Kamala Harris
49th Vice President
Kamala Harris began her career as a deputy district attorney in Oakland, California before becoming district attorney. In 2004, Harris was elected Attorney General of California by less than one percentage point. She became the first woman and Black American to serve in the role. In 2016, Harris was elected to the United States Senate, becoming only the second Black woman to ever serve in the Senate. After running unsuccessfully for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary, nominee Joe Biden chose her as his running mate. In Nov. 2020, she was elected Vice President of the United States, becoming the first woman, first Black American and first Asian American to serve as Vice President. She lost the 2024 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump.
Thurgood Marshall
Supreme Court Justice
In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first Black American to be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. After graduating Howard University Law School first in his class, he began practicing law for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. His most famous win was the Brown v. Board of Education case, where the Court ruled racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. In 1965, he was appointed the U.S. Solicitor General by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson nominated him to be an associate Supreme Court justice in 1967, and he was confirmed by a vote of 69-11 by the U.S. Senate.
Barack Obama
44th President
After graduating Columbia University in 1983, he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991. He then worked as a community organizer with a Chicago church. After working as an associate at a Chicago law firm, he became a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. In 1996, he was elected to the Illinois State Senate. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House in 2000. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, and he became the third Black American elected to the Senate since Reconstruction. His 2004 Democratic National Convention speech shot him to political stardom. He narrowly won the 2008 Democratic presidential primary and won a massive victory, becoming America’s first Black president. He won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize and was re-elected president in 2012.
Raphael Warnock
U.S. Senator
Raphael Warnock was the 11th child in his family, born in Savannah, Georgia. Warnock preached his first He lived in public housing and in high school was voted, “Most Likely to Succeed”. He became a Baptist minister and worked as a pastor and community organizer in Harlem and Baltimore. In 2005, he became the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been a co-pastor. In 2020, he ran for the U.S. Senate, and because no candidate reached 50% in November, a second election was held in January 2021, which Warnock won. He became the first Black person to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate and the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from the South. In 2022, he was re-elected to a full six year term in the Senate.
Ketanji Brown Jackson
Supreme Court Justice
Ketanji Brown Jackson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1970 to two public school teachers. She grew up in Miami and was a master in debate. In 1988, she enrolled at Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude. She graduated Harvard Law School in 1996 and then held three high-ranking clerkships with different U.S. attorneys. She worked in private law firms before becoming a federal public defender in Washington, D.C. She was on President Barack Obama’s short-list for the Supreme Court when a nomination opened in 2016. In 2022, President Joe Biden nominated Jackson to the next member of the Supreme Court. She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate 53-47 and became the first Black woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
John Lewis
U.S. Representative
John Lewis was a congressman and civil rights icon. Growing up in the segregated South, he was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. He began participating in the Freedom Rides that protested bus segregation. In 1961, he was beaten and arrested for doing so. In 1965, he led more than 600 protestors in support of equal voting rights in Selma, Alabama across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. On the bridge, they were attacked by police with horses, billy clubs and bullwhips. After being a leading supporter of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he was elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1981. In 1986, he was elected a member of the U.S. House, representing Atlanta. He won the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in 2020 after a battle with cancer and became the first Black American to ever lie in state at the U.S. Capitol.
Shirley Chisholm
U.S. Representative
The daughter of immigrants, Shirley Chisholm grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at Columbia University and became active with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1964, she was elected to represent Brooklyn in the New York state legislature. In 1968, she ran for the U.S. House with the slogan, “Unbought and Unbossed”. She upset her opponent and became the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress. In 1972, she became the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. After winning 152 delegates, she dropped out of the race. Her congressional career spanned from 1969 to 1983, where she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, supported the Equal Rights Amendment and fought for abortion rights. She died in 2005.
Colin Powell
U.S. Secretary of State
Colin Powell was born to Jamaican immigrants in New York City in 1937. He was raised in the Harlem and South Bronx neighborhoods. After studying at the City College of New York, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was deployed to Vietnam during the Vietnam War, where he served for two years. Upon coming home, he became a White House fellow and an assistant in the West Wing. After moving jobs, he became a senior military assistant to the Secretary of Defense in 1983. Powell then joined the National Security Council and after leading the Army Forces Command, he was appointed Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by President George H.W. Bush. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Powell as the U.S. Secretary of State. He was the first Black American to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff or serve as the Secretary of State.
Hakeem Jeffries
U.S. Representative
Hakeem Jeffries was born in Brooklyn in 1970 to a substance abuse counselor and social worker. He attended college at the State University of New York (SUNY) Binghamton. He furthered his political career at Georgetown University and then enrolled in the New York University (NYU) School of Law. He then clerked for both a federal judge and private practice. In 2006, Jeffries was elected to the New York State Assembly. After winning re-election twice, he was elected to the U.S. House in 2012. He worked on criminal justice reform, including an effort to ban chokeholds. He joined the Congressional Black Caucus and in 2019, he became the Chair of the House Democratic Caucus. In 2022, the House Democrats elected him their caucus leader and he became House Minority Leader in 2023, the first Black person to lead a major party in Congress.
Hiram Rhodes Revels
U.S. Senator
Hiram Rhodes Revels was born in North Carolina in 1827. As education was denied to him in the South, he traveled to Indiana and Illinois to study. He became a minister in 1845 and moved to Baltimore where he was a pastor and principal for a school for Black Americans. Following the start of the Civil War, he organized volunteer regiments to fight for the Union Army. He then volunteered as a chaplain to an African American regiment in Mississippi. He became a military governor in 1868 and then was elected the first Black person elected to the U.S. Senate. A Republican, he supported bills to expand voting rights and supported allowing former Confederates to hold office in an effort to reduce racial tension. He fought for desegregated schools. He only held his Senate seat for one year before becoming a college president.
