Actress and model Jayne Kennedy Overton was born on October 27, 1951 in Washington D.C. to Herbert and Virginia Harrison. She moved to Ohio at a young age and graduated from Wickliffe High School in 1970. Before graduating high school, she was the first African American to be crowned Miss Ohio in 1970 and was one of twelve finalists in the Miss Universe pageant.

After graduating from high school, Overton moved to California with her then husband, Leon Isaac Kennedy, to pursue a career in acting. She began as a dancer on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In show and eventually landed a role on The Dean Martin Show as a Ding-A-Ling Sister, performing in night clubs all over the United States. Throughout the 1970s, she appeared on television shows like Banacek, Sanford and Son, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Rockford Files. In addition, she was featured in various movies, including Group Marriage, Big Time, and Fighting Man. She is best known for her role as Julie Winters in the movie Body and Soul, for which she won the NAACP Image Award for Best Actress in 1982.

In addition to her acting career, Overton has modeled for a variety of magazines, and she appeared on the covers of publications like Jet and Ebony. She was also the first African American actress to be featured on the cover of Playboy in 1981. Though her roles on television and movies are numerous, in 1978, Overton was hired by CBS Sports for the show The NFL Today, where she was a strong advocate for gender equality in sports. Overton ran campaigns for women to love their bodies, creating exercise videos in the 1980s as a part of her campaign. She also worked with former First Lady Michelle Obama on the Let Girls Learn Initiative, advocating to give educational opportunities to young women. Her memoir, Plain Jayne, was published in 2025.

Overton resides in Los Angeles, California with her husband, Bill Overton. They have four daughters: Cheyenne, Savannah, Kopper, and Zaire.

Jayne Kennedy Overton was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on November 21, 2024.

Cartoonist Gregory Harris was born on May 6, 1961 in Chicago, Illinois to Joe Nathan Harris and Mae Rainey Kennedy Harris. He graduated from Christian Fenger Academy High School in Chicago, Illinois in 1979 and attended Columbia College Chicago and Loyola University Chicago, where he studied psychology.

While attending Loyola University, Harris worked for the United States Social Security Administration. In 1987, Harris joined the United States Post Office in Chicago, Illinois as a clerk carrier. Then, in 1990, Harris began working as a cartoonist for The Chicago Defender, a Chicago-based African American news publication. In 1994, Harris created The BlackBoard Project, an artistic and civic campaign that organized town hall meetings and utilized billboards to appeal to African American men living in Chicago’s inner city. Throughout his career, Harris published his cartoons in over one hundred newspaper publications, over fifty of which were African American news publications.

Beginning in 1993, Harris’ work was exhibited at the Woodson Regional Library in Chicago in annual showcases seeking to encourage African American children to pursue careers in journalism. His cartoons were also displayed in Black Ink: Spotlight on African-American Cartoonists, a long-running exhibit that debuted at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, California in 1992. Black Ink was also displayed at the San Francisco International Airport in 1993 and the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Florida in 1994. Harris joined WVON Radio in 1998. He also appeared on numerous other radio broadcasts and television shows including The Stan West Show, and Black Entertainment Television’s Our Voices in 1992. During his career, Harris lectured at numerous colleges and universities throughout the United States.

Harris co-founded the National Association of African American Artists with cartoonist Tim Jackson in 1997. He became the first cartoonist to be officially archived by the Chicago Public Library in the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature in 1995. Harris also received invitations to the Black Art Center in Lagos, Nigeria.

Harris resides in Chicago, Illinois. He has four children and two grandchildren.

Gregory Harris was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on November 10, 2024.

Lawyer, scholar, and academic administrator Tomiko Brown-Nagin was born on April 23, 1970 in Edgefield County, South Carolina to Lillie and Willie Brown. Brown-Nagin received her B.A. degree in history summa cum laude from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina in 1992, her J.D. degree from Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut in 1997, and her Ph.D. degree in history from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in 2002.

