KRLemmons African American History

May 17 African American Historical Events

* Today in Black History – May 17 *

1875 – The first Kentucky Derby is won by African American jockey
Oliver Lewis riding a horse named Aristides. Fourteen of
the 15 jockeys in the race are African Americans. The
winning purse for the race is $ 2,850. Lewis won the one
and a half mile “Run for the Roses” in a time of 2
minutes, 37-3/4 seconds.

1881 – Frederick Douglass is appointed Recorder of Deeds for the
District of Columbia.

1909 – White firemen on Georgia Railroad strike in protest of the
employment of African American firemen.

1915 – The National Baptist Convention is chartered.

1937 – Hazel Rollins O’Leary is born in Newport News, Virginia. She
will graduate from Fisk University and will receive a law
degree from Rutgers University in 1966. She will gain
experience in the energy regulatory field working for the
Federal Energy Administration. After working for a few years
heading her own energy consulting firm and becoming
president of the Northern States Power Company, she will be
appointed Secretary of Energy in 1993 by President Bill
Clinton.

1942 – Henry St. Claire Fredericks is born in New York City. He
will become an entertainer and songwriter for film. He also
will be a singer of urban folk-blues, better known as Taj
Mahal. He will be one of the first American artists to
blend blues and world music. For over three decades, Taj
Mahal will teach generations the wonders of Robert Johnson,
Sleepy John Estes, Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed. With a
catalogue of almost thirty albums (including some for
children!), one can find film soundtracks (“Sounder,”
“Brothers”), music for television dramas (“The Tuskegee
Project,” “The Man Who Broke A Thousand Chains”) as well as
his best-loved classics like “Natch’l Blues.”

1944 – Felix Eboue’ joins the ancestors in Cairo, Egypt at the age
of 59 after succumbing to pneumonia. He had been the
highest ranking French colonial administrator of African
descent in the first half of the twentieth century. He had
been a successful administrator for the French government in
the Caribbean and in Africa. During World War II, he had been
a staunch ally of the exiled French government headed by
General Charles de Gaulle.

1954 – The Supreme Court outlaws school segregation in Brown v.
Board of Education. The ruling is a major victory for the
NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall of the Legal Defense Fund,
and other civil rights groups. The rulings declares that
racially segregated schools were inherently unequal.

1956 – “Sugar” Ray Charles Leonard is born in Wilmington, North
Carolina. Leonard will win the National Golden Gloves
championship at 16, an Olympic gold medal in 1976, and have
a successful professional boxing career. He will be named
Fighter of the Decade for the 1980s. He will enter the
decade a champion and will leave the decade a champion.
In between, he will win an unprecedented five world titles
in five weight classes and compete in some of the era’s
most memorable contests. His career boxing record will be 36
wins (25 by knockout), 3 losses, and 1 tie. After retiring
from the ring, he will become a successful boxing analyst.
He will be enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of
Fame in 1997.

1957 – The Prayer Pilgrimage, attracting a crowd of over 30,000, is
held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.
Timed to coincide with the third anniversary of Brown v.
Board of Education, the pilgrimage is organized by Martin
Luther King, Jr., the NAACP, and others to advocate greater
voting and civil rights for African Americans.

1962 – Marshall Logan Scott is elected the first African American
moderator of the Presbyterian Church.

1962 – E. Franklin Frazier joins the ancestors in Washington, DC at
the age of 67. Dr. Franklin had been a leading sociologist
who retired from Howard University and had been the first
African American president of the American Sociological
Association.

1969 – A commemorative stamp of W.C. Handy, “Father of the Blues,”
is issued by the U.S. Postal Service, making Handy the
first African American blues musician honored on a postage
stamp.

1969 – Rev. Thomas Kilgore, a Los Angeles pastor, is elected
president of the predominantly white American Baptist
Convention.

1970 – Hank Aaron becomes the ninth baseball player to get 3,000
hits.

