*                 Today in Black History - January 23                *

1837 - Amanda Berry Smith is born into slavery in Long Green, Maryland.
        She will be widowed twice, after which she will attempt to
        minister to her people.  Unable to preach in the AME Church,
        which did not ordain women ministers, Smith will become an
        independent missionary and travel throughout the United States
        and three continents.  She will publish her autobiography,
        "Amanda Smith's Story - The Story of the Lord's Dealings with
        Mrs. Amanda Smith, The Colored Evangelist," in 1893.

1891 - Provident Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, the first African
        American hospital, is founded by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.
        He also establishes the Provident Hospital School of Nursing
        around the same time, because Emma Reynolds, an African
        American, had been denied admission to every school of nursing
        in the city of Chicago.

1941 - Richard Wright is awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for his
        book, "Native Son."

1943 - Duke Ellington's band plays for a black-tie crowd at Carnegie
        Hall in New York City.  It is the first of what will become an
        annual series of concerts for 'The Duke'.

1945 - The Army Nurse Corps discontinues its color barrier and starts
        admitting nurses without regard to race.  This is due primarily
        to the pressure applied by the National Association of Colored
        Nursing Graduates (NACGN) and other groups.

1962 - Demonstrations against discrimination in off-campus housing are
        staged by students at University of Chicago for fourteen days.
        The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) charges that the
        university operates segregated apartment houses.

1964 - The 24th amendment to the United States' Constitution, abolishing
        the poll tax in federal elections, is ratified.  The poll tax
        had been used extensively in the South as a means of preventing
        African Americans from voting.

1976 - Paul Robeson joins the ancestors, as the result of a stroke, in
        Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  He had been a world-renown actor and
        singer.  He was perhaps the best known and most widely respected
        African American of the 1930s and 1940s.  Robeson was also a
        staunch supporter of the Soviet Union, and a man, later in his
        life, widely vilified and censored for his frankness and
        unyielding views on issues to which public opinion ran contrary.
        As a young man, Robeson was virile, charismatic, eloquent, and
        powerful. He learned to speak more than 20 languages in order to
        break down the barriers of race and ignorance throughout the world,
        and yet, as Sterling Stuckey pointed out in the "New York Times
        Book Review," for the last 25 years of his life his was "a great
        whisper and a greater silence in black America."

1977 - The first episode of "Roots," adapted from the "New York Times"
        bestseller by Alex Haley, is aired on ABC.  Over the next
        several nights, 130 million Americans will be transfixed before
        their televisions as the story of Kunta Kinte is told.

1985 - O.J. Simpson becomes the first Heisman Trophy winner to be
        inducted into pro football's Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
        Roger Staubach of the Dallas Cowboys, another Heisman winner, is
        also elected, but is after O.J. in the sequence of induction.

1986 - The first annual induction ceremony for the Rock 'N' Roll Hall
        of Fame is held in New York City.  Among those inducted were
        Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, and Fats Domino.

1989 - In "City of Richmond vs. J.A. Croson Co.," the United States
        Supreme Court invalidates the city's minority set-aside program,
        a major setback for the concept's proponents.

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