Peter Salem: A free slave, Peter Salem, a private in Captain Simon Edgels company at the battle of Bunker Hill, was the first military hero of the War of Independence against British rule. On June 17, 1775, at a crucial moment in the battle, when British major John Pitcairn, had rallied the disorganized British troops and prepared a counterattack, Salem, shot the major through the head just after he yelled The day is Ours. Peter Salem, a former slave who had gained his freedom upon enlisted in the militia, had battled Pitcairn, and his forces earlier at Lexington and was glad to have dispatched the hated major as he did. Now leaderless, the British lost their nerve and the battle. Afterward, Salems fellow soldiers took up a collection for him. He was also honored by a visit to meet George Washington and by a monument placed over his grave in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1882.

Tennis great Venus Williams birthday.

Congress authorized President Lincoln to accept blacks in Union Army.

Flamboyant blues singer, the Godfather of Soul, James Brown is born in Pulaski, Tennessee.

Journalist Robert Clyve Maynard, owner, editor and publisher of The Oakland Tribune, was born in the borough of Brooklyn, NY.

William Frank Powell, New Jersey educator, named minister to Haiti.

Frank Wills, Washington security guard, foiled break-in at offices of Democratic National Committee in first event of the Watergate conspiracy.

Miller was born in Ferrebeeville, Beaufort County, South Carolina on June 17, 1849.

Blacks soldiers fought at Battle of Bunker Hill and Breeds Hill. Among the heroes of the battle were Peter Salem and Salem Poor.

Harriett Scott died eighteen years later on June 17, 1876.

Emanuel A.M.E. Church is the oldest black A.M.E. Church in the South and contains the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore, Maryland.  The church’s early roots emerged out of slavery in a shared legacy with Charleston (South Carolina) Methodist Episcopal Church in 1791. Due to disputes over burial grounds, enslaved and free black members of the church withdrew their membership, and, under the leadership of Morris Brown, they established a church affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal churches in 1816.  Because of the perceived threat of religious gatherings by enslaved and free blacks in antebellum Charleston and elsewhere in the slave-holding South, Brown and fellow ministers were placed in jail for violating state and local laws just two years after the church’s founding.

In the 19th century, Emanuel formed the hotbed of anti-slavery and political activism, alarming the city’s white population. But nothing perhaps had been more alarming and national in scope than the developments around the largest planned slave revolt that rocked not only the South, but the nation. In 1821, Denmark Vesey, a former slave and one of the church’s leaders, began organizing a major slave rebellion in Charleston to be carried out in June of 1822. Authorities were informed before the plot could take place, and, in 1822, they investigated the church for its participation with the slave revolt.  Rev. Morris Brown became a central target and suspect of the plot but was never convicted. He immediately fled to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he later became the second bishop of the A.M.E. denomination. Vesey, along with 35 other conspirators, was executed while over 300 alleged participants were imprisoned.

Due to the church’s connection with the slave revolt in their fight for freedom, local white agitators burned the church, and the state passed a series of stringent laws against the congregating of black churches, including a ban on services conducted without white supervision. However, the church continued its

Tuskegee boycott began. Blacks boycotted city stores in protest against act of state legislature which deprived them of municipal votes by placing their homes outside city limits.

James Weldon Johnson was a prominent African American leader born on June 17, 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida.

Williams was born on June 17, 1980 to Richard Williams and Oracene Price in Lynwood, California.

James Weldon Johnson, composer, diplomat, social critic, and civil rights activist, was born of Bahamian immigrant parents in Jacksonville, Florida on June 17, 1871.   Instilled with the value of education by his father, James, a waiter, and teacher-mother, Helen, Johnson excelled at the Stanton School in Jacksonville. In 1889 he entered Atlanta University in Georgia, graduating in 1894.  

In 1896, Johnson began to study law in Thomas Ledwith’s law office in Jacksonville, Florida.  In 1898, Ledwith considered Johnson ready to take the Florida bar exam.  After a grueling two hour exam, Johnson was given a pass and admitted to the bar.  One examiner expressed his anguish by bolting from the room and stating “Well, I can’t forget he’s a nigger; and I’ll be damned if I’ll stay here to see him admitted.” In 1898, Johnson became one of only a handful of black attorneys in the state. 

