BlackFacts.com: Learn/Teach/Create Black History

BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for June 6.

Marian Wright Edelman was born.

She is an American attorney and civil rights activist who founded the Children’s Defense Fund in 1973.

After work registering African American voters in Mississippi, she moved to New York City as a staff attorney for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Edelman was the first African American woman admitted to The Mississippi Bar in 1964, and the first Black woman elected on the Yale board of trustees in 1971.

In 1973, she founded the Children's Defense Fund as a voice for poor children, children of color, and children with disabilities.  

The organization has served as an advocacy and research center for children's issues, documenting the problems and possible solutions to children in need.

She also worked to persuade United States Congress to overhaul foster care, support adoption, improve child care and protect children who are disabled, homeless, abused or neglected.  

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BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for June 5.

American Negro Theater was formed.

It was an African American theatre company that was active in the Harlem district of New York City from 1940 to 1951.

It provided professional training and critical exposure to African American actors, actresses, and playwrights by creating and producing plays concerning diverse aspects of African American life.

It was established by two African Americans, the playwright Abram Hill and the actor Frederick O’Neal.

In the beginning, Hill spent his time mailing out postcards to invite as many people as he could to meetings and within just a few weeks, the group grew to thirty people.

Initially, the ANT held its performances in the basements of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and the 135th Street library.

Soon after its founding, the ANT won attention and praise for its first major production, a staging of Hill’s On Striver’s Row.

Between 1940 and 1949 the ANT produced a total of 19 plays, 12 of which were based on original scripts.

Well-known actors and actresses who worked with the ANT, in some cases starting their theatrical careers there, included Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Clarice Taylor amongst others.

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BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for June 4.

Angela Davis was acquitted by a white jury.

She is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, and author of over ten books on class, feminism, race, and the US prison system.

Born to an African-American family in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis studied French at Brandeis University and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt in West Germany.  

After returning to the United States, she joined the Communist Party and became involved in numerous causes, including the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War.

Championing the cause of black prisoners in the 1960s and ’70s, Davis grew particularly attached to a young revolutionary, George Jackson, one of the so-called Soledad Brothers (after Soledad Prison).  

Jackson’s brother Jonathan was among the four persons killed—including the trial judge—in an abortive escape and kidnapping attempt from the Hall of Justice in Marin County, California.

Suspected of complicity, Davis was sought for arrest and became one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most wanted criminals.

Arrested in New York City in October 1970, she was returned to California to face charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy. Across the nation, thousands of people began organizing a movement to gain her release.

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BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for June 3.

Physician Charles Drew was born. 

He was an African American physician and surgeon who was an authority on the preservation of human blood for transfusion.

Drew was educated at Amherst College, McGill University, Montreal, and Columbia University.

While earning his doctorate at Columbia in the late 1930s, he researched the properties and preservation of blood plasma. 

He soon developed efficient ways to process and store large quantities of blood plasma in “blood banks.”

As the leading authority in the field, he organized and directed the blood-plasma programs of the United States and Great Britain in the early years of World War II, while also agitating the authorities to stop excluding the blood of African Americans from plasma-supply networks.

He resigned his official posts in 1942 after the armed forces ruled that the blood of African Americans would be accepted but would have to be stored separately from that of whites.

He then became a surgeon and professor of medicine at Freedmen’s Hospital, Washington, D.C., and Howard University (1942–50).

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BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for June 2.

James Augustine Healy became the first Black Roman Catholic Bishop in USA.

Healy was one of 10 children born on a Georgia cotton plantation to an Irish immigrant and his common-law wife, a mixed-race slave.

Because Healy and his siblings were legally considered illegitimate and slaves, they were barred from attending school in the state, and their parents were forced to send the boys to schools in the North.

After college Healy attended seminary in Montreal and in Paris and was ordained a priest in 1854. He was the first African American to be ordained a Roman Catholic priest.

