On Feb. 12 — President Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born. It remains the nation’s oldest champion for civil rights. The date of the organization’s founding was intentional.
In 1865, when Union troops seized the Confederate capital of Richmond, Va., Philadelphia Press reporter Thomas Morris Chester was the only African American covering the Civil War for a major daily.
For 13 years, Ebony magazine photographer Moneta Sleet chronicled the key moments in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life. Sleet's photo of Mrs. King tearfully clasping daughter Bernice won a Pulitzer Prize, making him the first African-American photographer to win the highest honor for news.
Ethel Payne, one of the first black women to cover the White House, aggressively questioned politicians on matters of racial discrimination and segregation.
Frederick Douglass' Paper, published in 1851 as a continuation of the famed publisher's North Star, was called the country's most prestigious and authoritative anti-slavery newspaper. This 1860 edition contains an article on the Underground Railroad.
