This Day in History

Mon. Oct. 2, 2023

"World Habitat Day is marked on the first Monday of October each year, and is recognized by the United Nations to reflect on the state of towns and cities, and on the basic right of all to adequate shelter." (Habitat for Humanity Heartland). 

Interested in volunteering for Habitat for Humanity Heartland?
Contact: Renee VanderHarst, (519) 759-8600 x528 or rvanderharst@habitat4home.ca

Mon. Sept. 25 - Sat. Sept. 30, 2023

On September 30, we honour the Survivors
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"The theme of 2023 National Truth and Reconciliation Week is "Honouring the Survivors," where we memorialize the children lost to the residential school system and honour Survivors and their families." (National Film Board of Canada)
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WATCH NOW

Fri. Sept. 22, 2023

​Sept. 22 - Out. 15, 2023

Wed. Sept 27, 2023, 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. - Truth and Reconciliation stamp launch 
Sun. Oct 1, 2023, 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. - Richard Pierpoint Commemorative Plaque Ceremony
Sept. 30, 2023 - The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation 

Sat. Sept. 2, 2023

Raise Awareness by Wearing Orange on September 30th
"The orange shirts are a symbol of solidarity with the Indigenous peoples and the communities who were affected by the Residential School system in Canada. Help raise awareness about the inter-generational impact these schools have had on First Nations communities across the country.

Purchase your Orange Shirt at Woodland Cultural Centre and help support our efforts to revitalize, protect, and celebrate Indigenous languages, cultures, and art.

Your support is needed to help us share our stories!" (From Woodland Cultural Centre mailing)  
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                                                                           Purchase Your Orange Shirt Today

Fri. Sept. 1, 2023

"One of the two Residential Schools left standing in Ontario, the former Mohawk Institute Residential School was the longest-operating Residential School in Canada. A building created to destroy Indigenous identity and heritage is now the home of Woodland Cultural Centre.

September 30th is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, also known as Orange Shirt Day. A day that recognizes the legacy of the Residential School system in Canada.

The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation honours the children who never returned home and the Survivors of Residential Schools, as well as their families and communities. Public commemoration of this painful history is part of the ongoing reconciliation process.

On September 30th, we wear orange to raise awareness of the individuals, families, and community inter-generational impacts of Residential Schools. Wearing orange promotes the message of "Every Child Matters". We encourage you to wear orange to honour the Survivors of Residential Schools." (From Woodland Cultural Centre mailing) 
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                                                 Support Woodland By Giving a Gift this September
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Wed. Aug. 23, 2023

"August 23rd marks the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade & its Abolition. We remember the lives of those enslaved, honour those who agitated for freedom, and acknowledge the lasting legacies of the brutal system on people of African descent. At least 4500 African people were enslaved in Canada for over 200 years, approximately 600 in colonial Ontario." (From Dr. Natasha Henry-Dixon LinkedIn) 
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Tue. Aug. 1, 2023

Emancipation Day

(Image from Internet)

Hundreds in Toronto ride the 'Underground Freedom Train' to mark Emancipation Day

What Emancipation Day means to Nova Scotia

Thurs. July 20, 2023

An extraordinary  event:

Fugitive slave chapel's new home, Fanshawe Pioneer Village | London Free Press
London Free Press

Fugitive Slave Chapel rehomed and restored at Fanshawe Pioneer Village - Global News
Global News

After 175 years, London's once-derelict fugitive slave chapel is resurrected | CBC News
CBC
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'More than a relief': Supporters celebrate chapel's restoration - CTV News London
CTV News London
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The AME Church at Fanshawe on June 6, 2023 (Image by H. Rennalls)

Wed. June 21, 2023

Fri. June 9, 2023

​Ottawa girl set to become the youngest university graduate in Canadian history 
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(From LinkedIn)

Thurs. June 1, 2023

Mon. May 1, 2023

(Image from the Internet)

Sat. April 29, 2023

Maple Leafs win 1st playoff series in 19 years with OT victory over Lightning in Game 6

Tue. April 25, 2023

Harry Belafonte, barrier-smashing entertainer and activist, dies at 96 - The Washington Post

(Image from Internet)

Mon. April 3, 2023

Why these historians are restoring the graves of former slaves

Sat. April 1, 2023

"The month of April was proclaimed as Sikh Heritage Month by the Ontario government in 2013, as April is when the Sikh community celebrates Vaisakhi, a spring festival that also marks important events in the religion’s history."  (From Oxford Historical Society website) ​

Thurs. March 23, 2023 

Hamilton student receives largest scholarship award in Canada

Tue. March 21, 2023

"Today is the anniversary of the March 21, 2021 passage of M-36 making August 1st as Emancipation Day a national day of commemoration in Canada!... August 1st, 1834 marks the date when the British Imperial Act went into effect in the lands we now call Canada, abolishing the enslavement of Africans after more than 200 years of slavery. By recognizing Emancipation Day at the federal level, we would begin to be living up to the three pillars of the International Decade for People of African Descent: Recognition, Justice and Development. This is the right thing to do and acknowledges the multi-generational harms caused by slavery. (Dr. Rosemary Sadlier LinkedIn)

“We’re not the descendants of slaves. We’re descendants of free people who were enslaved."
Francia Márquez, Colombia's Vice President. She is the first Black woman to win the vice presidency in Colombia.  

Wednesday March 8, 2023

Tuesday February 28, 2023

​Activist Harding-Davis launches petition calling on feds to apologize for slavery

Monday February 27, 2023

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

"Tribute to Negro league baseball executive Effa Manley, part of a Baseball Hall of Fame exhibit on the Negro leagues." (From from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

2006 -Effa Manley becomes first woman elected to Baseball Hall of Fame, baseball pioneer Effa Manley becomes the first woman elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Manley, who died in 1981, was co-owner of the Newark (New Jersey) Eagles, a Negro League powerhouse, and a huge advocate for Black ballplayers and civil rights causes. 

“She’s deserving; she did a lot for the game,” said Hall of Famer Monte Irvin, who played for the Eagles in the 1940s. Irvin, who starred for the New York Giants in the big leagues, was among MLB's first Black players. 
"This is a historic day at the Hall of Fame," HOF president Dale Petroskey said. "I hoped that someday there would be a woman in the Hall.”

READ MORE: How the Only Woman in Baseball Hall of Fame Challenged Convention—and MLB
Manley, who co-owned the Eagles with her husband, Abe, ran the business side for the team—Abe had little interest in that role. She eventually assumed many other duties. 
“Little by little, I found myself doing more and more, and I finally just ended up completely involved,” Manley said in a 1977 interview.  

In the 1940s, Manley feuded with the management from big-league teams, who pursued Negro League stars after Jackie Robinson's signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers broke MLB's color line in 1947. General manager Branch Rickey, who signed Robinson, was among her adversaries.
As baseball owner, Manley held an Anti-Lynching Day at the ballpark.
"She did a lot for the Newark community," Irvin said. "She was a well-rounded, influential person." (From History.com)

1973 - AIM occupation of Wounded Knee begins. On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, some 200 Sioux Native Americans, led by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), occupy Wounded Knee, the site of the infamous 1890 massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. The AIM members, some of them armed, took 11 residents of the historic Oglala Sioux settlement hostage as local authorities and federal agents descended on the reservation.

AIM was founded in 1968 by Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and other Native leaders as a militant political and civil rights organization. From November 1969 to June 1971, AIM members occupied Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, saying they had the right to it under a treaty provision granting them unused federal land. In November 1972, AIM members briefly occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., to protest programs controlling reservation development. Then, in early 1973, AIM prepared for its dramatic occupation of Wounded Knee. In addition to its historical significance, Wounded Knee was one of the poorest communities in the United States and shared with the other Pine Ridge settlements some of the country’s lowest rates of life expectancy.

READ MORE: When Native American Activists Occupied Alcatraz Island
The day after the Wounded Knee occupation began, AIM members traded gunfire with the federal marshals surrounding the settlement and fired on automobiles and low-flying planes that dared come within rifle range. Russell Means began negotiations for the release of the hostages, demanding that the U.S. Senate launch an investigation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and all Sioux reservations in South Dakota, and that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hold hearings on the scores of Indian treaties broken by the U.S. government.

The Wounded Knee occupation lasted for a total of 71 days, during which time two Sioux men were shot to death by federal agents and several more were wounded. On May 8, the AIM leaders and their supporters surrendered after officials promised to investigate their complaints. Russell Means and Dennis Banks were arrested, but on September 16, 1973, the charges against them were dismissed by a federal judge because of the U.S. government’s unlawful handling of witnesses and evidence.

Congress took no steps to honor broken Indian treaties, but in the courts some tribes won major settlements from federal and state governments in cases involving tribal land claims. Russell Means continued to advocate for Native rights at Pine Ridge and elsewhere and in 1988 was a presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party. In 2001, Means attempted to run for the governorship of New Mexico, but his candidacy was disallowed because procedure had not been followed. Beginning in 1992, Means appeared in several films, including Last of the Mohicans. He also had a guest spot on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. His autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, was published in 1997. Means died on October 12, 2012, at age 72.
Leonard Peltier remains in prison, although efforts to win him pardon continue. 

READ MORE: Why Native Americans Have Protested Mt. Rushmore

1844-Dominican Republic declares independence as a sovereign state. Revolutionary fervor boiled over on the eastern side of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Finally coming into the open after years of covert planning, a group known as La Trinitaria seized the fortress of Puerta del Conde in the city of Santo Domingo, and ...read more


WOMEN’S HISTORY
1922 - Supreme Court defends women’s voting rights. In Washington, D.C., the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing for female suffrage, is unanimously declared constitutional by the eight members of the U.S. Supreme Court. The 19th Amendment, which stated that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall ...read more (From History.com)

Sunday February 26, 2023

2012 - Florida teen Trayvon Martin is shot and killed. Trayvon Martin, an African American teen walking home from a trip to a convenience store, is fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer patrolling the townhouse community of the Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman later claimed to have shot the unarmed 17-year-old out of self-defence during a physical altercation. The term “Black lives matter” was then used for the first time by organizer Alicia Garza in a July 13, 2013 Facebook post in response to Zimmerman's acquittal. The phrase spread widely and became a rallying cry against racial injustice.

After Martin’s parents raised concerns about the police investigation into the death of their son, who had no criminal record, the case gained national attention. Protest rallies were held in cities nationwide, including New York City, where on March 21 hundreds of people gathered for the Million Hoodie March and demanded justice for Martin, who many believed Zimmerman had profiled as suspicious and threatening simply because the teen was Black. Two days later, President Barack Obama said of the shooting: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” In addition to raising a national debate about race relations, the shooting drew attention to Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, which allows people to use lethal force if they fear for their safety and does not require them to retreat from a dangerous situation, even when it’s possible to do so.

In November 2013, the city of Sanford announced new rules forbidding volunteers in its neighborhood watch program from carrying guns and pursuing suspects. Martin’s death set off nationwide protests like the Million Hoodie March. And in 2013, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi formed the Black Lives Matter Network with the mission to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” 

​ON THIS DAY: THE ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY OF CANADA WAS FORMED

1851 - The Anti-Slavery Society of Canada was formed. In a public meeting chaired by the mayor in Toronto City Hall (now part of St. Lawrence market), the aim was to promote the global abolition of slavery and provide relief to African American refugees seeking freedom in Canada.

See also: On This Day: Rosemary Brown Elected as the First Black Woman to Sit in a Legislative Assembly in Canada

MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE
The founding committee included several faith leaders and other prominent members of the public. The committee was a mix of Black and Caucasian members across Canada West who came together to adopt a constitution, bylaws and four resolutions. These resolutions created by the Anti-Slavery Society condemned enslavement as inhumane, indicted the United States for not outlawing the practice and sympathized with the efforts of American abolitionists. 

Publisher George Brown was a member, as well as Black members Wilson Ruffin Abbott, businessman and father of Anderson Abbott, grocer Albert Beckford Jones and Henry Bibb, activist and editor of Voice of the Fugitive. 

Bibb was born as a slave in Kentucky in 1815. He made several attempts to escape before ultimately achieving freedom in 1840. Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Bibb and his wife settled from Detroit to the west side of Windsor. Bibb was also a founding director of the Refugee Home Society, which used donations from anti-slavery groups to purchase land in Essex County that could then be sold to refugees. 

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE COMMITTEE
Wives of the society’s committee members and local-vice presidents played an essential role to the Anti-Slavery Society. Women’s organizations collected and distributed money and clothing for fugitives, plus campaigning for abolition in the US. 

The Ladies Association gathered almost 14,000 signatures for the Stafford House Address of 1853. The petition — signed by more than half a million women throughout the British Empire — appealed to women in the United States to help end enslavement in their country. 

Although a larger society was established in the United States in the 1850s, the Anti-Slavery Society Canadian group helped shape public opinion in the years leading up to the American Civil War, where an estimated 40,000 Canadians fought on the side of the abolitionist North." (From History 

Saturday February 25, 2023

1870 - First African American congressman sworn in. Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Natchez, Mississippi, is sworn into the U.S. Senate, becoming the first African American ever to sit in Congress.During the Civil War, Revels, a college-educated minister, helped form African American army regiments for the Union cause, started a school for freed men, and served as a chaplain for the Union army. Posted to Mississippi, Revels remained in the former Confederate state after the war and entered into Reconstruction-era Southern politics.
In 1867, the first Reconstruction Act was passed by Congress, dividing the South into five military districts and granting suffrage to all male citizens, regardless of race. A politically mobilized African American community joined with white allies in the Southern states to elect the Republican party to power, which in turn brought about radical changes across the South. By 1870, all the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and most were controlled by the Republican Party, thanks in large part to the support of African American voters.
On January 20, 1870, Hiram R. Revels was elected by the Mississippi legislature to fill the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy. On February 25, two days after Mississippi was granted representation in Congress for the first time since it seceded in 1861, Revels was sworn in.
Although African Americans Republicans never obtained political office in proportion to their overwhelming electoral majority, Revels and some 15 other African American men served in Congress during Reconstruction, more than 600 served in state legislatures, and hundreds of African Americans held local offices. 
READ MORE: The First Black Man Elected to Congress Was Nearly Blocked From Taking His Seat (From History.com)

Friday February 24, 2023

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

1841 John Quincy Adams begins arguments in Amistad case. Former President John Quincy Adams begins to argue the Amistad case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.A practicing lawyer and member of the House of Representatives, John Quincy Adams was the son of America’s second president, founding father and avowed abolitionist John Adams. Although John Quincy Adams publicly downplayed his abolitionist stance, he too viewed the practice as contrary to the nation’s core principles of freedom and equality. After serving one term as president between 1825 and 1829, Adams was elected to the House of Representatives, in which he served until his death in 1848. During his tenure, he succeeded in repealing a rule that prevented any debate about slavery on the House floor.

In 1839, a Spanish slave ship named La Amistad appeared off the coast of New York. The captives aboard it, who were free Africans kidnapped in Africa and originally bound for sale in Cuba, had rebelled, killing the Spanish ship’s captain and cook. The African mutineers then promised to spare the lives of the ship’s crew and their captors if they took them back to Africa. The crew agreed, but then duped the slaves by sailing up the coast to New York, where they were taken into custody by the U.S. Navy.

A complicated series of trials ensued regarding the ownership and outcome of the ship and its human cargo. The capture of the Amistad occurred in an era in which debate over the institution of slavery, its legality within the United States and its role in the American economy became more intense. Although the federal government had ruled the slave trade between the U.S. and other countries illegal in 1808, the “peculiar institution” persisted in the South and some northeastern states.

READ MORE: The Atlantic Slave Trade Continued Illegally in America Until the Civil War

The Navy captains who commandeered the Amistad off the coast of New York turned the ship in to authorities in Connecticut. In Connecticut at this time, slavery was still technically legal, a fact that further complicated the case. Abolitionists filed a suit on behalf of the Africans against the captors for assault, kidnapping and false imprisonment. Spain, backed by a 1795 anti-piracy treaty with the U.S., also claimed rights to the Amistad and her cargo. President Martin Van Buren, personally neutral on the issue of slavery and concerned about his popularity in southern states, supported Spain’s claim.
After two district courts ruled in favor of the abolitionists, President Van Buren immediately instructed the U.S. attorney general to appeal. Abolitionists hired Adams, who some referred to as “Old Man Eloquent,” to argue for the Africans’ freedom in the Supreme Court.

In a seven-hour argument that lasted two days, Adams attacked Van Buren’s abuse of executive power. His case deflated the U.S. attorney’s argument that the treaty with Spain should override U.S. principles of individual rights. In appeasing a foreign nation, Adams argued that the president committed the “utter injustice [of interfering] in a suit between parties for their individual rights.” In a dramatic moment, Adams faced the judges, pointed to a copy of the Declaration of Independence hanging on the courtroom wall, and said “[I know] no law, statute or constitution, no code, no treaty, except that law…which [is] forever before the eyes of your Honors.”

Adams’ skillful arguments convinced the court to rule in favor of returning the Africans to their native country, but later, President Tyler refused to allocate federal funds to send the Africans back to Africa. Instead, the abolitionists had to raise money to pay for the expense. 
READ MORE: Amistad Case: Date, Facts & Significance (From History.com)

Thursday February 23, 2023

2020 - Ahmaud Arbery is shot dead while out jogging. Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, is shot dead by a white father and son while out for a jog in a suburb of Brunswick, Georgia. On May 7, following the release of a video of the killing that spurred national attention from the media, civil rights groups, lawmakers, celebrities and, eventually, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Gregory and Travis McMichael were arrested on charges of murder and aggravated assault. William Bryan, who filmed the shooting on his phone, was also arrested and charged with felony murder and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. All three men were later found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Arbery, a former high school football player, reportedly jogged around the neighborhoods of Brunswick frequently, according to The New York Times... Arbery's killing happened shortly before the deaths of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor by police during a failed no-knock raid in Louisville, Kentucky. All these incidents sparked widespread protests against police violence and racial injustice in the United States and around the globe. (From History.com)

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

"W. E. B. Du Bois, photo taken in summer 1907 in connection with the annual Niagara Movement meeting."

1868 - W.E.B. Du Bois is born.  William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois is born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A brilliant scholar, Du Bois was an influential proponent of civil rights.Du Bois’ childhood was happy, but during adolescence he became aware of a “vast veil” separating him from his white classmates. He devoted most of his life to studying the position of Black Americas from a sociological point of view. He took his doctorate at Harvard but was unable to get a job at a major university, despite his impressive academic achievements and the publication of his doctoral thesis, about the slave trade to the United States in the mid-1800s. He taught at Wilberforce College in Ohio, then spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote his first major book, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899). The book was the first sociological case study of a Black community.

Du Bois came to national attention with the publication of The Souls of Black Folks (1903). The book explored the thesis that the “central problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” One controversial essay attacked the widely respected Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which trained Black men in agricultural and industrial skills. Du Bois accused Washington of selling out Black people by advocating silence in civil rights issues in return for vocational training opportunities.

In 1909, Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He edited the association’s journal, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1934, reaching an audience of more than 100,000 readers. But he resigned after an ideological rift with the group. In 1935, he published Black Reconstruction, a Marxist interpretation of the post-Civil War era. At Atlanta University, where he later taught, he founded a review of race and culture called Phylon in 1940 and the same year published Dusk at Dawn, in which he examined his own career as a case study of race dynamics. He rejoined the NAACP from 1944 to 1948 but broke with the group permanently after a bitter dispute. He joined the Communist Party in 1961 and moved to Ghana, where he became a citizen in 1963, the year of his death. 
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READ MORE: Black History Milestones: A Timeline (From History.com)

Wednesday February 22, 2023

Tuesday February 21, 2023

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org, by Marion S. Trikosko)

"Malcolm X waiting for a press conference to begin on March 26, 1964" (From commons.wikimedia.org)

1965-Malcolm X assassinated. In New York City, Malcolm X, an African American nationalist and religious leader, is assassinated while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. He was 39. 

​Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, Malcolm was the son of James Earl Little, a Baptist preacher who advocated the Black nationalist ideals of Marcus Garvey. Threats from the Ku Klux Klan forced the family to move to Lansing, Michigan, where his father continued to preach his controversial sermons despite continuing threats. In 1931, Malcolm’s father was murdered by the white supremacist Black Legion, and Michigan authorities refused to prosecute those responsible. In 1937, Malcolm was taken from his family by welfare caseworkers. By the time he reached high school age, he had dropped out of school and moved to Boston, where he became increasingly involved in criminal activities.

In 1946, at the age of 21, Malcolm was sent to prison on a burglary conviction. It was there he encountered the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, whose members are popularly known as Black Muslims. The Nation of Islam advocated Black nationalism and racial separatism. Muhammad’s teachings had a strong effect on Malcolm, who entered into an intense program of self-education and took the last name “X” to symbolize his stolen African identity.

READ MORE: The Explosive Chapter Left Out of Malcolm X’s Autobiography

After six years, Malcolm was released from prison and became a loyal and effective minister of the Nation of Islam in Harlem, New York. In contrast with civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X advocated self-defense and the liberation of African Americans “by any means necessary.” A fiery orator, Malcolm was admired by the African American community in New York and around the country....

A few months later, Malcolm formally left the organization and made a Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, where he was profoundly affected by the lack of racial discord among orthodox Muslims. He returned to America as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and in June 1964 founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which advocated Black identity and held that racism, not the white race, was the greatest foe of the African American. Malcolm’s new movement steadily gained followers, and his more moderate philosophy became increasingly influential in the civil rights movement, especially among the leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

On stage at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down as his pregnant wife and four daughters took cover in the front row. Three members of the Nation of Islam—Mujahid Abdul Halim, Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam—were soon after charged with first-degree murder. Islam and Aziz maintained their innocence, and during the 1966 trial, Halim confessed to the crime and testified that Islam and Aziz were innocent. All three men were found guilty, however, and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. 

In 2021, Aziz and Islam were exonerated after an investigation that included the discovery of key FBI documents withheld from the defense and prosecution during the trial. Aziz was 83 at the time of the exoneration; Islam had died in 2009. 

READ MORE: 7 Things You May Not Know About Malcolm X  (From History.com)

1933 - Nina Simone was born.  A prominent figure in the Civil Rights movement in America, Simone was also a noted jazz and soul singer. Her famous recording include versions of "I Loves You, Porgy," "My Baby Just Cares for Me" and her own civil rights anthem "Mississippi Goddam".

