Thurgood Marshall, U.S. solicitor general, named to the Supreme Court by President Johnson. He was confirmed by the Senate on August 30 and became the first Black Supreme Court justice.

Eleanor Holmes (later Eleanor Norton) is born in Washington, DC. A graduate of the Yale University School of Law, Norton will become chairperson of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, and a Georgetown University law professor before being elected a non-voting delegate to Congress representing the District of Columbia.

The American League of Colored Laborers (ALCL) was the first black American labor union. It was formed in New York City in 1850 as a collective for skilled free craftsmen, and sought to develop agricultural and industrial arts skills among its members, and to encourage African American business.

Frederick Douglass helped organize the union in response to the difficulty black laborers had in joining white unions. On June 13, 1850, the organization assembled for its inaugural meeting in the lecture room of Zion’s church on the corner of Leonard and Church streets. There, the League appointed New York minister Samuel Ringgold Ward as its president, and Henry Bibb of Michigan as its secretary. Douglass agreed to act as vice-president.  Notably all three men were activists know more for their work to abolish slavery than their efforts on behalf of working class people.   Nonetheless Douglass’s involvement, as well as of that of several newspaper editors in the union leadership, earned the organization substantial coverage in the African American press at the time. In that meeting, the union resolved to create a fund to give loans to black entrepreneurs, and planned an industrial fair for the second week of May 1852.  Seventy per cent of the proceeds of which would go to the exhibitors, and thirty per cent to the union. However, the fair never took place.

At the ALCL’s 1851 convention in New York, the members planned the creation of a bank that would provide credit and encourage saving. The ALCL was undermined by the small number of African American workers in cities at the time, and the rise of craft unions that tended to exclude black workers from joining.

Sources:

Dorothy P. Wesley and Constance P. Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings 1872-1874 (Black Classic Press, 2002); Nina Mjagkij, ed., Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001).

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William D. Crum (1859-1912), a South Carolina physician, appointed minister to Liberia.

Bernadette Locke becomes the first female on-court coach when she is named assistant coach of the University of Kentucky mens basketball team.

Thomas Greene Wiggins was born May 25, 1849 to Mungo and Charity Wiggins, slaves on a Georgia plantation. He was blind and autistic but a musical genius with a phenomenal memory. In 1850 Tom, his parents, and two brothers were sold to James Neil Bethune, a lawyer and newspaper editor in Columbus, Georgia. Young Tom was fascinated by music and other sounds, and could pick out tunes on the piano by the age of four. He made his concert debut at eight, performing in Atlanta.

In 1858 Tom was hired out as a slave-musician, at a price of $15,000. In 1859, at the age of 10, he became the first African American performer to play at the White House when he gave a concert before President James Buchanan. His piano pieces “Oliver Galop” and “Virginia Polka” were published in 1860. During the Civil War he was back with his owner, raising funds for Confederate relief. By 1863 he played his own composition, “Battle of Manassas.” By 1865, 16-year-old Tom Wiggins, now “indentured” to James Bethune, could play difficult works of Bach, Chopin, Liszt, Beethoven, and Thalberg. He also played pieces after one hearing, and memorized poems and text in foreign languages. Advertising claimed Tom was untaught, but in fact he was tutored by a Professor of Music who traveled with him.

James Neil Bethune took Tom Wiggins to Europe where he collected testimonials from music critics Ignaz Moscheles and Charles Halle, which were printed in a booklet “The Marvelous Musical Prodigy Blind Tom.” With these and other endorsements, Blind Tom Wiggins became an internationally recognized performer. By 1868 Tom and the Bethune family lived on a Virginia farm in the summer, while touring the United States and Canada the rest of the year, averaging $50,000 annually in concert revenue. James Bethune eventually lost custody of Tom to his late sons ex-wife, Eliza Bethune. Charity Wiggins, Toms mother, was a party to the suit, but she did not win control of her son or his income.

Blind Tom Wiggins gave his last performance in 1905. He

Eleanor Holmes Norton was born on June 13, 1937 in Washington, D.C. to parents Coleman and Vela Holmes.  Both her parents were government employees.  Growing up in a well educated and politically conscious household caused Eleanor Holmes to be very aware of the surrounding struggles for African Americans.  At the age of 12, she recalled watching protests against a Washington, D.C. department store which allowed black shoppers but refused them entry into its bathrooms.

In 1955, Eleanor entered Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio where she became heavily involved with civil rights work.  While in college she headed the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter and became a local activist working to desegregate public facilities in Ohio.  The emerging civil rights movement influenced her decision to enter Yale University in 1960 with the intention of becoming a civil rights lawyer.  In 1963 Holmes worked in Mississippi for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  She graduated from Yale in 1963 with a Master’s in American Studies and a law degree in 1964.  

Eleanor Holmes moved to Philadelphia in 1964 to work as a law clerk for Federal Judge A. Leon Higginbotham.  The following year she married Edward Norton and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar as an attorney.  From 1965 to 1970 she worked for the New York office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).  In 1968 Norton was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court where in her first case she successfully defended the National States Rights Party, a white supremacist group that was denied a permit to hold a political rally in Maryland.  Between 1970 and 1977, Eleanor Holmes Norton headed New York City’s Human Rights Commission.  In 1973 Norton organized African American women from across the nation into the National Black Feminist Organization.  Four years later President Jimmy Carter appointed her the first woman to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a post she

Ex-slave Oscar J. Dunn becomes lieutenant governor of Louisiana. It is the highest executive office held by an African American to date.