01 September 1867 – 1979

1867 – Robert T. Freeman becomes the first African American person to graduate from Harvard Dental School.

1875 – White Democrats attacked Republicans at Yazoo City, Mississippi.  One white and three African-Americans were killed.

1912 – Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, English-born composer of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast and professor of music at Trinity College of Music in London, joins the ancestors in Croyden, England.  Coleridge-Taylor was the most important black composer of his day and toured the United States three times, where he played with Will Marion Cook, Clarence Cameron White, and collaborated with Paul Laurence Dunbar in setting several of his poems to music.

1925 – Rosa Guy is born in Trinidad. She will become the author of “The Friends,” “Ruby,” and “Edith Jackson.”

1937 – Ron O’Neal is born in Utica, New York.  He will become an actor and will star in movies during the 1970’s and be best known for his role in “Superfly.”

1948 – William T. Coleman is appointed by Justice Frankfurter as a clerk to the U.S. Supreme Court, the first African American to hold the position.  A Harvard Law School graduate and Army Air Corps veteran, Coleman will again enter public service, first as president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and, in 1975, as Secretary of Transportation under President Gerald Ford.

1970 – Dr. Hugh S. Scott of Washington, DC, becomes the first African American superintendent of schools in a major US. city.

1971 – The Pittsburgh Pirates field an all African American team in a baseball game against the Philadelphia Phillies.

1973 – George Foreman knocks out Jose Roman in the first round to retain his heavyweight title.

1975 – General Daniel (“Chappie”) James Jr. is promoted to the rank of four-star general and named commander-in-chief of the North American Air Defense Command.  He is the first African American to achieve this rank.

1977 – Ethel Waters, singer and actress, joins the ancestors in Chatsworth, California at the age of 80.  She was the first African American entertainer to move from vaudeville to ‘white’ entertainment.  She starred in many movies such as “Something Special” (1971), “Carib Gold” (1955), “The Member of the Wedding” (1952), “Pinky” (1949), “Cabin in the Sky” (1943), “Cairo” (1942), “Tales of Manhattan” (1942), “Black Musical Featurettes, V. 1″ (1929),  Short Subjects V. 1” (1929),  and “On With the Show” (1929).  She also was in the first network show to feature an African American actress as the star (The Beulah Show-1950).

1979 – Hazel W. Johnson becomes the first African American woman to attain general officer rank in American military history. Under her tenure as Chief, the Army Nurse Corps continued to improve standards of education and training. The Army Nurse Corps Standards of Nursing Practice were published as an official Department of the Army Pamphlet (DA PAM 40-5). She received the Distinguished Service Medal, Legion Of Merit, Meritorious Service Medal, and the Army Commendation Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster among her awards and honors.

02 September 1766 – 1989

1766 – Abolitionist, inventor, and entrepreneur, James Forten is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1833 – Oberlin College, one of the first colleges to admit African Americans, is founded in Oberlin, Ohio.

1864 – In series of battles around Chaffin’s Farm in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, African American troops capture entrenchments at New Market Heights, make a gallant but unsuccessful assault on Fort Gilmer and help repulse a Confederate counterattack on Fort Harrison.  The Thirty-Ninth U.S. Colored Troops will win a Congressional Medal of Honor in the engagements.

1902 – “In Dahomey” premieres at the Old Globe Theater in Boston, Massachusetts.  With music by Will Marion Cook and lyrics by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, it is the most successful musical of its day.

1914 – Romare Bearden is born in Charlotte, North Carolina.  A student at New York University,  the American Artists School, Columbia University, and the Sorbonne, Bearden’s depiction of the rituals and social customs of African American life will be imbued with an eloquence and power that will earn him accolades as one of the finest artists of the 20th century and a master of collage.  Among his honors will be election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and receiving the President’s National Medal of Arts in 1987.

1928 – Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver is born in Norwalk, Connecticut.  He will become a jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer who will initially lead the Jazz Messengers with drummer Art Blakey before forming his own band in 1956.  A pioneer of the hard bop style, he will attract to his band the talents of Art Farmer, Donald Byrd, and Blue Mitchell, among others.

1945 – The end of World War II (V-J Day).  A total of 1,154,720 African Americans have been inducted or drafted into the armed forces.  Official records list 7,768 African American commissioned officers on August 31, 1945.   At the height of the conflict,  3,902 African American women (115 officers) were enrolled in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WACS) and 68 were in the Navy auxiliary, the WAVES.   The highest ranking African American women were Major Harriet M. West and Major Charity E. Adams.  Distinguished Unit Citations were awarded to the 969th Field Artillery Battalion, the 614th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and the 332nd Fighter Group (Tuskegee Airmen).

1956 – The Tennessee National Guard is sent to Clinton, Tennessee, to quell white mobs demonstrating against school integration.