He did mission work in Boston, where he opposed state anti-Catholic laws. He then served as chancellor of the diocese and, during the Civil War, as secretary to the bishop.

Healy was consecrated as Bishop of Portland on June 2, 1875, becoming the first African American to be consecrated a Catholic bishop.

Two months before his death, Healy was called as assistant to the Papal throne by Pope Leo XIII, a position in the Catholic hierarchy just below that of cardinal.

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BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for June 1st.

White House Conference on Civil Rights

The aim of the conference was built on the momentum of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in addressing discrimination against African Americans.  

The four areas of discussion were housing, economic security, education, and the administration of justice.

President Lyndon Johnson had promised this conference in his commencement address at Howard University the year before.

Like that address, the conference was named "To Fulfill These Rights." The title was a play on "To Secure These Rights," a report issued by Truman's civil rights commission in 1947.

There were over 2,400 participants, representing all the major civil rights groups. Out of the conference came a hundred-page report.

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BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for May 31.

Jesse Dwight Locker was born.

He was an attorney, politician and, the second black American appointed as ambassador.

Locker graduated valedictorian of his class at College Hill High School and graduated from Howard University with a law degree in 1945.

He led the North Ward Progressive Republican Club and the Lincoln-Douglas Republican Club. He also endeavored with various charities. 

In 1941, he won the first of six terms on the city council, rising to become its president.

Locker also was president of the segregated Hamilton County Bar Association for Negro Lawyers.

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower named him ambassador to Liberia. His foremost diplomatic accomplishment was negotiating for use of the principal airport by U.S. airlines.

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BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for May 30.

Countee Cullen was born.

He was an American poet, one of the finest of the Harlem Renaissance.

He won a citywide poetry contest as a schoolboy and saw his winning stanzas widely reprinted. At New York University he won the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.  

Major American literary magazines accepted his poems regularly, and his first collection of poems, "Color" (1925), was published to critical acclaim before he had finished college.

Most notable among his other works are "Copper Sun" (1927), "The Ballad of the Brown Girl" (1928), and "The Medea and Some Poems" (1935). His novel "One Way to Heaven" (1932) depicts life in Harlem.

The Countee Cullen Library, a Harlem branch location of the New York Public Library, was named in his honor. In 2013, he was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

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BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for May 29.

Thomas Bradley was elected the first African-American mayor of Los Angeles.

The son of sharecroppers and the grandson of slaves, Bradley grew up in poverty. When he was seven years old, his parents moved to Los Angeles.

He was attending Southwestern University Law School while a police officer and began his practice as a lawyer when he retired from the police department.

His first mayoral campaign was in 1969; the city was still recovering from the Watts riots of 1965.

In 1973, he defeated Sam Yorty after establishing the support of a coalition with white voters. Bradley was re-elected four times.

Bradley’s achievements included securing the 1984 Summer Olympic Games for Los Angeles and presiding over two decades of expansion and civic growth. 

He ran for Governor of California twice, in 1982 and 1986, but lost both times to Republican George Deukmejian.  He was the first African American to head a gubernatorial ticket in California.

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BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for May 28.

Gladys Knight was born.

She is an American singer, songwriter, actress, businesswoman, and author. 

Knight is known for the hits she recorded during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with her group Gladys Knight & the Pips.

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, she would sing in the church choir.

She first achieved minor fame by winning Ted Mack's "The Original Amateur Hour" TV show contest at the age of eight in 1952.

The Pips were invented when she joined with her brother Merald and cousin William Guest to perform at a family party. 

Knight has acted in films, such as “Pipe Dreams” (1976), and on television, including a season as Flip Wilson’s wife on the comedy series “Charlie and Company”.

She has also produced television musical specials, among them the highly acclaimed “Sisters in the Name of Love” (HBO, 1986), which featured the voices of Patti LaBelle and Dionne Warwick.

With the Pips, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation in 1998.

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