*               Today in Black History - March 17               *

1806 - Norbert Rillieux is born a free man in New Orleans, Louisiana.
        Rillieux will become best known for his revolutionary
        improvements in sugar refining methods.  Awarded his second
        patent for an evaporator, the invention will be widely used
        throughout Louisiana and the West Indies, dramatically
        increasing and modernizing sugar production.

1865 - Aaron Anderson wins the Navy's Medal of Honor for his heroic
        actions aboard the USS Wyandank during the Civil War.

1886 - A massacre occurs in Carrollton, Mississippi. Twenty African
        Americans are killed by white supremacists.

1891 - West Virginia State College is founded in Institute, West
        Virginia.

1896 - C.B. Scott receives a patent for the street sweeper.

1898 - Blanche Kelso Bruce joins the ancestors in Washington, DC at
        the age of 57.

1912 - Bayard Rustin is born in West Chester, Pennsylvania.  He will
        become a civil rights leader and peace activist.  He will join
        Martin Luther King Jr. in organizing the bus boycott that will
        establish King as a national figure.  For the next 10 years, he
        will move back and forth between the world of the civil rights
        movement and the world of peace activism.  He will be instrumental
        in helping A. Philip Randolph plan the 1963 March on Washington.
        But due to his youthful ties to the Communist Party, a wartime
        imprisonment, and an arrest in California on public morals charges,
        Rustin will be obligated to limit his public exposure to avoid
        problems for King and others whom Southern white leaders (and the
        FBI) were attempting to destroy.

1919 - Nathaniel Adams Coles is born in Montgomery, Alabama.  Better
        known as Nat "King" Cole, he will start his musical career in
        a band with his brother Eddie and in a production of "Shuffle
        Along."  Leader of the King Cole Trio, he will achieve
        international acclaim as a jazz pianist before becoming an
        even more popular balladeer known for such songs as "Mona
        Lisa," "The Christmas Song" and "Unforgettable."  Cole will
        also have the distinction of being the first African American
        to host a network television variety show (1956-1957), a pioneer
        in breaking down racial barriers in Las Vegas, and a founding
        member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences,
        which will honor him with a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Grammy
        in 1989.

1933 - Myrlie Beasley is born in Vicksburg, Mississippi.  She will become
        the wife of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1951 and will
        work with him in order to combat discrimination and segregation in
        Mississippi.  Together, they will open and manage the first NAACP
        Mississippi State Office.  Her husband will be assassinated in
        1963, by white supremacist, Byron de la Beckwith.  She will later
        move to California where she will graduate from Pomona College.
        She will work in the corporate world as Director for Consumer
        Affairs at the Atlantic Richfield Company and in government as a
        Commissioner of the Los Angeles, California, Board of Public Works.
        She will be the first African American woman to serve on that board.
        She will be the author of the book, "For Us, the Living," and the
        recipient of numerous honorary degrees.  She will later become Mrs.
        Myrlie Evers-Williams and be elected vice-chairperson of the NAACP
        in 1994, and in 1995 will become the first woman chairperson. In
        1998, she will be succeeded by Julian Bond as Chair of the NAACP.

1970 - The United States casts its first veto in the U.N. Security Council.
        The U.S. kills a resolution that would have condemned Britain for
        failure to use force to overthrow the white-ruled government of
        Rhodesia.

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