1960 – Eric Dickerson is born.  He will become a professional football player and will become NFC Rookie of the Year in 1983.   He will also set a NFL single-season rushing record of 2,105 yards in 1984.

1963 – Alabama Governor George Wallace blocks the integration of Tuskegee High School in Tuskegee, Alabama.

1965 – Lennox Lewis, former WBC boxing champ, is born.

1966 – Frank Robinson is named Most Valuable Player of the American League.

1971 – Cheryl White becomes the first African American woman jockey to win a sanctioned horse race.

1975 – Joseph W. Hatchett sworn in as first African American state supreme court justice in the South (Florida) in the twentieth century.

1978 – Reggie Jackson is 19th player to hit 20 home runs in 11 straight years.

1989 – Rev. Al Sharpton leads a civil rights march through the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York..

03 September 1783 – 1990

1783 – Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, purchases his freedom with his earnings as a self-employed teamster.

1838 – Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, disguised as a sailor, escapes from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland to New Bedford, Massachusetts via New York City.  He will take the name Douglass, after the hero of Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Lady of the Lake”.

1865 – The Union Army commander in South Carolina orders the Freedmen’s Bureau personnel to stop seizing land.

1868 – Henry McNeal Turner delivers a speech before the Georgia legislature defending African Americans’ rights to hold state office.  The lower house of the Georgia legislature, rules that African Americans were ineligible to hold office, and expels twenty-eight representatives. Ten days later the senate expels three African Americans.   Congress will refuse to re-admit the state to the Union until the legislature seats the African American representatives.

1891 – John Stephens Durham, assistant editor of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, is named minister to Haiti.

1891 – Cotton pickers organize a union and stage a strike for higher wages in Texas.

1895 – Charles Houston is born.  He will become a leader of the the NAACP.

1910 – Dorothy Maynor is born in Norfolk, Virginia.  She will become a renown soprano and will sing with all of the major American and European orchestras.  She will found the Harlem School of the Arts.

1918 – Five African American soldiers are hanged for alleged participation in the Houston riot of 1917.

1919 – The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, owned by African Americans Noble Johnson and Clarence Brooks, releases its first feature-length film, “A Man’s Duty”.

1970 – Representatives from 27 African nations, Caribbean nations, four South American countries, Australia, and the United States meet in Atlanta, Georgia, for the first Congress of African People.

1970 – Billy Williams ends the longest National League consecutive streak at 1,117 games.

1974 – NBA guard, Oscar Robinson, retires from professional basketball.

1984 – A new South African constitution comes into effect, setting up a three-chamber, racially divided parliament – White, Indian and Colored (mixed race) people.

1990 – Jonathan A. Rodgers becomes president of CBS’s Television Stations Division, the highest-ranking African American to date in network television.  Rodgers had been general manager of WBBM-TV, CBS’s Chicago station.

04 September 1781 – 1960

1781 – California’s second pueblo near San Gabriel, Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula (Los Angeles, California) is founded by forty-four settlers, of whom at least twenty-six were descendants of Africans.  Among the settlers of African descent, according to H.H. Bancroft’s authoritative History of California, were “Joseph Moreno, Mulatto, 22 years old, wife a Mulattress, five children; Manuel Cameron, Mulatto, 30 years old, wife Mulattress; Antonio Mesa, Negro, 38 years old, wife Mulattress, six children; Jose Antonio Navarro, Mestizo, 42 years old, wife, Mulattress, three children; Basil Rosas, Indian, 68 years old, wife, Mulattress, six children.”

1848 – Louis H. Latimer is born in Chelsea, Massachusetts.  A one-time draftsman and preparer of patents for Aexander Graham Bell, he will later join the United States Electric Company, where he will patent a carbon filament for the incandescent lamp.  When he joins the ancestors, he will be eulogized by his co-workers as a valuable member of the “Edison Pioneers,” a group of men and women who advanced electrical light usage in the United States.

1865 – Bowie State College (now University) is established in Bowie, Maryland.

1875 – The Clinton Massacre occurs in Clinton, Mississippi. Twenty to thirty African Americans are killed over a two-day period.

1908 – Richard Wright,  who will become the author of the best-selling “Native Son,” “Uncle Tom’s Children,” and “Black Boy,” is born near Natchez, Mississippi.  Wright will be among the first African American writers to protest white treatment of African Americans.

1942 – Merald ‘Bubba’ Knight is born in Atlanta, Georgia.  He will become a singer with his sister Gladys Knight as part of her background group, The Pips.  They will record many songs including “Midnight Train to Georgia,” “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me,” “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Every Beat of My Heart,” “Letter Full of Tears,” and “The Way We Were/Try to Remember” medley.

