The Fierce 44: Black Americans Who Shook Up the World

by The Staff of The Undefeated, Robert Ball (Illustrator)

Overview

A dynamic collective biography that presents 44 of America’s greatest Black movers and shakers, from Frederick Douglass to Aretha Franklin to Barack Obama, written by ESPN’s TheUndefeated and illustrated with dazzling portraits by Rob Ball.

From visionaries to entrepreneurs, athletes to activists, the Fierce 44 are beacons of brilliance, perseverance, and excellence. Each short biography is accompanied by a compelling portrait by Robert Ball, whose bright, graphic art pops off the page.

Bringing household names like Serena Williams and Harriet Tubman together with lesser-known but highly deserving figures such as Robert Abbott and Dr. Charles Drew, this collection is a celebration of all that African Americans have achieved, despite everything they have had to overcome.

Meet forty-four of America’s most impressive heroes in this collective biography of African American figures authored by the team at ESPN’s TheUndefeated.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780358668053
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/21/2021
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	281,920
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.30(d)
Age Range:	10 - 12 Years

About the Author

TheUndefeated.com is a website owned by ESPN that focuses on the intersection of sports, race, and culture.

Robert Ball has been a practicing graphic designer since 2000, and has illustrated throughout his career. His work carries the dynamism of comic-book art, mixed with an eye for the absurd, influenced by a misspent youth poring over the pages of Marvel comics and 2000AD.

Read an Excerpt

1

Robert Abbott

FOUNDER OF THE CHICAGO DEFENDER * 1870–1940

In 1905, Robert Abbott started the Chicago Defender, one of the most important black newspapers in history, with just twenty-five cents (the equivalent of about seven dollars today). What began as a weekly four-page pamphlet distributed in the city’s black neighborhoods quickly grew into a national publication with a readership of more than half a million.
      The success of the Defender made Abbott, the son of former slaves, into one of the nation’s most prominent black millionaires and paved the way for other successful black publishers.
      At the Defender, Abbott encouraged the Great Migration, in which six million African Americans fled the poverty and racially motivated violence of the South for new lives in the West, Northeast, and Midwest. Many of them settled in Chicago, where manufacturing jobs were opening up as World War I approached.
      Abbott was a natural hustler, which helped his reputation and the paper’s circulation. When the Defender was initially banned by white authorities in the South because it encouraged African Americans to abandon the area and head north, Abbott, who was born in Georgia, used a network of black railroad porters to surreptitiously distribute the paper in southern states. His legacy lives on today in black publications such as Essence and Black Enterprise.

Table of Contents

Robert Abbott 9

Alvin Ailey 10

Muhammad Ali 13

Richard Allen 14

Maya Angelou 17

Ella Baker 18

James Baldwin 21

Jean-Michel Basquiat 22

Mary McLeod Bethune 25

Simone Biles 26

Shirley Chisholm 29

Benjamin O. Davis Sr. 30

Frederick Douglass 33

Charles Drew 34

W. E. B. Du Bois 37

Duke Ellington 38

Aretha Franklin 41

Jimi Hendrix 42

Zora Neale Hurston 45

Jesse Jackson 46

Jay-Z 49

Katherine Johnson 50

Quincy Jones 53

Michael Jordan 54

Martin Luther King Jr. 57

Henrietta Lacks 58

Malcolm X 61

Thurgood Marshall 62

Toni Morrison 65

Barack Obama 66

Jesse Owens 69

Gordon Parks 70

Sidney Poitier 73

Richard Pryor 74

Jackie Robinson 77

Sojourner Truth 78

Harriet Tubman 81

Madam C. J. Walker 82

Booker T. Washington 85

Ida B. Wells 86

Serena Williams 89

August Wilson 90

Oprah Winfrey 93

Stevie Wonder 94