Ourstory

[Meyakus]

1635 - America's first public school, the Boston Latin School, opened in Boston. Black students were excluded from attending.

1882 - Henry Highland Garnet, abolitionist, preacher, diplomat and
protest leader, joins the ancestors in Monrovia, Liberia at
the age of 66.

1907 - Wendell P. Dabney establishes "The Union." The Cincinnati,
Ohio paper's motto is "For no people can become great without being united, for in union, there is strength."

1920 - The National Association of Professional Baseball Clubs is
founded by Andrew "Rube" Foster. They will be called the
Negro National League. It will become the first successful
African American professional baseball league. Two other
leagues had previously been started, but failed to last more
than one season.

1923 - The first African American professional basketball team "The Renaissance" is organized by Robert J. Douglas. It is named
after its home court, the Renaissance Casino. They will
play from 1923 to 1939 and have a record of 1,588 wins
against 239 losses. They will become the first African
American team in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

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

1973 - Gertrude E. Downing and William Desjardin Corner Cleaner Attachment, Patent No. 3,715,772 on February 13, 1973

1976 - General Murtala Mohammed, head of Nigeria, who came to power in 1975 after General Gowon is ousted, joins the ancestors
after being killed in an unsuccessful counter-coup. His
chief of staff, General Olusegun Obasanjo, will assume
Mohammed's post and his promise to hand over political power to civilian rule.

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

[Meyakus]

1760 - Richard Allen, is born into slavery in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. He will purchase his freedom in 1786 and will
become a preacher the same year. He will become the first
African American ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church
(1799), and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME)
Church in 1816, and first bishop of the AME Church. He will
join the ancestors on March 26, 1831.

1818 - Possible birth of Frederick Douglass “the Great Emancipator” (some sources say 1817) in Tuckahoe (Talbot County), Maryland, is attributed to this date. He will state, "I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it... and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant." He will be a great African American leader/orator and "one of the giants of nineteenth century America. He was born Frederick Bailey and will change his name to Douglass after he escapes slavery in 1838. Some accounts say he purchased his freedom in 1845. He became the greatest abolitionist of his time and was also the creator of the “North Star” newspaper. He will join the ancestors on February 20, 1895 in Washington, DC.

1867 - Morehouse College is organized in Augusta, Georgia. The
school will be moved later to Atlanta.

1867 - New registration law in Tennessee abolishes racial
distinctions in voting.

1936 - The National Negro Congress is organized at a Chicago meeting attended by eight hundred seventeen delegates representing more than five hundred organizations. Asa Phillip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is elected
president of the new organization.

1946 - Gregory Hines is born in New York City. A child tap-dancing
star in the group Hines, Hines, and Dad, Hines will lead a
new generation of tap dancers that will benefit from the
advice and teaching of such tap legends as Henry Le Tang,
"Honi" Coles, Sandman Sims, the Nicholas Brothers, and Sammy Davis, Jr. He will also become a successful actor in movies
including "White Knights," "Tap," and "A Rage in Harlem." He
will join the ancestors on August 9, 2003.

1978 - Maxima Corporation, a computer systems and management company, is incorporated. Headquartered in Lanham, Maryland, it will become one of the largest African American-owned companies
and earn its founder, chairman and CEO, Joshua I. Smith, chairmanship of the U.S. Commission on Minority Business Development.

[Meyakus]

Republic Day in Guyana

1841 - Grafton Tyler Brown is born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A
lithographer and painter, he will be considered to be one of
the first African-American artists in California. His
paintings will be collected by the Oakland (California) Museum
of Art, Washington State Museum, and private individuals. He will join the ancestors on March 3, 1918.

1865 - Tennessee adopts a new constitution abolishing slavery. This will allow Tennessee to become the first former confederate
state to be re-admitted to the Union.

1868 - On this day Dr.William Edward Burghardt DuBois, (W E B DuBois) educator and civil rights advocate, is born in Great Barrington, Mass. He was also a Black sociologist and one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. A race riot convinced him that he couldn’t confine himself to scholarly research, but to find a way to protest the worsening conditions of Black life in America.

1888 - Horace Pippin is born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. His right arm crippled in World War I (where he will earn a Purple
Heart), Pippin will paint holding the wrist of his practically useless right arm in his left fist. The self-taught artist will win wide acclaim for the primitive style and strong emotional content of his work. He will join the ancestors on July 6, 1946.

1895 - William H. Heard, AME minister and educator, named minister to Liberia.

1898 - The African American postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina joins the ancestors after being lynched. His wife and three daughters are shot and maimed for life.

