On This Day in Black History: January 3 1621 William Tucker was the first African-American to be born in America. 1848 Joseph Jenkins Roberts was sworn in as the first president of Liberia, Africas first republic. 1924 British archaeologist Howard Carter found a sarcophagus containing a solid gold coffin with the mummy of Tutankhamen in the tomb of the Pharaoh. 1958 The West Indies Federation, comprising the ten territories of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, the then St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent and Trinidad and Tobago was created by the United Kingdom, with Lord Hailes as Governor-General. 1961 Adam Clayton Powell was elected Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. 1966 Sammy Younge, Jr. was fatally shot by a white gas station owner while trying to use a segregated restroom in Tuskegee, Alabama. According to James Forman, veteran civil rights activist, he is The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement. 1969 Louis Stokes was sworn in as the first African-American congressman from the state of Ohio. He went on to serve more than ten terms in Congress, distinguished by being the first African-American to head a major congressional investigation and to preside over nationally televised hearings, which revealed new facts about the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and U.S. President John F. Kennedy. 1983 Jesse Jackson travelled to Syria and secured the release of a captured American pilot, Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, who had been shot down over Damascus.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 09:00:28 +0000