Heroes

He was a fighter, whether in or out of the ring. In the ring, he was as much businessman as athlete. Most young people today know Muhammad Ali only as the hunched old man whose...

Bruce created a jambalaya of martial arts, adding and discarding moves that were less effective. No wasted movements I took it to heart, I dedicated myself to preparation by maintaining complete focus during basketball practice...

Some lives are so extraordinary and touch so many people that their story must be told to generations to come so those values aren't diminished or lost altogether. From the first day of my freshman...

When I was just a boy, my mom and I used to listen to baseball on the radio. My favorite team was the Brooklyn Dodgers, and my favorite player was Jackie Robinson, whose presence on...

Most people think of Hickok as a steely-eyed gunfighter – or the guy shot in the back of the head while playing poker (his hand, a pair of aces and a pair of eights, is...

I met Dr. King in the summer of 1964 when I was seventeen years old. He had come to speak to participants of the HARYOU ACT, a mentoring program in Harlem that I was a...

A self-taught musician, Monk is credited with founding bebop, a type of jazz that focuses on fast tempos and improvisation. What I admire most about Monk is that he was a man of integrity both...

His autobiography, co-written with Alex Hailey (Roots), is the kind of world-changing book that doesn’t come along too often in history. The story of how he transformed from Malcolm Little the petty crook to Malcolm...

During the Old West, many African-Americans distinguished themselves as brave and resourceful lawmen. The most prominent was Bass Reeves, who rose from ex-slave to U.S. Marshall. Reeves taught himself to be fast with a revolver,...

The first person to die for the cause of American independence was a runaway slave who became a sailor and ropemaker. On March 5, 1770, British soldiers show and killed Attucks along with four other...