After graduating from law school, Brown-Nagin worked as a clerk for Federal District Court Judge Robert L. Carter at the United States District Court, Southern District Court of New York in 1997 and for Federal Court of Appeals Judge Jane R. Roth at the United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit in 1998. In 1999, Brown-Nagin was named a Charles Hamilton Houston Fellow with Harvard Law School and a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University. In 2001, she was hired as an associate with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York, New York and after two years, she joined Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri as an associate professor of law and history. Brown-Nagin then joined the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as a professor of law and history in 2006. In 2012, Brown-Nagin was hired as a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a professor of history at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2018, she was promoted to dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she oversaw interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities, social sciences, sciences, and professions. In 2019, she chaired the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, which released a landmark report on Harvard University’s ties to slavery. Brown-Nagin published numerous books, book chapters, and articles including Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement in 2011, Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of American Empire, co-edited with Gerald Neuman in 2015, and Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality in 2022.

Brown-Nagin is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Law Institute, and the American Bar Foundation. She holds bar memberships with the New York State Bar, the United States District Court, Southern District of New York, the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bar. Brown-Nagin is also a member of The Links, Inc. and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

Brown-Nagin has received numerous awards and honors. These include a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Duke University Graduate School in 2022 and an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Furman University, in 2023. She has received numerous prizes for books Courage to Dissent and Civil Rights Queen, including the Bancroft Prize, the Order of the Coif Award, the Liberty Legacy Award, the John Phillip Reid Book Award, the Lillian Smith Book Award, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, and the Darlene Clark Hine Book Award.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 27, 2023.

Television news reporter Farai Chideya was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Cynthia and Lucas Chideya. She received her B.A. degree in English from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1990.

That same year, Chideya was hired as a reporter for Newsweek Magazine in New York, New York. Then, in 1994, she joined VIBE magazine as a political reporter. Chideya worked as a writer for MTV News and as a political analyst for CNN in 1995. In 1997, she served as a reporter for ABC News for two years. After leaving ABC News, she worked as a political columnist for Syndicated in 1999. Chideya also served as a host of Oxygen Media in 2000. In 2004, she became an NPR affiliate radio station host and then worked as NPR’s News & Notes host in Los Angeles, California in 2006. In 2008, Chideya was hired as a visiting professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In 2015, Chideya worked as a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight.Com in New York City. She founded Diaspora Farms Media, LLC in 2020.

Chideya started her blog, Pop and Politics, in 1995, and published Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation about African Americans that same year. Her other published works include, The Color of Our Future, Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Voters, Kiss the Sky, Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, co-written with Vivek Wadhwa, and The Episodic Career: How to Thrive at Work in the Age of Disruption. Chideya worked on several podcasts including One with Farai in 2014 and Our Body Politic in 2020.

Chideya served on the Journalism Advisory Committee for the Knight Foundation and as a program officer on the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression team.

Chideya has received multiple awards and honors, including a National Education Reporting Award from the Education Writers Association in 1994, a Distinguished Alumni Award from Harvard University in 2000, the North Star News Prize in 2006, the Enterprise Reporting Award from the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007, and a special award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association in 2008. Chideya completed multiple fellowships, including a Freedom Forum Media Studies Center Fellowship in 1996, a Knight Foundation Fellowship in 2001, a Foreign Press Fellowship for Japan in 2002, a fellowship at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2012, and a fellowship at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy in 2017. Chideya became a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in 2012, where she worked until 2016.

Farai Chideya was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 24, 2023.

Hip-hop artist Maimouna “Mumu Fresh” Youssef was born on March 10, 1985 in Baltimore, Maryland to Nat’aska Hasan Youssef and Elwood Farmer. She released her first album, Subversive Activity, at seventeen years old while attending Duke Ellington High School of the Arts in Washington D.C.

