Black History Month Jeopardy

Celebrate Black History Month with a game spanning civil rights leaders, inventors, writers, artists, and historic firsts. Free to copy, phones buzz in.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

Copies all 30 clues into an editor of your own. Free, no account needed.

Every clue on this board

This page is public, so anyone can read the answers — copy the board and swap a few clues before game day.

Civil Rights Leaders

$200
This Baptist minister delivered the I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington in 1963.
Who is Martin Luther King Jr.?
$400
This activist and future congressman was beaten while leading a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.
Who is John Lewis?
$600
This lawyer argued the winning side of Brown v. Board of Education before becoming the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.
Who is Thurgood Marshall?
$800
This activist, born Malcolm Little, became a prominent voice for Black empowerment before his assassination in 1965.
Who is Malcolm X?
$1,000
This voting rights activist from Mississippi testified in 1964 about the violence she faced trying to register to vote, saying she was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Who is Fannie Lou Hamer?

Inventors and Scientists

$200
This inventor patented an improved three-way traffic signal and a safety hood that later inspired the modern gas mask.
Who is Garrett Morgan?
$400
This mathematician calculated flight trajectories for NASA's early space missions, including John Glenn's orbit of Earth.
Who is Katherine Johnson?
$600
This inventor patented an improved carbon filament for light bulbs and also worked on Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent.
Who is Lewis Latimer?
$800
This surgeon performed one of the first successful open-heart surgeries in the United States in 1893.
Who is Daniel Hale Williams?
$1,000
This agricultural scientist developed hundreds of products from peanuts and sweet potatoes while teaching at the Tuskegee Institute.
Who is George Washington Carver?

Writers and Artists

$200
This poet and civil rights activist wrote the acclaimed memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Who is Maya Angelou?
$400
This novelist won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and wrote Beloved and Song of Solomon.
Who is Toni Morrison?
$600
This poet, a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers and I, Too.
Who is Langston Hughes?
$800
This painter, known for his bold use of color and pattern, created The Migration Series depicting the movement of Black Americans to Northern cities.
Who is Jacob Lawrence?
$1,000
This author's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God became a landmark of Harlem Renaissance literature.
Who is Zora Neale Hurston?

Musicians and Athletes

$200
This boxer, born Cassius Clay, became a three-time world heavyweight champion and a prominent civil rights voice.
Who is Muhammad Ali?
$400
This sprinter won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, directly challenging Nazi claims of racial superiority.
Who is Jesse Owens?
$600
This musician, known as the Queen of Soul, recorded hits including Respect and Think.
Who is Aretha Franklin?
$800
This athlete broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947 when he debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Who is Jackie Robinson?
$1,000
This trumpeter and bandleader, nicknamed Satchmo, helped popularize jazz around the world with hits including What a Wonderful World.
Who is Louis Armstrong?

Historic Events

$200
This 1963 gathering in Washington, D.C., drew over 200,000 people and featured Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous speech.
What is the March on Washington?
$400
This 1955 to 1956 protest began after Rosa Parks's arrest and ended segregation on public buses in Montgomery, Alabama.
What is the Montgomery Bus Boycott?
$600
This landmark 1954 Supreme Court case declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
What is Brown v. Board of Education?
$800
This 1965 law, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, outlawed literacy tests and other discriminatory practices that had blocked Black Americans from voting.
What is the Voting Rights Act?
$1,000
This 1921 racial massacre destroyed the prosperous Greenwood District, known as Black Wall Street, in Oklahoma.
What is the Tulsa Race Massacre?

Trailblazing Firsts

$200
This engineer and astronaut became the first African American in space in 1983.
Who is Guion Bluford?
$400
This politician became the first African American president of the United States when he took office in 2009.
Who is Barack Obama?
$600
This congresswoman from New York became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress in 1968.
Who is Shirley Chisholm?
$800
This retired four-star general became the first African American to serve as United States Secretary of State in 2001.
Who is Colin Powell?
$1,000
This tennis player became the first Black player, man or woman, to win a Grand Slam singles title, taking the 1956 French Championships.
Who is Althea Gibson?

Final Jeopardy — Civil Rights

In 1955 this seamstress refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking a boycott that lasted over a year.

Who is Rosa Parks?

How to run this board

February deserves more than a poster on the wall, and this board turns the month's material into an hour of active recall. Categories span civil rights leaders, inventors and scientists, writers and artists, musicians and athletes, historic events, and trailblazing firsts, reaching well beyond the handful of names students already know.

Treat wrong answers as openings rather than misses; the stories behind figures like Garrett Morgan or Katherine Johnson are short to tell and hard to forget. It works equally well as a month opener or a closer.

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