15 OF THE MOST OUTSTANDING BLACK PEOPLE IN HISTORY

Femi Akinpelu Joseph

In a world where the white folks dominate when it comes to achieving extra-ordinary things in various professions and works of life, it is therefore, worthy of celebrating the black men and women who have done tangibly well and carved a niche for themselves in their respective professions.

These are individuals who have defied all odds, even in the face of a fierce racial discrimination in the very intimidating white men’s (Western world), and have gone on to attain enviable achievements in their different chosen careers. 

The profile of some of the most exceptional black individuals in world history is highlighted here. 

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela OMP BR OM AC CC OJ GCStJ QC GCIH PMF, Madiba as he was fondly called, was a South-African apartheid revolutionary politician, lawyer, and philanthropist who served as President of South-Africa from 1994 to 1999. His government focused on tackling institutionalized racism, poverty, inequality and fostering racial reconciliation; politically an African nationalist and democratic socialist. He won the Noble Peace award in 1993. He was notable for leading a sabotage campaign against the apartheid government. Mandela served 27 years in prison after being arrested and convicted of “conspiracy to overthrow the state” for life imprisonment. Mandela became an elder statesman, focusing on charitable work in combating poverty and HIV/AIDS through the Nelson Mandela Foundation. He gained international acclaim for his activism, having received more than 250 honours including the 1993 NPP and the U.S Presidential Medal of Freedom and Soviet Order of Lenin. He is often described as the “Father of the Nation”. 


 Matin Luther King Jr.
 

 

 
Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Martin Luther King jr was an American Baptist minister, activist, humanitarian and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs. King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president.

He helped organize the 1963 nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response.

King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history. On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence.

In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities.

He is regarded as one of the greatest African Americans ever to live.

 

Cassius Clay (Mohammed Ali)

Mohammed Ali (born Cassius Clay Jr.) is an American professional boxer, generally considered among the greatest heavyweight boxers in the sports’ history. Ali is today regarded for the skills he displayed in the ring plus the values he exemplified outside of it; religious freedom, racial justice and the triumph of principle over expedience.

He is one of the most recognized sports figures of the past 100 years, crowned “sportsman of the century” by Sports Illustrated and “Sports personality of the Century” by the BBC. Ali remains the only three-time Linear World Heavyweight Champion; he won the title in 1964, 1974 and 1978.
He transformed the role and image of the African American athlete in America by his embrace of social pride and his willingness to antagonize the white establishment in doing so. He had a total number of 61 fights; he won 56 and had 37 knockouts.

 

Kofi Annan

 

Kofi Annan 

Kofi Atta Annan is a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the 7^th Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1997 to December 2006. Annan and United Nations were the recipients of the 2001 Nobel Prize “for their work for a better, organized and more peaceful world. He is the Chairman of the Elders, a group founded by Nelson Mandela.  Annan is fluent in English, French, Akan, some Kru languages and other African language. He is one of the 15 black people so far to have been honoured with the Nobel Prize. He was the first black to become the United Nations Secretary-General and so far the only.

 George Weah

George Oppong Weah is a Liberian humanitarian, politician, and an ex-footballer who played 
 as a striker. He was regarded as one of the greatest African players of all time. In 1995, he was named FIFA World Player of the Year and the Ballon d ‘Or. He won the African Footballer of the Year 3 times.  In 2004, he was named in the FIFA 100 list of the world’s greatest living players. Weah became the top scorer of the UEFA Champions League in 1994/1995. He scored 16 goals in 25 European games.  Weah was named FIFA World Player of the year in 1995, becoming the only African player to win the award. He was also the first black recipient of the award. Weah is devoted humanitarian for war-torn country. 

Professor Wole Soyinka

Soyinka

Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Babatunde Soyinka was born 13^th of July 1934, and he is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored in that (Literature) category.

After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain.

Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian governments, especially the country's many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.

Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, he was made professor emeritus.

 Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US.

Oprah Winfrey

 

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Gail Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her multi-award winning talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show which was the highest-rated programme of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed “Queen of All Media”, she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th Century and Forbes’ international rich list has listed her as the world’s only black billionaire from 2004 to 2006, and first black woman billionaire in world history. She is also, according to some assessment, the most influential woman in the world. She was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and an honorary doctorate degree from Duke and Harvard. Oprah’s original name was “Orpah” from the Bible, but people mispronounced it regularly as Oprah and it stuck. 


            

Agbani Darego  

She was born Ibiagbanidokibubu Asenite Darego, she is a Nigerian model and a former Miss World. The young beautiful Darego became the first black woman and the first African to be crowned with the prestigious Miss World Pageant, as an 18 year old student of Computer Science of the University of Port-Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria, in the year 2001.       

Barack Obama

 

 Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44^th and current president of the United States of America, and the very first African American (black) president to hold the office. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a Civil Rights attorney and taught Constitutional Law at the University Of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He began his presidential campaign in 2007, and after a close primary campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, he won in the Democratic Party primaries to receive the presidential nomination. He then defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.
 Nine months after his election, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace prize laureate.  In 2011, he ordered the military operation that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden. His mother Stanley Kansas was mostly English ancestry. His father Barack Obama Sr. was a Luo from western province of Nyanza in Kenya.

Ralph Bunche

 Ralph Bunche

 Ralph Johnson Bunche was an American political scientist, academic, and diplomat who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s Mediation in Palestine. Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1903. His father Fred Bunche was a barber, while his mother, Olive Agnes was an amateur musician, from a large and talented family. He (Bunche) was the first African American and black person to be so honoured in the history of the prize. 

 He was involved in the formation and administration of the United Nations. In 1963 he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy. For more than 2 decades, Bunche served as chair of the department of Political Science at Howard University, where he also taught generations of students.  

