Black History Month is upon us once again, but if your K-12 schooling resembled that of the majority of Americans, you’ve been left woefully uninformed about Black history (beyond a few tidbits about a march that M.L.K. went on and a bus that Rosa Parks sat down in). Here are a few Black-history facts that you wouldn’t be able to say for certain aren’t true, based on what you learned in school:
Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s pivotal “I Have a Dream” speech was completely improvised.
In the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, along with the ruling that separate schools are inherently unequal, Chief Justice Earl Warren also wrote, “School sucks major butts.”
The lauded author James Baldwin died having never finished his final work, “The Fire Next Time (I’m in the Kitchen!): A Cookbook.”
J. Edgar Hoover famously tracked Malcolm X’s every move, and, because of this, was considered one of X’s biggest fans.
A full five years before Neil Armstrong took his “first” steps on the moon, two Black children, Shamika Smith and Harold Everett, visited to play hopscotch. Their court was erased by Apollo 11’s landing.
May 25, 1965: Muhammad Ali knocks out Sonny Liston, marking the first time someone behind a camera screamed, “Wooorrrld staarrrr!”
Thurgood Marshall made history as the first Supreme Court Justice to actually pull off wearing the robes.
In 1994, the Westchester Society for Afro-American Progress, formed in 1972, finally admitted its first Black board member.
The celebrated educator and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois was known to have a way with words. One of his most cited quotations remains “Let me tell you—these white people cannot dance!”
Aside from her work as a queer-rights and AIDS activist, Marsha P. Johnson had a very public rivalry with the New York Mets mascot, Mr. Met.
Langston Hughes was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, and many regarded him as a poet of the people. Later in his career, however, he penned several pieces about Chihuahuas that led him to also be regarded as a poet of the canines.
When Angela Davis was a philosophy professor at U.C.L.A., she was fired owing to her outspoken political beliefs and Communist Party ties. But, to the dismay of her critics, this only improved her RateMyProfessor score.
On the eve of the Y2K crisis, the F.B.I. experimented on Black men by sending them to the year 2000.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 granted 154,277 visas to Europeans as well as to one lucky Nigerian man.
As a scout and spy for the Union Army, Harriet Tubman often carried a gun—her weapon of choice being a laser-scoped, extended-mag AR-15.
July 12, 1962: Maya Angelou, Stokely Carmichael, Louis Farrakhan, Joe Frazier, Nikki Giovanni, and Marvin Gaye check in to the same Manhattan hotel, but don’t end up hanging out, owing to conflicting schedules.
Although Henrietta Lacks’s immortalized cell line has contributed to countless biomedical breakthroughs, her family was only recently compensated for her cells’ use, without her consent, in the form of several Chuck E. Cheese tokens.
Your grandparents actually played a crucial role in Black history—you should ask them about it sometime.
