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One Mic Black History Each episode of One Mic centers around little known events or persons from Black history selected for

21/08/2026

We like think of Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” is just the Black birthday song. It’s not. It was a tool used to force the United States government to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a national holiday.

After Congress voted against the holiday in 1979, Stevie Wonder put his music career on hold. He paid for a four-month national tour, stood with Coretta Scott King, and collected over 6 million signatures to force politicians to change their minds.

It wasn’t written to celebrate a birthday; it was a demand for respect.

19/08/2026

Before he was a rock legend, Jimi Hendrix was a backup guitar player catching hell from Little Richard.

In 1964, Hendrix played for Little Richard’s backing band, the Upsetters. Richard demanded strict uniformity and handed out heavy cash fines to anyone who broke the rules or tried to steal his shine. Hendrix refused to blend in. He constantly clashed with Richard over wearing flamboyant ruffled shirts and playing his guitar with his teeth to pull the crowd’s attention.

Richard finally had enough. He stopped a show, fined Hendrix on the spot, and fired him, telling him directly: “I am the only one allowed to be pretty.”

One Mic History

18/08/2026

When Sidney Poitier was handed the script for In the Heat of the Night in 1967, he saw a scene where a racist white plantation owner slaps his character in the face.

In the original draft, Detective Virgil Tibbs was supposed to just stand there, take the hit, and walk away in silence. Sidney, however, completely refused to play it that way.

He told the studio executives that there was absolutely no way he was taking that disrespect on camera. He demanded they change the script so he could slap the man right back, and he even had it written directly into his contract so the studio couldn’t edit it out in post-production.

When the cameras rolled, Poitier returned the slap so hard it echoed. He refused to play the victim, and in the process, delivered the backhand that changed Hollywood forever.

Follow for the untold, raw, and wild stories from Black history.

In 1919, the white establishment in the South was panicking. Their entire economy was built on cheap Black labor, and th...
10/08/2026

In 1919, the white establishment in the South was panicking. Their entire economy was built on cheap Black labor, and those workers were suddenly packing up and leaving.

The spark behind this massive exit was a single newspaper: the Chicago Defender.

The paper was printing northern factory job listings, train schedules, and exact instructions on how to escape Jim Crow. To stop the bleeding, Southern mayors made a ruthless move. They made it a crime for Black folks to even read or hold a copy of the paper. They wanted to cut off the information and physically trap their workforce in the dark.

But they completely ignored the Black men operating their own trains.

The Pullman Porters used their jobs on luxury sleeper cars as the perfect cover. They packed their coats, mattresses, and cargo holds full of the illegal papers before they ever left northern stations. As they rolled through the segregated South, they didn't hand them out at the heavily policed platforms. Instead, they memorized the routes and hurled heavy bundles of newspapers out of moving train windows to trusted contacts hiding in the brush.

The South tried to keep their labor force captive. The Pullman Porters used the rail system to hand millions of people the map out of the Jim Crow South

By 1863, Harriet Tubman was operating as an armed military intelligence officer for the Union Army in South Carolina. Sh...
06/08/2026

By 1863, Harriet Tubman was operating as an armed military intelligence officer for the Union Army in South Carolina. She built a covert spy ring using the people who knew the local terrain better than anyone: currently and formerly enslaved boatmen and scouts.

The Union needed to destroy Confederate supply lines along the Combahee River, but the water was heavily rigged with underwater explosives known as torpedoes. The Confederate forces thought the river was impenetrable.

Tubman’s operatives mapped out the exact location of every single explosive barrel hidden beneath the surface.

Armed with that tactical intelligence, Tubman became the first woman in US history to command a major military assault. On the night of June 1, 1863, she stood on the deck of the USS John Adams. She guided three federal warships carrying 300 Black soldiers from the 2nd South Carolina Infantry straight through the Confederate minefield without triggering a single bomb.

When they reached the shore, it was a coordinated military strike. The Union soldiers swept through the surrounding plantations. They burned down the estates of wealthy slaveholders, torching millions of dollars worth of cotton, rice, and infrastructure that actively funded the Confederate war machine.

When the enslaved workers realized what was happening, they rushed toward the ships. Confederate overseers and armed guards tried to stop the mass exodus, drawing pistols and firing on the crowds. Tubman's forces responded with overwhelming firepower. The Union warships aimed their heavy artillery at the shore and opened fire, forcing the enslavers to drop their weapons and scatter for their lives.

In a matter of hours, Tubman and her forces dismantled the local Confederate economy and loaded over 700 enslaved men, women, and children onto the warships. Over 100 of the men freed that night immediately picked up rifles and enlisted in the Union Army to go back and fight.

Harriett Tubman was an American hero

Days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a schoolteacher named Harriet Glickman wrote to Charles Schulz, ...
03/08/2026

Days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a schoolteacher named Harriet Glickman wrote to Charles Schulz, telling him that adding a Black character to the strip could help mend racial fences.

