Leon Bridges is recorded as the founder of the second African American-owned firm in Seattle. He was born on August 18, 1932 in Los Angeles, California. In high school he was told by a counselor that he couldnt become an architect because he was black, and then while a student in high school he met his mentor, famed African American architect, Paul Williams.

While a student at UCLA, Bridges was drafted into the military in 1952, and was stationed in Japan. While a soldier, he continued to study architecture. He earned his bachelors of architecture degree from the University of Washington in 1960.

Bridges began working in Seattle architecture firms while still a student at the University of Washington and received his first job in 1956 as a draftsman. Bridges worked for the architecture firm Gotteland and Kocarski and designed Catholic churches and buildings in Seattle.

After becoming a registered architect in 1962, Bridges formed his own firm, Leon Bridges AIA in 1963. His first project was designing a building for the Seattle YMCA. In 1966, he formed a partnership with colleague Edward Burke and they worked together until 1972 when Bridges relocated his firm to Baltimore.

He was the first registered African American architect in Maryland. He served as National Director of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) where he co-founded the AIA/Ford Minority Scholarship fund. In 1984 he was invested as a Fellow of the prestigious College of Fellows of the AIA.

Bridges is the recipient of more than twenty national, regional and local awards for design excellence including the restoration of Baltimores Penn Station and Baltimore City College High School. Bridges is also a member of the counsel of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), for which he has served in every national office, including president.

Currently, Bridges is a partner in The Obsidian Group, an architectural, design and planning firm with offices in Baltimore, New York and North Carolina.

Matthew Henson was an American explorer who accompanied Robert Peary, most famously on an expedition intended to reach the Geographic North Pole in 1909. Subsequent research and exploration has revealed that Peary and Henson did not reach the North Pole but their failed attempt is still recognized as an important contribution to scientific knowledge. 

Henson was born on a farm in Nanjemoy, Maryland on August 8, 1866.  His parents were free people of color who worked as sharecroppers. Both parents died when Henson was a child and he was subsequently sent to Washington, D.C. to live with an uncle. At the age of 12, after his uncles death, Henson moved to Baltimore where he became a cabin boy on a merchant ship, the Katie Hines.  The captain of the vessel taught Henson to read and write.  Henson sailed the world with the Katie Hines for the next few years.  By the age of 20 he had visited China, Japan, The Phillippines, France, Africa, and Russia.

By November 1887 however, Henson worked at a Washington D.C. clothing store where he met Commander Robert E. Peary.  Impressed by Hensons experience, Peary hired him to go on a surveying expedition to Nicaragua to determine if a canal could be built across the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Impressed with Hansons skilled Peary called him his first man in seven expeditions he led to the Arctic region for the next two decades. Over that time Hensen traded with the Inuit in Canada and Greenland and learned their language.  Eventually he and Peary married Inuit women.

The most important of Pearys expeditons took place in 1908-09 when Peary led his eighth attempt to reach the North Pole. On August 18, 1909 Peary and Henson left Greenland by ship to begin their effort to reach the Pole.  They were accompanied by 22 Inuit men and 17 Inuit women, 10 children, 246 dogs and 70 tons of whale meat from Labrador, Canada. Peary and Henson left their ship at Ellesmere Island in what is now Nunavut Territory, Canada and with a smaller party of four Inuit men, laid a

Louis Stokes died on August 18, 2015 from lung and brain cancer at his home in Cleveland, Ohio.

Vice Admiral Samuel L. Garvely Jr. assumed command of the U.S. Third Fleet.

Steve Biko , in full Bantu Stephen Biko (born December 18, 1946, King William’s Town, South Africa—died September 12, 1977, Pretoria), founder of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. His death from injuries suffered while in police custody made him an international martyr for South African black nationalism.

After being expelled from high school for political activism, Biko enrolled in and graduated (1966) from St. Francis College, a liberal boarding school in Natal, and then entered the University of Natal Medical School. There he became involved in the multiracial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), a moderate organization that had long espoused the rights of blacks. He soon grew disenchanted with NUSAS, believing that, instead of simply allowing blacks to participate in white South African society, the society itself needed to be restructured around the culture of the black majority. In 1968 he cofounded the all-black South African Students’ Organization (SASO), and he became its first president the following year. SASO was based on the philosophy of black consciousness, which encouraged blacks to recognize their inherent dignity and self-worth. In the 1970s the Black Consciousness Movement spread from university campuses into urban black communities throughout South Africa. In 1972 Biko was one of the founders of the Black People’s Convention, an umbrella organization of black consciousness groups.

Biko drew official censure in 1973, when he and other SASO members were banned; their associations, movements, and public statements were thereby restricted. He then operated covertly, establishing the Zimele Trust Fund in 1975 to help political prisoners and their families. He was arrested four times over the next two years and was held without trial for months at a time. On August 18, 1977, he and a fellow activist were seized at a roadblock and jailed in Port Elizabeth. Biko was found naked and shackled outside a hospital in Pretoria, 740 miles (1,190 km) away, on September 11 and

The first Black person admitted to the University of Mississippi, James Meredith, graduates from University of

Mississippi, 1963

South Africa was banned from the Olympic Games because of its apartheid policies.

Maxie was born August 18, 1936, in Amarillo, Texas to Cleveland and Rebecca Maxie, an auto mechanic and a housewife.

Swanson was born in Atlanta, Georgia on August 18, 1907.

Roberto Clemente born in Carolina, Puerto Rico