Black History Month Trivia: 24 Questions and Answers That Make History Fun

You've heard of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., but what about Bessie Coleman, who moved to France just to earn a pilot's license, or Shirley Chisholm, who ran for president before most thought that was possible? Black History Month trivia is the fastest way into the stories school never covered.

You'll find 24 questions, four rounds, and a few answers that will surprise you. Warm-ups, deep cuts, movies, and the kind of context that makes a name actually mean something.

The Nibble app is built for exactly this kind of learning. It takes the curiosity that makes trivia fun and feeds it with bite-sized lessons on history, philosophy, art, and more, so you keep going long after the quiz ends.

Try Nibble and let curiosity drive your knowledge.

Before you dive in, a quick look at what makes this trivia worth your time.

• Origins: Black History Month started as Negro History Week in 1926, founded by Carter G. Woodson.
• Retention: Trivia makes history facts much easier to remember than reading alone.
• Diversity: African American history spans innovators, writers, athletes, and activists across every era.
• Context: The stories behind the answers are where things get interesting.
• Method: A daily quiz habit builds knowledge faster than any course.

Carter G. Woodson established Negro History Week in 1926, choosing February for the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The federal government officially recognized the full month in 1976.

Douglass taught himself to read partly through Greek texts, a fact that makes Greek mythology trivia feel surprisingly connected to this history.

✨ Phillis Wheatley became the first African American to publish a book of poetry in 1773, translating classical Latin literature while still enslaved. Explore the unwritten chapters of literary and cultural history with short daily puzzles on Nibble.

If you've ever sat out a pub quiz round on history, this is where you catch up.

Question 1: Who refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama?

Answer: Rosa Parks, whose 1955 refusal sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a 381-day protest that ended with the Supreme Court ruling bus segregation unconstitutional.

Question 2: Who delivered the iconic "I Have a Dream" speech?

Answer: Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered it to 250,000 people in Washington, D.C. in 1963 and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to organize the civil rights movement.

Question 3: Who was the first African American President of the United States?

Answer: Barack Obama, elected in 2008.

Question 4: What does NAACP stand for?

Answer: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909 by an interracial coalition including W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, and Mary White Ovington as the leading civil rights organization in the US.

Question 5: Who was the first African American Supreme Court Justice?

Answer: Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown v. Board of Education (1954) as lead attorney and dismantled the separate but equal doctrine before joining the Supreme Court bench in 1967.

Some names you'll recognize. Others you might not, and that's exactly the point.

Question 6: Who led dozens of enslaved people to freedom along the underground railroad?

Answer: Harriet Tubman, who made roughly 13 missions along the underground railroad and freed approximately 70 people, never losing a single person in her care.

Question 7: Which athlete broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball?

Answer: Jackie Robinson, who signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 after baseball had been segregated for over 60 years.

Baseball's long history of exclusion is just one reason sports trivia runs much deeper than scores and statistics.

Question 8: Who was a key figure in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee?

Answer: John Lewis, beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 and a congressman for over 30 years.

Question 9: Who gave the famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech?

Answer: Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist who delivered it in 1851 and argued that women's rights and abolition were one fight, not two.

Question 10: Who was the first African American woman elected to the US Congress?

Answer: Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968 and later the first Black person to seek a major-party presidential nomination, running in the 1972 Democratic primary.

Question 11: Which author wrote 'Beloved' and became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Answer: Toni Morrison, who changed what literature could do with painful truth.

Question 12: Which poet wrote 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'?

Answer: Maya Angelou, whose 1969 memoir is still assigned in schools today.

✨ Paul Williams, one of America's most celebrated architects, secretly learned to draw upside down so white clients felt comfortable sitting across from him. Explore the real stories behind art, design, and history with short daily lessons on Nibble.

Most people get at least one of these wrong. See how you do.

Question 13: Who was the first African American woman to earn a pilot's license?

Answer: Bessie Coleman, who earned her license in France in 1921 after every US flight school refused her.

Question 14: Who became the first self-made female millionaire in America?

Answer: Madam C.J. Walker, who built a cosmetics empire in the early 1900s and employed thousands of women.

Question 15: What legislation ended segregation in public places?

Answer: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.

Question 16: What were the protests called when activists rode buses into the segregated South?

Answer: The Freedom Rides (1961), which forced the federal government to confront illegal segregation after the violence against riders became impossible to ignore.

Question 17: Which athlete won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics?

Answer: Jesse Owens, who won in front of Adolf Hitler at Games designed to showcase Aryan supremacy.

Owens ran the 100m in 10.3 seconds in 1936, just 33 years before the moon landing, a gap that puts both achievements in a different light if you follow space trivia.

Question 18: Who was the first Black female billionaire in the world?

Answer: Oprah Winfrey, who built a media empire from a single local talk show.

Question 19: Who became the first female Vice President of the United States?

Answer: Kamala Harris, the first woman, the first Black American, and the first person of South Asian descent to hold the office.

Question 20: Who was the first Black actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor?

Answer: Sidney Poitier, who won in 1964 for Lilies of the Field.

Question 21: Which boxing champion gave up his title rather than fight in a war he opposed?

Answer: Muhammad Ali, three-time heavyweight champion and one of the most prominent activist athletes in American history.

History hit differently on the big screen. Match the film to the story behind it.

Question 22: Which movie covers Martin Luther King Jr.'s voting rights marches?

Answer: Selma, which covers the 1965 marches that led directly to the Voting Rights Act.

Question 23: Which film tells the story of Harriet Tubman?

Answer: Harriet (2019), which brings her story on the underground railroad to the screen.

Question 24: Which film tells the story of the Black female NASA mathematicians behind the first American crewed spaceflights?

Answer: Hidden Figures, based on Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, whose calculations made those missions possible.

The science behind why trivia works is just as interesting: active recall reinforces facts in a way passive reading doesn't, which is something biology trivia gets into when covering how memory works.

Black History Month trivia is just the start. The people in this article reshaped law, sport, and literature, often all at once, and there's far more to each story than a single answer captures. Every name here connects to a longer thread worth pulling on.

Bite-sized lessons on Nibble fit into any gap in your day, whether that's a five-minute break or a commute. They're built for adults who want to stay curious without blocking out hours, covering history, philosophy, literature, and more across dozens of topics.

These stories belong in your everyday learning, not just one month a year. The more you explore African American history, the more it changes how you read the news, follow politics, and understand the world around you.

Download the Nibble app and keep learning about the people who shaped the world you live in.