In 2007, Youssef was nominated for a Grammy Award for her vocal contribution to “Don’t Feel Right” by The Roots. That same year, she performed in the hip-hop documentary film Dave Chappelle’s Block Party alongside featured artists Khnum Muata “stic.man” Ibomu of dead prez, the Fugees, and Kanye West. In 2011 Youssef released her first solo EP, Black Magic Woman, followed by her full-length album,The Blooming. Its leading single, “I Got A Man,” was selected as the theme music to BET’s original series Being Mary Jane starring Gabrielle Union. Youssef launched her artist development company, MKY Entertainment Group, in 2016. The following year, she collaborated with DJ Dummy on the duo’s joint album Vintage Babies. The project included features by Common, Irvin Washington, and Malik Yusef.

Youssef was selected as a U.S. Department of State musical ambassador in 2017, traveling abroad to perform and facilitate workshops for youth addressing gender-based violence. In 2018, Youssef performed an NPR Tiny Desk concert with August Greene followed by her own solo set. She also joined Common’s Let Love tour in 2019. She began an artist residency at the Inner-City Muslim Action Network in Chicago, Illinois the same year. In 2020, she founded Muniversity Studies, an e-learning music education program, and in 2021, she released Vintage Babies II: Queen of Culture. Youssef has performed at the Black Girls Rock Awards, the Black Music Honors, SXSW, the Essence Music Festival, the National Museum of African American History & Culture Hip-Hop Block Party, and at the Apollo Theater, as well as for the Congressional Black Caucus. Her album, The Healing, was released in 2024.

Youssef served as governor of the Washington D.C. chapter of the Recording Academy and as an ambassador of the Black Music Collective.

Youssef has a son named Messiah Youssef. She resides in Mount Rainier, Maryland.

Maimouna “Mumu Fresh” Youssef was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 23, 2023.

Ambassador Donald F. McHenry was born on October 13, 1936 in St. Louis, Missouri to Dora Brooks McHenry and Limas McHenry. He received his B.S. degree in international affairs in 1957 from Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois and his M.A. degree in international affairs and rhetoric in 1959 from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

After graduating from Southern Illinois University, McHenry taught public speaking at Howard University in Washington D.C. for three years. He joined the U.S. Department of State as a foreign affairs officer for the dependent areas section of the United Nations political affairs office in 1963. McHenry worked eight years at the Department of State on the desks of the Pacific Islands, Southwest Africa, and Namibia, and as an assistant to Secretary of State David Dean Rusk. In 1971, McHenry went on leave from the Department of State to work for the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which published his book Micronesia: Trust Betrayed in 1975. McHenry returned to the Department of State in 1976, where he served on the transition team of President Jimmy Carter, who appointed McHenry as the U.S. deputy representative to the United Nations Security Council in 1977. That same year, McHenry was appointed ambassador and U.S. permanent representative to the U.N., serving until 1981.

McHenry then joined the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. as a distinguished professor of diplomacy in 1981. While at Georgetown, McHenry undertook several governmental assignments, working as a special envoy of President Bill Clinton for Nigeria in 1994, as a member of the United Nations Panel of Eminent Persons on Algeria in 1998, and as a member of the Congressional Task on the United Nations in 2005. Upon his retirement in 2014, Georgetown University established the Donald F. McHenry Chair in Global Human Development.

McHenry served in numerous trustee and board positions in non-governmental organizations including the International Paper Company, the Coca-Cola Company, the Fleet National Bank, Glaxo Smith Kline p.l.c., AT&T, the American Ditchley Foundation, the American Assembly, and the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation. He worked as chairman of the Ford Foundation International Fellowship Fund and director of the Institute for International Education. McHenry also served as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and as a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy, the Association of Black American Ambassadors, and the Global Leadership Forum.

During his career, McHenry received honorary degrees from sixteen universities, including Duke University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, Illinois State University, Princeton University, and Southern Illinois University. He was inducted as a laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln by Governor J.B. Pritzker in 2021.

The Honorable Donald F. McHenry was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 20, 2023.

Photographer Iké Udé was born on July 27, 1964 in Lagos, Nigeria to Samuel Obe Udé-Agu and Cecilia Nnemembchi Udé-Agu. He graduated from Government Secondary School, Afikpo in Afikpo, Nigeria. In 1981, he began his studies in media communications at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY).

