Ourstory

1964 - Rebecca Lee Crumpler becomes the first black woman to receive an M.D. degree. She graduated from the New England Female Medical College. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was born in 1833. She worked from 1852-1860 as a nurse in Massachusetts.

1966 - Military leaders oust Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana - while on a peace mission, in Beijing, to stop the Vietnam War.

2008 – Raul Castro is elected president of Cuba after his brother Fidel resigns.

Japanese General Takahashi met with NOI leader Elijah Muhammad and explained that Japan was committed to the Black man’s struggle and wanted to destroy America for all the crimes it had committed against people of color throughout the world.

2 years later the attack on Pearl Harbor.
4 years later the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Executive Order 9066

Ourstory 2/28 (the irony of some of the info associated with Wheatley and Duncan falling on the same dates is rather odd but nothing spooky at all)


1704 - A school for African Americans is opened in New York City by Elias Neau, a Frenchman.

1708 - A slave revolt occurs in Newton, Long Island in New York State. Seven whites are killed. Two African American male slaves and an Indian slave are hanged, and an African American woman is burned alive.

1776 - George Washington, in his letter of acknowledgment to Phyllis Wheatley for a poem she wrote for his birthday, says, "I thank you most sincerely for...the elegant line you enclosed...the
style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your poetic talents."

1778 - Rhode Island General Assembly in precedent-breaking act
authorizes the enlistment of slaves.

1784 - Phyllis Wheatley, poet, joins the ancestors.

1854 - Some 50 slavery opponents meet in Ripon, Wisconsin, to call for the creation of a new political group, which will become the
Republican Party.

1859 - Arkansas legislature requires free African Americans to choose between exile and enslavement.

1879 – The “Exodus of 1879” where many Blacks left the South in large numbers heading North starts.

1932 - Richard Spikes invented/patented automatic gear shift.

1940 - United States population: 131,669,275. Black population: 12,865,518 (9.8 per cent). Richard Wright's Native Son published.

1942 - Riots against African Americans occur in Detroit, Michigan at
the Sojourner Truth Homes.

1943 - "Porgy and Bess" opens on Broadway with Anne Brown and Todd Duncan in starring roles.

1945 - Charles "Bubba" Smith is born in Beaumont, Texas. He will
become a professional football player with the Baltimore Colts, Oakland Raiders and the Houston Oilers. After a successful football career, he will become an actor in the "Police Academy" series. He also will become the president and CEO of Vital Aircraft Company, which solicits the Department of Defense for government contracts. To illustrate his enduring interest in education and work with children, he will endow an engineering scholarship at his alma mater, Michigan State University.

1948 - Sgt. Cornelius F. Adjetey becomes the first martyr for national independence of Ghana.

1977 - Death of comedian Eddie ("Rochester") Anderson (71).

1984 - Singer Michael Jackson wins eight Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, breaking the previous record of six awards won by a single artist in 1965. Jackson's awards stem from his album "Thriller," which became the biggest selling record of all time with 35 million copies sold since its release in 1982.

1990 - Philip Emeagwali awarded the Gordon Bell Prize (computing's Nobel Prize) for solving one of the twenty most difficult problems in the computing field.

1991 - "The Content of our Character," the controversial book on
affirmative action and race relations by Shelby Steele, wins the National Book Critics Circle Award.

1998 - Todd Duncan joins the ancestors at his home in Washington, DC, at the age 95. His ascension is on the fifty-fifth anniversary of his starring role in the Broadway opening of "Porgy and Bess."

up...thread like this should never disappear off the first page