Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was born on this day in 1874 in Santurce, Puerto Rico. He was a historian, writer, bibliophile, and an activist. He established the Negro Society for Historical Research, collecting artworks, literature, and other artifacts to make the case of the African contribution to American History. He was a member and the last president of, the American Negro Academy, a learned society to unearth African History.
Jack Roosevelt Robinson, baseball hero, was elected on this day in 1962 into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He became the first Black person so honored.
Robison Delany’s great career came to an end on this day in 1885 in Wilberforce, Ohio. Born free in Charles Town in present day West Virginia, he went on to become an abolitionist, journalist, military officer during the Civil War, and a physician. As an activist on behalf of black people, he made a case for a return to Africa with his slogan, “Africa for Africans”.
Legal lion Thurgood Marshall died on this day in 1993 in Bethesda, Maryland.
Aaron Joseph Neville was born on this day in 1941 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is an accomplished singer and musician, specializing in Rhythm and Blues, soul, country, jazz and pop.
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”
MLK, Jr, 1967
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