1915 - Death of Robert Smalls (75), Reconstruction congressman, in Beaufort, South Carolina

1921 - Jean-Bedel Bokassa I is born in Bobangul, Oubangul-Chari,
French Equatorial Africa (present-day Central African
Republic). He will become a career soldier who will seize
power from President David Dacko in a 1965 coup. In 1972 he will proclaim himself president-for-life, ruling the country with brutal repression, using its revenues for personal enrichment, and crowning himself emperor in 1976. He will be deposed in September 1979 and was imprisoned for murder in 1986 after seven years in exile. He will be pardoned in 1993 and will join the ancestors in 1996 at the age of 75.

1938 - Ishmael Reed is born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He will become a poet (nominated for the National Book Award for "Conjure"), novelist ("Yellow Back," "Radio Broke Down," "Mumbo Jumbo," "Flight to Canada"), and anthologist of the well-received "19 Necromancers from Now" and "The Yardbird Reader, Volume I."

1953 - Bass Singer Melvin Franklin of The Temptations died of complications following a brain seizure in Los Angeles. He was 53.

1972 – Political activist Angela Davis is released from jail. She was not only an activist but also an educator and author and was associated with the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panthers

1979 - St. Lucia gains its independence from Great Britain.

[Meyakus]

Oustory 2/24

1964 - Rebecca Lee Crumpler becomes the first black woman to receive an M.D. degree. She graduated from the New England Female Medical College. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was born in 1833. She worked from 1852-1860 as a nurse in Massachusetts.

1966 - Military leaders oust Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana - while on a peace mission, in Beijing, to stop the Vietnam War.

2008 – Raul Castro is elected president of Cuba after his brother Fidel resigns.

[Meyakus]

Japanese General Takahashi met with NOI leader Elijah Muhammad and explained that Japan was committed to the Black man’s struggle and wanted to destroy America for all the crimes it had committed against people of color throughout the world.

2 years later the attack on Pearl Harbor.
4 years later the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Executive Order 9066

[Meyakus]

Ourstory 2/28 (the irony of some of the info associated with Wheatley and Duncan falling on the same dates is rather odd but nothing spooky at all)


1704 - A school for African Americans is opened in New York City by Elias Neau, a Frenchman.

1708 - A slave revolt occurs in Newton, Long Island in New York State. Seven whites are killed. Two African American male slaves and an Indian slave are hanged, and an African American woman is burned alive.

1776 - George Washington, in his letter of acknowledgment to Phyllis Wheatley for a poem she wrote for his birthday, says, "I thank you most sincerely for...the elegant line you enclosed...the
style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your poetic talents."

1778 - Rhode Island General Assembly in precedent-breaking act
authorizes the enlistment of slaves.

1784 - Phyllis Wheatley, poet, joins the ancestors.

1854 - Some 50 slavery opponents meet in Ripon, Wisconsin, to call for the creation of a new political group, which will become the
Republican Party.

1859 - Arkansas legislature requires free African Americans to choose between exile and enslavement.

1879 – The “Exodus of 1879” where many Blacks left the South in large numbers heading North starts.

1932 - Richard Spikes invented/patented automatic gear shift.

1940 - United States population: 131,669,275. Black population: 12,865,518 (9.8 per cent). Richard Wright's Native Son published.

1942 - Riots against African Americans occur in Detroit, Michigan at
the Sojourner Truth Homes.

1943 - "Porgy and Bess" opens on Broadway with Anne Brown and Todd Duncan in starring roles.

1945 - Charles "Bubba" Smith is born in Beaumont, Texas. He will
become a professional football player with the Baltimore Colts, Oakland Raiders and the Houston Oilers. After a successful football career, he will become an actor in the "Police Academy" series. He also will become the president and CEO of Vital Aircraft Company, which solicits the Department of Defense for government contracts. To illustrate his enduring interest in education and work with children, he will endow an engineering scholarship at his alma mater, Michigan State University.

1948 - Sgt. Cornelius F. Adjetey becomes the first martyr for national independence of Ghana.

1977 - Death of comedian Eddie ("Rochester") Anderson (71).

1984 - Singer Michael Jackson wins eight Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, breaking the previous record of six awards won by a single artist in 1965. Jackson's awards stem from his album "Thriller," which became the biggest selling record of all time with 35 million copies sold since its release in 1982.

1990 - Philip Emeagwali awarded the Gordon Bell Prize (computing's Nobel Prize) for solving one of the twenty most difficult problems in the computing field.

1991 - "The Content of our Character," the controversial book on
affirmative action and race relations by Shelby Steele, wins the National Book Critics Circle Award.

1998 - Todd Duncan joins the ancestors at his home in Washington, DC, at the age 95. His ascension is on the fifty-fifth anniversary of his starring role in the Broadway opening of "Porgy and Bess."