Elizabeth Alexander – Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets[2][3]
Odette Harris – Professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford University and the Director of the Brain Injury Program for the Stanford University School of Medicine. America’s second Black female professor of neurosurgery [15]
Gene Andrew Jarrett – Dean of the Faculty and William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University. Founding editor-in-chief of the Oxford Bibliographies module on African American Studies[22][23]
Heather Knight – former president of Pacific Union College.The first black president and first female president in Pacific Union College history. The first black female to lead a Seventh-day Adventist college in the United States[25][26]
Jewel Scott – first Jamaican American judge in Georgia. First Jamaican American (female) appointed as a Judge of the Clayton County Superior Court. First woman and first Caribbean-American District Attorney for Clayton County.[77][78]
Alison Smith – lawyer, first black woman president of Florida's Broward County Bar Association[79][80]
James S. Watson (1882-1952) – one of the first two black Americans elected as a judge in the state of New York. The first justice of African descent to sit in judgment on white litigants and the first African American attorney nominated to the American Bar Association since 1912[83]
Kamala Harris – Vice President of the United States; former U.S. Senator from California. The first African American vice president, the first female vice president and the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history
Yvette Francis-McBarnette (1926–2016) – pioneering pediatrician, the first practitioner to use prophylactic antibiotics in the treatment of children with sickle cell. Second ever black woman to enrol at the Yale School of Medicine in 1946[136][137]
Mercedes Richards (1955–2016) – pioneering scientist, the first astronomer to make images of the gravitational flow of gas between the stars in any interacting binary; the first to image the chromospheres and accretion disks in Algol binaries; the first in astronomy to apply the technique of tomography; the first astrophysicist to make theoretical hydrodynamic simulations of the Algol binary stars; the first astronomer to discover starspots on the cool star in an Algol binary and the first astrophysicist to apply novel distance correlation statistical methods to large astronomical databases[142][143][144]