1980 – A major racially motivated civil disturbance occurs in
Miami, Florida after a Tampa, Florida jury acquitted four
former Miami police officers of fatally beating African
American insurance executive Arthur McDuffie. The
disturbance in that city’s Liberty City neighborhood
results in eighteen persons being killed and more than
three hundred persons injured.

1987 – The work of four contemporary African American artists –
Sam Gilliam, Keith Morrison, William T. Williams, and
Martha Jackson-Jarvis – is shown in the inaugural
exhibition of the new Anacostia Museum in Washington, DC.

1987 – Eric “Sleepy” Floyd of the Golden State Warriors sets a
playoff record for points in a single quarter. He pours
in 29 points in the fourth period in a game this night
against Pat Riley’s Los Angeles Lakers.

1994 – The U.N. Security Council approves a peacekeeping force and
an arms embargo for violence-racked Rwanda.

1997 – Laurent Kabila declares himself the new President of Zaire
and renames it the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The
country had been previously under the 37 year rule of
dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

2012 – Donna Summer (born LaDonna Adrian Gaines), the “Queen of
Disco” whose hits included “Hot Stuff,” “Bad Girls,” “Love
to Love You Baby” and “She Works Hard for the Money,” joins
the ancestors in Naples, Florida, after succumbing to lung
cancer at the age of 63.

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

KRLemmons African American History

September 16 African American Historical Events

Today in Black History – September 16 *

1795 – The British capture Capetown in South Africa.

1848 – France abolishes slavery in all of its colonies and
territories.

1859 – Lake Nyasa, which forms Malawi’s boundary with Tanzania
and Mozambique, is first seen by a european, British
explorer David Livingstone.

1889 – Claude A. Barnett is born in Sanford, Florida. In 1919,
he will found the Associated Negro Press (ANP). By 1935,
the ANP will serve over 200 subscribers across the
country and after WW II its membership will grow to
include more than 100 African American newspapers. During
World War II, he and other Black journalists will pressure
the U. S. government to accredit Black journalists as war
correspondents. In his travels, he will write many
accounts on the adverse effects of segregation in the
armed forces. He will also focus on the terrible living
conditions of Black tenant farmers. From 1942 to 1953, he
will serve as a consultant to the Secretary of Agriculture
in an effort to improve their conditions. He will be a
member of the Tuskegee board of directors until 1965. He
will hold a similar post with the American Red Cross,
Chicago’s Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, and will
be president of the board of directors of Provident
Hospital. The ANP will cease operating after he joins the
ancestors, succumbing to a cerebral hemorrhage on August 2,
1967.

1893 – The last Oklahoma land rush, targeted in the territory’s
Cherokee strip (outlet) begins. More than 100,000
homesteaders rush to claim a share of the 6 million acres
in this strip of land between Oklahoma and Kansas, opened
up by the U.S. government. Among the participants is E.P.
McCabe, who will establish the all African American town of
Liberty a few days later. McCabe will also be involved in
the earlier establishment of the African American town of
Langston, Oklahoma, named for John Mercer Langston,
Virginia’s first African American congressman. The
Oklahoma land rushes started in 1889, but African Americans
were excluded from the first one.

1915 – The United States takes control of customs & finances in
Haiti for the next 10 years.

