Born (March.2 1941), physician, educator, and administrator, was born in Anniston, Alabama, on March 2, 1941 to Wilmer and Anne Satcher. In 1963 Satcher graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta.  He earned a M.D. and Ph.D. in cytogenetics from Case Western Reserve University in 1970.  

In 1979 Satcher became a professor and later chair of the Department of Community Medicine and Family Practice at Morehouse School of Medicine.  In the early 1980s, he also served on the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine and Public Health and the Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he developed and chaired the King/Drew Department of Family Medicine. While in his position, Satcher negotiated the agreement with the UCLA School of Medicine and the Board of Regents that created a medical education program at King/Drew. In this new program, he directed sickle cell research.  In 1982, Satcher began his five year presidency at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee.

In 1988, Satcher began a career in federal government, serving concurrently as Surgeon General and Assistant Secretary for Health.  In 1993, he became the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.  In 1998, Satcher was sworn in under President William Clinton’s administration as the third African American and 16th Surgeon General of the United States.  As Surgeon General, he advocated for better healthcare for the poor and ethnic minorities and he pushed to destigmatize mental illness.  He served in this position through part of President George W. Bush’s administration until 2002. 

During his distinguished career, Satcher earned 18 honorary degrees.  He also received awards from the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, and Ebony magazine.

Born (March 2 1998) in Danville, Kentucky in 1903, Todd Duncan was the first African American to perform in an otherwise all-white cast in the New York City Opera’s production of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.

He began his professional stage career in 1933 in Pietro Mascagnis Cavalleria rusticana at the Mecca Temple in New York City with the Aeolian Opera, a black opera company.  Duncan’s resounding baritone and commanding stage presence won him the role of “Porgy” in Gershwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess. He was the personal choice of Gershwin for the role.  Following this premiere, Duncan performed his role of “Porgy” in two subsequent revivals in 1937 and 1942. Throughout his tenure as “Porgy” Duncan played the role in over 1,600 performances. His portrayal of “Porgy” is recognized as a classic, serving as the model for subsequent singers cast in the role. During one performance of Porgy and Bess at the National Theater in 1936, however, Duncan led the cast in a protest of the theaters policy of segregated seating.   Duncan vowed to never again perform before a segregated audience.   The National Theater eventually gave in to the casts demands and ended its segregation policy.

A consummate performer known for his refined musical phrasing, Duncan’s abilities as a singer and actor won him roles in numerous operas and stage productions, such as Cabin in the Sky, Carmen, Rigoletto, and Lost in the Stars, and two films, Syncopation (1942) and Unchained (1955). Additionally, Duncan was an accomplished and celebrated recitalist, singing in 2,000 recitals in fifty-six countries over his twenty-five year career span. During his touring career, Duncan became the first African American concert artist to be invited to perform in Australia and New Zealand in 1946.  In 1955 Duncan became the first artist to record Unchained Melody which would later be popularized by the 1960s duo, the Righteous Brothers.

Todd Duncan singing from the heart and soul

March 2. 1972: Dr. Holland, was elected to the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange on this day.

1808: An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves into any Port or Place Within the Jurisdiction of the United States, From and After the First Day of January, in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the first day of January, one thousand eight hundred and eight, it shall not be lawful to import or bring into the United States or the territories thereof from any foreign kingdom, place, or country, any negro, mulatto, or person of colour, with intent to hold, sell, or dispose of such negro, mulatto, or person of colour, as a slave, or to be held to service or labour.

SEC 2. And be it further enacted, That no citizen or citizens of the United States, or any other person, shall, from arid after the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and eight, for himself, or themselves, or any other person whatsoever, either as master, factor, or owner, build, fit, equip, load or otherwise prepare any ship or vessel, in any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States, nor shall cause any ship or vessel to sail from any port or place within the same, for the purpose of procuring any negro, mulatto, or person of colour, from any foreign kingdom, place, or country, to be transported to any port or place whatsoever, within the jurisdiction of the United States, to be held, sold, or disposed of as slaves, or to be held to service or labour: and if any ship or vessel shall be so fitted out for the purpose aforesaid, or shall be caused to sail so as aforesaid, every such ship or vessel, her tackle, apparel, and furniture, shall be!

1867: Blacks voted in municipal election in Alexandria, Va., for perhaps the first time in the South. The election commissioners refused to count the fourteen hundred votes and military officials suspended local elections pending clarification of the status of the freedmen.

1867: Howard University (HU or simply Howard) is a federally chartered, private, coeducational, nonsectarian, historically black university (HBCU) in Washington, D.C. It is recognized by the Carnegie Foundation as a research university with high research activity and is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. (Howard University established &Also founded or chartered in 1867 were Talladege College, Morgan State University, Johnson C. Smith College, and St. Augustine's College.)

1956: Morocco becomes Independent. Morocco as an independent state has been in existence since 788 AD, when Idris I was proclaimed King at Volubilis. Today, Morocco is a constitutional monarchy. King Hassan II came to the throne in 1961. A descendant of the Prophet, he is also the commander of the Believers, or in other words, Morocco religious leader.

He was born on March 3, 1966 to Margaret Smith, who was the manager of a retirement home and James Smith.

Tone Lōc is an American rapper and actor who is best known for his song “Wild Thing”. He was born Anthony Terrell Smith on March 3, 1966 to Margaret Smith, who was the manager of a retirement home and James Smith. During his youth, Smith was a member of a street gang called SouthSide Compton Crips. He was named after his father, and his middle name was given to him in honor of his grandfather James Smith. One of his siblings, a brother named Johnny Gadberry died in a car accident in April 2006.

Long was born a slave in Knoxville, Georgia on March 3, 1836. Jefferson Franklin Long, a Republican who represented Georgia in the 41st Congress, was the first black member to speak on the floor of the House of Representatives, and was the only black representative from Georgia for just over a century. Long was born a slave in Knoxville, Georgia on March 3, 1836. Little is known of his early years, however by the end of the civil war he had been educated and was working as a tailor in the town of Macon. He was prosperous in business and involved in local politics.

By 1867 he had become active in the Georgia Educational Association and had traveled through the state on behalf of the Republican Party.  He also served on the state Republican Central Committee.  In 1869 Long chaired a special convention in Macon, Georgia which addressed the problems faced by the freedmen.

In December of 1870 Georgia held elections for two sets of congressional representatives – one for the final session of the 41st Congress (the first two of which Georgia had missed due to delayed readmission to the Union), and one for the 42nd Congress, set to begin in March of 1871. Georgia Republicans nominated Long, an African American, to run for the 41st congress, while Thomas Jefferson Speer, a white American, was chosen to run for the 42nd. Long was elected on January 16th, 1871.

In his only speech to Congress on February 1, 1871, Long opposed a measure which would remove voting restrictions on ex-Confederate political leaders because he felt these men still posed a threat to African Americans political freedom if allowed to regain power. His opposition failed, however, and the bill was approved by the House and two weeks later became a law without President Grant’s signature. Long’s turn in office expired less than one month later.

Jefferson Franklin Long returned to Georgia to campaign for the Republicans.  He addressed a gathering of freedmen and women in Macon on Election Day, 1872.  The freedmen then marched to the polls. A riot broke out shortly after armed whites attacked the group.  Four freedmen were killed and most black voters in Macon did not get to cast their ballots that day. After this, Long became increasingly disillusioned with party politics, and by the mid-1880s was focusing primarily on his business in Macon. He died on February 4, 1907.

The ethnic groups of Africa number in the thousands, each generally having its own language (or dialect of a language) and culture. The ethnolinguistic groups include various Afro-Asiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan populations.

The official population count of the various ethnic groups in Africa has in some instances been controversial because certain groups believe populations are blatantly misreported to give other ethnicities numerical superiority (as in the case of Nigerias Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo people).[1] [2] [3]

The following ethnic groups number 5 million people or more:

Kongo in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola and Republic of the Congo (c. 10 million)

Kanuri in Nigeria,[4] Niger,[5] Chad [6] and Cameroon [7] (c. 10 million)

Oromo in Ethiopia (c. 30 million)

Amhara in Ethiopia (c. 25 million)

Somali in Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya (c. 16-19 million)

Afar in Eritrea, Djibouti and Ethiopia(c. 4-5 million)

Maghrebis in Maghreb (c. 110 million), including Berbers in Mauritania, Morocco (including Western Sahara), Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya (c. 30 million)

Egyptians in Egypt (c. 91 million), including Copts in Egypt and Sudan (c. 15 million) and tribes such as the two largest in North Sinai, the al-Tarabin tribe and the al-Sawarka tribe.[8]

Hutu in Rwanda, Burundi, and Democratic Republic of Congo (c. 15 million)

Yoruba in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone (c. 40 million)

^ Onuah, Felix (29 December 2006). Nigeria gives census result, avoids risky details. Reuters. Retrieved 2008-11-23.

^ Lewis, Peter (2007). Growing Apart: Oil, Politics, and Economic Change in Indonesia and Nigeria. University of Michigan Press. p. 132. ISBN 0-472-06980-2 . Retrieved 2008-11-23.

^ Suberu, Rotimi T. (2001). Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria. US Institute of Peace Press. p. 154. ISBN 1-929223-28-5 . Retrieved 2008-12-18.

^ a b c d The World Factbook: Nigeria. World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency . Retrieved 2013-12-31.

^ a b c d

Herschel Walker was born on March 3, 1962, in Wrightsville, Georgia. He was born to Willis and Christine Walker and was one of the seven siblings. Walker attended Johnson County High School in Wrightsville. As a child, Walker showed little interest in sports rather he preferred reading books and writing poetry. In high school, Walker developed an interest in sports and played football, basketball and competed in track. In high school he played for the for the Johnson County Trojans High School Football team from 1976 to 1979. He helped the Trojans to win their first state championship. In 1979, he was awarded the first Dial Award.

Walker attended University of Georgia where he was a three time All-American and winner of the Heisman Trophy and Maxwell Award. He set an NCAA freshman rushing record and helped win the national collegiate football title. He set 10 NCAA records, 15 Southeast Conference records, 30 Georgia all-time records.

In 1983, Walker joined the United States Football League, where he intended to go professional before graduating.  He signed with the New Jersey Generals which was owned by Oklahoma oil tycoon J. Walter Duncan, who later sold the team to Donald Trump. Walker won the USFL rushing title in 1983. While being a part of USFL, Walker had 5,562 yards rushing in 1,143 carries, averaging 4.87 yards. In 1985, The Dallas Cowboys acquired Walker’s National Football League rights by drafting him in the fifth round of the 1985 NFL Draft. He became the first backfield tandem in NFL history during the first two years. Walker had NFL career highs of 1,514 rushing yards and 505 receiving yards, which made him become a one-man offense and became the premier NFL running back in 1988. Walker became the 10th Player in NFL history to amass more than 2000 combined rushing and receiving yards, during which he achieved two consecutive Pro Bowls.

Hergé , pen name of Georgés Remi (born May 22, 1907, Etterbeek, near Brussels, Belg.—died March 3, 1983, Brussels), Belgian cartoonist who created the comic strip hero Tintin, a teenage journalist. Over the next 50 years, Tintin’s adventures filled 23 albums and sold 70 million copies in some 30 languages. Throughout the years the young reporter remained recognizably the same, with his signature blond quiff and his plus fours.

Hergé, whose pen name derived from the pronunciation of his transposed initials, published his first comic strip—Totor, de la Patrouille des Hannetons (“Totor of the June Bug Patrol”), for Le Boy-Scout Belge (“The Belgian Boy Scout”)—at age 19. In 1929 he created Tintin for the children’s supplement (a weekly feature called Le Petit Ventième) of the daily newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. Tintin’s first adventure was later published as the album Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, but it was not until 1958 that The Black Island became the first Tintin album in English translation. It was followed, with growing success, by other albums taking Tintin and his friends on adventures in many different countries (though Hergé himself traveled little, preferring to live quietly in Brussels). The stories, which appealed to children because of their gentle humour and eventful plots, were never violent; the villains might be menacing and the plots filled with action, but in almost every case heroes and villains emerged largely unscathed. The drawings, especially in the later albums, lovingly portray the details of Tintin’s world, though they clearly reflect the attitudes of the era.

A museum dedicated to the work of Hergé, designed by French architect Christian de Portzamparc, opened in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belg., in June 2009.

A tailor living in New York City, NY Invented a

method for the dry cleaning of clothes

U.S. Patent 3306X (March 3, 1821)

Thomas L. Jennings -- 1st Black male patent holder IN AMERICA

Thomas L.Jennings IS THE FIRST BLACK TO BE GRANTED A PATENT IN THE UNITED STATES FOR HIS TECHNIQUE TO "DRY- SCOUR" CLOTHES.

Robert F. Flemming, Jr. patents a guitar. ("Euphonica" )

Robert Francis Flemming Jr. (July 1839  – February 23, 1919) was an American inventor and Union sailor in the American Civil War. He was the first crew member aboard the USS Housatonic to spot the H.L. Hunley before it sank the USS Housatonic. The sinking of USS Housatonic is renowned as the first sinking of an enemy ship in combat by a submarine.

The Freedmen's Bureau, officially the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, was a federal agency established in 1865 to assist newly freed African Americans and impoverished whites in the South during Reconstruction, providing food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and education. 

The Freeman's Bureau was established by Congress on March 3, 1865. The bureau was designed to protect the interests of former slaves. This included helping them to find new employment and to improve educational and health facilities. In the year that followed the bureau spent $17,000,000 establishing 4,000 schools, 100 hospitals and providing homes and food for former slaves.

