*		    Today in Black History - May 25		      *

1878 - Luther Robinson is born in Richmond, Virginia.  He will later be
	known as tapdancing legend Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. He will be
	the best known and most highly paid African American entertainer 
	in the first half of the twentieth century. His long career will
	mirror changes in American entertainment tastes and technology, 
	starting in the age of minstrel shows, moving to vaudeville, 
	Broadway, the recording industry, Hollywood radio, and television. 
	According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, "Robinson's contribution 
	to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it up on its toes, 
	dancing upright and swinging", giving tap a "…hitherto-unknown 
	lightness and presence." His signature routine will be the stair 
	dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in a 
	rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he 
	unsuccessfully attempted to patent. He is also credited with having 
	introduced a new word, copacetic, into popular culture, via his 
	repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances. A popular 
	figure in both the black and white entertainment worlds of his era, 
	he will be best known today for his dancing with Shirley Temple in a 
	series of films during the 1930s, and for starring in the musical 
	"Stormy Weather" (1943), loosely based on his own life, and selected 
	for preservation in the National Film Registry. He will use his 
	popularity to challenge and overcome numerous racial barriers, 
	including becoming 1) one of the first minstrel and vaudeville 
	performers to appear without the use of blackface makeup, 2) one of 
	the earliest African American performers to go solo, overcoming 
	vaudeville's two colored rule, 3) a headliner in Broadway shows, 4)
	the first African American to appear in a Hollywood film in an 
	interracial dance team (with Temple in "The Little Colonel"), and 
	5) the first African American to headline a mixed-race Broadway 
	production. He will join the ancestors on November 25, 1949.
	
1905 - Dorothy Burnett (later Porter) is born in Warrenton, Virginia. She 
	will become a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the first African American 
	woman to receive a Masters of Library Science degree from Columbia 
	University, and will author several African American historical 
	works. She will be a long-time librarian at the Howard University 
	Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and will be responsible for
	developing it into one of the world's largest collections of material
	authored by and about people of African descent. She will join the
	ancestors on December 17, 1995.

1906 - Martin Dihigo is born in Havana, Cuba. He will become a baseball
	player in the Negro Leagues and will be considered by some to be the 
	greatest all-around player of all-time of African descent. He will be 
	elected to the Cuban and Mexican Halls of Fame during his lifetime, and 
	will be posthumously elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 
	1977. He will join the ancestors on May 20, 1971.

1919 - Millionaire Madame C.J. Walker joins the ancestors at the age of 52 at 
	Irvington-on-the-Hudson, New York. She was the founder of the Madame 
	C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the largest African American 
	haircare company of its time. After her death, a substantial portion 
	of her business's proceeds will be donated to African American 
	organizations and scholarships. 

1932 - K.C. Jones is born in San Francisco, California. He will become a member 
	of the Olympic basketball team and help win the 1956 Olympic Gold Medal.
	He will then become a professional basketball player with the Boston 
	Celtics, where he will help win eight NBA titles. He will then win two 
	championships as the coach of the Celtics. He will also be the head 
	coach of the Washington Bullets and the Seattle Supersonics. He will 
	have 522 wins as a NBA coach and in 1997 will become the coach of 
	American Basketball League women's team, the New England Blizzard.  
	After the league disbands, he will join the coaching staff of the 
	women's basketball team at the University of Rhode Island, at the age 
	of 67. He is the only African-American non-player head coach to win 
	multiple NBA championships. He will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial 
	Basketball Hall of Fame in 1989. 

1935 - This is "the greatest day in the history of track," according to "The 
	New York Times." Jesse Owens of Ohio State University breaks two 
	world sprint records, ties a third, and breaks a long jump world 
	record in a meet at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, all in 
	one hour.

1936 - David Levering Lewis is born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He will become
	a historian and biographer. Professor Lewis will receive his Ph.D. in 
	modern European history from the London School of Economics and 
	Political Science in 1962. His research and publications will focus 
	on African American history, conceptions of race and racism, and the 
	dynamics of European colonialism, especially in Africa. He will author 
	a biography of Du Bois entitled "W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race," 
	which will win a Pulitzer prize in 1994. His other works include "King: 
	A Biography" (1970), "Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair" (1975), 
	"When Harlem Was in Vogue" (1982), "The Race to Fashoda: European 
	Colonialism and the African Resistance to the Scramble for Africa" 
	(1987), and "W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader" (1995). In 2003, he will be
	appointed as the Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of 
	History at New York University.

