Business

This category includes blacks in finance, engineers, journalist, architects, inventors or own companies; work in corporate settlings and more.

Chicago Defender Newspaper founded

The Chicago Defender was founded on this date in 1905. The brainchild of Robert Abbott, it was one of the first African-American newspapers in this country to reach a circulation of more than 100,000.

| More

National Urban League founded.

This date marks the founding of the National Urban League (NUL) in 1911. The National Urban League is a nonprofit social service and civil rights organization with headquarters in New York City.

| More

Granville T. Woods, creative inventor and businessman


Granville
T. Woods

On this date in 1856, Granville T. Woods was born in Columbus, Ohio.

He was an African American businessman and inventor. Woods began work in a machine shop at age ten. Though largely self-taught, he studied electrical and mechanical engineering from 1876 to 1878. After that he worked on a British steamer, then became an engineer on a railroad based in Cincinnati, where he settled around 1880. Woods received his first patent in 1884 for a steam boiler furnace. In 1885 he invented a system called telegraphony, which allowed telegraph lines to carry voice signals.

| More

Journalist Alice Dunnigan specialized in politics


Alice Dunnigan

*On this date in 1906, Alice Dunnigan was born. She was a journalist who was instrumental in establishing African-American presence in political news coverage.

Born near Russellville, Ky., she attended Kentucky State College and later graduated from West Kentucky Industrial College. Dunnigan was the first Black woman accredited to the White House and the State Department and to gain access to the House of Representatives and Senate galleries. She was also the first Black woman elected to the Woman’s National Press Club.

| More

Oliver Harrington was a cartoonist pioneer


Oliver
Harrington

*This date marks the birth of Oliver Harrington in 1913. He was an African-American cartoonist best known for his character Bootsie.

| More

Mary Dawson supported Black opera. . .


Mary C.
Dawson

*On this date in 1894, Mary Dawson was born. She was an African-American musician, administrator, and teacher and the founding director of the National Negro Opera Company (NNOC).

| More

Abram Harris intellectual influence on Black thinking


Abram Harris

Abram Harris, an African-American economist, was born on the date in 1899 in Richmond, Virginia.

| More

Earl Graves, an image of Black business success!


Earl Graves

*On this date in 1935, Earl G. Graves was born. He is an African-American businessman, entrepreneur and activist.

Earl Gilbert Graves is from Brooklyn, New York; his parents were Earl Godwin Graves and Winifred Sealy Graves, long-time West Indian residents of the Bedford-Stuyvesant area. His father was a role model and mentor; whose economic circumstances reduced his own plans for the future.

| More

Fountain Pen Patent awarded.

On this date in 1890, William B. Purvis was awarded a patent for a fountain pen.

Purvis was from Philadelphia and obtained his first patent on a paper bag device on April 25th 1882. Of the sixteen patents Purvis received most were sold to the Union Paper Bag Company of New York.

| More

Minnie Cox, a first for Mississippi


Minnie Cox plaque

*The birth of Minnie Cox in 1869 is celebrated on this date. She was an African-American teacher, and postal administrator.

| More