Forgotten African Americans You Never Learned About In School

Grab almost any standardized grade school or high school textbook, and flip through the pages. Notice anything? The famous, world-changing figures most learn about in school, well, they all have something in common, don't they?

Now, think back to the African Americans you learned about. Rosa Parks, probably, although you were only taught half of her story (and most of it was incomplete at best). Martin Luther King, Jr., no doubt. Harriet Tubman. And... that might be about it. And that's just wrong. Take a look back through history — real history, not the stuff you learn in school — and you'll find tons of brilliant and brave innovators who shaped the world as we know it today... then promptly fell from the pages of the textbooks, for one reason or another. Let's rectify that, at least for as many people as we can.

All of these? They have a few things in common, too: they're black, they're not remembered as they should be, and the world would look very different without their contributions. So let's start remembering.

The stories of Arctic exploration are nothing short of extraordinary, and a huge part of our advancements in making it to the North Pole came courtesy of an explorer that history has largely forgotten. Matthew Henson was born in 1866, and at 12-years-old, he got on board a sailing ship as a cabin boy. For six years, they sailed all around the world, from the East Coast of the US to the African coast to the seas of Asia.

After the death of the captain, Henson got a job in a Washington, D.C. shop — and that's where National Geographic says he met Robert Peary, a naval officer just back from Greenland. Peary hired Henson as a valet, but after their first expedition through Central America, they were fast friends. By 1891, Peary was embarking on his expedition to map the northernmost reaches of the world, and he wanted Henson with him. It's no wonder — Henson was a carpenter, a craftsman, a hunter and fisherman, and accomplished dog-sledder. He was also just a nice guy — the Inuit called him "Matthew the Kind One."

It wasn't until 1909 that they finally reached the North Pole, and while just what happened varies by the telling, Matthew Henson's version is that he overshot the North Pole, backtracked, and — seeing his footprints in the snow — realized he was the first person to stand at the top of the world.

Lonnie Johnson found his calling in 1968, when he headed to the University of Alabama to represent his high school in a science fair. Using scraps from a junkyard, he pieced together an air-compressed robot he called Linex — and, in spite of winning first place, those from the university hardly acknowledged him... the only black student competing.

Nevertheless, he went on to earn degrees in mechanical engineering and nuclear engineering, and over the course of his career, he's worked as a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, then at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Smithsonian says that his work on the Galileo mission to Jupiter was invaluable, and afterwards, he went on to be an Advanced Space Systems Requirements Officer at Edwards Air Force Base. 

That's the literal rocket science covered, now here's the fun. Johnson told the BBC that it wasn't long after he settled into his home in Omaha, Nebraska (amid his work on the B-2 stealth bomber) that he started messing about with making water guns. When he took a prototype to an Air Force picnic and a superior officer asked him if it worked, he literally shot the man in the face. The picnic turned into a massive water fight, and that prototype? It became the Super Soaker, and he used the profits to buy his own scientific research facility and fill it with staff.

Steroids are used in the treatment of countless conditions, and if you or anyone you know has ever suffered from things like glaucoma, you know how important access to these medicines can be. Well, you can thank an often-overlooked chemist named Percy Lavon Julian for making them readily available.

The Alabama-born grandson of slaves, Julian enrolled in DePauw University to take high school and college courses together. A few years of hard work later, and it was on to Harvard and the University of Vienna, where he did his doctoral work on the chemistry of medicinal plants.

According to the Science History Institute, chemists had been extracting steroidal compounds from animal tissues since the 1930s, but it was insanely expensive. It wasn't until Julian returned to the US and started researching that anyone had synthesized steroids from plants. That first compound he synthesized was physostigmine, and it's used to treat glaucoma. He also figured out how to mass produce progesterone from soybeans (which is used in the prevention of miscarriages), and then both cortisone and hydrocortisone (which are used in the treatment of arthritis) — allowing for a massive improvement in the quality of life for millions.

Look at pictures of the beaches on D-Day, and you'll notice something odd-looking: a series of oval-shaped craft floating above the ground troops. Those aren't planes or blimps, they're balloons — and according to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, they were extremely important.

They were towed ashore by the men of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion (which CBS notes was the only all-black combat unit to participate in D-Day), who had spent weeks learning how to camouflage and repair the balloons, along with filling them with highly flammable hydrogen gas. They were dispatched at Omaha and Utah, tasked with getting the balloons in place to protect ground troops from aerial Axis attacks. Dozens of balloons were lofted, shot down, and replaced over the course of the invasion, protecting countless ground troops and allowing invaluable supplies to be offloaded. The 320th helped with that part, too, and as for their medic, Waverly Woodson? He was saving lives. 

Woodson disembarked on Omaha Beach — a shell hit his landing craft, killed the man next to him, and peppered him with so much shrapnel he'd thought he was dead. He wasn't — and he spent the next 30 hours tending the wounded. According to History, he's credited with treating around 200 soldiers before collapsing; he was treated on a nearby hospital ship, and was back on the beach just a few days later. He never received the Medal of Honor.

For as long as film has been around, there's been mainstream and outsider. According to The New York Times, Oscar Micheaux was always an outsider, documenting racial inequality and the struggles of minorities in the US since the beginning of his career... in 1919.

Between 1919 and 1948, Micheaux wrote, produced, and directed 44 feature films. And it was an odd journey — he started out as a Pullman porter on the railway, which he gave up to move to South Dakota and become a homesteader. After suffering several family tragedies, he turned to reading then writing to cope — and it was a fictionalized version of his memoir that turned into his first movie. Sadly, that's been long lost to time, but it kicked open the door to Micheaux's other films — and he didn't shy away from anything, especially when he was answering other filmmakers. The NAACP says his Within Our Gates was a response to Birth of a Nation, and it's the tale of a racist man who repents... when he realizes the woman he's about to assault is his illegitimate black daughter.

Oscar Micheaux died in 1951, while on a book tour. He wrote of his life's work, "It is only by presenting those portions of the race portrayed in my pictures, in the light and background of their true state, that we can raise our people to greater heights."

Sometimes, you hear about those incredible people who have life stories that just sound too insane to be true... and Bass Reeves is one of those people. He was born a slave in 1838, and when he was tasked with fighting for the Confederacy alongside his owner's son, he decided he was going to get out of Dodge... or, more accurately, head there.

He escaped into Indian Territory, fell in with the Seminole and Creek tribes, and after the end of slavery, he headed to Arkansas. According to History, it was 10 years before he'd go back to the territory where he'd found freedom and this time, he was working alongside US Marshal James Fagan. Reeves was one of around 200 deputy marshals that were recruited to try to return law to the lawless West, and no one can say that he didn't do his part: he's credited with arresting more than 3,000 people... including his own son, who was ultimately sentenced to life in jail for the murder of his wife. 

Reeves's life story is the stuff of the silver screen, so it's not surprising that historians have posited he's the actual inspiration for the Lone Ranger. He even had such a strong sense of duty that he was 100 percent impossible to corrupt. According to The Washington Post, Reeves died in 1910 — when Jim Crow laws were ending the sort of freedom and authority he had.