* Today in Black History - May 17 *
1875 - The first Kentucky Derby is won by African American jockey Oliver
Lewis riding a horse named Aristides. Fourteen of the 15 jockeys in
the race are African Americans. The winning purse for the race is
$ 2,850. Lewis won the one and a half mile "Run for the Roses" in
a time of 2 minutes, 37-3/4 seconds.
1881 - Frederick Douglass is appointed Recorder of Deeds for the District
of Columbia.
1909 - White firemen on Georgia Railroad strike in protest of the
employment of African American firemen.
1915 - The National Baptist Convention is chartered.
1937 - Hazel Rollins O'Leary is born in Newport News, Virginia. She will
graduate from Fisk University and will receive a law degree from
Rutgers University in 1966. She will gain experience in the energy
regulatory field working for the Federal Energy Administration.
After working for a few years heading her own energy consulting
firm and becoming president of the Northern States Power Company,
she will be appointed Secretary of Energy in 1993 by President Bill
Clinton.
1942 - Henry St. Claire Fredericks is born in New York City. He will
become an entertainer and songwriter for film. He also will be a
singer of urban folk-blues, better known as Taj Mahal. He will be
one of the first American artists to blend blues and world music.
For over three decades, Taj Mahal will teach generations the
wonders of Robert Johnson, Sleepy John Estes, Muddy Waters and
Jimmy Reed. With a catalogue of almost thirty albums (including
some for children!), one can find film soundtracks ("Sounder,"
"Brothers"), music for television dramas ("The Tuskegee Project,"
"The Man Who Broke A Thousand Chains") as well as his best-loved
classics like "Natch'l Blues."
1944 - Felix Eboue' joins the ancestors in Cairo, Egypt at the age of 59
after succumbing to pneumonia. He had been the highest ranking
French colonial administrator of African descent in the first half
of the twentieth century. He had been a successful administrator
for the French government in the Caribbean and in Africa. During
World War II, he had been a staunch ally of the exiled French
government headed by General Charles de Gaulle.
1954 - The Supreme Court outlaws school segregation in Brown v. Board of
Education. The ruling is a major victory for the NAACP, led by
Thurgood Marshall of the Legal Defense Fund, and other civil rights
groups. The rulings declares that racially segregated schools were
inherently unequal.
1956 - "Sugar" Ray Charles Leonard is born in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Leonard will win the National Golden Gloves championship at 16, an
Olympic gold medal in 1976, and have a successful professional
boxing career. He will be named Fighter of the Decade for the
1980s. He will enter the decade a champion and will leave the
decade a champion. In between, he will win an unprecedented five
world titles in five weight classes and compete in some of the
era's most memorable contests. His career boxing record will be 36
wins (25 by knockout), 3 losses, and 1 tie. After retiring from the
ring, he will become a successful boxing analyst. He will be
enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1997.
1957 - The Prayer Pilgrimage, attracting a crowd of over 30,000, is held on
the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Timed to
coincide with the third anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education,
the pilgrimage is organized by Martin Luther King, Jr., the NAACP,
and others to advocate greater voting and civil rights for African
Americans.
1962 - Marshall Logan Scott is elected the first African American moderator
of the Presbyterian Church.
1962 - E. Franklin Frazier joins the ancestors in Washington, DC at the age
of 67. Dr. Franklin had been a leading sociologist who retired from
Howard University and had been the first African American president
of the American Sociological Association.
1969 - A commemorative stamp of W.C. Handy, "Father of the Blues," is issued
by the U.S. Postal Service, making Handy the first African American
blues musician honored on a postage stamp.
1969 - Rev. Thomas Kilgore, a Los Angeles pastor, is elected president of
the predominantly white American Baptist Convention.
1970 - Hank Aaron becomes the ninth baseball player to get 3,000 hits.
1980 - A major racially motivated civil disturbance occurs in Miami, Florida
after a Tampa, Florida jury acquitted four former Miami police
officers of fatally beating African American insurance executive
Arthur McDuffie. The disturbance in that city's Liberty City
neighborhood results in eighteen persons being killed and more than
three hundred persons injured.
1987 - The work of four contemporary African American artists - Sam Gilliam,
Keith Morrison, William T. Williams, and Martha Jackson-Jarvis - is
shown in the inaugural exhibition of the new Anacostia Museum in
Washington, DC.
1987 - Eric "Sleepy" Floyd of the Golden State Warriors sets a playoff
record for points in a single quarter. He pours in 29 points in
the fourth period in a game this night against Pat Riley's Los
Angeles Lakers.
1994 - The U.N. Security Council approves a peacekeeping force and an arms
embargo for violence-racked Rwanda.
1997 - Laurent Kabila declares himself the new President of Zaire and
renames it the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The country had
been previously under the 37 year rule of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
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