Also known as African American History Month, the event grew out of “Negro History Week,” the brainchild of noted historian Carter G. Woodson and other prominent African Americans beginning in 1926.

(https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-history-month)

President Abraham Lincoln's birthday is February 12, 1809.

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."

(https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation#:~:text=President%20Abraham%20Lincoln%20issued%20the,and%20henceforward%20shall%20be%20free.%22)

Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a prominent activist, author and public speaker. He became a leader in the abolitionist movement, which sought to end the practice of slavery, before and during the Civil War.
(https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/frederick-douglass)

Born around 1750 in St. Marc, Sainte-Domingue [now Haiti], Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable was a black pioneer trader and founder of the settlement that later became the city of Chicago.
At some time in the 1770s he went to the Great Lakes area of North America, settling on the shore of Lake Michigan at the mouth of the Chicago River, with his Potawatomi wife, Kittihawa (Catherine).
(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Baptist-Point-Du-Sable)

Alonzo Franklin Herndon was an African American entrepreneur who founded and was the first president of Atlanta Life Insurance Company. Herndon was born on June 26, 1858 in Walton County, Georgia to Frank Herndon, a white farmer, and Sophenie, his slave. By the time of his death in 1927, Herndon was Atlanta, Georgia’s wealthiest African American and one of the first black millionaires in the United States.
(https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/herndon-alonzo-franklin-1858-1927/)

The son of a barber, Daniel Hale Williams founded the first black-owned hospital in America, and performed the world's first successful heart surgery, in 1893.

Determined that Chicago should have a hospital where both black and white doctors could study and where black nurses could receive training, Williams rallied for a hospital open to all races. After months of hard work, he opened Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses on May 4, 1891, the country's first interracial hospital and nursing school.

(https://columbiasurgery.org/news/daniel-hale-williams-and-first-successful-heart-surgery#:~:text=The%20son%20of%20a%20barber,successful%20heart%20surgery%2C%20in%201893.)

Sojourner Truth was an African American evangelist, abolitionist, women’s rights activist and author who lived a miserable life as a slave, serving several masters throughout New York before escaping to freedom in 1826. After gaining her freedom, Truth became a Christian and, at what she believed was God’s urging, preached about abolitionism and equal rights for all, highlighted in her stirring “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, delivered at a women’s convention in Ohio in 1851

After the New York Anti-Slavery Law was passed, Sojourner's previous slave owner illegally sold her five-year-old son Peter. With the help of another NY family, she filed a lawsuit to get him back. Months later, she won her case and regained custody of her son. She was the first black woman to sue a white man in a United States court and prevail.
(https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/sojourner-truth#section_3)

On December 1, 1955, Parks was arrested for refusing a bus driver's instructions to give up her seat to a white passenger.

Rosa Parks was a civil rights leader whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her bravery led to nationwide efforts to end racial segregation. Parks was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Award by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.
(https://www.biography.com/activist/rosa-parks)

Known as the “Moses of her people,” Harriet Tubman was enslaved, escaped, and helped others gain their freedom as a “conductor" of the Underground Railroad. Tubman also served as a scout, spy, guerrilla soldier, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. She is considered the first African American woman to serve in the military.
(https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/harriet-tubman)

Rainey was born a slave, but his father bought the family's freedom. During the Civil War, the Confederacy drafted Rainey to work on the military fortifications in the Charleston, S.C., harbor. He and his wife eventually escaped during the war to Bermuda. When he returned to Charleston after the war, he became politically active, championing civil rights causes. In 1870, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and was reelected four times. As a Congressman, Rainey was dedicated to passing civil-rights legislation.
(https://www.infoplease.com/biographies/society-culture/joseph-rainey)

Born a free black, Revels worked as a barber and as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. During the Civil War he helped recruit two regiments of African American troops in Maryland and served as the chaplain of a black regiment. After the war he moved to Natchez, Miss., where he was elected an alderman (1868) and a Republican state senator (1870). In 1870 Revels was elected as the first African American member of the United States Senate. A few senators objected, arguing that Revels had not been a U.S. citizen for the nine years, a requirement for serving in the Senate--African Americans had only technically become citizens four years earlier, after the passage of the 1866 Civil Rights Act. But this ploy to keep him out of the Senate failed--the Senate voted 48 to 8 in favor of Revels. Revels served as senator from Feb. 25, 1870, to March 4, 1871. (His term was an abbreviated one because he was elected to complete the term vacated ten years earlier by Jefferson Davis, who left the Senate to become the president of the Confederacy.) After the Senate, Revels served as the president of a black college and returned to the ministry.
(https://www.infoplease.com/biographies/society-culture/hiram-revels)

In 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court; he was the first black to sit on the high court, where he consistently supported the position taken by those challenging discrimination based on race or sex, opposed the death penalty, and supported the rights of criminal defendants.
(https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/people/history/supreme-court/marshall-thurgood)

Ralph Bunche was the first African American and the first person of color to win the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor he received in 1950 in recognition of his successful mediation of the Armistice Agreements between Arab nations and Israel. It was the first and only time in the long history of the Middle East conflict that peace agreements were signed by all of the nations involved. For almost two decades, as Undersecretary General of the United Nations, Bunche was celebrated worldwide for his contributions to humanity, particularly in the areas of peacekeeping, decolonization, human rights and civil rights.
(https://bunchecenter.ucla.edu/ralph-j-bunche/)

William Carney was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on July 18, 1863 at Fort Wagner, S.C. while a member of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Civil War - the state's first all-black regiment. During the disastrous battle at Ft. Wagner, Carney noticed that the man who carried the flag had been wounded.
So Carney bravely rescued the flag and carried it for him. He delivered it safely to his regiment and reportedly shouted "Boys, the old flag never touched the ground." Carney was wounded during the battle but was not killed.
(https://www.infoplease.com/askeds/first-african-american-win-congressional-medal-honor)