Half-Month, Inclusive History

June/Part II

Do you know that June Black History also includes:

• 16^th - Adam Wade became the first Black nationally televised game show host (1975); Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open (2002);

• 17^th – Peter Salem and Salem Poor were commended for their service on the American side at the Battle of Bunker Hill (1775); Congress authorized President Lincoln to accept African Americans in the Union Army (1862); James Weldon Johnson was born (1871); the U.S. Navy commissioned its first African American officer, Harvard Medical student Bernard Whitfield Robinson (1942); Venus Williams was born (1980); nine black worshippers were killed in a racially motivated attack during Bible Study (2015);

• 18^th - Law Enforcement Officers in Gadsden, AL, tortured Civil Rights Protesters (1963); the Supreme Court banned racial discrimination in sale and rental housing (1968);

• 19^th - Joachim Pease earned the Congressional Medal of Honor (1864); enslaved Blacks in Texas were (finally) told they were free (1865); Henry O. Flipper became the first Black West Point graduate (1877); Phylicia Rashad was born (1948); U.S. Congress issued a formal apology to Black Americans for the enslavement of our ancestors (2009);

• 20^th - NAACP was incorporated (1911); Elbert Williams was lynched (1940); Harry Belafonte became the first Black to win an Emmy (1960); Muhammad Ali was convicted in a Houston federal court of violating the Selective Service Act by refusing to be inducted into the armed services (1967);

• 21^st - Joseph Hayne Rainey was born (1832); Henry Ossawa Tanner was born (1859); civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner disappeared near Philadelphia, MS (1964); Edgar Ray “The Preacher” Killen was convicted of the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner (2005);

• 22^nd - Congress readmitted the state of Arkansas on the condition that it would never change its constitution to disenfranchise Black Americans (1868); Willie Mae Ford Smith was born (1904); Katherine Dunham was born (1909); Joe Louis defeated James J. Braddock and became heavyweight boxing champion of the world (1937); Edward Rudolph “Ed” Bradley Jr. (1941); Benjamin O. Davis Jr. became the first Black US Air Force General (1959); The state legislature of Louisiana repealed the last racial classification law in the United States (1983);

• 23^rd - Wilma Rudolph was born (1940); Bob Marley was given an official state funeral in his homeland of Jamaica (1981);

• 24^th - John Lynch was elected temporary chairman of the Republican convention and became the first Black to preside over deliberations of a national party (1884); the rules committee of the Democratic National Convention approved the nomination of Yvonne Brathwaite Burke as co-chairperson of the convention (1972);

• 25^th - President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order forbidding discrimination in defense industries after pressure from blacks led by A. Philip Randolph (1941); Carolyn Cheeks was born (1945); Supreme Court Invalidates key provision of Voting Rights Act at Southern States’ Request (2013); Michael Jackson succumbed (2009);

• 26^th - Oregon Territory bans free Black people (1844); Mordecai Johnson became the first Black president of Howard University (1926); W.E.B Du Bois resigned from his position at the NAACP (1934); Martin Luther King, Jr. was denied freedom of speech when at a Chicago church (1967); Derek Jeter was born (1974);

• 27^th - Frederick Jones received a patent for the ticket dispensing machine (1839); Paul Laurence Dunbar was born (1872); Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement (1991);

• 28^th – Sengbe Pieh, also known as Joseph Cinque, was captured and enslaved

  with others illegally (1839); William Henry Hunt was born (1863); Malcolm X founded the Organization for Afro-American Unity (1964);

• 29^th - Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael, was born (1941); The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth's Bethel Street Baptist Church was bombed (1958); and

• 30^th - Lena Horne was born (1917); Larry Doby became the manager of the Chicago White Sox (1978)?