U.S. Supreme Court ruled the five-four decision that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment which violated the Eighth Amendment. At the time of the ruling, Blacks and members of other minority groups constituted 483 of the 60 persons awaiting execution.

Stokely Carmichael was a significant Trinidadian-American figure during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and the global Pan-African movement in which he actively participated. With time he gained prominence as a black leader as he led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and served at the Black Panther Party as Honorary Prime Minister. Eventually, he was rendered the leader of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party.

Born on June 29, 1941 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Carmichael also known as Kwame Touré, moved to Harlem, New York to meet his parents. When he was two years old, they left him with his grandmother and immigrated to America. In Trinidad he was sent to Tranquility School. Being from the working class family, his father was a carpenter and taxi driver, and mother, stewardess for a steamship line. Later the family moved to Van Nest neighborhood in the East Bronx. There Carmichael attended an elite Bronx High School of Science. The school was very selective with its students and only admitted those with outstanding academic performance.

Upon graduation, he went on to enroll himself at Howard University, Washington, D.C. It was a historical African American education institute. He studied under the supervision of renowned scholars, including Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, Nathan Hare and Sterling Brown. In 1964, he graduated from Howard with a degree in philosophy. His remarkable academic achievement earned him a full graduation program scholarship offer from Harvard University but he refused.

During his years at Howard, Carmichael joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG). With his Jewish friend and civil-right activist Tom Kahn, they funded the gatherings that held at his apartment in which the fellow activists shared their political enthusiasm for human rights. Kahn also introduced him to a well-known African-American leader, Bayard Rustin. Inspired by the talk during these gatherings, Stokely Carmichael found himself more closely involved in the Civil Rights Movement.

NAACP annual report said the unemployment of urban Blacks in 1971 was worse than at anytime since the great depression of the thirties. The report also said that more school desegregation occurred in 1971 than in any other year since the 1954 school decision.

NAACP chairman Stephen Gill Spottswood told the NAACP convention that the Nixon administration was anti-Negro and was pressing a calculated Policy inimical to the needs and aspirations of the large majority of citizens.

Performer, composer, arranger and teacher, Hale Smith, Jr., encompassed the worlds of jazz and classical music. Beginning with his childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, he trained in jazz and classical composition, performance, and teaching. His collaborations and influence crossed multiple fields where he set out to resolve the paradoxes of both improvisation and notated music.

Hale Smith, Jr. was born June 29, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio to parents Hale and Jimmie Smith.  Beginning piano at age seven, he was introduced to composing and collecting musical scores. His father owned a printing business and his parents were highly supportive. By high school he was playing jazz piano and composing. One of his early compositions was encouraged by Duke Ellington.

After military service in World War II (1943-45) he received a B.A. degree (1950) and M.A. (1952) from the Cleveland Institute of Music. Smith’s first opera, Blood Wedding, premiered in Cleveland in 1953.  Moving to New York in 1958, he became an editor, advisor, and copyright consultant for several publishing houses. In 1960 he received a commission from BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.), one of the major music licensing and performing rights companies, for his work Contours for Orchestra. He also taught at C.W. Post College on Long Island, New York until 1970.

Smith performed as a jazz pianist and arranger in New York. He worked with prominent jazz artists, including Chico Hamilton, Dizzy Gillespie, Eric Dolphy, Randy Weston, Melba Liston, Ahmad Jamal, and Oliver Nelson among many others. His influence was also felt as his students and colleagues mingled in the blending of jazz and classical ventures.

In 1970 Smith became a professor of Music at the University of Connecticut, where he taught until he retired in 1984.  During this period composing classical music became paramount with solo pieces, duos, chamber ensembles, choir, and incidental music. Among his compositions are In Memoriam, Beryl Rubinstein (1953), Faces of Jazz (1965), and Innerflexions (1977), all for the

Born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina on June 29, 1849, William J. Simmons served as the second president of what would later become Simmons College of Kentucky between 1880 and 1890. He was also a prominent historian and biographer of African American men.  Simmons’s parents were Edward and Esther Simmons.  When William was a child, he and his mother escaped to Bordentown, New Jersey.

William J. Simmons connection to the ministry began early.  According to the 1860 census, his mother resided in the home of a Methodist Episcopal minister, Abram Griffens, while William lived nearby in the home of an African American bootmaker.  Simmons also briefly worked as an apprentice to a dentist.  Toward the end of the Civil War, he served for a time with the Union Army.  After the war, Simmons attended several schools and colleges before graduating from Howard University in 1873.  Simmons then taught school in Washington, D.C., and Florida.  

In 1879, Simmons assumed his first pastorate at the First Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky. One year later he at 31 was named president of the Normal and Theological Institute in Louisville.  Like many black colleges during the late nineteenth century, the institution Simmons led emphasized religious studies, vocational education, and racial pride for its students.  Simmons died on October 30, 1890 in his tenth year as President of the Normal and Theological Institute.  In 1918, twenty-eight years after his death in 1890, the Baptist trustees renamed the institution Simmons College of Kentucky as a tribute to his leadership.  

Simmons is best known for his 1887 work, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising.  The book was a compilation of brief biographies of 177 prominent African American males from across the United States. Men of Mark was at the time a best seller and the single largest collection of African American biographies.

Simmons and his wife, the former Josephine A. Silence, raised seven children. Despite her deceased husbands prominence, Josephine

Louisiana legislature met in New Orleans. The temporary chairman of the house was a Black representative, R.H. Isabelle. Oscar J. Dunn presided over the senate. Seven of the thirty-six senators were Black. Thirty-five of the 101 representatives were Black.