Curated playlist
20th-century African-American people
- DJ HollywoodDid DJ Hollywood invent hip-hop style rapping? Kurtis Blow points to him, yet little was taped.
- Joseph Deighton Gibson Jr.Joseph Gibson helped turn a money-losing Atlanta station into America's first Black-owned radio station.
- Marley MarlMarley Marl's studio mistake with a snare drum changed how hip-hop beats were built.
- Colin PowellOn the 5th of February 2003, Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council. He told the council: "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." The…
- John Allen MuhammadJohn Allen Muhammad was pronounced dead at 9:11 p.m. on the 10th of November 2009. The place was the Greensville Correctional Center, near Jarratt, Virginia. Seven years earlier, in 2002, shootings attributed to him and a young partner…
- Larry HooverLarry Hoover Sr., born on the 30th of November 1950, is an American former gangster who founded the Gangster Disciples, a street gang from Chicago. On the 28th of May 2025, President Donald Trump commuted his federal prison sentences. Yet…
- Frank LucasFrank Lucas liked to ask one question when he explained how he moved heroin. "Who the hell is gonna look in a dead soldier's coffin?" He put it that way in an interview for a New York magazine article published in 2000. Lucas operated in…
- Russell SimmonsRussell Simmons said a 1977 Harlem rap show was "the invention of the wheel." He went on to build Def Jam and Phat Farm.
- Emmett TillEmmett Till was a boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. When his body came home, his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, made a decision that would reach far beyond her family. Looking back, she said: "There was…
- Harriet TubmanHarriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross, never forgot the moment she first felt free. Years later she described it this way: "When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory…
- Justin SimienDirector Justin Simien paid for a film trailer with his own tax refund. Fans then gave $40,000 toward a $25,000 goal.
- Samuel LittleSamuel Little, born Samuel McDowell, told investigators that he had committed 93 murders between 1970 and 2005. Courts convicted him of eight. The FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program has confirmed his involvement in at least 60 of…
- Stanley WilliamsStanley Tookie Williams III was seventeen when a juvenile review board asked what he planned to do once he was released. By his own account, he replied with "being the leader of the biggest gang in the world." He was a teenager with a…