The Freeman's Bureau also helped to establish Howard University in Washington in 1867. Instigated by the Radical Republicans in Congress it was named after General Oliver Howard, a civil War hero and commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees and a leading figure in the Freeman's Bureau.

Attempts by Congress to extend the powers of the Freemen's Bureau was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson in February, 1866. This increased the conflict between Johnson and the Radical Republicans in Congress.

was born on March 4, 1916 in Seattle, Washington.  In 1933, Harris became the first black captain of the football team at Garfield High School in Seattle.  At the University of Iowa, Homer was elected by his teammates to be team captain, most inspirational, and Most Valuable Player.  He was the first African American team captain in Big Ten history and had hopes of becoming a player in the National Football League.

In 1933, the National Football League banned African Americans from playing, so upon graduation Harris instead accepted a coaching job at A & T College in Greensboro, North Carolina.  His mother’s influence caused him to enter medical school at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee.  Harris joined the Army, and after World War II had an internship in dermatology at the University of Illinois.

Harris returned to Seattle in 1955 and opened his own dermatology practice.  After initial difficulty renting office space in the Medical Dental Building, Harris built up his practice which was reputed to be the largest west of the Rockies.  Harris received an award in 1989 from the Black Heritage Society for being a black pioneer in dermatology.  He retired from practicing medicine after 43 years.

Washington State declared November 13,  2002 to be Dr. Homer Harris Day, and the Seattle Parks Foundation announced that an anonymous donor contributed $1.3 million to build a park in Seattle’s Central Area in Harris’ honor.  The University of Iowa inducted Harris into their Hall of Fame in August 2002, and the Pacific Northwest chapter of the African American Sports Hall of Fame followed suit in 2003.  Homer Harris Park opened on May 14, 2005.

Homer Harris died in Seattle on March 17, 2007, at age 90 from Alzheimer’s disease.

A lawyer, judge, and politician, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on March 4, 1915 to Jules and Louise Wilson.  In 1918 the family moved to Oakland, California, where his parents believed a smaller and less-noticeable black community would afford them greater freedoms and less discrimination.  Following his elementary schooling Wilson attended McClymonds High School in Oakland, a predominantly white institution. After graduating with honors in 1932 he took a position at a local newspaper.

In 1939 Wilson received a Baccalaureate degree in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.  During and after his undergraduate education he worked as a porter, sugar-factory laborer, and dishwasher, while pursuing a career in athletics.  Standing only five feet, five inches tall and weighing a diminutive 130 pounds, Wilson nonetheless quickly distinguished himself as a gifted tennis, basketball, and baseball player.  His athletic prowess attracted talent scouts, and soon followed a short-lived semi-professional baseball career.  He retired in 1943 however, as racially exclusionist policies in professional sports precluded his further advancement.

Disappointed, Wilson enlisted in the United States Army and served in a combat unit in Europe during the last two years of World War II.  By the end of the war he was promoted to First Sergeant.  Upon his return in 1946 Wilson was accepted at Hastings School of Law in San Francisco, where he received a law degree in 1949.  Immediately following graduation he began working in civil law.  Specializing in civil rights cases, he regularly offered pro bono work to low-income individuals.

Lionel Wilson first ran for the Berkeley City Council in 1953 and later in 1955, but was not elected on either occasion.  In 1960, however, he became the first African American judge of Alameda County when he was appointed to the Oakland Municipal Court by Governor Edmund G. Brown, Sr.  Four years later he was appointed to the Alameda County Superior Court by Brown.  In 1965 Judge Wilson was elected chairman of the Oakland Economic Development Council, an anti-poverty group funded by the Federal government.

Twelve years later in 1977, Judge Wilson resigned from the bench and ran for mayor of Oakland.  With the support of labor groups, the Black Panther Party, and liberal Democrats, he won a close run-off election, becoming the first African American mayor of that city.  With white flight having begun a decade earlier, and with the ever-increasing prominence of black militant groups like the Black Panthers, his election was a watershed event.  He represented not only the city’s first black mayor, but the first non-Republican mayor following decades of GOP leadership.

Wilson was elected to three consecutive terms.  He was a staunch proponent of civil rights and affirmative action, as well as a close ally of business leaders.  He was also a fiscal conservative.  Wilson worked hand-in-hand with Republican business leaders in implementing pro-business, pro-growth policies, initiating a decade-long boom in downtown economic development.

Wilson was defeated as he attempted to run for a fourth term in 1990.  By the late 1980s, Wilson’s image had become tarnished among many African Americans for his unwavering support of big business interests at the expense of neighborhood development.  Moreover, the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and his perceived indifference to escalating inner city problems proved his political demise.  Finally, a failed attempt at returning the National Football League team the Raiders to Oakland using taxpayer money served to further isolate him from his support base.  In the 1990 mayoral election Lionel Wilson finished in third place, receiving a mere 17 percent of the popular vote.

Lionel Wilson, a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, died on January 23, 1998 at his Oakland home after a long battle with cancer.  He was 82.

Is a professonal basketball player with the National Basketball Association (NBA). He is currently playing with the Golden State (California) Warriors.  Green was born on March 4, 1990, in Saginaw, Michigan to Mary Babers and Wallace Davis. Green was raised by his stepfather, Raymond Green, and took his name. Green had two brothers and three sisters, Torrian Harris, Braylon Green, LaToya Barbers, Jordan Davis, and Gabby Davis.

Draymond Green attended Saginaw High School in Saginaw, Michigan where he played for the high school basketball team. He helped lead the team to two Class A State Championships. After graduating from high school in 2008, Green attended Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan where he played for the Michigan State Spartans men’s basketball team.  Unlike many of his NBA colleagues, Green played all four years of his eligibility with the Spartans.  During those years he was named Big Ten Player of the Year, First team All Big Ten, and Consensus first-team All-American. After his senior year, Green considered himself eligible for the NBA draft.

In the 2012 NBA Draft, Green was selected as the 35th overall pick by the Golden State Warriors. Since becoming part of the Warriors team, Green has established himself as an elite three-point shooter and player alongside Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson. During his years with the Warriors, Green has become a two-time NBA All-Star, All-NBA second team, All-NBA first team, and two-time NBA All-Defensive First Team.

Green was part of the Warriors team that in the NBA 2015 National Championship defeated the Cleveland (Ohio) Cavaliers, led by LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love in six games.  Green helped win the first Warriors NBA championship since 1975. The success of Green and the Warriors continued into the following season which Green made it to his first NBA All-Star game and the team itself generated a record setting 73-9 win-loss regular season, the best in NBA history.

The Warriors returned to the NBA

Martin Luther King, Jr. announced plans for Poor People's Campaign in Washington. He said he would lead a massive civil disobedience campaign in the capital to pressure the government to provide jobs and income for all Americans. He told a press conference that an army of poor white, poor Blacks and Hispanics would converge on Washington on April 20 and would demonstrate until their demands were met.

Was born near Columbus, Georgia on April 1, 1846. The slave of Georgia planter John Haralson, he was taken to Alabama where he remained in bondage until 1865. It is unclear as to what he did in the earlier years of his freedom, but there are records that suggest he may have been a farmer and clergyman. Haralson taught himself to read and write and later became a skilled orator and debater.

In 1868, Haralson made his first unsuccessful attempt for a seat in the Forty-first Congress, representing Alabama’s First District of Alabama.  Two years later he won a seat in Alabama’s House of Representatives and in 1872 was elected to the State Senate.  In 1874 Haralson again ran for the U.S. House of Representatives.  Haralson narrowly won the Republican primary over Liberal Republican Frederick G. Bromberg.  Soon after the primary Bromberg accused Haralson of voter fraud and sought to deny him his seat.  The Democrats who controlled the U.S. House of Representatives supported Haralson and on March 4, 1875 he took his seat in Congress.   

Congressman Jeremiah Haralson supported the policies of President Ulysses Grant and urged black voters to remain loyal to the Republican Party.  Appointed to the House Committee on Public expenditures, he introduced legislation to use proceeds from public land sales for educational purposes and for the relief of the Medical College of Alabama. Haralson broke with other Republican-era black Congressmen by criticizing the use of federal soldiers to control violence and ensure orderly voting in the South.  He also favored general amnesty for former Confederates.

In 1876 Haralson stood for election in the newly created, predominately black Fourth Congressional District.  This district was already represented by black Congressman James T. Rapier.  Both he and Haralson ran in the Republican Primary.  Haralson won the primary but lost narrowly to Democrat Charles M. Shelley.  Haralson contested the results before the House of Representatives but on this occasion, the

Desi Arnaz Giles says he's starring in the role of his life, but the black actor's portrayal of Jesus Christ comes at the expense of ticket cancellations and death threats.

"I've led a complete life," Giles said Tuesday. "Should somebody clip me during a performance, don't cry for me, just rejoice because I'm ready to go home."

The controversy began Sunday after his first performance in the Park Theater Performing Arts Center's annual production of the "Passion Play," focusing on Jesus' last days.

The play attracts many bus groups, and word spread fast that a black man was sharing the role with a white actor.

Garrett Morgan is one of those rare people who are able to come up with an extraordinary inventions which have a tremendous impact on society – and then follows that up with even more!

Garrett Morgan was born on March 4, 1877 in Paris, Kentucky the seventh of 11 children born to Sydney and Elizabeth Morgan. Garrett, at the early age of 14 decided that he should travel north to Ohio in order to receive a better education. Morgan is an inspiration to many education seekers today, whether pursuing business with an AACSB accredited online MBA or masters in education. He moved to Cincinnati and then to Cleveland, working as a handyman in order to make ends meet. In Cleveland, he learned the inner workings of the sewing machine and in 1907 opened his own sewing machine store, selling new machines and repairing old ones. In 1908 Morgan married Mary Anne Hassek with whom he would have three sons.

In 1909, Morgan opened a tailoring shop, selling coats, suits and dresses. While working in this shop he came upon a discover which brought about his first invention. He noticed that the needle of a sewing machine moved so fast that its friction often scorched the thread of the woolen materials. He thus set out to develop a liquid that would provide a useful polish to the needle, reducing friction. When his wife called him to dinner, he wiped the liquid from his hands onto a a piece of pony-fur cloth. When he returned to his workshop, he saw that the fibers on the cloth were now standing straight up. He theorized that the fluid had actually straightened the fibers. In order to confirm his theory, he decided to apply some of the fluid to the hair of a neighbor’s dog, an Airedale. The fluid straightened the dog’s hair so much, the neighbor, not recognizing his own pet, chased the animal away. Morgan then decided try the fluid on himself, to small portions of his hair at first, and then to his entire head. He was successful and had invented the first human-hair straightener. He marketed the product under the name the G. A. Morgan Hair Refining Cream and sold by his G. A. Morgan Refining Company, which became a very successful business.

In 1912, Morgan developed another invention, much different from his hair straightener. Morgan called it a Safety Hood and patented it as a Breathing Device, but the world came to know it as a Gas Mask. The Safety Hood consisted of a hood worn over the head of a person from which emanated a tube which reached near the ground and allowed in clean air. The bottom of the tube was lined with a sponge type material that would help to filter the incoming air. Another tube existed which allowed the user to exhale air out of the device. Morgan intended the device to be used “to provide a portable attachment which will enable a fireman to enter a house filled with thick suffocating gases and smoke and to breathe freely for some time therein, and thereby enable him to perform his duties of saving life and valuables without danger to himself from suffocation. The device is also efficient and useful for protection to engineers, chemists and working men who are obliged to breathe noxious fumes or dust derived from the materials in which they are obliged to work.”

The National Safety Device Company, with Morgan as its General Manager was set up to manufacture and sell the device and it was demonstrated at various exhibitions across the country. At the Second International Exposition of Safety and Sanitation, the device won first prize and Morgan was award a gold medal. While demonstrations were good for sales, the true test of the product would come only under real life circumstances.

That opportunity arose on July 24, 1916 when an explosion occurred in a tunnel being dug under Lake Erie by the Cleveland Water Works. The tunnel quickly filled with smoke, dust and poisonous gases and trapped 32 workers underground. They were feared lost because no means of safely entering and rescuing them was known. Fortunately someone at the scene remembered about Morgan’s invention and ran to call him at his home where he was relaxing. Garrett and his brother Frank quickly arrived at the scene, donned the Safety Hood and entered the tunnel. After a heart wrenching delay, Garrett appeared from the tunnel carrying a survivor on his back as did his brother seconds later. The crowd erupted in a staggering applause and Garrett and Frank reentered the tunnel, this time joined by two other men. While they were unable to save all of the workers, the were able to rescue many who would otherwise have certainly died. Reaction to Morgan’s device and his heroism quickly spread across the city and the country as newspapers picked up on the story. Morgan received a gold medal from a Cleveland citizens group as well as a medal from the International Association of Fire Engineers, which also made him an honorary member.

Satisfied with his efforts, Morgan sold the rights to his device to the General Electric Company for the astounding sum of $40,000.00 and it became the standard across the country. Today’s modern traffic lights are based upon Morgan’s original design.