Angered by racism in America, she permanently left the country in 1973.

1945- Anne Frank died. Aged 13, German born Dutch Jewish national Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam in 1942 to escape persecution under Nazi occupation.

Betrayed two years later they were sent to concentration camps where Anne later died from Typhus.

Anne's diary from June 1942 to August 1944 is regarded as the most famous personal account of the Holocaust and has been turned into a play and film. She died at aged 15 from typhus in German concentration camp. (From OnThisDay.com)

Monday February 20, 2023

1927-Sidney Poitier born. The first black man and first Bahamian to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1958 appearance in "The Defiant Ones".

In 1964, he won another Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Actor for his role as a handyman helping a group of German-speaking nuns build a chapel in "Lilies of the Field". (From OnThisDay.com)

Wednesday February 15, 2023

1965 - Canada adopts maple leaf flag

Tuesday February 14, 2023

1818 - Frederick Douglass born. A leader of the abolitionist movement in the American North East, most famous for his oratory and writing. Born into slavery in Maryland, Douglass escaped north in 1838 and became involved in the anti-slavery movement.

In 1845 he published the "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave", a bestseller at the time and still considered among the most influential personal accounts of slavery. He went on to publish abolitionist newspapers including the famous "North Star" and was appointed to many public offices by the government including President Lincoln.

Douglass also actively supported women's suffrage, held several public offices and was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples. He died on February 20, 1895 aged 77 of a heart attack. (From OnThisDay.com)

Monday February 13, 2023

1923 - First all-Black professional basketball team organized. The New York Renaissance, the first all-Black professional basketball team, is organized. The Renaissance, commonly called the Rens, become one of the dominant teams of the 1920s and 1930s.The team's founder was Robert L. Douglas, whose primary objective was to give New York City's male, Black athletes opportunities to better themselves. In February 1923, Douglas struck an agreement with William Roach, a Harlem-based real estate developer who owned the New Renaissance Ballroom and Casino, and the Rens were born.

With Black players barred from professional basketball leagues, the Rens barnstormed throughout the country, often competing against all-white teams. Along with owning the team, Douglas coached it from its inception through its last game in 1949. Douglas was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor in 1972. One of the greatest players in the sport's history recognized his impact.
"I tried to spread the word [about Douglas] with my book and documentary, On the Shoulder of Giants," Kareem Abdul-Jabbar told The Undefeated in 2017. "I did both to make people aware of the Rens' contribution to basketball because it's important that we honor those pioneers who made this billion-dollar industry possible."

The team played its first game November 3, 1923, winning 28-22 against the Collegiate Five—an all-white team. "The Rens' immediate success and notoriety helped shift the presence of African-American sports from the amateur level to the professional level," wrote NYHoops.org. "They were able to compete with and even defeat the original Boston Celtics, who were one of the dominant professional white teams during that era."
In the 1932-33 season, the Rens, led by future Hall of Famers William "Pop" Gates and Charles "Tarzan" Cooper, won 88 consecutive games.

In 1939—seven years before the launch of the NBA—the Rens won the World Professional Basketball tournament. In 1949, the Rens, then based in Dayton, Ohio, played their last game as part of the racially integrated National Basketball League. By that time, the NBA was up and running, and interest in barnstorming basketball had waned. In 1963, the Rens team was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. 

1905 - Teddy Roosevelt discusses America’s race problem. President Theodore Roosevelt delivers a speech to the New York City Republican Club.Roosevelt had just won reelection, and in this speech, he discussed the country’s current state of race relations and his plan for improving them. In 1905, many white Americans’ attitude of superiority to other races still lingered. Much bitterness still existed between North and South and, in addition, Roosevelt’s tenure in office had seen an influx of Asian immigrants in the West, which contributed to new racial tensions. 
Roosevelt’s solution in 1905 was to proceed slowly toward social and economic equality. He cautioned against imposing radical changes in government policy and instead suggested a gradual adjustment in attitudes. 
While Roosevelt believed in the words of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, his administration took only a passive, long-term approach to improving civil rights. His successors in the 20th century would take the same route—it was not until Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that government efforts to correct racial bias would be encoded into law. 
READ MORE: How Teddy Roosevelt's Belief in a Racial Hierarchy Shaped His Policies (From History.com) 

Sunday February 12, 2023

Super Bowl 2023: Two black quarterbacks to face off in championship for first time in history

"The Chiefs and Eagles will face off on Feb. 12 at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, marking the first time two black quarterbacks have played against each other during the pinnacle match. Only three black quarterbacks have ever won the Super Bowl championship before, with Mahomes becoming the third to ever do so after defeating the San Francisco 49ers in 2020.

SUPER BOWL 2023: PHILADELPHIA EAGLES AND KANSAS CITY CHIEFS ADVANCE TO SUPER BOWL
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If Mahomes wins Super Bowl LVII, he'll be the first black quarterback to win multiple Super Bowl championships. If Hurts wins, he would become the fourth black quarterback to win the Super Bowl...." (From Washington Examiner) 

1934 - American former basketball player Bill Russell born. Widely regarded as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, Bill Russell was five-times NBA Most Valuable Player. He was central to the Celtics winning 11 NBA championships and captained the American team to the an Olympic gold medal in 1956.

In 1966 he was the first black player-coach of a major NBA team and the first to win a championship in 1968 and 1969. He was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2011. (From OnThisDay.com)

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

"American former basketball player, Bill Russell, waiting in the Green Room of the White House. He is about to receive the 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Barack and Michelle Obama are standing in the background. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)."

1909 - The NAACP is founded [on] the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, a group that included African American leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett announced the formation of a new organization. Called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, it would have a profound effect on the struggle for civil rights and the course of 20th-century American history.

The conference that led to the NAACP's founding had been called in response to a race riot in Illinois. The founders also noted the disturbing trends of lynchings, which reached their peak not during or immediately after the Civil War but in the 1890s and early 1900s, as segregation laws took effect across the South and white supremacists once again gained total control of state governments. Many of the organization's early members came from the Niagara Movement, a group created by Black activists who were opposed to the concepts of conciliation and assimilation.

In its early years, the NAACP spread awareness of the lynching epidemic by means of a 100,000-person silent march in New York City. It also won a major legal victory in 1915, when the Supreme Court declared an Oklahoma "grandfather clause" that allowed whites to bypass voting restrictions unconstitutional. Perhaps its most famous legal victory came in 1954, when NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund founder Thurgood Marshall won the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Marshall went on to become the first African American Supreme Court justice in 1967. In addition to other legal victories during the Civil Rights Era, the NAACP helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, as well as the Mississippi Freedom Summer, a seminal voter registration drive. The campaign came two years after an NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers, was assassinated at his home in Jackson.

Due to its prominent members, landmark legal victories, and lobbying for laws like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, the NAACP holds a place of distinction in the history of the civil rights movement. It remains the largest and oldest active civil rights group in the nation, and its emphasis on voter registration, legal defense and activism have set an example for subsequent groups to follow.

READ MORE: 8 Steps That Paved the Way to the Civil Rights Act of 1964  (From History.com)

1809 - Abraham Lincoln is born. Future U.S. president Abraham Lincoln is born in Hodgenville, Kentucky.... 

WATCH: The HISTORY Channel documentary event, Abraham Lincoln, premieres Sunday, February 20 at 8/7c. 

Lincoln, one of America’s most admired presidents, grew up a member of a poor family in Kentucky and Indiana. He attended school for only one year, but thereafter read on his own in a continual effort to improve his mind. As an adult, he lived in Illinois and performed a variety of jobs including stints as a postmaster, surveyor and shopkeeper, before entering politics. He served in the Illinois legislature from 1834 to 1842 and in Congress from 1847-1849, and then became an attorney. In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd; together, the pair raised four sons.

Lincoln returned to politics during the 1850s, a time when the nation’s long-standing division over slavery was flaring up, particularly in new territories being added to the Union. As leader of the new Republican Party, Lincoln was considered politically moderate, even on the issue of slavery. He advocated the restriction of slavery to the states in which it already existed and described the practice in a letter as a minor issue as late as 1854. In an 1858 senatorial race, as secessionist sentiment brewed among the southern states, he warned, a house divided against itself cannot stand. He did not win the Senate seat but earned national recognition as a strong political force. Lincoln’s inspiring oratory soothed a populace anxious about southern states’ secessionist threats and boosted his popularity...(Read more History.com)

1793 - Congress enacts first fugitive slave law. Congress passes the first fugitive slave law, requiring all states, including those that forbid slavery, to forcibly return enslaved people who have escaped from other states to their original owners. The laws stated that “no person held to service of labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such labor or service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”As Northern states abolished slavery, most relaxed enforcement of the 1793 law, and many passed laws ensuring fugitive enslaved people a jury trial. Several Northern states even enacted measures prohibiting state officials from aiding in the capture of runaways or from jailing the fugitives. This disregard of the first fugitive slave law enraged Southern states and led to the passage of a second fugitive slave law as part of the Compromise of 1850 between the North and South.
The second fugitive slave law called for the return of enslaved people “on pain of heavy penalty” but permitted a jury trial under the condition that fugitives be prohibited from testifying in their own defense. Notable fugitive slave trials, such as the Dred Scott case of 1857, stirred up public opinion on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Meanwhile, fugitive enslaved people circumvented the law through the “Underground Railroad,” which was a network of persons, primarily free African Americans, who helped fugitives escape to freedom in the Northern states or Canada.

READ MORE: How the Underground Railroad Worked  (From History.com)

Saturday February 11, 2023

‘Heroes in the community’: 16 Black Hamiltonians honoured in citywide campaign for Black History Month

• Anita Isaac (1939-2020), educator and health-care worker.

• Jack “Jackie” Washington (1919-2009), musician and Canada’s first Black disc jockey.

• Sophia Burthen Pooley (c1772-c1860), slave to Haudenosaunee/Mohawk leader Thayendanegea/Joseph Brant and Ancaster’s Samuel Hatt, legally freed in 1834.

• Cynthia Taylor (1925-2002), educator.

• Denise J. Brooks (1956-2020), executive director of Hamilton Urban Core Community Health Centre.

• Eleanor Rodney (1938-2020), teacher and founder of the youth organization African Caribbean Cultural Potpourri Inc. (ACCPI).

• Ethilda (Tillie) Johnson (1929-2016), entrepreneur and honorary doctor of law.

• Fleurette Osborne (1927-2019), activist and author.

• John Christie Holland (1882-1954), pastor and railway porter. (From The Hamilton Spectator) 

2012 - Pop superstar Whitney Houston dies at age 48....The 48-year-old pop diva, known for her soaring voice, won a total of six Grammy Awards and 22 American Music Awards (more than any other female), and was credited with influencing several generations of singers, from Mariah Carey to Jennifer Hudson. (Read more History.com) 
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1990 - Nelson Mandela released from prison, leader of the movement to end South African apartheid, is released from prison after 27 years. In 1944, Mandela, a lawyer, joined the African National Congress (ANC), the oldest Black political organization in South Africa, where he became a leader of Johannesburg’s youth wing of the ANC. In 1952, he became deputy national president of the ANC, advocating nonviolent resistance to apartheid—South Africa’s institutionalized system of white supremacy and racial segregation. However, after the massacre of peaceful Black demonstrators at Sharpeville in 1960, Nelson helped organize a paramilitary branch of the ANC to engage in guerrilla warfare against the white minority government.In 1961, he was arrested for treason, and although acquitted he was arrested again in 1962 for illegally leaving the country. Convicted and sentenced to five years at Robben Island Prison, he was put on trial again in 1964 on charges of sabotage. In June 1964, he was convicted along with several other ANC leaders and sentenced to life in prison. 
READ MORE: The Harsh Reality of Life Under Apartheid in South Africa (Read more History.com) 

1805 - Sacagawea gives birth to her first child. Sacagawea, the Shoshone interpreter and guide to the Lewis and Clark expedition, gives birth to her first child, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. (Read more History.com) 

Friday February 10, 2023

(Image by Jack Mitchell from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

Leontyne Price
96th Birthday

1927 - Leontyne Price is born. One of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1960s.
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A soprano, Price's voice was especially suited to the works of Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In 1966 she was chosen to sing the lead the reopening of the Met in its new purpose-designed Lincoln Centre in New York in "Anthony and Cleopatra"

Price is the recipient of many awards including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and 9 Grammys. (From OnThisDay.com)

Thursday February 9, 2023

1971 - Satchel Paige nominated to Baseball Hall of Fame. Ppitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige becomes the first Negro League veteran to be nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame. In August of that year, Paige, a pitching legend known for his fastball, showmanship and the longevity of his playing career, which spanned five decades, was induced. Joe DiMaggio once called Paige “the best and fastest pitcher I’ve ever faced.”

Paige was born in Mobile, Alabama, most likely on July 7, 1906, although the exact date remains a mystery. He earned his nickname, Satchel, as a boy when he earned money carrying passengers’ bags at train stations. Baseball was segregated when Paige started playing baseball professionally in the 1920s, so he spent most of his career pitching for Negro League teams around the United States. During the winter season, he pitched for teams in the Caribbean and Central and South America. As a barnstorming player who traveled thousands of miles each season and played for whichever team met his asking price, he pitched an estimated 2,500 games, had 300 shut-outs and 55 no-hitters. In one month in 1935, he reportedly pitched 29 consecutive games.

In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier and became the first African American to play in the Major Leagues when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. The following year, Paige also entered the majors, signing with the Cleveland Guardians (then known as the Cleveland Indians) and becoming, at age 42, baseball’s oldest rookie. He helped the Guardians win the pennant that year and later played for the St. Louis Browns and Kansas City A’s.

Paige retired from the majors in 1953, but returned in 1965 to pitch three innings for the Kansas City A’s. He was 59 at the time, making him the oldest person ever to play in the Major Leagues. In addition to being famous for his talent and longevity, Paige was also well-known for his sense of humor and colorful observations on life, including: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you” and “Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” 

He died June 8, 1982, in Kansas City, Missouri.

READ MORE: Black History Milestones: A Timeline (From History.com)
 

Paul Laurence Dunbar
1872 - 1906

1906 - Poet ​Paul Laurence Dunbar dies. Paul Laurence Dunbar has been called the first great black poet in America. He wrote not only verse but short stories and novels and lyrics during his short career before his premature death from tuberculosis at just 33.

Many of his works were written in black dialect. His first poems were published when he was just 16 in a local newspaper in Dayton. He was school friends with Orville and Wilbur Wright, whose printing company printed the first African American weekly newspaper in Dayton, which Dunbar edited.

Dunbar's first book of short stories "Folks From Dixie" was published in 1898, the same year as his first novel "The Uncalled". Dunbar also wrote the lyrics for the musical " In Dahomey", the first musical produced and performed by African Americans which successfully performed on Broadway in 1903.

Dunbar's work went on to have a tremendous influence on writers during the Harlem Renaissance and later writers including Maya Angelou whose autobiography title "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" is taken from one of Dunbar's poems. (From OnThisDay.com)

Wednesday February 8, 2023

The Greatest Story Never Told
"From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones comes The 1619 Project, a docuseries based on the New York Times multimedia project, that examines the legacy of slavery in America and its impact on our society today." (From Hulu.com)

Stream Now

Monday February 6, 2023

1993 - Tennis great Arthur Ashe dies of AIDS. The only African American man to win Wimbledon and the U.S. and Australian Opens, dies of complications from AIDS, at age 49 in New York City. Ashe’s body later laid in state at the governor’s mansion in Richmond, Virginia, where thousands of people lined up to pay their respects to the ground-breaking athlete and social activist. 


READ MORE: How Arthur Ashe Transformed Tennis—and Athlete Activism
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In 1988, Ashe learned he had AIDS. It was believed he contracted the HIV virus from a tainted blood transfusion following a 1983 heart operation. Ashe kept his medical condition private until April 1992, when a newspaper informed him of its intention to run an article about his illness. Ashe decided to pre-empt the article and held a news conference to announce he had AIDS. He spent the remainder of his life working to raise awareness about the disease... (Read more History.com)

1820 - Formerly enslaved people depart on journey to Africa. The first organized immigration of freed enslaved people to Africa from the United States departs New York harbor on a journey to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The immigration was largely the work of the American Colonization Society, a U.S. organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to return formerly enslaved African people to Africa. However, the expedition was also partially funded by the U.S. Congress, which in 1819 had appropriated $100,000 to be used in returning displaced Africans, illegally brought to the United States after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1808, to Africa.

READ MORE: The Atlantic Slave Trade Continued Illegally in America Until the Civil War

The program was modeled after British’s efforts to resettle formerly enslaved people in Africa following England’s abolishment of the slave trade in 1772. In 1787, the British government settled 300 formerly enslaved people and 70 white prostitutes on the Sierra Leone peninsula in West Africa. Within two years, most members of this settlement had died from disease or warfare with the local Temne people. However, in 1792, a second attempt was made when 1,100 formerly enslaved people, mostly individuals who had supported Britain during the American Revolution and were unhappy with their postwar resettlement in Canada, established Freetown under the leadership of British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.

During the next few decades, thousands of formerly enslaved people came from Canada, the West Indies, and other parts of West Africa to the Sierra Leone Colony, and in 1820 the first formerly enslaved people from the United States arrived at Sierra Leone. In 1821, the American Colonization Society founded the colony of Liberia south of Sierra Leone as a homeland for formerly enslaved U.S. people outside of British jurisdiction.
Most Americans of African descent were not enthusiastic to abandon their homes in the United States for the West African coast. The American Colonization Society also came under attack from American abolitionists, who charged that the removal of formerly enslaved people from the United States strengthened the institution of slavery. However, between 1822 and the American Civil War, some 15,000 African Americans settled in Liberia, which was granted independence by the United States in 1847 under pressure from Great Britain. Liberia was granted official U.S. diplomatic recognition in 1862. It was the first independent democratic republic in African history.
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READ MORE: How a Movement to Send Formerly Enslaved People to Africa Created Liberia

Sunday February 5, 2023

1994 - White supremacist convicted of killing Medgar Evers, African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers, over 30 years after the crime occurred. Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home on June 12, 1963, while his wife, Myrlie, and three small children were inside.

READ MORE: How Medgar Evers’ Widow Fought 30 Years for His Killer’s Conviction
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Medgar Wiley Evers was born July 2, 1925, near Decatur, Mississippi, and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After fighting for his country, he returned home to experience discrimination in the racially divided South, with its separate public facilities and services for Black and white people. Evers graduated from Alcorn College in 1952 and began organizing local chapters of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). In 1954, after being rejected for admission to then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School, he became part of an NAACP campaign to desegregate the school. Later that year, Evers was named the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi. He moved with his family to Jackson and worked to dismantle segregation, leading peaceful rallies, economic boycotts and voter registration drives around the state. In 1962, he helped James Meredith become the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, a watershed event in the civil rights movement. As a result of his work, Evers received numerous threats and several attempts were made on his life before he was murdered in 1963 at the age of 37.

READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement Timeline

Wednesday February 1, 2023

Recognizing the legacy of Chloe Cooley

(2023, ©Canada Post Corporation, copied with permission)

On January 30, 2023, Canada Post issued a new stamp honouring Chloe Cooley, a young Black enslaved woman who lived in Queenston, Upper Canada, in the late 18th century. Her act of resistance on the evening of March 14, 1793, led to legislation that would change the course of enslavement in Canada – and help shape this country’s story.

Upper Canada in Chloe Cooley’s time
Cooley lived in Upper Canada at a time when enslavement was on the rise. After the American Revolution, Britain pushed for more Americans to settle in British North America, including Upper Canada. To help in this effort, it allowed enslavers to continue to hold Black men, women and children in bondage. But the resulting increase in enslavement gave momentum to the abolitionist movement that opposed it.

Rumours that enslavement could be abolished started to grow and enslavers became concerned they could lose what was legally considered their property. Some planned to sell their slaves across the border while they still could – including Sergeant Adam Vrooman, who enslaved Cooley.... (Read more Canada Post)

​1978 - Harriet Tubman becomes the first African American woman to appear on a U.S. postage stamp.​ Antislavery crusader and Civil War veteran Harriet Tubman becomes the first African American woman to appear on a U.S. postage stamp, the first in the Post Office's Black Heritage Series. Tubman's appearance on stamps was emblematic both of the progress made in recognizing African Americans' contributions to American history and of the ongoing effort to put abolitionists on equal footing with slaveowners in the nation's historical canon. Tubman was a singular figure of the abolition movement, an enslaved woman who escaped captivity in Maryland and made at least 19 trips back to free more enslaved peoples. Tubman is estimated to have helped several hundred enslaved people find freedom in Canada via the Underground Railroad and is said to have "never lost a passenger." During the Civil War, she freed 700 more when she led Union forces on a raid on Combahee Ferry in South Carolina. In her later life, though she had little money of her own, Tubman worked to house and feed the poor and became an important figure in the fight for women's suffrage. Despite these extraordinary efforts, which earned her the epithet "the Moses of her people," Tubman did not receive a pension for her services in the war until 1889 and died with little to her name.
READ MORE: 6 Strategies Harriet Tubman and Others Used to Escape Along the Underground Railroad (Read more History.com)

1960 - Greensboro sit-in begins in Greensboro, North Carolina, four Black college students spark a nationwide civil rights movement by refusing to leave a “whites-only” lunch counter at a popular retail store after they are denied service. The North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State students—Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond—become known as the “Greensboro Four.”The students sat at the Woolworth counter until the store closed, promising they would be back the next day. By the end of the first week, 200 protested at the store.
The demonstration in Greensboro continued for six months, until Woolworth gave in and integrated the lunch counter.
Although not the first sit-in, the non-violent Greensboro protest became the best known. Local television provided extensive coverage, and in subsequent days, similar sit-ins occurred in more than 30 other cities.
The initial protest was a result of extensive planning by the students, who received guidance from mentor activists and others.
In 2002, a monument to the “Greensboro Four” was dedicated at North Carolina A&T. The Woolworth’s store, which closed in 1993, became home to the International Civil Rights Center & Museum. 
READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement Timeline  (Read more History.com)

Tuesday January 31, 2023

​1931 - Ernie Banks was born, Nicknamed "Mr. Cub," he spent all of his 19 seasons (1953-71) with the Chicago Cubs. Banks won back-to-back National League Most Valuable Player awards in 1958 and 1959 and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977. (OnThisDay.com)

(Image by Bob Sandberg from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn Dodgers, 1954

1919 - Jackie Robinson, first African American to play in MLB in 1947, was born (OnThisDay.com)

1865 - Slavery abolished in the United States. The U.S. House of Representatives passes the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery in America. The amendment read, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”When the Civil War began, President Abraham Lincoln’s professed goal was the restoration of the Union. But early in the war, the Union began keeping escaped enslaved people rather than returning them to their owners, so slavery essentially ended wherever the Union army was victorious. In September 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all enslaved people in areas that were still in rebellion against the Union. This measure opened the issue of what to do about slavery in border states that had not seceded or in areas that had been captured by the Union before the proclamation. 

