KRLemmons African American History

April 22 African American Historical Events

* Today in Black History – April 22 *

1526 – The first recorded slave revolt occurs in a settlement of
some five hundred Spaniards and one hundred slaves, located
on the Pedee River in what is now South Carolina.

1882 – Benjamin Griffith Brawley is born in Columbia, South
Carolina. He will become a prolific author and educator,
serving as a professor of English at Morehouse, Howard,
and Shaw universities. He will also serve as the first Dean
of Morehouse. His books, among them “A Short History of the
American Negro”, “The Negro in Literature and Art in the
United States” and “A New Survey of English Literature,”
will be landmark texts recommended at several colleges. He
will join the ancestors on February 1, 1939.

1922 – Charles Mingus is born in Nogales, Arizona. Raised in Watts,
California, he will play double bass with Charlie Parker,
Duke Ellington, and Bud Powell before becoming a bandleader
and composer in his own right. Although not as popular as
Miles Davis or Ellington, Mingus, who also will play piano,
will be considered one of the principal forces in modern
jazz. He will join the ancestors on January 5, 1979
succumbing to Lou Gehrig’s disease.

1950 – Charles Hamilton Houston, architect of the NAACP legal
campaign, joins the ancestors in Washington, DC at the age
of 54.

1964 – A Trinity College student occupies the school administration
building to protest campus bias.

1964 – New York police arrest 294 civil rights demonstrators at the
opening of the World Fair.

1970 – Yale University students protest in support of the Black
Panthers.

1981 – The Joint Center for Political Studies reports that 2991
African Americans held elective offices in 45 states and
the District of Columbia, compared with 2621 in April, 1973,
and 1185 in 1969. The Center reports 108 African American
mayors. Michigan had the largest number of African American
elected officials (194), followed by Mississippi (191).

1981 – Brailsford Reese Brazeal, economist and former dean of
Morehouse College, joins the ancestors in Atlanta, Georgia,
at the age of 76.

1989 – Huey Newton, black activist and co-founder of the Black
Panther Party, joins the ancestors, after being killed at
age 47.

2000 – The Rev. R.F. Jenkins, a pastor active in civil-rights
organizations, who led his church for 25 years, joins the
ancestors in Omaha, Nebraska, after suffering a heart attack
at the age of 87. He was the first African American Lutheran
Church Missouri Synod minister in the Nebraska district. He
and his wife, Beatrice, had come to Omaha in 1954 after
serving pastorates in Alabama and North Carolina. He had
also previously served eight years as a faculty member at
Alabama Lutheran College. He had returned to his hometown of
Selma, Alabama, to take part in a civil-rights march in
1965. He served on the Omaha School District board from 1970
to 1976, and retired from the pulpit in 1979.

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

KRLemmons African American History

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 NAACP Litigation Director who
will play a significant role in dismantling the Jim Crow
laws, which will earned him the title “The Man Who Killed
Jim Crow”. He will also be well known for having trained
future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Through his
work at the NAACP, 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 will be the masterstroke that brings about
the landmark Brown decision. In the documentary “The Road to
Brown”, Hon. Juanita Kidd Stout describes his strategy, “When
he attacked the “separate but equal” theory his real thought
behind it was that “All right, if you want it separate but
equal, I will make it so expensive for it to be separate that
you will have to abandon your separateness.” And so that was
the reason he started demanding equalization of salaries for
teachers, equal facilities in the schools and all of that.”
He will take a movie camera across South Carolina to document
the inequalities between African American and white education.
Then, as Special Counsel to the NAACP he will dispatch
Thurgood Marshall, Oliver Hill and other young attorneys to
work to equalize teachers’ salaries. From 1935 to 1940, he
will serve as special counsel for the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), arguing several
important civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1939), he will argue that
it was unconstitutional for Missouri to exclude blacks from
the state’s university law school when, under the “separate
but equal” provision, no comparable facility for blacks
existed within the state. His efforts to dismantle the legal
theory of “separate but equal” came to fruition after he joins
the ancestors on April 22, 1950 with the historic Brown v.
Board of Education (1954) decision, which prohibited
segregation in public schools.

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.

2012 – Michael Clarke Duncan, nominated for an Academy Award for his
role in the 1999 film “The Green Mile,” joins the ancestors
at the age of 54. He suffered a myocardial infarction on
July 13 and never fully recovered.

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

KRLemmons African American History

April 22 African American Historical Events

* Today in Black History – April 22 *

1526 – The first recorded slave revolt occurs in a settlement of
some five hundred Spaniards and one hundred slaves, located
on the Pedee River in what is now South Carolina.

1882 – Benjamin Griffith Brawley is born in Columbia, South
Carolina. He will become a prolific author and educator,
serving as a professor of English at Morehouse, Howard,
and Shaw universities. He will also serve as dean of
Morehouse. His books, among them “A Short History of the
American Negro” and “A New Survey of English Literature,”
will be landmark texts recommended at several colleges. He
will join the ancestors in 1939.