At that point, Morgan was honored by many influential people around him, including such tycoons as John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan (after whom he named one of his sons.) Although his successes had brought him status and acclaim, Morgan never forgot that his fellow Blacks still suffered injustices and difficulties. His next endeavor sought to address these as he started a newspaper called the Cleveland Call (later renamed as the Call & Post.) He also served as the treasurer of the Cleveland Association of Colored Men which eventually merged with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and ran as a candidate for Cleveland’s City Council

In his later years, Morgan would develop glaucoma and would thereby lose 90% of his vision. He died on July 27, 1963 and because of his contribution, the world is certainly a much safer place.

Born on March 5, 1938, in Gary, Indiana, Fred Williamson has remained under the spotlight in various fields for a long time. Former Football player and actor, Williamson has produced and directed various movies along with being a black belt in Kenpo, Shotokan Karate and Tae-Kwon-Do.

Williamson started off his football career by playing college football for Northwestern in the 1950s, followed by a signing with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Williamson played at defense for this team and soon earned himself the nickname of ‘The Hammer’ for his aggressive behaviour during the game.

This deal marked the beginning of a seven year professional career in the NFL which continued to thrive in the AFL as Williamson played four and three seasons for the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs respectively. Williamsons also managed to make it to the AFL All-Star team for three consecutive years starting in 1961.

During his time with the Chiefs, Williamson continued to live up to his reputation of being knows as ‘The Hammer’ by using his forearm to deliver karate-style blows to the heads of the players from the opposing team.

Williamson’s first Super Bowl season set off to a promising start as he promised to knock down some of the best players of the Green Bay Packers with his blows. However, fate brought in an ironic outcome to Williamson’s predictions as the hammer himself was knocked out in the fourth quarter of the game after running back Donny Anderson’s knee collided with Williamson’s head. He also suffered from a broken arm after Sherrill Headrick fell on him.

After an eight season pro football career, Fred Williamson left the AFL in 1967 with 497 yards and two touchdowns. Williamson then retired entirely from football after playing briefly for the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League.

However, Williamson was not ready to put a complete end to his success just yet. After retiring as a football player, Williamson joined Hollywood. His first few television roles included ‘Anka’ from a 1968 Star Trek episode and ‘Steve Bruce’ in the sit com, Julia.

Some of his early movies included roles in M*A*S*H, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon and the lead role in the 1975 hit, Boss Nigger. Fred Williamson continued to star in Hollywood movies which are mostly considered to belong to the ‘blaxploitation’ genre. Playing the role of an African-American in the film Black Caesar and its sequel, Hell up in Harlem, Williamson also acted alongside Peter Boyle in Crazy Joe.

Replacing Don Meredith in 1974, Williamson was selected to be Monday Night Football’s commentator by ABC television network. However, he was soon declared unsuitable for the job and became the first MNF personality to not live through a whole season. Instead, Alex Karras filled in Williamson’s shoes.

Returning to the world of films, Williamson started directing and producing movies as well, mostly those belonging to the ‘blaxploitation’ genre. One of the movies in which Williamson contributed as an actor, director and producer is Mean Johnny Barrows. Some of his other productions include Adios Amigo and Death Journey which were produced at his production house, Po’ Boy Productions, in Italy.

Between the 1990s and 2000s, Fred Williamson continued to appear on screen, be it in the form of a spokesperson for King Cobra or appearing in Snoop Doggy Dogg’s music video, Dogg Dogg World. From 2014 to the present day, Williamson continues to be an eminent spokesman for the Wounded Warrior Project.

On March 5 1770

On this day, Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave became the first man killed in the cause of America's freedom. This event is better known as the 'Boston Massacre'.

On March 5 1845
President John Tyler signed the joint resolution of Congress to admit Texas as a slave state.

On March 5 1897

American Negro Academy founded.

On March 5 1981

U.S. government granted Atlanta some $1 million to finance mental health and social programs in the wake of a mysterious series of abductions and slayings involving at least twenty two Black youths.

In 1908 explorer Robert Peary set out to reach the North Pole. His mission began with 24 men, 19 sledges and 133 dogs. By April of the following year, Peary had four men, 40 dogs and his most trusted and loyal team member—Matthew Henson.

As the team trudged through the Arctic, Peary said, “Henson must go all the way. I can’t make it there without him.”

On April 6, 1909, Peary and Henson became the first men in history to reach the North Pole.

Achievements 

Credited with being the first African-American to reach the North Pole with Peary explorer in 1909.

Published A Black Explorer at the North Pole in 1912.

Appointed to the US Customs House in recognition of Henson’s Arctic travels by former President William Howard Taft.

Recipient of the Joint Medal of Honor by US Congress in 1944.

Admitted to the Explorer’s Club, a professional organization dedicated to honoring the work of men and women conducting field research.

Interred in Arlington National Cemetery in 1987 by former President Ronald Reagan.

Commemorated with a US Postage Stamp in 1986 for his work as an explorer.

Early Life

Henson was born Matthew Alexander Henson in Charles County, Md. On August 8, 1866. His parents worked as sharecroppers.

Following the death of his mother in 1870, Henson’s father moved the family to Washington D.C. By Henson’s tenth birthday, his father also died, leaving him and his siblings as orphans. At the age of eleven, Henson ran away from home and within a year he was working on a ship as a cabin boy. While working on the ship, Henson became the mentee of Captain Childs, who taught him not only to read and write but also navigation skills.

Henson returned to Washington D.C. after Childs’ death and worked with a furrier. While working with the furrier, Henson met Peary who would enlist Henson’s services as a valet during travel expeditions.

Life As an Explorer 

Peary and Henson embarked on an expedition of Greenland in 1891. During this time period, Henson became interested in learning about Eskimo culture. Henson and Peary spent two years in Greenland, learning the language and various survival skills that Eskimos used.

For the next several years Henson would accompany Peary on several expeditions to Greenland to collect meteorites which were sold to the American Museum of Natural History.

The proceeds of Peary and Henson’s findings in Greenland would fund expeditions as they tried to reach the North Pole. In 1902, the team attempted to reach the North Pole only to have several Eskimo members die from starvation.

But by 1906 with the financial support of former President Theodore Roosevelt, Peary and Henson were able to purchase a vessel that could cut through ice. Although the vessel was able to sail within 170 miles of the North Pole, melted ice blocked the sea path in the direction of the North Pole.

Two years later, the team took another chance at reaching the North Pole. By this time, Henson was able to train other team members on sled handling and other survival skills learned from Eskimos. For a year, Henson stayed with Peary as other team members gave up.

 And on April 6, 1909, Henson, Peary, four Eskimos and 40 dogs reached the North Pole.

Later Years

Although reaching the North Pole was a great feat for all team member, Peary received credit for the expedition. Henson’s was almost forgotten because he was an African-American.

For the next thirty years, Henson worked in the US Customs office as a clerk. In 1912 Henson published his memoir Black Explorer at the North Pole.

Later in life, Henson was acknowledged for his work as an explorer—he was granted membership to the elite Explorer’s Club in New York.

In 1947 the Chicago Geographic Society awarded Henson with a gold medal. That same year, Henson collaborated with Bradley Robinson to write his biography Dark Companion.

Personal Life

Henson married Eva Flint in April of 1891. However, Henson’s constant travels caused the couple to divorce six years later. In 1906 Henson married Lucy Ross and their union lasted until his death in 1955. Although the couple never had children, Henson had many sexual relationships with Eskimo women. From one of these relationships, Henson bore a son named Anauakaq around 1906.

In 1987, Anauakaq met the descendants of Peary. Their reunion is well documented in the book, North Pole Legacy: Black, White, and Eskimo.

Death

Henson died on March 5, 1955, in New York City. His body was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Thirteen years later, his wife Lucy also died and she was buried with Henson. In 1987 Ronald Reagan honored the life and work of Henson by having his body re-interred at Arlington National Cemetery. 

Nigerian nationalist, politician, lawyer, statesman, and chancellor, Chief was born on March 6, 1909 in Ogun State, Nigeria, where he commenced his political career.

Awolowo attended various local schools in Ogun State, Nigeria and later served as an editor of The Nigerian Worker. While working as a journalist in the 1930s, he founded many political and economic organizations such as the Trade Unions Congress of Nigeria, The Nigerian Produce Traders Association, The Nigerian Motor Transport Union, and Egbe Omo Oduduwa, a Yoruba political and cultural organization that sought to unite the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria. In 1947, while in England studying law at the London School of Economics, he founded The Action Group, a political party centered mostly among the Yoruba people in the Southwestern part of Nigeria.

Upon the completion of his degree in 1949, Awolowo returned to Nigeria and became the leader of the Action Group and the premier of the Western Region of Nigeria which at the time was still under British colonial control.

During the 1950s, a period in Nigerian history associated with the struggle for independence from British rule, Awolowo used his position as leader of the opposition to challenge the government of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa who led the Northern People’s Party, the largest political party in the colony and the group most closely aligned with the British colonial administration.  In 1957, the British appointed Balewa Prime Minister three years before Nigeria actually became independent to advocate for greater political autonomy for Nigeria and its eventual independence.  Though Awolowo initially faced enormous opposition within his Action Group party, he eventually rallied support to end party division which he felt fueled violence and allowed continued British domination.

As a nationalist, Awolowo campaigned not only for Nigeria’s independence but also for its economic and social development. He thus introduced free primary education and free health care in Western Nigeria and facilitated the building of Nigeria’s first stadium, Liberty Stadium in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. Awolowo wrote two books: Voice of Wisdom and The People’s Republic urging Nigerians to use the nation’s resources to promote educational and infrastructural developments.

Obafemi Awolowo died in Ikenne, Ogun State, Nigeria at the age of 78 on May 9, 1987.

In recognition to his contribution to Nigerian statehood and development, the Federal Government of Nigeria renamed the University of Ife, The Obafemi Awolowo University on May 12, 1987. In addition to this honor, the Nigerian Federal government on October 1, 2010 while celebrating the nation’s golden jubilee in Abuja, honored Obafemi Awolowo posthumously for his contribution to the Nigerian independence movement.

Joseph, an enslaved person, was one of a handful of survivors at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836.  He was born around 1815. Known simply as Joe, he was sold four times in his life, most notably to his third master, Colonel William Barret Travis. His mother, Elizabeth, four brothers, William, Leander, Millford, Solomon, and sister, Elizabeth, were enslaved as well. Joe’s brother, William, escaped to freedom in 1833 and became the first published African American writer under the name William Wells Brown.

Born on the Mount Sterling, Kentucky, farm of Dr. John Young, Joe and his family were brought to Missouri in 1816. Young founded the town of Marthasville, Missouri, where Joe spent his childhood and adolescence as a field worker. In 1829, at the age of fourteen, Joe, his brother Millford, his mother, and his sister were sold to a Connecticut businessman, Isaac Mansfield. They were then brought to St. Louis, Missouri, where they served for several years.

Around 1830, Mansfield sold Joe’s sister, whom he would never see again. After that, William, who Dr. Young sold to work on steamships, attempted to escape with his mother from Mansfield’s plantation. They made it far into Illinois but were captured and returned to their respective owners. By the winter of 1832, Mansfield had decided to take Joe and his family to New Orleans, Louisiana, after which they would travel to Texas, which was still part of Mexico.

Slavery during the 1830s was illegal in Mexican territories. However, slaves were smuggled in or kept under the guise of contracts. By this point, Joe was technically recognized as an indentured servant for the next ten years or up until the death of Mansfield. When Joe’s master died in 1834, Joe was not given his freedom. Instead, he and his family were sold off to pay the estate’s debts. Joe never saw the rest of his family again. William Barret Travis then purchased him. By February of 1836, Joe had been brought to Bexar, Texas, the site of the Alamo.

On March 6, 1836, Joe, with musket in hand, was among the defenders of the Alamo. His owner was wounded and eventually killed during the battle. When Mexican troops overran the stronghold, Joe was taken as a prisoner and interrogated by Santa Anna himself but was allowed to escape custody as a prisoner-of-war. Instead, Joe was sent away with the white female and child survivors. Texas slaveholder John Rice Jones then acquired him.

Rather than stay in Texas and risk the chance of being sold yet again, Joe escaped precisely one year after the battle of the Alamo. In 1838, he made his way from Texas to the Travis plantation in Alabama, where he told the rest of the family about the heroism and fate of William Barret Travis. He is assumed to have remained there, possibly being renamed “Ben” sometime in the 1850s.

Joe was called a hero for his actions but was never awarded a pension for his service by the independent nation of Texas. He was last seen in San Antonio in 1877. His fate after that is unknown.

Shaquille Rashaun O’Neal was born on March 6, 1972 in New Jersey. He is a retired NBA player, former rapper, former actor and currently, an analyst on Inside NBA. He was drafted by Orlando Magic in 1992 and was suddenly thrown into the spot light. He shined brightly, winning Rookie of the Year in 1992 – 1993 and led his team to the NBA Finals of 1995. O’Neal’s personal life has been hard. His biological father was not interested in a relationship with him and gave O’Neal’s step father parental visitation rights. Ever since then, O’Neal has made no effort to revive his relationship with his biological father and has dismissed the idea completely. O’Neal has five kids with Shaunie Nelson whom he married in 2002. However, after a couple of wavering episodes, they filed for divorce in 2009 after which O’Neal started dating a TV star.

As a kid, O’Neal played for his school team and set a record of 68 – 1 for the two years that he played. He also helped them win the state championship. He was honored as one of the 35 Greatest McDonald’s All-Americans. After graduating from school he went to Louisiana State University to study business. From there on out, he won award after award and ultimately ended up leaving LSU before finishing his degree. He was named college player of the year by AP and UPI as well as received the Adolph Rupp Trophy as basketball player of the year in 1991. Despite his fame, he held on to his promise made to his mother to earn a degree and went back to school to finish his undergraduate studies.