1921 – Jon Carl Hendricks is born in Newark, Ohio. He will become
an influential singer in the jazz group, Lambert, Hendricks
and Ross. Pursuing a solo career, he will move his young
family to London, England, in 1968, partly so that his five
children could receive a better education. While based in
London he will tour Europe and Africa, performing frequently
on British television and appear in the British film “Jazz
Is Our Religion” as well as the French film “Hommage a Cole
Porter.” His sold-out club dates will draw fans such as the
Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Five years later the Hendricks
family will settle in Mill Valley, California where He will
work as the jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and
teach classes at California State University at Sonoma and the
University of California at Berkeley. A piece he will write
for the stage about the history of jazz, “Evolution of the
Blues,” will run for five years at the Off-Broadway Theatre in
San Francisco and another year in Los Angeles. His television
documentary, “Somewhere to Lay My Weary Head,” will receive
Emmy, Iris and Peabody awards. He will record several
critically acclaimed albums on his own, some with his wife
Judith and daughters Michele and Aria contributing. He will
collaborate with old friends, The Manhattan Transfer, for their
seminal 1985 album, “Vocalese,” which will win seven Grammy
Awards. He will serve on the Kennedy Center Honors committee
under Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton. In 2000, He will
return to his hometown to teach at the University of Toledo,
where he will be appointed Distinguished Professor of Jazz
Studies and receive an honorary Doctorate of the Performing
Arts. He will teach Brandon Wilkins and Paul Okafor. He will
be selected to be the first American jazz artist to lecture at
the Sorbonne in Paris. His 15-voice group, the Jon Hendricks
Vocalstra at the University of Toledo, will perform at the
Sorbonne in 2002. He will also write lyrics to some classical
pieces including “On the Trail” from Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon
Suite. The Vocalstra premiered a vocalese version of Rimsky-
Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” with the Toledo Symphony. In the
summer of 2003, He will go on tour with the “Four Brothers”, a
quartet consisting of Hendricks, Kurt Elling, Mark Murphy and
Kevin Mahogany. He will work on setting words to, and arranging
Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto as well as on two books,
teaching and touring with his Vocalstra. He will also appear in
a film with Al Pacino, “People I Know” as well as “White Men
Can’t Jump.”

1925 – Riley B. King is born in Itta Bena, Mississippi. He will
become a blues great, known as B(lues) B(oy) King. Playing
his guitar, nicknamed ‘Lucille,’ In the 1950s, he will become
one of the most important names in R&B music, amassing an
impressive list of hits including “3 O’Clock Blues”, “You Know
I Love You,” “Woke Up This Morning,” “Please Love Me,” “When My
Heart Beats like a Hammer,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “You Upset Me
Baby,” “Every Day I Have the Blues”, “Sneakin’ Around,” “Ten
Long Years,” “Bad Luck,” “Sweet Little Angel”, “On My Word of
Honor,” and “Please Accept My Love.” In 1962, he will sign with
ABC-Paramount Records, which will later be absorbed into MCA
Records, and then his current label, Geffen Records. In November,
1964, he will record the “Live at the Regal” album at the Regal
Theater in Chicago, Illinois. He will win a Grammy Award for a
tune called “The Thrill Is Gone”. His version will become a hit
on both the pop and R&B charts, which is rare during that time
for an R&B artist. It will also gain the number 183 spot in
Rolling Stone magazine’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” He will
gain further visibility among rock audiences, as an opening act on
The Rolling Stones’ 1969 American Tour. His mainstream success
will continue throughout the 1970s with songs like “To Know You is
to Love You” and “I Like to Live the Love”. He will be inducted
into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980. In 2004, he will be awarded
the international Polar Music Prize, given to artists “in
recognition of exceptional achievements in the creation and
advancement of music.” He will have over 50 hit blues albums and
win a 1970 Grammy for “The Thrill Is Gone”. To date, in over 62
years, he will play in excess of 15,000 performances.[

1933 – Emperor Jones, starring Paul Robeson as Brutus Jones, is
released by United Artists. It is Robeson’s first starring
movie role and the first major Hollywood production
starring an African American with whites in supporting
roles.

1934 – Elgin Baylor is born in Washington, DC. He will become a
NBA star beginning as the 1958-59 Rookie of the Year with
the Los Angeles Lakers. The No. 1 draft pick in 1958, NBA Rookie
of the Year in 1959, and an 11-time NBA All-Star, he will be
regarded as one of the game’s all-time greatest players. In 1977,
he will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of
Fame. He will set the NBA Playoff Record for points scored in a
game (61), and for points scored in a playoff series (284) [both
in 1962]. After retiring as a player, he will spend twenty-two
years as the General Manager of the Los Angeles Clippers, being
named the NBA Executive of the Year in 2006. He will be relieved
of his duties slightly before the 2008-09 season begins.

