Madam C. J. Walker's skill as a businesswoman and desire to create products for black women drove her to become the first black female millionaire. While improving women's lives with her products, she employed women as sales agents and hair culturists, all while giving back to her community.
Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass was struck by the unfairness and cruelty of slave life and escaped as a young man to the North. A skilled speaker and writer of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass became a fierce fighter for the end of slavery and later led the early civil rights movement.
Eighteenth-century inventor and astronomer Benjamin Banneker was widely known and respected in his time. Most of what he knew, he taught himself. His letter to Thomas Jefferson asked the future president to reconsider his racial prejudices. Later, abolitionists would use Banneker as proof that people of any race can be equally intelligent.