1953 – Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs is born in New York City.  He will become an actor and will star in “Alien Nation,” “Rituals,” “Roots,” “Welcome Back, Kotter,” “Quiet Fire,” “L.A. Heat,” and “L.A. Vice.”

1957 – The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, calls out the National Guard to stop nine African American students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.   Three weeks later, President Dwight Eisenhower sends a force of 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers (The 101st Airborne) to Little Rock to guarantee the peaceful desegregation of the public school.

1960 – Damon Wayans, Jr. is born.  He will become an actor/comedian and will star in “In Living Color,” “Major Payne,” “Blankman,” “Celtic Pride,” “The Great White Hype” and many others.

05 September 1804 – 1995

1804 – Absalom Jones is ordained a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church.

1846 – John W. Cromwell is born.  He will become the Secretary of the American Negro Academy.

1859 – “Our Nig” by Harriet E. Wilson is published.  It is the first novel published in the United States by an African American woman and will be lost to readers for years until reprinted with a critical essay by noted African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1983.

1877 – African Americans from the Post-Civil-War South, led by Benjamin ‘Pap’ Singleton, settle in Kansas and establish towns like Nicodemus, to take advantage of free land offered by the United States government through the Homestead Act of 1860.

1895 – George Washington Murray is elected to Congress from South Carolina.

1916 – Novelist Frank Yerby is born in Augusta, Georgia. A student at Fisk University and the University of Chicago, Yerby’s early short story “Health Card” will win the O. Henry short story award. He will later turn to adventure novels and become a best-selling author in the 1940’s and 1950’s with “The Foxes of Harrow”, “The Vixens” and many others. His later novels will include “Goat Song”, “The Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest-A Tale of the Slaveholding South”, and “Devil Seed”.  In total, Yerby will publish over 30 novels that sell over 20 million copies.

1960 – Cassius Clay of Louisville, Kentucky, wins the gold medal in light heavyweight boxing at the Olympic Games in Rome, Italy. Clay will later change his name to Muhammad Ali and become one of the great boxing champions in the world.  In 1996, at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, Muhammad Ali will have the honor of lighting the Olympic flame.

1960 – Leopold Sedar Senghor, poet, politician, is elected President of Senegal.

1972 – Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway win a gold record — for their duet, “Where is the Love”.  The song gets to number five on the pop music charts and is one of two songs for the duo to earn gold. The other will be “The Closer I Get To You” (1978).

1995 – O.J. Simpson jurors hear testimony that police detective Mark Fuhrman had uttered a racist slur, and advocated the killing of Blacks.

06 September 1826 – 1989

1826 – John Brown Russwurm graduates from Bowdoin College.  While many sources consider him to be the first African American in America to graduate from college, he was preceded by Edward Jones (B.A. Amherst College – August 23, 1826) and Alexander Lucius Twilight (B.A. Middlebury College – 1823).

1848 – National Black Convention meets in Cleveland, Ohio with some seventy delegates.   Frederick Douglass is elected president of the convention.

1865 – Thaddeus Stevens, powerful U.S. congressman, urges confiscation of estates of Confederate leaders and the distribution of land to adult freedmen in forty-acre lots.

1866 – Frederick Douglass becomes the first African American delegate to a national political convention.

1876 – A race riot occurs in Charleston, South Carolina.

1892 – George “Little Chocolate” Dixon beats Jack Skelly in New Orleans to win the world featherweight title. While some African American citizens celebrate for two days, the New Orleans Times-Democrat says, “It was a mistake to match a Negro and a white man, to bring the races together on any terms of equality even in the prize ring.”

1905 – The Atlanta Life Insurance Company is established by A.F. Herndon.

1930 – Leander Jay Shaw, Jr. is born in Salem, Virginia.  He will become a justice of the Florida State Supreme Court in 1983 and, in 1990, the chief justice, a first in Florida and the second African American chief justice in any state supreme court.

1966 – A racially motivated civil disturbance occurs in Atlanta, Georgia.

1967 – President Lyndon B. Johnson names Walter E. Washington, commissioner and “unofficial” mayor of Washington, DC.

1968 – The Kingdom of Swaziland achieves full independence from Great Britain as a constitutional monarchy.

1982 – Willie Stargell, of the Pittsburgh Pirates, sees his uniform, number 8, retired by the Bucs.  It is the fourth Pirate player’s uniform to be so honored.  The other three belonged to Roberto Clemente (#21), Honus Wagner (#33) and Pie Traynor (#20).

1988 – Lee Roy Young becomes the first African American Texas Ranger in the police force’s 165-year history.  Young is a 14-year veteran of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

1989 – The International Amateur Athletic Federation bans Ben Johnson of Canada from competition, after he tests positive for steroids.  He is also stripped of all of his track records.

