One hundred and eighteen Blacks were reported lynched in 1893.

Race riot, Lansing, Michigan.

Charles H. Mahoney was confirmed by the Senate and became the first Black to serve as a full delegate to the United Nations.

Angela Davis is known as a radical activist, philosopher, writer, speaker, and educator. She was well known for a time through her association with the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s. She was fired from one teaching job for being a Communist, and she appeared on the Federal Bureau of Investigations Ten Most Wanted List for a time.

 Angela Yvonne Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama.

 Her father B. Frank Davis was a teacher who opened a gas station, and her mother, Sallye E. Davis, was a teacher.  She lived in a segregated neighborhood and went to segregated schools through high school.  She became involved with her family in civil rights demonstrations.  She spent some time in New York City where her mother was earning a masters degree during summer breaks from teaching.

She excelled as a student, graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in 1965, with two years of study at the Sorbonne, University of Paris. She studied philosophy in Germany at the University of Frankfort for two years, then received an M.A. from the University of California at San Diego in 1968. Her doctoral study was from 1968 to 1969.

During her undergraduate years at Brandeis, she was shocked to hear of the bombing of a Birmingham church, killing four girls she had known.

A member of the Communist Party, USA, at the time, she became involved in radical black politics and in several organizations for black women, including helping to found Sisters Inside and Critical Resistance.

She also joined the Black Panthers and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was part of an all-black Communist group called the Che-Lumumba Club, and through that group began to organize public protests.

In 1969, Davis was hired to a position at the University of California at Los Angeles, an assistant professorship.

She taught Kant, Marxism, and philosophy in black literature. She was popular as a a teacher, but a leak identifying her as a member of the Communist Party led to the UCLA regent --

Alice Coachman, becomes the first African American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in the high jump during the Summer Games in London

James Cameron

Founder/Director

Americas Black Holocaust Museum, Inc.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

August 7, 1930.

The night James Camerons life changed forever. A day before, he and two other young Black

men were arrested for the robbery, rape and assault of a White couple in Marion, Indiana. James

is in a cell in the Grant County Jail. There is a lynch mob outside numbering into the thousands.

James is sixteen years old.

The mob comes into the jail and grabs one of men accused, with James, of the crime. He is beaten

unconscious, dragged outside and lynched. The second man is then given the same treatment. The

bodies of these two men, Tom Shipp, 18, and Abraham Smith, 19, hanging from a tree is depicted

in a famous and disturbing photograph. The mob now comes for James. He is beaten and dragged

out to the tree where his friends now hang and the rope is placed around his neck. It is at this

moment that James remembers hearing what he describes as an angelic voice above the crowd

say Take this boy back, he had nothing to do with any killing or rape. Suddenly the hands that

were beating him are now helping him. The rope is taken from around his neck and the crowd

clears a path for him to walk back to the jail. In interviews he later conducted with people who

were in the crowd, no one remembers hearing any voice. Their reason for why the crowd did not

lynch James: You were lucky that night. Though James never admitted any guilt in the assault (he

admits that he was there), he served 4 years in prison. The female victim later changed her story

and confirmed that James had no part in the assault.

After he was paroled, James Cameron moved to Milwaukee. During his career, he held several

jobs including table waiter, laborer, construction worker, laundry worker, salesman, janitor, ditch

digger, record shop owner, theater custodian, junkman, newspaper reporter, shoeshine boy and

cardboard-box factory worker. He also organized the Madison County Branch of the NAACP in

Madison and other chapters in Muncie and South Bend,

Bunche was born on August 7, 1903 or 1904(there is some disagreement about the year of his birth) in Detroit, Michigan.

Ira Frederick Aldridge was the first African American actor to achieve success on the international stage. He also pushed social boundaries by playing opposite white actresses in England and becoming known as the preeminent Shakespearean actor and tragedian of the 19th Century.

Ira Frederick Aldridge was born in New York City, New York on July 24, 1807 to free blacks Reverend Daniel and Lurona Aldridge.  Although his parents encouraged him to become a pastor, he studied classical education at the African Free School in New York where he was first exposed to the performance arts.  While there he became impressed with acting and by age 15 was associating with professional black actors in the city. They encouraged Aldridge to join the prestigious African Grove Theatre, an all-black theatre troupe founded by William Henry Brown and James Hewlett in 1821. He apprenticed under Hewlett, the first African American Shakespearean actor. Though Aldridge was gainfully employed as an actor in the 1820s, he felt that the United States was not a hospitable place for theatrical performers.  Many whites resented the claim to cultural equality that they saw in black performances of Shakespeare and other white-authored texts. Realizing this, Aldridge emigrated to Europe in 1824 as the valet for British-American actor James William Wallack.

Aldridge eventually moved to Glasgow, Scotland and began studies at the University of Glasgow, where he enhanced his voice and dramatic skills in theatre. He moved to England and made his debut in London in 1825 as Othello at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, a role he would remain associated with until his death. The critic reviews gave Aldridge the name Roscius (the celebrated Roman actor of tragedy and comedy). Aldridge embraced it and began using the stage name “The African Roscius.” He even created the myth that he was the descendant of a Senegalese Prince whose family was forced to escape to the United States to save their lives. This deception erased Aldridge’s American upbringing and

Melvin Herbert Evans was born on August 7, 1917, in Christiansted, St.

Death of actor Ira Aldridge (63), Lodes, Poland.

Roland Kirk, tenor saxophonist, blind, born

Black longshoremen struck for higher wages and better working conditions in Galveston, Texas.

First Black winner of Nobel Peace Prize was Ralph J Bunche, diplomat, born, 1904

Black and white students staged kneel-in demonstrations in Atlanta churches.

Angela Davis, activist, educator, scholar, and politician, was born on January 26, 1944, in the “Dynamite Hill” area of Birmingham, Alabama.  The area received that name because so many African American homes in this middle class neighborhood had been bombed over the years by the Ku Klux Klan.  Her father, Frank Davis, was a service station owner and her mother, Sallye Davis, was an elementary school teacher.  Davis’s mother was also active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), when it was dangerous to be openly associated with the organization because of its civil rights activities.  As a teenager Davis moved to New York City with her mother, who was pursuing a Master’s degree at New York University.  While there she attended Elizabeth Irwin High School, a school considered leftist because a number of its teachers were blacklisted during the McCarthy era for their earlier alleged Communist activities.

In 1961 Davis enrolled in Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. While at Brandeis, Davis also studied abroad for a year in France and returned to the U.S. to complete her studies, joining Phi Beta Kappa and earning her B.A. (magna cum laude) in 1965.  Even before her graduation, Davis, so moved by the deaths of the four girls killed in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in her hometown in 1963, that she decided to join the civil rights movement.  By 1967, however, Davis was influenced by Black Power advocates and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and then the Black Panther Party.  She also continued her education, earning an M.A. from the University of California at San Diego in 1968.  Davis moved further to the left in the same year when she became a member of the American Communist Party.

In 1969 Angela Davis was hired by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as an assistant professor of philosophy, but her involvement in the Communist Party led to her dismissal.  During the early 1970s she also became active in

Fifty-third Congress (1893-95) convened. One Black congressman, George W. Marray, South Carolina.