was born in 1875 in New Canton, Virginia. One of the first African Americans to receive a doctorate from Harvard, Woodson dedicated his career to the field of African-American history and lobbied extensively to establish Black HistoryMonth as a nationwide institution. He also wrote many historical works, including the 1933 book The Mis-Education of the Negro. He died in 1950.

In 1915, Woodson helped found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (which later became the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History), which had the goal of placing African-American historical contributions front and center. The next year he established the Journal of Negro History, a scholarly publication.

Woodson also formed the African-American-owned AssociatedPublishers Press in 1921 and would go on to write more than a dozen books over the years, including A Century of Negro Migration(1918), The History of the Negro Church (1921), The Negro in Our History (1922) and Mis-Education of the Negro (1933). Mis-Education—with its focus on the Western indoctrination system and African-American self-empowerment—is a particularly noted work and has become regularly course adopted by college institutions.

In addition to his writing pursuits, Woodson also worked in a number of educational positions, serving as a principal for Washington, D.C.’s Armstrong Manual Training School before working as a college dean at Howard University and the West Virginia Collegiate Institute.

To help teachers with African-American studies, Woodson later created the Negro History Bulletinin 1937 and also penned literature for elementary and secondary school students.

The first professional black American athletes were jockeys, who dominated the sport until the early 20th Century. Jimmy Winkfield (pictured) was the last black rider to win the Kentucky Derby in 1901 and 1902.

Think of the greatest American sports stars of all time and names like Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali and Serena Williams will likely spring to mind.

But long before these champions smashed the record books — and blazed a trail in the public’s imagination — the first generation of black U.S. athletes dominated an unlikely sport.

The godfathers of Owens, Ali and Williams weren’t stereotypical towering, musclebound men found on basketball courts or in boxing rings.

Instead, they were the jockeys of the race track and their dizzying success — and dramatic fall — is one of the most remarkable buried chapters in U.S. sporting history.When the country’s most prestigious horse race, theKentucky Derby, launched in 1875, 13 of the 15 jockeys were African-American.

Much like the NBA today, black athletes dominated horse racing for the next three decades, winning 15 of the first 28 Derbies.

“They were the premier horsemen in the world,” says Joe Drape, author of “Black Maestro,” which tells the story of champion jockey Jimmy Winkfield.

“It was the first professional sport for black athletes in America. They were at the forefront of horse racing and it was a place where they could earn a good living.”

Decades before Jackie Robinson made history in 1947 as the first black major league baseball player, African American jockeys forged a name as the first sports heroes of post-Civil War America.

The son of a former slave, Isaac Murphy was the first jockey to win three Kentucky Derbies — in 1884, 1890, 1891. He went on to win an unheard-of 44% of all his competitions, becoming the first rider inducted into the National Racing Hall of fame.

“Murphy was the first millionaire black athlete,” Drape told CNN. “He even had a white valet.”

Read: Jockey who refused to stay in the kitchen

Many of these jockeys had been slaves in the South, working as stable hands and becoming skilled horse handlers.

Plantation owners put them on the backs of horses in informal — and dangerous — competitions. When horse racing became an organized sport in the early 19th-Century, black jockeys were already leaders in the saddle.Yet fast forward to today and you’d struggle to find an African-American jockey on a U.S. race track.

Just 30 of the around 750 members of the national Jockey’s Guild are black, according to the most recent figures available.

Read: Melbourne Cup Memories — The legs that stopped a nation

Winkfield was the last African American to win the Kentucky Derby — in 1901 and 1902 — and by 1921 they had all but disappeared.

It would be 79 years before another black rider, Marlon St. Julien, competed in 2000.

The introduction of the Jim Crow laws in the late 1880s — segregating blacks and whites — spelled an end to the golden era of jockeys like Winkfield and Murphy.

Increasing violence against black jockeys forced many to abandon racing and move to northern urban areas, says Drape.

“It became too dangerous to put black riders on horses,” he added. “An influx of Irish immigrants were now slugging it out on the track, riding black jockeys into railings and making them fall.”

Other riders, such as Winkfield, fled to Russia — which had a thriving horse racing industry.

“The Russians were colorblind, you had jazz players and heavyweight boxers like Jack Johnson — it was basically the last place black American sportsmen could go,” Drape said.

can mean either the word in the Akan language of Ghana that translates in English to “go back and get it” (to look, to seek and take) or the Asante Adinkra symbols of a a bird with its head turned backwards taking an egg off its back, or of a stylised heart shape. It is often associated with the proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi,” which translates “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.”

The sankofa symbol appears frequently in traditional Akan art, and has also been adopted as an important symbol in an African American context. It is one of the most widely dispersed adinkra symbols, appearing in modern jewelry, tattoos, and clothing.

The Akan people of Ghana use an Adinkra symbol to represent this same idea and one version of it is similar to the eastern symbol of a heart, and another version is that of a bird with its head turned backwards taking an egg off its back. It symbolizes one taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress through the benevolent use of knowledge. Adinkra symbols are used by the Akan people to express proverbs and other philosophical ideas.

During a building excavation in Lower Manhattan in 1991, a cemetery for free and enslaved Africans was discovered. Over 400 remains were identified, but one coffin in particular stood out. Nailed into its wooden lid were iron tacks, 51 of which formed an enigmatic, heart-shaped design that could be a Sankofa.^[5] [6] The site is now a national monument, known as the African Burial Ground National Monument, administered by the National Park Service. A copy of the design found on the coffin lid is prominently carved onto a large black granite memorial at the center of the site.