* Today in Black History - August 26 *
1874 - Sixteen African Americans are lynched in the state of
Tennessee.
1900 - Hale Woodruff is born in Cairo, Illinois. He will study at
the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis and at
the Chicago Institute of Art. He will win an award from the
Harmon Foundation in 1926, which will enable him to spend
four "crucial years studying in Paris from 1927-31." He
will enroll at the Academie Scandinave and the Acadamie
Moderne. He will learn in the city's museums as well, while
getting to know other ex-patriots, including Henry Ossawa
Tanner, the leading African American artist. He will get to
know the French avante-garde and begin collecting African
art, which was inspiring Picasso and other modernists.
Returning to the United States in 1931, he will establish
an art school at Atlanta University. He will teach classes
at the university's Laboratory High School as well as
students at Morehouse and Spelman, a school for women. Then
he will go to Mexico in 1936 to study as an apprentice
under the famed muralist Diego Rivera, learning his fresco
technique and becoming interested in portrayal of figures.
He will return to Atlanta and continue teaching. He will
begin traveling to Talladega College in Alabama to teach
and work on a commission for a series of murals. He will
apply his understanding of Post-Impressionism and Cubism
to painting for social advocacy after his return to the
United States in 1936, during the Great Depression. His
best-known work will be the three-panel Amistad Mutiny
murals (1938) that he creates for the Savery Library at
Talladega College. The murals will be entitled: The Revolt,
The Court Scene, and Back to Africa, portraying events
related to the 18th-century slave revolt on the Amistad.
They depict events on the ship, the U.S. Supreme Court
trial, and the Mende people's repatriation to Africa. (The
murals were recently restored in a collaboration between
the High Museum in Atlanta and the college. They will be
on a national tour, and be in Kansas City during the
summer of 2015.) His two other surviving murals are "The
Negro in California History" for the Golden State Mutual
Life Insurance Company in Los Angeles, done in 1949 as a
collaboration with Charles Alston, and six panels
completed around 1951 called "Art of the Negro" at the
Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries. He will join the
ancestors on September 6, 1980.
1905 - George Washington joins the ancestors in Centralia,
Washington. An African American settler of a vast land
claim at the junction of the Shockumchuck and Chehalis
rivers in 1851, Washington endured schemes of white
settlers to take his land and the Indian Wars of 1853 to
found the town of Centerville (later Centralia),
Washington, in 1875.
1918 - Katherine Coleman (later Goble Johnson) is born in White
Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She will become a
mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a
NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and
subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. During her 35-year
career at NASA and its predecessor, she will earn a
reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and
help pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. The
space agency will note her "historical role as one of the
first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist".
Her work will include calculating trajectories, launch
windows and emergency return paths for Project Mercury
spaceflights, including those for astronauts Alan Shepard,
the first American in space, and John Glenn, the first
American in orbit, and rendezvous paths for the Apollo
Lunar Module and command module on flights to the Moon. Her
calculations were also essential to the beginning of the
Space Shuttle program, and she will work on plans for a
mission to Mars. In 2015, President Barack Obama will award
her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She will be as
portrayed by Taraji P. Henson as a lead character in the
2016 film Hidden Figures. In 2019, she will be awarded the
Congressional Gold Medal. She will join the ancestors on
February 24, 2020.
1943 - William L. Dawson is elected as the Black Democratic Party
Vice President candidate.
1947 - Daniel Robert "Dan" Bankhead becomes the first African
American pitcher in major league baseball. The Brooklyn
Dodger hurler helps his own cause by slamming a home run
in his first appearance at the plate.
1948 - Valerie Simpson (Ashford) is born in the Bronx, New York
City. She will become an accomplished singer, composer,
and producer. She will marry Nicholas 'Nick' Ashford and
perform with him for many years. She will lose her husband
and entertainment partner when he joins the ancestors after
succumbing to throat cancer on August 22, 2011.
1960 - Jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis is born in New Orleans,
Louisiana. He will begin his musical career with Art
Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, later playing with his
brother Wynton's quintet, will record with Miles Davis,
Dizzy Gillespie, and Sting, and become musical director
for the Tonight Show in 1992.
1982 - Rickey Henderson ties Lou Brock's 1974 record of 118
stolen bases in a season, as the Milwaukee Brewers down
the Kansas City Royals, 10-3.
1985 - Baltimore Oriole Eddie Murray knocks in 9 RBIs in a game
vs. the California Angels.
1998 - Attorney General Janet Reno reopens the investigation of
the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., focusing on two allegations of a conspiracy
beyond James Earl Ray.
2000 - Sir Lynden Pindling, the father of Bahamas independence,
joins the ancestors after succumbing to prostate cancer.
Pindling had led the Black Progressive Liberal Party to
victory in 1967. Sir Lynden ruled the Bahamas for 25
years. He resigned from the House of Assembly in July
1997, ending 41 years of unbroken service as a legislator.
2015 - Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson joins the ancestors. She was
an activist who was a leader of the American Civil Rights
Movement in Selma, Alabama and a key figure in the 1965
Selma to Montgomery marches.
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