Spingarn Medal awarded to Carter G. Woodson for ten years devoted service in collecting and publishing the records of the Negro in America.

President Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a native of Virginia, declared Liberia an independent republic.

President Truman issued Executive Order No. 9981 directing equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces.

Liberia /l aɪ ˈ b ɪər i ə/  (  listen), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to its west, Guinea to its north and Ivory Coast to its east. It covers an area of 111,369 square kilometers (43,000 sq mi) and has a population of 4,503,000 people.[3] English is the official language and over 20 indigenous languages are spoken, representing the numerous tribes who make up more than 95% of the population. The countrys capital and largest city is Monrovia.

Forests on the coastline are composed mostly of salt-tolerant mangrove trees, while the more sparsely populated inland has forests opening onto a plateau of drier grasslands. The climate is equatorial, with significant rainfall during the May–October rainy season and harsh harmattan winds the remainder of the year. Liberia possesses about forty percent of the remaining Upper Guinean rainforest. It was an important producer of rubber in the early 20th century.

The Republic of Liberia began as a settlement of the American Colonization Society (ACS), who believed blacks would face better chances for freedom in Africa than in the United States.[7] The country declared its independence on July 26, 1847. The United Kingdom was the first country to recognize Liberias independence.[8] The U.S. did not recognize Liberias independence until during the American Civil War on February 5, 1862. Between January 7, 1822 and the American Civil War, more than 15,000 freed and free-born blacks, who faced legislated limits in the U.S., and 3,198 Afro-Caribbeans, relocated to the settlement.[9] The black settlers carried their culture and tradition with them to Liberia. The Liberian constitution and flag were modeled after those of the U.S. On January 3, 1848, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a wealthy, free-born African American from Virginia who settled in Liberia, was elected

Frederick Douglass was the only male to play a prominent role at the first Womans Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York. He seconded the womans suffrage motion introduced by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Race riot, Philadelphia. Three whites and one Black were killed.

National Bar Association incorporated.

Independence Day for the Republic of Liberia

Captain H. Ford Douglas was born in Virginia in 1831 to a white man named William Douglas, and an enslaved mother named Mary.  He escaped from slavery sometime after his fifteenth birthday, and moved to Cleveland, Ohio.

Working as a barber, the self-educated Douglas was active in the free black community of Cleveland, especially its state convention movement.  His first state meeting was at Columbus in 1850, at which time Douglas was already gaining attention for his outstanding oratorical talents.  He appeared at the Ohio State Convention again 1851 and 1852, arguing that African Americans would never gain equality in the United States, and advocating African American emigration.  Douglas supported William Lloyd Garrison’s view that the United States Constitution was a proslavery document because it did not exclusively prohibit slavery.  He claimed it was written with the intention of continuing slavery.   Douglas also felt African-Americans allowed slavery to continue by remaining in the United States and making themselves subject to the U.S. Constitution.  

At the 1854 National Emigration Convention, Douglas emerged as a prominent speaker with his defense of emigration.  He moved to British-controlled West Canada after the convention and in 1856 became a proprietor of the Provincial Freedom, a Canadian newspaper promoting antislavery and emigrationist principles.  Through the newspaper Douglas promoted Canada as a place where blacks could live under a government which protected them.  He married Statira Steele in October 1857, with whom he had one child.  

Douglas returned to Chicago in 1858, where he continued to support the emigration movement, which now promoted emigration to Africa, Haiti, and Central America.

After a trip to New England in May 1860 at the invitation of Parker Pillsbury, Douglas became an abolitionist speaker.  He shocked many in his audience with open calls for violence to end slavery, and spoke about it increasingly after 1860.  He continued to promote his belief that it was the

Patrick Francis Healy, first Black awarded Ph.D. degree, passed final examination at Louvain in Belgium.

Spottiswood W. Robinson, representative of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, dean of the Howard University Law School, member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S. Circuit Judge of the D.C. Circuit, born

Bobbi Brown was found unconscious in the bathtub of her home near Atlanta on January 31, 2015, in circumstances reminiscent of her mother’s death; she spent months in a medically-induced coma and died on July 26, 2015… Whitney Houston was the subject of a widespread false rumor in September of 2001 that she had died of a drug overdose.