History: Alice Walker born to sharecroppers
February 7, 1926: Historian Carter G. Woodson established the first Negro History Week. He chose February because it is the birth month for both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The week was eventually expanded to Black History Month. Woodson, who received a doctorate in history from Harvard University, became known as the “Father of Black History.”
February 8, 1915: The Birth of a Nation premiered in Los Angeles. Its racist portrayal of African Americans during Reconstruction prompted outrage and boycotts by the NAACP and other civil rights groups. The movie helped to inspire a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, and when the white supremacist organization arose again in the 1950s and 1960s, the movie was used as a recruitment tool.
February 8, 1968: Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr., Delano Herman Middleton and Henry Ezekial Smith were shot and killed by officers who fired on student demonstrators at the South Carolina State College campus in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Fifty were also wounded in the confrontation with highway patrolmen at the rally supporting civil rights protesters. They are among the 40 martyrs listed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
February 9, 1944: Alice Walker, novelist and poet, was born to sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia. While at Spelman College, she had a scholarship to study in Paris. She turned it down to go instead to Mississippi, where she joined the civil rights movement. Part of her work involving taking depositions of sharecroppers, who like her parents had been thrown off the land. She showed students at Tougaloo College and Jackson State University how poetry could be used in activism. In 1983, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Color Purple, which has since been adapted in both a movie and a musical. She has remained an activist, saying, “Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet.”
February 9, 1995: Astronaut Bernard Harris, a native of Temple, Texas, became the first African American to spacewalk during the second of his two space shuttle flights.
February 10, 1989: Ron Brown was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, becoming the first African American to lead a major United States political party. After Bill Clinton became President in 1993, he appointed Brown as Secretary of Commerce. Three years later, he was on an official trade mission when he died in a plane crash in Croatia.
February 11, 1790: The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, composed mostly of Quakers and Mennonites, petitioned Congress for emancipation of all who were enslaved. Benjamin Franklin served as president of the society.
February 12, 1793: The Second Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The new law enabled the arrests of those who fled slavery and established a $500 fine for anyone who aided them.
February 12, 1809: Abraham Lincoln was born in a small log cabin in Kentucky. He went on to become one of the nation’s greatest Presidents, guiding the nation through the Civil War and playing a pivotal role in ending slavery in the nation.
February 12, 1909: On the centennial of President Abraham Lincoln’s birth, African Americans signed a proclamation known as “The Call,” leading to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The interracial group was created to safeguard civil, legal, economic, human and political rights of African Americans. The appeal took place in response to continued lynchings and a 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois. Sixty people, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, signed the proclamation.
February 13, 1920: The Negro National League, one of several baseball leagues created for African Americans, was organized by Rube Foster, who became known as “the father of black baseball.” He and other team owners had their first meeting at a Kansas City YMCA. Their all-star games attracted as many as 50,000 fans.
February 13, 1946: Army veteran Isaac Woodard was left blind after two police officers in Batesburg, South Carolina, beat him. A man tried for the crime was acquitted on federal charges.
February 13, 1960: Students began sit-ins in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, and in the months that followed, more than 150 were arrested. The home of the students’ lawyer was bombed. After three months of sit-ins, six downtown stores desegregated their lunch counters. James Lawson led the students, many of whom became important leaders in the civil rights movement: John Lewis, James Bevel, C.T. Vivian, Diane Nash, Marion Barry and Bernard Lafayette.
Contact Jerry Mitchell at (601) 961-7064 or jmitchell@gannett.com. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.