Unearthing hidden histories

Atlantic Beach — affectionately known as “The Black Pearl” is a small town in South Carolina that has long stood as a symbol of refuge, resilience and pride for African Americans.

Founded in 1934 by businessman George Tyson, Atlantic Beach was created during segregation as a safe haven where Black families could vacation, own property and build wealth at a time when opportunities were systematically denied.

During the height of segregation, Atlantic Beach flourished as a thriving vacation destination. Big band music filled the air, and visitors packed bars, restaurants and lounges along 30th Street — the cultural and economic heartbeat of the town.
But beyond the music and festivities, Mallett said the town offered something even more valuable, safety. During the era of Jim Crow, Atlantic Beach provided a rare space where African Americans could relax without fear.

Tyson’s vision extended beyond tourism. By purchasing land and selling lots to Black families, he established generational property ownership that still exists today. The town became fertile ground for Black entrepreneurship and skilled tradespeople, including brick mason Lenin Evans, who helped build the infrastructure that turned the beach community into a destination

Development slowed dramatically in 1954 when Hurricane Hazel devastated much of the Carolina coastline. For Atlantic Beach families, rebuilding was complicated by systemic barriers.

Segregation also shaped the town’s physical layout. To this day, Atlantic Beach remains just four streets wide and is geographically boxed in by surrounding communities, limiting direct access beyond its borders.

Despite those challenges, the town endured. Now, decades later, that legacy is entering a new chapter. Community leaders are working to attract new businesses back to historic 30th Street.

Septima Poinsette Clark (May 3, 1898 – December 15, 1987) was an African American educator and civil rights activist. Clark developed the literacy and citizenship workshops that played an important role in the drive for voting rights and civil rights for African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement. Septima Clark's work was commonly under-appreciated by Southern male activists.

Clark is most famous for establishing "Citizenship Schools" teaching reading to adults throughout the Deep South, in hopes of carrying on a tradition. The creation of citizenship schools developed from Septima Clark's teaching of adult literacy courses throughout the interwar years.

While the project served to increase literacy, it also served as a means to empower Black communities. Her teaching approach was very specific in making sure her students felt invested in what they were learning. She connected the politics of the movement to the personal experiences and needs of the people.

She was not only teaching literacy, but also citizenship rights. Clark's goals for the schools were to instill both personal and cultural pride, literacy, and a sense of one's citizenship rights. She recruited the rural communities to get involved with the movement. Citizenship schools were frequently taught in the back rooms of shop so as to elude the violence of racist whites.

She became known as the "Queen Mother" or "Grandmother" of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. commonly referred to Clark as "The Mother of the Movement". Clark's argument for her position in the Civil Rights Movement was one that claimed "knowledge could empower marginalized groups in ways that formal legal equality couldn't.

Rickey Jackson was a teenager living in Cleveland, Ohio, when he was wrongfully sentenced to death. He was a victim of wrongful conviction in the 1975 murder-robbery case of a money order salesman named Harold Franks. The sole evidence against Rickey and his co-defendants, brothers Wiley and Ronnie Bridgeman was the false, coerced eyewitness testimony of a 13-year-old boy named Eddie Vernon, who was to later play a central role in exonerating the three men.

No physical or forensic evidence linked any of them to the crime, none of them had any prior criminal record, and defense witnesses provided all three with credible alibis. Nevertheless, all three were sentenced to death just months after their arrest, later commuted to life without parole.

Unlike his co-defendants, Rickey was never granted parole, since he was considered the actual shooter in the murder-robbery of Harold Franks. Rickey wound up serving 39 years, three months and nine days—the longest time in prison of any person exonerated in U.S. history.

In 2011, Cleveland Scene magazine published a detailed examination of the case and highlighted the numerous inconsistencies in young Eddie Vernon’s testimony, and the absence of any other evidence linking Jackson and the Bridgemans to the crime. The reporter reached out to the pastor of Vernon in an attempt to talk to him, but Vernon still refused to talk openly about the case.

The pastor later said in a sworn affidavit that “Edward Vernon told me that he lied to the police when he said he had witnessed the murder in 1975, and he had put three innocent men in prison for murder. He told me that he tried to back out of the lie at the time of the line-up, but he was only a child and the police told him it was too late to change his story.”
At the urging of his pastor, Vernon publicly recanted his story, setting in motion the exonerations of Kwame Ajamu, Wiley Bridgeman, and Rickey Jackson.

