NAACP

 

 

February 12, 1909: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded in New York City.

 

 

 

 

 

To join in the fight go to:http://www.naacp.org/

The Great Pony Express

 

 

George Monroe and William Robinson are thought to be two of the first African Americans to work as Pony Express riders.

 

Pony Express rider George Monroe was also a highly skilled stagecoach driver for U.S. presidents Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield and Rutherford B. Hayes. Monroe, who was known as "Knight of the Sierras," frequently navigated passengers through the curving Wanona Trail in the Yosemite Valley. As a result, Monroe Meadows in Yosemite National Park is named after him.

 

 

http://www.biography.com/news/little-known-facts-about-black-history-20730659
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express

A Grammy Award Winning Performance

With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank.

After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.

He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community.

President Obama's years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online.

He was elected the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and sworn in on January 20, 2009. After being re-elected in 2012, President Obama is currently serving his second and final term, which will end in January 2017.

Barack Obama has won two Grammy Awards. He was first honored in 2005 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams from My Father (best spoken word album), and received his second Grammy (in the same category) in 2007 for his political work, The Audacity of Hope.  Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/barackobama

Written in History

In 1773, as a Boston slave, she became the first African-American to publish a work.
Phyllis Wheatley was born in Gambia, Senegal and was forced into slavery at the age of seven. Her book of poetry is titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral and focuses on her upbringing and on religion.

Read more about this exceptional lady at: http://www.biography.com/people/phillis-wheatley-9528784#synopsis

"Negro History Week"

Black History Month began as “Negro History Week,” which was created in 1926 by Carter G. Woodson, a noted African American historian, scholar, educator, and publisher. It became a month-long celebration in 1976. The month of February was chosen to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-history-facts

TuesdayNight Football 12/27/1892

The first intercollegiate football contest between Black colleges took place on this day in 1892. Biddle College, now Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, N.C., and Livingstone College in Salisbury, N.C., played against one another on Livingstone’s snowy front lawn and gave way to a bowl game that celebrates HBCU football’s excellence.

According to historians of the game, women who worked and studied Livingstone’s industrial department fashioned the teams with uniforms and outfitted street shoes with cleats. The game was not an official contest and players from both sides had to raise funds to get a regulation size football.

The men of Biddle had to study the game of football for two years before mounting the challenge to Livingstone, which formed its team the year of their game. Biddle won the game 5-0. In 1956, an athletic marker was erected at Livingstone in honor of the historic game.

Now in its second year, the Air Force Reserve Celebration bowl pits the champions of the MEAC and SWAC divisions against each other, serving as an extension of the historic implication of Biddle and Livingstone’s game. This year’s game featured Grambling State University and N.C. Central University. Grambling bested N.C. Central 10-9 in a game that was played at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome on Dec.

 

https://blackamericaweb.com/2016/12/27/little-known-black-history-fact-the-first-intercollegiate-hbcu-football-game/

A Song for Justice

Marian Anderson (February 27, 1897 – April 8, 1993) was an American contralto and one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. Music critic Alan Blyth said: "Her voice was a rich, vibrant contralto of intrinsic beauty." Most of her singing career was spent performing in concert and recital in major music venues and with famous orchestras throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965. Although offered roles with many important European opera companies, Anderson declined, as she had no training in acting. She preferred to perform in concert and recital only. She did, however, perform opera arias within her concerts and recitals. She made many recordings that reflected her broad performance repertoire of everything from concert literature to lieder to opera to traditional American songs and spirituals. Between 1940 and 1965 the German-American pianist Franz Rupp was her permanent accompanist.

Anderson became an important figure in the struggle for black artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused permission for Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall. The incident placed Anderson into the spotlight of the international community on a level unusual for a classical musician. With the aid of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anderson performed a critically acclaimed open-air concert on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. She sang before a crowd of more than 75,000 people and a radio audience in the millions. Anderson continued to break barriers for black artists in the United States, becoming the first black person, American or otherwise, to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on January 7, 1955. Her performance as Ulrica in Giuseppe Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera at the Met was the only time she sang an opera role on stage.

Anderson worked for several years as a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and as a "goodwill ambassadress" for the United States Department of State, giving concerts all over the world. She participated in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, singing at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Anderson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1978, the National Medal of Arts in 1986, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Anderson