This month, we celebrate the lives of the legendary trailblazers and life-changing events of the people of the African Diaspora. It is Black History Month.

This celebration, which Carter G. Woodson initially started as a one-week event, is enjoyed by millions of people throughout the country because in one way or another, people of African descent have influenced everything we do on a daily basis. From sports to education, food and finally manufacturing—black people largely contributed to the foundation of the country we live in.

February is a month of more than just the birthdays of two extraordinary men, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, who had huge influences on the freedom of black people. It is also the month W.E.B. DuBois was born, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or better known as the NAACP, was founded and that the 15th Amendment was passed, granting blacks the right to vote.

In a month that normally only celebrates the most obvious and widely-known black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and now President Barack Obama, it is time to make an effort to dig deeper.

Sports have not always been a place for people of African descent. There was an idea of black athletic inferiority, so blacks were forced to break color barriers.

There were trailblazers like the fabled Jesse Owens and Muhammad Ali, but there were also Jackie Robinson, who integrated Major League Baseball in 1947; Charles Follis, the first black professional football player; Willie O’Ree, who broke the color barrier in hockey to become the first professional black hockey player. Chuck Cooper became the first black basketball player drafted by an NBA team in 1950.

Also in 1950, Althea Gibson became the first black to compete in professional tennis and Arthur Ashe became the first black to win the Wimbledon tournament.

For a while, golf was different than most other sports. The Professional Golf Association had a “Caucasian Clause,” which prevented blacks from participating. The U.S. tournaments didn’t necessarily ban blacks from participating, but they claimed it was hard to find courses throughout the country that would welcome black people. The first black to play professional golf was John Shippen, who played in the second round of the 1896 U.S. Open.

Though color barriers have been broken, we’ve progressed as a country and elected a black president, we still do not live in a post-racial society, contrary to popular belief.