READ MORE: Does an Exception Clause in the 13th Amendment Still Permit Slavery? (Read more History.com)

Monday January 30, 2023

1956 - Martin Luther King Jr.'s home is bombed [by] an unidentified suspected white supremacist terrorist bombed the Montgomery home of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. No one was harmed, but the explosion outraged the community and was a major test of King’s steadfast commitment to non-violence.King was relatively new to Montgomery, Alabama but had quickly involved himself in the civil rights struggle there. He was a leading organizer of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began in December of 1955 after activist Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated city bus to a white passenger. The boycott brought King national recognition, but also made him a target of white supremacists. He was speaking at a nearby church on the evening of January 30 when a man pulled up in a car, walked up to King’s house, and tossed an explosive onto the porch. The bomb went off, damaging the house, but did not harm King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, who was inside with the couple’s seven-month-old daughter Yolanda.
News of the bombing spread quickly, and an angry crowd soon gathered outside King’s home. A matter of minutes after his home had been bombed, standing feet away from the site of the explosion, King preached non-violence. “I want you to love our enemies,” he told his supporters. “Be good to them, love them, and let them know you love them.” It was a prime example of King’s deeply-held belief in nonviolence, as what could have been a riot instead became a powerful display of the highest ideals of the civil rights movement. 

1948 - Gandhi assassinated. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the political and spiritual leader of the Indian independence movement, is assassinated in New Delhi by a Hindu extremist....Settling in Natal, he was subjected to racism and South African laws that restricted the rights of Indian laborers. Gandhi later recalled one such incident, in which he was removed from a first-class railway compartment and thrown off a train, as his moment of truth. From thereon, he decided to fight injustice and defend his rights as an Indian and a man. When his contract expired, he spontaneously decided to remain in South Africa and launched a campaign against legislation that would deprive Indians of the right to vote. He formed the Natal Indian Congress and drew international attention to the plight of Indians in South Africa. In 1906, the Transvaal government sought to further restrict the rights of Indians, and Gandhi organized his first campaign of satyagraha, or mass civil disobedience. After seven years of protest, he negotiated a compromise agreement with the South African government. 

Sunday January 29, 2023

1988 - Canadian Ben Johnson breaks own 50-yard dash world record at 5.15 (OnThisDay.com)

(Image Jacket design by Al Nagy, published by Doubleday from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

1977 - "Roots" premieres on television, a groundbreaking television program. The eight-episode miniseries, which was broadcast over eight consecutive nights, follows a family from its origins in West Africa through generations of slavery and the end of the Civil War. Roots was one of the most-watched television events in American history and a major moment in mainstream American culture's reckoning with the legacy of slavery.

The miniseries was based on Alex Haley's novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which he claimed was based on research he had conducted into his own family history. Though these claims were later debunked, the story succeeded in dramatizing and personalizing the brutal, true story of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in America. It begins with Kunta Kinte, a warrior belonging to the Mandinka ethnic group and living in what is now the Gambia. Kunta is captured and sold to traders, endures a harrowing journey aboard a slave ship, and is eventually sold to a plantation owner in Virginia. The story follows the remainder of his life, including a brutal scene in which he is tortured into acknowledging his slave name, Toby, and continues to follow his family for several generations. Kunta's daughter, her son George, and his sons Tom and Lewis experience life on various plantations and are subjected to many historically-accurate brutalities, including the separation of enslaved families and harassment from whites after the abolition of slavery. The book and miniseries were recognized for balancing this sweeping narrative with intensely personal stories and brutally realistic depictions of the horrors of slavery.

Due to fears about the audience's reaction to these depictions, ABC decided to air Roots on eight consecutive nights as a way of cutting its losses. Instead, Roots achieved unprecedented popularity. An estimated 140 million people, accounting for over half of the population of the United States, saw the series, and its finale remains the second-most-watched series finale in American television history. A cultural phenomenon, it was nominated for 37 Emmys and won nine, including Best Limited Series and Best Writing in a Drama Series. A sequel miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations, aired in 1979 to impressive ratings and several more award nominations.

Some found Roots to be divisive—future president Ronald Reagan opined that "the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive." Other commentators noted that the series went out of its way to include "good" or morally conflicted white characters who did not exist in the book. Overall, however, critics praised Roots for "dealing with the institution of slavery and its effect on succeeding generations of one family in a dramatic form," something uncommon in American culture and virtually unheard of on American television at the time. Roots continues to be remembered as both a moving work of fiction and a step forward in America's difficult confrontation with its racial history.

READ MORE: America's History of Slavery Began Long Before Jamestown

Saturday January 28, 2023

February 14, 2023
12-3 PM (EDT)
Featuring the Papers of Mary Ann Shadd Cary
DouglassDay.org

Register for Douglass Day
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A collective day of love & action for Black history! 
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(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

 1997 - Afrikaner police admit to killing Stephen Biko. In South Africa, four apartheid-era police officers, appearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, admit to the 1977 killing of Stephen Biko, a leader of the South African “Black consciousness” movement.In 1969, Biko, a medical student, founded an organization for South Africa’s Black students to combat the minority government’s racist apartheid policies and to promote Black identity. In 1972, he helped organize the Black People’s Convention and in the next year was banned from politics by the Afrikaner government. Four years later, in September 1977, he was arrested for subversion. While in police custody in Port Elizabeth, Biko was brutally beaten and then driven 700 miles to Pretoria, where he was thrown into a cell. On September 12, 1977, he died naked and shackled on the filthy floor of a police hospital. News of the political killing, denied by the country’s white minority government, led to international protests and a U.N.-imposed arms embargo. (Read more History.com) 

1988 Canada's Supreme court declares anti-abortion law unconstitutional (OnThisDay.com)
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(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

Challenger flight
​ The crew of Space Shuttle mission STS-51-L pose for their official portrait on November 15, 1985.

In the back row from left to right: Ellison S. Onizuka, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Greg Jarvis, and Judy Resnik. In the front row from left to right: Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ron McNair.

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1986 - The space shuttle Challenger explodes after liftoff. At 11:38 a.m. EST, on January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Christa McAuliffe is on her way to becoming the first ordinary U.S. civilian to travel into space. McAuliffe, a 37-year-old high school social studies teacher from New Hampshire, won a co... read more

1985 - Music stars gather to record "We Are the World" 
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Friday January 27, 2023

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

View of the entrance to the main camp of Auschwitz (Auschwitz I). The gate bears the motto "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes one free). (From Commomns.Wikimedia.org)

1945 - Auschwitz is liberated. Soviet troops enter Auschwitz, Poland, freeing the survivors of the network of concentration camps—and finally revealing to the world the depth of the horrors perpetrated there. Auschwitz was really a group of camps, designated I, II, and III. There were also 40 smaller "“satellite” camps. It was at Auschwitz II, at Birkenau, established in October 1941, that the SS created a complex, monstrously orchestrated killing ground: 300 prison barracks; four “bathhouses” in which prisoners were gassed; corpse cellars; and cremating ovens. Thousands of prisoners were also used for medical experiments overseen and performed by the camp doctor, Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death.”

Listen to HISTORY This Week Podcast: January 27, 1945: Surviving Auschwitz

The Red Army had been advancing deeper into Poland since mid-January. Having liberated Warsaw and Krakow, Soviet troops headed for Auschwitz. In anticipation of the Soviet arrival, SS officers began a murder spree in the camps, shooting sick prisoners and blowing up crematoria in a desperate attempt to destroy the evidence of their crimes. When the Red Army finally broke through, Soviet soldiers encountered 648 corpses and more than 7,000 starving camp survivors. There were also six storehouses filled with hundreds of thousands of women’s dresses, men's suits and shoes that the Germans did not have time to burn.

READ MORE:
The Shocking Liberation of Auschwitz: Soviets ‘Knew Nothing’ as They Approached
Auschwitz Survivors Recall Harrowing and Heroic Moments From the Death Camps
Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII's Deadliest Concentration Camp
This Midwife at Auschwitz Delivered 3,000 Babies in Unfathomable Conditions
The Jewish Men Forced to Help Run Auschwitz
How the Nazis Tried to Cover Up Their Crimes at Auschwitz

1888 - National Geographic Society founded. The National Geographic Society is founded in Washington, D.C., for “the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.” The 33 men who originally met and formed the National Geographic Society were a diverse group of geographers, explorers, teachers, ...read more

Monday January 23, 2023

1976 Bahamian-American actor Sidney Poitier (48) weds Canadian actress Joanna Shimkus (From  On This Day)

(Image Gordon Parks, Office of War Information; cropped by Beyond My Ken from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

1976 -  American actor, athlete, bass-baritone concert singer, writer, civil rights activist, Spingarn Medal winner, and Stalin peace prize laureate Paul Robeson dies at the age of 79 on January 23, 1976.Robeson’s physical strength, size and grace made him one of the elite sports figures of his generation, but his stature in other fields—music, theater, politics, human rights— eventually overshadowed his athletic greatness. On stage and screen, his unique voice earned him universal artistic acclaim, but when he raised it in support of Civil Rights and social justice, his voice often aroused violent controversy.

Paul LeRoy Bustill Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 9, 1898, the son of a father born into slavery and a mother raised as a vocal abolitionist. Robeson’s academic and athletic achievements earned him a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1915, where he became not only a four-sport letterman and two-time All American football star, but a member of Phi Beta Kappa and class valedictorian—all of this while being only the third African-American student in school history. Robeson moved to Harlem after graduation, where he worked his way through Columbia University Law School as an actor and professional football player. By 1923, Robeson had passed the New York bar and earned critical raves on the London and Broadway stage. The lure of a promising career in law proved less compelling for Robeson than a career in the theater.

Over the next twenty years, Robeson established himself as one of the most important musical and dramatic performers of his day. The role of Joe and the song “Ol’ Man River” in Show Boat were written for Robeson’s famous bass voice; Robeson originated the title role in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones; and he became the first African American to play Othello on Broadway. By the late 1940s, Robeson’s international artistic reputation was well established, but it was rivaled by his reputation as a political activist. Racism generally, and the horror of racial lynching particularly, were Robeson’s greatest concerns. If his outspoken views on segregation didn’t win him enough enemies in the United States, his openly leftist leanings certainly did. 
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Robeson traveled repeatedly to the Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s—a history that led to the unconstitutional seizure of his passport and to his blacklisting following an appearance before the Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950. When asked during those hearings why he did not simply move to the USSR, Robeson offered a typically powerful response: “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it just like you.” (From History website) 

Sunday January 22, 2023

​1879 - Chief Dull Knife makes last fight for freedom

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

Cheyenne chief Dull Knife (also anglicized as "Morning Star") and his people are defeated by U.S. army soldiers. In doing so, the so-called Dull Knife Outbreak came to an end. 

A leading chief of the Northern Cheyenne, Dull Knife had long urged peace with the powerful soldiers invading his homeland in the Powder River country of modern-day Wyoming and Montana. However, the 1864 massacre of more than 200 peaceful Cheyenne Indians by Colorado militiamen at Sand Creek, Colorado, led Dull Knife to question whether the U.S. army could ever be trusted. He reluctantly led his people into a war he suspected they could never win. In 1876, many of Dull Knife’s people fought alongside Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull at their victorious battle at Little Bighorn, though the chief himself apparently did not participate. (Read more at History.com) 

Friday January 20, 2023

Famous American Inaugurations

2021 - Kamala Harris becomes first female vice president Kamala Harris makes history when she is sworn in as the 49th U.S. vice president on January 20, 2021, becoming the first woman, the first Black American and the first Asian American to occupy the office.

When Harris was chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate in August 2020, the former California senator and attorney general, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, became the third woman to be named on a major political party’s ticket, following Geraldine Ferraro (chosen by Walter Mondale) in 1984 and Sarah Palin (chosen by John McCain) in 2008. Harris made her own presidential bid in the 2020 Democratic Party’s primary before suspending her campaign and endorsing Biden. Together, they defeated incumbents Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

“In many ways, this moment embodies our character as a nation,” Harris said on the evening of her inauguration. “It demonstrates who we are. Even in dark times—we not only dream. We do. We not only see what has been, we see what can be.”

As second in line for the U.S. presidency, Harris has come closer than any woman before her to breaking what Hillary Clinton famously called “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.” (From History.com)

1961 - John F. Kennedy inaugurated On January 20, 1961, on the newly renovated east front of the United States Capitol, John Fitzgerald Kennedy is inaugurated as the 35th president of the United States. It was a cold and clear day, and the nation’s capital was covered with a snowfall from the previous night. The ceremony began with a religious invocation and prayers, and then African American opera singer Marian Anderson sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Robert Frost recited his poem “The Gift Outright.” Kennedy was administered the oath of office by Chief Justice Earl Warren. During his famous inauguration address, Kennedy, the youngest candidate ever elected to the presidency and the country’s first Catholic president, declared that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” and appealed to Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” (From History.com) 
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Barack Obama 2013 inauguration as the 44th President of the United States

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

2009 - Barack Obama is inaugurated On a freezing day in Washington, D.C., Barack Hussein Obama is sworn in as the 44th U.S. president. The son of a Black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, Obama had become the first African American to win election to the nation’s highest office the previous November.As the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, he won a tight Democratic primary battle over Senator Hillary Clinton of New York before triumphing over Arizona Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate, in the general election. Against a backdrop of the nation’s devastating economic collapse during the start of the Great Recession, Obama’s message of hope and optimism—as embodied by his campaign slogan, “Yes We Can”—struck an inspirational chord with a nation seeking change. (From Histtory.com) 
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Thursday January 19, 2023

1952 - PGA approves participation of Black golfers On January 19, 1952, Professional Golfers Association president Horton Smith announces that a seven-man committee “almost unanimously” votes to allow Black golfers to compete in PGA co-sponsored events. With the announcement, Smith hopes that Black golfers participate in the next two events, the Phoenix Open and Tucson Open. “I shall feel our efforts here will have gone for little if the plan doesn’t work out the next two events,” he says.The push for inclusion into a sport dominated by white players came after pressure from former boxing champion Joe Louis, a talented amateur golfer. At the San Diego Open on January 17, 1952, Louis competed in the PGA-sanctioned event as an invited amateur. (As an amateur golfer, Louis wasn't governed by PGA rules.) But professional Bill Spiller, a Black golfer, was denied entry in the tournament.

In response, Louis criticized the PGA, telling the New York Times, “I want people to know what the PGA is… We’ve got another Hitler to get by.” Louis told the Los Angeles Sentinel, “This is the last major sport in America in which Negroes are barred.”

The pressure from Louis worked, and Louis, Spiller, Ted Rhodes and Eural Clark would go onto break the PGA’s color barrier at the Phoenix Open.

But it would take years for the sport to approach full integration. In 1961, Charles Sifford became the first Black golfer to earn a PGA Tour card. He won the 1967 Greater Hartford Open Invitational and 1969 Los Angeles Open.
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1975 - Lee Elder became the first Black golfer to compete in the Masters—considered the sport's most prestigious tournament—at famed Augusta National Golf Club. The club didn't have a Black member until 1990 (businessman Ron Townsend) or female member until 2012 (former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice). (From History.com)

Wednesday January 18, 2023

2022 - Boston Bruins retire Willie O'Ree's #22 jersey, on the 64th anniversary of his becoming the NHL's first Black player 

Sunday January 15, 2023
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1929 - Martin Luther King Jr. born

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

1929 - Martin Luther King Jr. is born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister. King received a doctorate degree in theology and in 1955 helped organize the first major protest of the African American civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to segregation in the South. The peaceful protests he led throughout the American South were often met with violence, but King and his followers persisted, and the movement gained momentum.

A powerful orator, King appealed to Christian and American ideals and won growing support from the federal government and Northern whites. In 1963, Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph led the massive March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; the event’s grand finale was King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Two hundred and fifty thousand people gathered outside the Lincoln Memorial to hear the stirring speech. 

In 1964, the civil rights movement achieved two of its greatest successes: the ratification of the 24th Amendment, which abolished the poll tax, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education and outlawed racial segregation in public facilities. Later that year, King became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize (in 2014 Malala Yousafzai became the youngest to receive the prize at age 17). In the late 1960s, King openly criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam and turned his efforts to winning economic rights for poor Americans. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.

READ MORE ABOUT MLK: 
10 Things You May Not Know About Martin Luther King Jr
For Martin Luther King Jr., Nonviolent Protest Never Meant ‘Wait and See’
Quotes from 7 of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Most Notable Speeches
The Fight for Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Why MLK's Right-Hand Man, Bayard Rustin, Was Nearly Written Out of History (From History.com) 

​Saturday January 14, 2023

1​970 - Diana Ross and the Supremes perform their final concert

Friday January 13, 2023

​1966 - President Lyndon B. Johnson appoints the first African American cabinet member, making Robert C. Weaver head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the agency that develops and implements national housing policy and enforces fair housing laws. In keeping with his vision for a Great Society, Johnson sought to improve race relations and eliminate urban blight. As many of the country’s African Americans lived in run-down inner-city areas, appointing Weaver was an attempt to show his African American constituency that he meant business on both counts. 

Weaver’s expertise in social and economic issues concerning urban African Americans was well-known. Prior to his appointment as HUD secretary, he held key positions in several Democratic administrations. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the mid-to-late 1930s, he advised the secretary of the interior and served as a special assistant with the Housing Authority. In 1940, he was appointed to the National Defense Advisory Commission and worked to mobilize Black workers during World War II. From 1955 to 1959, Weaver served as rent commissioner for the state of New York, then went on to serve as head of the Housing and Home Finance Agency under President John F. Kennedy....

READ MORE: Black History Milestones: Timeline (From History.com)

1990 - Douglas Wilder of Virginia becomes the nation's first elected Black governor

Thursday January 12, 2023

2010 - Massive earthquake strikes Haiti. Haiti is devastated by a massive earthquake. It drew an outpouring of support from around the globe but the small nation has yet to fully recover. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, due largely to its history of colonization, occupation and exploitation by S... read more Haiti has a history of seismic activity—devastating earthquakes were recorded there in 1751, 1770, 1842 and 1946. The island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, lies mostly between two large tectonic plates, the North American and the Caribbean. The Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince practically straddles this fault line. Despite this knowledge and warnings from seismologists that another earthquake was likely in the near future, the country's poverty meant that infrastructure and emergency services were not prepared to handle the effects of a natural disaster.

The 2010 earthquake struck just before 5 pm. The tremor was felt as far away as Cuba and Venezuela, but the epicenter of the 7.0-magnitude quake was just 16 miles away from Port-au-Prince. Eight aftershocks followed the same day, and at least 52 were recorded over the next two weeks. The effects were catastrophic. All of the capital’s hospitals, as well as three facilities run by Doctors Without Borders, sustained serious damage, as did Port-au-Prince's airport and its seaport, which was rendered inoperable. Telecoms services were greatly affected, major roads were rendered impassible, and close to 300,000 buildings, most of which were residences, were damaged beyond repair. The National Assembly building and Port-au-Prince Cathedral were also destroyed.

The human toll was horrific and remains incalculable. Some estimates put the number of deaths around 40-50,000, while the Haitian government estimated that over 316,000 died, but all authorities acknowledge that the death toll is impossible to truly count. Something approaching 1 million people were displaced... (From History.com)

1879 - British-Zulu War begins​. The British-Zulu War begins as British troops under Lieutenant General Frederic Augustus invade Zululand from the southern African republic of Natal. 

In 1843, Britain succeeded the Boers as the rulers of Natal, which controlled Zululand, the neighboring kingdom of the Zulu people. Boers, also known as Afrikaners, were the descendants of the original Dutch settlers who came to South Africa in the 17th century. Zulus, a migrant people from the north, also came to southern Africa during the 17th century, settling around the Tugela River region.
In 1838, the Boers, migrating north to elude the new British dominions in the south, first came into armed conflict with the Zulus, who were under the rule of King Dingane at the time. The European migrants succeeded in overthrowing Dingane in 1840, replacing him with his son Mpande, who became a vassal of the new Boer republic of Natal. In 1843, the British took over Natal and Zululand.

In 1872, King Mpande died and was succeeded by his son Cetshwayo, who was determined to resist European domination in his territory. In December 1878, Cetshwayo rejected the British demand that he disband his troops, and in January British forces invaded Zululand to suppress Cetshwayo. The British suffered grave defeats at Isandlwana, where 1,300 British soldiers were killed or wounded, and at Hlobane Mountain, but on March 29 the tide turned in favor of the British at the Battle of Khambula.

At Ulundi in July, Cetshwayo’s forces were utterly routed, and the Zulus were forced to surrender to the British. In 1887, faced with continuing Zulu rebellions, the British formally annexed Zululand, and in 1897 it became a part of Natal, which joined the Union of South Africa in 1910.

READ MORE: 7 Influential African Empires

 Tuesday January 10, 2023

2022 - The US Mint issues quarter coins commemorating poet Maya Angelou, first black woman to be depicted 

Sunday January 8, 2023

1877 -  Crazy Horse fights last battle

1867 - African American men gain the right to vote in Washington, D.C. despite the veto of its most powerful resident, President Andrew Johnson. The Republican-controlled senate overrode Johnson by a vote of 29-10 three years before a constitutional amendment granted the right to vote to all men regardless of race.At the time, citizens of D.C. voted for a local council, but had no representation in Congress and no say in presidential elections. Congress was the final authority on many matters for the District, including voting rights—to this day, the capital city’s budget is the only municipal budget in the country subject to congressional approval. At the end of the Civil War, Lincoln’s Republican Party dominated the legislature, which had been reduced in size and drained of Democrats due to the secession of Southern states. Johnson, however, was not a Republican but rather a Unionist Democrat whom Lincoln had chosen as his running mate during the Civil War in the hopes of appealing to Southern Unionists. 

