My Sincere Thoughts

1895 – The North Carolina Legislature adjourns for the day to mark the death of Frederick Douglass.

1965 – El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) joins the ancestors after being assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem at the age of 39. He was best known for his doctrine of self-determination for African American people, including their right to fight for their rights and protect themselves in a hostile America by “whatever means necessary.”

1998 – Julian Bond, civil rights leader from the 1960′s, former Georgia state legislator, and college professor, becomes the new chairperson of the NAACP.

1895 – Frederick Douglass, famous African American abolitionist and diplomat, passes away in Washington, DC at the age of 78. His home in Washington is later turned into a national monument under the auspices of the National Park Service.

1963 – Baseball great, Willie “The Say Hey Kid” Mays, signs with the San Francisco Giants as baseball’s highest paid player (at that time). He earned $100,000 a year.

1968 – State troopers use tear gas to stop civil rights demonstrations at Alcorn A&M College in Mississippi.

1865 – Confederate Troops abandon Charleston, South Carolina. The first Union troops to enter the city include the Twenty-first U.S. Colored Troops, followed by two companies of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers.

1867 – The Augusta Institute is founded in Georgia. It is established as an institution of higher learning for African American students, and moves to Atlanta in 1879. In 1913, the name is changed to Morehouse College.

1979 – The miniseries “Roots: The Next Generations” premiers on ABC TV.

1870 – Congress passes a resolution readmitting Mississippi to the Union on the condition that it will never change its constitution to disenfranchise African Americans.

1942 – Huey P. Newton, a co-founder and minister of defense for the Black Panther Party, is born in Monroe, Louisiana.

1963 – Michael Jeffrey Jordan, who will be a star basketball player for the University of North Carolina, the 1984 Olympic gold medal team and the Chicago Bulls, is born in Brooklyn, New York. Jordan’s phenomenal style and scoring ability will earn him universal acclaim and selection on more than eight all- star NBA teams and NBA Most Valuable Player more than four times.

1989 – The African countries of Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia & Libya form an economic common market.

1874 – Frederick Douglass is elected President of Freedman’s Bank and Trust Company.

1951 – The New York City Council passes a bill prohibiting racial discrimination in city-assisted housing developments.

1992 – The Los Angeles Lakers retire Magic Johnson’s uniform, # 32.

1848 – Sarah Roberts is barred from a white school in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Benjamin Roberts, files the first school integration suit on her behalf.

1965 – Nat King Cole, singer and pianist, passes away in Santa Monica, California at the age of 45. He succumbs to lung cancer.

1999 – The body of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African gunned down by New York City police, is returned to his native Guinea.

1818 – The birth of Frederick Douglass in Tuckahoe (Talbot County), Maryland, is attributed to this date. He will state, “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it… and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.” He became a great African American leader and “one of the giants of nineteenth century America. He was born Frederick Bailey and later changed his name to Douglass after he escaped slavery in 1838. He passed away on February 20, 1895 in Washington, DC.

2006 – A prince by the name of Jab (my son Justin) is born to Sincere and Brooklyn (my wife and I).

1892 – The first African American performers, the World’s Fair Colored Opera Company, appear at New York City’s Carnegie Hall less than one year after the hall’s opening. In the company is concert singer Matilda Sissieretta Jones, who will have her solo debut at Carnegie Hall two years later.

1957 – The Southern Leadership Conference is founded at a meeting of ministers in New Orleans, Louisiana. Martin Luther King, Jr. is elected its first president. Later in the year its name will be changed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

1996 – Minister Louis Farrakhan, of the Nation of Islam, visits Iran to celebrate its 1979 revolution ousting the Shah.

1793 – Congress makes it a crime to hide or protect a runaway slave by passing the first fugitive slave law.

1909 – When six African Americans were killed and 200 others driven out of town in race riots in Springfield, Illinois in the summer of 1908, many Americans were shocked, because they associated such violence only with racism in the south. Springfield was not only a northern city, but the home of Abraham Lincoln. Three people, Mary Ovington, William E. Walling, and Dr. Henry Moskowitz, alarmed at the deterioration of race relations, decided to open a campaign to oppose the pervasive discrimination against racial minorities. They issue a call for a national conference on “the Negro question”, and for its symbolic value, they will choose the centennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, February 12, 1909, as the date for the conference. Held in New York City, it will draw an interracial group of 60 distinguished citizens, who will formulate plans for a permanent organization devoted to fighting all forms of racial discrimination. That organization will be the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP is the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the U.S. With more than 2,200 branches across the country, it is in the forefront of the struggle for voting rights, and an end to discrimination in housing, employment, and education.