Prompted by the recantation, attorneys with the Ohio Innocence Project filed a petition for a new trial on behalf of Jackson. Similar petitions were later filed on behalf of Wiley Bridgeman and Ronnie Bridgeman, who had since changed his name to Kwame Ajamu. The Ohio Innocence Project’s re-investigation of the case uncovered evidence that when Vernon attempted to recant his identification of the three defendants, police intimidated him to testify falsely.

The police had never disclosed to the defense attorneys for the three defendants that Vernon attempted to recant his accusation prior to the trials.

In November 2014, Judge Richard McMonagle granted motions for a new trial filed by Rickey Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman and vacated their convictions. The prosecution then dismissed the charges against both of them and they were released. On December 9, 2014, Kwame Ajamu's conviction was vacated and the prosecution dismissed the charges against him.

On August 31, 1962, Mary Lou Hamer and 17 others attempted to vote but failed a literacy test, which meant that they could not vote. On December 4, just after she returned to her hometown, Hamer went to the courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi, where she took the test again, but she failed it again and she was turned away as a result. She told the registrar, "You'll see me every 30 days till I pass".

On January 10, 1963, she took the test a third time. She was successful and was informed that she was now a registered voter in Mississippi. But when she attempted to vote that fall, she discovered her registration did not allow her to vote, as her county also required voters to have two poll tax receipts.

This requirement had emerged in some (mostly former Confederate) states after the right to vote was first given to men of all races by the 1870 ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Hamer later paid for and acquired the required poll tax receipts.

As an example of how black citizens were disenfranchised in Mississippi, Hamer said that she "had never heard, until 1962, that black people could register and vote."

Hamer began to become more involved in the activism of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee after these incidents. She attended many Southern Christian Leadership Conferences (SCLC), where she sometimes taught classes, and various SNCC (pronounced "Snick") workshops. She traveled to gather signatures for petitions to attempt to be granted federal resources for impoverished black families across the South.

In early 1963, she became a SNCC field secretary for voter registration and welfare programs. Many of these first attempts to register more black voters in Mississippi were met with the same problems Hamer had found in trying to register herself.

Jack "Jackie" Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American professional baseball player who became the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era. Robinson broke the color line when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. The Dodgers signing Robinson heralded the end of racial segregation in professional baseball.

Born in Cairo, Georgia, Robinson was raised in Pasadena, California. A four-sport student athlete at Pasadena Junior College and the University of California, Los Angeles, he was better known for football than he was for baseball, becoming a star college player with the UCLA Bruins football team.

Following his college career, Robinson was drafted for service during World War II but was court-martialed for refusing to sit at the back of a segregated Army bus, eventually being honorably discharged. Afterwards, he signed with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro leagues, where he caught the eye of Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who thought he would be the perfect candidate for breaking the color line in MLB.

Robinson's character, his use of nonviolence, and his talent challenged the traditional basis of segregation that had then marked many other aspects of American life. He influenced the culture of and contributed significantly to the civil rights movement.
Robinson also was the first black television analyst in MLB and the first black vice president of a major American corporation, Chock full o'Nuts.

In the 1960s, he helped establish the Freedom National Bank, an African-American-owned financial institution based in Harlem, New York. After his death in 1972, Robinson was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of his achievements on and off the field.

In 1997, MLB retired his uniform number, 42, across all Major League teams; he was the first professional athlete in any sport to be honored this way.

MLB also adopted a new annual tradition, "Jackie Robinson Day", for the first time on April 15, 2004, on which every player on every team wore no. 42.

On “Freedom’s Eve,” or the eve of January 1, 1863, the first Watch Night services took place. On that night, enslaved and free African Americans gathered in churches and private homes all across the country, awaiting news that the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. At the stroke of midnight, prayers were answered as all enslaved people in Confederate States were declared legally free.

Union soldiers, many of whom were black, marched onto plantations and across cities in the south reading small copies of the Emancipation Proclamation spreading the news of freedom in Confederate States. Only through the Thirteenth Amendment did emancipation end slavery throughout the United States.

But not everyone in Confederate territory would immediately be free. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later.

Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as "Juneteenth," by the newly freed people in Texas.

Gantt was born in Charleston, South Carolina on January 14, 1943 to Wilhelminia and Christopher C. Gantt, a shipyard worker. He started to participate in civil rights activism in high school. In 1963, he was the first African American to be admitted to Clemson University in South Carolina when he transferred from Iowa State University. He received a degree in architecture with Honors from Clemson and a Master's degree in City Planning from MIT.

