KRLemmons African American History

September 20 African American Historical Events

Today in Black History – September 20          *

1664 – Maryland enacts the first anti-amalgamation law to prevent
widespread intermarriage of English women and African
American men. Other colonies passed similar laws:
Virginia, 1691; Massachusetts 1705; North Carolina, 1715;
South Carolina, 1717; Delaware, 1721; Pennsylvania, 1725.

1830 – The National Negro Convention, a group of 38 free African
Americans from eight states, meets in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, at the Bethel A.M.E. Church, with the
express purpose of abolishing slavery and improving the
social status of African Americans.  They will elect
Richard Allen president and agree to boycott slave-
produced goods.

1847 – William A. Leidesdorff is elected to San Francisco town
council receiving the third highest vote.  Leidesdorff,
who was one of the first African American elected
officials, becomes the town treasurer in 1848.

1850 – Slave trade is abolished in Washington, DC, but slavery
will be allowed to continue until 1862.

1885 – Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe (“Jelly Roll” Morton) is born
in Gulfport (New Orleans), Louisiana. He will become a
renown jazz pianist and composer. Morton, whose fabulous
series of 1938 recordings for the Library of Congress are
a gold mine of information about early jazz, was a
complex man. Vain, ambitious, and given to exaggeration,
he was a pool shark, hustler and gambler, as well as a
brilliant pianist and composer.  His greatest talent,
perhaps was for organizing and arranging.  The series of
records he made with his “Red Hot Peppers” between 1926
and 1928 stands, alongside King Oliver’s as the crowning
glory of the New Orleans tradition and one of the great
achievements in Jazz.

1915 – Hughie Lee-Smith is born in Eustis, Florida. He will
become a painter known for such surrealistic landscapes
as “Man with Balloons”, “Man Standing on His Head” and
“Big Brother”.

1943 – Sani Abacha is born in Kano, Nigeria.  After being educated
in his home state, will become a soldier and go to England
for advanced military education. He will achieve many
promotions as a soldier and by the mid-1980s, will enter
Nigeria’s military elite. In 1983 he will be among those
who will overthrow Shehu Shagari, leader of the Second
Republic, in a coup which led to the military rule of
Muhammadu Buhari. In 1985, Abacha will participate in a
second coup, which will replace Buhari with General
Ibrahim Babangida. As head of state, Babangida will
announce that free elections will be held in the early
1990s. In 1993, however, after Babangida nullifies the
results of these belated free elections, Abacha will
stage a third coup and oust his former ally. His regime
will be characterized by a concern with security that
verges on paranoia.  Abacha will schedule elections for
August, 1998, but months beforehand, all five legal
parties nominate him as their “consensus candidate.”  In
June, 1998, Abacha will join the ancestors when he dies
unexpectedly of a heart attack.

1958 – Martin Luther King Jr. is stabbed in the chest by a
deranged African American woman while he is autographing
books in a Harlem department store.  The woman is placed
under mental observation.

1962 – Mississippi’s governor, Ross Barnett, personally refuses
to admit James Meredith to University of Mississippi as
its first African American student. (Meredith is later
admitted.)

1962 – The Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) is banned in an
order issued by Sir Edgar Whitehead, the prime minister of
Southern Rhodesia.

1973 – Willie Mays announces his retirement from major league
baseball at the end of the 1973 baseball season.

1979 – A bloodless coup overthrows Jean-Bedel Bokassa, self-styled
head of the Central African Empire, in a French-supported
coup while he is visiting Libya.

1984 – NBC-TV debuts “The Cosby Show”.  Bill Cosby plays Dr.
Heathcliff (Cliff) Huxtable. His lovely wife, Clair, is
played by Phylicia Rashad.  The Huxtable kids were Sondra,
age 20 (Sabrina Le Beauf), Denise, age 16 (Lisa Bonet),
Theodore, age 14 (Malcom-Jamal Warner), Vanessa, age 8
(Tempestt Bledsoe) and Rudy, age 5 (Keshia Knight Pulliam).
The premiere is the most watched show of the week and the
show goes on to become an Emmy Award-winner and one of the
most popular on television for eight years. The series,
which had been rejected by other network television
executives, will become one of the most popular in
television history.

1987 – Alfre Woodard wins an Emmy for outstanding guest performance
in the dramatic series “L.A. Law”.  It is her second Emmy
award, her first having been for a supporting role in “Hill
Street Blues” in 1984.

1987 – Walter Payton scores the NFL record 107th rushing touchdown.

