Civil rights activist and U.S. Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton is Day 21 Woman of the Day. Read more about this pioneering woman below.
Biography: http://www.biography.com/people/eleanor-holmes-norton-9425250
Black Past.org: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/norton-eleanor-holmes-1937
District of Columbia information: http://norton.house.gov/about/full-biography
Youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCmHZtUSc5I, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSbte5yYkVs
* Today in Black History – March 21 *
1934 – Al Freeman, Jr. is born in San Antonio, Texas. He will become
an actor and will be known for his roles in “One Life to
Live,” “My Sweet Charlie,” “Once Upon A Time When We Were
Colored,” “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” and “Down in The
Delta.” He will join the ancestors on August 9, 2012. He was
a professor in the Department of Theater Arts at Howard
University until the time of his transition.
1946 – The Los Angeles Rams sign Kenny Washington, the first African
American player to join a National Football League team since
1933.
1949 – The Rens, originally from New York, but now representing
Dayton, Ohio, play their last game against the Denver Nuggets.
Their lifetime record, amassed over 26 years, is 2,318 wins
and 381 losses. Their opponents, the Nuggets, will become
the first NBA team to be owned by African Americans, when
Bertram Lee and Peter Bynoe lead a group of investors that
buys the club in 1989.
1955 – NAACP chairman, author, and civil rights pioneer, Walter White
joins the ancestors in New York City.
1960 – Police in Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, fire on Black South
Africans protesting racial pass laws. A protest strategy
devised by the Pan-African Congress to flood South African
jails with pass violators, the protesters will suffer 72
deaths and over 200 injuries in the two days of violence that
will become known as the “Sharpeville Massacre.” The ANC is
outlawed.
1965 – Thousands of marchers complete the first leg of a five-day
freedom march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, dramatizing
the denial of voting rights for African Americans. Led by
Martin Luther King, Jr., thousands of marchers are protected
by U.S. Army troops and federalized Alabama National
Guardsmen because of violence encountered earlier, including
the fatal beating of a white minister, Reverend James J. Reeb.
1981 – Michael Donald, an African American teen-ager in Mobile,
Alabama, is abducted, tortured and killed in what prosecutors
charge is a Ku Klux Klan plot. A lawsuit brought by the
Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of Donald’s mother,
Beulah Mae Donald, will later result in a landmark $ 7
million judgment that bankrupts The United Klans of America.
1990 – Namibia celebrates independence from South Africa.
1990 – United States Secretary of State James Baker meets Black
nationalist leader Nelson Mandela, in Namibia, on the
occasion of Namibia’s independence.
1991 – Test results released in Los Angeles show that Rodney King,
the motorist whose beating by police was videotaped by a
bystander, had marijuana and alcohol in his system following
his arrest. President Bush denounces King’s beating as
“sickening” and “outrageous.”
2011 – Disco-era singer Loleatta Holloway joins the ancestors at the
age of 64. She’s mainly known for her 1980 hit single “Love
Sensation” which has been resampled over the years by several
high-profile bands.
Information retrieved from the Munirah Chronicle and is edited by Mr. Rene’ A. Perry.
Author and Playwright Pearl Cleage is Day 20 Woman of the Day. A prolific writer of several books and plays including “What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day”, “Flying West” and more. Read more about this multitalented writer below.
Website: http://www.pearlcleage.net/
NPR: http://www.npr.org/2014/05/01/308619983/playwright-pearl-cleage-opens-up
Black Past.org: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/cleage-pearl-1948
Youtube videos: AARP Black Community Bookclub: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL-F6BrDFRg, reading from her memoir “Things I Should Have Told My Daugher”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnFkhlQJZHg
* Today in Black History – March 20 *
1852 – Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by white abolitionist Harriet Beecher
Stowe, is published. The controversial novel will be
credited by many, including Abraham Lincoln, with sparking
the Civil War. Mr. Lincoln will later tell Mrs. Stowe,
that she was “the little woman who wrote the book that
started this great war”.
1852 – Martin R. Delany publishes “The Condition, Elevation,
Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United
States,” the first major statement of the African American
nationalist position. Delany says, “The claims of no people,
according to established policy and usage, are respected by
any nation, until they are presented in a national capacity.”
He adds: “We are a nation within a nation; as the Poles in
Russia, the Hungarians in Austria, the Welsh, Irish, and
Scotch in the British dominions.”
1883 – Jan Matzeliger receives patent #274,207 for his shoe lasting
machine. His invention will revolutionize the shoe industry,
allowing for the first mass production of shoes.
1890 – The Blair Bill, which provides federal support for education
and allocates funds to reduce illiteracy among the freedmen
is defeated in the U.S. Senate, 37-31.
1950 – Dr. Ralph Bunche receives the Nobel Peace Prize for his work
as a mediator in the Palestine crisis. He is the first
African American to be so honored.
1957 – Shelton “Spike” Lee is born in Atlanta, Georgia. He will
grow up in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York,
the son of an accomplished jazz bassist and art teacher,
Bill Lee. He will become a motion picture director,
producing many of his own films. His films, among them
“She’s Gotta Have It,” “Do the Right Thing” and “Jungle
Fever” explore the social, political, and interpersonal
relationships between African Americans and whites similar
to the early work of director Oscar Micheaux.
1970 – Students strike at the University of Michigan and demand
increased African American enrollment. The strike ends on
April 2, after the administration agrees to meet their
demands.
1973 – Roberto Clemente is elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame, 11
weeks after he joins the ancestors. He becomes the first
person of African descent to be elected to the Hall of Fame
in a special election (before the five-year waiting period).
He also is the first person of Hispanic descent to enter the
Hall of Fame.
1987 – “Hollywood Shuffle” premieres. The film is directed by,
produced by, and stars Robert Townsend. Townsend also used
his own money to bring his comedic vision to the screen.
2000 – Former Black Panther Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, once known as H.
Rap Brown, is captured in Alabama. He is wanted in the fatal
shooting of a sheriff’s deputy in Atlanta, Georgia. Al-Amin
will maintain his innocence. On March 9, 2002, he will be
convicted of 13 criminal charges, including the murder of
sheriif’s deputy Kinchen. Four days later, he will be
sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
He will then be assigned to Georgia State Prison, the state’s
maximum security facility near Reidsville, Georgia. In August,
2007, he will be transferred from state custody to Federal
custody, as Georgia officials decide that he is too high-
profile an inmate for the Georgia prison system to handle.
He will be subsequently moved to a Federal transfer facility
in Oklahoma pending assignment to a Federal penitentiary. On
October 21, 2007, he will be transferred to the ADX Florence
supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. After being diagnosed
with multiple myeloma, he will be transferred again, on July
18, 2014, to Butner (FMC) Federal Medical Center in North
Carolina.
Information retrieved from the Munirah Chronicle and is edited by Mr. Rene’ A. Perry.
The CamaraIfe Maktaba 