READ MORE: When Did African Americans Get the Right to Vote?
As evidenced by his veto, Johnson valued reconciliation with the former Confederacy over racial equality. He also opposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which made freed slaves citizens. Johnson’s opposition to the Republicans’ views on Reconstruction would define his presidency and lead to his becoming the first president ever to be impeached. Though he was unable to stop Congress from granting voting rights to the African Americans of D.C., he spent much of his presidency vetoing the bills of the so-called Radical Reconstructionisms.

African American men in D.C.—with some exceptions, including those on welfare—gained the right to vote three years before the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed that right for all American men, regardless of race. As citizens of D.C., however, they did not gain the right to vote in federal elections until 1961. Today, the nation’s capital stands on equal footing with the states in the Electoral College, but its congressional representation remains limited to a single, non-voting member of the House of Representatives. Many official license plates in the district carry the phrase “Taxation without representation,” a nod to the irony that the capital of the United States has roughly the amount of influence in the legislative process as it did before the Revolutionary War.
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READ MORE: How the 1876 Election Tested the Constitution and Effectively Ended Reconstruction" (From History website)

Friday January 7, 2023

1955 - Marian Anderson becomes first African American to perform at the Met Opera
2021  -  Three men convicted of murdering Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Feb 2020, sentenced to life in prison in a Georgia court

Thursday January 6, 2023

King Center announces 2023 MLK Day events

Monday December 26, 2022

From The Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia website)

"The Black Cultural Centre of Nova Scotia in partnership with the Black Educators Association of Nova Scotia n of Adult Learning program, presents the 7 Days of Kwanzaa. A video series of videos explaining the practice of Kwanzaa. A new video will be released each day at 10 am from December 26th to January 1st. Watch online each day at www.bccns.tv" (From e-newsletter) ​

The First Kwanza 

"The first day of the first Kwanzaa is celebrated in Los Angeles under the direction of Maulana Karenga, the chair of Black Studies at California State University at Long Beach. The seven-day holiday, which has strong African roots, was designed by Dr. Karenga as a celebration of African American family, community, and culture.

In 1965, a deadly riot broke out in the predominantly Black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, leaving 34 people dead, 1,000 injured, and $40 million worth of property destroyed. Karenga, a former Black activist, was deeply disturbed by the devastation and searched for a way to overcome the despair he felt had gripped the African American community in the rebellion's aftermath. He founded Us, a Black cultural organization, and looked to Africa in search of practices and concepts that might empower and unite the nation’s African American community. Inspired by Africa’s harvest celebrations, he decided to develop a nonreligious holiday that would stress the importance of family and community while giving African Americans an opportunity to explore their African identities.

Karenga combined aspects of several different harvest celebrations, such as those of the Ashanti and those of the Zulu, to form the basis of Kwanzaa. The name Kwanzaa is derived from the phrase matunda ya kwanza, which means “first fruits” in Swahili. Each family celebrates Kwanzaa in its own way, but celebrations often include songs and dances, African drums, storytelling, poetry readings, and a large traditional meal. On each of the seven nights, the family gathers and a child lights one of the candles on the kinara, or candleholder, then one of the seven principles is discussed. The principles, called the Nguzo Saba, are values of African culture that contribute to building and reinforcing community among African Americans. These values include unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, economic cooperation, purpose, creativity and faith. An African feast, called a Karamu, is held on December 31. Today, Kwanzaa is celebrated by millions of people of African descent all across the United States and Canada. 

READ MORE: 5 Things You May Not Know About Kwanzaa" (From History website) 

Friday December 16, 2022

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

1966 - Jimmie Lee Jackson born. American Civil rights protester and church deacon who was shot and killed by Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler in 1965 during a peaceful march for voting rights in his home town of Marion, Alabama.

His death inspired the Selma to Montgomery marches a month later that ultimately led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (From On This Day in History)

Tuesday December 6, 2022

1961 - Ernie Davis becomes first Black player to win Heisman Trophy. Syracuse running back Ernie Davis becomes the first Black player to win the Heisman Trophy—college football's top individual award—beating  Ohio State fullback Bob Ferguson. Earlier in day, Davis meets with President John Kennedy at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. "I never thought I'd ever be shaking the hand of the President of the United States," he says.As a senior in 1961, Davis rushed for 823 yards and scored 14 touchdowns. The previous season, he rushed for 877 yards. 
Davis was the first pick in the 1962 NFL draft, by Washington, which traded him to the Cleveland Browns. But he never played in the NFL. Davis was diagnosed with leukemia later in 1962, and died on May 18, 1963. He was 23.... (read more History.com & From On This Day in History)


1917 - The Great Halifax Explosion. At 9:05 a.m., in the harbor of Halifax in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, the most devastating manmade explosion in the pre-atomic age occurs when the Mont Blanc, a French munitions ship, explodes 20 minutes after colliding with another vessel....The massive explosion killed more than 1,800 people, injured another 9,000–including blinding 200–and destroyed almost the entire north end of the city of Halifax, including more than 1,600 homes. The resulting shock wave shattered windows 50 miles away, and the sound of the explosion could be heard hundreds of miles away. (read more History.com)
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1865 - 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution is ratified officially ending the institution of slavery. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” With these words, the single greatest change wrought by the Civil War was officially noted in the Constitution.The ratification came eight months after the end of the war, but it represented the culmination of the struggle against slavery. When the war began, some in the North were against fighting what they saw as a crusade to end slavery. Although many northern Democrats and conservative Republicans were opposed to slavery’s expansion, they were ambivalent about outlawing the institution entirely. The war’s escalation after the First Battle of Bull Run, Virginia, in July 1861 caused many to rethink the role that slavery played in creating the conflict. 

By 1862, Lincoln realized that it was folly to wage such a bloody war without plans to eliminate slavery. In September 1862, following the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in Maryland, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all enslaved people in territory still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be declared forever free. The move was largely symbolic, as it only freed enslaved people in areas outside of Union control, but it changed the conflict from a war for the reunification of the states to a war whose objectives included the destruction of slavery. (From On This Day in History & History.com)

Monday December 5, 2022

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2013 - South African president Nelson Mandela dies at 95.  Nelson Mandela, the former activist who overcame a nearly three-decade prison stint to become president of South Africa, passes away after years of struggling with health issues. He was 95."Our nation has lost its greatest son. Our people have lost a father," South African President Jacob Zuma said. "What made Nelson Mandela great was precisely what made him human. We saw in him what we seek in ourselves."
Mandela was known as a freedom fighter, prisoner, civil rights leader, political leader and symbol of integrity and reconciliation not only for South Africa, but for the world.
His lifelong mission to end apartheid started when he left school early to join the the African National Congress (ANC). He rose quickly in the organization, and was elected president of the organization in 1950. It was in 1960 that Mandela’s efforts turned more militant, sparked when police opened fire on a group of unarmed protestors in the Sharpeville township, killing 69 people.

READ MORE: Key Steps That Led to the End of Apartheid 

Soon after, the ANC was outlawed, but that didn’t stop Mandela. After the ban, he went underground to form a new, armed wing of the organization named “Spear of the Nation.” Through this group, which was also known as the MK, Mandela helped plan attacks on government institutions, like the post office.
The violent turn was not one he took lightly. “It would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and nonviolence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force,” he said about starting the more militant branch. “It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle.”

In 1962, Mandela secretly left South Africa, traveling around Africa and England to gain support. He also trained in Morocco and Ethiopia. When he returned, he was arrested and charged with illegal exit of the country and incitement to strike. He was then sentenced to life in prison for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government.

Instead of a testimony, he gave a four hours long speech, ending it by saying: "I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."
While he was in prison, a “Free Nelson Mandela” campaign fueled the outcry against the regime.

In 1990, newly elected president F. W. de Klerk made a shocking move that broke from the conservatives of his party, lifting the ban on the ANC—and all other formerly banned political parties—and calling for a non-racist South Africa. That February, de Klerk unconditionally released Mandela. The then 71-year-old walked out of prison, fist held above his head. He had served 27 years in prison.

After his release, Mandela resumed his leadership of the ANC in its negotiations for an end to apartheid. Incredibly, just four years after his release, on May 10, 1994, he was inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratically elected President.

As president, Mandela introduced social and economic programs and presided over the enactment of a new constitution that established a strong central government and prohibited discrimination. He also discouraged black South Africans from seeking revenge for the apartheid period, preaching kindness and forgiveness instead. Mandela only served one term in order to set an example for future leaders, but he remained in the nation’s consciousness until his death.

Dozens of officials world leaders expressed their grief over Mandela’s passing. The funeral and burial cap took place over 10 days of national mourning. On December 15, tribal leaders clad in animal skins stood alongside officials in dark suits as Mandela's coffin, which was draped with the South African flag, was buried in his childhood village of Qunu. 
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READ MORE: Nelson Mandela: His Written Legacy

1945 - Aircraft squadron disappears in the Bermuda Triangle. At 2:10 p.m. on December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 take off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission. After having completed their objective, Flight 19 was scheduled to take them due ...read more

1872 - The Mary Celeste, a ship whose crew mysteriously disappeared, is spotted at sea. The Dei Gratia, a small British brig under Captain David Morehouse, spots the Mary Celeste, an American vessel, sailing erratically but at full sail near the Azores Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was seaworthy, its stores and supplies were untouched, but not a soul was ...read more

1349  500 Jews of Nuremberg massacred during Black Death riots. The ​Black Death was the single worst pandemic in the history of the world. Peaking between 1347 and 1351 in Europe, estimates of the death toll vary widely, but is generally believed to have killed between 50 to 125 million people. The Black Death was essentially the spread of the disease known as plague (which is sometimes used to refer to the pandemic itself), caused by the Yersinia pestitis bacterium which was carried by the fleas on black rats.
The infection is believed to have originated in China or Inner Asia. Carried along the Silk Road trading route, it destroyed the army of the Mongol ruler Jani Beg, who was besieging the Genoese town of Kaffa in the Crimea. Attempting to weaken the defenders, he flung infected corpses at the Genoese inside the city. Infected sailors went back to their hometown in Genoa, Italy, thus beginning the European outbreak. ...

The Black Death had a vast effect on European society. Jewish people were persecuted relentlessly by many during the outbreak, as rumors spread that Jews had deliberately poisoned wells combined with a deep reservoir of medieval antisemitism. On February 14, 1349, several hundred Jews were burned to death in the city of Strasbourg. ... (From On This Day in History) 

Thursday December 1, 2022

1955 - Rosa Parks ignites bus boycott In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks is jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws. The  successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Park’s historic act of civil disobedience. ... (Read more History.com)

1862 - President Abraham Lincoln addresses the U.S. Congress and speaks some of his most memorable words as he discusses the Northern war effort.Lincoln used the address to present a moderate message concerning his policy towards slavery. Just ten weeks before, he had issued his Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that enslaved people in territories still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, would be free. The measure was not welcomed by everyone in the North—it met with considerable resistance from conservative Democrats who did not want to fight a war to free enslaved people.

The November 1862 elections were widely interpreted as a condemnation of the emancipation plan. The Democrats won the New York governorship and 34 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, though the Republicans gained five Senate seats and maintained control of most state legislatures. Lincoln used the State of the Union address to present a more moderate position on emancipation. He mentioned gradual, compensated emancipation of enslaved people, which many moderates and conservatives desired, but he also asserted that the enslaved people liberated thus far by Union armies would remain forever free.

Lincoln’s closing paragraph was a statement on the trials of the time: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present…fellow citizens, we cannot escape history…The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union…In giving freedom to the slave, we ensure freedom to the free–honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.” 

READ MORE: Why Lincoln's 'House Divided' Speech Was So Important (From History.com) ​

Saturday November 26, 2022

(Image from Commons.Wikimedia.org)

1883 - Sojourner Truth dies. Born Isabella Baumfree, Sojourner Truth was an American Abolitionist and Women's Rights Advocate, known for her extemporaneous speech on gender inequalities "Ain't I a Woman?" She was born on November 18, 1797. (From On This Day in History)

Friday November 25, 2022

1999 - First International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The United Nations General Assembly passes a resolution designating November 25 the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The resolution, which was introduced by the Dominican Republic, marked the anniversary of the death of three sisters, Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal, who were murdered there in 1960. While women in Latin America and the Caribbean had honored the day since 1981, all UN countries did not formally recognize it until 1999.

Many organizations, including the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), had been pushing for international recognition of the date for some time. (read more History.c0m)

1963 - JFK buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Three days after his assassination in Dallas, Texas, John F. Kennedy is laid to rest with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was shot to death while riding in an open-car motorcade with his wife and Texas Governor John Connally through the streets of downtown Dallas... (read more History.com)

1960 - Mirabal sisters assassinated by Trujillo regime

Tuesday November 22, 2022

1963 - President John F. Kennedy is assassinated. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, is assassinated in 1963 while traveling through Dallas, Texas, in an open-top convertible. 

First lady Jacqueline Kennedy rarely accompanied her husband on political outings, but she was beside him, along with Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, for a 10-mile motorcade through the streets of downtown Dallas on November 22. Sitting in a Lincoln convertible, the Kennedys and Connallys waved at the large and enthusiastic crowds gathered along the parade route. As their vehicle passed the Texas School Book Depository Building at 12:30 p.m., Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly fired three shots from the sixth floor, fatally wounding President Kennedy and seriously injuring Governor Connally. Kennedy was pronounced dead 30 minutes later at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital. He was 46. ... (read more History.com)

WATCH: JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald on HISTORY Vault

Monday November 14, 2022

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

1960 - Ruby Bridges desegregates her school. On November 14, 1960, a court order mandating the desegregation of schools comes into effect in New Orleans, Louisiana. Six-year-old Ruby Bridges walks into William Frantz Elementary School, accompanied by federal marshals and taunted by angry crowds, instantly becoming a symbol of the civil rights movement, an icon for the cause of racial equality and a target for racial animosity.The Supreme Court ordered the end of segregated public schools in Brown vs. Board of Education just a few months before Bridges was born, but it was not until after her kindergarten year that the City of New Orleans finally assented to desegregation. African American children in New Orleans were given a test, and only those who passed were allowed to enroll in all-white public schools. Bridges passed the test and became the only one of the six eligible students to go ahead with desegregating Frantz Elementary. Her father opposed the idea at first, but Bridges’ mother convinced him that sending Ruby to Frantz was both right for their daughter and an important moment for all African Americans. Bridges entered the school along with her mother and several marshals on November 14, and images of the small child and her escorts walking calmly through crowds of rabid segregationists spread across the country. Bridges later recalled that she had initially thought the crowds were there to celebrate Mardi Gras.

READ MORE: Brown v. Board of Education: The First Step in the Desegregation of America’s Schools
Bridges did not attend any classes on November 14 due to the chaos outside the school. No other students attended and all but one teacher, Barbara Henry, stayed home in protest of desegregation. It was several days until a white father finally broke the boycott and brought his son to school, and even when the white students returned, they were kept separate from the school’s lone Black student. Henry, whom Bridges said was the first white teacher and “the nicest teacher I ever had,” taught a class consisting of only Bridges for the entire school year. Federal marshaled continued to escort her to school for that time, and crowds chanting racial slurs and making death threats continued to greet Bridges for months. 
Bridges’ family suffered enormously—her father lost his job, her sharecropper grandparents were kicked off of their land and her parents eventually separated—but they also received support in the form of gifts, donations, a new job offer for her father, and even pro-bono security services from friends, neighbors and people around the country. The following year, the school became further integrated, and Bridges attended class with both Black and white children without major incident. Today, Bridges remains a household name and an icon of the civil rights movement. 
READ MORE: The 8-Year-Old Chinese-American Girl Who Helped Desegregate Schools—in 1885 (From History.com) 

Sunday November 10, 2022

Saturday November 12, 2022

Friday November 11, 2022

SPECIAL EXHIBITION: A COMMUNITY AT WAR
THE MILITARY SERVICE OF BLACK CANADIANS OF THE NIAGARA REGION

UNTIL MARCH 19, 2023

"Today on Remembrance / Veterans Day, it is essential to also remember the Afro-Black Caribbean service people. They were often forgotten and unrecognized in both World Wars and various conflicts around the world. The Caribbean was vital to protect North America against the enemy forces. Here are a couple of their stories.

Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps
In the late 1850s, hundreds of Black settlers moved to Vancouver Island from California, looking for better opportunities. They soon organized the Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps, an all-Black volunteer force known locally as the “African Rifles.” Even though it was disbanded by 1865 after only a few years of existence, it was the first officially-authorized militia unit in the West Coast colony in Canadian history.

The Battle of the Caribbean
During World War II, the USA established a naval base in Trinidad called NAS Trinidad. It was a prominent United States Navy Naval base built during World War II to support the many naval ships fighting and patrolling the Battle of the Atlantic. The fighting in the area became known as the Battle of the Caribbean, which was part of the Battle of the Atlantic from 1941 to 1945. Italian submarines and German U-boats tried to disrupt the Allied supply of oil and other materials. They sank various ships in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico and attacked coastal targets in the Antilles. The Allied forces rallied together with improved Allied anti-submarine warfare and strategy, driving them out of the Caribbean region. The Caribbean and its citizens were integral in this battle.

Thanks to people like #thelegacyvoicesproject and #blackprescence for helping us to celebrate black history, not just on special occasions but all year round." (From LinkedIn)

1921 Dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. 

1918 WWI armistice signed by the Allies and Germany comes into effect and World War I hostilities end at 11am, "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month." (From On This Day in History website)

1831 Nat Turner executed in Virginia. Nat Turner, the leader of a bloody revolt of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, is hanged in Jerusalem, the county seat, on November 11, 1831.

Turner, an enslaved man and educated minister, believed that he was chosen by God to lead his people out of slavery. On August 21, 1831, he initiated his uprising by slaughtering Joseph Travis, his owner, and Travis’ family. With seven followers, Turner set off across the countryside, hoping to rally hundreds of enslaved people to join his insurrection. Turner planned to capture the county armory at Jerusalem, Virginia, and then march 30 miles to Dismal Swamp, where his rebels would be able to elude their pursuers.

During the next two days and nights, Turner and 75 followers rampaged through Southampton County, killing about 60 white people. Locals resisted the rebels, and then the state militia—consisting of some 3,000 men—crushed the rebellion. Only a few miles from Jerusalem, Turner and all his followers were dispersed, captured, or killed. In the aftermath of the rebellion, scores of African Americans were lynched, though many of them had not participated in the revolt. Turner himself was not captured until the end of October, and after confessing without regret to his role in the bloodshed, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. On November 11, he was hanged in Jerusalem.

Turner’s rebellion was the largest revolt of enslaved people in U.S. history and led to a new wave of oppressive legislation prohibiting the movement, assembly and education of enslaved peoples.

READ MORE: This 1841 Rebellion at Sea Freed More Than 100 Enslaved People (From History.com)

Thursday November 10, 2022

1995 - Playwright and activist hanged in Nigeria. Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian playwright and environmental activist, is hanged in Nigeria along with eight other activists from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Mosop).

Saro-Wiwa, an outspoken critic of Nigeria’s military regime, was charged by the government with the 1994 murder of four pro-military traditional leaders. He maintained his innocence, claiming that he was being unlawfully silenced for his criticism of the exploitation of the oil-rich Ogoni basin by the Nigerian ruling government and the Shell Petroleum Development Company. Most of the international community agreed, but Nigerian leader General Sani Abacha refused to grant the defendants an appeal and would not delay the executions.

Before his death, Saro-Wiwa won Sweden’s prestigious Right Livelihood Award and had also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In reaction to the executions, U.S. President Bill Clinton recalled the U.S. ambassador from Lagos and imposed an arms ban, though trade with oil-rich Nigeria continued." (From History.com) 

1969 - “Sesame Street” debuts

Wednesday November 9, 2022

1965 - The Great Northeast Blackout. At dusk on November 9, 1965, one of the biggest power failures in history occurs as all of New York state, portions of seven nearby states, and parts of eastern Canada are plunged into darkness. The Great Northeast Blackout began at the height of rush hour, delaying millions of commuters, trapping 800,000 people in New York’s subways, and stranding thousands more in office buildings, elevators, and trains. Ten thousand National Guardsmen and 5,000 off-duty policemen were called into service.

The blackout was caused by the tripping of a 230-kilovolt transmission line near Ontario, Canada, at 5:16 p.m., which caused several other heavily loaded lines also to fail. This precipitated a surge of power that overwhelmed the transmission lines in western New York, causing a “cascading” tripping of additional lines, resulting in the eventual breakup of the entire Northeastern transmission network. All together, 30 million people in eight U.S. states and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec were affected by the blackout. During the night, power was gradually restored to the blacked-out areas, and by morning power had been restored throughout the Northeast.

On August 14, 2003 another major blackout occurred which affected most of Eastern Canada as well as most of the Eastern United States.

1938 - Nazis launch Kristallnacht. On November 9, 1938, in an event that would foreshadow the Holocaust, German Nazis launch a campaign of terror against Jewish people and their homes and businesses in Germany and Austria. The violence, which continued through November 10 and was later dubbed “Kristallnacht,” or “Night of Broken Glass,” after the countless smashed windows of Jewish-owned establishments, left approximately 100 Jews dead, 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged and hundreds of synagogues, homes, schools and graveyards vandalized. An estimated 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, many of whom were then sent to concentration camps for several months; they were released when they promised to leave Germany. Kristallnacht represented a dramatic escalation of the campaign started by Adolf Hitler in 1933 when he became chancellor to purge Germany of its Jewish population.

WATCH: Third Reich: The Rise on HISTORY Vault 

The Nazis used the murder of a low-level German diplomat in Paris by a 17-year-old Polish Jew as an excuse to carry out the Kristallnacht attacks. On November 7, 1938, Ernst vom Rath was shot outside the German embassy by Herschel Grynszpan, who wanted revenge for his parents’ sudden deportation from Germany to Poland, along with tens of thousands of other Polish Jews. Following vom Rath’s death, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels ordered German storm troopers to carry out violent riots disguised as “spontaneous demonstrations” against Jewish citizens. Local police and fire departments were told not to interfere. In the face of all the devastation, some Jews, including entire families, died by suicide.

