Section » History
Reclaim Our History Feb. 1-15
Feb. 1, 1960: Four black students sit in at Woolworths’ lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina to protest segregation. Similar protests later take place all over the South and in some northern communities. By September 1961, more than 70,000 students, whites and blacks, will have participated in sit-ins. 1978: First US postage stamp to honor an African-American woman, Harriet Tubman, issued.
Feb. 2, 1956: Autherine J. Lucy is first African American student to attend the University of Alabama.
Feb. 3, 1965: Over 2,600 arrests, many of them schoolchildren, in week-long voter registration demonstrations in Selma, Alabama.
Feb. 4, 1822: Emancipated US blacks settle in Liberia, West Africa. 1956: White student riot at University of Alabama against court-ordered admission of first Negro student.
Feb. 5, 1994: White supremacist Byron De La Beckwith convicted of killing Medgar Evers in 1963, Jackson, Mississippi.
Feb. 6, 1926: Negro History Week, originated by Carter G. Woodson, is observed for first time. Would become Black History Month. 1956: Autherine Lucy, first black student to enter the University of Alabama, is suspended after three days of riots due to her presence. It is not clear why the University, in its vast academic wisdom, did not elect to suspend the rioters.
Feb. 8, 1968: South Carolina highway patrolmen kill four and wound 33 as black students protest at a segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg. First student protest deaths in the ’60s. 1971: National Guard ends four days of black rioting in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Feb. 10, 1780: Capt. Paul Cuffe and six other black residents of Massachusetts petition the state legislature for the right to vote.
Feb. 11, 1861: US House unanimously passes resolution guaranteeing noninterference with slavery in any state. 1916: Black feminist and civil-rights activist Flo Kennedy born in Kansas City, Missouri. As a lawyer, Kennedy represented Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker & H. Rap Brown. In 1966, she founded the Media Workshop to confront racism in media & advertising. In 1972 she formed the Feminist Party and files IRS complaint alleging that the Catholic Church violates tax-exempt requirements by spending money to influence political decisions.
Feb. 12, 1853: Illinois passes law requiring any black entering the state and staying more than 10 days to pay a $50 fine. If unable to pay, they would be sold into slavery for a period commensurate with the fine.
Feb. 13, 1946: Isaac Woodard blinded by Atlanta police while being abused in custody, less than three hours after the African-American soldier received his honorable discharge from the armed forces. Immortalized in a Woody Guthrie song, “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.”
Feb. 14, 1817: Birth as a slave of Frederick Douglass, black abolitionist and founder of the influential The North Star newspaper in Rochester, New York. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.” 1957: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC, originally with another name) is founded. Martin Luther King, Jr. becomes its president, Atlanta, Georgia. 1965: Less than a week before his assassination, Malcolm X’s home fire bombed. New York City.