Facts of the Day

February 2016

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• February 1, 2016

  National African American History Month, also known as Black History Month, is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans and a time to recognize the central role they have played in the history of the United States. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History has selected the theme: Hallowed Grounds: Sites of African American Memories.

• February 2, 2016

  In 1930, Thurgood Marshall was denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because he was black. After being accepted to Howard University Law School, he began to develop an impressive track record of winning court cases against states that aimed to continue practicing discrimination. He later became the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, where he served from 1967 to 1991.

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• February 3, 2016

  Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights activist whose depiction of her own suffering focused attention on the plight of Blacks throughout the South. In 1964, she worked with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, organizing the Freedom Summer voter registration drive in Mississippi. Hamer's tombstone is inscribed with her famous quote, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."

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• February 4, 2016

  Known as the "Father of Black History," Dr. Carter G. Woodson founded the celebration he called "Negro History Week" in 1926. He selected the second week of February because it fell between the birthdays of the famed orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln. In 1976, the celebration expanded to include the entire month.

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• February 5, 2016

  On May 4, 1961, a group of 13 civil rights activists began the Freedom Rides, a series of bus trips through the American South to protest segregation in interstate bus terminals. The Freedom Riders departed from Washington, D.C. and attempted to integrate facilities at bus terminals along the way into the South. Before leaving for the trip, the young adults wrote their wills and said goodbye to loved ones. The group encountered tremendous violence from white protestors along the route, but were able to draw international attention to their cause.

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• February 6, 2016

  On March 7, 1965, a group of demonstrators began a march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights. They were stopped by state troopers and the Dallas County Sheriff's Department at the Edmund Winston Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The lawmen attacked the peaceful demonstrators, and the day became known as "Bloody Sunday." The march was the catalyst for the passage of the Voting Rights Act, passed by President Lyndon B. Johnson less than five months later.

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• February 7, 2016

  Founded in 1738, Fort Mose Settlement was the first community of free ex-slaves. It was located at a Spanish colony in Florida called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves could escape to the colony and get their freedom when they declared their allegiance to the King of Spain and joined the Catholic Church.

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• February 8, 2016

  The largest plantation house in Florida is the Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island. The main house was built by slaves in 1738, and was sold to Zephaniah Kingsley and his African wife, Anta Madgigine Jai in 1815. When the U.S. gained possession of Florida in 1821, Kingsley fought against laws that greatly prohibited the activities of slaves and free Blacks, and even wrote a major treatise on the subject. Even though he owned slaves, he was a strong believer in treating people according to their abilities, not their color.

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• February 9, 2016

  Mary McLeod Bethune was the founder of the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in Daytona Beach, Florida. It formally opened in October of 1904 with five students enrolled. In 1929, Bethune merged with the Cookman Institute and became co-ed. As of 2015, the Bethune-Cookman University has grown to enroll upwards of 4,000 undergraduate students each year.

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• February 10, 2016

  Jean Baptiste Point du Sable is known as the first settler of present-day Chicago. As merchant and farmer of the region, Point du Sable established both a prosperous farm in an area otherwise unsettled and an affable relationship with local Native American tribes. After the end of the Revolutionary War, his farm prospered greatly. Travelers as far as the East coast knew of the Point du Sable farm as one of the only sources of farmed produce in the area.

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• February 11, 2016

  When the U.S. military was segregated, there were myths that Black men were not successful fighters. The Tuskegee Airmen proved this misled theory wrong when they flew over 200 combat missions in World War II and lost none of their own to enemy fire. Their second-to-none fighting record was instrumental in burying myths about correlations concerning race and combat skills and paved the way to full integration of the U.S. military.

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• February 12, 2016

  The Underground Railroad was a loosely organized network of connections for slaves escaping to the North. Homes, or "stations" would provide food and shelter for escaping slaves, and the leader of the group, or "conductor", ensured that they moved safely from station to station. It is estimated that close to 100,000 fugitive slaves used the railroad between 1810 and 1860, the majority of whom escaped from Kentucky, Virginia and Maryland.

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• February 13, 2016

  "On April 5, 1945, the 477th Bombardment Group, the first Black bomber group, attempted to integrate an all-White officers’ club at Freeman Field, Indiana. As the officers attempted to enter, they were arrested. By the end of the evening, 103 officers had been arrested. The trials drew national attention. The Freeman Field Mutiny is regarded as an important step toward the integration of the U.S. military."

