Week of January 3 to January 9:
January 3
1947 - NAACP report said 1946 was "one of the grimmest years in the history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People." The report deplored "reports of blow torch killing and eye-gouging of Negro veterans freshly returned from a war to end torture and racial extermination" and said "Negroes in America...
1961 - Adam Clayton Powell elected Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
1966 - Sammy Younge, Jr., 21, was shot to death by a 67 year old white service station attendant. A Tuskegee Institute student and civil rights activist, Younge was shot after using the "Whites only" restroom at the service station where the white attendant was working.
January 4
1958 - Archie A. Alexander, architectural engineer and former governor of the Virgin Islands, died on this day in 1958 at the age of 69. He had been appointed governor of the Virgin Islands by President Eisenhower in 1954. This coachman's son earned an engineering degree from the State University of Iowa, where he ...
1971 - Congressional Black Caucus organized.
1985 - Leontyne Price makes her farewell appearance with the Metropolitan Opera singing the title role of Aida.
1985 - Congressman William H. Gray is elected chairman of the House Budget Committee, the highest congressional post held by an African American.
1990 - Fashion designer Patrick Kelly, a 35-year old native of Vicksburg, Mississippi, died in Paris. The clothing Kelly designed was worn by the Princess of Wales, Jane Seymour, the late Bette Davis, Grace Jones and Madonna.
January 5
1804 - Ohio legislature passed the first of a succession of Northern Black Laws which restricted the rights and movement of free Blacks in the North. Most Northern states passed Black Laws. Constitutions of three states --Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon--barred Black settlers.
1875 - President Grant sent federal troops to Vicksburg, Mississippi.
1911 - Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity was founded at Indiana University by Elder Watson Diggs, and Byron Kenneth Armstrong.
January 6
1831 - In London, The World Anti-Slavery Convention opens.
1867 - The Peabody Fund is established to provide monies for construction, endowments, scholarships, teacher, and industrial education for newly freed slaves.
2003 - Mamie Till Mobley, mother of Emmett Till, a Chicago teen lynched while visiting Mississippi dies at age 81. Her insistence that her son's casket remain open helped spur the civil rights movement.
January 7
1891 – Zora Neale Hurston is born in Eatonville, Florida. She became one of the central figures in that great African American cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. She excelled as a writer, folklorist, and anthropologist.
January 8
1811- The largest slave revolt in American history takes place on this day in 1811. Charles Deslandes leads an estimated 500 slaves in an uprising in St. Charles and St James parishes in Louisiana. After burning crops, plantations, and killing several whites, the slaves march on New Orleans. But federal troops aided by a militia of plantation owners turn them back killing 63 blacks. Deslandes and 20 other slaves were sentenced to death and beheaded.
1836 –Fannie Mae Jackson is born. She becomes the first black female college graduate.
January 9:
1866 – Fisk University is founded in Nashville, Tennessee to educate newly freed slaves by the American Missionary Association.
1967 – The Georgia legislature finally seats Representative Julian Bond. In an amazing anti-democracy display of arrogance, Georgia legislators had refused to allow Bond to take the seat he had duly won because of his opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. But a 1966 U.S. Supreme Court ruling declared their action unconstitutional. Bond later became chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors.