O’Neal, after being drafted by Orlando Magic spent majority of his time in LA. He scored an astounding average 23.4 point on 56.2% shooting during his rookie season and became Player of the Week in his first week at NBA, followed by titles such as 1993 NBA Rookie of the Year and All-Star starter (first rookie to be voted that after Michael Jordan). His second season topped his first and he improved his shooting and this ultimately led him to be drafted in the All-NBA 3rd Team. In his third season, he made his first NBA Finals appearance but his team lost to the Rockets. O’Neal missed about twenty eight games in the 1995 – 1996 season due to injuries. He then moved on to being a free agent with the Los Angeles Lakers. During his stint, the Lakers won three consecutive championships in 2000, 2001 and 2003. Then in 2004, he was sent to Miami Heat and they won another championship in 2006. He played for Phoenix Suns in the 2007 – 2008 season before being traded to Cleveland Cavaliers and then eventually to Boston Celtics before retiring. O’Neal’s international career took course with the advent of O’Neal being named MVP of the 1994 FIBA World Championship. He pocketed more than twenty points and before 2010, he received a gold medal for his performance. He is not only a basketball player, he has ventured into music, television, advertising, video games and even law enforcement. He served as a reserve officer in 2005 receiving an honorary title of US Marshall and worked with a task force that hunted down sexual predators. It is suffice to say that Shaquille O’Neal is indeed a jack of all trades.

Dred Scott, was an enslaved person noted mainly for the unsuccessful lawsuit brought to free him from bondage. The decision rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 in the Dred Scott case, said that no blacks slave or free were U.S. citizens and allowed slavery in all U.S. territories.  The decision helped propel the United States toward the Civil War.

Scott was born into slavery in Southampton, Virginia, around 1795, the property of the Peter Blow family. He was given the name “Sam” but took the name of his older brother, Dred, when the latter died.  Scott was taken by the Blow family to Huntsville, Alabama where they settled on a nearby farm.  When farming proved unsuccessful, the family in 1830 relocated to St. Louis, Missouri.  In 1831 his owner, Peter Blow, died, John Emerson, U.S. Army surgeon, bought him and took him to Fort Armstrong, in 1833 when Emerson was assigned there.  In 1836 Emerson was transferred to Fort Snelling in Wisconsin Territory (later Minnesota Territory) and Scott was taken with Emerson. 

In 1836, Scott who was approximately 41, married a teenaged slave, Harriett Robinson, at Fort Snelling who was owned by another U.S. Army officer, Major Lawrence Taliaferro of Virginia.  Scott and Robinson gave birth to their first child, Eliza, in 1838 and a second daughter, Lizzie, in 1840.  The U.S. Army reassigned Emerson to Jefferson Barracks, south of St. Louis in 1837 and Fort Jessup, Louisiana, in 1838.  The Scotts were brought briefly to Louisiana where Emerson married Irene Sanford, a native of New York.  The Emersons and Scotts returned to Fort Snelling later in 1848 and remained there for four years until 1842 when Emerson permanently left the Army and settled in St. Louis with the Scott family.  By this point Scott had been in free territory nearly a decade, Harriett even longer, and their two children were born free.   

In 1843, Emerson died and left his estate to his widow, Irene Sanford Emerson. When Scott offered to purchase his freedom for $300 in 1846, Emerson refused…

Howard Jeter, U.S. Ambassador to Botswana and later to Nigeria, was born in Maple Ridge, Union County, South Carolina on March 6, 1947 to James Walter Jeter, Jr. and Emma Mattocks Jeter. Howard Jeter first attended school in a one-room schoolhouse in Maple Ridge. The school had no electricity, heat, or indoor plumbing. In high school, Jeter played the clarinet and drums in the school band and was in the drama club. Howard Jeter graduated from Sims High School in 1964 as the class valedictorian.

Jeter attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia where he majored in political science and minored in economics and French. At Morehouse, he received a Merrill Study Travel Fellowship through the Institute of European Studies that allowed him to study for a year at the Institute of Studies Pierre in Nantes, France. Jeter’s participation in the program encouraged his interests in a career in international relations. After earning his Bachelor’s at Morehouse in 1970, Jeter earned a Master’s in International Relations and Comparative Politics from Columbia University in New York City, New York and a Master’s in Africa Area Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.

After joining the U.S. Foreign Service, and going through the required training including Portuguese language training, Jeter took up his first overseas assignment, a post in the U.S. Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique in 1979.  He later served in the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and was Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge d’Affaires in Lesotho.  From September 1990 to July 1993, Jeter served as Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Windhoek, Namibia.

In 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated Jeter to be U.S. Ambassador to Botswana. He served in the capital, Gaborone, from 1993 to 1996.  In July 1996, President Bill Clinton appointed Jeter as a special envoy to Liberia.  He returned to Washington, D.C. and served as the U.S. State Department’s Director of West African Affairs from September 1997 to June 1999. From June 1999 to July 2000, Jeter was Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs.

Jeter’s second ambassadorial appointment came in 2000 when President Clinton named him to be U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria.  After serving in the capital, Abuja, until 2003, Ambassador Jeter returned home and retired from the State Department after 27 years of service, with the rank of Career Minister.

Ambassador Jeter is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Foreign Service Association, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He has served as chair of the selection panel for the Charles B. Rangel Fellowship Program.

In recognition of his Foreign Service career, Ambassador Jeter has received a Presidential Meritorious Award, the U.S. State Department Superior Awards, Senior Foreign Service Performance Awards, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition International Peace and Justice Award, and the Bennie Trailblazer Award from Morehouse College.

Howard Jeter has served as a board member of Africare, the Morehouse College Andrew Young Center for International Affairs, and the Florida A&M University International Advisory Board. He is former President and CEO of the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation and he was Executive Vice President of GoodWorks International, LLC.

Ambassador Jeter is married with two children.

1942: First cadets graduated from flying school at Tuskegee.

1960: This civil rights movement timeline focuses on the struggles final years, when some activists embraced black power, and leaders no longer appealed to the federal government to end segregation, thanks to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Although the passage of such legislation was a major triumph for civil rights activists, Northern cities continued to suffer from de facto segregation, or segregation that was the result of economic inequality rather than discriminatory laws.

De facto segregation was not as easily addressed as the legalized segregation that had existed in the South, and Martin Luther King Jr. spent the mid-to-late 1960s working on behalf of of both black and white Americans living in poverty. African-Americans in Northern cities became increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of change, and a number of cities experienced riots.

Some turned to the black power movement, feeling that it had a better chance of rectifying the sort of discrimination that existed in the North. By the end of the decade, white Americans had moved their attention away from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War, and the heady days of change and victory experienced by civil rights activists in the early 1960s came to an end with Kings assassination in 1968.

On March 7, 600 civil rights activists, including Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), leave Selma, Ala., traveling eastward on Route 80 toward Montgomery, Ala. They are marching to protest the killing of Jimmy Lee Jackson, an unarmed demonstrator slain during a march the prior month by an Alabama state trooper. State troopers and local police stop the marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, beating them with clubs as well as spraying them with water hoses and tear gas.

Thousands of marchers, led by Martin Luther King Jr. completed first leg of five-day Selma-to-Montgomery march. Marchers were protected by federalized Alabama National Guardsmen and U.S. Army troops. Selma-to-Montgomery march ended with rally of some fifty thousands at Alabama capitol. One of the marchers, a white civil rights worker named Viola Liuzzo, was shot to death on U.S. Highway after the rally by white terrorists. Three Klansmen were convicted of violating her civil rights and sentenced to ten years in prison.

He is a retired American football player. He was born in March 7, 1950 to an African American father and an Italian mother. He studied at Rancocas Valley Regional High School in New Jersey and later at Penn State University. Here he played for the team “Littany Lions” as a fullback and served as a blocker for fellow teammate and All-American running back Lydell Mitchell. Although he was a blocker, he chalked up almost 1400 yards on the board and scored 14 touchdowns in his college career. In 1970, he was the leading scorer on his college team and had an impressive record overall.

Harris was drafted to the National Football League in 1972 by the team “Pittsburgh Steelers” and was picked as the 13th selection in the first round. Many critics commented that Mitchell should have been picked instead of Harris, but the former was instead selected by the team “Baltimore Colts” in the same NFL Draft. Harris, however, cleared all doubts by starting his career with a bang. In his first season with the Pittsburgh Steelers, he had 188 carries, had run for 10 touchdowns and caught three touchdown passes. This led him to be named the National Football League’s “Rookie of the Year” by The Sporting News and United Press International.

His professional career lasted for 13 seasons, 12 of which he spent with the Pittsburgh Steelers. During this time, his statistics were in the top of the league and he was an invaluable asset to his team. He helped them win four Super Bowls in 1975, 1976, 1979, and 1980. In their very first victory in 1975, the Steelers defeated the Minnesota Vikings 16-6. Harris was named the Most Valuable Player of the tournament, making him not only the first African American, but also the first Italian American to be given this honor. He was very popular with Italian Americans in Pittsburgh, who called themselves “Franco’s Italian Army” and wore his jersey number “32” on their helmets.

(born March 7, 1929, Johannesburg, South Africa—died June 12, 2014, London, England), South African-born novelist and short-story writer who wrote with both humour and pathos of the troubled land of his birth and of his eastern European Jewish heritage, though in his later work he explored more-historical and biblical subjects.

Said to be the son of an African prince, Agrippa Hull was born free in Northampton, Massachusetts on March 7, 1759.

The, first African

American faculty member of an American medical school, Howard University, is born free!

A minister, sociologist, civil rights worker, and administrator, served in a number of important offices in Seattle government.  Hundley was born in Philadelphia on March 8, 1929, and raised there in a black neighborhood which he recalled as being pretty rough.  He graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1950, and Yale Divinity School in 1953.  Arriving in  Seattle in 1954, he served as minister at the Church of the People until 1956. Social work then became his focus and he received a degree in social work from the University of British Columbia in 1960, and a Masters of Social Work Degree from the University of Washington in 1963. 

During the late 1960s, Hundley became a highly visible figure in the civil rights movement in Seattle.  As chair of the Congress for Racial Equality and member of the Central Area Civil Rights Committee, he was a leader in organizing the boycott against Seattle Public Schools and in promoting picketing and marches through downtown for equal employment and housing opportunities.  In 1966, he was asked to direct the Central Area Motivation Project, the largest community action program in King County.  In 1968, he became director of the Seattle Model City Program which, under his direction, became a model for the nation.  From 1974, until 1977, he served as Director of Office of Management and Budget.  From 1977, until 1988, when he retired, he served as Superintendent of the Department of Parks and Recreation.

He was a professional boxer and former World Heavyweight Champion. He was born on January 12, 1944 and was the youngest of several children. His parents were farmers and lived in Beaufort, South Carolina. They lived in relative poverty and Joe had to work as a farmhand from a very early age. He had a strong build and was interested in boxing from his childhood, when he first watched fighters like Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Willie Pep and Rocky Graziano on the family’s black and white television. He used to work at a meat packing factory and would often punch the hanging animal carcasses to practice his punches. A scene inspired by this incident is shot in the film “Rocky” starring Sylvester Stallone. In 1959, at the age of 15, Frazier left home to go to New York to live with his elder brother and his family.

Frazier began boxing in 1961 under the training of Yank Durham. Durham helped the young Frazier to hone his technique and perfect his punches. During his amateur boxing career, he won three consecutive Golden Gloves Heavyweight Championships in 1962, 1963 and 1964. His only loss during his amateur career was to Buster Mathis, who also beat him in the final round of the U.S. Olympic Trials held at the World Fair in New York in 1964. However, his coach persuaded him to attend the Olympics nevertheless which proved to be extremely fruitful as Mathis became injured and Frazier took over for him. Despite injuring his thumb in the semi final fight, he ended up winning Olympic Gold.

He turned professional in 1965 and in just a year’s time, built up an impressive record of 11 victories to 0 losses. When Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title in 1967 for refusing to serve in the Vietnam War, the title was up for grabs. The match for the title was held in 1970 between Jimmy Ellis and Frazier at Madison Square Garden. Frazier defeated Ellis in 4 rounds to become the World Champion. He defended his title against World Light Heavyweight Champion Bob Foster in Detroit. He then fought Muhammad Ali, who

Henry L. Marsh III elected 1st Black mayor of Richmond.

Congdon Street Baptist Church is the oldest African American church in Rhode Island. The church, located on College Hill, sprang from the effort of the black community in the city to provide a place for people of color to worship and a locale for a secular school for black children in the city.  This effort combined the work of a small group of black Rhode Islanders and sympathetic white residents.  

The campaign to create a church began March 9, 1819 at a gathering in the city’s First Baptist Meeting House. A group of 12 men were chosen to appeal to Moses Brown, popular New England Quaker abolitionist and industrialist, and the wealthiest individual in the state. Brown, who is more generally known as the cofounder of Brown University in 1764, purchased land that would become the site of the African Union Meeting House.  That structure was completed in 1820 and it housed both the church and the Schoolhouse Society. Initially the church was interdenominational.  Its members included those who considered themselves African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.), A.M.E. Zion, Free Will Baptists, Calvinists, and Missionary Baptists.  Several of these denominations later decided to pull out of the African Union Meeting House to establish their own churches to assert their distinct denominational identities. After the various exoduses from the church, the remaining members were Baptists and Calvinists who in 1840 changed the name of the African Union Meeting House to the Meeting Street Baptist Church.