1922 – Charles Mingus is born in Nogales, Arizona. Raised in Watts,
California, he will play double bass with Charlie Parker,
Duke Ellington, and Bud Powell before becoming a bandleader
and composer in his own right. Although not as popular as
Miles Davis or Ellington, Mingus, who also will play piano,
will be considered one of the principal forces in modern
jazz. He will join the ancestors in 1979 succumbing to Lou
Gehrig’s disease.

1950 – Charles Hamilton Houston, architect of the NAACP legal
campaign, joins the ancestors in Washington, DC at the age
of 54.

1964 – A Trinity College student occupies the school administration
building to protest campus bias.

1964 – New York police arrest 294 civil rights demonstrators at the
opening of the World Fair.

1970 – Yale University students protest in support of the Black
Panthers.

1981 – The Joint Center for Political Studies reports that 2991
African Americans held elective offices in 45 states and
the District of Columbia, compared with 2621 in April, 1973,
and 1185 in 1969. The Center reports 108 African American
mayors. Michigan had the largest number of African American
elected officials (194), followed by Mississippi (191).

1981 – Brailsford Reese Brazeal, economist and former dean of
Morehouse College, joins the ancestors in Atlanta, Georgia,
at the age of 76.

1989 – Huey Newton, black activist and co-founder of the Black
Panther Party, joins the ancestors, after being killed at
age 47.

2000 – The Rev. R.F. Jenkins, a pastor active in civil-rights
organizations, who led his church for 25 years, joins the
ancestors in Omaha, Nebraska, after suffering a heart attack
at the age of 87. He was the first African American Lutheran
Church Missouri Synod minister in the Nebraska district. He
and his wife, Beatrice, had come to Omaha in 1954 after
serving pastorates in Alabama and North Carolina. He had
also previously served eight years as a faculty member at
Alabama Lutheran College. He had returned to his hometown of
Selma, Alabama, to take part in a civil-rights march in
1965. He served on the Omaha School District board from 1970
to 1976, and retired from the pulpit in 1979.

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

KRLemmons African American History

April 22 African American Historical Events

Today in Black History – April 22 *

1526 – The first recorded slave revolt occurs in a settlement of
some five hundred Spaniards and one hundred slaves, located
on the Pedee River in what is now South Carolina.

1882 – Benjamin Griffith Brawley is born in Columbia, South
Carolina. He will become a prolific author and educator,
serving as a professor of English at Morehouse, Howard,
and Shaw universities. He will also serve as dean of
Morehouse. His books, among them “A Short History of the
American Negro” and “A New Survey of English Literature,”
will be landmark texts recommended at several colleges. He
will join the ancestors in 1939.

1922 – Charles Mingus is born in Nogales, Arizona. Raised in Watts,
California, he will play double bass with Charlie Parker,
Duke Ellington, and Bud Powell before becoming a bandleader
and composer in his own right. Although not as popular as
Miles Davis or Ellington, Mingus, who also will play piano,
will be considered one of the principal forces in modern
jazz. He will join the ancestors in 1979 succumbing to Lou
Gehrig’s disease.

1950 – Charles Hamilton Houston, architect of the NAACP legal
campaign, joins the ancestors in Washington, DC at the age
of 54.

1964 – A Trinity College student occupies the school administration
building to protest campus bias.

1964 – New York police arrest 294 civil rights demonstrators at the
opening of the World Fair.

1970 – Yale University students protest in support of the Black
Panthers.

1981 – The Joint Center for Political Studies reports that 2991
African Americans held elective offices in 45 states and
the District of Columbia, compared with 2621 in April, 1973,
and 1185 in 1969. The Center reports 108 African American
mayors. Michigan had the largest number of African American
elected officials (194), followed by Mississippi (191).

1981 – Brailsford Reese Brazeal, economist and former dean of
Morehouse College, joins the ancestors in Atlanta, Georgia,
at the age of 76.

1989 – Huey Newton, black activist and co-founder of the Black
Panther Party, joins the ancestors, after being killed at
age 47.

2000 – The Rev. R.F. Jenkins, a pastor active in civil-rights
organizations, who led his church for 25 years, joins the
ancestors in Omaha, Nebraska, after suffering a heart attack
at the age of 87. He was the first African American Lutheran
Church Missouri Synod minister in the Nebraska district. He
and his wife, Beatrice, had come to Omaha in 1954 after
serving pastorates in Alabama and North Carolina. He had
also previously served eight years as a faculty member at
Alabama Lutheran College. He had returned to his hometown of
Selma, Alabama, to take part in a civil-rights march in
1965. He served on the Omaha School District board from 1970
to 1976, and retired from the pulpit in 1979.

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