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Our lives would not be the same without the work of scientists, academics and thinkers.

For Black History Month, we’ve asked Black Studies professor Kehinde Andrews to tell us about the contributions of seven black scholars you might not have heard of whose work has impacted the world, but was overlooked or erased.

Alice Ball: Defeating leprosy

In 1915, Alice Augusta Ball became the first woman to graduate from College of Hawaii with a master's degree in chemistry. She then became the first African American researcher in the college chemistry department.

Ball developed a successful treatment for Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) which would be used until later breakthroughs in the 1940s. She created an injectable form of Chaulmoogra oil, which was the best known leprosy treatment at the time, by modifying the oil compounds and making them water-soluble.

Unfortunately she died in 1916 at the age of 24 before publishing her work, so the president of the college went on to publish the findings and manufacture the injectable treatment without giving credit to Ball. She was later recognised in 2000, and a 2020 film was made to tell her story of her life to bring her work into the spotlight.

Patricia Hill Collins: Inequality and intersectionality

Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic who specialises in class, race and gender. Black feminism is the most developed body of work in academic Black Studies, and concepts like intersectionality (the idea that social categories such as class, race and gender are interconnected) have made a broad impact on how we discuss inequality.

Professor Hill Collins’ book Black Feminist Thought is an important contribution to understanding how racism affects black women in society, and the wider picture of how inequality works. Many issues which affect black women are often overlooked or unheard of, and her texts brought them into the spotlight. For example, her book categorised stereotypes which are used to shut down the arguments of black women, such as the ‘angry black woman’ trope.

Kwame Nkrumah: Fighting for decolonisation

Ghana became independent from Britain in 1957, and Kwame Nkrumah was its first elected president. Nkrumah became a leader in the pan-African Congress Movement, which started in London in 1900.

At the fifth pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945, Nkrumah was among the representatives who demanded independence across Africa. His work explores how colonialism continued after independence. For example, he argued how the continent was left with not enough schools, hospitals, roads or the ability to produce all it needed, and therefore forced to rely on Europe. This meant that western companies could continue to exploit the African continent for its resources.

Nkrumah’s take on the idea of globalisation offered the perspective that poverty in Africa is necessary to produce wealth in the west, and this was greatly influential in the decolonisation movement in Africa between the 1950s-1970s.

Patricia Bath: Tackling blindness

While studying a fellowship in ophthalmology (medicine to do with the eyes and eye diseases), Dr Patricia Bath found that black patients were more affected by glaucoma than other patients. In 1975, she became the first woman to join the ophthalmology department at UCLA.

It was here she invented a laser probe which could remove cataracts in a less-invasive form of surgery. This probe could restore sight in patients who had been blinded by cataracts and other diseases for as long as 30 years. Dr Bath patented her device in 1988, making her the first black female doctor to receive a medical patent.

Stuart Hall: Understanding stereotype

A professor of social theology, Professor Stuart Hall founded the ground-breaking Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964 along with its first director Richard Hoggart. The centre produced one of the earliest book collections from those known as ‘children of the Empire’ ((migrants from the colonies and their children)) in Britain.

Professor Hall was part of a team who traced how Black communities are stereotyped as criminals and more likely to be stopped and searched, arrested, and convicted. He was also a key inspiration involved in developing the Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and 1990s that sought to represent Blackness in Britain.

Claudia Jones: West Indian Gazette and Notting Hill Carnival founder

Claudia Jones was born in the British colony of Trinidad in 1915 and deported to Britain from the USA in 1955 for being a member of the Communist Party.

In London, Jones founded the first Black British newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, and organised resistance to the immigration legislation that eventually led to the Windrush scandal. Following the 1958 Notting Hill Riots, where racists terrorised the black community, Jones organised cultural events to raise money for black youth arrested by the police and boost morale among the communities.

The events eventually became the Notting Hill Carnival, which is now the largest street festival in Europe

W.E.B. DuBois: Exploring the idea of white privilege

Professor William Edward Burghardt DuBois wrote and published one of the earliest pieces of sociological research in 1899: a forensic examination of urban life in Philadelphia that introduces many techniques still used in sociology today.

However, the work is mostly overlooked in favour of work by white scholars at the University of Chicago. Professor Dubois was the first African American academic employed at Harvard University, and one of the most important theorists of racism. His idea of ‘double consciousness’, the struggle of being both black and American, still echoes today. In the essay Black Reconstruction in America he is one of the first scholars to explore the idea of white privilege.