In 1863 hostile white neighbors of the church tore down the building leaving the congregation without a permanent place of worship for one year.  Eventually the congregation arranged an exchange of lots with one of the church’s neighbors who disagreed with the mob’s actions. The church moved from its previous location at Meeting Street and Congdon Street to Congdon Street and Angel Court. The new building was finally completed in July 1875 at the cost of $16,000.  It was renamed the Congdon Street Baptist Church.

The New

Musician, composer, and conductor Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was born on June 14, 1932, in Manhattan, New York City.  Perkinson’s mother, a talented pianist, organist, and theater director in the Bronx, named her son after the Afro-British composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Perkinson began showing an interest in music at a very young age and in 1945 he began attending New York’s High School of Music and Art. In 1948, he won the prestigious High School Music and Art Choral Competition with his composition titled And Behold. Perkinson graduated from the high school in 1949 and that same year he won the coveted LaGuardia Prize for Music.

After high school, Perkinson attended New York University where he was an education major until 1951, intending to become a public school teacher. In that year, however he decided instead to focus on music and transferred to the Manhattan School of Music where he became a composition major. Perkinson studied under influential figures such as Charles Mills, Vittorio Giannini, and Jonel Perlea. He graduated in 1953 and during the summer of 1954 began taking courses in conducting at the Berkshire Music Center in Massachusetts while at the same time studying under renowned composer Earl Kim at Princeton University. In 1960, Perkinson traveled to Holland, where he spent three years pursuing his studies in conducting under Maestros Dean Dixon and Franco Ferrara at the Netherlands Radio Union at Hilversum.

Perkinson had a long and successful career in the music industry. He worked as a music director and arranger for many famous jazz and soul artists including Marvin Gaye, Barbara McNair, Lou Rawls, Donald Byrd, Max Roach, Melvin Van Peebles, and Harry Belafonte. Perkinson also composed numerous musical scores for the stage, film, and television. He wrote ballet scores for dance companies like Dance Theater of Harlem, Alvin Ailey, and the Pomare Dance Company. He also wrote and conducted the scores for award winning films such as Montgomery to Memphis, a documentary about Martin Luther King Jr., and A Warm December, a film both starring and directed by Sidney Poitier. Perkinson also wrote the theme songs for several hit network television shows including Get Christie Love! and Room 222.

In 1965, Perkinson co-founded the Symphony of the New World, which he also conducted from 1965 to 1970. In addition to writing and conducting, Perkinson also held various teaching positions, including a job at Indiana University from 1997 to 1998. From 1998 until his death in 2004, he worked as the Coordinator of Performance Activities at Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson passed away on March 9, 2004 in Chicago, Illinois. The year after his death a wide-range compilation of his music was released on an album titled Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004); A Celebration.

A child of the early post-reconstruction south, Oscar DePriest was born in Florence, Alabama on March 9, 1871.

While in office DePriest worked as a real estate broker and amassed considerable wealth by moving black families into previously all-white neighborhoods, a practice later know as blockbusting.  He also continued to rise in Republican Party politics and in 1915 he became Chicago’s first black alderman.

DePriest soon became known as an avid defender of black civil rights and a progressive on labor issues.  He also developed a reputation as a corrupt politician.   In 1917 he was indicted for bribery and accused of protecting South Side gamblers.  DePriest, however, was acquitted at his trial.  For the next decade, he would continue to run for public office with varying degrees of success.  Finally, in 1928 DePriest was elected to represent the First Congressional District of Illinois.  He became the first African American Congressman since North Carolina’s George H. White left Washington, D.C. in 1901 and the first black congressman ever elected outside the South.  As the sole early 20th Century black Congressman, DePriest soon became a political symbol for much of African America.

While in Congress DePriest vigorously fought against racial discrimination in both government and military employment.  He introduced several measures that would have outlawed discrimination including, most notably, an anti-lynching bill.  Most of his measures failed but his 1933 amendment barring racial discrimination in the Civilian Conservation Corps was attached to the measure that established this federal program.

DePriest was as popular among African Americans for his high profile challenges of racial practices as for his legislation.  He once told an Alabama Senator that he was “not big enough to prevent” DePriest from dining in the Senate restaurant.  On another occasion he defended the right of Howard University students to eat in the House restaurant, eventually taking the cause to the floor of the House.  He also became involved in a public controversy with Republican President Herbert Hoover when First Lady Louann Hoover refused to invite DePriest’s wife, Jessie Williams DePriest, to the White House to have tea with the spouses of other Republican Congressmen.  After DePriest publicized the snub, Mrs. Hoover invited Mrs. DePriest to the White House in a highly symbolic event that marked the first time an African American woman had ever been entertained by a First Lady in the official resident of the President.

Although DePriest prided himself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative, his latter views seemed increasingly out of step with the needs of the Depression-ravaged South Side district he represented.  DePriest managed to hold on to his seat in the Franklin D. Roosevelt landslide in 1932 but in 1934 he lost the election to Democrat Arthur Mitchell in a contest that signaled both the popularity of the New Deal Programs in Chicago and the movement of African Americans from the Republican to Democratic Party.  DePriest returned full-time to his real estate business.  He staged a brief political comeback when he served as a Chicago alderman between 1943 and 1947.  Oscar DePriest died in Chicago on May 12, 1951.

Walter F. White named NAACP executive secretary.

The NAACP has had many leaders since its beginning in 1910, but none was more determined and devoted than Walter F. White. This fair-skinned, blue-eyed man who wouldn't pass worked a lifetime to defeat the nation's barriers to integration

Howard Bailey Jr, best known as Chingy, is an American rapper and actor, born on March 9, 1980 in St. Louis, Missouri. While his music simply adheres to the Hip Hop genre, Chingy is best known for plain delivery of lyrics in upbeat music. His familiarity with singing in a nursery rhyme style makes him largely popular with the youth. He developed a taste for music at the early age of 9, the same time he wrote some of his first lyrics. Growing up in the Walnut Park area of the St. Louis neighborhood, he joined a local group called Without Warning, recording a local hit “What’s Poppin Off”.

Chingy made a brief entrance in to the popular Hip Hop scene with American Rapper Nelly in the summer of 2002. While Nelly was touring the states and performing in various venues, Chingy did an opening act with the Grammy winner. However, it was Chingy’s 2003 debut single “Right Thurr” that caught the eye of the crowd. The 4 minute, Southern Hip Hop classic became an instant hit, charting at #2 for a 4 consecutive weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. It also topped the Hot Rap Songs list and was #2 and #5 on the Hot R&B & Hip-Hop Songs and Mainstream Top 40 charts. It was around this time that Ludacris, together his Chingy’s manager Chaka Zulu picked up the rising star and signed him to the label Disturbing tha Peace. A few weeks after the release of “Right Thurr”, Chingy released his debut album, Jackpot (2003). Because of the success of the single, the album managed to sell 2 million copies under the Capitol Records label. The album featured guest appearances from stars of the Hip Hop scene, including Snoop Dogg, Murphy Lee, I-20, Raindrop and Tity Boi. Singles such as “One Call Away” and “Holidae In” became instant hits as well. With the success of his first album, Chingy released his second album, Powerballin’ a year later. This album was just as successful as its predecessor, selling one million copies and achieving platinum status. The single “Balla Baby” became a popular choice amongst Chingy’s fans.

(formerly Lil’ Bow Wow) is an American rapper and actor. His birth name is Shad Gregory Moss and he was born on March 9, 1987 in Columbus, Ohio to Teresa Caldwell and Alfonso Moss. He was interested in rap music as a child, and started to rap when he was 6 years old. He was a big fan of the band Niggaz Wit Attitudes (N.W.A) and was heavily influenced by their music. In 1993, at the age of 6, his performance at a concert got him noticed by the rapper Snoop Dogg (Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr.) who then gave him the stage name of “Lil’ Bow Wow”. In 1998, at the age of 11, he met a record producer by the name of Jermaine Dupri who was also the producer for many major artists such as Lil’ Kim, Destiny’s Child and Mariah Carey. Dupri helped Bow Wow to launch his career. In 1999, his song “The Stick Up” was featured on the soundtrack of the movie “Wild Wild West”.

His debut album, titled “Beware of Dog” was released in 2000 when he was just 13 years old. His single “Bow Wow (That’s My Name)” featured the rapper Snoop Dogg and was a chart topper. Other singles included “Bounce with Me” (featuring the R&B band Xscape), “Puppy Love”, and “Ghetto Girls”. With sales in excess of 2 million copies, the album was certified double platinum in March 2001 by the Recording Industry Association of America. His second album was titled “Doggy Bag” and it was released in 2002. The album reached No. 11 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on the Top R&B/Hip Hop Albums chart. The track “Basketball” was featured on the soundtrack of the film “Like Mike” in which he also acted. It reached No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 25 on the rap charts and was certified platinum by the RIAA. Shortly after the release of this album, he changed his name to “Bow Wow” claiming that he had dropped the “Lil” because he was getting older and that there were already too many “Lil”s in the music industry.

In 2005, his third studio album “Wanted” was released which was also certified platinum. It included the track “Let Me Hold You” featuring the rapper

North Carolina Agicultural and Technical State University

is founded in Greensboro, NC.

Rap artist the Nortorious B.I.G. is killed in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. He was 24.

Organized in 1836, the Witherspoon Street Church is one of the oldest African American Presbyterian congregations in New Jersey. On March 10, 1836, 90 out of 131former African American members of the Nassau Presbyterian Church were released from the congregation to form their own church. Nassau had just suffered a fire that destroyed their church. Although slaves and indentured servants were allowed to attend Nassau Presbyterian, they suffered much racism and were forced to sit in the small balcony. Many of them saw this as the opportunity to establish a church they controlled.

The original church name was The First Presbyterian Church of Colour of Princeton. After the first official communion was held in 1840, the church was referred to as Third Presbyterian Church, and later the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church for Colored People in Princeton. The congregation included enslaved, indentured, and free people of color.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Stockton was born enslaved to the Stockton Family in Princeton; she attended Nassau Presbyterian Church and was instrumental in establishing the new church. Betsy Stockton earned her freedom at the age of twenty and traveled to Hawaii as a missionary. She returned to Princeton in 1835 and helped found the First Presbyterian Church of Colour. In 1837 Stockton began teaching African American children in a public school and later established a Sabbath School at what is now the Witherspoon Street Church. A stained glass window in the church is dedicated to Stockton and her work in the church.

In October of 1879, Rev. William Drew Robeson was installed as pastor. Along with his wife, Maria Louisa Bustill of Philadelphia, the Robesons moved into the church parsonage and began their family. That parsonage was the place of birth of twentieth century singer and activist Paul Robeson and is now called The Robeson House. As a former slave, Rev. Robeson fought for the rights of African Americans. His preaching on racial equality was eventually deemed “too radical” by Presbyterian

He pleaded guilty in a Memphis court to charges of killing Martin Luther King Jr. He was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. The House Select Committee on Assassinations said later that Ray fired the shot that killed King but that he was probably one element in a larger conspiracy.

Timothy Zachery Mosley, born on March 10, 1972 in Norfolk, Virginia, is a popular American musician and recording artist. He attended Salem High School at Virginia Beach. Having interest in music since his childhood, he was known as “DJ Tim” or “DJ Timmy Tim”. The first tracks he composed were on a Casio keyboard at home. He started collaborating with other artists from his high school days, which included Melvin Barcliff (who performed under the stage name “Magoo”) as well as Pharrell Williams. He later worked with Magoo on his albums “Indecent Proposal” and “Under Construction Pt. II”.

Some of his other friends included Terrence Thornton and Gene Thorton, better known as “Pusha T” and “Malice”, members of a rap group called “Clipse”. As a teenager, Timbaland joined a rap group called “S.B.I” (which stood for “Surrounded by Idiots”). At the age of 15, Timbaland was accidentally shot in the arm by his co-worker, which left him paralyzed on one side of his body for almost nine months. During his time in recovery, he learnt how to DJ using his left hand.

One of the singers that he collaborated with was Missy Elliott. Elliott was part of an R&B band called Sista, which was signed on by a successful producer DeVante Swing to his record label “Swing Mob”. Timbaland was involved in many of their productions, including the 1995 album “The Show, The After-Party, The Hotel”. Timbaland soon began making a name for himself and collaborating with dozens of artists. One of these included the album “Ginuwine…the Bachelor” for the rapper Ginuwine. He also produced the Aaliyah’s album titled “One in a Million” on which he again worked alongside Missy Elliot. Some of the albums he solely produced for Elliott include “Da Real World” and “Miss E…So Addictive”.

Another famous artist that Timbaland worked with was the hip hop singer and producer Jay-Z, for his album “Vol. 3: Life and Times of S. Carter”. He also worked on Justin Timberlake’s hit 2002 album “Justified” which included the hit single “Cry Me a River”. In 2006…

Poet, novelist and U.S. diplomat, James Weldon Johnson is probably best known to millions as the author of the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the black national anthem. Johnson was also a civil rights activist and was Executive Secretary of the National Association of Colored People from 1920 to 1929. As such, Johnson spoke out on a variety of issues facing African Americans. In the speech below, given at a dinner for Congressman (and future New York Mayor) Fiorello H. LaGuardia at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City on March 10, 1923, Johnson outlines the importance of the vote for the nation’s black citizens.