1943 - Leslie Marian Uggams is born in the village of Harlem in New York City. 
	She will make her acting debut on television's "Beulah" and be a regular 
	on The Mitch Miller Show before achieving acclaim in Broadway's 
	"Hallelujah Baby". She will be best recognized for portraying Kizzy 
	Reynolds in the television miniseries "Roots" (1977), earning Golden Globe 
	and Emmy Award nominations for her performance. In 1979, she will star as 
	Lillian Rogers Parks in "Backstairs at the White House," a miniseries for 
	which she will be nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Actress. She will 
	also make guest appearances on such television programs as "Hollywood 
	Squares," "Fantasy," "The Muppet Show," "The Love Boat" and "Magnum, P.I.." 
	In 1996, she will play the role of Rose Keefer on "All My Children." Her 
	film career will include roles in "Skyjacked" (1972), "Black Girl" (1972) 
	and "Poor Pretty Eddie" (1975), in which she will play a popular singer who, 
	upon being stranded in the deep South, is abused and humiliated by the 
	perverse denizens of a backwoods town. She will later appear in "Sugar Hill" 
	(1994) opposite Wesley Snipes, and play Blind Al in "Deadpool" (2016) in 
	February, 2016. In April, 2016, she will portray Leah Walker, the bipolar 
	mother of Lucious Lyon in the hit Fox series "Empire."

1943 - A riot, started by white workers, occurs in a Mobile, Alabama shipyard 
	over the job upgrading of twelve African American workers.

1959 - The U.S. Supreme Court declares a Louisiana law enforcing a ban on 
	bouts between African American and white boxers to be unconstitutional.

1963 - The first observance of African Liberation Day occurs. It begins at the 
	founding conference of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, 
	Ethiopia.

1964 - The closing of schools to avoid desegregation is ruled unconstitutional 
	by the U.S. Supreme Court. Prince Edward County, Virginia will have to 
	reopen and desegregate its schools. 

1965 - A very short heavyweight title fight occurs in Lewiston, Maine. Cassius 
	Clay (later Muhammad Ali) knocks out challenger, Sonny Liston, in one 
	minute and 56 seconds of the first round. Liston never sees the punch 
	coming. Neither did an unbelieving crowd at ringside, nor those in 
	theatres all over the world watching the fight on closed-circuit TV. 

1971 - A young African American woman, Jo Etha Collier, joins the ancestors 
	after being killed in Drew, Mississippi by a bullet fired from a passing 
	car. Three whites are arrested on May 26 and charged with the unprovoked 
	attack.

1994 - The United Nations Security Council lifts a 10-year-old ban on weapons 
	exports from South Africa, ending the last of its apartheid-era 
	embargos.

2020 - George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, joins the ancestors after being 
	killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, while being arrested for allegedly using 
	a counterfeit bill. During the arrest Derek Chauvin, a white police officer 
	with the Minneapolis Police Department, knelt on Floyd's neck for 
	approximately eight to nine minutes after he was handcuffed and lying face 
	down. Two police officers, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, assisted 
	Chauvin in restraining Floyd, while another officer, Tou Thao, prevented 
	bystanders from interfering with the arrest and intervening as events 
	unfolded. Floyd had complained about being unable to breathe prior to being 
	on the ground, but after being restrained he became more distressed, and 
	continued to complain about breathing difficulties, the knee on his neck, 
	and expressed the fear he was about to die and called for his mother. After 
	several minutes passed Floyd stopped speaking. For a further two minutes, 
	he lay motionless and officer Kueng found no pulse when urged to check. 
	Despite this, Chauvin refused pleas to lift his knee until medics told him 
	to. The following day, after videos made by witnesses and security cameras 
	became public, all four officers were dismissed. Two autopsies found Floyd's 
	death to be a homicide. Chauvin was charged with second-degree unintentional 
	murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Kueng, Lane, 
	and Thao were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. 
	Chauvin's trial began on March 8, 2021, while the trial of the other three 
	officers is scheduled to begin August 23, 2021. Floyd's death has since then 
	spawned worldwide protests against police brutality, police racism, and lack 
	of police accountability. In early June, the Minneapolis City Council voted 
	an intent to restructure the police department as a "new community-based 
	system of public safety". However, the city council's proposal, which became 
	subject to an indefinite review by the Minneapolis City Charter Commission,
	failed to make the 2020 general ballot. The Minneapolis Police Chief cancelled 
	contract negotiations with the police union and announced plans to bring in 
	outside experts to examine how the union contract can be restructured to 
	provide transparency and "flexibility for true reform". 

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