1898

Troops of the 9th and 10th Cavalry charge up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill alongside Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders in Cuba. Multiple eyewitness accounts, including Roosevelt's initial report, credit the Buffalo Soldiers with rescuing the Rough Riders from being pinned down. Five Buffalo Soldiers received the Medal of Honor; their bravery was widely reported in Black newspapers.

John Merrick, Aaron McDuffie Moore, and partners founded North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in Durham, NC. It grew into the largest Black-owned business in the United States by the early 20th century, anchoring what became known as "Black Wall Street of the South" in Durham's Parrish Street district.

John Merrick, a formerly enslaved barber who became one of Durham's wealthiest Black citizens, joined Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore in 1898 to form mutual aid societies that became the foundation for the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, incorporated in 1899. 'North Carolina Mutual' became the largest Black-owned business in America, anchoring the 'Black Wall Street of Durham.'

Anthony Overton founded the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company in 1898, producing cosmetics and personal care products marketed to Black women. He expanded into banking and publishing, becoming the first Black American to win the Spingarn Medal for business achievement and one of the most powerful Black businessmen of the early 20th century.

John Hope, who had graduated from Brown University in 1894, joined the faculty of Atlanta Baptist College (later Morehouse College) as a classics instructor, and would become its first Black president in 1906. A close friend and intellectual ally of W.E.B. Du Bois, Hope was one of the earliest prominent Black educators to openly challenge Booker T. Washington's accommodationist approach and insist on full political equality. His leadership helped shape Morehouse into one of the nation's most distinguished HBCUs.

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, a Philadelphia-born artist, traveled to Paris in 1898 to study sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts and gained the personal encouragement of Auguste Rodin. Her haunting, psychologically intense sculptures depicting Black American experience won recognition in French artistic circles. Fuller became one of the first Black women to achieve international recognition as a fine artist, and her work is considered a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance's celebration of Black visual culture.