Black History Month Quiz Answers

1) To commemorate and celebrate the contributions to our nation made by people of African descent, American historian Carter G. Woodson established Black History Week. The first celebration occurred on Feb. 12, 1926. For many years, the second week of February was set aside for this celebration to coincide with the birthdays of abolitionist/editor Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. In 1976, as part of the nation's bicentennial, the week was expanded into Black History Month. Each year, U.S. presidents proclaim February as National African-American History Month.

2) Fayetteville State University was founded in 1867 as the Howard School for the education of African Americans.3) In 1898 The Wilmington race riots erupted. On November 10 and 11, a white militia headed by local Democratic leaders terrorized the black community, killing and wounding dozens, banishing much of the city's black leadership, and burning the offices of several black businesses, including Wilmington's black newspaper, the Record. David Bryant Fulton's Hanover (1900) and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) are both thinly fictionalized accounts of the massacre. J. Allen Kirk, a black minister in Wilmington, details his experience in A Statement of Facts Concerning the Bloody Riot in Wilmington, N.C. Of Interest to Every Citizen of the United States (1898).

4) In 1790 Henry Evans, a Virginia-born shoemaker, organized Evans Chapel, now The Evans Metropolitan AME Zion Church, in Fayetteville. Evans was headed for Charleston when he stopped in Fayetteville and felt called by God to stay and help reform the residents there. Rosser H. Taylor's The Free Negro in North Carolina (1920) and Carter Godwin Woodson's The History of the Negro Church (1921) both refer to Evans' work.

5) In 1898 John Merrick founded the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association in Durham. The company grew to become the United States' largest and most successful black-owned business, with over $1.6 million in revenues upon Merrick's death in 1919. Robert McCants Andrews chronicles Merrick's life and the rise of North Carolina Mutual in John Merrick: A Biographical Sketch (1920), and W.E.B. DuBois briefly profiles the company in his 1912 article "The Upbuilding of Black Durham: The Success of the Negroes and their Value to a Tolerant and Helpful Southern City."

6) In 1885 Sarah E. Goode became the first African-American woman to receive a patent, for a bed that folded up into a cabinet.

7) William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing the Liberator, a weekly paper that advocates the complete abolition of slavery. He becomes one of the most famous figures in the abolitionist movement.

8) In 1869 Howard University's law school becomes the country's first black law school.

9) In 1882 The American Colonization Society, founded by Presbyterian minister Robert Finley, establishes the colony of Monrovia, which would eventually become the country of Liberia, in western Africa. The society contends that the immigration of blacks to Africa is an answer to the problem of slavery as well as to what it feels is the incompatibility of the races. Over the course of the next forty years, about 12,000 slaves are voluntarily relocated.

10) Four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter (Feb. 1). Six months later the "Greensboro Four" are served lunch at the same Woolworth's counter. The event triggers many similar nonviolent protests throughout the South.

Information compiled from Documenting the American South, University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and www.infoplease.com.