Congress passes a bill authorizing the creation of 500,000

Black Revolutionary War Patriots Commemorative coins.

The Martin L. King, Jr. Federal Building is dedicated in Atlanta, Ga. It is the first federal building in the nation to bear the name of the slain civil rights leader.

Rayford Logan, educator, historian, author, dies

Lecture 4 of Clay Carson"s Introduction to African-American History Course (HIST 166) concentrating on the Modern Freedom Struggle (Fall 2007). This lecture is entitled "Paul Robeson: Star to Outcast". Recorded October 4, 2007 at Stanford University.

This course introduces the viewer to African-American history, with particular emphasis on the political thought and protest movements of the period after 1930, focusing on selected individuals who have shaped and been shaped by modern African-American struggles for freedom and justice. Clayborne Carson is a professor in the History Department at Stanford University.

Complete playlist for the course:

http://youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4...

Course syllabus:

http://www.stanford.edu/~ccarson/Hist...

More on Clayborne Carson:

http://www.stanford.edu/~ccarson/

Stanford University channel on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/stanford

This was the date the first black daily newspaper was founded.

New Orleans Tribune, first Black daily newspaper, founded by Dr. Louis C. Roudanez. The newspaper, published in both English and French, started as a tri-weekly but soon became an influential daily.

A month after the infamous Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress, Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen (1813-1872), a fugitive slave from Tennessee, persuaded his adopted hometown, Syracuse, New York, to declare that city a refuge for liberated slaves. On October 4, 1850, the people of Syracuse filled city hall to hear a discussion of the recently passed law. Samuel Ringgold Ward, a well known minister and anti-slavery activist, spoke in opposition to the Act. Ward was followed by Rev. Loguen (1813-1872). Like Ward who was also a fugitive slave, Loguen knew first hand the horrors of the institution and the immediate danger he faced by the passage of the new Act. He appealed to his fellow citizens to honor the Constitution by dishonoring the law that would reenslave him and others. He argued that his continued freedom depended upon the willingness of his white fellow citizens to resist the law and protect him if he were threatened. Following his plea that Syracuse be made an "open city" for fugitive slaves, the meeting voted 395 to 96 in favor of his proposal. Loguen later became a Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His speech appears below:

I WAS A SLAVE; I knew the dangers I was exposed to. I had made up my mind as to the course I was to take. On that score I needed no counsel, nor did the colored citizens generally. They had taken their stand—they would not be taken back to slavery. If to shoot down their assailants should forfeit their lives, such result was the least of the evil. They will have their liberties or die in their defense. What is life to me if I am to be a slave in Tennessee? My neighbors! I have lived with you many years, and you know me. My home is here, and my children were born here. I am bound to Syracuse by pecuniary interests, and social and family bonds. And do you think I can be taken away from you and from my wife and children, and be a slave in Tennessee? Has the President and his Secretary sent this enactment up here, to you, Mr. Chairman, to enforce on me in Syracuse?—and

Howard N. Lee and Charles Evers are elected the first African American mayors of Chapel Hill, N.C. and Fayette, Miss., respectively.

Elgin Baylor announces his retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers. After 14 years in the NBA, Baylor had scored 23,149 points, the third highest in the league, and was the fifth highest career rebounder.

Independence Day - Kingdom of Lesotho

In the article below Clarence Spigner, DrPH., Professor of Health Services in the School of Public Health, University of Washington, Seattle, briefly describes the saga of Henrietta Lacks whose cells have been used without her family’s permission for over sixty years of bio-medical research.  Dr. Spigner teaches a course in the University of Washington’s Honors’ College based on the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Henrietta Lacks was born August 1, 1920, into a family of impoverished tobacco farmers in Roanoke, Virginia. She died at the age of 31 from the effects of cervical cancer on October 4, 1951, after treatment in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. But Henrietta Lacks’s cells did not die. A sample taken from her without permission became the immortal He-La cell line used for extensive bio-medical research and then commodified in a multi-million dollar industry. Henrietta Lacks’s story was resurrected in magnificent detail in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the 2010 best seller by freelance science author Rebecca Skloot.

Born Loretta Pleasant (it is not clear how Henrietta became her first name), Henrietta’s mother, Eliza, born in 1886, died in childbirth in 1924. Henrietta’s father, John Pleasant (1881-1969), took the children to Clover, Virginia to be raised among relatives. Henrietta married her first cousin, David “Day” Lacks (1915-2002) in 1941 when she already had two children, Lawrence and Elsie. Henrietta had her first child at age 14. Following the Depression and between the two World Wars, opportunities for African Americans opened in the steel mills in Bethlehem, Maryland, near Baltimore, and in 1941, Henrietta and David left tobacco farming with the two children and joined the Great Migration. They bought a home in Turner Station, which is now Dundalk, Maryland.

Henrietta and David had five children, Lawrence (1935-   ), Elsie (1939-1955), David aka Sonny (1947-   ), Deborah (1949-2009), and Joseph aka Zakariyyan Bari Abdul Rahman (1950-   ). Oldest daughter Elsie

Sugar Ray Robinson, born Walker Smith Junior, was an American Professional Boxer. A member of the international boxing hall of fame, Robinson is believed by many to be the greatest boxer of all time; owing mostly to his 91 fight unbeaten streak, and his remarkable 128-1-2 record.

