Today In Black History – Feb 5th

1866 – The distribution of public land and confiscated land to freedmen and loyal refugees in forty acre lots is offered in an amendment to the Freedmen’s Bureau bill by Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. The measure is defeated in the House by a vote of 126 to 37. An African American delegation, led by Frederick Douglass calls on President Johnson and urges ballots for former slaves. The meeting ends in disagreement and controversy after Johnson reiterates his opposition to African American suffrage.

1956 – L.R. Lautier becomes the first African American to be admitted to the National Press Club.

1968 – Students in Orangeburg, South Carolina try to end the discriminatory practices of a local bowling alley. Their confrontation with police and the National Guard, and the subsequent death of three students, creates widespread outrage among students on campuses across the South.

1989 – Kareem Abdul-Jabar becomes the first NBA player to score 38,000 points.

1994 – Avowed white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith is convicted of Medger Evers’ murder, more than thirty years after Evers was shot in the back from ambush. After deliberating for seven hours, a jury of eight African Americans and four whites convicted 73-year-old De La Beckwith of Medgar Evers’s murder, sentencing him to life in prison. He died there seven years later. As a Mississippi State Supreme Court justice wrote about the retrial: “Miscreants brought before the bar of justice in this state must, sooner or later, face the cold realization that justice, slow and plodding though she may be, is certain in the state of Mississippi.”