Ladies and Gentlemen: For some time since I have had growing apprehensions about any subject especially the subject of a speech that contained the word “democracy.” The word “democracy” carries so many awe inspiring implications. As the key word of the subject of an address it may be the presage of an outpour of altitudinous and platitudinous expressions regarding “the most free and glorious government of the most free and glorious people that the world has ever seen. ” On the other hand, it may hold up its sleeve; if you will permit such a figure, a display of abstruse and recondite theorizations or hypotheses of democracy as a system of government. In choosing between either of these evils it is difficult to decide which is the lesser.

Indeed, the wording of my subject gave me somewhat more concern than the speech. I am not lure that it contains the slightest idea of what I shall attempt to say; but if the wording of my subject is loose it only places upon me greater reason for being more specific and definite in what I shall say. This I shall endeavor to do; at the same time, however, without being so, confident or so cocksure as an old preacher I used to listen to on Sundays when I taught school one summer down in the backwoods of Georgia, sometimes to my edification and often to my amazement.

On one particular Sunday, after taking a rather cryptic text, he took off his spectacles and laid them on the pulpit, closed the with a bang; and said, “Brothers and sisters, this morning I intend to explain the unexplainable, to find out the indefinable, to ponder over the imponderable, and to unscrew the inscrutable.”

Our Democracy and the Ballot

It is one of the commonplaces of American thought that we a democracy based upon the free will of the governed. The popular idea of the strength of this democracy is that it is founded upon the fact that every American citizen, through the ballot, is a ruler in his own right; that every citizen of age and outside of jail or the insane asylum has the undisputed right to determine through his vote by what laws he shall be governed and by whom these laws shall be enforced.

I could be cynical or flippant and illustrate in how many this popular idea is a fiction, but it is not my purpose to deal in cleverisms. I wish to bring to your attention seriously a situation, a condition, which not only runs counter to the popular conception of democracy in America but which runs counter to the fundamental law upon which that democracy rests and which, in addition, is a negation of our principles of government and a to our institutions.

Without any waste of words, I Come directly to a condition which exists in that section of our country which we call “the South,” where millions of American citizens are denied both the right to vote and the privilege of qualifying themselves to vote. I refer to the wholesale disfranchisement of Negro citizens. There is no need at this time of going minutely into the methods employed to bring about this condition or into the reasons given as justification for those methods. Neither am I called upon to give proof of my general statement that millions of Negro citizens in the South are disfranchised. It is no secret. There are the published records of state constitutional conventions in which the whole subject is set forth with brutal frankness. The purpose of these state constitutional conventions is stated over and. over again, that purpose being to exclude from the right of franchise the Negro, however literate, and to include the white man, however illiterate.

The press of the South, public men in public utterances, and representatives of those states in Congress, have not only admitted these facts but have boasted of them. And so we have it as an admitted and undisputed fact that there are upwards of four million Negroes in the South who are denied the right to vote but who in any of the great northern, mid western or western states would be allowed to vote or world at least have the privilege of qualifying themselves to vote.

Now, nothing is further from me than the intention to discuss this question either from an anti South point of view or from a pro Negro point of view. It is my intention to put it before you purely as an American question, a question in which is involved the political life of the whole country.

Let us first consider this situation as a violation, not merely a violation but a defiance, of the Constitution of the United States. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution taken together express so plainly that a grammar school boy can understand it that the Negro is created a citizen of the United States and that as such he is entitled to all the rights of every other citizen and that those rights, specifically among them the right to vote, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state. This is the expressed meaning of these amendments in spite of all the sophistry and fallacious pretense which have been invoked by the courts to overcome it.

There are some, perhaps even here, who feel that serious a matter to violate or defy one amendment to the Constitution than another. Such persons will have in mind the Eighteenth Amendment. This is true in a strictly legal sense but any sort of analysis will show that violation of the two Civil War Amendments strikes deeper. As important as the Eighteenth Amendment may be, it is not fundamental; it contains no grant of rights to the citizen nor any requirement of service from him. It is rather a sort of welfare regulation for his personal conduct and for his general moral uplift.

But the two Civil War Amendments are grants of citizenship rights and a guarantee of protection in those rights, and therefore their observation is fundamental and vital not only to the citizen but to the integrity of the government.

We may next consider it as a question of political franchise equality between the states. We need not here go into a list of figures. A few examples will strike the difference:

In the elections of 1920 it took 82,492 votes in Mississippi to elect two senators and eight representatives. In Kansas it 570,220 votes to elect exactly the same representation. Another illustration from the statistics of the same election shows that vote in Louisiana has fifteen times the political power of one vote in Kansas.

In the Congressional elections of 1918 the total vote for the ten representatives from the State of Alabama was 62,345, while the total vote for ten representatives in Congress from Minnesota was 299,127, and the total vote in Iowa, which has ten representations was 316,377.

In the Presidential election of 1916 the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia cast a total vote for the Presidential candidates of 1,870,209. In Congress these states a total of 104 representatives and 126 votes in the electoral college. The State of New York alone cast a total vote for Presidential candidates of 1,706,354, a vote within 170,000 of all the votes cast by the above states, and yet New York has only 43 representatives and 45 votes in the electoral college.

What becomes of our democracy when such conditions of inequality as these can be brought about through chicanery, the open violation of the law and defiance of the Constitution ?

But the question naturally arises, What if there is violation of certain clauses of the Constitution; what if there is an inequality of political power among the states? All this may be justified by necessity.

In fact, the justification is constantly offered. The justification goes back and makes a long story. It is grounded in memories of the Reconstruction period. Although most of those who were actors during that period have long since died, and although there is a new South and a new Negro, the argument is still made that the Negro is ignorant,. the Negro is illiterate, the Negro is venal, the Negro is inferior; and, therefore, for the preservation of civilized government in the’ South, he must be debarred from the polls. This argument does not take into account the fact that the restrictions are not against ignorance, illiteracy and venality, because by the very practices by which intelligent, decent Negroes are debarred, ignorant and illiterate white men are included.

Is this pronounced desire on the part of the South for an enlightened franchise sincere, and what has been the result of these practices during the past forty years? What has been the effect socially; intellectually and politically, on the South? In all three of these vital phases of life the South is, of all sections of the country, at the bottom. Socially, it is that section of the country where public opinion allows it to remain the only spot in the civilized world no, more than that, we may count in the blackest spots of Africa and the most unfrequented islands of the sea it is a section where public opinion allows it to remain the only spot on the earth where a human being may be publicly burned at the stake.

And what about its intellectual and political life? As to intellectual life I can do nothing better than quote from Mr. H. L. Mencken, himself a Southerner. In speaking of the intellectual life of the South, Mr. Mencken says:

“It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. One could throw into the South France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the `progress’ it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert . . . . If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect on the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang tse kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying up of a civilization. In that section there is not a single poet, not a serious historian, a creditable composer, not a critic good or bad, not a dramatist dead or alive.”

In a word, it may be said that this whole section where, at the cost of the defiance of the Constitution, the perversion of law, stultification of men’s consciousness, injustice and violence upon a weaker group, the “purity” of the ballot has been preserved and the right to vote restricted to only lineal survivors of Lothrop Stoddard ‘s mystical Nordic supermen that intellectually it is dead and politically it is rotten.

If this experiment in super democracy had resulted in one-hundredth of what was promised, there might be justification for it, but the result has been to make the South a section not only which Negroes are denied the right to vote, but one in which white men dare not express their honest political opinions. Talk about political corruption through the buying of votes, here is political corruption which makes a white man fear to express a divergent political opinion. The actual and total result of this practice has been not only the disfranchisement of the Negro but the disenfranchisement of the white man. The figures which I quoted a few moments ago prove that not only Negroes are denied the right vote but that white men fail to exercise it; and the latter condition is directly dependent upon the former.

The whole condition is intolerable and should be abolished. It has failed to justify itself even upon the grounds which it claimed made it necessary. Its results and its tendencies make it more dangerous and more damaging than anything which might result from an ignorant and illiterate electorate. How this iniquity might be abolished is, however, another story.

I said that I did not intend to present this subject either anti South or pro Negro, and I repeat that I have not wished to speak with anything that approached bitterness toward the South.

Indeed, I consider the condition of the South unfortunate, more than unfortunate. The South is in a state of superstition which makes it see ghosts and bogymen, ghosts which are the creation of its own mental processes.

With a free vote in the South the specter of Negro domination would vanish into thin air. There would naturally follow a breaking up of the South into two parties. There would be political light, political discussion, the right to differences of opinion, and the Negro vote would naturally divide itself. No other procedure would be probable. The idea of a solid party, a minority party at that, is inconceivable.

But perhaps the South will not see the light. Then, I believe, in the interest of the whole country, steps should be taken to compel compliance with the Constitution, and that should be done through the enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment, which calls for a reduction in representation in proportion to the number of citizens in any state denied the right to vote.

And now I cannot sit down after all without saying one word for the group of which I am a member.

The Negro in the matter of the ballot demands only that he should be given the right as an American citizen to vote under the. identical qualifications required of other citizens. He cares not how high those qualifications are made whether they include the ability to read and write, or the possession of five hundred dollars, or a knowledge of the Einstein Theory just so long as these qualifications are impartially demanded of white men and black men.

In this controversy over which have been waged battles of words and battles of blood, where does the Negro himself stand?

The Negro in the matter of the ballot demands only that he be given his right as an American citizen. He is justified in making this demand because of his undoubted Americanism, an Americanism which began when he first set foot on the shores of this country more than three hundred years ago, antedating even the Pilgrim Fathers; an Americanism which has woven him into the woof and warp of the country and which has impelled him to play his part in every war in which the country has been engaged, from the Revolution down to the late World War.

Through his whole history in this country he has worked with patience; and in spite of discouragement he has never turned his back on the light. Whatever may be his shortcomings, however slow may have been his progress, however disappointing may have been his achievements, he has never consciously sought the backward path. He has always kept his face to the light and continued to struggle forward and upward in spite of obstacles, making his humble contributions to the common prosperity and glory of our land. And it is his land. With conscious pride the Negro say:

“This land is ours by right of birth, This land is ours by right of toil; We helped to turn its virgin earth, Our sweat is in its fruitful soil.

“Where once the tangled forest stood, Where flourished once rank weed and thorn, Behold the path traced, peaceful wood, The cotton white, the yellow corn.

“To gain these fruits that have been earned, To hold these fields that have been won, Our arms have strained, our backs have burned Bent bare beneath a ruthless sun.

“That banner which is now the type Of victory on field. and flood Remember, its first crimson stripe Was dyed by Attucks’ willing blood.

“And never yet has come the cry When that fair flag has been assailed For men to do, for men to die, That we have faltered or have failed.”

The Negro stands as the supreme test of the civilization. Christianity and. the common decency of the American people. It is upon the answer demanded of America today by the Negro that there depends the fulfillment or the failure of democracy in America. I believe that that answer will be the right and just answer. I believe that the spirit in which American democracy was founded; though often turned aside and often thwarted; can never be defeated or destroyed but that ultimately it will triumph.

If American democracy cannot stand the test of giving to any citizen who measures up to the qualifications required of others the full rights and privileges of American citizenship, then we had just as well abandon that democracy in name as in deed. If the Constitution of the United States cannot extend the arm of protection around the weakest and humblest of American citizens as around the strongest and proudest, then it is not worth the paper it is written on.

Singer of the Drifters dies of cancer. He was 54.

Yup, in full Samuel Eto’o Fils

(born March 10, 1981, Nkon, Cameroon), Cameroonian professional football (soccer) player who is considered one of the greatest African footballers of all time.

Eto’o attended the Kadji Sports Academy in Douala, Cameroon, and first came to national prominence while playing for UCB Douala, a second-division club, in the 1996 Cup of Cameroon. At only 16 years of age, he caught the attention of Real Madrid—one of the top teams in Europe—who signed him in 1997, though Eto’o saw little playing time. Nor did he see much action after joining Cameroon when it qualified for the 1998 World Cup but faltered in the first round.

Eto’o made his name playing for Cameroon during the 2000 African Cup of Nations, where he scored four times, including a crucial goal in the Indomitable Lions’ gold-medal victory over Nigeria. His impressive play continued at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, where Cameroon defeated Spain for the first Olympic gold in its history. In the Olympic final, with the Indomitable Lions facing a 2–0 deficit in the second half, Eto’o and teammate Patrick Mboma led the comeback with two goals, forcing extra time. After Eto’o’s apparent goal in the final seconds of extra time was called back owing to an offside penalty, the game went into penalty kicks, in which Cameroon prevailed.

Eto’o was lent out to a number of teams by Real Madrid until 2000, when he signed with Real Mallorca of the Spanish League; his $6.3 million contract was the largest amount paid by the club at the time. Internationally, he guided Cameroon to a second African Cup of Nations title and a World Cup berth in 2002. While Eto’o was an impressive player for Mallorca—he became the club’s all-time leading goal scorer—his team was still considered below the top tier of European football, and he was lured to the powerhouse club FC Barcelona in 2004.

Eto’o continued his stellar play in Barcelona. He won his record third consecutive African Player of the Year award in 2005, and Barcelona won Spanish.

Moore was born in Akron, Ohio on March 11, 1929. Over a long distinguished career Kermit Moore has been a cellist of outstanding acclaim, an orchestra conductor, composer, teacher, and mentor. Through these activities in classical music he has been successful in breaking down racial and social barriers.