In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the Nazis blamed the Jews and fined them 1 billion marks (or $400 million in 1938 dollars) for vom Rath’s death. As repayment, the government seized Jewish property and kept insurance money owed to Jewish people. In its quest to create a master Aryan race, the Nazi government enacted further discriminatory policies that essentially excluded Jews from all aspects of public life.

Over 100,000 Jews fled Germany for other countries after Kristallnacht. The international community was outraged by the violent events of November 9 and 10. Some countries broke off diplomatic relations in protest, but the Nazis suffered no serious consequences, leading them to believe they could get away with the mass murder that was the Holocaust, in which an estimated 6 million European Jews died. (From History.com) 

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Benjamin Banneker on his almanac of the year 1795

 1731 - Benjamin Banneker born, Mathematician, Astronomer and Almanac Author. Banneker was a largely self-educated, free African-American scientist. He is most famous for his widely published almanacs (1792-1797) for which he calculated the daily locations of stars and planets and accurately forecast lunar and solar eclipses. His almanacs also included opinion pieces, literature, and medical and tidal information.

Banneker was an outspoken anti-slavery supporter who corresponded with Thomas Jefferson on the topics of slavery and racial equality. He included the correspondence between himself and Jefferson in his 1793 almanac.

His other achievements include constructing a wooden clock despite having seen only one other timepiece in his life, and assisting Major Andrew Ellicott in surveying the borders of the original federal capital of the District of Columbia.  Died: October 9, 1806 (aged 74). (From On This Day website)

Monday November 7, 2022

 1989 - Two African American firsts in politics. In New York, former Manhattan borough president David Dinkins, a Democrat, is elected New York City’s first African American mayor, while in Virginia, Lieutenant Governor Douglas Wilder, also a Democrat, becomes the first elected African American state governor in American history. 

Although Wilder was the first African American to be popularly elected to the governor’s post, he was not the first African American to hold that office. That distinction goes to Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, a Reconstruction-era lieutenant general of Louisiana who became Louisiana state governor in December 1872. Pinchback served as acting governor for five weeks while impeachment proceedings were in progress against Governor Henry Clay Warmoth. (For more information/from History.com) 

1885 - Canada's transcontinental railway completed

Sunday November 6, 2022

Treaties Recognition Week 2022: November 6-12

(Image courtesy of/& used with permission)

1962 UN condemns apartheid in South Africa. On November 6, 1962, the United Nations General Assembly adopts a resolution condemning South Africa’s racist apartheid policies and calling on all its members to end economic and military relations with the country.

In effect from 1948 to 1993, apartheid, which comes from the Afrikaans word for “apartness,” was government-sanctioned racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against South Africa’s non-white majority. Among many injustices, Black South Africans were forced to live in segregated areas and couldn’t enter whites-only neighborhoods unless they had a special pass. Although white South Africans represented only a small fraction of the population, they held the vast majority of the country’s land and wealth.

Following the 1960 massacre of unarmed demonstrators at Sharpeville near Johannesburg, South Africa, in which 69 Black people were killed and over 180 were injured, the international movement to end apartheid gained wide support. However, few Western powers or South Africa’s other main trading partners favored a full economic or military embargo against the country. Nonetheless, opposition to apartheid within the U.N. grew, and in 1973 a U.N. resolution labeled apartheid a “crime against humanity.” In 1974, South Africa was suspended from the General Assembly." (For more information/from History.com)

1860 - Abraham Lincoln elected president

Friday November 4, 2022 

 2008 - Barack Obama becomes the first African-American to be elected President of the United States, defeating Republican candidate John McCain (From On This Day website)

1922 - Entrance to King Tut's tomb discovered. British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discover a step leading to the tomb of King Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. When Carter first arrived in Egypt in 1891, most of the ancient Egyptian tombs had been discovered, though the little-known King Tutankhamen, who had died when he was 18, was still unaccounted for. After World War I, Carter began an intensive search for “King Tut’s Tomb,” finally finding steps to the burial room hidden in the debris near the entrance of the nearby tomb of King Ramses VI in the Valley of the Kings. On November 26, 1922, Carter and fellow archaeologist Lord Carnarvon entered the interior chambers of the tomb, finding them miraculously intact." (For more information/from History.com) 

Wednesday November 2, 2022

1983 - MLK federal holiday declared

1947 - Howard Hughes's "Spruce Goose" flies. The Hughes Flying Boat-at one time the largest aircraft ever built-is piloted by designer Howard Hughes on its first and only flight. Built with laminated birch and spruce (hence the nickname the Spruce Goose) the massive wooden aircraft had a wingspan longer than a football field and was designed to carry more than 700 men to battle. Howard Hughes was a successful Hollywood movie producer when he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932. He personally tested cutting-edge aircraft of his own design and in 1937 broke the transcontinental flight-time record. In 1938, he flew around the world in a record three days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes. (For more information/from History.com) 

Sunday October 16, 2022

1859 - John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

Friday October 14, 2022

1995 - Million Man March
1964 - Martin Luther King Jr. wins Nobel Peace Prize

Monday September 5,  2022

(Image from the Internet)

Sunday September 4, 2022

1957 - Arkansas troops block "Little Rock Nine" from entering segregated high school (See History.com for more information)

1886 - "Geronimo surrenders - On September 4, 1886, Apache leader Geronimo surrenders to U.S. government troops. For 30 years, the Native American warrior had battled to protect his tribe's homeland; however, by 1886 the Apaches were exhausted and hopelessly outnumbered. General Nelson Miles accepted Geronimo's surrender, making him the last Native American warrior to formally give in to U.S. forces and signaling the end of the Indian Wars in the Southwest." (For more information History.com)

September 3, 2022

1944 - Holocaust diarist Anne Frank sent to Auschwitz concentration camp (From On This Day.com website)

September 2, 2022

1885 - "Chinese miners are massacred in Wyoming Territory - On September 2, 1885, 150 white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, brutally attack their Chinese coworkers, killing 28, wounding 15 others, and driving several hundred more out of town.The miners working in the Union Pacific coal mine had been struggling to unionize and strike for better working conditions for years. But at every juncture the powerful railroad company had bested them. Searching for a scapegoat, the angry miners blamed the Chinese. The Chinese coal miners were hard workers, but the Union Pacific had initially brought many of them to Rock Springs as strike-breakers, and they showed little interest in the miners’ union. 

Outraged by a company decision to allow Chinese miners to work the richest coal seams, a mob of white miners impulsively decided to strike back by attacking Rock Spring’s small Chinatown. When they saw the armed mob approaching, most of the Chinese abandoned their homes and businesses and fled for the hills. But those who failed to escape in time were brutally beaten and murdered. A week later, on September 9, U.S. troops escorted the surviving Chinese back into the town where many of them returned to work. Eventually the Union Pacific fired 45 of the white miners for their roles in the massacre, but no effective legal action was ever taken against any of the participants.

The Rock Springs Massacre was symptomatic of the anti-Chinese feelings shared by many Americans at that time. The Chinese had been victims of prejudice and violence ever since they first began to come to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, fleeing famine and political upheaval. Widely blamed for all sorts of social ills, the Chinese were also singled-out for attack by some national politicians who popularized strident slogans like “The Chinese Must Go” and helped pass an 1882 law that closed the U.S. to any further Chinese immigration. In this climate of racial hatred, violent attacks against the Chinese in the West became all too common, though the Rock Springs massacre was notable both for its size and savage brutality. "
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READ MORE: Building the Transcontinental Railroad: How 20,000 Chinese Immigrants Made It Happen (From History.com website)

Friday August 24, 2022

Sarah Nurse on EA Sports cover history, women in hockey and judging 'Drag Race'

Thursday August 23, 2022

International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition 2022: History, theme, and significance

(Image from the Internet)

Saturday August 20, 2022

(Image from Getty Images)

1619 - First enslaved Africans arrive in Jamestown, setting the stage for slavery in North America
On August 20, 1619, "20 and odd" Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrive in the British colony of Virginia and are then bought by English colonists. The arrival of the enslaved Africans in the New World marks a beginning of two and a half centuries of slavery in North America.

Founded at Jamestown in 1607, the Virginia Colony was home to about 700 people by 1619. The first enslaved Africans to arrive in Virginia disembarked at Point Comfort, in what is today known as Fort Monroe. Most of their names, as well as the exact number who remained at Point Comfort, have been lost to history, but much is known about their journey. 

They were originally kidnapped by Portuguese colonial forces, who sent captured members of the native Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms on a forced march to the port of Luanda, the capital of modern-day Angola. From there, they were ordered on the ship San Juan Bautista, which set sail for Veracruz in the colony of New Spain. As was quite common, about 150 of the 350 captives aboard the ship died during the crossing. Then, as it approached its destination, the ship was attacked by two privateer ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer. Crews from the two ships kidnapped up to 60 of the Bautista’s enslaved people. It was the White Lion which docked at Virginia Colony's Point Comfort and traded some of the prisoners for food on August 20, 1619.

WATCH: The Middle Passage on HISTORY Vault 

Scholars note that the arrivals were technically sold as indentured servants. Indentured servants agreed, or in many cases were forced, to work with no pay for a set amount of time, often to pay off a debt and could legally expect to become free at the end of the contract. Many Europeans who arrived in the Americas came as indentured servants. Despite this classification—and records which indicate that some of them did eventually obtain their freedom—it is clear that the Africans arriving at Point Comfort in 1619 were forced into servitude and that they fit the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ definition of enslaved peoples.
The arrival at Point Comfort marked a new chapter in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began in the early 1500s and continued into the mid-1800s. The trade uprooted roughly 12 million Africans, depositing roughly 5 million in Brazil and over 3 million in the Caribbean. Though the number of Africans brought to mainland North America was relatively small--roughly 400,000—their labor and that of their descendants was crucial to the economies of the British colonies and, later, the United States.

READ MORE: How Slavery Became the Economic Engine of the South

Two of the Africans who arrived aboard the White Lion, Antonio and Isabella, became “servants” of Captain William Tucker, commander of Point Comfort. Their son William is the first known African child to have been born in America, and under the law of the time he was born a freeman. In the coming decades, however, slavery became codified. 

Servants of African origin were oftentimes forced to continue working after the end of their contract, and in 1640 a Virginia court sentenced rebellious servant John Punch to a lifetime of slavery. With fewer white indentured servants arriving from England, a racial caste system developed and African servants were increasingly held for life. In 1662, a Virginia court ruled that children born to enslaved mothers were the property of the mother’s owner.

As cash crops like tobacco, cotton and sugar became pillars of the colonial economy, slavery became its engine. Though the slave trade was outlawed in 1807, chattel slavery and the plantation economy it made possible flourished in the South. The 1860 census found that there were 3,953,760 enslaved people in the United States, making up roughly 13 percent of the total population.

The conflict between abolitionists and those who wanted to preserve and spread slavery was a major catalyst in the outbreak of the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln formally freed enslaved people in the South with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, although it was not until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 that slavery was formally abolished in the United States.

In the end, 246 brutal years of slavery had an incalculable effect on American society. It would take another century after the Civil War for racial segregation to be declared unconstitutional, but the end of state-sanctioned racism was by no means the end of racism and discrimination in America. Because it became a crucial part of the culture and economy of early America after its introduction in Jamestown, slavery is often referred to as the nation’s “original sin.” 
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READ MORE: The Last American Slave Ship (From History website)

Friday August 19, 2022

Canada nominates O'Bonsawin as first Indigenous Supreme Court judge

1791 - Benjamin Banneker writes to Thomas Jefferson, urging justice for African Americans - On August 19, 1791, the accomplished American mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker pens a letter to then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson corresponds prolifically with luminaries from around the world, but Banneker is unique among them: the son of a free Black American woman and a formerly enslaved African man from Guinea, Banneker criticizes Jefferson’s hypocritical stance on slavery in respectful but unambiguous terms, using Jefferson’s own words to make his case for the abolition of slavery.Banneker himself was born free in what is now Ellicott City, Maryland, and was encouraged in his studies of astronomy and mathematics by the Ellicotts, a Quaker family who owned a mill and much of the land in the area. Predicting a solar eclipse and constructing a functioning clock that struck on the hour were among his early achievements. His prowess caught the eye of Jefferson after Major Andrew Ellicott chose Banneker to assist him in surveying the original boundaries of what would become the District of Columbia. Banneker also compiled several ephemerides (a type of astronomical chart) and almanacs.
In August of 1791, Banneker sent Jefferson, who was known both as a Founding Father and a devoted scientist, a draft of an almanac he was readying for publication. He felt compelled to include a personal note. In this letter, Banneker quoted the famous preamble to the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…”) and said plainly that he was disappointed in the hypocrisy of Jefferson, a slaveowner:

"…but Sir how pitiable is it to reflect, that altho you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of those rights and privileges which he had conferred upon them, that you should at the Same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the Same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves."

Jefferson’s response, eleven days later, was cordial and complimentary but also condescending and racist. Jefferson praised the almanac and informed Banneker that he was sending it along to the Marquis de Condorcet, a French philosopher, mathematician, and abolitionist. The future president praised Banneker as a credit to the Black race, essentially telling him that he considered the almanac evidence that African American’s inferiority was owed “merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America” and not to their innate inferiority, a paternalistic sentiment that was a frequent topic of debate among whites.
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After Banneker’s death, Jefferson expressed doubt that a Black man could have written the almanac. He continued to own enslaved workers, despite decrying slavery in some of his writings, until his own death in 1826. Shortly after they were written, a Philadelphia publisher circulated a pamphlet containing Banneker’s eloquent argument for abolition and Jefferson’s non-committal response, which made the rounds among the nascent abolitionist movement. Contrary to the myth that slavery was universally accepted among educated and elite circles in the early United States, Banneker’s letter stands as proof that one of the nation’s founders received first-hand criticism of his hypocritical and contradictory stance on slavery in his lifetime.

READ MORE: Why Thomas Jefferson's Anti-Slavery Passage Was Removed from the Declaration of Independence (From History website)

Tuesday August 2, 2022

Project to bring stories of Black community to life

Black leaders want Canada to apologize for its history of slavery

Monday August 1, 2022

Emancipation Day organizer looks to build up London event

Londoners reflect on freedom during Emancipation Day event

Sunday July 31, 2022

​Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols dies at age 89
​Nichelle Nichols, trailblazing 'Star Trek' actress, dies at 89 - CNN

(Drawing by Artist Robin Damore from LinkedIn)

Friday July 29, 2022

Windsor's Significance in the History of Emancipation Day

Thursday July 28, 2022

1917 Silent Parade organised by James Weldon Johnson of 10,000 African-Americans who march on 5th Ave in NYC to protest against lynching. James Weldon Johnson displayed an extraordinary array of talent throughout his life, becoming a lawyer, diplomat, writer, poet and civil rights leader.
Johnson was the first African American to pass the bar in Florida in 1897. He became American Consul to Venezuela in 1906 and during that appointment wrote his novel "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" anonymously. His earlier poem "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," (1899) was put to music by his brother and later became the anthem of the NAACP.

Johnson is best remembered as the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1920-1930, its 1st African American Executive Secretary. In 1917 he organised a silent protest march of 10,000 people down NYC's 5th Avenue was working for the NAACP.

Johnson was also an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, publishing his own poetry, and anthologies of others. In later years he was the first African American professor at a New York university.
Born: June 17, 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida, USA Died: June 26, 1938 (aged 67)
Cause of Death: Automobile accident when the car his wife [civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson] was driving was hit by a train. (From On This Day website)

Monday July 18, 2022

1918 Anti-apartheid activist and South African President Nelson Mandela is born. Often referred to as the father of the nation by South Africans, Nelson Mandela was an anti-apartheid activist and politician who served 27 years in prison. After being freed in 1990 he became the President of the African National Congress (1991-97) before being elected the first black President of his country in a fully multiracial election in 1994.

For his activism, he received over 250 honours, including the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Soviet Order of Lenin. Birthplace: Mvezo, Umtatu, South Africa, Died: December 5, 2013 (aged 95), Cause of Death: Lung infection (From On This Day website) 

Sunday July 17, 2022

2020 Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis dies in the midst of a pandemic and a time of unparalleled racial tensions in the United States, the nation loses one of the last towering figures of the civil rights movement. John Lewis, former Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and a 17-term congressman from Georgia’s Fifth District, dies at the age of 80.

Born to two sharecroppers in rural Alabama, Lewis preached his first sermon at the age of 15, met Martin Luther King, Jr. at the age of 18, and was ordained as a Baptist minister before attending college at Nashville’s Fisk University. Inspired by King, he quickly became a leader of the Nashville desegregation movement, organizing sit-ins and boycotts—which he called “good trouble, necessary trouble”—and getting arrested numerous times. 

READ MORE: ‘Good Trouble’: How John Lewis and Other Civil Rights Crusaders Expected Arrests
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Lewis was one of the very first Freedom Riders—activists who refused to follow the rules while traveling through the South on segregated buses—and made repeated Freedom Rides despite being badly beaten and arrested on multiple occasions. After becoming Chairman of SNCC, of which he was a founding member, in 1963, he took a leading role in organizing a number of civil rights actions, including the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery marches. During the latter march, a policeman fractured Lewis’ skull as law enforcement attacked a group of protesters crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The assault, dubbed “Bloody Sunday,” opened the eyes of many across America to the brutal behavior of police in the South. In the years since, many have suggested renaming the bridge after Lewis.
Lewis continued to work in voter education and community organizing until 1981, when he was elected to the Atlanta City Council. In 1986, he ran for Congress, where he would represent a district that included most of Atlanta for the rest of his life. Though sometimes referred to as a “partisan” Democrat, he often took positions that set him to the left of the party’s establishment. Lewis was an early advocate of gay rights, opposed both the Gulf War and the War in Iraq, sided against the popular Democratic President Bill Clinton on welfare reform and the North America Free Trade Agreement, and refused to attend President George W. Bush’s inauguration on the grounds that Bush’s claim to victory was not valid. In his first term in Congress, Lewis introduced a bill to create a national museum of African American history and remained dedicated to this cause, despite decades of resistance from Republican legislators, until the museum opened on the National Mall in 2016.

As news broke of his death from pancreatic cancer, tributes to Lewis poured in from all across the country, with many celebrating his lifetime of activism and his support of the protests against police violence which largely defined the summer of 2020. His casket traveled from Troy, Alabama, where his rejection from the local college prompted his first correspondence with King, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and then to Washington, where it lay in state in the U.S. Capitol. In a New York Times op-ed written shortly before his death and published the day of his funeral, Lewis cited the recent killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, expressed his admiration for the Black Lives Matter movement, and urged the generations that followed him to have the courage to speak out against injustice, to participate in democracy, and to “let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.”

READ MORE: The MLK Graphic Novel That Inspired John Lewis and Generations of Civil Rights Activists
(From History website)

Thursday July 14, 2022

​13-Year-Old Is Youngest Black Person to Get Accepted Into Med School

Wednesday July 13, 2022

The greatest discoveries and advancements in the history of astronomy
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(Image from Getty Images)

2013 The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter first appears, sparking a movement - Outraged and saddened after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Florida man who killed a Black teenager in 2012, Oakland, California resident Alicia Garza posts a message on Facebook on July 13, 2013. Her post contains the phrase "Black lives matter," which soon becomes a rallying cry and a movement throughout the United States and around the world.Garza said she felt "a deep sense of grief" after Zimmerman was acquitted. She was further saddened to note that many people appeared to blame the victim, Trayvon Martin, and not the "disease" of racism. Patrice Cullors, a Los Angeles community organizer and friend of Garza, read her post and replied with the first instance of #BlackLivesMatter.

As the hashtag became popular on Facebook and Twitter, Garza, Cullors and fellow activist Opal Tometi built a network of community organizers and racial justice activists using the name Black Lives Matter. The phrase and the hashtag were then quickly adopted by grassroots activists and protests all across the country, particularly after the subsequent killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and a number of other African Americans at the hands of police officers or would-be vigilantes like Zimmerman. 
Simple and clear in its demand for Black dignity, the phrase became one of the major symbols of the protests that erupted after Brown's killing in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. While polling showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of the Black Lives Matter movement when it first began, in the years following, support for its central arguments grew. 

After the May 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis unleashed a nationwide protest movement against police brutality and racism, support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased by a 28-point margin in two weeks—almost as much as it had in the preceding two years, according to the New York Times. 
Perhaps more than any other phrase since “Black Power,” “Black Lives Matter” became a singular rallying cry for the American and global racial justice movements."

READ MORE: Black History Milestones: Timeline (From History website)

1934 Wole Soyinka born. In 1986 Wole Soyinka was the first person from the African continent to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Soyinka is primarily a playwright, but has also written poetry, novels and essays.

A member of the Yoruba People of Nigeria, Soyinka often employs elements of Yoruba folklore into his work. His style is lyrical, satirical and humorous, much of his work criticizes figures in authority. Soyinka was imprisoned for 22 months 1966-67 during the Biafra war for speaking out against the war. His major works include the plays "Dance of the Forests" (1960),"The Strong Breed" (1964) and "Kongi's Harvest" (1965).
Born: July 13, 1934, Birthplace: Abeokuta, near Ibadan, Nigeria, Age: 88 years old (From On This Day website) 

Tuesday July 12, 2022

Monday July 11, 2022

1656 First Quaker colonists land at Boston Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, two Englishwomen, become the first Quakers to immigrate to the American colonies when the ship carrying them lands at Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The pair came from Barbados, where Quakers had established a center for missionary work.The Religious Society of Friends, whose members are commonly known as Quakers, was a Christian movement founded by George Fox in England during the early 1650s. Quakers opposed central church authority, preferring to seek spiritual insight and consensus through egalitarian Quaker meetings. They advocated sexual equality and became some of the most outspoken opponents of slavery in early America.
Shortly after arriving to Massachusetts, Austin and Fisher, whose liberal teachings enraged the Puritan colonial government, were arrested and jailed. After five years in prison, they were deported back to Barbados. In October 1656, the Massachusetts colonial government enacted their first ban on Quakers, and in 1658 it ordered Quakers banished from the colony “under penalty of death.” Quakers found solace in Rhode Island and other colonies, and Massachusetts’ anti-Quaker laws were later repealed.
In the mid-18th century, John Woolman, an abolitionist Quaker, traveled the American colonies, preaching and advancing the anti-slavery cause. He organized boycotts of products made by slave labor and was responsible for convincing many Quaker communities to publicly denounce slavery. Another of many important abolitionist Quakers was Lucretia Mott, who worked on the Underground Railroad in the 19th century, helping lead fugitive slaves to freedom in the Northern states and Canada. In later years, Mott was a leader in the movement for women’s rights." (From History website)

Sunday July 10, 2022

1943 Arthur Ashe born.  Arthur Ashe was ranked number one in the world and won three Grand Slam titles. An African American, he was the first black player ever selected to the United States Davis Cup team and the only black man ever to win the singles title at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open.

