Who was the first African-American flight attendant for a U.S. airline? The skies weren’t always so friendly to black people. In the mid-1950s, the handful of black employees working for the major U.S. carriers were in service positions, and all the pilots (male only) and flight attendants (stewardesses or hostesses, in the vernacular of the…

Editor’s note: They Did It First is The Root’s new weekly series on trailblazing people and events in the history of black America. Who was the first (and only) historian to have an orchid named for him? It certainly wasn’t his only “first,” but it was his most unusual. Revered historian John Hope Franklin, the author of…