1999 – Lawrence Russell Brewer becomes the second white supremacist
to be convicted in the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in
Jasper, Texas. He will be later sentenced to death.

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

KRLemmons African American History

September 13 African American Historical Events

  Today in Black History – September 13         *

1663 – The first known slave revolt in the thirteen American
        colonies is planned in Gloucester County, Virginia.
        The conspirators, both white servants and African
        American slaves, are betrayed by fellow indentured
        servants.

1867 – Gen. E.R.S. Canby orders South Carolina courts to
        impanel African American jurors.

1881 – Louis Latimer patents an electric lamp with a carbon
        filament.

1886 – Alain Leroy Locke is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
        He will graduate from Harvard University in 1907 with a
        degree in philosophy and become the first African
        American Rhodes scholar, studying at Oxford University
        from 1907-10 and the University of Berlin from 1910-11.
        He will receive his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in
        1918. For almost 40 years, until retirement in 1953 as
        head of the department of philosophy, Locke will teach
        at Howard University, Washington, DC. He will be best
        known for his involvement with the Harlem Renaissance,
        although his work and influence extend well beyond.
        Through “The New Negro”, published in 1925, Locke
        popularized and most adequately defined the Renaissance
        as a movement in Black arts and letters. He will join
        the ancestors on June 9, 1954.

1915 – The first historically black and Catholic university for
        African Americans in the United States, Xavier
        University, is founded by Blessed Katherine Drexel and
        the religious order she established, the “Sisters of
        the Blessed Sacrament,” in New Orleans, Louisiana.

1948 – Nell Ruth Hardy is born in Birmingham, Alabama. She will
        be better known as Nell Carter and become a Broadway
        sensation as a singer and actress in Broadway’s
        “Bubbling Brown Sugar”, “Ain’t Misbehavin’ “(for which
        she will win a Tony), and for five seasons in
        television’s “Gimme a Break”. She will join the ancestors
        on January 23, 2003 after succumbing to heart disease
        complicated by diabetes and obesity.

1962 – Mississippi Governor Ross R. Barnett defies the federal
        government in an impassioned speech on statewide radio-
        television hookup, saying he would “interpose” the
        authority of the state between the University of
        Mississippi and federal judges who had ordered the
        admission of James H. Meredith. Barnett says, “There is
        no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived
        social integration.” He promises to go to jail, if
        necessary, to prevent integration at the state
        university. His defiance set the stage for the gravest
        federal/state crisis since the Civil War.

1962 – President John F. Kennedy denounces the burning of
        churches in Georgia and supports voter registration
        drives in the South.

1965 – Willie Mays hits his 500th career home run.

1967 – Michael Johnson is born in Dallas, Texas.  He will become
        a world class sprinter, Olympic athlete, and the first
        person to break 44 (43.65) seconds for the 400-meter run.
        At the Atlanta Olympics, he also will become the first
        man to win the double gold in the 400 ad 200 meters.

1971 – Two hundred troopers and officers storm the Attica
        Correctional Facility in upstate New York under orders
        from Governor Nelson Rockefeller.   Thirty-three
        convicts and ten guards are killed. Later investigations
        show that nine of the ten guards were killed by the
        storming party. This riot will focus national attention
        on corrections departments nationwide and the practice
        of imprisonment in the United States. A National
        Conference on Corrections will be convened in December,
        1971 resulting in the formation of the National
        Institute of Corrections in 1974.

1971 – Frank Robinson hits his 500th career home run.

1972 – Two African Americans, Johnny Ford of Tuskegee and A.J.
        Cooper of Prichard, are elected mayors in Alabama.

1979 – South Africa grants Venda independence (Not recognized
        outside of South Africa). Venda is a homeland situated
        in the north eastern part of the Transvaal Province of
        South Africa.

1981 – Isabel Sanford wins an Emmy award as best comedic actress
        for “The Jeffersons”.

1989 – Archbishop Desmond Tutu leads huge crowds of singing and
        dancing people through central Cape Town in the biggest
        anti-apartheid protest march in South Africa for 30
        years.

1996 – Rap artist Tupac Shakur joins the ancestors six days after
        being the target of a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas at
        the age of 25.

1998 – Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs hits his 61st and 62nd home
        runs of the season, passing Roger Maris’ record and
        pulling into a tie with St. Louis Cardinals’ Mark McGwire
        in this years home run derby.
Information retrieved from the Munirah Chronicle and is edited by Rene’ A. Perry