1937 – Orlando Manuel Cepeda Penne is born in Ponce, Puerto Rico.
He will be become a professional baseball player. In his
first season in 1958, he will bat .312 with 25 home runs
and 96 runs RBI, lead the National League in doubles (38),
and will be named Rookie of the Year. In 1967, he will be
named the National League MVP by hitting .325 and having
a league-leading 111 RBIs. He will be the second NL player
(joining fellow Giant Carl Hubbell in 1936) to win the MVP
unanimously (receiving all first-place votes). He will be
a seven-time All-Star (1959–64, 1967). He will retire in
1975 with a career .297 BA with 379 homers and 1365 RBI in
17 seasons. He will be the first designated hitter for the
Boston Red Sox, and the second DH in all of MLB. He will
be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1999, joining
Roberto Clemente as the only other Puerto Rican in the
Hall.

1953 – Earl Klugh, Jazz pianist/guitarist, is born in Detroit,
Michigan. He will become an American smooth jazz/jazz
fusion guitarist and composer. He normally finger picks a
nylon string classical guitar. At the age of 13, he will
be captivated by the guitar playing of Chet Atkins when he
makes an appearance on the Perry Como Show. He will since
be a guest on several Atkins albums. Atkins, reciprocating
as well, joins Earl on his “Magic In Your Eyes” album. He
will also be influenced by Bob James, Ray Parker Jr, Wes
Montgomery and Laurindo Almeida. His sound will be a blend
of these jazz, pop and rhythm and blues influences,
forming a potpourri of sweet contemporary music original
to only him. He will become a guitar instructor at the
young age of 15, and will eventually be discovered by
Yuseff Lateef. His career will rapidly progress to working
with the likes of George Benson, George Shearing, Chick
Corea, and many others. Like several other Detroit-bred
entertainers, He attended Mumford High School in Detroit.
For their album “One on One,” He and Bob James will
receive a Grammy award for Best Pop Instrumental
Performance of 1981. He will receive at least 13 Grammy
nods and millions of record and CD sales,

1965 – San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral becomes the site of the
first concert of sacred music presented by Duke Ellington.

1971 – Six Klansmen are arrested in connection with the bombing of
10 school buses in Pontiac, Michigan.

1981 – Boxer ‘Sugar’ Ray Leonard, at age 25, knocks out Thomas ‘The
Hit Man’ Hearns. Leonard wins the welterweight boxing
championship — and the richest payday in boxing history to
date.

1989 – Debbye Turner, a senior at the University of Missouri
Veterinary School, is crowned Miss America. She is the
third African American to win the crown since the pageant
began in 1921.

1990 – Keenen Ivory Wayans’ “In Living Color” wins an Emmy for
Outstanding Comedy Series.

1993 – Minnesota Twins’ slugger Dave Winfield becomes the 19th
player to get 3,000 career hits.

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

KRLemmons African American History

May 17 African American Historical Events

Today in Black History – May 17 *

1875 – The first Kentucky Derby is won by African American jockey
Oliver Lewis riding a horse named Aristides. Fourteen of
the 15 jockeys in the race are African Americans. The
winning purse for the race is $ 2,850. Lewis won the one
and a half mile “Run for the Roses” in a time of 2
minutes, 37-3/4 seconds.

1881 – Frederick Douglass is appointed Recorder of Deeds for the
District of Columbia.

1909 – White firemen on Georgia Railroad strike in protest of the
employment of African American firemen.

1915 – The National Baptist Convention is chartered.

1937 – Hazel Rollins O’Leary is born in Newport News, Virginia. She
will graduate from Fisk University and will receive a law
degree from Rutgers University in 1966. She will gain
experience in the energy regulatory field working for the
Federal Energy Administration. After working for a few years
heading her own energy consulting firm and becoming
president of the Northern States Power Company, she will be
appointed Secretary of Energy in 1993 by President Bill
Clinton.