 Michael Jackson

 

Michael Jackson

Michael Joseph Jackson was an American singer, songwriter, record producer, dancer, and actor. He was called the King of Pop, his contributions to music and dance, along with his publicized personal life, made him a global figure in popular culture for over four decades.

The eighth child of the Jackson family, he debuted on the professional music scene along with his elder brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, and Marlon as a member of the Jackson 5 in 1964, and began his solo career in 1971. In the early 1980s, Jackson became a dominant figure in popular music. The music videos for his songs, including those of "Beat It", "Billie Jean", and "Thriller", were credited with breaking down racial barriers and with transforming the medium into an art form and promotional tool.

Through stage and video performances, Jackson popularized a number of complicated dance techniques, such as the robot and the moonwalk. His distinctive sound and style has influenced numerous artists of various music genres. Jackson's 1982 album Thriller is the best-selling album of all time.

Jackson is one of the few artists to have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice. He was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Dance Hall of Fame as the first and only dancer from pop and rock music.

His other achievements include multiple Guinness World Records, 13 Grammy Awards, the Grammy Legend Award, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, 26 American Music Awards—more than any other artist—including the "Artist of the Century" and "Artist of the 1980s".

Jackson traveled the world attending events honoring his humanitarianism, and, in 2000, the Guinness World Records recognized him for supporting 39 charities, more than any other entertainer.  

Forbes currently ranks Jackson as the top-earning dead celebrity, a title held for a fifth consecutive year, with $140 million in earnings. He died on June 25, 2009, after suffering from cardiac arrest.


Usain Bolt

Usain Bolt   

Usain St. Leo Bolt is a Jamaican sprinter. He is regarded as the fastest person ever; he is the first man to hold both the 100 metres and 200 metres world records since fully automatic time measurements became mandatory in 1977. Along with his teammates, he also set the world record in the 4×100 metres relay.

He is the reigning Olympic champion in these three events, the first man to win six Olympic gold medals in sprinting, and an eleven-time World champion. He was the first to achieve a "double double" by winning 100 m and 200 m titles at consecutive Olympics (2008 and 2012), and topped this through the first "double triple" (including 4×100 m relays).

Further, at the 2013 World Championships in Moscow, Bolt completed a hat-trick of 200 m world titles by winning his third straight gold in the event. His 2009 record breaking margin for 100 m, from 9.69 seconds (his personal previous world record) to 9.58, is the highest since the start of fully automatic time measurements.

Bolt's achievements in sprinting have earned him the media nickname "Lightning Bolt", and awards including the IAAF World Athlete of the Year, Track & Field Athlete of the Year, and Laureus World Sportsman of the Year (three times). He is the highest paid athlete ever in track and field. 

Bolt became the first athlete to complete a "triple triple", and also became the most successful athlete in the 32-year history of the athletics world championships.

 Toni Morrison

 

Toni Morrison
 

Toni Morrison, born Chloe Ardelia Wofford is an American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987). She was also commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005.

She won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved and the Nobel Prize in 1993. On May 29, 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Morrison serves as Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.

In 1988, Morrison's fifth novel, Beloved, won the Pulitzer Prize; five years later, she became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She acts as a mentor for many writers and she is currently on the editorial board of The Nation magazine.

Bob Marley

 

Robert Nesta "Bob" Marley, OM (6 February 1945 – 11 May 1981) was a Jamaican reggae singer, song writer, musician, and guitarist who achieved international fame and acclaim. Starting out in 1963 with the group The Wailers, he forged a distinctive songwriting and vocal style that would later resonate with audiences worldwide.

 After the Wailers disbanded in 1974, Marley pursued a solo career that culminated in the release of the album Exodus in 1977, which established his worldwide reputation and produced his status as one of the world's best-selling artists of all time, with sales of more than 75 million records. He was a committed Rastafari who infused his music with a sense of spirituality.

Marley was a Pan-Africanist, and believed in the unity of African people worldwide. His beliefs in Pan-Africanism were rooted in his Rastafari religious beliefs. He was substantially inspired by Marcus Garvey, and had anti-imperialist and pro-African themes in many of his songs, such as "Zimbabwe", "Exodus", "Survival", "Blackman Redemption", and "Redemption Song". "Redemption Song" draws influence from a speech given by Marcus Garvey in Nova Scotia, 1937. In the song "Africa Unite", Bob Marley sings of a desire for all peoples of the African diaspora to come together and fight against "Babylon", which represents imperialist and colonialist ideals that have oppressed African people through the eradication of their original culture and beliefs. Marley believed that independence of African countries (such as Zimbabwe) from European domination was a victory for all peoples of the African diaspora.

Pele

 

 
Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known as Pelé is a retired Brazilian professional footballer who is widely regarded to be the greatest player of all time. In 1999, he was voted World Player of the Century by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS).

In 1999, Pelé was elected Athlete of the Century by the IOC, and Time named him in their list of 100 most influential people of the 20th century. In 2013 he received the FIFA Ballon d'Or Prix d'Honneur in recognition of his career and achievements as a global icon of football.

According to the IFFHS, Pelé is the most successful league goal scorer in the world, with 541 league goals. In total Pelé scored 1281 goals in 1363 games, including unofficial friendlies and tour games, for which he was listed in the Guinness World Records for most career goals scored in football.

In his native Brazil, he is hailed as a national hero for his accomplishments in football and for his vocal support of policies to improve the social conditions of the poor.

 He won three FIFA World Cups: 1958, 1962 and 1970, the only player ever to do so; and is the all-time leading goal scorer for Brazil with 77 goals in 92 games.

Since retiring in 1977, Pelé has been a worldwide ambassador for football and has undertaken various acting roles and commercial ventures. In 2010, he was named the Honorary President of the New York Cosmos.