* Today in Black History - January 28 *
1858 - John Brown organizes the raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's
Ferry, West Virginia. The raid was an attempt to obtain arms
and ammunition to free African Americans from slavery by force.
1901 - James Richmond Barthe' is born in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
Educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, he will begin to
attain critical acclaim as a sculptor at 26. He will drop the
use of his first name when producing his works of art and will
be best known as Richmond Barthe. His first commissions will be
of Henry O. Tanner and Toussaint L'Ouverture. He will also
become the first African American commissioned to produce a bust
for the NYU Hall of Fame (of Booker T. Washington).
1938 - Crystal Byrd Fauset is elected to the Pennsylvania House of
Representatives, becoming the first African American woman to
be elected to a state legislature.
1944 - Matthew Henson is a recipient of a joint medal by Congress for
his role as co-discoverer of the North Pole. It is the U.S.
government's first official recognition of the explorer who
accompanied Commander Robert Peary on his 1909 expedition.
1958 - Brooklyn Dodger catcher Roy Campanella's career ends when he
loses control of his car on a slick highway. He will become a
paraplegic and be confined to a wheelchair the remainder of
his life. The accident ends his ten-year playing career with
the Dodgers, where he had been named the National League's MVP
three times, but he will remain a part of the Dodgers
organization for many years. He will join the ancestors on
June 26, 1993.
1960 - Zora Neale Hurston joins the ancestors in Fort Pierce, Florida
at the age of 71. She had been a prominent figure during the
Harlem Renaissance.
1970 - Arthur Ashe is denied entry to compete on the U.S. Team for the
South African Open Tennis Championships due to Ashe's
sentiments on South Africa's racial policies.
1972 - Scott Joplin's Opera "Treemonisha," published 61 years earlier,
has its world premiere with Robert Shaw and Katherine Dunham
directing.
1986 - The space shuttle "Challenger" explodes 73 seconds after lift-off
at Cape Canaveral, Florida. One of the seven crew members killed
is physicist Dr. Ronald McNair, the only African American aboard.
1997 - The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa announces
that as part of their petition for amnesty, five Afrikaner police
had admitted to killing Steve Biko. The announcement confirms
what his admirers and followers had never doubted: Steve Biko was
a martyr to the struggle against the apartheid government. Steve
Biko was one of the major figures in the struggle against South
Africa's system of apartheid. Founder and leader of the Black
Consciousness Movement, the charismatic Biko was the first
president of the all-black South African Students Organization
before organizing the Black People's Convention, a coalition of
over 70 black organizations committed to ending apartheid. In
1977, Biko was arrested. While in custody in Port Elizabeth, on
the Indian Ocean coast, he was apparently severely beaten. He was
denied medical attention and driven in the back of a police van
nearly 700 miles to Pretoria, where he died, naked and shackled in
a police hospital at the age of 29. The police first claimed that
Biko starved himself to death, then that he died of self-inflicted
injuries.
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