Half-Month, Inclusive History
May/Part II
Do you know May Black History also includes:
16th – William Harry Barnes became the first Black surgeon certified by any American surgical board (1927); Janet Jackson was born (1966); Jan E. Matzeliger Day was declared in Lynn, MA (1967); A. Philip Randolph succumbed (1979); Sammy Davis Jr. succumbed (1990);
17th - Oliver Lewis became the first Black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby (1875); National Baptist Convention was chartered (1915); William H. Hastie was inaugurated as the first Black governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands (1946 ); the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954); Sugar Ray Leonard was born (1956); E. Franklin Frazier, the first Black President of the American Sociological Association, succumbed (1962);
18th – Reggie Jackson was born (1946); the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal” education and public accommodations (1896); Mary McLeod Bethune succumbed (1955); Ernie Davis, the first Black player to win the Heisman Trophy, succumbed (1963);
19th - Malcolm X -fka- Malcolm Little was born (1925); Playwright Lorraine Hansberry was born (1930); Grace Jones was born (1948); Willy T. Ribbs became the first Black motorsports driver to qualify for the Indy 500 (1991);
20th - Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture was born (1743); Lawrence Tero was born (1952); U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy dispatched U.S. Marshals to Montgomery, AL., to restore order in the “Freedom Rider” disturbance (1961); Trevor Tahiem Smith, Jr. -aka- Busta Rhymes was born (1970);
21st – Black students enrolled at Oberlin College for the first time (1833); Mr. T was born (1952); The Notorious B.I.G. was born (1972);
22nd – Shuffle Along, a musical featuring a score by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, opened on Broadway (1921); news anchor Bernard Shaw was born (1940); Claude McKay succumbed (1948); Bill Cosby became the first Black to receive the Best Actor Emmy (1966); Langston Hughes succumbed (1967); Serena Williams' trading card became the highest-priced trading card of any female athlete (2022);
23rd – Sgt. William H. Carney became the first Black to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for Valor (1900); Katie Booth was born (1907); Marvelous Marvin Hagler was born (1954); Moms Mabley succumbed (1975);
24th – The first black college, Lincoln University (PA), was founded; (1854); Patti LaBelle was born (1944); Duke Ellington succumbed (1974); Jesse Jackson became the first Black to address a joint session of the United States Senate and House of Representatives (1983);
25th - Bill “Bojangles” Robinson is born (1878); civil rights activist and organizer Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson born (1889); Dorothy Wesley, one of the first black women to earn a master’s in library science, born (1905); Madame C.J. Walker, cosmetics manufacturer, and first Black female millionaire, succumbed (1919); Miles Davis born (1926); Henry Ossawa Tanner, the first Black painter to gain international acclaim, succumbed (1937); Jamaica Kincaid was born (1949); Octavia Spencer was born (1970);
26th - Aleksandr Puskin was born (1799); Pam Grier was born (1949); Marvin Cook was ambassador to the Niger Republic (1961); Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee was established (1961); Lauryn Hill was born (1975); Howard University renamed its College of Fine Arts after actor Chadwick Boseman (2021);
27th – Ramsey Lewis was born (1935); Louis Gossett Jr. was born (1936); Ernest Green, of the Little Rock Nine, became the first Black graduate from Central High School (1958);
28th - Eliza Ann Gardner was born (1831); Aaron “T-Bone” Walker was born (1910); Betty Shabazz was born (1934); Gladys Knight was born (1944); Bishop Vashti McKenzie, the first woman to be elected a bishop in AME church, was born (1947); National Party wins Whites-only election in South Africa and begins to institute the policy of apartheid (1948); Mary Lou Williams succumbed (1981); Gary Coleman succumbed (2010); Maya Angelou succumbed (2014);
29th - Sojourner Truth delivered “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech (1851); Andrew Johnson announced his program of Reconstruction (1865); Granville T. Woods patented the overhead conducting system for the electric railway (1901); 1973 – Thomas Bradley was elected mayor of Los Angeles; Carmelo Anthony was born (1984);
30th - Countee Cullen was born (1903); Gale Sayers, the youngest NFL player to be inducted to the Hall of Fame, was born (1943); Vivian Malone became the first Black graduate of the University of Alabama (1965); Dr. Patricia E. Bath succumbed (2019); and
31st – Congress passes the first Enforcement Act, providing stiff penalties for those who deprived others of their civil rights (1870); National Negro Committee (now NAACP) held first conference (1909 ); Patricia Roberts Harris, the first Black woman to serve in a Presidential cabinet position, is born (1924); Judge Irving Kaufman ordered the board of education of New Rochelle to integrate schools (1961); Zimbabwe was proclaimed independent (1979)?
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