1942 – Henry St. Claire Fredericks is born in New York City. He
will become an entertainer and songwriter for film. He also
will be a singer of urban folk-blues, better known as Taj
Mahal. He will be one of the first American artists to
blend blues and world music. For over three decades, Taj
Mahal will teach generations the wonders of Robert Johnson,
Sleepy John Estes, Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed. With a
catalogue of almost thirty albums (including some for
children!), one can find film soundtracks (“Sounder,”
“Brothers”), music for television dramas (“The Tuskegee
Project,” “The Man Who Broke A Thousand Chains”) as well as
his best-loved classics like “Natch’l Blues.”

1944 – Felix Eboue’ joins the ancestors in Cairo, Egypt at the age
of 59 after succumbing to pneumonia. He had been the
highest ranking French colonial administrator of African
descent in the first half of the twentieth century. He had
been a successful administrator for the French government in
the Caribbean and in Africa. During World War II, he had been
a staunch ally of the exiled French government headed by
General Charles de Gaulle.

1954 – The Supreme Court outlaws school segregation in Brown v.
Board of Education. The ruling is a major victory for the
NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall of the Legal Defense Fund,
and other civil rights groups. The rulings declares that
racially segregated schools were inherently unequal.

1956 – “Sugar” Ray Charles Leonard is born in Wilmington, North
Carolina. Leonard will win the National Golden Gloves
championship at 16, an Olympic gold medal in 1976, and have
a successful professional boxing career. He will be named
Fighter of the Decade for the 1980s. He will enter the
decade a champion and will leave the decade a champion.
In between, he will win an unprecedented five world titles
in five weight classes and compete in some of the era’s
most memorable contests. His career boxing record will be 36
wins (25 by knockout), 3 losses, and 1 tie. After retiring
from the ring, he will become a successful boxing analyst.
He will be enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of
Fame in 1997.

1957 – The Prayer Pilgrimage, attracting a crowd of over 30,000, is
held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.
Timed to coincide with the third anniversary of Brown v.
Board of Education, the pilgrimage is organized by Martin
Luther King, Jr., the NAACP, and others to advocate greater
voting and civil rights for African Americans.

1962 – Marshall Logan Scott is elected the first African American
moderator of the Presbyterian Church.

1962 – E. Franklin Frazier joins the ancestors in Washington, DC at
the age of 67. Dr. Franklin had been a leading sociologist
who retired from Howard University and had been the first
African American president of the American Sociological
Association.

1969 – A commemorative stamp of W.C. Handy, “Father of the Blues,”
is issued by the U.S. Postal Service, making Handy the
first African American blues musician honored on a postage
stamp.

1969 – Rev. Thomas Kilgore, a Los Angeles pastor, is elected
president of the predominantly white American Baptist
Convention.

1970 – Hank Aaron becomes the ninth baseball player to get 3,000
hits.

1980 – A major racially motivated civil disturbance occurs in
Miami, Florida after a Tampa, Florida jury acquitted four
former Miami police officers of fatally beating African
American insurance executive Arthur McDuffie. The
disturbance in that city’s Liberty City neighborhood
results in eighteen persons being killed and more than
three hundred persons injured.

1987 – The work of four contemporary African American artists –
Sam Gilliam, Keith Morrison, William T. Williams, and
Martha Jackson-Jarvis – is shown in the inaugural
exhibition of the new Anacostia Museum in Washington, DC.

1987 – Eric “Sleepy” Floyd of the Golden State Warriors sets a
playoff record for points in a single quarter. He pours
in 29 points in the fourth period in a game this night
against Pat Riley’s Los Angeles Lakers.

1994 – The U.N. Security Council approves a peacekeeping force and
an arms embargo for violence-racked Rwanda.

1997 – Laurent Kabila declares himself the new President of Zaire
and renames it the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The
country had been previously under the 37 year rule of
dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

2012 – Donna Summer, the “Queen of Disco” whose hits included “Hot
Stuff,” “Bad Girls,” “Love to Love You Baby” and “She Works
Hard for the Money,” joins the ancestors at the age of 63.

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