Black History Month is underway in the U.S., and Canada this month, and in the U.K. in October. It’s a time to celebrate the immense contributions of African Americans to the betterment of the nation, and some have not only made an impact on our shores but far beyond them.
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The following leaders took their influence from the overseas, creating far-reaching legacies that will be remembered until the end of time.
RITA DOVE
Dove was the first African American to serve as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. In her youth, the lauded poet and author studied as a Fulbright Scholarship recipient in Tubingen, Germany. She would go on receive numerous literary and academic honors including more than 20 honorary doctorates, the 1996 National Humanities Medal/Charles Frankel Prize from then-President Bill Clinton, the 2009 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
MARCUS GARVEY
Garvey was a prolific but controversial political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who is often called one of the forefathers of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements. Founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL), the Jamaican-born activist established the Black Star Line, which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands. He studied in London and played a huge role in rallying African Americans, with a base in Harlem that was pivotal in promoting black power before it was a popular ’70s concept.
Martin Luther King once said Garvey “was the first man of color to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny. And make the Negro feel he was somebody.”
BOB MARLEY
From songs that moved audiences and cooled political unrest to expanding the reach of reggae music, Marley was for sure an international phenom. He even lived in the U.S. for a short time after marrying Rita Marley, and reportedly worked in Wilmington, Delaware, as a DuPont lab assistant and on the assembly line at a Chrysler plant, under an alias.
His music and impact abroad would become bigger after his 1981 death in Miami, and his messages of peace are echoed today, as young men, women, and children fight against poverty, war, discrimination and inequities. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, and in 1999 his 1977 album “Exodus†was named “Album of the Century” by Time Magazine. Since its 1984 release, Marley’s “Legend†compilation has annually sold more than 250,000 copies according to Nielsen Sound Scan, and it is only the 17th album to exceed sales of 10 million copies since SoundScan began ranking albums in 1991.
ASSATA SHAKUR
This author, activist, and former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army (BLA) was a key figure during the Black Power Movement of the late ’60s and ’70s, rallying for justice for black Americans. She played a vital role in strengthening the black, female voice for rights, and though oftentimes remembered as militant, one can’t deny the impact she had on society and black history. One can’t also ignore that in 1973, Shakur was accused and convicted of several crimes, including the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, and was the subject of a multistate manhunt. She was sentenced and jailed, only to escape and flee to Cuba, where she has lived under political asylum since 1984. She has called the country, “One of the largest, most resistant and most courageous palenques (or maroon camps) that has ever existed on the face of this planet.”
She has reportedly worked as an English-language editor for Radio Havana Cuba, and penned Assata: An Autobiography, in the Caribbean country.
HALLE BERRY
An award-winning actress and film producer, Berry solidified her name in history when she won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 2002, making her the only woman of color to win in the category to date. She’s had other critically acclaimed roles since the film, but more recently she’s more involved with motherhood than news buzz-sparking Hollywood moves, with a slowdown of box-office topping films since the X-Men franchise.
Internationally recognized for her role as Storm, particularly in Asia, she landed the 2014 Global Icon honor at China’s Huading Film Awards. In her acceptance speech she said she felt like “an original Beatle” in China.”
STOKELY CARMICHAEL
Born in Trinidad but raised in New York, Carmichael would become a prominent activist, lecturer, and organizer during the civil rights movement, and later, the global Pan-African movement. The Howard University graduate rose to prominence in the civil rights and Black Power movements, as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), later as the “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Panthers, and then as a leader of the All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).
As a student, he participated in the Freedom Rides of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to
desegregate the bus station restaurants along U.S. Route 40, and was frequently arrested along with other Freedom Riders. Though his views often conflicted with major leaders of the civil rights movement, his impact on providing a diverse narrative advocating for freedom and equality for black people in the U.S. was pivotal at the time.In 1968, he married Miriam Makeba, an esteemed South African singer who was Guinea’s official delegate to the UN and relocated to Guinea, living there as Kwame Turé, and he continued as a political writer and speaker, through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, even venturing back to the U.S. to address and recruit for A-APRP and speaking out against inequality and discrimination until his death in 1998. The Rev. Jesse Jackson once said of Carmichael: “He was one of our generation who was determined to give his life to transforming America and Africa. He was committed to ending racial apartheid in our country. He helped to bring those walls down.”
