Black History Month

This year at Longroyde we have taken a different approach to Black History Month. We have been looking at how people have overcome adversity and gone on to influence many people and achieve amazing things. As always we look at very influential leaders including Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parkers and Nelson Mandela. In addition to these, we wanted to find out about other amazing people and what they have achieved.

Click on the image to find out more!

• Garret Morgan
  Garret Morgan

  Garret Morgan was born in 1877 in
  Kentucky. He was an inventor who
  after seeing a terrible accident,
  decided he would invent the three
  way traffic lights used across the
  world today.

• Oprah Winfrey
  Oprah Winfrey

  Oprah Winfrey was born n 1954 in
  Mississippi. Her mother was a
  house maid and the family lived in
  poverty. Oprah worked hard at
  school and landed a job on radio
  while she was still in high school.

  She went on to become a broad-
  caster, journalist, author, actress

  and talk show host. Through all her
  achievements she has now the first
  black North American women to be
  a multi-Billionaire.

• Phillis Wheatley
  Phillis Wheatley

  When she was a young girl, she was put on board a ship and sent to

  the US, where she was sold as a slave to a family called the Wheat-
  leys. She was named after that ship - the Phillis. While Phillis was a

  slave, she was taught to read and write, which was unusual at the
  time. She wrote her first poem at the age of 14. At the age of 20,
  she moved to England with her son and within a year, published her

  first book. This made her the first African-American poet to be pub-
  lished, with her first volume of poetry in 1773.The fact that her

  writing was so brilliant proved that women who were slaves could
  have amazing intellectual ideas, when people hadn't thought that.

• Mary Seacole
  Mary Seacole

  Mary Seacole was born and grew up in Jamaica, but came over to Eng-
  land in 1854. She asked the War Office if she could go to help wounded

  soldiers who were fighting in the Crimean War (1853-1856), but she

  wasn't allowed. So she raised the money herself and travelled to Bala-
  clava, Ukraine. Here, she looked after British soldiers who had been in-
  jured. Despite all that she did, not many people knew who she was or

  the amazing work that she had done after she died. Most people re-
  member Florence Nightingale, who helped many people too. However,

  people have campaigned to make sure that people remember every-
  thing that Mary Seacole did. In 2016, a statue of her was built  opposite the Houses of Parliament in the grounds of St Thomas' Hospital.

• Lillan Bader
  Lillan Bader

  Lilian Bader was born in 1918 in Liverpool and went on to become one
  of the very first black women to join the British Armed Forces. Starting
  out as a canteen assistant at an army base in Yorkshire, she eventually

  trained as an instrument repairer, before becoming a leading aircraft-
  woman and soon afterwards earning herself the rank of Corporal.

  Three generations of her family served in the armed forces. When she

  left the army to have children of her own, she retrained and got a degree from the University of London to become a teacher.

• Joan Armatrading
  Joan Armatrading

  The first ever female UK artist to be nominated for a Grammy in
  the blues category. She went on to be nominated three times.
  She arrived in the UK at the age of seven, from the Caribbean
  island of Saint Kitts. She started writing songs at the age of 14.

  She also taught herself to play the guitar. In the 1970s, she be-
  came the first black British singer songwriter to enjoy great suc-
  cess abroad. Then, in 2007, she became the first female UK

  artist to debut at number 1 in the Billboards blues chart (which is
  like the top 40 chart for blues music in America).

• John Edmonstone
  John Edmonstone

  John Edmonstone was born into slavery in British Guiana in the

  late 1700s but died a free man in Britain having taught and influ-
  enced one of the greatest men in the history of science, Charles

  Darwin. Many Black people's contributions to science are hidden
  from history and we have to reconstruct their stories from the
  margins of more famous naturalists' lives.

• Paul Stephenson
  Paul Stephenson

  Paul Stephenson was born in England and went to school where he was
  the only black child. Even though it does not feel like that long ago, at
  the time he was a child, being black and being English were sometimes
  seen as two very different things. This is what inspired him to go on to
  dedicated his life to stopping racial discrimination and bringing black and

  white communities together. He became Bristol's first black social work-
  er, which improved the relationship between black and white people in

  the city. He spent his life leading important campaigns that made big
  changes in how black people were treated.

• Barack Obama
  Barack Obama

  Barack Obama served as the 44th President of the United States. (the first African-
  American President) . With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, Presi-
  dent Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from

  his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked

  her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank. He is quoted as saying "The opportunity that Hawaii offered ”to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect ”became an integral part of my world view,

  and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."

• Lewis Hamilton
  Lewis Hamilton

  Lewis Hamilton is the first and only black driver to race in Formula
  One . Born on 7 January 1985 in Stevenage, England,, Lewis
  starting Karting at the age of eight. His father worked three jobs

  to enable Lewis to fulfil his dream of being a racing driver. A six-
  time Formula One World Champion, he is widely regarded as one

  of the greatest drivers in the history of the sport, and considered
  by some to be the greatest of all time.