Moore was born in Akron, Ohio on March 11, 1929.  By his fifth birthday he was studying piano with his mother and at ten, had chosen the cello as his instrument. Charles McBride, a prominent mentor and instructor at the Cleveland Institute of Music, taught Moore and arranged for him to join the Cleveland Symphony. Moore also won a prestigious John Hancock Scholarship which allowed him to spend his eighteenth summer at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts.  There he played in a student orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky, renowned Boston Symphony conductor. At 19, Moore debuted in a recital at New York City’s Town Hall. He then studied simultaneously three years at Juilliard School of Music and New York University, receiving his M.A. in Music. He became principal cellist in the Hartford Symphony Orchestra in 1949.  At the time he was among a handful of African Americans regularly performing with symphony orchestras in the United States.

After concertizing throughout the United States, he settled in Europe in the early 1950s, studying at the Paris Conservatoire in Paris, France and with Nadia Boulanger. Later he lived in Brussels, Belgium for four years doing research while playing and conducting with major European orchestras.

In 1961 Moore returned to New York to live, tour, and to teach.  Since 1961 he has been a guest conductor with numerous orchestras including New York Philharmonic and the New York Festival Orchestra.  He has also performed as a cellist with virtuoso violinist Ruggiero Ricci, jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, and George Shirley, the longtime Metropolitan Opera tenor. He helped found the Symphony of the New World which actively welcomes minority artists.

In 1964 Moore married Dorothy Rudd, one of the most prolific women composers in the United States. After graduating from Howard University in 1963, she studied in Paris and New York. They both taught at the Harlem School of Arts and New York University.  They compose independently, and their music, including song cycles, chamber pieces, and orchestral works, has been performed by major professional groups. Their Rud/Mor publishing company distributes their work.

Kermit Moore’s awards were many, including the Edgar Stillman Kelly Award in Ohio and the Lili Boulanger Award in Paris.  A specially cast medal was presented to him by Queen Elisabeth of Belgium.

Kermit Moore died on November 2, 2013 in New York City.  He was 84.

Ralph David Abernathy was born on March 11, 1926 in Linden, Alabama.  His boyhood was spent on his father’s Alabama farm but he joined the U.S. Army and served in World War II from 1941 to 1945.  After his service Abernathy returned to his home state where he attended Alabama State College in Montgomery, Alabama, receiving a degree in Mathematics in 1950.

During his years at Alabama State College, he became involved in protest activities.  He led demonstrations protesting the lack of heat and hot water in his dormitory and the inferior food served by the college cafeteria.  Abernathy also became a Baptist minister in 1948 while still in college.  Abernathy attended Atlanta University, where he earned his M.A. degree in 1951.  That same year he became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the largest African American church in the city.  It was this pastoral post that eventually propelled him into the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks’s refusal to sit at the back of a segregated city bus on December 1, 1955 sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  Rev. Ralph Abernathy soon joined Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, in the protest.  Both men became leaders of the effort and founders of the Montgomery Improvement Association which was the coordinating arm of the boycott.  In 1957 King, Abernathy and other Southern black ministers created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta, Georgia to continue the civil rights activism that began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  King was selected as SCLC’s first president and Abernathy became secretary treasurer of the organization.

In 1961 Rev. Ralph Abernathy became the pastor of the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta.  From this new pastoral post he led the Albany Movement with Dr. Martin Luther King that year.  For nearly a decade Rev. Abernathy was involved in every civil rights campaign launched by Dr. King.  After the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, Rev. Abernathy immediately became President of SCLC and continued to lead the protests in that city in support of striking sanitation workers.  He also vowed to continue Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign and led the campaign’s demonstrations in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1968 and the Charleston Sanitation Workers Strike in 1969.  The Poor People’s Campaign failed partly because Abernathy lacked the charisma of his friend, Martin Luther King, and partly because the nation’s mood was much more conservative on civil rights issues.

Rev. Ralph Abernathy continued to lead SCLC until growing tensions over the direction of the organization forced to his resignation in 1977.  Later that year he ran unsuccessfully for Congress.  Three years later Abernathy became the most prominent civil rights leader to endorse Ronald Reagan for President.

After 1977 Rev. Abernathy returned to his pastoral duties at West Hunter Avenue Baptist Church in Atlanta, a post he held until his death.  In 1989 he published his autobiography, The Walls Came Tumbling Down.  Rev. Ralph David Abernathy died of cardiac arrest on April 17, 1990 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ralph Abernathy , (born March 11, 1926, Linden, Alabama, U.S.—died April 17, 1990, Atlanta, Georgia) was a Black American pastor and civil rights leader who was Martin Luther King’s chief aide and closest associate during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

Terrence Howard is a celebrated American actor known for his strong performances in movies such as “Hustle & Flow” and “Ray & Crash”. He was born on March 11, 1969 in Chicago, Illinois to Tyrone Howard and Anita Williams. He came from a family of actors; his maternal great-grandmother, Minnie Gentry, was a stage actress, and his mother and uncles were actors as well. His father was an abusive man, and used to beat Terrence as a child. At the age of 2, Terrence witnessed his father stabbing another man for which he was sent to jail. Upon Tyrone’s release a year later, he and Anita divorced. Terrence emancipated himself at the age of 16, and lived in shelters and off government welfare for two years. He then decided to move to New York to become an actor.

At first he enrolled as a student of chemical engineering at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Dropping out after two years, he began to make small appearances in television shows including a part in “The Cosby Show” starring Bill Cosby. Other roles during this time included a leading role in the television miniseries titled “The Jacksons: An American Dream” and other programs such as “Family Matters”, “Coach” and “Picket Fences”. Moving from television to film, Howard caught his big break with more prominent roles. The first of these was the 1995 film “Mr. Holland’s Opus” followed by “Sunset Park” in 1996, “Spark” in 1998 and “The Best Man” in 1999. In 2000, he co-starred with comedian Martin Lawrence in the hit film “Big Momma’s House” and in 2001, he starred with Jennifer Lopez in the film “Angel Eyes”. Other major roles followed, such as “Hart’s War” in 2002, “Biker Boys” in 2003 and “Ray” featuring Jamie Foxx in 2004.

Howard’s reputation as a respected actor was now confirmed and he began to receive even more lucrative roles. In 2004, he co-starred with several of Hollywood’s top stars such as Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, Michael Peña, Brendan Fraser, Ludacris, Thandie Newton, and Ryan Phillippe in the film “Crash”.

The Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Southern Christian Leadership Conference figure, was born in Linden, Alabama.

In full Didier Yves Drogba Tébily (born March 11, 1978, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire), Ivorian professional football (soccer) player who was Côte d’Ivoire’s all-time leader in goals scored in international matches and who was twice named the African Footballer of the Year (2006, 2009).

At age five Drogba was sent to France in the care of an uncle, a professional footballer. After three years he returned home, only to go back to France after three more years in Côte d’Ivoire. At age 15 Drogba became an apprentice with second-division Levallois, outside Paris, and then in 1997–98 he moved to Le Mans FC, where in his second season he signed as a professional.

In January 2002 Drogba joined top-division Guingamp, tallying 17 goals in 34 league games. This success prompted a 2003 trade to Olympique de Marseille, where he scored 19 goals in 35 domestic matches and an additional 11 goals in European play as the club reached the 2004 Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Cup final, where it lost 2–0 to Valencia of Spain.

Drogba moved to England’s Chelsea FC in 2004 in a trade from Marseille. Though Chelsea won its first Premier League championship in 50 years the following season, its new centre-forward was inconsistent. Drogba was quick, alert, and supremely confident in his own ability, though he showed a tendency to a quick temper in matches. Even in his second season, when Chelsea’s title was successfully defended, fan appreciation was still muted. Yet by the end of the 2006–07 season, when Chelsea failed in its attempt to take a third straight league championship, Drogba had won over most of the skeptical Chelsea fans by being the league’s top scorer (with 20 goals) and by finishing the season with an overall tally of 33 goals. In addition, he was the key player in Chelsea’s winning both the Football Association (FA) Cup and Carling Cup trophies that season, as he scored the club’s only goals in the finals of those two tournaments. Drogba helped lead Chelsea to the 2008 Champions League final,

Jesse Jackson Jr. is a former African-American Democratic Congressman. From 1995 to 2012, he represented Illinois’s 2nd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives. Moreover, his father was an eminent political figure who was a former presidential candidate.

Born on March 11, 1965, in Greenville, South Carolina, Jesse Louis Jackson, Jr. grew up in the Jackson Park Highlands District. He received his early education from a nursery school and John J. Pershing Elementary School. He and his brother were sent to Le Mans Military Academy in Rolling Prairie, Indiana considering Jackson’s hyperactive behavior. He was often paddled for disciplinary reasons and also suspended twice from school. Besides, he showed keen interest in sports as he played for his high school football team and featured on one of Sports Illustrated’s sections. Following in his father’s footsteps he enrolled himself at North Carolina A&T University. In 1987, he received Bachelor of Science degree with magna cum laude. He took his father’s advice and went on to attend the Chicago Theological Seminary from where he obtained the masters degree.

Jackson’s educational background is quite rich as he went on to study at a law school at the University Of Illinois College Of Law. He earned Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 1993, however, he did not take bar exam even after he finished his coursework. In his teen years he assisted his father along with his brothers in civil rights activities. He also helped his father in his presidential campaign by holding a voter registration drive that registered 3,500 voters on a campus. Upon graduation he accepted his first job as an executive director for the Rainbow Coalition. His father had him involved in the 1988 Democratic primaries and obtained a position for him as an at-large member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The position offered him the opportunity to work on a number of congressional election races. Afterwards, he was promoted to the post of a vice president of Operation PUSH.

(born March 11, 1950, New York, New York, U.S.), American musician noted for his tremendous vocal control and improvisational ability. He often sang a cappella, mixing folk songs, 1960s rock and soul tunes, and jazz themes with original lyrics. He preferred to sing without fixed lyrics, and he could imitate the sounds of various musical instruments with great skill.

McFerrin’s parents both had distinguished vocal careers. His mother, a soprano, was a Metropolitan Opera judge who chaired the vocal department at Fullerton College, near Los Angeles, and his father, who sang at the Met, dubbed actor Sidney Poitier’s singing on the 1959 Porgy and Bess sound track. In McFerrin’s youth he was inclined to become a minister of music, but, after attending California State University at Sacramento and Cerritos College in Norwalk, California, he instead became a pianist and organist with the Ice Follies ice-skating show and with pop music bands. In 1977 he auditioned for and won a singing job. As a swinging jazz and ballad vocalist, by 1980 McFerrin was touring with popular jazz singer Jon Hendricks. Inspired by Keith Jarrett’s improvised piano concerts, in 1982 he worked up the nerve to sing alone.

McFerrin issued his self-titled debut album in 1982, and it was followed by The Voice (1984), which was unusual because it featured no accompaniment; Spontaneous Inventions (1985), which featured music by Herbie Hancock and Manhattan Transfer; and Simple Pleasures (1988), which featured the hit song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” He also recorded television commercials and a theme song for The Cosby Show; improvised music for actor Jack Nicholson’s readings of Rudyard Kipling’s children’s stories; and released an album with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, titled Hush, in 1992.

Dr. Reginald Weir becomes the first black player to compete in the U.S. Indoor Lawn Tennis Association Championship.

Through the 12th New Orleans laborers attacked by whites. Six Blacks were killed.

Moshoeshoe , also spelled Mshweshwe, Moshweshwe, or Moshesh, original name Lepoqo (born c. 1786, near the upper Caledon River, northern Basutoland [now in Lesotho]—died March 11, 1870, Thaba Bosiu, Basutoland), founder and first paramount chief of the Sotho (Basuto, Basotho) nation. One of the most successful Southern African leaders of the 19th century, Moshoeshoe combined aggressive military counteraction and adroit diplomacy against colonial invasions. He created a large African state in the face of attacks by the Boers and the British, raiders from the south east coastal lowlands of Africa, and local African rivals.

Moshoeshoe was the son of Mokhachane, the chief of the Mokoteli. As a young man, Moshoeshoe—then known by his post circumcision name of Letlama (“The Binder”)—won a reputation for leadership by conducting daring cattle raids. In early adulthood he took the name Moshoeshoe, an imitation of the sounds made by a knife in shaving that symbolized his deft skills at rustling cattle. His acquaintance with the chief Mohlomi, who was revered as a wise man, strengthened his capacity for generous treatment of allies and enemies alike.

In the late 1810s and early ’20s, European land invasions, labour needs, and trade heightened Southern African disturbances and led to migration in the region. Moshoeshoe led his people south to the nearly impregnable stronghold of Thaba Bosiu (“Mountain at Night”) in the western Maloti Mountains, where his following expanded to other African peoples attracted by the protection he was able to provide. He eventually united the various small groups to form the Sotho nation, called Basutoland by English-speaking persons. He strengthened his new nation by raiding local Tembu and Xhosa groups for cattle and adopting the use of horses and firearms. In the cold Highveld he was able to defeat mounted Griqua and Korana raiders with his own mounted cavalry and expanded his control into the Caledon valley.

One good white person to make up for all the bad in the world, but

Charles Sumner , (born Jan. 6, 1811, Boston—died March 11, 1874, Washington, D.C.), U.S. statesman of the American Civil War period dedicated to human equality and to the abolition of slavery.

