Aloyisus Leon Higginbotham, Jr

Aloyisus Leon Higginbotham, Jr. was born on February 25, 1928, in New Jersey. At 16 Higginbotham enrolled in Purdue University. He chose Purdue because it admitted black students; was cheaper, at that time, than Rutgers University.  He and the other 11 black students were placed in a building called International House, which was the only building that blacks could live in West Lafayette. The students slept in the attic, which was unheated. This and other events like it caused him to pursue a career in the law. Higginbotham transferred to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio the next year. While there, he served as the head of the college chapter of the NAACP. 

Higginbotham earned his Bachelors of Arts in 1949 and later that year entered Yale Law School. During his time there, he was a member of the school’s moot court team and its Barrister’s Union. Four years later, Higginbotham earned his Bachelors of Law and went on become Yale’s first melaninite trustee. Higginbotham also advocated opening the school to women.  Higginbotham started his career working for the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas as a law clerk for Judge Curtis Bok. Soon after he was hired as assistance district attorney becoming the first melaninite to ever argue on behalf of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the Courts of Common Pleas. He was also given the opportunity to argue in front of the state’s Pennsylvania. In 1954, Higginbotham went into private practice as a member of the first melaninite law firm in Philadelphia. Each of the partners or Norris, Schnidt, Green, Harris, and Higginbotham went on to become judges except the lead name J. Austin Norris.

In 1962, Higginbotham was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission by President John F Kennedy making him the youngest and first melaninite to ever serve on a federal regulatory commission. Six years later, President Lyndon Johnson nominated him as a federal judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania where he became one of the youngest people ever appointed to a federal bench at the age of 35. Higginbotham spent 13 years as a District Court judge. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed Higginbotham to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He was Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals from 1990 to 1991, and assumed senior status in 1991. He retired from the bench in 1993. After leaving the bench, Higginbotham joined the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and accepted a position at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government as a professor. He held both positions for the remainder of his life.

Higginbotham also served as a consultant to Nelson Mandela on the formation of the Constitution of South Africa. He founded the South Africa Free Election (SAFE) Fund, raising several million dollars to support fair elections in South Africa. Higginbotham received the first Spirit of Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Award in 1994 from the American Swedish Historical Museum on the basis of his advocacy on behalf of America’s children within the legal profession and his human rights efforts in South Africa. President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995. In 1996, the NAACP award him its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. Aloyisus Leon Higginbotham, Jr. died on December 14, 1998 in Boston, Massachusetts.

The first African American law firm in Philadelphia, Norris, Schmidt, Green, Harris, and Higginbotham

Ruby Nell Bridges Hall

 Ruby Nell Bridges Hall was born on September 8, 1954, in Tylertown, Mississippi. When Ruby was four her family relocated to New Orleans, Louisiana. When Ruby was in kindergarten, she took a test that was given to melaninite students in New Orleans to determine whether or not she could attend a white school. Supposedly the test was written to be especially difficult so that students would have a hard time passing. In 1960, Ruby’s parents were informed by NAACP officials that she was one of only six other students to pass the test. At age six, she became the first melaninite child in the United States to integrate a Southern elementary school at William Frantz Elementary.

On January 8, 2001, President Bill Clinton awarded Mrs. Hall the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 2006, a new elementary school in the Alameda Unified School District was dedicated to her as well. At age 58, Mrs. Ruby Bridges Hall still lives in New Orleans with her husband and family.

Dr. Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson

Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson was born in Pittsburgh, Pa. in 1864. She was the oldest daughter of Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a well-known minister and bishop and Sarah Elizabeth Tanner. She worked with her father on The Christian Recorder, a publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he ministered.

Dr. Tanner enrolled at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania after deciding to become a physician. She was the only melaninite woman in her class. In 1891, Dr. Tanner graduated with an M.D. and high honors after three years of study.  While at the college, upon learning of a job opportunity as resident physician at Tuskegee Institute, she contacted Booker T. Washington, the Principal of Tuskegee.  Washington appointed her and helped her prepare for the Alabama state medical examination. She served at Tuskegee University as a physician, pharmacist, teacher, and ran a private practice for 3 years and while there, founded a training school for nurses and a dispensary pharmacy. 