Udé worked as an artist in the 1980s, with a focus on photography. In 1994, Udé created his photographic series Cover Girl. The following year, he founded aRUDE Magazine, an art-fashion print magazine, and his work was featured in the book Beyond Decorum: The Photography of Iké Udé, published by the MIT Press in 2000. In 2008, Udé published his book Style File: The World’s Most Elegantly Dressed with HarperCollins. That same year, his series Paris Hilton: Fantasy and Simulacrum was featured in the Stux Gallery in New York City and in the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway, in 2009. Udé then created his photographic series on dandyism, Sartorial Anarchy, which was displayed in The Global Africa Project exhibit at the Museum of Art & Design (MAD) in New York, New York, from 2010 to 2013, and in the Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion exhibit at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum in 2013. A selection of Udé’s self-portraits from his Sartorial Anarchy series was exhibited in a solo exhibition, Style and Sympathies, at the Leila Heller Gallery in New York City in 2013.

Udé created a series of portraits titled Nollywood Portraits between 2014 and 2016, photographing major figures in Nigeria’s Nollywood movie industry. His Nollywood Portraits were the focus of the book Iké Udé: Nollywood Portraits: A Radical Beauty and were displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in 2022. Udé’s photography has been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, including the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 2025, Udé served as a special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” exhibit.

Throughout his career, Udé has received numerous awards and honors including on Vanity Fair magazine’s “Best Dressed” list in 2009, 2012, and 2015. He was inducted into the Best Dressed Hall of Fame in 2022.

Udé resides in New York, New York.

Iké Udé was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 18, 2023.

Civic leader Rashad Robinson was born on October 13, 1978 in Long Island, New York to Shirley Ann and Everett Robinson. He graduated from Riverhead High School in 1997. He went on to earn his B.A. degree in political science from Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia in 2001.

Robinson was hired as an organizer for the Education Trust, Inc. in 2001. That same year, he worked in after-school programming at the Maya Angelou Charter School in Washington D.C. Then, in 2002, he joined FairVote, an organization that advocates for electoral reform in the United States, as the national field director. Robinson stepped down from his position with FairVote in 2004. Shortly after, he was hired as the director of communications of Right to Vote at the JEHT Foundation. Robinson served as the campaign manager for Showtime Network’s political reality show American Candidate in 2004. Then, in 2005, he was hired as the senior director of media programs at GLAAD, a non-profit advocacy organization for the LGBTQ community. In 2010, Robinson was selected by the U.S. State Department's Diplomacy in Action Program to travel to Belgrade, Serbia to work with activists and journalists on cultural change and media advocacy strategies. In 2011, Robinson stepped down from his position at GLAAD, and he was hired as executive director and president of Color of Change, a non-profit advocacy organization for civil rights. Robinson appeared in Pay 2 Play: Democracy’s High Stakes, a documentary about the American political system, in 2014. Two years later, he appeared in the Netflix documentary 13th, about the American prison system. Robinson also worked as a consulting producer on the Netflix mini-series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story in 2022. Robinson stepped down from Color of Change in 2024.

Since 2016, Robinson has served as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership in Washington D.C. Robinson has also served on the boards of directors for ALLOUT, the Applied Research Center, Demos, the Global Campaign for LGBT Equality, and State Voices. He is on the board of the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

Robinson resides in New York, New York.

Rashad Robinson was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 16 and May 8, 2023.

Chief financial officer Tracey Thomas Travis was born on June 22, 1962 in Rochester, New York to Stanley Thomas, Jr. and Claire Jean Thomas (Burgess). She received her B.S. degree in industrial engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania in 1983 and her M.B.A. degree from Columbia Business School in New York, New York in 1986.