1989 – The National Party, the governing party of South Africa, loses nearly a quarter of its parliamentary seats to far-right and anti-apartheid rivals, its worst setback in four decades.

07 September 1800 – 1994

1800 – The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church is dedicated in New York City.

1859 – John Merrick, co-organizer of The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, is born.

1914 – Jean Blackwell Hutson is born in Summerfield, Florida. She will be the longtime curator and chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, the largest collection on the culture and literature of people of African descent.

1917 – Jacob Lawrence is born in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  He will become one of the leading painters in chronicling African American history and urban life.  Among his most celebrated works will be the historical panels “The Life of Toussaint L’ouverture” and “The Life of Harriet Tubman.”

1930 – Theodore Walter “Sonny” Rollins, jazz saxophonist, is born in New York City.  Rollins will grow up in a neighborhood where Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins (his early idol), and Bud Powell were playing.  After recording with the latter in 1949, Rollins begins recording with Miles Davis in 1951.   During the next three years he composes three of his best-known tunes, “Oleo,” “Doxy,” and “Airegin,” and continues to work with Davis, Charlie Parker, and others.  Following his withdrawal from music in 1954 to cure a heroin addiction, Rollins re-emerges with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach quintet in 1955, and the next four years prove to be his most fertile.  He will be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972.

1934 – James Milton Campbell, Jr. is born in Inverness, Mississippi. He will becomes a blues guitar artist better known as “Little Milton.”  He started his career playing in blues bands when he was a teenager. His first recording was accompanying pianist Willie Love in the early 50s. He then appeared under his own name on three singles issued on Sam Phillips’ Sun label under the guidance of Ike Turner.  His vocal style will be in the mould of Bobby “Blues” Bland and “T-Bone” Walker.  His hits will include “We’re Gonna Make It,” “Who’s Cheating Who,” “Grits Ain’t Groceries,” and “That’s What Love Will Do.”

1937 – Olly Wilson is born in St. Louis, Missouri.  He will become a classical composer whose works will be played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Oakland City Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and many others.

1942 – Richard Roundtree is born in New Rochelle, New York. He will attend college on a football scholarship but will later give up athletics to pursue an acting career. After touring as a model with the Ebony Fashion Fair, he will join the Negro Ensemble Company’s acting workshop program in 1967. He will make his film debut in 1970’s What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, but is still an unknown when filmmaker Gordon Parks, Sr. cast him as Shaft. The role will shoot Roundtree to instant fame, launching the blaxploitation genre and proving so successful at the box office that it helped save MGM from the brink of bankruptcy. Thanks to the film’s popularity — as well as its two sequels, 1972’s “Shaft’s Big Score!” and the following year’s “Shaft in Africa,” and even a short-lived television series. H will also appear in films including the 1974 disaster epic “Earthquake,” 1975’s “Man Friday” and the blockbuster 1977 TV miniseries “Roots.”

1949 – Gloria Gaynor is born in Newark New Jersey.  She will become a singer and will be best known for her 1979 hit, “I Will Survive”.  The hit tops the charts in both the United Kingdom and the United States

1954 – Integration of public schools begins in Washington, DC and Baltimore, Maryland.

1972 – Curtis Mayfield earns a gold record for his album, “Superfly”, from the movie of the same name.  The LP contained the hits, “Freddie’s Dead” and “Superfly” — both songs were also million record sellers.

1980 – Bessie A. Buchanan, the first African American woman to be elected to the New York State legislature, joins the ancestors in New York City.  Before her political career, she was a Broadway star who had leading roles in “Shuffle Along” and “Showboat.”

1986 – Bishop Desmond Tutu is enthroned as Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the first black head of South Africa’s Anglican Church.

1987 – Dr. Benjamin S. Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, leads a surgical team that successfully separates Siamese twins who had been joined at the head.

1994 – U.S. Marines begin training on a Puerto Rican island amid talk in Washington of a U.S.-led intervention in Haiti.

08 September 1866 – 1990

1866 – Charles Harrison Mason is born on the Prior Farm near Memphis, Tennessee.  He will be inspired by the autobiography of evangelist Amanda Berry Smith in 1893, and will found and organize the “Church of God in Christ,” in Memphis, Tennessee in 1907.

1875 – The governor of Mississippi requests federal troops to protect African American voters. Attorney General Edward Pierrepont refuses the request and says “the whole public are tired of these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South…”

1925 – Ossian Sweet, a prominent Detroit doctor, is arrested on murder charges after shots are fired into a mob in front of the Sweet home in a previously all-white area.   Sweet is defended by Clarence Darrow, who won an acquittal in the second trial.

1940 – Willie Tyler is born in Red Level, Alabama.  He will become a well known ventriloquist along with his wooden partner, Lester.