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• February 14, 2016

  Little Rock Central High School is widely regarded as the first Southern school to be integrated, but Clinton High School in Tennessee was integrated a year earlier. In 1957, three years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Bobby Cain graduated from Clinton High as the first Black graduate of an integrated high school in the South. In 1958, Gail Ann Epps became the first Black female to graduate. Later theat year, Clinton High was bombed and the school was destroyed.

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• February 15, 2016

  The Montgomery Bus Boycott began when Rosa Parks, a Black protestor, refused to give up her seat for a White man on the bus. Parks was a politically active member of the NAACP long before her actions on that day, and came from a family of activists. On that day in 1955, a simple act of the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement" echoed throughout the country.

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• February 16, 2016

  When he escaped slavery in 1838, Frederick Douglass landed in New York and began to astonish America with his intellect and rhetorical skills. He used his knowledge and talents to change the way Americans thought about race, slavery, and American Democracy. Even after his death over a century ago, his legacy endures. Every day, people are inspired by his resilient advocacy for civil rights and political awareness.

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• February 17, 2016

  Seneca Village was a settlement in central Manhattan, and comprised a small part of present-day Central Park. It is thought to have been Manhattan’s first stable community of African American property owners from 1825 to the mid-1850s.

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• February 18, 2016

  Mulberry Row was the main road on Monticello -Thomas Jefferson’s 5,000-acre plantation in Virginia. A once-bustling hub of homes, workshops and sheds, the Row was where all walks of life –enslaved people, indentured servants, and free men and women- came together and worked as farmers, weavers, carpenters, gardeners, and blacksmiths. The plantation suggests the intricacy of labor at such a large, production-focused establishment.

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• February 19, 2016

  Ralph Abernathy was the pastor of Montgomery’s First Baptist Church and one of the most prolific Freedom Riders of the movement. Abernathy, a good friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. helped to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott and later took over as the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLS) after King’s assassination.

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• February 20, 2016

  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the nation's largest and strongest civil rights organization. Founded in 1909 in New York City by a group of Black and White citizens committed to social justice, the NAACP's principal objective is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of minority group citizens of United States and eliminate racial prejudice.

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• February 21, 2016

  President Abraham Lincoln considered the Emancipation Proclamation to be the most important aspect of his legacy. "I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper," he declared. "If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it."

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• February 22, 2016

  Since 1976, every U.S. President has officially designated the month of February as Black History Month. Other countries around the world, including Canada and the United Kingdom, also devote a month to celebrating Black history.

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• February 23, 2016

  On August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., for a political rally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organized by civil rights and religious groups, the event was designed to shed light on the political and social challenges African Americans faced across the United States. The march became a key moment in the struggle for civil rights in the U.S., and it culminated in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech.

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• February 24, 2016

  The Civil Rights Act of 1964—which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin—is considered one of the greatest legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. First proposed by President John F. Kennedy, it survived strong opposition from Southern members of Congress and was signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson.

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• February 25, 2016

  On March 6, 1960, President Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925, prohibiting discrimination in federal government hiring on the basis of race, religion, or national origin and establishing the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, the EEOC. They were directed to scrutinize and study employment practices of the U.S. government and recommend additional affirmative steps for executive departments and agencies.

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• February 26, 2016

  In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The Court's unanimous decision overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which allowed for "separate but equal" public facilities. Declaring that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," the Brown v. Board decision helped break state-sponsored segregation and provided an intricate piece to the American Civil Rights Movement.

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• February 27, 2016

  "Charles Lenox Remond was one of the earliest recorded Black abolitionist speakers. At 18, he traveled from his home in Massachusetts to London for the World Anti-Slavery Convention and remained abroad for many years to lecture on abolition in universities across the United Kingdom. During the Civil War, he recruited blacks and helped to staff the first two all-Black units from Massachusetts."

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• February 28, 2016

  Little Rock High School was the scene of one of the most tumultuous tests of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Three years after the trial, a federal court ordered Little Rock to comply and desegregate the school. Nine students –known as the "Little Rock Nine"- were met with mobs of angry white protesters swarming front steps. This violence and noncooperation from the community forced the Nine to withdraw from the school for their own protection. Two years later, four of the Nine returned to complete their high school educations.

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• February 29, 2016

  Joseph Cinque and 53 others were abducted from their home in Sierra Leone by Portuguese slave traders. Aboard the schooner Amistad, Cinque led a successful revolt against the crew. On March 9, 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court freed the 35 Africans who survived the ordeal and cleared their passage back to their home on the West African coast.

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