After years of performing all over the world, American contralto Marian Anderson finally made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera on this day in 1955. She performed music ranging from gospel, and spirituals to opera. Ms. Anderson was famously barred from singing at DAR Constitution Hall in 1939, which led to her open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial that year.
Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist, teacher, folklorist, ethnographer, writer, and filmmaker was born on this day in 1891 in Alabama. Among her great works was Their Eyes Were Watching God.
W. B. Purvis was a businessman and inventor who was responsible for many inventions. His most important invention was the updated design of the fountain pen for which he received a patent on this day in 1890.
Colonel Frederick Gregory was born on this day in 1941. He will become one of the first Blacks to serve as astronauts at NASA, where he also became the administrator in 2005.
“Now in order to develop these massive action programs we've got to get rid of one or two false notions that continue to exist in our society. One is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. I'm sure you've heard this idea. It is the notion almost that there is something in the very flow of time that will miraculously cure all evils. And I've heard this over and over again. There are those, and they are often sincere people, who say to Negroes and their allies In the white community, that we should slow up and just be nice and patient and continue to pray, and in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out because only time can solve the problem.
I think there is an answer to that myth. And it is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I'm absolutely convinced that the forces of ill-will in our nation, the extreme rightists in our nation, have often used time much more effectively than the forces of good will. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words of the bad people and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time.”
MLK, Jr, ‘The Other America’, 1967
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