1956 – Maurice Cheeks is born.  He will become a professional basketball player and will play guard for the New York Knicks and the Philadelphia ’76ers.

1957 – Tennis champion, Althea Gibson, becomes the first African American athlete to win a U.S. national tennis championship.

1965 – Dorothy Dandridge, nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Carmen Jones,” joins the ancestors at the age of 41 in Hollywood, California.

1968 – Black Panther Huey Newton is convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of an Oakland policeman.   He will later begin a 2 to l5-year jail sentence.

1968 – Saundra Williams is crowned the first Miss Black America in a contest held exclusively for African American women in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

1973 – Hank Aaron sets the record for most Home Runs in 1 league (709).

1975 – The city of Boston begins court ordered citywide busing of public schools amid scattered incidents of violence.

1981 – Roy Wilkins, longtime and second executive director of the NAACP, joins the ancestors.

1990 – Marjorie Judith Vincent of Illinois is selected as Miss America in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  The Haitian native, a third-year law student at Duke University, is the fourth woman of African descent to become Miss America.

09 September 1739 – 1990

1739 – Led by a slave named Jemmy (Cato), a slave revolt occurs in Stono, South Carolina.  Twenty-five whites are killed before the insurrection is put down.

1806 – Sarah Mapps Douglass, abolitionist, is born.

1816 – Rev. John Gregg Fee, Kentucky abolitionist, is born.  He will become member of the American Missionary Association,  and will found a settlement called “Berea” on land donated to him by an admirer, Cassius Marcellus Clay. It will be later that Fee will be inspired to build a college, adjacent to the donated land – Berea College.

1817 – Captain Paul Cuffe,  entrepreneur and civil rights activist, joins the ancestors at 58, in Westport, Masschusetts.  Cuffe was a Massachusetts shipbuilder and sea captain.   He also was one of the most influential African American freedmen of the eighteenth century.  In 1780, Cuffe and six other African Americans refused to pay taxes until they were granted citizenship.  Massachusetts gave African Americans who owned property the vote three years later.   Although Cuffe became wealthy, he believed that most African Americans would never be completely accepted in white society. In 1816, Cuffe began one of the first experiments in colonizing African Americans in Africa when he brought a group to Sierra Leone. Cuffe’s experiment helped inspire the founding of the American Colonization Society later that year.

1823 – Alexander Lucius Twilight, becomes the first African American to earn a baccalaureate degree in the United States, when he graduates from Middlebury College with a BA degree.

1915 – A group of visionary scholars (George Cleveland Hall, W.B. Hartgrove, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamps) led by Dr. Carter G. Woodson found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in Chicago, Illinois.    Dr. Woodson is convinced that among scholars, the role of his own people in American history and in the history of other cultures was being either ignored or misrepresented.   Dr. Woodson realizes the need for special research into the neglected past of the Negro.  The association is the only organization of its kind concerned with preserving African American history.

1928 – Silvio Cator of Haiti, sets the then long jump record at 26′ 0″.

1934 – Sonia Sanchez is born in Birmingham, Alabama.  She will become a noted poet, playwright, short story writer, and author of children’s books.  She will be most noted for her poetry volumes “We a BaddDDD People”, “A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women”, and anthologies she will edit including “We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans.”

1941 – Otis Redding is born in Dawson, Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister.  He will become a rhythm and blues musician and singer and will be best known for his recording of “[Sittin’ on] The Dock of the Bay,” which will be released after he is killed in a small airplane in December, 1967.   Some of his other hits were “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”, “Respect”, and “Try A Little Tenderness.”

1942 – Inez Foxx is born in Greensboro, North Carolina.  She will become a a rhythm and blues singer and will perform as part of a duuo act with her brother , Charlie.  Their biggest hit will be “Mockingbird” in 1963.  They will record together until 1967.

1942 – Luther Simmons is born.  He will become a rhythm and blues singer with the group “Main Ingredient.”   They will be best known for their hit, “Everybody Plays the Fool.”

1945 – Dione LaRue is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  She will become a rhythm and blues singer better known as “Dee Dee Sharp.” Her first hit will be “It’s Mashed Potato Time” in 1962.  She will also record “Gravy” [For My Mashed Potatoes], “Ride!”, “Do the Bird”, and “Slow Twistin’ “(with Chubby Checker).

1946 – Billy Preston is born in Houston, Texas.  He will become a musician songwriter and singer.  His hits will include “Will It Go Round in Circles”, “Nothing from Nothing”, “Outa-Space”, “Get Back” (with The Beatles), and “With You I’m Born Again”(with Syreeta).  He also will appear in film: “St. Louis Blues” and play with Little Richard’s Band.

1957 – President Eisenhower signs the first civil rights bill passed by Congress since Reconstruction.

1957 – Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth is mobbed when he attempts to enroll his daughters in a  “white” Birmingham school.

