By Iffat Alam, Davit Antonyan, and Ani Bagmanian
- February was chosen as Black History Month to include the births of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.
- Out of the the 12.5 million Africans shipped to the New World during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, around 2 million slaves died during the journey.
- One in four cowboys was black, despite the stories told in popular books and movies.
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- Jerry Lawson was a self-taught engineer and video game pioneer. He is widely known for the invention of the first cartridge-based video game console. Because of the Brooklyn-born computer hobbyist, the way we played video games was forever changed.
- In 1823, Alexander Lucius became the first African American man to get a degree from an American university. He was awarded a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College.
- Dorothy Dandridge was the first African American woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Actress” for her role in an all-black production of Carmen Jones.
- The African-American musical genre known as jazz originated in Louisiana at the turn of the 19th century. It is a union of both African and European music.
- Neurosurgeon Ben Carson was the first to separate two twins conjoined at the head. It was the first successful procedure of its kind.
- Inoculation, or vaccination, was introduced to the United States by a slave.
- George Washington Carver developed 300 derivative products from peanuts among them cheese, milk, coffee, flour, ink, dyes, plastics, wood stains, soap, linoleum, medicinal oils and cosmetics.
