sojourner, she began preaching about the abolitionist movement and in 1850 she branched out to womens' suffrage. Her autobiography, "The Narrative of Sojourner Truth" had the introduction written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who also wrote about her in the Atlantic Monthly.

Later, Sojourner moved to Michigan and again joined a commune, although this time it was one associated with the Quakers. Active collecting food and clothes for Black regiments during the Civil War and recruiting troops for the Union forces, she also tried to challenge the discrimination by street cars in Washington, D.C., when she was there to meet President Abraham Lincoln. In 1870 forward, without success, she tried to garner land grants from the federal government for former slaves. Sojourner Truth had strong support from many famous people of that day, including Parker Pillsbury, Amy Post, Susan B. Anthony and others.

Answer: Jackie Robinson

Jack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson was born January, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia. In 1947 he began playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson was the first black man to play in the major leagues since the 1880s and, as such, broke the color line in the leagues allowing other African-American players to leave the Negro Leagues and join the major leagues.

His career with the Brooklyn Dodgers last over ten seasons and included six World Series as well as a World Championship. Robinson was given the inaugural MLB Rookie of the Year in 1947 and in 1949 was the first black player to win the National League's MVP. Then, in 1962, he was entered into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and later, in 1997, his jersey uniform number, 42, was retired from all the major league teams. For his achievements, Jackie Robinson was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Unfortunately both were given after his death.

Answer: Harriet E. Wilson

Harriet E. Wilson, born in March, 1825, was born a free person of mixed race in Milford, New Hampshire who was abandoned by her mother, sometime in 1830-31.

Wilson's one novel was "Our Nig: Sketches of the Life of a Free Black" and was believed to have been published in 1859. It did not do well. In 1982 a Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and colleagues agreed it was the first novel written by an African-American. It was republished in 2004. The novel pointed out that even in the North, where the people of color were free, they were still abused and treated very differently from the white people.

Harriet Wilson's life was a hard one, simply trying to survive. Her only son died in a poorhouse where she had to put him because she could not work and pay for his care, too. She worked as a housekeeper and seamtress, and eventually as a spirtualist in Boston, working as a "clairvoyant physician" while speaking on labor reform, children's education, and matters of spirtuality.

Answer: umpire

Emmett Littleton Ashford, nicknamed "Ash", was born in November, 1914, in Los Angeles, California. He was the first black umpire in Major League Baseball and worked in the American League. As a young man, while working as a post office clerk, he played baseball for a semi-pro team and spent most of the time on the bench. One day the umpire didn't show up and Ash was asked to be the umpire. He found he liked it.

He resigned his job with the post office after becoming the first black umpire in organized baseball. After that league, the Southwestern International League ended, he joined the Arizona-Texas, the Western International, and the Pacific Coast leagues, in that order.

In September, 1965, his contract was sold to the American League and he'd finally reached what he'd dreamed about when he was in the service in World War II and Jackie Robinson had broken baseball's color barrier. Ashford worked all five games of the World Series in 1970 as well as being left-field umpire in the 1967 All-Star Game. After reaching the retirement age required by the American League, he became a public relations advisor for Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. He was also the head umpire for the Alaska League for three years and showed in a number of advertisements, television and movies. His daughter wrote a book that was published in 2004 called "Strrr-ike! Emmett Ashford, Major League Umpire". He had a full and busy life, indeed.

Answer: African Methodist Episcopal Church

Richard Allen was born into slavery in February, 1760, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When he was 17 both his master and he were converted by an itinerant Methodist preacher. After he was converted, his master allowed his slaves to buy their freedom, which Allen, by working odd jobs, managed to do in 1783. In the interim he began preaching and was asked to return to Philadelphia from Baltimore to teach and preach at Saint George's Methodist Episcopal Church. As more and more African-Americans began attending services, hard feelings started and the church seating became segregated. In 1787 he and another pastor as well as many congregants walked out and began the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was the first Methodist church in the country for African-Americans. In 1794 the church was dedicated by the Bishop with Allen serving as pastor. In 1799 he was ordained a Deacon.

Over the years other AME churches were formed in the east and in 1816 Allen and the other pastors of the AME churches met and formed the new denomination.
Allen was named the Bishop of the new African Methodist Episcopal Church and when that happened he became the first African-American Bishop in the United States. Bishop Allen so firmly believed in education that he opened day schools for black children. He hated slavery, worked for abolition, and maintained a stop on the Underground Railroad. He was a man who made a difference for his people, all to the better!

Answer: Bessie Coleman

Elizabeth "Bessie" Coleman was born in January, 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, the 10th of 13 children to sharecroppers, one of whom was part American Indian.
She was an excellent student and loved learning. At 18 she was accepted into what is now Langston University in Oklahoma but could only stay one term because of lack of money. After returning home, she realized there was no future there so she left for Chicago and lived with some brothers while working as a manicurist. Hearing the tales of the returning pilots from World War I she decided she wanted to learn how to fly. She could not attend a flight school here because she was both a woman as well as a woman of color. Further, no black US aviator would train her, either. The publisher of the Chicago "Defender" and a banker, backed her trip to France to study for her pilot's license. The publisher knew that because of her looks as well as her personality it would promote his paper.

On June 15, 1921, she received her aviator's license, the first African-American female to do so. She then spent two months with a French pilot as she worked on her flying skills. Later she went to Germany to the Fokker plant and took more lessons from their chief pilot.

Answer: Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey into slavery about February, 1818, in eastern Maryland. (He chose his own birthdate since it was unknown.) As was the manner of the times, he was separated from his mother as an infant and raised until about age 6 by his grandmother. At that time he was given to the "master" and later sent to Baltimore to live with the owner's brother, Hugh Auld. While there, Mrs. Ault started to teach him how to read but had to stop because her husband explained it was illegal to teach slaves how to read. By trading food for lessons, Frederick learned how to read from the neighbor boys. He also watched the writing of the men with whom he worked.

After being the property of several men, he finally made a successful escape to an abolitionist household in New York, sending for his young wife after his arrival there.

In due course, he became a lecturer for an anti-slavery society which led him into public speaking and writing. He wrote three autobiographies, alone, along with publishing his own newspaper. In 1848 he also participated in the first women's rights convention. He was internationally known as an abolitionist, a believer of equal opportunity and justice, and a staunch defender of women's rights.

Douglass was an advisor to President Lincoln, a US Marshal for the District of Columbia, Washington, DC, recorder of deeds, and Minister-General to the Republic of Haiti. He traveled widely across the world and was applauded wherever he went for his writings, speeches and teachings.