Today in OUR Story - September 5 * 1804 - Absalom Jones is ordained a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church. 1846 - John Wesley Cromwell is born into slavery in Portsmouth, Virginia. After receiving freedom, he and his family will move to Philadelphia. In 1865, he will return to Portsmouth to open a private school, which will fail due to racial harassment. He will enter Howard University in Washington, DC in 1871. He will receive a law degree and be admitted to the bar in 1874. He will be the first African American to practice law for the Interstate Commerce Commission. He will found the weekly paper, The Peoples Advocate in 1876. In 1881, he will be elected President of Bethel Library and Historical Association in Washington, DC. He will use this position to generate interest in African American history. He will inspire the foundation of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. He will also be the Secretary of the American Negro Academy. He will join the ancestors on April 14, 1927. 1859 - Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson is published. It is the first novel published in the United States by an African American woman and will be lost to readers for years until reprinted with a critical essay by noted African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1983. 1877 - African Americans from the Post-Civil-War South, led by Benjamin Pap Singleton, settle in Kansas and establish towns like Nicodemus, to take advantage of free land offered by the United States government through the Homestead Act of 1860. 1895 - George Washington Murray is elected to Congress from South Carolina. 1916 - Novelist Frank Yerby is born in Augusta, Georgia. A student at Fisk University and the University of Chicago, Yerbys early short story Health Card will win the O. Henry short story award. He will later turn to adventure novels and become a best-selling author in the 1940s and 1950s with The Foxes of Harrow, The Vixens and many others. His later novels will include Goat Song, The Darkness at Ingrahams Crest-A Tale of the Slaveholding South, and Devil Seed. In total, Yerby will publish over 30 novels that sell over 20 million copies. He will leave the United States in 1955 in protest against racial discrimination, moving to Spain where he will remain for the rest of his life. He will join the ancestors on November 29, 1991, after succumbing to congestive heart failure in Madrid. He will be interred there in the Cementerio de la Almudena. 1960 - Cassius Clay of Louisville, Kentucky, wins the gold medal in light heavyweight boxing at the Olympic Games in Rome, Italy. Clay will later change his name to Muhammad Ali and become one of the great boxing champions in the world. In 1996, at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, Muhammad Ali will have the honor of lighting the Olympic flame. 1960 - Leopold Sedar Senghor, poet, politician, is elected President of Senegal. 1972 - Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway win a gold record -- for their duet, Where is the Love. The song gets to number five on the pop music charts and is one of two songs for the duo to earn gold. The other will be The Closer I Get To You (1978). 1995 - O.J. Simpson jurors hear testimony that police detective Mark Fuhrman had uttered a racist slur, and advocated the killing of Blacks.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 14:06:26 +0000
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