By Iffat Alam, Davit Antonyan, and Ani Bagmanian

1. February was chosen as Black History Month to include the births of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

2. 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.

3. One in four cowboys was black, despite the stories told in popular books and movies.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Neurosurgeon Ben Carson was the first to separate two twins conjoined at the head. It was the first successful procedure of its kind.

9. Inoculation, or vaccination, was introduced to the United States by a slave.

10. 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.