He is thus considered to be one of the best tennis players in history from the United States.

Birthplace: Richmond, Virginia, U.S.A., Died: February 6, 1993 (aged 49)" (From On This Day website)

Saturday July 9, 2022

​Prime minister apologizes for anti-Black racism experienced by No. 2 Construction Battalion

(Image courtesy of/& used with permission by Nova Scotia Archives)

2000 Venus Williams wins Wimbledon for the first time Venus Williams wins at Wimbledon for the first time. Her victory over defending champion, Lindsay Davenport, made Williams the first Black female Wimbledon champion since Althea Gibson won back-to-back titles in 1957 and 1958. 

Overcoming a tough childhood in Compton, California, Williams became a champion women’s tennis player with seven Grand Slam singles titles, 16 Grand Slam doubles titles and four Olympic gold medals. Williams and her sister Serena are considered two of the greatest tennis players of all time.

Williams was born on June 17, 1980, in Lynwood, California. Her father, a self-taught tennis coach, trained his daughters on the local courts. When Williams was 10 years old, the family relocated to West Palm Beach, Florida so Venus and Serena could attend a tennis academy.

By the age of 10, Williams’ serve topped off at an impressive 100 miles per hour. Thanks to that serve and athletic prowess on the court, Williams was 63-0 on the United States Tennis Association junior tour.

On October 31, 1994, Williams turned pro at 14 years old. In 1997, she became the first woman since Pam Shriver in 1978 to reach the final of her first U.S. Open. In 1998, she won her first Grand Slam at the Australian Open. A year later, she won the French Open women’s doubles tournament with her sister.

When Williams won at Wimbledon in 2000, she said, “It’s really great because I’ve been working so hard all my life to be here… It’s strange. I’d go to bed at night and I’d dream I’d won a Grand Slam, but when I woke up, there was the nightmare. Now, I don’t have to wake up like that anymore.” 
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That same year she went on to win the U.S. Open, two gold medals at the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney and signed a $40 million sponsorship deal with Reebok.

In 2011, Williams revealed she was battling Sjögren syndrome, a chronic, incurable immune system disorder. Many expected her to take a step back from tennis. Instead, she went on to win gold at the 2012 Summer Olympics and the women’s doubles title at Wimbledon.

READ MORE: Trailblazing Black Women in Sports" (From History website) ​

1877 Wimbledon tournament begins

Friday July 8, 2022

1777  Independent Vermont introduces a new constitution, prohibiting slavery

Thursday July 7, 2022

1921 Ezzard Charles born in Lawrenceville, Georgia, U.S.A.. Defeated numerous Hall of Fame fighters in three different weight classes. He retired with a record of 93 wins, 25 losses and 1 draw. Died: May 27, 1975 (aged 53) Cause of Death: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)" (From On This Day website) 

Wednesday July 6, 2022

 1971 Louis Armstorng dies. Louis Armstrong or 'Satchmo' as he was also known as, remains one of the most famous and influential jazz artists. He was the leading trumpet player of his day and in his later career, with his famous gravelly voice, was even able to kick The Beatles off the number 1 spot in the charts.
Born and bred in New Orleans, he was educated by the city's early and important jazz scene before moving to play in Chicago jazz bands, recording such hits as "Star Dust" and "La Via En Rose".

From the end of the 1920s Armstrong further developed his singing and is one of the inventors of scat singing. In the 1940s he formed the Louis Armstrong and His All Stars band, producing such famous hits as “Mack the Knife” and "Hello Dolly" Armstrong appeared in more than a dozen Hollywood films, often as himself, singing alongside Bing Crosby in "High Society" and with Barbra Streisand in "Hello Dolly". Born August 4, 1901, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A., Died: July 6, 1971 (aged 69), Cause of Death: Heart attack (From On This Day website) 
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1957 Althea Gibson is first African American to win Wimbledon. Althea Gibson claims the women's singles tennis title at Wimbledon and becomes the first African American to win a championship at London's All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Gibson was born on August 25, 1927, in Silver, South Carolina, and raised in the Harlem section of New York City. She began playing tennis as a teenager and went on to win the national Black women’s championship twice. At a time when tennis was largely segregated, four-time U.S. Nationals winner Alice Marble advocated on Gibson’s behalf and the 5’11” player was invited to make her United States National Championships (now known as the U.S. Open) debut in 1950. In 1956, Gibson’s tennis career took off and she won the singles title at the French Championships (now known as the French Open)—the first African American to do so—as well as the doubles’ title there. In July 1957, Gibson won Wimbledon, defeating Darlene Hard, 6-3, 6-2. (In 1975, Arthur Ashe became the first African American man to win the men’s singles title at Wimbledon, when he defeated Jimmy Connors.) In September 1957, she won the U.S. Open, and the Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year in 1957 and 1958. During the 1950s, Gibson won 56 singles and doubles titles, including 11 major titles.

After winning Wimbledon and the U.S. Open again in 1958, Gibson retired from amateur tennis. In 1960, she toured with the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, playing exhibition tennis matches before their games. In 1964, Gibson joined the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour, the first Black woman to do so. The trailblazing athlete played pro golf until 1971, the same year in which she was voted into the National Lawn Tennis Association Hall of Fame.

After serving as New Jersey’s commissioner of athletics from 1975 to 1985, Althea Gibson died at age 76 from respiratory failure on September 28, 2003, at a hospital in East Orange, New Jersey.

READ MORE: Trailblazing Black Women in Sports  (From History website) 

Tuesday July 5, 2022

 1975 Arthur Ashe becomes the first Black man to win Wimbledon

1946 Bikini introduced (From History website)

1852  Frederick Douglass, fugitive slave, delivers his 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?' speech to the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, condemns the celebration as hypocritical sham (From On This Day website)

Sunday July 3, 2022

1863 Battle of Gettysburg ends - On the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s last attempt at breaking the Union line ends in disastrous failure, bringing the most decisive battle of the American Civil War to an end.In June 1863, following his masterful victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville, General Lee launched his second invasion of the Union in less than a year. He led his 75,000-man Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River, through Maryland, and into Pennsylvania, seeking to win a major battle on Northern soil that would further dispirit the Union war effort and induce Britain or France to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf. The 90,000-strong Army of the Potomac pursued the Confederates into Maryland, but its commander, General Joseph Hooker, was still stinging from his defeat at Chancellorsville and seemed reluctant to chase Lee further. Meanwhile, the Confederates divided their forces and investigated various targets, such as Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania capital.

On June 28, President Abraham Lincoln replaced Hooker with General George Meade, and Lee learned of the presence of the Army of the Potomac in Maryland. Lee ordered his army to concentrate in the vicinity of the crossroads town of Gettysburg and prepare to meet the Federal army. At the same time, Meade sent ahead part of his force into Pennsylvania but intended to make a stand at Pipe Creek in Maryland.
On July 1, a Confederate division under General Henry Heth marched into Gettysburg hoping to seize supplies but finding instead three brigades of Union cavalry. Thus began the Battle of Gettysburg, and Lee and Meade ordered their massive armies to converge on the impromptu battle site. The Union cavalrymen defiantly held the field against overwhelming numbers until the arrival of Federal reinforcements. Later, the Confederates were reinforced, and by mid-afternoon some 19,000 Federals faced 24,000 Confederates. Lee arrived to the battlefield soon afterward and ordered a general advance that forced the Union line back to Cemetery Hill, just south of the town.
During the night, the rest of Meade’s force arrived, and by the morning Union General Winfield Hancock had formed a strong Union line. On July 2, against the Union left, General James Longstreet led the main Confederate attack, but it was not carried out until about 4 p.m., and the Federals had time to consolidate their positions. Thus began some of the heaviest fighting of the battle, and Union forces retained control of their strategic positions at heavy cost. After three hours, the battle ended, and the total number of dead at Gettysburg stood in the thousands.
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READ MORE: How the Battle of Gettysburg Turned the Tide of the Civil War
On July 3, Lee, having failed on the right and the left, planned an assault on Meade’s center. A 15,000-man strong column under General George Pickett was organized, and Lee ordered a massive bombardment of the Union positions. The 10,000 Federals answered the Confederate artillery onslaught, and for more than an hour the guns raged in the heaviest cannonade of the Civil War. At 3 p.m., Pickett led his force into no-man’s-land and found that Lee’s bombardment had failed. As Pickett’s force attempted to cross the mile distance to Cemetery Ridge, Union artillery blew great holes in their lines. Meanwhile, Yankee infantry flanked the main body of “Pickett’s charge” and began cutting down the Confederates. Only a few hundred Virginians reached the Union line, and within minutes they all were dead, dying, or captured. In less than an hour, more than 7,000 Confederate troops had been killed or wounded.
Both armies, exhausted, held their positions until the night of July 4, when Lee withdrew. The Army of the Potomac was too weak to pursue the Confederates, and Lee led his army out of the North, never to invade it again. The Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point in the Civil War, costing the Union 23,000 killed, wounded, or missing in action. The Confederates suffered some 25,000 casualties. On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address during the dedication of a new national cemetery at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. The Civil War effectively ended with the surrender of General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in April 1865. (From History website) 

Friday July 1, 2022

(Image from the Internet)

1867 Canada Day The autonomous Dominion of Canada, a confederation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the future provinces of Ontario and Quebec, is officially recognized by Great Britain with the passage of the British North America Act. July 1 will later become known as Canada Day.During the 19th century, colonial dependence gave way to increasing autonomy for a growing Canada. In 1841, Upper and Lower Canada—now known as Ontario and Quebec—were made a single province by the Act of Union. In the 1860s, a movement for a greater Canadian federation grew out of the need for a common defense, the desire for a national railroad system, and the necessity of finding a solution to the problem of French and British conflict. When the Maritime provinces, which sought union among themselves, called a conference in 1864, delegates from the other provinces of Canada attended. Later in the year, another conference was held in Quebec, and in 1866 Canadian representatives traveled to London to meet with the British government.
On July 1, 1867, with passage of the British North America Act, the Dominion of Canada was officially established as a self-governing entity within the British Empire. Two years later, Canada acquired the vast possessions of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and within a decade the provinces of Manitoba and Prince Edward Island had joined the Canadian federation. In 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, making mass settlement across the vast territory of Canada possible. 
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READ MORE: Canada's Long, Gradual Road to Independence (From History website) 

Monday June 27, 2022

​​​1890 Canadian boxer George Dixon becomes first black world champion when he stops English bantamweight champion Edwin "Nunc" Wallace in 18 rounds in London, England (From On This Day website) 

Canadian boxer George Dixon

​1872 Paul Laurence Dunbar has been called the first great black poet in America. He wrote not only verse but short stories and novels and lyrics during his short career before his premature death from tuberculosis at just 33.
Many of his works were written in black dialect. His first poems were published when he was just 16 in a local newspaper in Dayton. He was school friends with Orville and Wilbur Wright, whose printing company printed the first African American weekly newspaper in Dayton, which Dunbar edited.

Dunbar's first book of short stories "Folks From Dixie" was published in 1898, the same year as his first novel "The Uncalled". Dunbar also wrote the lyrics for the musical " In Dahomey", the first musical produced and performed by African Americans which successfully performed on Broadway in 1903.

Dunbar's work went on to have a tremendous influence on writers during the Harlem Renaissance and later writers including Maya Angelou whose autobiography title "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" is taken from one of Dunbar's poems. Died: February 9, 1906 (aged 33) Cause of Death: Tuberculosis." (From On This Day website)

Saturday June 25, 2022

• 2009 "King of Pop" Michael Jackson dies at age 50
• 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn  - On June 25, 1876, Native American forces led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeat the U.S. Army troops of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn near southern Montana’s Little Bighorn River.

Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, Lakota Sioux leaders, strongly resisted the mid-19th-century efforts of the U.S. government to confine their people to reservations. In 1875, after gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills, the U.S. Army ignored previous treaty agreements and invaded the region. This betrayal led many Sioux and Cheyenne tribesmen to leave their reservations and join Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in Montana. By the late spring of 1876, more than 10,000 Native Americans had gathered in a camp along the Little Bighorn River–which they called the Greasy Grass—in defiance of a U.S. War Department order to return to their reservations or risk being attacked.

In mid-June, three columns of U.S. soldiers lined up against the camp and prepared to march. A force of 1,200 Native Americans turned back the first column on June 17. Five days later, General Alfred Terry ordered Custer’s 7th Cavalry to scout ahead for enemy troops. On the morning of June 25, Custer drew near the camp and decided to press on ahead rather than wait for reinforcements.

READ MORE: What Really Happened at the Battle of the Little Bighorn?

At mid-day, Custer’s 600 men entered the Little Bighorn Valley. Among the Native Americans, word quickly spread of the impending attack. The older Sitting Bull rallied the warriors and saw to the safety of the women and children, while Crazy Horse set off with a large force to meet the attackers head on. Despite Custer’s desperate attempts to regroup his men, they were quickly overwhelmed. Custer and some 200 men in his battalion were attacked by as many as 3,000 Native Americans; within an hour, Custer and every last one of his soldier were dead.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn—also called Custer’s Last Stand—marked the most decisive Native American victory and the worst U.S. Army defeat in the long Plains Indian War. The gruesome fate of Custer and his men outraged many white Americans and confirmed their image of the Native Americans as "wild." Meanwhile, the U.S. government increased its efforts to subdue the tribes. Within five years, almost all of the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne would be confined to reservations." (From History website and On This Day website)

Friday June 24, 2022

1997 U.S. Air Force reports on Roswell - U.S. Air Force officials release a 231-page report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash in Roswell, New Mexico, almost exactly 50 years earlier.

READ MORE: What Really Happened at Roswell? 

Public interest in Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, began to flourish in the 1940s, when developments in space travel and the dawn of the atomic age caused many Americans to turn their attention to the skies. The town of Roswell, located near the Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico, became a magnet for UFO believers due to the strange events of early July 1947, when ranch foreman W.W. Brazel found a strange, shiny material scattered over some of his land. He turned the material over to the sheriff, who passed it on to authorities at the nearby Air Force base. On July 8, Air Force officials announced they had recovered the wreckage of a “flying disk.” A local newspaper put the story on its front page, launching Roswell into the spotlight of the public’s UFO fascination. 

READ MORE: How the U.S. Air Force Investigated UFOs During the Cold War

The Air Force soon took back their story, however, saying the debris had been merely a downed weather balloon. Aside from die-hard UFO believers, or “ufologists,” public interest in the so-called “Roswell Incident” faded until the late 1970s, when claims surfaced that the military had invented the weather balloon story as a cover-up. Believers in this theory argued that officials had in fact retrieved several alien bodies from the crashed spacecraft, which were now stored in the mysterious Area 51 installation in Nevada. Seeking to dispel these suspicions, the Air Force issued a 1,000-page report in 1994 stating that the crashed object was actually a high-altitude weather balloon launched from a nearby missile test-site as part of a classified experiment aimed at monitoring the atmosphere in order to detect Soviet nuclear tests.

INTERACTIVE MAP: UFO Sightings Taken Seriously by the U.S. Government

On July 24, 1997, barely a week before the extravagant 50th anniversary celebration of the incident, the Air Force released yet another report on the controversial subject. Titled “The Roswell Report, Case Closed,” the document stated definitively that there was no Pentagon evidence that any kind of life form was found in the Roswell area in connection with the reported UFO sightings, and that the “bodies” recovered were not aliens but dummies used in parachute tests conducted in the region. Any hopes that this would put an end to the cover-up debate were in vain, as furious ufologists rushed to point out the report’s inconsistencies. With conspiracy theories still alive and well on the Internet, Roswell continues to thrive as a tourist destination for UFO enthusiasts far and wide, hosting the annual UFO Encounter Festival each July and welcoming visitors year-round to its International UFO Museum and Research Center. (From History website) 

1864 Colorado governor orders Native Americans to Sand Creek reservation - Colorado Governor John Evans warns that all peaceful Native Americans in the region must report to the Sand Creek reservation or risk being attacked, creating the conditions that will lead to the Sand Creek Massacre.

Evans’ offer of sanctuary was at best halfhearted. His primary goal in 1864 was to eliminate all Native American activity in eastern Colorado Territory, an accomplishment he hoped would increase his popularity and eventually win him a U.S. Senate seat. Immediately after ordering the local Native Americans to the reservation, Evans issued a second proclamation that invited white settlers to indiscriminately “kill and destroy all…hostile Indians.” At the same time, Evans began creating a temporary 100-day militia force to wage war on the Native Americans. He placed the new regiment under the command of Colonel John Chivington, another ambitious man who hoped to gain high political office by fighting Native Americans.

The Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe peoples of eastern Colorado were unaware of these duplicitous political maneuverings. Although some bands had violently resisted white settlers in years past, by the autumn of 1864 many Native Americans were becoming more receptive to Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle’s argument that they must make peace. Black Kettle had recently returned from a visit to Washington, D.C., where President Abraham Lincoln had given him a huge American flag of which Black Kettle was very proud. He had seen the vast numbers of the white people and their powerful machines. The Native Americans, Black Kettle argued, must make peace or be crushed.

When word of Governor Evans’ June 24 offer of sanctuary reached the Native Americans, however, most of the Indians remained distrustful and were unwilling to give up the fight. Only Black Kettle and a few lesser chiefs took Evans up on his offer of amnesty. In truth, Evans and Chivington were reluctant to see hostilities further abate before they had won a glorious victory, but they grudgingly promised Black Kettle his people would be safe if they came to Fort Lyon in eastern Colorado. In November 1864, the Indians reported to the fort as requested. Major Edward Wynkoop, the commanding federal officer, told Black Kettle to settle his band about 40 miles away on Sand Creek, where he promised they would be safe.

Wynkoop, however, could not control John Chivington. By November, the 100-day enlistment of the soldiers in his Colorado militia was nearly up, and Chivington had seen no action. His political stock was rapidly falling, and he seems to have become almost insane in his desire to kill Native Americans. “I long to be wading in gore!” he is said to have proclaimed at a dinner party. In this demented state, Chivington apparently concluded that it did not matter whether he killed peaceful or hostile Indians. In his mind, Black Kettle’s village on Sand Creek became a legitimate and easy target.

At daybreak on November 29, 1864, Chivington led 700 men, many of them drunk, in a savage assault on Black Kettle’s peaceful village. Most of the Cheyenne warriors were away hunting. In the awful hours that followed, Chivington and his men brutally slaughtered 105 women and children and killed 28 men. The soldiers scalped and mutilated the corpses, carrying body parts back to display in Denver as trophies. Amazingly, Black Kettle and a number of other Cheyenne managed to escape.

In the following months, the nation learned of Chivington’s treachery at Sand Creek, and many Americans reacted with horror and disgust. By then, Chivington and his soldiers had left the military and were beyond reach of a court-martial. Chivington’s political ambitions, however, were ruined, and he spent the rest of his inconsequential life wandering the West. The scandal over Sand Creek also forced Evans to resign and dashed his hopes of holding political office. Evans did, however, go on to a successful and lucrative career building and operating Colorado railroads.

READ MORE: Native American History Timeline

Wednesday June 22, 2022

1783 Zong slave ship trial - Hearing arguments in the case of the Zong, a slave ship, the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in London states that a massacre of enslaved African “was the same as if Horses had been thrown over board” on June 22, 1783. The crew of the Zong had thrown at least 142 captive Africans into the sea, but the question before the court was not who had committed this atrocity but rather whether the lost “cargo” was covered by insurance. The trial laid bare the horror and inhumanity of the Atlantic slave trade and galvanized the nascent movement to abolish it.

The Zong left Accra in August of 1781, carrying 442 enslaved Africans and bound for the colonial plantations of Jamaica. As was common in the slave trade, the Zong was grossly overcrowded, carrying more than double the amount of people a ship its size could safely transport. Running low on water and having lengthened their journey due to a navigation error, the crew voted to jettison some of its human “cargo” in order to ensure the safe delivery of the rest, a loss for which the shipping company could be compensated under British law. Over the course of several days, the crew threw at least 122 Africans overboard. The Zong arrived in Black River, Jamaica with 208 enslaved people on board.

READ MORE: Details of Brutal First Slave Voyages Discovered 

The trial commenced in March of 1783, and the court found that the insurance company was liable for the damages, as enslaved people were the same as any other cargo. Two months later, the Chief Justice overturned the decision due to new evidence, but his statement that the enslaved were equivalent to horses remained the opinion of Britain’s highest court.

Formerly enslaved man and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano told the abolitionist Granville Sharp of the Zong affair, leading Sharp to explore the possibility of having the crew tried for murder. Nothing approaching that level of justice would ever touch those responsible for the massacre, but Sharp and Equiano’s efforts to publicize the story did build momentum for the abolitionist movement. A few months after the Zong trial, the Society of Friends began to campaign against slavery, and the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded four years later. Thanks largely to their efforts, in which the story of the Zong featured prominently, Parliament outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833.

READ MORE: U.S. Slavery: Timeline, Figures & Abolition (From History website) 

Tuesday June 21, 2022

(Image courtesy of/& used with permission)

Sunday June 19, 2022

(Image from LinkedIn)

 1865 Abolition of slavery announced in Texas on "Juneteenth" In what is now known as Juneteenth, on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrive in Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War is over and slavery in the United States is abolished. 