Walker Smith Junior was born on May 3, 1921 in Alley, Georgia. He earned the nickname ‘Sugar’ after a lady remarked that he was ‘sweet as sugar’ after watching one of his fights. He earned the latter part of his nickname, ‘Ray Robinson’, after he borrowed his friend’s birth certificate (whose name was Ray Robinson) to bypass the Amateur Athletic Union’s age restrictions. Robinson had an outstanding amateur career, in which he won 89 fights without a single loss, that too with 69 knockouts. Robinson won the 1939 Golden Gloves Featherweight Championship and the 1940 Golden Gloves Lightweight Championship.

Robinson’s first professional fight was held on October 4, 1940, in which he beat the Philippine Joe Echevarria by a second round knockout. Robinson went on to win five more fights in 1940, four of which were won by knockout. He gathered significant attention once he defeated the then lightweight champion, Sammy Angott, in front of a record 20,551 crowd at the Madison Square Garden. However, he did not win the title as Robinson was above the lightweight weight limit; furthermore, Robinson defeated former champion Fritzie Zivic by unanimous decision in 1941, alongside future champion Marty Servo, also in 1941. Robinson again beat Zivic in a 1942 rematch, which was incidentally, Zivic’s second knockout loss in a total of 150 fights. Robinson also met Marty Servo in another rematch, which he also won. He then won against the great Jake LaMotta, after which he was named Fighter of the Year in 1942.

Sugar Ray Robinson lost his first professional fight after an unbeaten run of forty fights against Jake LaMotta, who knocked him out on their rematch. Robinson then served with the United States Military for a 15 month period between 1943 and

Will Mercer Cook served as the United States ambassador to the Republic of Niger from 1961 to 1964. Cook directed U.S. economic, social, and cultural programs in Niger, which included the Peace Corps. During the mid-1960s he also became the special envoy to Gambia and Senegal.

Will Mercer Cook was born on March 30, 1903, in Washington, D.C., to Will Marion Cook, a composer and Abbie Mitchell Cook, an actress and classical singer.  Cook had one sibling, Abigail, an older sister. During his childhood, he frequently traveled with his family as they performed at various venues throughout the United States and abroad.  Jazz superstar Duke Ellington lived on the same block in Cook’s middle class Washington, D.C. neighborhood.    

Cook attended Washington, D.C. public schools and graduated from the historic Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in the city. In 1925 he earned his bachelor’s degree in French language and literature from Amherst College in Massachusetts and a teacher"s diploma the following year from the University of Paris in France.  In 1929 Cook married Vashti Smith and they had two sons, Mercer and Jacques. Cook earned a master"s degree in French language and literature in 1931 from Brown University in Rhode Island and a doctorate from the same institution in 1936.

While still a graduate student, Cook was hired as an assistant professor of romance languages for one year at Howard University in Washington, D.C. After he earned his doctorate, Cook joined the foreign language faculty of Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia where he taught French until 1943.

During his career at Atlanta University, Cook received the prestigious Rosenwald Fellowship to conduct research abroad in Paris and the French West Indies. In 1943 Cook also became a professor at the University of Haiti. While in Haiti he authored the Handbook for Haitian Teachers of English and other studies related to the Haitian experience.  

Cook completed his tenure in Haiti in 1943 and moved that same year to Washington, D.C. to accept what

National Black convention met in Syracuse, New York.

A small but growing number of black women are slowly being recognized for their contributions to the “long” civil rights movement, the nearly century-long struggle by African Americans against all forms of racial discrimination.  In the account below University of Texas-El Paso historian Cecilia Gutierrez Venable describes Juanita Jewel Shanks Craft, one of the most important of these activists in 20th Century Texas history.

Juanita Jewel Shanks was a pivotal local, state, and regional organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the campaign for racial justice in Texas as she confronted the state’s segregationist practices from the 1930s to the 1980s.  Shanks, the only child of educators David Sylvestus and Eliza Balfour Shanks, was born on February 9, 1902 in Round Rock, Texas.  Both her parents taught school, and her father would later become a principal.  The young Shanks went to Austin’s segregated Anderson High School, but after a couple of years her mother Eliza Shanks fell ill with tuberculosis and Juanita accompanied her to San Angelo state sanitarium.  They were refused admission because of their race and this experience of pleading with hospital officials to care for her mother and living in a tent during the rainy season near the hospital for months was one of the seminal experiences Juanita Shanks carried with her throughout her life.

Eliza Shanks died in 1918, and the sixteen-year-old Juanita Shanks joined her father in Columbus, Texas and later graduated high school in 1919.  Juanita Shanks moved to Prairie View and studied sewing and millinery at Prairie View Industrial School (now University) but returned to Austin and graduated from Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson University) where she received her teaching certificate.  She briefly taught in 1921, but—that same year—left the profession to marry an old boyfriend, Charles Floyd Langham, who was a tailor in Galveston.

In 1925, Juanita moved to Dallas with her aunt, and the couple