Colette Coleman

From eating red foods to promoting activism, Juneteenth traditions pay tribute to the liberation of America's enslaved.

A. Philip Randolph proved instrumental in urging FDR to open up the Marines—and other military branches—to African American recruits.

Following Nat Turner's rebellion of 1831, legislation to limit Black people's access to education intensified. But enslaved people found ways to learn.

With the slogan, "I am a man," workers in Memphis sought financial justice in a strike that fatefully became Martin Luther King Jr.'s final cause.

They include a spy, a poet, a guerrilla fighter—and foot soldiers who fought on both sides of the war.