Schulz was reluctant at first but came around. The white executives handling his money did not.

The president of the United Feature Syndicate was terrified that Southern newspapers would cancel their contracts and cost the company millions.

When Schulz sent in the first comic featuring Franklin returning a lost beach ball to Charlie Brown, the executives demanded changes.
Schulz refused to negotiate. He told the head of the UFS:

"Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit."

The UFS caved. On July 31, 1968, Franklin hit newspapers nationwide.
The South complained, but Franklin stayed.

Happy belated Franklin Day.

We just passed Ida B. Wells' birthday, July 16th, and I wanted to circle back and talk about the times she absolutely pi...
30/07/2026

We just passed Ida B. Wells' birthday, July 16th, and I wanted to circle back and talk about the times she absolutely pi**ed off the white folks with her pen.

In 1892, the mainstream media was actively covering up a lynching epidemic.
The excuse the mobs used was that they were simply "protecting" white women from Black men.

Ida B. Wells knew that was bull

She published an editorial in the Memphis Free Speech that called the entire system a fraud, she wrote:
"Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men r**e white women."

And then, she suggested that white women were willingly having relationships with Black men.

"If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves... a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women."

In 1892, a Black woman publicly calling Southern white men liars and questioning the "purity" of white women wasn't just journalism.
It was a death sentence.

The white folks went absolutely berserk. A mob marched on her office, burned her printing press to ashes, and there was a hit put out to hang her on sight if she ever returned to Memphis.

They expected her to just fade into obscurity.

Instead, she moved to Chicago, bought a gun, and wrote two books on lynching. In one of them, she dropped this solution to the violence:

"A Wi******er rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give."

Ida B. Wells didn't just document history, she dragged their dirt into the light, and tried to change the world

29/07/2026

The 1964 Freedom Summer manhunt is famous, but the darkest part of the story is what the FBI found by accident.
When James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi, the FBI launched a massive manhunt. But that level of federal intervention only happened because two of the victims were white. The brutal proof? While searching the swamps and dragging the rivers for those three men, the FBI stumbled upon the bodies of at least five other Black men who had been murdered and completely ignored by the state. The recent discussions around Nolan Wells in Mississippi prove that this specific history isn’t as far in the past as we pretend it is.
Full episodes on the One Mic Black History YouTube channel and substack .

On July 28, 1866, Congress passed an act creating six all-Black peacetime regiments: the 9th and 10th Cavalry, and the 3...
28/07/2026

On July 28, 1866, Congress passed an act creating six all-Black peacetime regiments: the 9th and 10th Cavalry, and the 38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st Infantry.

History knows them better as the Buffalo Soldiers.

The government didn’t create them out of the kindness of their heart. For $13 a month, Black men were handed defective Civil War rifles, given the worst horses, and shipped West.

They made up 20% of the United States Cavalry and were explicitly used to clear Indigenous people off their land. It was a calculated game of using one oppressed group to subjugate another.

But despite being handed the most dangerous assignments in the country, these men excelled.

They maintained the lowest desertion rate in the entire U.S. military. They fought so relentlessly that the Indigenous tribes they battled gave them the "Buffalo Soldier" moniker out of respect.

When they weren't on the battlefield, they became the country's very first park rangers.

Years before the National Park Service even existed, it was Black soldiers who protected Yosemite and Sequoia from poachers, built the early trail systems, and fought the wildfires.

The federal government sent them into the desert to fail. Instead, they built the American frontier.

We just passed Ida B. Wells' birthday, July 16th, and I wanted to circle back and talk about the times she absolutely pi...
27/07/2026

We just passed Ida B. Wells' birthday, July 16th, and I wanted to circle back and talk about the times she absolutely pi**ed off the white folks with her pen.

In 1892, the mainstream media was actively covering up a lynching epidemic.

The excuse the mobs used was that they were simply "protecting" white women from Black men.

Ida B. Wells knew that was bull

She published an editorial in the Memphis Free Speech that called the entire system a fraud, she wrote:

"Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men r**e white women."

And then, she suggested that white women were willingly having relationships with Black men.

"If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves... a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women."

In 1892, a Black woman publicly calling Southern white men liars and questioning the "purity" of white women wasn't just journalism.

It was a death sentence.

The white folks went absolutely berserk. A mob marched on her office, burned her printing press to ashes, and there was a hit put out to hang her on sight if she ever returned to Memphis.

They expected her to just fade into obscurity.

Instead, she moved to Chicago, bought a gun, and wrote two books on lynching. In one of them, she dropped this solution to the violence:

"A Wi******er rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give."

Ida B. Wells didn't just document history, she dragged their dirt into the light, and tried to change the world.

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