* 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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