Uncovering Hidden Black History, On Screen And On The Page

The perception that blacks were absent from life in 1940s America (outside of service roles) is largely due to their absence in the media that comes down to us through time. As author Maureen Honey points out in her book Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II, "Advertising, recruitment papers and newsreels nearly always portrayed white women as ... Army nurses, defense plant workers, service wives ... and the like in the national effort to get women into wartime activities." This collection of photos and writing by and about black women is a great place to start uncovering the lives that contemporaneous sources ignored and buried.

For more voices from World War II and the postwar era, try The First Black Policeman Remembers, an oral history by Samuel J. Battle, New York City's first African American police sergeant, lieutenant, and parole commissioner. Or Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton.

The first African American to publish a medical text was Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, also the first black woman to earn a medical degree. She wasn't alone in this for long; within a few years she was joined by Rebecca J. Cole and Susan McKinney Steward, and by 1900 there were also Matilda Arabella Evans, Ida Gray Nelson Robbins, Eliza Ann Grier, and Sarah Parker Remond.

For Remond, her career as a doctor was a second one. She was a prominent lecturer and abolitionist who traveled throughout the US and to Europe to lecture against slavery, rouse foreign support for the Union cause, and advocate for freedmen once the war ended. She retired to Florence, Italy — where she earned a medical degree and set up a practice that lasted for 20 years. She never went back to America.

Further reading: African American Lives, by by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Voices of Historical and Contemporary Black American Pioneers, edited by Vernon L. Farmer and Evelyn Shepherd-Wynn.

Aristides, the first horse to win the Kentucky Derby, is immortalized in bronze at Churchill Downs. The black jockey who rode him to victory is not. African Americans played a major role in the early history of thoroughbred horse racing, a fact that is almost forgotten today. Oliver Lewis was one of 13 black jockeys in that first Derby out of a field of 15 (he's buried in Lexington, Kentucky's famous African Cemetery No. 2). African Americans rode in all the major stakes and played key roles in the training and breeding of race horses from the early 18th century. But by the early 20th century, their contribution had been forgotten so thoroughly that even the graves of those early Derby winners were obscured by brush and overgrowth.