* 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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