2020 Black History Quiz » Festive Holiday Trivia

A new research paper about Alexander Hamilton, “the abolitionist founding father,” is citing evidence he was a slave owner himself. For example, Hamilton’s cash books record a payment of $250 in 1796 for “2 Negro servants purchased for me,” and an inventory made of Hamilton’s property after his death, which includes “servants” valued at $400.

• Watch Hamilton: One Shot to Broadway

“The 1619 Project” is the New York Times’ highly-acclaimed historic project. Educators are vowing to teach it in schools. An expanded edition of “The 1619 Project” in a book came out Nov. 2021.

The childhood home of iconic musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone will be indefinitely preserved in North Carolina. Simone taught herself to play piano in the wooden cottage as a young girl in the 1930s.

• Is David Dinkins Dead?

  David Dinkins, the first Black mayor of New York, died Monday, Nov. 23, 2020, at 93.

  What singled out Dinkins’s term as NYC Mayor?

  In his single term, Dinkins raised taxes to hire thousands of police officers, spent billions revitalizing neglected housing, and got Disney to invest in the cleanup of Times Square.

  What was the Crown Heights riot?

  Many blamed him for mishandling the Crown Heights riot in 1991 – Three days of anti-Jewish rioting by young Black men, with nearly 190 people hurt. A state report from 1993 cleared Dinkins of intentionally holding back police in the first days of the violence.

  Who was elected Mayor of New York after Dinkins?

  After beating Rudy Giuliani, now President Donald Trump’s lawyer, in 1989, Dinkins lost the rematch in 1993.

None of the three officers involved in Breonna Taylor‘s death were charged with her killing. A grand jury decided to indict only one of the three officers involved in first-degree wanton endangerment charges. The charge applies to the risk put on Taylor’s neighbors but does not hold the officer responsible for her death. Taylor’s case has been a rallying point for protesters demonstrating against racial injustice and police brutality.

Former President Barack Obama’s book, A Promised Land, sold nearly 890,000 copies in the U.S. and Canada in its first 24 hours – putting it on track to be the best-selling presidential memoir in modern history. The only book by a former White House resident to come close to the early pace of A Promised Land is the memoir by Obama’s wife, Michelle Obama, whose book Becoming, sold 725,000 copies in North America its first day and has topped 10 million worldwide since its release in 2018. 

• Get Barack Obama’s A Promised Land in digital, audio, or print.
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Exactly. The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X is the 2020 National Book Award winner for non-fiction. Tamara Payne’s and her father’s, the late Les Payne, Malcolm X biography is the second time in a decade a Malcolm X biography got a high honor for nonfiction. 

• Get The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X in digital, audio, or print.
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Yep. Barbie has a YouTube vlog with over 9.7 million subscribers that is maintained by the official brand. This past week, Barbie uploaded a video with her friend Nikki discussing the Black Lives Matter movement, on which they talked about acts of racism that Nikki and other Black people experience daily.

Did this make you like Barbie again?

Miles Morales is Black (and Hispanic) Spider-Man. He appeared in the comics series after Peter Parker’s death in 2011 and then in an Oscar-winning animation feature in 2018. Spider-Man: Mile Morales, the video game, was released on Nov. 12, 2020.