* 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.
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."
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.
1956 - "Sugar" Ray Charles Leonard is born in Wilmington, South Carolina.
Leonard will win the National Golden Gloves championship at 16, an
Olympic gold medal in 1976, and have a successful professional boxing
career, winning titles in both the welterweight and middleweight
divisions.
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.
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 race riot occurs in Miami, Florida. Sixteen persons are
killed and more than three hundred are 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 Kabilia becomes 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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