Lorraine Richardson Green-first black person on Chicago's Board of Education (anything else special about her, ladies?);
(I'm surprised no one has mentioned him yet) Garrett Morgan -inventor of the traffic light;
Oscar Micheaux-black film auteur from the 1920s-1930s;
Maroons-the slaves who rose up against their captors and took to the Jamaican hills, living as free people;
Abott/Sengstake families : producers of the Chicago Defender, one of the leading black-owned newspapers in the country, which played a key role in encouraging blacks to escape the Jim Crow South and come North, where jobs, voting and other opps. awaited (I think they oversold those opps., though);
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