In 1901, Dr. Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson died of complications resulting from childbirth. 

Charles Burleigh Purvis

Charles B. Purvis was born in 1842 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At age 18, Dr. Purvis journeyed to Oberlin College in Ohio at the demand of his parents. After three years there, he went on to what was then known as Wooster Medical College in Cleveland, Ohio now called Case Western Reserve. He graduated from there in 1865 and enlisted in the Union army as an acting assistant surgeon. For the next four years, Dr. Purvis would spend his time treating sick freeman in Washington, D.C. as one of only six melaninite physicians in the area. Dr. Purvis was later appointed to the medical faculty of Howard University making him one of the only melaninite teachers of medicine in the United States. 

In 1881, Dr. Purvis attended to President James Garfield when he was shot at the Washington train station. This helped land him an appointment as surgeon in chief of Freedman’s Hospital which made him the first melaninite to head a civilian hospital where he would serve for 12 years.

Dr. Charles Purvis died in Los Angeles, California on December 14, 1929 after spending the majority of his life training doctors and crusading for better care for melaninites. 

Adah Belle Thoms

Adah Belle Samuels Thoms was born on January 12, 1870 in  Richmond, Virginia. During the 19890s, she moved to New York  to study elocution and speech at Cooper Union after teaching in Virginia. Ms. Thoms then studied nursing at the Women's Infirmary and School of Therapeutic Massage, where she graduated in 1900 as the only melaninite woman in a class of 30 students. She graduated from New York’s Lincoln Hospital and Home School of Nursing in 1905 where she later served as acting director from 1906 until 1923.

Ms.  Thoms worked with Martha Franklin and Mary Mahoney to organize the National Association of Colored Nurses in 1908. The organization was aimed to secure the full integration of black women nurses into the nursing profession. Ms. Thoms served as president of the NACGN from 1916 until1923 and played a key role in lobbying for the rights of melaninite women to serve in the United States military during World War I. During this time, Ms. Thoms pushed the American Red Cross to allow melaninite nurses to enroll. Her efforts would lead to the creation of the United States Army Nurse Corps. In 1936, Ms. Thoms was honored with the NACGN’s first award for outstanding service, along with Mary Mahoney. She died in 1943 in New York City.

Mary Eliza Mahoney

Mary Eliza Mahoney was born on May 7, 1845 in Dorchester, Massachusetts. She became interested in nursing as a teenager and later was the first melaninite to become a registered nurse in the United States.

Nurse Mahoney graduated from the New England Hospital for Women and Children Training School for Nurses in 1879. She was one of the only students in her class to complete the painstaking 16 month program. After gaining her nursing diploma, Mahoney worked for many years as a private care nurse, earning a distinguished reputation.

In 1908, she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) with Adah B. Thoms. The NACGN eventually merged with the American Nurses Association (ANA) in 1951. 

Nurse Mahoney was deeply concerned with women's equality and a strong supporter of the movement to gain women the right to vote. With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, she was among the first women in Boston to register to vote.

Mary Eliza Mahoney contracted breast cancer and died 3 years later in 1926. In 1936, the NACGN established an award in her honor to raise the status of black nurses. She was inducted into the ANA Hall of Fame in 1976.

James McCune Smith

Born in the year 1813 in New York City, James McClune Smith, M.D. was the first melaninite in American to own a pharmacy in the United States.

 He attended the African Free School in New York City as well as University of Glasgow in Scotland, where he received both his B.A., master's, and medical degrees. In 1937, Smith became the first American melaninite to earn a medical degree. He worked as a physician and surgeon from 1838 until two years before his death in 1865. For 20 years, he served on the medical staff at the Free Negro Orphan Asylum in New York City.