A graduate of Harvard Law School (1833), Sumner crusaded for many causes, including prison reform, world peace, and Horace Mann’s educational reforms. It was in his long service as a U.S. senator from Massachusetts (1852–74), however, that he exercised his major influence on history. He bitterly attacked the Compromise of 1850, which attempted to balance the demands of North against South. On May 19/20, 1856, he denounced the “Crime against Kansas” (the Kansas–Nebraska Act) as “in every respect a swindle” and characterized its authors, Senators Andrew P. Butler and Stephen A. Douglas, as myrmidons (followers) of slavery. Two days later Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina invaded the Senate, labelled the speech a libel on his state and on his uncle, Senator Butler, and then severely beat Sumner with a cane. It took three years for Sumner to recover from the beating.

Sumner was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from March 1861 to March 1871. Close acquaintanceships with prominent Englishmen such as Richard Cobden, John Bright, William Ewart Gladstone, and other European leaders—gained during his several European sojourns (1837–40)—afforded him unusual understanding of and influence in international affairs. He helped preserve peace between Britain and the United States by persuading President Lincoln to give up Confederate commissioners James M. Mason and John Slidell after their capture aboard the “Trent” in November 1861.

Sumner opposed President Lincoln and later Pres. Andrew Johnson on post-war Reconstruction policy. He took the position that the defeated South was a conquered province outside the protection of the Constitution, and that the Confederate states should provide constitutional guarantees of equal voting rights to blacks before those states could be readmitted to the Union.

In 2002, Ambassador James Irvin Gadsden, career diplomat, and educator, was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as ambassador to Iceland. Gadsden was born on March 12, 1948 in Charleston, South Carolina, to James who worked as a janitor and Hazel Gaines Gadsden who was a housewife and part-time domestic servant.

Gadsden attended racially segregated Charleston schools. From 1962 to 1964, he was a standout student at Charles A. Brown High School, where teachers, including future South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, provided their students with the best education their resources would allow. Gadsden became interested in world studies under Clyburn. Encouraged by Principal Nathaniel Manigault, who recognized his academic talents, Gadsden completed his secondary education in Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York City, New York through an exchange program administered by The American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers). This program eventually led to Gadsden enrolling in Harvard University in 1966 and graduating four years later with a Bachelor’s degree in economics.

While at Harvard Gadsden received his first international exposure by briefly participating in a social outreach program in Peru.  This exposure let to interest in working abroad.  To that end he took an M.A. in Chinese studies from Stanford University (California) in 1972.

Gadsden’s diplomatic career began soon after graduation from Stanford when he joined the U.S. State Department as a foreign affairs officer.  His initial assignment was at Taiwan, first as a Political Officer (1972-74), then as a Market Research Officer (1974-76) during a critical period in U.S.-China relations. In the latter position, Gadsden became recognized as one of the U.S.’s top diplomats on capitalist expansion in mainland China.

In 1977, Gadsden became one of the few blacks assigned to a diplomatic mission on European soil, when he was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Hungary (1977-1981). Building on this experience and continuing through various

March 12

He and Pierre Charles L'Enfant, are commissioned

to lay out the District of Columbia.

March 12

New York Mets controversial star outfielder Darryl Strawberry was born in Los Angeles.

Perry James Henry Watkins was the only openly gay person discharged from the U.S. Army with full honors after serving almost two decades.  He had to fight for this distinction, suing the Army after being forced out because of his sexual orientation.  The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Ola Watkins gave birth to Perry on August 20, 1948, in Joplin, Missouri.  Perry’s parents divorced when he was only three.  When in junior high, his mother remarried a career military man, and they moved to Tacoma, Washington.  Throughout high school in Tacoma, Perry took dance classes, even studying at the Tacoma City Ballet.  He later earned a BA in business and theater.

Watkins’ mother influenced him strongly.  First, she accepted her son’s sexual orientation.  Her emphasis on honesty played a key role in his embracing that orientation throughout his Army career.  Watkins knew growing up that he was gay.  If peers asked him, he answered truthfully. He considered the racism directed against him far more prominent than the homophobia.

In 1967, during the Vietnam War, Watkins received his draft summons.  He marked “yes” on his inductee questionnaire when asked about “homosexual tendencies.”  The Army responded by sending him to a psychiatrist who interrogated Watkins about his sexuality but also asked if Watkins had a problem serving his country.  Watkins answered, “No problem.”  Consequently, his military career as an openly gay man began in May 1968.  Several times in those early years he tried to leave the military due to his sexual orientation after hearing that the Army dismissed several white gay peers for that reason.  The military, however, denied Watkins’ requests.  He surmised that the primary reason for this differential treatment was his race.

Watkins’ first two years in the Army came to a close in 1970.  When realizing that he needed financial assistance for college, he reenlisted.  Again, he honestly answered the homosexuality question and again, the Army accepted him.  Watkins served twice in Korea in the early 1970s.  During this period he signed up to entertain the troops using his female impersonator role, Simone, and performed in Army clubs in Germany and throughout Europe.  Watkins received several commendations during his years of service.

In 1975, without warning, Watkins’ commanding officer started proceedings to discharge him.  A hearing was held in October of that year beginning a four year long administrative process to remove him.  Watkins, however, now fought these charges.  In 1979, his military-clearance renewal was rejected due to his gay status.  Two years later he sued the Army, which responded by discharging him for being gay.

That the Army had earlier accepted Watkins’s sexual orientation early in his career and then later removed him for it, became the center of his nine year legal challenge, which was decided in 1990 by the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Court rejected the Army’s argument and ordered him to be reinstated with back pay, retirement benefits, and retroactive promotion to Sergeant First Class.  Watkins was then honorably discharged from the U.S. Army in 1990

In his last years, Perry James Watkins lectured throughout the United States on his military experiences. He died from AIDS-related complications in Tacoma on March 13, 1996.

Named Career Ambassador, a title equivalent to a four-star general, U.S. ambassador to six different countries, Terence A. Todman was an outstanding diplomat in the service of the United States. He challenged the racial prejudice he encountered at the State Department, paving the way for hiring of more people of color there and he was a pioneer in integrating human rights issues into foreign policy.

Clarence Alphonso Todman was born on March 13, 1926, in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands to parents Alphonso and Rachael Todman, grocery clerk/stevedore, and laundress/maid. He attended the local university for one year and then was drafted into the US Army.  He served four years in the Army and when stationed in post-World War II Japan, he helped organize that defeated nation’s first post-war elections.

Returning to finish college at Polytechnic Institute, Puerto Rico, he received a Master’s Degree from Syracuse University (New York) in 1951 and passed the Foreign Service Exam for a career in the U.S. State Department the following year.  Although initially denied employment there because his accent was not “100 percent American,” Todman soon found only low level positions were open to blacks in the State Department. He fought this practice and the long standing assumption that black State Department employees would only be accepted for postings in Africa.

I come to you from a liberated South Africa, a nation that many of you helped to set free. I come from a continent about which more is written but less is understood; so I come with a message that is straight-forward and simple. Like the Apostle Paul on his return from the provinces, I come to bring good news, but I also come with an appeal for your support of a new generation of Africans who have a bold, new futurist vision for their countries and their continent; but who live for the moment between two worlds, an old order that is dying but not yet dead and a new order that is conceived but not yet born.

The reports coming out of Africa are often confusing and contradictory:

Transformation and reconciliation in Southern Africa; conflict and crisis in Central Africa; new leaders with new vision in some areas and old leaders desperately hanging onto the past in others. It is now obvious that one can not speak of Africa as one continuous stream of ideas and social arrangements providing either cultural unity or political uniformity. There is much that unites Africans; W.E.B. Dubois reminded us at the turn of the century of the common bond created by the problem of the color line, for example. But the first thing that must be accepted and acknowledged by any one who dares to write or speak about the new Africa is that what seems self-evident in one area may not be the reality in another. Far too many people who would not dare to speak of a homogeneous Europe or Asia speak of the more than fifty independent nations of Africa as if the continent was a single political entity.

It is indeed difficult for many Americans to grasp either the extraordinary range of cultural, political and economic diversity or the immense size of a continent so large that the whole of China, the continental United States, Europe, Argentina, India, and New Zealand can fit within its boundaries. It is even more difficult for Americans to recognize that any idea of a retreat from the African continent at the very moment so many

Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr. (born March 13, 1972), better known by his stage name Common (formerly Common Sense), is an American hip hop recording artist, actor, poet and film producer from Chicago, Illinois. Common debuted in 1992 with the album Can I Borrow a Dollar? and maintained a significant underground following into the late 1990s, after which he gained notable mainstream success through his work with the Soulquarians.[1] In 2011, Common launched Think Common Entertainment, his own record label imprint, and, in the past, has released music under various other labels such as Relativity, Geffen and GOOD Music, among others.

Commons first major-label album, Like Water for Chocolate, received widespread critical acclaim and tremendous commercial success.[2] His first Grammy Award was in 2003, winning Best R&B Song for Love of My Life, with Erykah Badu.[3] Its popularity was matched by May 2005s Be, which was nominated for Best Rap Album, at the 2006 Grammy Awards. Common was awarded his second Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group, for Southside (featuring Kanye West), from his July 2007 album Finding Forever. His best-of album, Thisisme Then: The Best of Common, was released on November 27, 2007.

Common won the 2015 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song and the 2015 Academy Award for Best Original Song, for his song Glory from the 2014 film Selma, in which he co-starred as Civil Rights Movement leader James Bevel. Commons acting career also includes starring significant roles in the films Smokin Aces, Street Kings, American Gangster, Wanted, Terminator Salvation, Date Night, Just Wright, Happy Feet Two, New Years Eve, Run All Night, Being Charlie, and John Wick: Chapter 2. He also narrated the award-winning documentary Bouncing Cats, about one mans efforts to improve the lives of children in Uganda through hip-hop/b-boy culture.

James Theodore Holly emigrationist, missionary, and bishop, was born in Washington, D.C on October 3, 1829. At age fourteen his family relocated to Brooklyn, New York. His father taught him the shoemaking trade. Then in 1848 he began working as an abolitionist with Lewis Tappan, one of the nation’s leading anti-slavery activists. In 1850 Holly and his brother Joseph opened their own boot making shop.

In 1851, James and Charlotte Holly were married in New York but they soon moved to Windsor, Canada, just across the border from Detroit. The Hollys remained in Windsor until 1854. While there James Holly helped former slave Henry Bibb edit his newspaper, Voice of the Fugitive. Holly also endorsed the Refugee Home Society and organized the Amherstburg Convention of free blacks in Canada.

Before leaving for Canada, Holly had joined the Protestant Episcopal Church. He became a church deacon in 1855 then in the following year a priest. Even as he continued his religious activities, Holly was drawn toward emigration, believing that African Americans had no future in the United States. In 1854 he was a delegate to the first Emigration Convention in Cleveland. The next year he represented the National Emigration Board as commissioner.

In 1856 Holly returned to the United States, settling in New Haven, Connecticut where he was the priest of St. Luke’s Church and teacher in public and private schools until 1861.

Holly now promoted black emigration to Haiti and made that argument in a series of lectures that were published in 1857 as Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self Governance and Civilized Progress.

In 1859 Holly corresponded with U.S. Congressman Francis P. Blair about getting government aid for emigration. He also lobbied the Board of Missions of the Episcopal to finance his journey to Haiti. Holly did not inform the Board that he planned to take emigrants to Haiti on his trip.

Then in 1861 Holly led 110 men, women and children from New Haven to Haiti. Holly’s first year in Haiti was full of personal challenges. His mother, wife, two children, and thirty-nine other members of his group died of yellow fever and malaria. In 1862 Holly had become a Haitian citizen but returned to the United States hoping for financial support to establish a mission station. His request was denied but in 1865 the Board of Missions of the Protestant Episcopal Church accepted sponsorship of Holly’s mission in Haiti. In 1874 he was consecrated missionary bishop of Haiti at Grace Church New York City, becoming the first African American Bishop in the Episcopal Church. In 1878 he was recognized as bishop of the Orthodox Apostolic Church of Haiti. Holly eventually remarried. He and his new wife, Sarah Henley, had nine children.

James Theodore Holly died in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on March 13, 1911.

Kofi Awoonor (born March 13, 1935, Weta, Gold Coast [now Ghana]—died September 21, 2013, Nairobi, Kenya) was a Ghanaian novelist and poet whose verse has been widely translated and anthologized.

On Jan. 16, 2013, Islamic militants took dozens of foreign hostages at the BP-controlled In Amenas gas field in eastern Algeria, near the Libyan border. Algerian officials said the militants were members of an offshoot of al-Qaeda called Al Mulathameen and were acting in retaliation for Frances intervention in nearby Mali to beat back militants who had crossed into government-controlled areas. On Jan. 17, Algerian troops stormed the complex and attacked the kidnappers. By the end of the standoff on Jan. 20, 29 militants and 37 hostages were killed. Three Americans were among the dead. The Algerian government was criticized for its heavy-handed approach to the crisis but remained unapologetic.

On Sept. 3, 2012, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika named Abdelmalek Sellal as prime minister. The governments main cabinet positions remained unchanged.

On March 13, 2014, Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal resigned in order to run the reelection campaign of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Energy Minister Youcef Yousfi was appointed prime minister. Bouteflika was reelected to a fourth term in April 2014, taking 81% of the vote. The opposition, led by Ali Benflis, who challenged Bouteflika and received 12% of the vote, claimed there were serious irregularities in the election.

Jefferson Davis signed bill authorizing use of slaves as soldiers in the Confederate army.