1957 – Nashville’s new Hattie Cotton Elementary School with enrollment of one African American and 388 whites is virtually destroyed by a dynamite blast.

1962 – Two churches are burned near Sasser, Georgia.  African American leaders ask the president to stop the “Nazi-like reign of terror in southwest Georgia.”

1963 – Alabama Governor George Wallace is served a federal injunction when he orders state police to bar African American students from enrolling in white schools.

1968 – Arthur Ashe becomes the first (and first African American) Men’s Singles Tennis Champion of the newly established U.S. Open tennis championships at Forest Hills, New York.

1971 – More than 1,200 inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York gain control of the facility in a well-planned takeover.  During the initial violence, 50 correctional officers and civilian employees are beaten and taken hostage. Correctional officer William Quinn receives the roughest beating and is soon freed by the inmates due to the severity of his injuries. Police handling of the takeover will result in the deaths of many inmates and will turn the nation’s interest toward the conditions in U.S. penal institutions.

1979 – Robert Guillaume wins an Emmy award for ‘Best Actor in a Comedy Series’ for his performances in “Soap”.

1981 – Vernon E. Jordan resigns as president of the National Urban League and announces plans to join a Washington DC legal firm.  He will be succeeded by John E. Jacob, executive vice president of the league.

1984 – Walter Payton, of the Chicago Bears, breaks Jim Brown’s combined yardage record — by reaching 15,517 yards.

1985 – President Reagan orders sanctions against South Africa because of that country’s apartheid policies.

1990 – Samuel K. Doe,  president of Liberia, joins the ancestors after being killed by rebels.

10 September 1847 – 1986

1847 – John Roy Lynch is born a slave in Concordia Parish, Louisiana.  Becoming free during the American Civil War, he will settle in Natchez, Mississippi.  There he will learn the photography business, attend night school, and enter public life in 1869 as justice of the peace for Natchez county.   In November, 1869 Lynch will be elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives, and reelected in 1871.  Although blacks never will be in the majority in the Mississippi legislature, Lynch will be chosen speaker of the House in 1872.   In 1884 he will become the first African American to preside over a national convention of a major U.S. political party and deliver the keynote address, when he was appointed temporary chairman.  In his book, “The Facts of Reconstruction” (1913), Lynch will attempt to dispel the erroneous notion that Southern state governments after the Civil War were under the control of blacks.

1886 – Poet Georgia Douglas Johnson is born in Atlanta, Georgia. Among her books will be “Heart of a Woman”, “Bronze”, “An Autumn Love Cycle”, and “Share My Love”.   She will be anthologized in Arna Bontemps’s “American Negro Poetry” and Davis and Lee’s “Negro Caravan,” among others.  Her home in Washington, DC, will be the center for African American literary gatherings.

1913 – George W. Buckner, a physician from Indiana, is named minister to Liberia.

1913 – The Cleveland Call & Post newspaper is established.

1930 – Charles E. Mitchell, certified public accountant and banker from West Virginia, is named minister to Liberia.

1940 – Roy Ayers is born in Los Angeles, California.  In high school Ayers will form his first group, the Latin Lyrics, and in the early 60s will begin working professionally with flautist/saxophonist Curtis Amy.  He will become a popular jazz vibraphonist and vocalist, reaching the peak of his commercial popularity during the mid-70s and early 80s.

1948 – Robert “Bob” Lanier is born in Buffalo, New York.  He will become a professional basketball player and will be a NBA center for 14 years (10 years with the Detroit Pistons and 4 years with the Milwaukee Bucks).  He will be an eight-time NBA All-Star and will be elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1991.

1956 – Louisville, Kentucky integrates its public school system.

1960 – Running barefoot, Ethiopian Abebe Bikila wins the marathon at the Rome Olympic Games.

1961 – Jomo Kenyatta returns to Kenya from exile to lead his country.

1962 – Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black vacates an order of a lower court, ruling that the University of Mississippi had to admit James H. Meredith, an African American Air Force veteran whose application for admission had been on file and in the courts for fourteen months.

1963 – 20 African American students enter public schools in Birmingham, Tuskegee and Mobile, Alabama, following a standoff between federal authorities and Governor George C. Wallace.

1965 – Father Divine joins the ancestors in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Divine, born George Baker, was the founder of the Peace Mission, a religious group whose followers worshiped Divine as God incarnate on earth.

1972 – Gayle Sayers, of the Chicago Bears, retires from pro football.

1973 – A commemorative stamp of Henry Ossawa Tanner is issued by the U.S. Postal Service.  Part of its American Arts issue, the stamp celebrates the work and accomplishments of Tanner, the first African American artist elected to the National Academy of Design.