TINA TURNER
Getting her chops as the dynamic power performer part of the “Ike & Tina Turner Revue,” Turner’s career has spanned more than half a century. She was listed as one of “The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time” by Rolling Stone and is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee. Some of her most popular hits, “River Deep — Mountain High,” “Proud Mary” and “What’s Love Got to Do with It” are in the Grammy Hall of Fame and she has won eight Grammy Awards. She is also the recipient of the Kennedy Honors and is one of the world’s best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more concert tickets than any other solo performer in history and having sold at least 180 million copies of singles and albums worldwide.
Early in her solo career she first found success overseas, particularly in Europe, and now the singer, born in Tennessee, is a Swiss citizen. Though retired from touring, the 76-year-old still boasts a major fan base, with more than 3 million followers on her Facebook page alone.
JAMES MEREDITH
In 1962, the civil rights activist was the first African American student admitted to the University of Mississippi. After graduating, he enrolled in a program at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria to further study political science. He toured Africa during that time at the invitation of the governments of countries including Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan.
Upon his return to the States, he became active in the Republican Party, unsuccessfully running for Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1967, and running for the Senate in 1972. After his unsuccessful congressional bids, from 1989 to 1991 Meredith served as a domestic adviser to U.S. Senator Jesse Helms.
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.
Gates is a literary critic, educator, and writer who became the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. Via that fellowship, he pursued his Ph.D. and earned his Ph.D. in English literature at Cambridge University in the U.K.
A proponent of black literature and a scholar who has written and extensively spoken about the impact of African American culture and perspective, he has served as a Alphonse Fletcher University professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He’s also author of several critically acclaimed books, and the writer and producer of the award-winning PBS series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.
RALPH BUNCHE
Ralph Bunche, a Harvard University graduate, was a political scientist, academic, and diplomat who became the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work mediating conflict between Palestine and Israel in the late 1940s.
As a student, Bunche, who was born in Detroit, studied abroad in London and Cape Town, South Africa, where he conducted postdoctoral research.
He continued to work for the United Nations after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, mediating in other regions, including the Congo, Yemen, Kashmir, and Cyprus, and he was appointed as undersecretary-general in 1968.
He would go on to serve as chair of the Department of Political Science at Howard University for more than two decades and taught generations of the esteemed HBCU’s students. He also served as a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, and the board of the Institute of International Education, and as a trustee of Oberlin College, Lincoln University, and New Lincoln School.
He was active in his support of the civil rights movement and participated in the 1963 March on Washington, and those from Selma to Montgomery, and the Alabama march, which contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and federal enforcement of voting rights.
JOSEPHINE BAKER
This American-born French dancer, singer, and actress has been cited as the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, Zouzou, and the first woman of color to become an international star. She began her career in the 1920s on the vaudeville circuit and would later become a citizen of France.
During World War II, she assisted the French Resistance and received the French military honor, the Croix de guerre. She was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by General Charles de Gaulle, a very prestigious honor in the country.
Inducted on the St. Louis Walk of Fame, though she never found the height of success she’d found in Europe in the U.S., she supported the civil rights movement and lectured at colleges including Fisk University.
RICHARD WRIGHT
An author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction, much of his literature tells prolific and groundbreaking stories on the African American experience during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. His work is credited with changing the narrative of race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century, and he’s most known for penning Native Son, and Black Boy, which became an instant best-seller upon its publication in 1945. He was one of the key figures in the Harlem Renaissance.
The 1941 recipient of the esteemed Spigarn Medal, Wright moved to Paris in 1946, and became a permanent American expatriate. Today, his works are included in academic curriculums, exploring themes of black literature, racism, and social perspectives.
HUGH A. ROBERTSON
Robertson was one of the first African American film editors in the industry, famously known for his work on Shaft. He also got an Academy Award nomination for his work on 1969’s Midnight Cowboy.
A shrewd negotiator in the 1970s, he parlayed editing gigs for opportunities to direct his own films which included Blaxploitation classics Honey Baby and Melinda. He also took the concept of gangsters and justice fighters of color across U.S. borders with Bim, a film set in Trinidad and Tobago, detailing issues of racism, crime, and colonialism via the narrative of a young East Indian man, who when forced to leave the countryside, navigates rough urban life in the Afro-Trinidadian-dominated Port of Spain.
The film won a gold medal special jury award at the United States Virgin Islands Film Festival in St. Thomas in 1975, and its impact was evident in the power of depicting what a New York Times critic described as “the accumulation of the raw, accurate details of the Trinidadian experience.”
Robertson, who would work as a film instructor and settle in Trinidad until his death in 1988, was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1982 and honored by the Los Angeles Black Media Coalition in 1987.