Johnson, however, did not practice law.  Instead he became principal at the Stanton School in Jacksonville where he improved the curriculum and added ninth and tenth grades.  Johnson also started the first black newspaper, the Daily American, in Jacksonville.  With his brother Rosamond, who had been trained at the New England Conservatory of Music in Massachusetts, James W. Johnson’s interests turned to songwriting for Broadway.

Rosamond and James migrated to New York in 1902 and soon were earning over twelve thousand dollars a year by selling their songs to Broadway performers.  Upon a return trip to Florida in 1900, the brothers were asked to write a celebratory song in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.  The product, a poem set to music, became “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” now known as the Negro National Anthem. 

In 1906, Johnson became United States consul to Puerto Cabello in Venezuela.  While in the foreign service he met his future wife, Grace Nail, daughter of the influential black New York city real estate speculator, John E. Nail. The couple’s first year was spent in Corinto, Nicaragua, Johnson’s new diplomatic post.

While

In 1923 Marcus Garvey was convicted on federal charges of mail fraud in connection with the sale of stock in the Universal Negro Improvement Associations Black Star Line.  Sentenced to prison, Garvey delivered his last address before a crowd at Liberty Hall in New York City on June 17, 1923.  That speech appears below.

Among the many names by which I have been called, I was dubbed by another name a couple days ago.  The district Attorney, with whom I have been contesting the case for my liberty and for the existence of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, in his fervid appeal, in his passionate appeal, to the gentlemen of the jury last Friday cried out: “Gentlemen, will you let the tiger loose?”

The tiger is already loose, and he has been at large for so long that it is no longer one tiger, but there are many tigers.  The spirit of the Universal Negro Improvement Association has, fortunately for us, made a circuit of the world, to the extent that harm of injury done to any one, will in no way affect the great membership of this association or retard its great program.  The world is ignorant of the purpose of this association.  The world is ignorant of the scope of this great movement, when it things that by laying low any one individual it can permanently silence this great spiritual wave, that has taken hold of the souls and the hearts and minds of 4000,000,000 Negroes throughout the world.  We have only started; we are just on our way; we have just made the first lap in the great race for existence, and for a place in the political and economic sun of men.

Those of you who have been observing events for the last four or five weeks with keen eyes and keen perceptions will come to no other conclusion than this—that through the effort to strangle the Universal Negro Improvement Association—through the effort to silence Marcus Garvey—there is a mad desire, there is a great plan to permanently lay the Negro low in this civilization and in future civilizations.  But the world is sadly mistaken.  No longer

No. 645 Argued: April 1-2, 1968 --- Decided: June 17, 1968

392 U.S. 409

MR JUSTICE STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.

In this case, we are called upon to determine the scope and the constitutionality of an Act of Congress, 42 U.S.C. § 1982 which provides that:

All citizens of the United States shall have the same right, in every State and Territory, as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property.

On September 2, 1965, the petitioners filed a complaint in the District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, alleging that the respondents had refused to sell them a home in the Paddock Woods community of St. Louis County for the sole reason that petitioner Joseph Lee Jones is a Negro. Relying in part upon § 1982, the petitioners sought injunctive and other relief. [n1] The District Court sustained the respondents motion to dismiss the complaint, [n2] and the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed, concluding that § 1982 applies only to state action, and does not reach private refusals to sell. [n3] We granted certiorari to consider the [p413] questions thus presented. [n4] For the reasons that follow, we reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals. We hold that § 1982 bars all racial discrimination, private as well as public, in the sale or rental of property, and that the statute, thus construed, is a valid exercise of the power of Congress to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment. [n5]

I

At the outset, it is important to make clear precisely what this case does not involve. Whatever else it may be, 42 U.S.C. § 1982 is not a comprehensive open housing law. In sharp contrast to the Fair Housing Title (Title VIII) of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Pub.L. 9284, 82 Stat. 81, the statute in this case deals only with racial discrimination, and does not address itself to discrimination on grounds of religion or national origin. [n6] It does not deal specifically with discrimination in the provision of services or facilities in

Secretary of Education, was born on June 17, 1933 in Monticello, Mississippi.

Actress Phylicia Rashad was born in Houston, Texas.

Author, lyricist, poet and educator James Weldon Johnson, also the first Black executive of the NAACP, is born in Jacksonville, Florida.