Curated playlist
Activists for African-American civil rights
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade. He was 46 years old, and had served as the 35th president of the United States for less than three years. The man…
- Elvis PresleyElvis Aaron Presley walked onto the stage of the International Hotel in Las Vegas on the 31st of July 1969, without a single word of introduction. The audience of 2,200 people gave him a standing ovation before he sang a note. Another…
- Frank SinatraFrancis Albert Sinatra weighed 13.5 pounds when he was born on the 12th of December 1915, in a tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey. The delivery required forceps, which scarred his left cheek and neck and left lifelong…
- Abraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky on the 12th of February 1809, and he died with a bullet in the back of his head at twenty-two minutes past seven on a April morning in 1865. Between those two facts sits the most…
- Aretha FranklinAretha Franklin heard Otis Redding's reaction to her own version of his song "Respect": "That little girl done took my song away from me." She had added a supercharged interlude that spelled out the title letter by letter. Released in…
- Marvin GayeOn the 1st of April 1984, in a house in the Western Heights area of West Adams in Los Angeles, Marvin Gaye was shot twice by his own father. One bullet pierced his heart. He was pronounced dead at 1:01 p.m., one day before he would have…
- Samuel L. JacksonSamuel Leroy Jackson was born on the 21st of December, 1948, in Washington, D.C., the only child of Elizabeth Harriett and Roy Henry Jackson. His father lived away in Kansas City, Missouri, and died of alcoholism. Jackson met him only…
- Ulysses S. GrantUlysses S. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant on the 27th of April 1822, in Ohio, and by the time he died on the 23rd of July 1885, he had commanded the largest army in American history, won the Civil War, and served two terms as…
- Benjamin HarrisonBenjamin Harrison holds a peculiar distinction in American history: he is the only person to have served as president between two terms of the same opponent. In 1888, he defeated the incumbent Grover Cleveland. Four years later, Cleveland…
- James A. GarfieldJames A. Garfield arrived at the presidency having never once sought the job. At the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago, delegates spent 35 ballots locked in a stalemate between Ulysses S. Grant and James G. Blaine. On the 36th…
- Sam CookeSam Cooke walked into a recording session in the mid-1950s and began singing George Gershwin. Art Rupe, the head of Specialty Records, was furious. That moment of artistic defiance captures everything about Cooke: a man who had charted his…
- James BrownJames Brown was supposed to be named Joseph James Brown. A clerk reversed his first and middle names on his birth certificate, and the mistake stuck. He was born on the 3rd of May 1933, in a small wooden shack in Barnwell, South Carolina,…
- Lyndon B. JohnsonLyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States aboard Air Force One, just hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on the 22nd of November 1963. The photograph of that moment, taken…
- Muhammad AliMuhammad Ali walked into the ring on the 25th of February 1964, a 22-year-old from Louisville, Kentucky, facing Sonny Liston, the menacing heavyweight champion with a criminal past and ties to organized crime. The odds were 8:1 against…
- Harry S. TrumanHarry S. Truman became the 33rd president of the United States not by winning an election, but by walking into a room where Eleanor Roosevelt told him her husband was dead. He had been vice president for only 82 days. He had never been…
- Malcolm XMalcolm X was pronounced dead at 3:30 pm on the 21st of February 1965, shortly after gunmen opened fire on him at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. The autopsy identified 21 gunshot wounds. He was 39 years old. In the hours after the…
- Radical RepublicansThe Radical Republicans named themselves. They did not shy from the word. In a pamphlet directed to black voters in 1867, the Union Republican Congressional Committee offered a definition that read more like a declaration: "the word…
- Frederick DouglassFrederick Douglass had no birth certificate, no record of his own age, and no settled name. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey into slavery on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Talbot County, Maryland. He never knew…
- Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall walked into the Supreme Court as an advocate 32 times and walked out a winner 29 of those times. That record alone would make him one of the most consequential lawyers in American history. But Marshall did not stop there.…
- W. E. B. Du BoisW. E. B. Du Bois died on the 27th of August 1963 in Accra, Ghana, at the age of 95. The very next day, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington for the March on Washington. The man who had spent nearly a century fighting…
- James LongstreetJames Longstreet was born on the 8th of January 1821 in Edgefield District, South Carolina, and by the end of the Civil War he had become the man Robert E. Lee called his "Old War Horse". That nickname captures the paradox at the center of…
- Simon CameronSimon Cameron died on the 26th of June 1889, six days after suffering a stroke, at the same Pennsylvania town where he had been born ninety years earlier. He had outlived nearly every political rival he ever made, and the machine he built…
- Ice-TIce-T was born Tracy Lauren Marrow on the 16th of February 1958 in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Solomon and Alice Marrow. By the time he was thirteen, both of his parents had died of heart attacks, leaving him an orphan who would…
- Benjamin ButlerBenjamin Butler earned two completely different reputations in the same war. The white South called him a beast and a felon worthy of execution if captured. Black newspapers, when he died in 1893, described him as "a staunch and…
- Angela DavisAngela Davis grew up on a street her Birmingham neighbors called "Dynamite Hill" - a name earned through the bombings of homes belonging to middle-class Black families who dared to move there in the 1950s. That was the neighborhood where…
- Cornel WestCornel Ronald West was born on the 2nd of June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the same city where his grandfather Clifton L. West, Sr. served as pastor of the Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church. By the time West was a teenager in Sacramento,…
- P. G. T. BeauregardP. G. T. Beauregard ordered the first shots of the American Civil War fired from Fort Johnson in the early hours of the 12th of April 1861. A 34-hour bombardment followed, and when the smoke cleared over Charleston Harbor, the general who…