From 1974 until 1983, Gantt served on the Charlotte City Council. He was elected to two terms as the first African-American mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, serving in that position from 1983 to 1987. He was defeated for a third term as mayor in 1987 by Sue Myrick. He was Charlotte's last Democratic mayor until Anthony Foxx was elected in 2009.

Gantt manages a successful architectural practice, Gantt Huberman Architects, and remains active in politics. He served on the North Carolina Democratic Party Executive Council, the Democratic National Committee, and was appointed as chair of the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington, DC.

In 2009, the Afro-American Cultural Center and the City of Charlotte honored Gantt by building the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, recognizing his contributions to the civil rights movement and as the city's first black mayor. The four-story, 46,500-square-foot building was built for $18.6 million, and is part the Levine Center for the Arts.

A riot breaks out in Harlem when local residents suspect that a Black boy has been beaten, and possibly killed, by a white business owner.

On March 19, 1935, Lino Rivera, a Black Puerto Rican teen from Harlem, was caught stealing a 10-cent penknife from Kress Five and Ten store on 125th Street. He briefly fought with a store employee before the police arrived. A crowd of concerned onlookers formed outside the store. The police and the store owner decided to let Rivera go, but they took him out the back door, so the crowd outside could not see him. An ambulance was called due to minor injuries sustained by the employee, but it left the scene empty. Coincidentally, there was also a hearse parked across the street. The crowd gathered outside assumed Rivera had been brutally beaten, and possibly killed.

Harlem community organizations, such as the Young Liberators and Young Communists League, led protests in the street in response. Harlemites, accustomed to collective action, had recently organized large protests of area businesses over their refusal to hire Black workers. The economic hardships of the Great Depression were amplified in Harlem and other African American urban communities, where unemployment ran 50 percent or higher.

As the night wore on, the protests turned to looting. People smashed the windows of white-owned businesses on the commercial corridor of 125th Street.

Many modern scholars consider the 1935 Harlem riot the first modern race riot. Three people died and approximately 100 were injured, while some 125 agitators were arrested by police. The riot spurred New York City Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia to appoint an interracial commission to investigate the grievances of the Harlem community and suggest remedies. Their report highlighted police aggression as a key factor behind the riot. Further, the report found that discontent in Harlem was due to “gross injustice and prejudice” in employment, education and housing.

Black inventor Alfred L. Cralle became a hero for dessert lovers on February 2, 1897, when he patented an “ice cream mold and disher,” the precursor to the scoop used to serve the popular frozen treat today.

As the story goes, Cralle saw that servers at businesses struggled at dessert time. Holding ice cream cones in one hand, they were accustomed to using a serving spoon or ladle in the other hand to dish out the treats. But ice cream often stuck to the spoon, forcing servers to juggle a cone and multiple utensils simultaneously.

The device was a near-instant hit. As the Pittsburgh Press wrote at the time, the invention could scoop “40 to 50 dishes of ice cream in a minute” while successfully doing “away with the soiling of hands.”

Newman’s hairbrush was patented in 1898 when she was 13 years old. Newman’s interest in making this newly designed hairbrush began when she would do her hair and started doing other women’s hair after moving to New York. In search to find a more efficient way to fix her clients’ hair, Newman invented the new hairbrush style. By getting it patented, she became the third black woman ever to receive a patent.

Newman’s design was specifically made for African American hair and had synthetic bristles instead of animal hair.

Every time you turn a doorknob, you may be using an idea connected to a little-known Black inventor named Osbourn Dorsey.

In 1878, Dorsey received U.S. Patent No. 210,764 for an improvement to a door-holding device. His design improved the way doors could be securely held and operated at a time when door hardware was still developing.

Dorsey's story is especially remarkable because he was born during slavery. Historical records indicate that he was born in Washington, D.C., around 1862 and was listed as an infant in records associated with the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which freed enslaved people in Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, very little documentation about Dorsey's life survives. Like many Black inventors of the 19th century, his personal history was not preserved as thoroughly as that of many of his white contemporaries. What we do have is his patent—proof that a Black inventor living only a few years after emancipation contributed to the development of everyday door hardware.

One important correction to the story that is often shared online: Dorsey did not invent the first doorknob. Doorknobs and other types of door handles existed before his 1878 patent. His documented invention was an improvement in door-holding hardware, rather than the invention of the doorknob itself.

That distinction doesn't make his accomplishment any less meaningful.

At a time when opportunities for Black Americans were severely restricted, Osbourn Dorsey was able to have his invention recognized by the United States Patent Office.

His name may not appear in most history books, but his patent remains part of America's history of Black innovation.

Osbourn Dorsey didn't invent the door—but he left his mark on how we use one.