* Today in Black History - July 23 * 1891 - Louis Tompkins Wright is born in LaGrange, Georgia. He will graduate from Harvard Medical School in 1915, and subsequently serve in World War I as an officer in the United States Army Medical Corps. He will become the first African American doctor to be appointed to the staff of a New York City municipal hospital in 1919 when he begins seeing patients at the Harlem Hospital out- patient clinic. He will be, at one point, the only African American member of the American College of Surgeons. He will be a brilliant medical doctor and specialist in fractures and head injuries and will make strides in multiple directions in the field of medicine. His greatest accomplishments will include the perfection of an intradermal smallpox vaccination, the use of Aureomycin for lymphogranuloma venereum (a viral venereal disease), the treatment of humans with antibiotic chlortetracycline, the invention of a brace to cushion head and neck injuries, a blade plate for the treatment of knee fractures, and drug therapy for cancer. From 1948 to 1952, he will have eighty-nine scientific publications to his credit. With grants from the National Cancer Institute and Damon Runyon Fund, he will found the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation where he will deal with the effectiveness of chemotherapeutic agents. He will publish fifteen papers dealing with his investigation of the effects of cancer-fighting drugs. Dr. Wright will also be an active civil rights advocate and leading member of the NAACP which will recognize him as a champion of human rights with the Spingarn Medal in 1940. Harlem Hospital will rename its library after him shortly before he joins the ancestors in 1952 after succumbing to a heart attack. 1892 - Lij Tafari Makonnen is born in Ejarsa Goro, Ethiopia. When Menilek II's daughter becomes empress in 1917, Ras (Prince) Tafari will be named regent and heir apparent to the throne. In 1923 he will have a conspicuous success in the admission of Ethiopia to the League of Nations. In the following year he will visit Rome, Paris, and London, becoming the first Ethiopian ruler ever to go abroad. In 1928 he will assume the title of negus (“king”), and two years later, when Zauditu joins the ancestors, he will be crowned emperor (Nov. 2, 1930) and take the name of Haile Selassie I (“Might of the Trinity”). In 1931 he will promulgate a new constitution, which strictly limits the powers of Parliament. From the late 1920s on, Haile Selassie in effect will be the Ethiopian government, and, by establishing provincial schools, strengthening the police forces, and progressively outlawing feudal taxation, he will seek to both help his people and increase the authority of the central government. When Italy invades Ethiopia in 1935, he will lead the resistance, but in May 1936 he will be forced into exile. He will appeal for help from the League of Nations in a memorable speech that he delivers to that body in Geneva on June 30, 1936. With the advent of World War II, he will secure British assistance in forming an army of Ethiopian exiles in the Sudan. British and Ethiopian forces will invade Ethiopia in January 1941 and recapture Addis Ababa several months later. Although he will be reinstated as emperor, he will have to recreate the authority he had previously exercised. He will again implement social, economic, and educational reforms in an attempt to modernize Ethiopian government and society on a slow and gradual basis. The Ethiopian government will continue to be largely the expression of his personal authority. In 1955 he will grant a new constitution giving him as much power as the previous one. Overt opposition to his rule will surface in December 1960, when a dissident wing of the army secures control of Addis Ababa and is dislodged only after a sharp engagement with loyalist elements. He will play a very important role in the establishment of the Organization of African Unity in 1963. His rule in Ethiopia will continue until 1974, at which time famine, worsening unemployment, and the political stagnation of his government prompts segments of the army to mutiny. They will depose him and establish a provisional military government that espouses Marxist ideologies. He will be kept under house arrest in his own palace, where he will spend the remainder of his life. Official sources at the time will attribute his death to natural causes, but evidence will later emerge suggesting that he had been strangled on the orders of the military government. He will be regarded as the Messiah of the African ace by the Rastafarian movement. He will join the ancestors on August 26, 1975. 1900 - The Pan-African Congress meets in London, England. Among the leaders of the Congress are H. Sylvester Williams, a West Indian Lawyer with a London practice, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Bishop Alexander Walters. 1920 - British East Africa is renamed Kenya. 1947 - Spencer Christian is born in Charles City, Virginia. He will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English and a minor in journalism from Hampton University. He will teach English at the Stony Brook School in Long Island, New York, for one year before launching his television career. He will begin a broadcasting career in 1971 in Richmond, Virginia, as a news reporter, covering state and local politics, the public school system, and landmark cases in the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He will become a weathercaster in Baltimore, Maryland from 1975- 1977, where he will also host "Spencer's World," a weekly half-hour talk show. He will go on to become weather forecaster for "Good Morning America" for thirteen years and sportscaster and weatherman for WABC-TV in New York for nine years. He will then join the ABC7 News team in San Francisco as weather anchor in 1999. He is the author of a series of children's books under the general heading "Spencer Christian's World of Wonders." The first four books are titled: "Can It Really Rain Frogs?," "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," "What Makes the Grand Canyon Grand?," and "Is There a Dinosaur in Your Backyard?." He will be inducted into the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame in April 1993, and named Virginian of the Year by the Virginia Press Association in July, 1993. 1948 - Progressive party convention, meeting in Philadelphia, nominates Henry Wallace for President. The New Party makes a major effort to attract African Americans. Approximately 150 African American delegates and alternates attend the convention. The keynote speaker is Charles P. Howard, and attorney, publisher and former Republican from Des Moines, Iowa. Thirty-seven African Americans will run for state and local offices on the party ticket. Ten Blacks will run for Congress. The party attracts few Black voters, but forces the Democratic party to make serious gestures to hold the African American vote. 1967 - Forty-three persons are killed in a racially motivated disturbance in Detroit, Michigan. Federal troops are called out for the first time since the Detroit riot of 1943, to quell the largest racial rebellion in a U.S. city in the twentieth century. More than two thousand persons are injured and some five thousand are arrested. Police report 1,442 fires. Disturbances will spread to other Michigan cities. 1968 - An alleged black radical ambush of a Cleveland police detail sparks two days of disturbances that will result in 11 deaths, including three policemen. The Ohio National Guard will be mobilized to control the situation. 1984 - Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America, relinquishes her crown after publication of nude photographs taken before her entry in the pageant. Replacing her is Suzette Charles, first runner-up in the contest. 1987 - Billy Williams is inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. ______________________________________________________________ Munirah Chronicle is edited by Rene' A. 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