Armstrong earned the nick-name “Satchmo” which was a shortened version of the moniker “satchel mouth.”
After a long career as an actress and singer, Pearl Bailey earned a bachelor’s degree in theology from Georgetown University in 1985.
After African American performer Josephine Baker expatriated to France, she famously smuggled military intelligence to French allies during World War II. She did this by pinning secrets inside her dress, as well as hiding them in her sheet music.
Scientist and mathematician Benjamin Banneker is credited with helping to design the blueprints for Washington, D.C.
Before he was a renowned artist, Romare Bearden was also a talented baseball player. He was recruited by the Philadelphia Athletics on the pretext that he would agree to pass as white. He turned down the offer, instead choosing to work on his art.
Though he is of Caribbean ancestry and had a trailblazing smash with his 1956 album Calypso, Harry Belafonte was actually born in the United States. The internationally renowned entertainment icon and human rights activist is from Harlem, New York.
Musician and activist Belafonte originally devised the idea for “We Are the World,” a single that he hoped would help raise money for famine relief in Africa. The song was a huge success, going multi-platinum and bringing in millions of dollars.
Before becoming a professional musician, Chuck Berry studied to be a hairdresser.
Chuck Berry’s famous “duck walk” dance originated in 1956 when he attempted to hide wrinkles in his trousers by shaking them out with his now-signature body movements.
The parents of actress Halle Berry chose their daughter’s name from Halle’s Department Store, a local landmark in her birthplace of Cleveland, Ohio.
In 1938, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt challenged the segregation rules at the Southern Conference on Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama, so she could sit next to African American educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Roosevelt would come to refer to Bethune as “her closest friend in her age group.”