1973 – Muhammad Ali defeats Ken Norton in a championship heavyweight boxing match in Los Angeles — and avenges his loss to Norton the previous March in San Diego.

1974 – Guinea-Bissau gains independence from Portugal.

1974 – Lou Brock, of the St. Louis Cardinals, breaks Maury Wills’ major league record for stolen bases in a season.    ‘Lighting’ Lou Brock steals his 105th base on his way to a career total of 938 stolen bases, a record which will be broken by Rickey Henderson.

1976 – Mordecai Johnson, the first African American president of Howard University, joins the ancestors at age 86.

1986 – Sprinter, Evelyn Ashford is defeated for the first time in eight years.  Ashford loses to Valerie Brisco-Hooks in the 200-meter run held in Rome, Italy.

11 September 1740 – 1999

1740 – An issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette reports on a Negro named Simon who reportedly can “bleed and draw teeth.”  It is the first mention of an African American doctor or dentist in the American Colonies.

1885 – Moses A. Hopkins, minister and educator, is named minister to Liberia.

1923 – Charles Evers is born in Decatur, Mississippi.  He will become a civil rights worker who will assume the post of field director of the Mississippi NAACP after his brother, Medgar, is assassinated in 1963.  He will be elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, in 1969.

1943 – Lola Falana is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  She will become a dancer, most notably in Broadway’s “Golden Boy”, and be a successful performer on television and in Las Vegas, where she will be called “The First Lady of Las Vegas.”

1953 – J. H. Jackson, pastor of Olivet Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois, is elected president of the National Baptist Convention at its Miami meeting.

1956 – Cincinnati Red’s Frank Robinson ties the rookie record with his 38th home run.

1959 – Duke Ellington receives the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for his outstanding musical achievements and contributions to the field of music.

1962 – Two youths involved in a voter registration drive in Mississippi are wounded by shotgun blasts fired through the window of a home in Ruleville.  A spokesperson for SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) asks the president to “convene a special White House Conference to discuss means of stopping the wave of terror sweeping through the South, especially where SNCC is working on voter registration.”

1977 – Quincy Jones wins an Emmy for outstanding achievement in musical composition for the miniseries “Roots”.  It is one of nine Emmys for the series, an unprecedented number.

1999 – Serena Williams wins the U.S. Open women’s title, beating top-seeded Martina Hingis, 6-3, 7-6 (7-4).

12 September 1913 – 1999

1913 – James Cleveland Owens is born in Oakville, Alabama. He will be better known as Jesse Owens, one of the greatest track and field stars in history.  Owens will achieve fame at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, where he will win four gold medals, dispelling Hitler’s notion of the superior Aryan race and the inferiority of black athletes.  Among his honors will be the Medal of Freedom, presented to him by President Gerald Ford in 1976.

1935 – Richard Hunt is born in Chicago, Illinois.  A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, he will later study in Europe and be considered one of the leading sculptors in the United States.  His work will be shown extensively in the United States and abroad and his sculptures will be collected by the National Museum of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of the   Twentieth Century in Vienna.

1944 – Barry White is born in Galveston, Texas.  He will become a singer and songwriter.  Some of his hits will be “I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little More Baby”, “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love Babe”, and “Love’s Theme [with Love Unlimited Orchestra.

1947 – The first African American baseball player in the major leagues, Jackie Robinson, is named National League Rookie of the Year.

1956 – African American students are barred from entering a Clay, Kentucky elementary school.  They will enter the school under National Guard protection on September 17.

1958 – The United States Supreme Court orders a Little Rock, Arkansas high school to admit African American students.

1964 – Ralph Boston of the United States, sets the long jump record at 27′ 4″.

1974 – The beginning of court-ordered busing to achieve racial integration in Boston’s public schools is marred by violence in South Boston.

1974 – Eugene A. Marino, SSJ, is consecrated as the first African American Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop in the United States.  He assumes his duties as auxiliary bishop of Washington, DC.

1974 – Haile Selassie is deposed by military leaders after fifty-eight years as the ruling monarch of Ethiopia.

1977 – Black South African student and civil rights leader Steven Biko joins the ancestors after succumbing to severe physical abuse while in police detention, triggering an international outcry.

1980 – Lillian Randolph joins the ancestors at the age of 65. She had been a film actress and had starred on television on the “Amos ‘n’ Andy Show” and in the mini-series “Roots”.

1984 – Michael Jordan signs a seven-year contract to play basketball with the Chicago Bulls.   ‘Air’ Jordan will become an NBA star for the Bulls and help make the team a dominant force in the NBA.

1984 – Dwight Gooden, of the New York Mets, sets a rookie strikeout record by striking out his 251st batter of the season.   He also leads the Mets to a 2-0 shutout over the Pittsburgh Pirates.

