Concert bass-baritone singer, actor, and teacher William Caesar Warfield was born on January 22, 1920 in West Helena, Arkansas to a family of sharecroppers.

Haitian liberator, Toussaint L"Ouverture, enters Santiago to battle the French, 1801

Clarence Willi Norris, last surviving member of the Scottsboro Boys, died at age 76 whiel a patient at the Bronx Community Hospital. Norris was one of nine African American teenagers accused of the 1931 rape of two white prostitutes in Alabama. The case was tried several times between 1931 and 1937 ending only after one woman recanted her charge. Norris spent 15 years in prison before being paroled. Once freed, Norris left Alabama for New York. He was pardoned by the state of Alabama in 1976 after the state parole board determined his innocence.

Lodge Bill, which called for federal supervision of U. elections, abandoned in the Senate after a Southern filibuster.

The first and only woman to hold the position of U.S. Secretary of Energy, Hazel Rollins Reid was born May 17, 1937 in Newport News, Virginia.  During this time of public school segregation, Reid’s parents, hoping for better schooling opportunities, sent their daughter to live with an aunt in New Jersey. There Reid attended a school for artistically gifted students.

Reid entered Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1955 and graduated with honors four years later. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Society at Fisk.  Seven years later she received a law degree from Rutgers University and soon became an attorney in the New Jersey State Attorney General’s Office.

By the early 1970s Reid moved to Washington, D.C., where she became a partner at Coopers and Lybrand, an accounting firm. Soon she joined the Gerald Ford Administration as general counsel to the Community Services Administration which administered most of the federal government’s anti-poverty programs.  President Ford later appointed Reid director of the Federal Energy Administration’s Office of Consumer Affairs. In this position she became well known as a representative of the concerns of consumers who challenged the power and influence of the major energy producers.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Reid to head the Department of Energy’s Economic Regulatory Administration. Her agency included more than 2,000 employees who enforced price controls on numerous forms of energy. At this time she successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Fuel Use Act, which decreased the demand for natural gas and developed conservation programs that assisted low-income residents.

While working for the Carter Administration, Reid met her future husband, John F. O’Leary, who was at the time the nation’s deputy energy secretary. The two married in 1980 and together left the department to establish and manage their own energy-consulting firm, O’Leary Associates.

In 1989, following the death of her husband, Hazel O’Leary went to work for Northern

Early Colorado gold miner, hotel magnate and entreprenuer, former slave Barney L. Ford, was born in Stafford Court House, Virginia. Through a number of business dealings, Ford became a wealthy man but was dogged by a series of tragic accidents. The restaurants and hotels he owned in Denver, Colorado, and Nicaragua were leveled by bombs and fires, and racism periodically forced him out of the gold fields. Despite such setbacks, Ford made and lost several fortunes during his lifetime.

George Foreman, two-time heavyweight boxing champion, was born in Marshall, TX. In a 1973 Kingston, Jamaica bout, he defeated Joe Frazier to receive the haveyweight championship. Foreman kept the title for 22 months until losing it to Muhammad Ali.

January 22, 1949 - James Robert Gladden becomes first African American certified in

orthopedic surgery.

Samuel Pierce is named Secretary of HUD in the Reagan Administration.

Singer Sam Cook, the son of a minister and believed by many to be the first father of soul music, was born in Chicago, Illinois. Cook began his singing career with a gospel group known as the Singing Children. His fame came in 1965 with "You and Me," "Only 16," and his very famous "Stand By Me" and "Shake, Rattle and Roll." Cook was fatally shot in a Los Angeles motel in 1964.

Efua Sutherland , (born June 27, 1924, Cape Coast, Gold Coast [now in Ghana]—died January 22, 1996), Ghanaian playwright, poet, teacher, and children’s author, who founded the Drama Studio in Accra (now the Writers’ Workshop in the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon).

After completing her studies at the Teacher Training College in Ghana, Sutherland went to England to do further work at Homerton College, Cambridge, and at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Upon her return to Accra, she helped to establish the literary magazine Okyeame, founded the Experimental Theatre, which became the Ghana Drama Studio, and directed the University of Ghana’s traveling theatre group. The Drama Studio produced a number of her plays, including the well-known Foriwa (1962), a play which stresses the alliance of new ways and old traditions, and Edufa (1967), based on Alcestis by Euripides. The Marriage of Anansewa: A Storytelling Drama appeared in 1975.

Sutherland established the Drama Studio as a workshop for writers who wrote for children. The studio soon became a training ground for Ghanaian playwrights. Sutherland herself wrote several works for children, including two animated rhythm plays, Vulture! Vulture! and Tahinta (both 1968), and two pictorial essays, Playtime in Africa (1960) and The Roadmakers (1961).

Many of Sutherland’s works were broadcast in Ghana on a popular radio program, “The Singing Net,” and most of her unpublished plays were performed by drama groups in Ghana. Many of her short stories can be described as rhythmic prose poems; one of her later plays, Nyamekye, a version of Alice in Wonderland, shows the influence of the folk opera tradition. Sutherland’s book of fairy tales and folklore of Ghana, The Voice in the Forest, was published in 1983.

Birthdate of actor, pianist and singer William Warfield who was born in West Helena, Arkansas. Warfield"s illustrious career in music spanned 54 years.