Hello once again! In honor of black history month I will be posting a random fun fact about black history everyday for the whole month. Since today is the 6th, I’ll provide 6 facts for the days I missed. Stay warm!

1. Cathay Williams was the first and only female Buffalo Soldier, posing as a man named William Cathay to enlist in the 38th infantry in 1866. She served for two years before a doctor discovered that she was a woman, which led to her discharge.

2. Both Condoleezza Rice and Martin Luther King, Jr. started college when they were just 15 years old. She studied political science at the University of Denver; he majored in sociology at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

3. Journalist Ida Wells-Barnett refused to give up her railcar seat for a white man in 1884, and bit a conductor on the hand when he tried to force her to give it up. Eventually, she was dragged off the train. She sued the railroad and initially won, but the decision was overturned.

4. Black ingenuity helped devise creative plans to escape enslavement. In 1848, husband and wife William and Ellen Craft made it to the North, and eventually England, when she dressed as a white man and he posed as one of her slaves. A year later, Henry “Box” Brown mailed himself to freedom in a shipping box during a 27-hour trip from Richmond to Philadelphia.

5. The hair brush, lawn mower, cellphone, refrigerator, and the air conditioner were all inventions from African-American designers.

6. Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman elected to Congress and the first black major-party presidential candidate. Unbelievably, she survived three assassination attempts during her 1972 campaign.