1986 – The National Council of Negro Women sponsors its first Black Family Reunion at the National Mall in Washington, DC.   The reunion, which will grow to encompass dozens of cities and attract over one million people annually, is held to celebrate and applaud the traditional values, history, and culture of the African American family.

1989 – David Dinkins, Manhattan borough president, wins the New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, defeating incumbent Mayor Ed Koch and two other candidates on his way to becoming the city’s first African American mayor.

1992 – Mae C. Jemison becomes the first woman of color to go into space when she travels on the space shuttle Endeavour.

1998 – Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs becomes the fourth major league baseball player to hit 60 home runs in a single season.

1999 – Serena and Venus Williams (sisters) take home the U.S. Open Women’s Doubles Championship trophy.  After losing the first set, they bounce back to win the remaining two sets against Chandra Rubin of  the U.S. and Sandrine Testud of France. The Williams sisters are the first African-Americans to win a U.S. Open Doubles Championship.

13 September 1663 – 1998

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

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

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

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

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

1948 – Nell Carter is born in Birmingham, Alabama.  She will become a Broadway sensation as a singer and actress in Broadway’s “Bubbling Brown Sugar”, “Ain’t Misbehavin’ “(for which she will win a Tony), and for five seasons in television’s “Gimme a Break”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1998 – Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs hits his 61st and 62nd home runs of the season, passing Roger Maris’ record and pulling into a tie with St. Louis Cardinals’ Mark McGwire in this years home run derby.

14 September 1874 – 1970

1874 – White Democrats seize the statehouse in a Louisiana coup d’etat.  President Grant orders the revolutionaries to disperse, and the rebellion collapses.  Twenty-seven persons (sixteen whites and eleven Blacks) are killed in battles between the Democrats and Republicans.

1891 – John Adams Hyman joins the ancestors in Washington, DC.  He was the first African American congressman from the state of North Carolina.

1921 – Constance Baker Motley is born in New Haven, Connecticut.  She will achieve many distinctions in her career, including being the only woman elected to the New York Senate in 1964, the only woman Manhattan borough president, and the first African American woman to be named as a federal court judge in 1966.  She will later serve as chief judge of the Southern District of New York.

1940 – African Americans are allowed to enter all branches of the United States Military Service, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Selective Service Act.

1964 – Leontyne Price and A. Philip Randolph are among the recipients of the Medal of Freedom awarded by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

1970 – One African American is killed and two whites are injured in shoot-out between activists and police officers in a New Orleans housing project.

15 September 1830 – 1991

1830 – The first National Negro Convention begins in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1876 – White terrorists attack Republicans in Ellenton, South Carolina. Two whites and thirty-nine African Americans are killed.

1890 – Claude McKay is born in Sunnyville, Jamaica.  Emigrating to the United States in 1912, he will be come a poet and winner of the 1928 Harmon Gold Medal Award for Literature.  Author of the influential poetry collection “Harlem Shadows”, he will also be famous for the poems “The Lynching,” “White Houses,” and “If We Must Die,” which will be used by Winston Churchill as a rallying cry during World War II.

1898 – The National Afro-American Council is founded in Rochester, New York.  Bishop Alexander Walters of the AME Zion Church is elected president.  The organization proposes a program of assertion and protest.

1923 – The governor of Oklahoma declares that Oklahoma is in a “state of virtual rebellion and insurrection” because of Ku Klux Klan activities.  Martial law is declared.

1924 – Robert “Bobby” Short is born in Danville, Illinois. He will become a singer and pianist and will be a long-time performer at the Carlisle Hotel in New York City.

1928 – Julian Edwin Adderly is born in Tampa, Florida.  He will be best known as “Cannonball” Adderly, a jazz saxophonist who will play with Miles Davis as well as lead his own band with brother Nat Adderly and musicians such as Yusef Lateef and George Duke.

1943 – Actor and activist Paul Robeson acts in the 296th performance of “Othello” at the Shubert Theatre in New York City.

1963 – Four African American schoolgirls – Addie Collins, Denise McNair, Carol Robertson and Cynthia Wesley – are killed in a bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  It is an act of violence that galvanizes the civil rights movement.

1964 – Rev. K.L. Buford and Dr. Stanley Smith are elected to the Tuskegee City Council and become the first African American elected officials in Alabama in the twentieth century.

1969 – Large-scale racially motivated disturbances are reported in Hartford, Connecticut. Five hundred persons are arrested and scores are injured.

1978 – Muhammad Ali wins the world heavyweight boxing championship for a record third time by defeating Leon Spinks in New Orleans, Louisiana.

1987 – Boxer, Thomas “Hit Man” Hearns, becomes the first African American to win boxing titles in five different weight classes.

1991 – San Diego State freshman, Marshall Faulk, sets the NCAA single game rushing record of 386 yards.