Arguably America’s greatest cultural icon, Paul Leroy Robeson died on this day in 1976 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Lawyer, professional athlete, stage and screen actor, activist, concert singer and polyglot, Robeson became a larger-than-life figure who was consistently harassed by the federal government.
ABC-TV made history on this day in 1977 when it began the mini-series based on Alex Haley’s book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The show won multiple awards, including the Golden Globe and Emmy, and was at the time the most watched mini-series on American television.
On this day in 1964, Congress ratified the 24th Amendment. This amendment abolished poll taxes and other such taxes which many states had to deny Black people the franchise.
“I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
MLK, Jr, 1963
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