A mix of June and 19th, Juneteenth has become a day to commemorate the end of slavery in America. Despite the fact that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued more than two years earlier on January 1, 1863, a lack of Union troops in the rebel state of Texas made the order difficult to enforce. 

Some historians blame the lapse in time on poor communication in that era, while others believe Texan slave-owners purposely withheld the information.

READ MORE: What Is Juneteenth?
Upon arrival and leading the Union soldiers, Major Gen. Gordon Granger announced General Order No. 3: "The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere."

On that day, 250,000 enslaved people were freed, and despite the message to stay and work for their owners, many left the state immediately and headed north or to nearby states in search of family members who had been taken to other regions during slavery.
For many African Americans, June 19 is considered an independence day. Before 2021, nearly all 50 states recognized Juneteenth as a state holiday. On June 17, 2021, President Biden signed legislation officially declaring it a federal holiday." (From History website)

1968 “Solidarity Day” rally at Resurrection City a long-term anti-poverty demonstration known as Resurrection City reaches its high-water mark. On “Solidarity Day,” over 50,000 people flock to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to protest, sing, hear speeches and demonstrate on behalf of national legislation to address the plight of the American poor. “Today is really only the beginning,” Rev. Ralph Abernathy tells the crowd. “We will not give up the battle until the Congress of the United States decides to open the doors of America and allow the nation’s poor to enter as full-fledged citizens into this land of wealth and opportunity.” (From History website)

Thursday June 16, 2022

1858 Lincoln warns that America is becoming a “house divided” newly nominated senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln addresses the Illinois Republican Convention in Springfield and warns that the nation faces a crisis that could destroy the Union. Speaking to more than 1,000 delegates in an ominous tone, Lincoln paraphrased a passage from the New Testament: “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”READ MORE: Why Lincoln's 'House Divided' Speech Was So Important
The issue dividing the nation was slavery’s place in the growing western territories and the extent of federal power over individual states’ rights. Lincoln declared that only the federal government had the power to end slavery. While the southern states relied on an economy and lifestyle dependent upon the labor provided by enslaved African Americans, the North opposed slavery. The northern states also considered industrialization and manufacturing the key to America’s economic future, not farming. The entrance of new states into the Union, such as Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska, brought to a head unresolved conflicts over which government entity—state or federal—should make the final decision regarding slavery. For his part, Lincoln firmly believed that slavery was immoral and was wholly incompatible with the principles of the Declaration of Independence embodied in the phrase “all men are created equal.” However, Lincoln prioritized preserving the Union above all else." (from History website)

Wednesday June 15, 2022

1877 First African American graduate of West Point Henry Ossian Flipper, born into slavery in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1856, becomes the first African American cadet to graduate from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York on June 15, 1877. The United States Military Academy—the first military school in America—was founded by Congress in 1802 for the purpose of educating and training young men in the theory and practice of military science. Established at West Point, New York, the U.S. Military Academy is often simply known as West Point.
In 1870, the first African American cadet, James Webster Smith, was admitted to West Point but never reached the graduation ceremonies. It was not until 1877 that Henry Ossian Flipper became the first Black cadet to graduate. 
Flipper was born to enslaved parents but came of age in Atlanta during Reconstruction. He was educated at American Missionary Association schools and Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University). In 1873, he was appointed to West Point. As he later wrote in his 1878 autobiography, The Colored Cadet at West Point, he was socially ostracized by white peers and professors during his four years there. 
After graduation, Flipper was appointed to serve as second lieutenant in the all-African American 10th Cavalry and stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. The Ninth and 10th Cavalry were regiments of Black enlisted men who became known as the Buffalo Soldiers." (From History website)

Saturday June 11, 2022

(Image courtesy of/& used with permission)

Tuesday May 31, 2022

​1921 Tulsa Race Massacre begins

'Beginning on the night of May 31, 1921, thousands of white citizens in Tulsa, Oklahoma descended on the city’s predominantly Black Greenwood District, burning homes and businesses to the ground and killing hundreds of people. Long mischaracterized as a race riot, rather than mass murder, the Tulsa Race Massacre stands as one of the worst incidents of racial violence in the nation’s history.
In the years following World War I, segregation was the law of the land, and the Ku Klux Klan was gaining ground—not only in the Jim Crow South, but across the United States. Amid that charged environment, Tulsa’s African American community was nationally recognized for its affluence. The Greenwood District, known as “Black Wall Street,” boasted more than 300 Black-owned businesses, including two movie theaters, doctors’ offices and pharmacies.

READ MORE: Tulsa's 'Black Wall Street' Flourished as a Self-Contained Hub in Early 1900s

On May 30, 1921, a young Black man named Dick Rowland entered an elevator in an office building in downtown Tulsa. At some point, Rowland was alone in the elevator with its white operator, Sarah Page. It’s unclear what happened next (one common version is that Rowland stepped on Page’s foot) but Page screamed, and Rowland fled the scene. The next day, the police arrested him.

Rumors about the incident spread quickly through Tulsa’s white community, some members of which undoubtedly resented the prosperity of the Greenwood District. After a story published in the Tulsa Tribune on the afternoon of May 31 claimed that Rowland had attempted to rape Page, an angry white mob gathered in front of the courthouse, demanding that Rowland be handed over.

Seeking to prevent a lynching, a group of some 75 Black men arrived on the scene that night, some of them World War I veterans who were carrying weapons. After a white man tried to disarm a Black veteran and the gun went off, chaos broke out.

READ MORE: What Role Did Airplanes Play in the Tulsa Race Massacre?

Over the next 24 hours, thousands of white rioters poured into the Greenwood District, shooting unarmed Black citizens in the streets and burning an area of some 35 city blocks, including more than 1,200 Black-owned houses, numerous businesses, a school, a hospital and a dozen churches. Historians believe as many as 300 people were killed in the rampage, though official counts at the time were much lower.

By the time Governor James Robertson declared martial law, and National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa by noon on June 1, the Greenwood District lay in ruins. Survivors of the massacre worked to rebuild the neighborhood, but segregation remained in force in Tulsa (and the nation) and racial tensions only grew, even as the massacre and its lingering scars were left largely unacknowledged by the white community for decades to come.

In 1997, the Oklahoma state legislature created the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (later renamed the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission), which studied the massacre and recommended that reparations be paid to the remaining Black survivors. City officials continue to investigate the events of May 31-June 1, 1921, and to search for unmarked graves used to bury the massacre’s many victims." (From History website)

LISTEN: Blindspot: Tulsa Burning from The HISTORY® Channel and WNYC Studios

Thursday May 26, 2022

1968 Resurrection City In May 1968, poor people from all over the country came to the National Mall and made temporary homes in plywood shelters, creating a settlement they called Resurrection City. The protest began less than two months after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and grew out of the Poor People’s Campaign and the campaign for an Economic Bill of Rights, both of which had been major focuses of King’s at the time of his death. The goal was to convince legislators of the need for laws that would lift poor people of all races out of poverty, and to sway public opinion by making the plight of the poor impossible to ignore. Protesters came from all over the country—“caravans” drove from as far away as Los Angeles and Seattle while a “Freedom Train” brought people from Memphis and one group from Marks, Mississippi rode mule-drawn wagons.

READ MORE: When Protesters Occupied D.C. for Six Weeks to Demand Economic Justice
Marches and demonstrations took place in Washington as more and more activists arrived throughout May, including a Mother’s Day march organized by the National Welfare Rights Organization and led by Coretta Scott King. Ethel Kennedy, wife of Sen. Robert Kennedy, was involved with the demonstrations, and his funeral procession stopped at Resurrection City on June 8, following his assassination on June 5. Businesses, schools and other fixtures of normal life flourished within the settlement, which also saw conflicts stemming from animosities between different groups living there, leadership disputes and the inherent uncertainty of living in makeshift dwellings on the National Mall. During this time, leaders of the movement met and testified before members of Congress. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, dubbed the “mayor” of Resurrection City, sought to lift spirits with his sermons, one of which became famous for the chant of “I am somebody!” which temporarily re-energized the protesters. The original permit issued by the National Parks Service expired a few days before Solidarity Day, but it was extended by four days.

After being moved due to an internal conflict among organizers, Solidarity Day took place on Juneteenth and was attended by over 50,000 people. Abernathy and Coretta Scott King spoke, along with leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Native American activist Martha Grass, the president of the United Auto Workers (80 busloads of UAW members were in attendance) and Democratic presidential hopefuls Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey.

The day may well have gone down as a powerful and peaceful day of activism on par with the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but the conclusion to the story of Resurrection City was far less inspiring. Allegedly in response to rocks thrown at them from the camp, and with the Parks Service permit expiring, the police moved to evict residents on June 23, firing tear gas into Resurrection City and rounding up its occupants for arrest. One SCLC leader remembered the eviction as “worse than anything I saw in Mississippi or Alabama.”

Today, Solidarity Day and Resurrection City are footnotes in the overall story of the civil rights movement, overshadowed by earlier, more successful protests and by the violence and conflict that defined 1968. At the time, however, the settlement by the Reflecting Pool was impossible to ignore—particularly for lawmakers and residents of Washington, D.C.—and regardless of its failure to achieve sweeping social change or anti-poverty legislation, it remains one of the largest and most sustained social justice protests in the history of the United States.
​
READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement Timeline (From History website)

Saturday May 21, 2022

1539 Black Spanish explorer Estevan is reported killed

"​Word reaches Fray Marcos that Native Americans have killed his guide Estevan, a Black enslaved man who was the first non-Indian to visit the pueblo lands of the American Southwest.

Thought to have been born sometime around 1500 on the west coast of Morocco, Estevan was sold to the Spanish as an enslaved worker. He ended up in the hands of Andres Dorantes de Carranza, who took him on an ill-fated expedition to Florida in 1527. A series of disasters reduced the original exploratory party of 300 to four men: Estevan, Dorantes de Carranza, Cabeza de Vaca, and Alonso del Castillo. The four survivors lived with Indians on the Gulf of Mexico for several years before finally heading west in hopes of reaching Mexico City. With the assistance of Spanish slave hunters they encountered, they finally made it to Mexico City in 1536, where their amazing story of survival caused a sensation....​However, it was Estevan, not the white nobleman Coronado, who was the first non-Indian to penetrate the southwest territory.

Thrusday May 17, 2022

Ceremony planned to mark anniversary of discovery of unmarked graves at former residential school site

The elderly Black Buffalo victims survived Jim Crow. Then they went shopping in 2022.

Wednesday May 18, 2022

Reconstruction II: The First Presidential Impeachment

"Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. join host Sally to discuss W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction,... the great project of rebuilding the nation after the Civil War. What made many members of Congress declare President Andrew Johnson unfit to lead that effort? And what motivated this former ally of Abraham Lincoln to declare himself an enemy of true Reconstruction? (From History website)" Listen to the podcast.

1980 Mount St. Helens erupts "At 8:32 a.m. PDT on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens, a volcanic peak in southwestern Washington, suffers a massive eruption, killing 57 people and devastating some 210 square miles of wilderness. Called Louwala-Clough, or “the Smoking Mountain,” by Native Americans, Mount St. Helens is located in the Cascade Range and stood 9,680 feet before its eruption. The volcano has erupted periodically during the last 4,500 years, and the last active period was between 1831 and 1857. On March 20, 1980, noticeable volcanic activity began with a series of earth tremors centered on the ground just beneath the north flank of the mountain. These earthquakes escalated, and on March 27 a minor eruption occurred, and Mount St. Helens began emitting steam and ash through its crater and vents." (From History website) 
​

Tuesday May 17, 2022

1954 - Brown v. Board of Ed is decided

"In a major civil rights victory, the U.S. Supreme Court hands down an unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruling that racial segregation in public educational facilities is unconstitutional. The historic decision, which brought an end to federal tolerance of racial segregation, specifically dealt with Linda Brown, a young African American girl who had been denied admission to her local elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, because of the color of her skin." (From History website) 
​

Friday May 13, 2022

Canada Post unveils its innovative new parcel facility named after civil rights hero Albert Jackson

Le​gacy of pioneering Black advocate, publisher honoured with sculpture

(Image courtesy of/& used with permission)

(Image courtesy of/& used with permission)

On May 12, 2022, the unveiling of a sculpture of Mary Ann Shadd Cary by Sculptor Donna Mayne occurred in downtown Windsor at Windsor Hall at the University of Windsor. The pictures above were taken by a friend, Jim Shreve. 

Thursday May 12, 2022

Poem that J. Norma Watson, second-year graduate student at Penn State University, presented at the Transatlantic Memories, Blackness, and African Diasporic Identity: Now and in the Future Conference, by the Harriet Tubman Institute.

Tuesday May 10, 2022

Happy National Nurses Week

​Canada Post celebrates the incomparable Salome Bey 

"On April 22, 2022, Canada Post launch[ed] a new commemorative stamp to honour the legendary Salome Bey. Fans of the acclaimed singer know her as Canada’s First Lady of the Blues, but Bey’s legacy far exceeds the title."

(2022, ©Canada Post Corporation, copied with permission)

Getting started
​
"Initially, Bey – who was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey – intended to become a lawyer. But after spending time studying law at Rutgers University, she decided to dedicate her life to performance where she felt she could make a greater impact on a larger number of people.
She began her musical career in the 1950s touring North America and Europe with her brother and sister as Andy Bey and the Bey Sisters. In the early 1960s – after meeting her future husband, Howard Matthews, in Toronto – she made Canada her home and went on to pursue a solo career.
The pair became leaders in the Black artist community, hosting local and touring performers in their home, which was always filled with music. It was here, in Canada, that Bey flourished creatively. She began writing songs, testing new boundaries and constantly evolving herself as an artist." (From Canada Post website)

Writer, producer, director, mentor

"Bey started appearing in musicals, such as the off-Broadway Love Me, Love My Children (Justine in Canada), for which she earned an Obie Award in 1972, and Broadway’s Tony Award–winning Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, which earned her and other performers a Grammy nomination for the original cast recording.

Among her many achievements, she wrote and starred in Indigo, a revue celebrating the history of Black music. Running from 1978 to 1980 to sold-out audiences, the show was a critical hit. It earned her two Dora Mavor Moore Awards, and was later brought to TV, airing on CBC in 1984. Featuring an all-Black cast, the show fulfilled her desire to create more meaningful opportunities for Black artists.

“I ended up doing several different pieces in Indigo and I just felt like wow she really loves what I do. She made me feel exceptional and that I had the talent and ability to perform these works,” says four-time Juno Award Winner, Vocalist Billy Newton-Davis. “She instilled that in me, that I was worthy.”

After Indigo, Bey went on to write more theatre productions. She wrote and starred in Shimmytime (1983) about American performer Ethel Waters, and she wrote and directed Madame Gertrude (1985) about blues legend Ma Rainey.

Her beloved children’s musical Rainboworld – which in 1988 was performed at the Young People’s Theatre – featured a cast of more than 40 children. Many in the diverse young cast got their first taste of performing through the show and Bey thrust herself into a mentoring role. Several of the performers would go on to have successful careers in the arts.

“I remember being enthralled by this woman who was so comfortable in her, for lack of a better term, in her Blackness,” says Toronto singer Divine Brown, who as a youth was part of the Rainboworld cast. “As a young aspiring singer and actor just wanting to be on stage, what Salome provided for me was hope and confidence… She had so much to give.”

Throughout her career, Bey continued singing for audiences. From blues to jazz to pop, she sang at festivals and concerts, in clubs, and on TV and radio. She also released several solo albums and appeared on recordings with the likes of jazz pianist Horace Silver and composer/pianist Galt MacDermot. She later performed with her daughters, TUkU and SATE, along with other musicians as Salome Bey and the Relatives." (From Canada Post website)

(2022, ©Canada Post Corporation, copied with permission)

Awards and giving back

"Always willing to contribute to charitable initiatives, Bey participated in the charity single “Tears Are Not Enough” in support of Ethiopian famine relief in 1985 and was also a member of Artists Against Racism. She was a key organizer of and songwriter for the 1986 Toronto Arts Against Apartheid Festival – the event, which was attended by the then Bishop Desmond Tutu, was held to protest apartheid in South Africa and to raise funds for local Toronto charities.
​
Over her career, Bey received several awards and honours, including a Toronto Arts Award (1992), the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award from Montréal’s Black Theatre Workshop (1996) and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012). In 2005, she became an Honorary Member of the Order of Canada, and in 2021 was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame.
Salome Bey passed away August 8, 2020, in Toronto." (From Canada Post website)
​

Sunday May 8, 2022

(Image from the Government of Canada website)

Download the Asian Heritage Month 2022 PDF poster 

• 1963 Sean Connery stars in his first Bond movie, "Dr. No"
  
• 1753 Phillis Wheatley [born on this day] was both the second published African-American poet and first published African-American woman.  The publication of her "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral" (1773) brought her fame both in England and the American colonies leading to historical figures such as George Washington praising her work.  [She] died December 5, 1784 at 31 years old. (From On This Day.com website)

Friday May 6, 2022

2004 Final episode of "Friends" airs on NBC
​1994 English Channel tunnel opens
1961 George Clooney turns 61 years old 
​1942 All American forces in the Philippines surrender unconditionally
1940 John Steinbeck wins a Pulitzer for "The Grapes of Wrath"
1931 Possibly the greatest all-around baseball player of all-time, Willie Mays is 91 years old 
1937  German airship Hindenburg explodes in flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 35 of the 97 on board and 1 on the ground
1895 Silent Film Idol Rudolph Valentino born in Italy (died August 23, 1926, aged 31)
1840  World's first adhesive postage stamp, the "Penny Black", is first used in Great Britain
1626  Dutch colonist Peter Minuit organizes the purchase of Manhattan Island from Native Americans for 60 guilders worth of goods, believed to have been Canarsee Indians of the Lenape

Thursday May 5, 2022

Grade 9 student delivers powerful speech about racism and change in national competition 

​(Listens to the full speech 1:00:218)
​

Wednesday May 4, 2022

May the Fourth be with you!

National Candied Orange Peel Day
​National Orange Juice Day
​National Renewal Day
​National Skilled Trades Day​
National Weather Observers Day

• 1990 Electric chair malfunctions in Florida, leading states to change execution methods
• 1979  Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman to be elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• 1972 "The Don't Make A Wave Committee," a fledgling environmental organization founded in Canada in 1971, officially changes its name to the "Greenpeace Foundation"
• 1970 National Guard kills four students in Kent State shootings
• 1966 Willie Mays breaks National League home run record
• 1961 The first Freedom Ride departs from Washington, D.C. 
• 1929 Legendary actress Audrey Hepburn is born
• ​1916 Germany agrees to limit its submarine warfare
• 1910 Wilfrid Laurier passes the Naval Service Act, which creates the Royal Canadian Navy
• 1905 The U.S. officially begins construction on the Panama Canal
• 1865 President Lincoln is buried in Springfield, Illinois
• 1776 Rhode Island becomes first colony to declare independence from England​

Monday May 2, 2022

"1933 Loch Ness "Monster" sighted for the first time, igniting the modern legend. The modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster is born when a sighting makes local news on May 2, 1933. "The newspaper Inverness Courier relates an account of a local couple who claim to have seen “an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface.” The story of the “monster” (a moniker chosen by the Courier editor) becomes a media phenomenon, with London newspapers sending correspondents to Scotland and a circus offering a 20,000 pound sterling reward for capture of the beast." (From History website) 

National Brothers and Sisters Day
Early May Bank Holiday 
Melanoma Monday 
National Life Insurance Day 
National Truffle Day ​

• 2011  Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI's most wanted man is killed by US special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan
• 2008  Cyclone Nargis makes landfall in Myanmar killing over 130,000 people and leaving millions of people homeless
• 1982  Falklands War: Argentine cruiser General Belgrano sunk by British submarine Conqueror, killing more than 350 men
• 1972 Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson's 50th birthday  
• 1967 Stanley Cup Final, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, ON: Terry Sawchuk makes 40 saves as Toronto Maple Leafs beat Montreal Canadiens, 3-1 in Game 6 to take title, 4-2 (From Today 
• ​1945  More than 1,000,000 German soldiers officially surrender to the Western Allies in Italy and Austria
• 1945  World War II: Battle of Berlin ends as Soviet army takes Berlin and General Weidling surrenders
• 1949  Arthur Miller wins Pulitzer Prize for "Death of a Salesman"
• 1844 Elijah McCoy, Canadian-American inventor of African descent, notable for his 57 US patents (lubrication of steam engines), born in Colchester, Ontario (d. 1929)​

Sunday May 1, 2022

Ontario's First Long-Term Care Home For Afro-Caribbean Community to be Built in Durham 

Setting the record straight - Updating four Black history plaques
​

(Image from the Internet)

National Lemonade Day​
National Chocolate Parfait Day
National Infertility Survival Day​
National Mother Goose Day

• 1960 U-2 spy plane shot down over Soviet Union
• 1958 ​the match was born by Chemist John Walker
• 1931  Empire State Building opens in New York City​
• 1915 International Congress of Women adopts resolutions on peace, women's suffrage
• 1896 Seven days after parliament was dissolved, Charles Tupper is sworn in as the 6th Prime Minister of Canada
• 1886  US general strike for 8-hour working day begins
• ​1852 Adventurer and performer Calamity Jane is born
• ​1851 First-ever "Great Exhibition" opens in London
• 1738 - King of Hawaii, Kamehameha I was born. He united the Hawaiian islands and formally established the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1810
• 1707  Acts of Union comes into force, uniting England and Scotland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain

Friday April 29, 2022

A Rare Black Moon Is Going to Coincide With Tomorrow's Solar Eclipse — How to See It

Charles Young: A century after his death, the first Black US Army colonel is promoted to general

Hate crimes in Hamilton in 2021 hit highest number in recent history

International Dance Day
National Arbor Day
​National Hairball Awareness Day
National Peace Rose Day
​National Shrimp Scampi Day
National Zipper Day

