This week in Black History- Mar 2nd-8th

March 2nd:
1867 – Howard University is chartered by Congress in Washington, DC. Also founded or chartered are Talladega College in Talledega, Alabama, Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland, Johnson C. Smith College in Charlotte, North Carolina, and St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

1867 – African Americans vote in municipal election in Alexandria, Virginia, for perhaps the first time in the South. The election commissioners refuse to count the fourteen hundred votes and military officials suspend local elections pending clarification of the status of the freedmen.

1919 – Claude A. Barnett establishes the Associated Negro Press (ANP), the first national news service for African American newspapers. The goal of the ANP is to provide national news releases to African American publishers. The ANP will operate for the next 48 years and have, at one time, 95% of all African American newspapers as subscribers.

1990 – Carole Gist, of Detroit, Michigan, is crowned Miss USA. She becomes the first African American to win the title.

March 3rd:
1821 – Thomas L. Jennings receives a patent for an invention to “dry scour” (dry clean) clothes. It is the earliest known patent granted to an African American.

1869 – The University of South Carolina is opened to all races. Two African Americans, B.A. Boseman and Francis L. Cardozo were elected to a seven-man board of trustees.

1988 – Juanita Kidd Stout becomes the first African American woman to serve on a state supreme court when she is sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

March 4th:
1869 – The forty-second Congress convenes (1871-73) with five African American congressmen: Joseph H. Rainey, Robert Carlos Delarge, and Robert Brown Elliott from South Carolina; Benjamin S. Turner, of Alabama; Josiah T. Walls of Florida. Walls is elected in an at-large election and is the first African American congressman to represent an entire state.

1968 – Martin Luther King, Jr. announces plans for the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC. He says that he will lead a massive civil disobedience campaign in the capital to pressure the government to provide jobs and income for all Americans. He tells a press conference that an army of poor white, poor African Americans and Hispanics will converge on Washington on April 20 and will demonstrate until their demands were met.

March 5th:
1770 – Crispus Attucks dies after becoming the first of five persons killed in the Boston Massacre. Historians have called him the first martyr of the American Revolution.

1897 – The American Negro Academy is founded by Alexander Crummel. The purpose of the organization is the promotion of literature, science, art, the fostering of higher education, and the defense of the Negro.

1985 – The Mary McLeod Bethune commemorative stamp is issued by the U.S. Postal Service as the eighth stamp in its Black Heritage USA series.

March 6th:
1857 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules against citizenship for African Americans in the Dred Scott decision. The Court rules that Dred Scott, a slave, cannot sue for his freedom in a free state because he is property and, as such, “has no rights a white man has to respect.” This ruling also opens up the northern territory to slavery.

1957 – Ghana becomes the first African nation to achieve freedom from colonial rule when the Ashanti, Northern Protectorates, the Gold Coast and British Togoland declare their independence. The celebration ceremonies are attended by a number of American dignitaries, including African American leaders Ralph Bunche, A. Philip Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King.

1981 – Dr. Bernard Harleston, former dean of arts and sciences at Tufts University, is appointed president of New York’s City College.

2000 – Three white New York police officers are convicted of a cover-up in the brutal police station attack on Haitian immigrant Abner Louima.

2000 – “Earth, Wind and Fire” is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

March 7th:
1927 – In Nixon v. Hearn, the United States Supreme Court strikes down a Texas law prohibiting African Americans from voting in a “white” primary.

1930 – “The New York Times” capitalizes the word Negro “in recognition of racial self-respect for those who have been for generations in the lowercase.”

1942 – The first five cadets graduate from the Tuskegee Flying School: Captain Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. and Second Lieutenants Mac Ross, Charles DeBow, L.R. Curtis, and George S. Roberts. They will become part of the famous 99th Pursuit Squadron.

1965 – John Lewis leads a group of civil rights marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where they are attacked by Alabama state troopers and sheriff’s deputies with tear gas and billy clubs. This violent confrontation will be known as “Bloody Sunday,” and will spark the historic Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march led by Martin Luther King Jr.

2006 – Gordon Parks, renown photogragher, writer and director, passes away at the age of 93.

March 8th:
1945 – Phyllis Mae Daley, a graduate of Lincoln School for Nurses in New York, receives her commission as an ensign in the Navy Nurse Corps. She is the first of four African American Navy nurses (including Helen Turner, Ella Lucille Stimley, and Edith De Voe) to serve on active duty in World War II.

1977 – Henry L. Marsh, III is elected the first African American mayor of Richmond, Virginia.

1991 – “New Jack City,” a film directed by Mario Van Peebles, actor and son of director Melvin Van Peebles, premieres. Produced by African Americans George Jackson and Doug McHenry, the film, which tells the violent story of the rise and fall of a drug lord played by Wesley Snipes, will suffer from widespread violence among moviegoers.