(Photo By Flickr User Lawren)
“What we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back, back into time………”
Alright family, are you ready to take a journey back together and see what happened on this day in Black History? Make sure that you’re buckled up, ready, here we go!!!!
1787- Georgia’s House of Assembly named Willliam Few, Abraham Baldwin, William Pierce, Georgie Walton, William Houston, and Nathaniel Pendleton as Georgia’s commissioners to the Philadelphia constitutional convention.
1868-Conservatives, aided by military forces, seized convention hall and established effective control over Reconstruction process in Florida. Republican conservatives drafted new constitution which concentrated political power in hands of governor and limited the impact of the Black vote.
1907-Civil rights activist and politician Grace Towns Hamilton was born in Atlanta, GA. She received her undergraduate degree from hometown Atlanta University, before completing her master’s degree at Ohio State University. She held teaching positions at the Atlanta School of Social Work, Clark College, and LeMoyne College in Memphis, TN, while maintaining an active interest in the civil rights movement. Hamilton served as executive director of the Atlanta Urban League from 1943-1960, and also sat on the board of the Southern Regional Council and the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women, as well as many other voluntary positions. But she made her most lasting mark by becoming the first African-American woman elected to the Georgia General Assembly in 1965. She served in Georgia House of Representatives until 1984. Today, a chair in the Emory University political science department is named in her honor.
1927-Attorney Ronald Brown was elected national chairman of the Democratic Party and became the first African American to hold the post. Brown was later appointed Secretary of Commerce under the Clinton administration in 1994. He served in this capacity until he was killed in 1996 when he and 32 others died in a plane crash while on a diplomatic mission in Croatia; Opera Singer Mary Leontyne Price was born in Laurel, MS on this day
1940-Singer Roberta Flack born in Asheville, NC on this day. Flack achieved huge success with a poignant version of folk-singer Ewan MacColl ‘s ballad, ‘First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’. Recorded in 1969, it was a major international hit three years later, following its inclusion in the film Play Misty For Me. Further hits came with ‘Where Is The Love?’ (1972), The Closer I Get To You (1978), Back Together Again (1979), and You Are My Heaven (1980; duets with Donny Hathaway), and ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’ (1973), where Flack’s penchant for sweeter, more MOR(Middle-Of-The-Road)-styled compositions gained an ascendancy.
1946-Georgia-born Jackie Robinson, Major League Baseball’s first black player, married Rachel Isum.
1966-Andrew Brimmer becomes the first African-American governor of the Federal Reserve Board when he is appointed by President Lyndon Johnson
1967-The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect. That amendment provided that in the case of a vice president’s become president, the new president would name a new vice president, subject to confirmation by a majority vote of both houses of Congress.
1992-Alex Haley, renowned American biographer, scriptwriter, and author who became famous with the publication of the novel ROOTS, died on this day.
(Information courtesy of blackfacts.com)
