1664
Maryland enacted the first anti-amalgamation law to prevent widespread intermarriage of English women and African-American men. Other colonies passed similar laws: Virginia, 1691; Massachusetts 1705; North Carolina, 1715; South Carolina, 1717; Delaware, 1721; Pennsylvania, 1725.
1830
The National Negro Convention, a group of 38 free African Americans from eight states, meets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the Bethel A.M.E. Church, with the express purpose of abolishing slavery and improving the social status of African Americans. They elected Richard Allen as president and agreed to boycott slave-produced goods.
1847
William A. Leidesdorff was elected to the San Francisco town council receiving the third highest vote. Leidesdorff, who was one of the first African-American elected officials, became the town treasurer in 1848.
1850
The slave trade was abolished in Washington, DC, but slavery was allowed to continue until 1862.
1890 – Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe (“Jelly Roll” Morton) was born in Gulfport (New Orleans), Louisiana. He will become a renowned jazz pianist and composer. Morton, whose fabulous series of 1938 recordings for the Library of Congress is a gold mine of information about early jazz, was a complex man. Vain, ambitious, and given to exaggeration, he was a pool shark, hustler, and gambler, as well as a brilliant pianist and composer. His greatest talent, perhaps was for organizing and arranging. The series of records he made with his “Red Hot Peppers” between 1926 and 1928 stands, alongside King Oliver’s as the crowning glory of the New Orleans tradition and one of the great achievements in Jazz. He will join the ancestors on July 10, 1941.
1915 – Hughie Lee-Smith was born in Eustis, Florida. He became a painter known for such surrealistic landscapes as “Man with Balloons”, “Man Standing on His Head” and “Big Brother.” He will join the ancestors on February 23, 1999.
1943 – Sani Abacha is born in Kano, Nigeria. After being educated in his home state, will become a soldier and go to England for advanced military education. He will achieve many promotions as a soldier and by the mid-1980s, will enter Nigeria’s military elite. In 1983 he was among those who overthrew Shehu Shagari, leader of the Second Republic, in a coup that will lead to the military rule of Muhammadu Buhari. In 1985, he participated in a second coup, which replaced Buhari with General Ibrahim Babangida. As head of state, Babangida will announce that free elections will be held in the early 1990s. In 1993, however, after Babangida nullified the results of these belated free elections, he staged a third coup and ousted his former ally. His regime will be characterized by a concern with security that verges on paranoia. He will schedule elections for August 1998, but months beforehand, all five legal parties nominate him as their “consensus candidate.” On June 8, 1998, he joined the ancestors when he succumbed unexpectedly to a heart attack.
1958 – Martin Luther King Jr. is stabbed in the chest by a deranged African-American woman while he is autographing books in a Harlem department store. The woman is placed under mental observation.
1962 – Mississippi’s governor, Ross Barnett, personally refuses to admit James Meredith to the University of Mississippi as its first African-American student. (Meredith is later admitted.)
1962 – The Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) is banned in an order issued by Sir Edgar Whitehead, the prime minister of Southern Rhodesia.
1973 – Willie Mays announces his retirement from major league baseball at the end of the 1973 baseball season.
1979 – A bloodless coup overthrows Jean-Bedel Bokassa, self-styled head of the Central African Empire, in a French-supported coup while he is visiting Libya.
1984 – NBC-TV debuts “The Cosby Show”. Bill Cosby plays Dr. Heathcliff (Cliff) Huxtable. His lovely wife, Clair, is played by Phylicia Rashad. The Huxtable kids were Sondra, age 20 (Sabrina Le Beauf), Denise, age 16 (Lisa Bonet), Theodore, age 14 (Malcom-Jamal Warner), Vanessa, age 8 (Tempestt Bledsoe) and Rudy, age 5 (Keshia Knight Pulliam). The premiere is the most watched show of the week and the show goes on to become an Emmy Award-winner and one of the most popular on television for eight years. The series, which had been rejected by other network television executives, will become one of the most popular in television history.
1987 – Alfre Woodard wins an Emmy for outstanding guest performance in the dramatic series “L.A. Law”. It is her second Emmy award, her first having been for a supporting role in “Hill Street Blues” in 1984.
1987 – Walter Payton scores the NFL record 107th rushing touchdown.
1999 – Lawrence Russell Brewer becomes the second white supremacist to be convicted in the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas. He will be later sentenced to death.
2015 – Viola Davis wins an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series (How to Get Away With Murder), becoming the first African American to do so.