September 3 African American Historical Events

 Today in Black History – September 3          *

1783 – Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal
        Church, purchases his freedom with his earnings as a
        self-employed teamster.

1838 – Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, disguised as a
        sailor, escapes from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland to
        New Bedford, Massachusetts via New York City.  He will
        take the name Douglass, after the hero of Sir Walter
        Scott’s poem “Lady of the Lake”.

1865 – The Union Army commander in South Carolina orders the
        Freedmen’s Bureau personnel to stop seizing land.

1868 – Henry McNeal Turner delivers a speech before the Georgia
        legislature defending African Americans’ rights to hold
        state office.  The lower house of the Georgia
        legislature, rules that African Americans were ineligible
        to hold office, and expels twenty-eight representatives.
        Ten days later the senate expels three African Americans.
        Congress will refuse to re-admit the state to the Union
        until the legislature seats the African American
        representatives.

1891 – John Stephens Durham, assistant editor of the Philadelphia
        Evening Bulletin, is named minister to Haiti.

1891 – Cotton pickers organize a union and stage a strike for
        higher wages in Texas.

1895 – Charles Hamilton Houston is born in Washington, DC. He will
        become a prominent African American lawyer, Dean of Howard
        University Law School, and the NAACP Litigation Director
        who plays a significant role in dismantling the Jim Crow
        laws, which earns him the title, “The Man Who Killed Jim
        Crow.” He will also be well known for having trained future
        Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. He will play a
        role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme
        Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
        His plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by
        demonstrating the inequality in the “separate but equal”
        doctrine from the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson
        decision as it pertained to public education in the United
        States was the masterstroke that brought about the landmark
        Brown decision. He will join the ancestors on April 22, 1950.

1910 – Dorothy Leigh Mainor (later Maynor) is born in Norfolk,
        Virginia.  She will become a renown soprano and will sing
        with all of the major American and European orchestras.
        She will found the Harlem School of the Arts in 1963, after
        ending her performing career. She will retire as executive
        director of the school in 1979. She will join the ancestors
        on February 19, 1996 in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

1918 – Five African American soldiers are hanged for alleged
        participation in the Houston riot of 1917.

1919 – The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, owned by African
        Americans Noble Johnson and Clarence Brooks, releases its
        first feature-length film, “A Man’s Duty”.

1970 – Representatives from 27 African nations, Caribbean nations,
        four South American countries, Australia, and the United
        States meet in Atlanta, Georgia, for the first Congress of
        African People.

1970 – Billy Williams ends the longest National League consecutive
        streak at 1,117 games.

1974 – NBA guard, Oscar Robinson, retires from professional
        basketball.

1984 – A new South African constitution comes into effect, setting
        up a three-chamber, racially divided parliament –  White,
        Indian and Colored (mixed race) people.

1990 – Jonathan A. Rodgers becomes president of CBS’s Television
        Stations Division, the highest-ranking African American to
        date in network television.  Rodgers had been general
        manager of WBBM-TV, CBS’s Chicago station.

Information retrieved from the Munirah Chronicle and is edited by Rene’ A. Perry.