After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, Travis was hired by General Motors as a reliability/quality engineer in 1983 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After completing her M.B.A. degree in 1986, Travis returned to General Motors and was promoted to the global comptroller staff in Detroit in 1988. In 1989, Travis joined PepsiCo and subsequently became a division CFO for the Michigan Business Unit in 1993 and a general manager of the Michigan Market Unit in 1995. Travis then served as CFO for the American National Can Company in Chicago, Illinois from 1999 to 2001. Travis was hired as senior vice president of finance and CFO at Limited Brands & Intimate Brands in Columbus, Ohio in 2001. Then, in 2005, Travis joined the Ralph Lauren Corporation in New York City as CFO and worked there for seven years. In 2012, Travis served as CFO for Estée Lauder Companies Inc. in New York City. She retired from Estée Lauder Companies Inc. in 2024 after twelve years as CFO.

Travis serves as a director on the boards of Accenture, PLC., Meta Platforms, the Hyatt Corporation, and the Brunswick Group. She previously served on the boards of the Campbell Soup Company and Jo-Ann Stores. She has also served on the boards of Columbia University Graduate School of Business, the Lincoln Center Theater, the Council of Foreign Relations, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Women’s Forum of New York.

Travis has received numerous awards and honors, including Best CFO from Institutional Investor Magazine in 2008, a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Pittsburgh in 2009, the Legal Momentum Aiming High Award from Legal Momentum in 2016, the Achiever Award from Cosmetic Women in 2019, and the Legacy Honoree Award from Black Enterprise in 2023. Travis was mentioned on Black Enterprise’s “The Top 100 African-Americans in Corporate America” list in 2009 and “The Most Powerful Women in Corporate America” list in 2019. She was also mentioned on the Treasury & Risk “Top 100 Most Influential People in Finance” list in 2012 and Ebony magazine’s “Power 100 Honoree” list in 2020.

Travis resides in Scarsdale, New York. She has two children: Alexandria and Adrienne.

Tracey Thomas Travis was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 14, 2023 and May 10, 2024.

General Charles Q. Brown, Jr. was born on September 28, 1962 in San Antonio, Texas to Charles Q. Brown, Sr. and Frances Tanner Brown. He received his B.S. degree in civil engineering in 1984 from Texas Tech University in Lubbock and his M.S. degree in aeronautical science in 1994 from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

After joining the U.S. Air Force as second lieutenant in 1984, Brown received his pilot’s wings with the 82nd Squadron at Williams Air Force Base, Arizona. In 1992, Brown served as an F-16 fighter jet instructor at the U.S. Air Force Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base for two years. In 1994, he worked as the aide-de-camp to Air Force Chief of Staff General Ronald R. Fogleman, a position he held for two years. In 2009, Brown received a promotion to brigadier general and was assigned as the commander of the 31st Fighter Wing at Aviano Air Base, Italy, which he oversaw until 2011. Brown then served as the deputy director of the Operations Directorate of U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida until 2013, when he became a major general and was appointed as director of operations for strategic deterrence for the U.S. Air Forces in Europe at Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany. In 2015, Brown received his third star and became the commander of the United States Air Forces Central Command (USAFCENT). Brown was then appointed deputy commander of U.S. Central Command in 2016, overseeing all U.S. Air Force operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. In 2018, Brown was promoted to four-star general and joined Pacific Air Forces as a commander. Brown became the first African American to lead a branch of the U.S. Armed Forces when he was confirmed as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force in 2020. In 2023, President Joe Biden appointed Brown as the twenty-first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he served until 2025.

Brown joined Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. in 1981 and the Air and Space Forces Association in 1986. Brown also joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 2020.

Brown has received numerous honors and awards including a Distinguished Alumni Award from Texas Tech University in 2012, the Black Engineer of the Year Award in 2014, on Time Magazine’s “The Most Influential People of 2020” list, and the General Jimmy Doolittle Award from the MIT Security Studies Program in 2021. Brown’s military decorations and awards include the Defense Force Distinguished Service Medal, the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Bronze Star Medal, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, and the Legion of Merit. Brown was inducted into the Tuskegee Airmen Inc. as an honorary member in 2021.

Brown resides in Fort Meyer, Virginia with his wife, Sharene Brown. They have two adult sons, Sean and Ross.

General Charles Q. Brown, Jr. was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on January 25, 2023.