365 Black Facts

Jan. 12 

Jan. 5 

Jack Johnson (1878—1946), the 1st African American heavy weight champion, patented a wrench in 1922.

Dec. 8

Black and Proud…
To offset the stigma of ‘race color,’ the phrase, ‘Black is Beautiful,’ was used to ease color pressure and dignify the use of the word ‘Black’ to describe African Americans

Dec. 1

Blazin’ Saddles…
Of the estimated 35,000 cowboys that worked the ranches and rode the trails of the American West frontier, 5,000 to 9,000 or more were Black.  They participated in almost all of the drives northward, and were assigned to every job possible except that of trail boss.

Nov. 24

Call a doctor, stat! 
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams was born in Pennsylvania and attended medical school in Chicago, where he received his M.D. in 1883.  He founded the Provident Hospital in Chicago in 1891, the oldest free standing Black owned hospital in the United States.  Dr. Williams was also the only African American in a group of 100 charter members of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.

Nov. 17 

Knowledge is Power
William Sanders Scarborough (1852-1926) was the first black member of the venerable Modern Language Association.  Scarborough, who was president of Wilberforce University in Ohio, was born into slavery and secretly taught himself to read and write.  When he mastered those skills, he went on to learn Greek and Latin. 

Nov. 10

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste…
In 1959, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors in Prince Edward Co., Virginia voted to close its public schools in a show of ‘massive resistance’ against integration.  The vast majority of the county’s 1,700 African American students and some white students went without formal education from 1959 to 1964. 

Nov. 3

Get out and Vote! 
Barack Obama, the nation’s first black democratic candidate President of the United States, was born on August 4th, 1961, in Hawaii.  Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983, and moved to Chicago in 1985 to work for a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment. In 1991, Obama graduated from Harvard Law School where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.
(http://obama.senate.gov/about)

Oct. 27

Jack Johnson (1878—1946), the 1st African American heavy weight champion, patented a wrench in 1922. 

Oct. 20

Welcome Drs. Vincent and Rachel Harding this week (father and daughter)
Vincent Gordon Harding was born in Harlem, attended City College of New York, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago respectively to complete his education

Dr. Harding and his wife co-founded Mennonite House, an interracial voluntary service center and Movement gathering place in Atlanta. The couple traveled throughout the South in the early 1960s working as reconcilers, counselors and participants in the Movement, assisting the anti-segregation campaigns of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

It is said that Vincent Harding occasionally drafted speeches for Martin Luther King, including King's famous anti-Vietnam speech, "A Time to Break Silence" which King delivered on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, exactly a year before he was assassinated.

Oct. 13

Celebrate our namesake with us! 
Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia, Mary Lou Williams grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of eleven children. She taught herself to play the piano (her first public performance was at the age of six), and became a professional musician in her teens.

Williams was long regarded as the only significant female musician in jazz, both as an instrumentalist and as a composer.  She was an important swing pianist, with a lightly rocking, legato manner based on subtly varied stride and boogie-woogie bass patterns.
Towards the end of her life, the distinguished pianist, composer, teacher and humanitarian received a number of honorary doctorates from American universities. Williams taught on the staff of Duke University as an Artist-in-Residence from 1977 until her death in 1981. 

Oct. 6

How sweet it is…Norbert Rillieux invented the sugar refinery process. Born on March 17, 1806 in New Orleans, Louisiana, Rillieux was free man, although his mother was a slave and father, a wealthy, white engineer involved in the cotton industry.  After being educated in Paris, France, Rillieux returned to NOLA to assist his father, whose plantation was then being used to process and refine sugar. Rilleux used what he learned in France to invent a triple evaporation pan system that revolutionized the sugar refining industry improving efficiency, quality, and safety.
(African American Answer Book)

Sept. 29

‘Turn that up…that’s my song!’ In 1949, black audiences in Atlanta tuned in to the first radio station owned and operated by African-Americans, WERD. Established by Jesse B. Blayton Sr. in 1949, the station was housed in a Masonic building in one of the wealthiest black neighborhoods in the United States. Blayton hired his son Jesse Jr. to run the station, along with, "Jockey" Jack Gibson, one of the most popular black DJs at the time.

WDIA in Memphis, Tenn., had black programming on the air in 1948, but was not owned by African-Americans.

("Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio," by William Barlow. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999)

Sept. 22

 “Spin yer partner, round and round…”
The banjo originated in Africa and up until the 1800s was considered an instrument only played by blacks.
(www.biography.com)

Sept. 15

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was used as a meeting-place for civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy, and Fred Shutterworth. Tensions became high when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the  Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) became involved in a campaign to register African Americans to vote in Birmingham.

On Sunday, 15th September, 1963, a white man was seen getting out of a white and turquoise Chevrolet car and placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Soon afterwards, at 10.22 a.m., the bomb exploded killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). The four girls had been attending Sunday school classes at the church.
Twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast.