The Staff of The Undefeated - The Fierce 44: Black Americans Who Shook Up the World

All images rendered from multiple images except the following:
Abbott, Robert: Getty/Robert Abbott Sengstacke, 1920; Ailey, Alvin: Jack Mitchell, Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution and Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, Inc., 1962; Ali, Muhammad: Getty/Robert Riger/Getty Images Sport Classic, 1963; Allen, Richard: Getty/Kean Collection, 1817; Angelou, Maya: Getty/Michael Ochs Archive/Stringer, 1970; Baker, Ella: Simmie Knox; Baldwin, James: Allan Warren, 1968; Bethune, Mary McLeod: Getty/PhotoQuest,1938; Chisholm, Shirley: Thomas J. OHalloran, 1972; Davis, Benjamin O., Sr.: Getty/Corbis Historical, 1944; Douglass, Frederick: Getty/Fotosearch/Stringer, 1848; Drew, Charles: National Museum of American History: Scurlock Studio, 194041; Du Bois, W. E. B.: Getty/GraphicaArtis, 1918; Ellington, Duke: Getty/George Rinhart/Corbis; Franklin, Aretha: Getty/ullstein bild, 1968; Hendrix, Jimi: Getty/Hulton Archive, 1967; Hurston, Zora Neale: Getty/Corbis Historical, 1900; Jay-Z: Getty Images/Entertainment/Scott Gries, 2005; Johnson, Katherine: Getty/NASA/Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives, 1960; Jones, Quincy: Getty/Michael Ochs Archive, 1984; King, Martin Luther, Jr.: Alwyn Scott Turner, 1968; Malcolm X: Getty/Archive Photos/MPI/Stringer; Marshall, Thurgood: Getty/Bachrach,1967; Morrison, Toni: Getty/Bernard Gotfryd, 1987; Obama, Barack: Getty/Saul Loeb, 2016; Owens, Jesse: Getty/ullstein bild, 1936; Parks, Gordon: Getty/MoviePix/John D. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive, 1968; Poitier, Sidney: Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1968; Pryor, Richard: Getty/Michael Ochs Archive/Stringer/MoviePix, 1980; Truth, Sojourner: Getty/Hulton Archive, 1860; Tubman, Harriet: Getty/Universal Images Group/Universal History Archive, 1885; Walker, Madam C. J.: Getty/Michael Ochs Archive/Stringer, 1914; Washington, Booker T.: Getty/Interim Archives, 1910; Wells, Ida B.: Getty/Universal Images Group/Universal History Archive, 1913; Wilson, August: From PBSs American MastersAugust Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand, 2015; Winfrey, Oprah: Everett Collection, 1997

Text copyright 2019 by ESPN, Inc.

Illustrations copyright 2019 by Robert Ball

Foreword copyright 2019 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Childrens Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

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The illustrations in this book were created digitally in Adobe Illustrator.

Hand-lettering 2020 by Abed Azarya

Cover design by Whitney Leader-Picone

The Library of Congress has cataloged the paper over board edition as follows:

Names: Reiss, Stephen, 1957 editor. | Ball, Robert, 1973 illustrator. | The Undefeated (Website) issuing body.

Title: The fierce 44 : black Americans who shook up the world / written by the staff of The Undefeated ; illustrated by Robert Ball ; edited by Stephen Reiss.

Other titles: Fierce forty-four | Black Americans who shook up the world

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Audience: Grades 46. | Audience: Ages 1012.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019006109 (print) | LCCN 2019020583 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African AmericansBiographyJuvenile literature.

Classification: LCC E185.96 (ebook) | LCC E185.96 .F54 2020 (print) | DDC 920.0092/96073dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006109

ISBN: 978-1-328-94062-9 paper over board

ISBN: 978-0-358-66805-3 paperback

eISBN 978-0-358-15723-6
v3.1221

This is a list of the Fierce 44, a collection of dreamers and doers, noisy geniuses and quiet innovators, record breakers and symbols of pride and aspiration.

The group includes a dashing lawyer who redefined fearlessness and broke Jim Crows back; the most gravity-defying, emulated athlete the world has ever produced; and a brilliant folklorist of spirited independence who was a proudly outrageous woman.

This is not a list of the Greatest Black Americans of All Time or the Most Influential Blacks in History. Or even the Dopest Brothers and Sisters Who Matter Most This Week. It is a listfervently debated among the staff of The Undefeated, a list chiseled and refinedof forty-four blacks who shook up the world, or at least their corner of it. We recognize that this is not a complete list of jaw-dropping black achievers; we know that such a list would never run out of names. Why limit ours to forty-four? Its an homage to the forty-fourth president of the United States and the first African American to hold this position, whose own stunning accomplishment was something a lot of usnot to mention our mothers and grandfathers and great-grandmothersnever thought wed see in our lifetime.

So from Frederick Douglass to Oprah Winfrey to Barack Obama, we hope this collection inspires you to learn more about the incredible contributions black Americans have made to our country.

Kevin Merida

Editor in Chief

The Undefeated, ESPN

On the Sunday before his inauguration as the forty-fourth president of the United States in 2009, Barack H. Obama summoned history in an address he delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

Abraham Lincoln, enthroned inside the memorial, was among the forty-three American presidents who preceded Obama, but that wasnt the only history behind him. On the eve of his swearing-in as the first black president, Obama was standing on a far firmer foundation: the history of the African American people. The pioneering black historian Carter G. Woodson once wrote that the accounts of the successful strivings of Negroes for enlightenment under most adverse circumstances read like beautiful romances of a people in an heroic age Those strivings were interwoven with every president who came before Obama, pushing the country to live up to the ideals of freedom and equal human rights that it had articulated at its founding, even as it retreated from them during both the long age of enslavement and the long retreat from Reconstruction after the Civil War that marked the nadir of race relations in the United States.

Today, we need those beautiful romances more than ever. The pages that follow in this gorgeously rendered volume, The Fierce 44, fill that need. The artwork by Robert Ball is both mesmerizing and elevating, while the snapshot biographies of the undefeated inside offer exemplary truths and models of action that will be a source of comfort, enlightenment, and courage to every reader. Although this is anything but a comprehensive list of the great heroes of our tradition, it serves up a rousing glimpse of a people who paved the way for our moment of reckoning. I have no doubt you will be as inspired studying their lives as I have been.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Cambridge, MA

In 1905, Robert Abbott started the Chicago Defender, one of the most important black newspapers in history, with just twenty-five cents (the equivalent of about seven dollars today). What began as a weekly four-page pamphlet distributed in the citys black neighborhoods quickly grew into a national publication with a readership of more than half a million.

The success of the Defender made Abbott, the son of former slaves, into one of the nations most prominent black millionaires and paved the way for other successful black publishers.