• 2004 World War II monument opens in Washington, D.C.
• 1997  Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 comes into force, outlaws production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons among its signatories
• 1992 Riots erupt in Los Angeles after police officers are acquitted in Rodney King trial
• 1991  Cyclone strikes the Chittagong district in Bangladesh, killing 139,000 people and leaving 10 million homeless
• 1990  Wrecking cranes began tearing down the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate
• 1975  Vietnam War: US begins to evacuate its citizens from Saigon in Operation Frequent Wind in response to advancing North Vietnamese forces, bringing an end to US involvement in the war
• 1968 "Hair" premieres on Broadway
• 1945  US Army liberates 31,601 people from the Dachau Nazi concentration camp in Germany
• 1916  Irish republicans abandon the post office in Dublin and surrender unconditionally, marking the end of the Easter Rising
• ​1864  Battle of Gate Pa (Pukehinahina): 1,700 British troops suffer their worst defeat of the New Zealand Wars at the hands of 230 entrenched Maori warriors in Tauranga
• ​1862  New Orleans falls to Union forces during US Civil War
• 1854 First African American college chartered
• 1429 Joan of Arc relieves Orleans​

Thursday April 28, 2022

Historic Black town lies one hurricane away from disaster 

Meet 10 Black Icons Who’ve Shaped Fashion History

National Superhero Day
Great Poetry Reading Day
National Blueberry Pie Day
​National BraveHearts Day
National Kids and Pets Day
Stop Food Waste Day
Take Our Kids To Work Day

• 1967 Muhammad Ali refuses Army induction
• 1945 Benito Mussolini executed
• 1937  1st commercial flight across Pacific operated by Pan Am
• 1910  First night air flight by Claude Grahame-White in England
• 1789  Fletcher Christian leads a mutiny on HMS Bounty against its captain William Bligh in the South Pacific
• ​1611  Establishment of the Pontifical and Royal University of Santo Tomas, The Catholic University of the Philippines, oldest existing university in Asia and largest Catholic university in the world

Wednesday April 27, 2022

(Image from the Internet credit: Latestly.com)

International Guide Dog Day
​Babe Ruth Day
​Denim Day - Sexual assault victims deserve all your support and your voice this Denim Day!
National Devil Dog Day 
National Prime Rib Day
National Tell A Story Day
Yom HaShoah -  is a Holocaust Remembrance Day 

• 2009 GM announces plans to phase out Pontiac
• 2005  The superjumbo jet aircraft Airbus A380 makes its first flight from Toulouse, France
  
• 1994 South Africa holds first multiracial elections
• 1993 D.A. announces negligence caused death of "The Crow" actor Brandon Lee
• 1967 Expo 67 opens in Montreal, Canada, featuring a giant Biosphere designed by Buckminster Fuller
• 1959 The last Canadian missionary leaves the People's Republic of China.
• 1904  The Australian Labor Party under Prime Minister Chris Watson becomes the first Labor government in the world
• 1865 Union soldiers die in steamship explosion (From History website) killing 1,800 of the 2,427 passengers in the greatest maritime disaster in United States history (From On This Day website)
• 4977 B.C. Universe is created, according to Kepler. On April 27, 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science. Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets. Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Germany. As a university student, he studied the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ theories of planetary ordering. Copernicus (1473-1543) believed that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, a theory that contradicted the prevailing view of the era that the sun revolved around the earth....Kepler’s research was slow to gain widespread traction during his lifetime, but it later served as a key influence on the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and his law of gravitational force....Kepler’s calculation about the universe’s birthday, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years. (From History website) 

Tuesday April 26, 2022

National Pretzel Day
​Audubon Day - Learn about an enduring conservation legacy, complete with some fun tips and activity suggestions.
Get Organized Day
​National Dissertation Day
​National Help A Horse Day

Richter Scale DayRichter Scale DayToday we pay a tribute to the man who invented the Richter scale.

• 2005  Under international pressure, Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troop military garrison in Lebanon, ending its 29-year military domination of that country.
• 1994 TV series "Due South" about Canadian Mounties starring Paul Gross premieres in Canada
• ​1986  World's worst nuclear disaster: 4th reactor at Chernobyl nuclear power station in USSR explodes, 31 die, radioactive contamination reaches much of Western Europe
• 1977 Studio 54 opens in New York City
• 1956  First modern container ship, the Ideal X, leaves Port Newark, New Jersey for Houston, Texas
• 1954 Polio vaccine trials begin
• 1954 Geneva Conference to resolve problems in Asia begins
• 1920 Ice hockey makes its Olympic debut at the Antwerp Games with center Frank Fredrickson scoring 7 goals in Canada's 12-1 drubbing of Sweden in the gold medal match
• 1920  Harlow Shapley and Heber D. Curtis hold "great debate" on the nature of nebulae, galaxies and size of the universe at US National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.
• 1478  Pazzi conspirators attack Lorenzo de'Medici and kill Giuliano de'Medici in Florence

Monday April 25, 2022

10 Incredible Asian-Canadians You Didn’t Learn About in History Class

It's National Volunteer Week!

(Image courtesy of/& used with permission)

"National Volunteer Week runs from April 24-30. Please join us in celebrating the many volunteers who support Oxford County Library programs. The theme for National Volunteer Week this year is Empathy in Action. Empathy is at the heart of stronger communities and our volunteers put empathy into action by providing books to individuals in our Home Outreach Program and by being caring literacy mentors in our Virtual Reading Buddies Program. Thank you so much to all our volunteers!" (From Oxford County Library e-newsletter) 

National Hug a Plumber Day
​National Telephone Day
World Malaria Day
​Anzac Day - one of Australia and New Zealand's most important and revered national occasions
National DNA Day
​National Hairstylist Appreciation Day
National Lingerie Day
​National Zucchini Bread Day

• 2015 Magnitude 7.8 earthquake kills thousands in Nepal
• 1990 Hubble Space Telescope placed in orbit
• 1985 For 2nd time, Wayne Gretzky, scores 7 points in a Cup game (3 goals, 4 assists)
• 1954  Bell labs announces the 1st Solar Battery made from silicon. It has about 6% efficiency.
• 1953  Francis Crick and James Watson's discovery of the double helix structure of DNA is published in "Nature" magazine
• 1950 Chuck Cooper becomes first African American selected in NBA draft
• 1917 Jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald is born
• 1859 Ground broken for Suez Canal
• 1849 The Governor General of Canada, Lord Elgin, signs the Rebellion Losses Bill, outraging Montreal's English population and triggering the Montreal Riots.
• 1846  Thornton Affair: Open conflict begins over the disputed border of Texas, triggering the Mexican–American War
• 1792  Guillotine first used in France, executes highwayman Nicolas Pelletier
• 1719 Daniel Defoe publishes "Robinson Crusoe", regarded as the 1st English novel​

Saturday April 23, 2022 

National Email Day
​National Cherry Cheesecake Day
​National Lost Dogs Awareness Day
​National Lover's Day
National Picnic Day
​National Take a Chance Day
Shakespeare Day
​St. George's Day - The patron saint of England has captivated British imaginations since the Crusades and Hundred Years' War
Talk Like Shakespeare Day 
​UN English Language Day
​World Book Day​

• 1984  AIDS--virus identified as HTLV-III (acquired immune deficiency syndrome)
• 1968  1st decimal coins issued in Britain (5 & 10 new pence, replacing shilling and two-shilling pieces)
• 1961 Judy Garland plays Carnegie Hall
• 1954 Hank Aaron hits first home run of his MLB career
• 1861  Robert E. Lee named commander of Virginia Confederate forces (US Civil War)
• 1851 Canada issues its 1st postage stamps
• 1597  William Shakespeare's "The Merry Wives of Windsor" is first performed, with Queen Elizabeth I of England in attendance
• 1564 William Shakespeare born. According to tradition, the great English dramatist and poet William Shakespeare is born in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23, 1564. It is impossible to be certain thee exact day on which he was born, but church records show that he was baptized on April 26, and three days was a customary amount of time to wait before baptizing a newborn. Shakespeare’s date of death is conclusively known, however: it was April 23, 1616. He was 52 years old and had retired to Stratford three years before. (From History website)

Friday April 22, 2022

Earth Day 

(Image from Weebly.com)

Day of Silence A campaign that seeks to shed light on what many LGBTQ youth experience daily
National Jelly Bean Day
Orthodox Good Friday

• 2003 Patrick Roy plays his final career NHL game
• 1994  7,000 Tutsi slaughtered by Hutus in the stadium at Kibuye, Rwanda
• 1994 Former President Richard Nixon dies
• 1993  Holocaust Memorial Museum dedicated in Washington, D.C.
• 1979 The Rolling Stones play two benefit concerts for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, in Oshawa, Ontario;
• 1978 The Blues Brothers make their world premiere on "Saturday Night Live"
• 1970 The first Earth Day. Earth Day, an event to increase public awareness of the world's environmental problems, is celebrated in the United States for the first time on April 22, 1970. Millions of Americans, including students from thousands of colleges and universities, participated in rallies, marches and educational programs across the country. (From History website)
• 1963 Lester B. Pearson is sworn in as the 14th Prime Minister of Canada
• 1915  1st military use of poison gas (chlorine, by Germany) in WW I
• 1889 The Oklahoma land rush begins
• 1876 First National League baseball game played
• 1370 Building begins on the Bastille fortress in Paris

Thursday April 21, 2022

National Bulldogs Are Beautiful Day
National Chocolate Covered Cashews Day
National High Five Day
National Kindergarten Day
National Tea Day
National Yellow Bat Day
Tiradentes Day - Brazilians recognize the martyrdom of Tiradentes every year on Tiradentes Day

• 2016 Legendary musician and megawatt star Prince dies at 57. On the morning of April 21, 2016, Prince, the polymathic musician who created more than 30 albums and won seven Grammy Awards over a 40-year career, is found dead in Paisley Park, his Minnesota home and recording studio. The cause of death was an accidental overdose of the opioid fentanyl. (From History website)
• 2010 "Shrek Forever After" directed by Mike Mitchell with voices by Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival
• 1989  Thousands of Chinese crowd into Beijing's Tiananmen Square cheering students demanding greater political freedom
• 1967 GM celebrates 100 millionth U.S.-made car
• 1918  World War I: German fighter ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen "The Red Baron", shot down and killed over Vaux sur Somme in France, Canadian pilot Arthur Roy Brown credited with the kill. (From On This Day website)
• 1865 Abraham Lincoln's funeral train leaves D.C.
• 1816 Charlotte Brontë born
• 753 B.C. Rome founded​

Wednesday April 20, 2022

Chinese Language Day
 National Look-Alike Day
Lima Bean Respect Day
National Banana Day
National Cheddar Fries Day
​National Pineapple Upside-Down Cake Day

• 1999 Teen gunmen kill 13 at Columbine High School
• 1992 All-star concert in memory of Freddie Mercury held at Wembley Stadium, London
  
• 1971 Supreme Court declares desegregation busing constitutional
• 1902  Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive compound radium chloride
• 1968 Pierre Trudeau sworn in as Canada's 15th Prime Minister
  
• 1777 New York adopts state constitution
•  1887 World's First Motor Race
• 1841 First detective story is published

Tuesday April 19, 2022

​National Garlic Day
Wear Pajamas to Work Day 

• 2011  Fidel Castro resigns from the Communist Party of Cuba's central committee after 45 years of holding the title.
• 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War demonstrate
• 1897 First Boston Marathon held
• 1824 Lord Byron dies in Greece
• 1775  American Revolution begins in Lexington, Massachusetts. The "Shot Heard Round the World" took place in Concord later that day
• 607 Comet 1P/607 H1 (Halley) approaches within 0.0898 AUs of Earth

Monday April 18, 2022

(Image from Internet)

Adult Autism Awareness Day
National Animal Crackers Day
​National Lineman Appreciation Day
​National Velociraptor Awareness Day

• 2014 Mt. Everest sees its single deadliest day
• 2012 Dick Clark, host of "American Bandstand" and "New Year's Rockin' Eve," dies
• 1989 Chinese students protest against government
• 1982 Canada Constitution Act replaces British North America Act
• 1977 81st Boston Marathon: Canadian Jerome Drayton wins men's race in 2:14:46; American Miki Gorman takes her 2nd women's event in 2:48:33
• 1956 Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco marry
• 1953 Rick Moranis, Canadian actor (SCTV; Spaceballs; Ghostbusters; Honey I Shrunk the Kids), born in Toronto, Ontario
• 1910 14th Boston Marathon won by Canadian Fred Cameron in 2:28:52.4
• 1906 The Great San Francisco Earthquake topples buildings, killing thousands On April 18, 1906, at 5:13 a.m., an earthquake estimated at close to 8.0 on the Richter scale strikes San Francisco, California, killing an estimated 3,000 people as it topples numerous buildings. The quake was caused by a slip of the San Andreas Fault over a segment about 275 miles long, and shock waves could be felt from southern Oregon down to Los Angeles." (From History website)
• 1506  The cornerstone of the current St. Peter's Basilica is laid in the Vatican by Pope Julius I 

Sunday April 17, 2022

(Image from the Internet)

• 2002 "General Hospital" airs 10,000th episode
• 1982  Proclamation of the Constitution Act by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
• 1970  Apollo 13 returns to Earth
• With the world anxiously watching, Apollo 13, a U.S. lunar spacecraft that suffered a severe malfunction on its journey to the moon, safely returns to Earth. On April 11, the third manned lunar landing mission was launched from Florida, carrying astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert and Fred W
• 1961 The Bay of Pigs invasion begins
  
• ​1941 Yugoslavia surrenders to the Nazis
• 1945 Americans seize 1,100 pounds of uranium in effort to prevent Soviets from developing A-bomb
• 1815 Indonesian volcano erupts, killing 80,000
• ​1790 Benjamin Franklin dies
• 1387  Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" characters begin their pilgrimage to Canterbury (according to scholars)​

Saturday April 16, 2022

National Park Week April 16 - 24th (U.S.A.) 

"Every April, during the presidentially proclaimed National Park Week, we join with the National Park Foundation, the official charity of America's national parks, to celebrate America's treasures." (From National Park Week - NPS Celebrates! (U.S. National Park Service)

​​National Librarian Day

(Image from the Internet)

​National Orchid Day
National Eggs Benedict Day
National Bean Counter Day
​Husband Appreciation Day

• 2022 NBA Legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, full name: Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr., is  75 years old
• 2018 Kendrick Lamar becomes the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize
  
• 2007 Virginia Tech shooting leaves 32 dead
  
• 1982 Queen Elizabeth proclaims Canada's new constitution
• 1972 Apollo 16 departs for moon
  
• 1934 38th Boston Marathon won by Dave Komonen of Canada in 2:32:53.8
• 1900 4th Boston Marathon won by Canadian Jim Caffrey in race record 2:39:44.4
• 1900  US Post Office issues 1st books of postage stamps
  
• 1889 Hollywood legend Charlie Chaplin born
  
• 1869 Ebenezer Bassett, 1st African American diplomat, begins service as Minister to Haiti
• 1862 Slavery abolished in District of Columbia
• 1705  Queen Anne of England knights Isaac Newton at Trinity College, Cambridge

Wednesday April 13, 2022

• National Make Lunch Count Day
  
• National Scrabble Day
• National Peach Cobbler Day

• 2017 U.S. military drops "Mother of All Bombs" on ISIS tunnel complex
• 1997 Tiger Woods wins the Masters Tournament for the first time. On April 13, 1997, 21-year-old Tiger Woods wins the prestigious Masters Tournament by a record 12 strokes in Augusta, Georgia. It was Woods' first victory in one of golf's four major championships-the U.S. Open, the British Open, the PGA Championship and the Masters-and the greatest performance by a professional golfer in more than a century. It also made him the youngest golfer by two years to win the Masters and the first person of Asian or African heritage to win a major. (From History website)
• 1970 Apollo 13 oxygen tank explodes
• 1964 Sidney Poitier wins Best Actor Oscar for "Lilies of the Field"
• 1945 Canadian army liberates Teuge & Assen, Netherlands, from Nazis
• 1928 First nonstop flight from Europe to North America
• 1919 British and Gurkha troops massacre hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in Amritsar Massacre
• 1870 Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in New York City
• 1860  1st Pony Express reaches Sacramento, California
• 1861 Union forces surrender at Fort Sumter

Tuesday April 12, 2022

Mimi Reinhardt, woman who typed up Schindler’s list, dead at 107

• 1981 The space shuttle Columbia is launched for the first time
• 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. is jailed; writes "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"
• 1961 Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space
• 1954  Bill Haley and His Comets record "Rock Around The Clock"
• 1945 FDR dies
• 1917 Canadians capture Vimy Ridge in northern France
• 1872  Jesse James gang robs bank in Columbia, Kentucky (1 dead/$1,500)
• 1864 Hundreds of Union soldiers killed in Fort Pillow Massacre
• 1861 Civil War begins as Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter
• The bloodiest four years in American history begin when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. During the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort." (From History website)
• 1633 Galileo is accused of heresy

Thursday April 7, 2022

• 1999  The World Trade Organisation rules in favor of the United States in its long-running trade dispute with the European Union over bananas
• 1994 "Violence erupts in Rwanda, foreshadowing genocide On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers. The Tutsis, a minority group that made up about 10 percent of Rwanda’s population, received no assistance from the international community, although the United Nations later conceded that a mere 5,000 soldiers deployed at the outset would have stopped the wholesale slaughter." (From History website)
• 1970 John Wayne wins Best Actor Oscar
• 1969  The Internet's symbolic birth date: publication of RFC 1
• 1954 Jackie Chan, full name: Chan Kong-sang, born
• 1948  World Health Organization formed by the United Nations
• 1915 Billie Holiday born Nicknamed "Lady Day", Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing
• 1868 Thomas D'Arcy McGee, one of the Canadian Fathers of Confederation is assassinated by the Irish, in one of the few Canadian political assassinations, and only federal politician

Monday April 4, 2022 

1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated

​(Image courtesy of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, PA)

"Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old." (From History website) 

• 2013 Movie critic Roger Ebert dies
• 1986 Wayne Gretzky sets NHL record with 213th point of season
• 1975 Microsoft founded
• ​1974 Hank Aaron ties Babe Ruth's home run record
• 1973 World Trade Center, then the world's tallest building, opens in New York City
• 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. speaks out against the war
• 1960 "Ben-Hur" wins 11 Academy Awards
• 1949  North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) treaty signed in Washington, D.C.
• 1928 Maya Angelou is born
• 1918 Second Battle of the Somme ends
• 1896 Announcement of gold discovery in Yukon
• 1865 President Lincoln dreams about his assassination​

Sunday April 3, 2022

• 1996 Unabomber arrested
• 1978 "Annie Hall" beats out "Star Wars" for Best Picture
• 1973  1st mobile phone call is made 
• 1936 Bruno Hauptmann, convicted of kidnapping Lindbergh's son, executed
  ​1882 Jesse James is murdered
  
• 1860 Pony Express debuts between St Joseph, Missouri & Sacramento, California

What is Ramadan?

Friday April 1, 2022

Sweet Potato Day 

• 2001  Netherlands becomes the first country in the world to make same-sex marriage legal
  
• 1999 Nunavut is established as a Canadian territory carved out of the eastern part of the Northwest Territories.
• 1996 The Halifax Regional Municipality in Nova Scotia is created.
• 1984 Marvin Gaye is shot and killed by his own father
• 1976  Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs found Apple Computer in the garage of Jobs' parents house in Cupertino, California
  
• 1969 Royal Canadian Mint formally forms as a Crown Corporation
• 1963 Soap operas "General Hospital" and "The Doctors" premiere
• 1952  Big Bang theory proposed in Physical Review by Alpher, Bethe & George Gamow
  
• 1945 World War II: Canadian troops free the Dutch cities of Doetinchem, Enschede, Borculo and Eibergen
• 1917 Scott Joplin, American ragtime composer (The Entertainer, Maple Leaf Rag), dies at 48
  
• 1924 The Royal Canadian Air Force is formed.
• 1873 British White Star steamship Atlantic sinks off Nova Scotia, 547 die
• 1748  Ruins of Pompeii rediscovered by Spaniard Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre
  
• 1700 April Fools' tradition popularized 

Thursday March 31, 2022

UN highlights human cost of transatlantic slave trade

• 1980 Jesse Owens, American athlete (4 Olympic gold 1936), dies of lung cancer at 66
• ​1967 1st time Jimi Hendrix burns his guitar (The Astoria, London)
• 1949 Newfoundland becomes Canada's 10th province
• 1889 Eiffel Tower opens
• 1878 Jack Johnson, American boxer (1st African-American world heavyweight champion 1908-15), born in Galveston, Texas (d. 1946)
• 1855 Charlotte Brontë, English novelist (Jane Eyre), dies at 38
• 1831 Quebec & Montreal incorporated
• 1727 Isaac Newton, English physicist and astronomer (Principia), dies in London at 84
• 1547 King Francis I of France (1515-47), dies complaining about the weight of the crown at 52

Monday March 21, 2022

Today is the first anniversary of the passage of M-36 making August 1st as Emancipation Day a national day of commemoration in Canada! (From LinkedIn)

(Image courtesy of/& used with permission)

​"Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
 
Adopted on October 26th, 1966, the UN General Assembly Resolution 2142 proclaimed March 21st as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
 
This date was chosen in honour of the 69 people who were killed in Sharpeville, South Africa when racist police officers opened fire on peaceful demonstrators in 1960.
 
Since and despite this adoption, racism, racial profiling, and racial discrimination continues to persist in and permeate every part of the Western society – whether in the US, UK, Canada, Europe and even in South Africa where the despicable incident upon which the UN Resolution was made.
 
To commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, we pay homage to the thousands of Indigenous children who were murdered in the Residential School System in Canada.
 
We pay homage to the thousands of indigenous people who are still fighting to simply have drinking water and a functional social system in their communities.
 
We pay homage to the thousands of Africans who were killed, abused, raped, hanged, lynched and tossed into the ocean during the slave trade.
 
We pay homage to the souls of over ten million Africans who were snatched from their families and homes in Africa and used to build monumental structures like the White House, Buckingham Palace, etc.

To the millions of people from Africa who were exploited to transform war-torn countries like the UK, US, Canada, France and others into developed nations.
 
We pay homage to the millions of blacks, Indigenous and racialized people who are languishing in jail for the lack of equitable justice due to racism, racial profiling and racial discrimination.
 
Who would you like to pay homage to in commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination?" (From Canadian Congress enewsletter)  

1965
Martin Luther King, Jr. begins the march from Selma to Montgomery

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​Quote: "We are not makers of history. We are made by history." ​~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ~